RE: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

Thanks for the response! I don't think you'll see any of the below errors
today (unless the original author hand coded them in, in which case we will
religiously not touch them). We briefly allowed mis-nested markup because it
resulted in tighter code, but have since gone back to enforcing proper
nesting (again, unless the author hand-codes it the other way). I'm trying
to remember a specific instance of failing to provide a closing tag for an
inline element, but I'm drawing a blank. If the author is hand coding their
HTML to omit end tags, we will notice that and output our HTML the same way,
in the name of following the author's coding conventions rather than trying
to enforce 'correctness', but if we do it otherwise, it's a bug.

The doctype issue (as I recall from years back) was that versions of NS3(?)
would crash if the doctype was present in some circumstance, so we stopped
writing it out. Since then we haven't heard of issues arising from the lack
of the docType so we haven't gotten around to writing it out again. 

Hopefully not too ignorant a question, but what breaks because the docType
is missing?

On the charge that WYSIWYG tools encourage non-structural markup, that's
really just a question (IMHO) of improving the tools. There are a number of
things in the WAI standards for authoring tools that can be implemented
without too much trouble; many others will take a fair bit of creativity to
implement in a way that isn't annoying to users. Specific feedback like "FP
does this when it should do that" is really helpful in getting these things
addressed, though.

FP (and DreamWeaver) is also doing a bit of a balancing act between one
constituency who wants us to provide absolute flexibility in how code is
authored and formatted (don't mess with my HTML!) and another that wants us
to promote structural markup, which would typically involve us taking more
control over the way the code is generated. The two are by no means mutually
exclusive, but it's hard to serve both communities and get it just right.
We'll keep trying, though.


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of David Woolley
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 5:35 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables


> other WYSIWYG editors. I would _love_ to see _specific_ examples of 'bad'
> HTML generated by FrontPage (or DreamWeaver) and how you got the HTML
> generated. 

The typical early frontpage errors were overlapping elements, 
inline elements not terminated before a block element, multiple
empty inline elements, incorrect doctypes.

FP 2000 may be better, but it doesn't generate a doctype at all.

These tools also encourage non-structural markup, by the way their
user interface makes such markup easier than proper markup.

Received on Thursday, 11 January 2001 22:49:07 UTC