Re: [ACTION 897] Establish best current practice regarding withrawal of use of X- form

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>>>
>>> Maybe, but I don't see any clear reason why one would accept that 
>>> viewpoint - it is not self-evident to me, and if the group has not 
>>> accepted it en masse already that suggests that it is really rather 
>>> less than self-evident.
>>
>> No Charles. *It is* self evident.
>
> Basing a definition on a notion of "ugliness" (as in your reply to 
> Ray) makes it very difficult to make something self-evident. You have 
> declared that something is decided by its possession of a quality 
> whose measurement is notoriously subjective.
well, it obviously depends on what you decide to measure or not to 
measure. From day one (and multiple times), I have asserted that the 
problem with transcoders is that they keep referring to what the user 
wants (or better, may want), while totally ignoring what content 
providers may want. This is obviously not acceptable, because respecting 
the terms and conditions of the content provider is quintessensial in 
creating the economical conditions that makes the web (and the mobile 
web) happen.
According to this very measurable parameter, transcoding is a hack. It 
breaks the contract between client and server, where the client receives 
what the server sent.

>> The only reason why you are denying reality is that transcoder 
>> vendors here have a commercial interest in using W3C as a selling 
>> tool for their hacks.
>
> I trust that I am simply misinterpreting this as you assserting that I 
> am lying.

yes. You are not being honest to us. You are simply serving the petty 
economical interests of your employer. Which is normally an OK thing to 
do, as long as one doesn't defy reality and 15 years of established web 
development practices. Had not Opera come up with OperaMini, you would 
be mad at transcoders just like everyone else.

>
> ...
>> Transcoding is a hack. A textbook example.
>
> Transcoding, like any other browser, is taking content from the wire 
> and providing a rendering to and end user or user agent. Like any 
> other Web browser there is no a priori rule about how it should be 
> rendered, although there are ill-defined conventions which are 
> effectively based on attempts to converge in most cases or to provide 
> something clearly more usable (hardly the sort of judgement that one 
> might claim is self-evident in the general case).
>
> For this reason, I do not consider transcoding per se to be a hack, 
> let alone self-evidently so. I don't mind whether you think it is a 
> hack or not, but I find it pointless to argue that the group should 
> subscribe to your personal subjective understanding of ugliness as if 
> that were self-evident fact.

there is no point try to change someone's mind, when that someone's 
mission is not to have their mind changed.

cheers

Luca

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 15:14:59 UTC