Re: Statistics on mobileOK Basic

I think we agree then. I suppose I'm saying that XML is how you get
well-formedness and that is without question important. What I am
referring to is the fact that XHTML imposes more in its schema/DTD
beyond well-formedness, like, "<span> must appear in <p>" or things
like that. Could some of that have been removed, and would it have
hurt its goals, and would that have left more valid documents out
there, and would that have been a net win? Because right now few
people are apparently following the rules. If I'm opening any can of
worms, it's that one.


Hopping back to well-formedness, XML could have been defined like
JSON, where the close tag doesn't repeat the opening tag's name. I
suppose you can argue what would have been better, but, adding more to
the language here just invented new ways of being invalid: misspelling
the close tag, improperly nesting. I suppose this tangent is about how
adding more to a language or spec can be harmful.

One more example from mobileOK: there are three ways to specify a
character encoding in an XHTML doc: HTTP header, XML header, <meta>
tag. While people wanted each of these mechanisms for a reason,
ultimately it just created even more ways to be confusingly invalid.
Now it's not just that I might omit a character encoding, or specify
the wrong one, but I might specify three wrong ones.

I am sorry, this is a tangent...


On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Jeff Sonstein <jeffs@it.rit.edu> wrote:
>  > 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

Received on Wednesday, 5 March 2008 17:34:06 UTC