Paving Cowpaths

I've been reading the exchanges on this issue, and I'm a little 
unsettled by it.  I'll give you one example.

I am asked to review other organizations' web sites on an almost 
weekly basis, and if I had a dollar for every time I saw this exact 
configuration:

<body leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">

I'd be spending my vacation in Montreal.

I'm sure it's not just the public sector, so this must be a fairly 
common usage.  Should it be written into the HTML 5 spec?  My vote 
would be no.  After years of nudging the reluctant to separate 
presentational information from the actual content, along come 
authoring tools and CMSs that apparently are not with the 
program.  All it takes is one misinformed programmer working for a 
tool vendor and voila -- instant cowpath.

I do hope we exercise some caution on which cowpaths to pave and 
which to close down.

Debi Orton / oradnio@gmail.com

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 16:19:06 UTC