Re: ACTION-994: Some evidence of CSS MQ in the wild

Bruce Lawson wrote:
>
> (On a side-note, I  disagree that Best Practices must be derived from 
> widely-used techniques. Otherwise we'd say "use tables for layout, 
> font tags and make sure your code doesn't validate".)

great comment. Just 4 years late. Anyway, I agree with you that 
demanding adherence to standard would have been a way to go, but BPWG 
decided to go a different way in 2005.
Personally, I promote a way of creating mobile apps and services based 
on exploiting what works, simply because my experience in the field told 
me as early as 1999 that this was the way to go (and not adherence to 
standard for adherence' sake).
 
Anyway, your approach would be legitimate. W3C creates specs, so 
demanding that W3C does not bow to the needs of mobile web clients which 
do not adhere to the spec is common sense. The non-negligible side 
effect of this approach in mobile is that this lack of flexibility in 
building apps would mean cutting off 60 to 90% of the mobile devices 
that people own from BP compliant services.

BPWG, after endless discussion, adopted the usual pattern of finding a 
compromise at all costs and ended up going for something in the middle 
that does not make a lot of sense to developers: it is hard to read, it 
is inconsistent, it is ambiguous and often wrong.

the following comments (from 
http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/editor-s-corner/2007-03-13
) pretty much summarized this discussion already in 2007:

"Now what's the best practice on choosing a set of best practices? For 
desktop Web designers the choice is largely philosophical. To borrow 
some terms from English grammarians, it's a split between the 
prescriptivists, who want to do it "the right way" with clean, 100 
percent standards-compliant markup, and the descriptivists, who believe 
in markup that works and that designing inclusively is more important 
than conforming to a spec. On the mobile Web, unfortunately, there 
doesn't even seem to be a "correct" markup specification, and 
differences between browsers are so vast that an XML database 
<http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/backgroundinfo.php> is needed to keep 
track of them."

Luca

Received on Friday, 10 July 2009 10:35:27 UTC