Re: "Pave The Cowpaths" Design Principle

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> I think it is impossible to quantify how much weight, but I do think 
> there are some people who, at least before joining this group, would 
> have said that no weight should be given to any practice that is not 
> explicitly required by the last version of HTML.

Fair enough.

>> This isn't a Pave the Cowpaths thing, because (as far as I know) 
>> software which reads the web using semantic information doesn't 
>> currently pay attention to class names. (Or perhaps someone has 
>> counter-examples?) So no-one is using this "cowpath".
> 
> The principle is about author practices as found in existing content, 
> not about what tools currently do with that content. However, contrary 
> to your assertion, many microformats-based tools extract semantic 
> information from class names in web pages.

But, as someone else has also pointed out, not from the ones I've seen 
thrown around as examples of potential standardisation (such as 
"copyright"), and - in the case of microformats - they use a defined 
hierarchy, not just one floating class name, so the pattern is much less 
likely to occur accidentally.

Gerv

Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2007 17:15:13 UTC