Re: Paving Cowpaths

Dave Fisher wrote:
 > In my experience, the proportion of hand-coding has risen significantly
 > in recent years ... as has the proportion of standard compliant
 > code.[1]

I find this a very rewarding and encouraging observation.

 > Given the trend, and these causes, it is simply unacceptable for any new
 > HTML recommendation to ignore the needs of hand-coders.

I'm sure Dave & I are on "the same side" here, but I do not
understand what he means by "the needs of hand-coders";
how do these needs differ from those who use DW (or similar),
yet still seek/aspire to produce elegant, compact, /correct/
code ?

 > While I support the view that tag soup should still be rendered sensibly
 > in graphical browsers, and that user agents should have conformance
 > guidelines which standardise this error handling, I fail to see why
 > those objectives prevent us from:
 >
 >    1. Producing a recommendation which allows authors to see/understand
 >       their own errors and identify potential solutions.
 >
 >    2. Providing incentives for authors to improve their coding practice.

Hear hear.

[...] it's worth remembering that most of the templates which this>
 > software uses are hand-coded by hand-coders.

I most certainly concur with that observation .

Philip Taylor

Received on Saturday, 26 May 2007 15:52:21 UTC