- From: Luca Passani <passani@eunet.no>
- Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:34:46 +0200
- To: public-bpwg@w3.org
- CC: Bruce Lawson <brucel@opera.com>
Bruce Lawson wrote: > > (On a side-note, I disagree that Best Practices must be derived from > widely-used techniques. Otherwise we'd say "use tables for layout, > font tags and make sure your code doesn't validate".) great comment. Just 4 years late. Anyway, I agree with you that demanding adherence to standard would have been a way to go, but BPWG decided to go a different way in 2005. Personally, I promote a way of creating mobile apps and services based on exploiting what works, simply because my experience in the field told me as early as 1999 that this was the way to go (and not adherence to standard for adherence' sake). Anyway, your approach would be legitimate. W3C creates specs, so demanding that W3C does not bow to the needs of mobile web clients which do not adhere to the spec is common sense. The non-negligible side effect of this approach in mobile is that this lack of flexibility in building apps would mean cutting off 60 to 90% of the mobile devices that people own from BP compliant services. BPWG, after endless discussion, adopted the usual pattern of finding a compromise at all costs and ended up going for something in the middle that does not make a lot of sense to developers: it is hard to read, it is inconsistent, it is ambiguous and often wrong. the following comments (from http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/editor-s-corner/2007-03-13 ) pretty much summarized this discussion already in 2007: "Now what's the best practice on choosing a set of best practices? For desktop Web designers the choice is largely philosophical. To borrow some terms from English grammarians, it's a split between the prescriptivists, who want to do it "the right way" with clean, 100 percent standards-compliant markup, and the descriptivists, who believe in markup that works and that designing inclusively is more important than conforming to a spec. On the mobile Web, unfortunately, there doesn't even seem to be a "correct" markup specification, and differences between browsers are so vast that an XML database <http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/backgroundinfo.php> is needed to keep track of them." Luca
Received on Friday, 10 July 2009 10:35:27 UTC