Re: Issue 31c: Meta generator

Daniel Glazman, Fri, 18 May 2012 21:56:14 +0200:
> Le 18/05/12 21:33, Leif Halvard Silli a écrit :
>> Daniel Glazman, Fri, 18 May 2012 20:58:56 +0200:
>>> Le 18/05/12 20:43, John Foliot a écrit :
>> 
>>> Not worth a "public warning", and too great power given to chairs w/o
>>> control, IMHO.
>> 
>> As a more helpful thing talk about: What are your insights, as a
>> WYSIWYG HTML generator vendor,  with regard to the meta generator
>> exception?

> To focus back on the meta generator exception, I just do not understand
> it. The meta generator was never meant to give useful information. It
> has always been almost only a way for editing tool authors to insert an
> advertisement for their tool in the documents created by users.
> In that sense, basing any kind of rule on the presence of such a meta
> tag seems to me a pretty serious conceptual error.
> 
> Is that an answer to the question asked?

It is not the dream answer, since you offer no proof that the negative 
effect *happens*. But if you have proof that some of your users would 
start to remove the meta generator because of its effect on the 
validator, then it would be a dream answer.

Another proof of negative effect could be someone who chose to publish 
as HTML4 instead of HTML5 (BlueGriffon offers both options) just 
because image validation is poorer - and different - for HTML5 than for 
HTML4 ...

By the way: I had a look at the HTML5 updated version of Tidy. By 
default, Tidy reports no errors for lack of @alt - just issues a 
warning - and it also doesn't auto-generate @alt text unless you ask it 
too.

But unrelated to that, Tidy can be set to insert a meta generator which 
says that the file was generated/tidyed with Tidy ... A subsequent 
check with the validator, would then cause the page to be reported as 
error free.

Someone could observe this "trick" and "implement" it. But I have no 
evidence that it is happening.
-- 
Leif H Silli

Received on Friday, 18 May 2012 21:11:20 UTC