Re: Statistics on mobileOK Basic

On Mar 5, 2008, at 11:46 AM, Sean wrote:

> Fascinating, fascinating. Thanks Dom. This below I think confirms what
> we all suspected, that the problem is largely compliance with the
> basic standards out there alone, not even higher-level issues.

important to know this is true in the mobile-oriented world as well

> On a philosophical tangent -- are the XHTML specs unnecessarily
> difficult to comply with?

absolutely not

> I like the idea of well-formedness without question, but do there
> need to be so many tags and rules about what can go where?

that is how you get well-formedness
<grin/>

honestly
one of the major advantages of XHTML
and other XML derived languages
is the ability to build parsers easily
*because* of the clear rules about well-formedness

as someone who used to have to build parsers
"in the old days"
I can tell you this is a god-send

> Then again I have heard anecdotally that the vast majority of browser
> code is in place because it has to expect all kinds of variation from
> the standard.

you have to deal gracefully with the real world
which is full of ham-fisted human coders like me who mess up

> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux  
> <dom@w3.org> wrote:
> >   * the most common errors were
> >   - not XHTML Basic valid (74% of pages)
> >   - not valid (70% of pages)

is there a more detailed breakdown?
it would be interesting to see what the more common problems were
and would not surprise me if they were "old coding habits"...
left-overs from the days of freely mixing style and scripting
all mushed up together in with the HTML (4.01 or earlier) code

on another note
we have finally finished up end-of-term exams and grading
and Dan Bogaard and I have some BP recommendations to add
which I will be typing up tonight
and submitting to the list tonight or tomorrow

question for Dom from the newbie:
how do you prefer them??

   - one email with all BP suggestions
   - one BP suggestion per email
   - one area-of-practice per email
      (possibly) containing multiple BP suggestions

jeffs

--
"If we knew what we were doing,
  it wouldn't be called research, would it?"
- Albert Einstein -
============

Prof. Jeff Sonstein
Director, MS-IT Program

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Received on Wednesday, 5 March 2008 17:16:06 UTC