Re: [Article] Web-Quality v1.1

A few more questions that pop up from time to time:

Stephane, Web hobbyist developer says: "I spent dozens of hours reading
about and experimenting with standards, and my web site is still using
tables and does not validate. Can you make the standards simpler?"

Stephane, Web hobbyist developer says: "I admire your Bene Gesserit skill of
saying that standards are simple while keeping a straigth face. But really,
could you make them simpler, please ? Pretty please ?"
(a lot of web hobbyist developers make their own tools, we can't just tell
them to use better tools. Tool making has to be simple too. 2 or 3 valid
tools is not enough. We need hundred of thousands of them to keep the Web an
exciting and creative place) (and no, 2 or 3 valid browsers is not enough
either. Browser making should be doable from scratch (i.e. no Gecko) in a
reasonable amount of human hours)

Stephane, Web hobbyist developers naively asks: "If we abandoned all
concessions to backward compatibility, could we create a simpler standard
for web pages? Given the weak adoption rate of current standards and the
even weaker success rate of adopters, maybe we should consider doing that."
(I just tried validating pages that proudly display the "Valid W3C" logo,
and so far only a very small fraction still validates today)

Stephane, Web hobbyist developer says: "My web site incorporates a lot of
real-time input (e.g. snippets of HTML, urls with the & character) from end
users and other external sources, should I spent hours making my web site
validate when a single user input can break the validity?"
(some very standards-savvy end users do get pissed off when they try to
input their fancy <blockquote> and find out I'm stripping nearly all markup,
but I don't want them to break everything because of a typo).

Thanks,

Stephane
Web hobbyist developer

Received on Monday, 23 September 2002 17:52:05 UTC