- From: Jim Ley <jim@jibbering.com>
- Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 00:24:51 +0100
- To: <public-evangelist@w3.org>
"Karl Dubost" <karl@w3.org> wrote: >Jim, you are waking up in the morning, you are maybe taking a coffee. Your >cup is falling over you and you have coffee all over you. Should I kill >Jim Ley, Should I suppress the cup? Should I not try to drink coffee in >the morning because I'm clumsy. :) I'd go for killing me, it would be very cathartic for a great many people I'm sure, or drink orange juice from a kids juice cup, not only do you get all the same liquid as the coffee, but it's healthier and you're safe from being burnt by it. >The work which has been done for QA Specification Guidelines [1] is one >part of this attempt to improve things. The QA spec guidelines are excellent, obviously there are some parts I disagree with, however they do not help with broken legacy specifications, and continued evangelism for these broken specifications hurts the entire evangelism process. Too often is the response from the evangelism community that invalid and non well-formed XML or XHTML is okay because it works in both browsers (or similar) I know you're not going to say exactly that, you'll say that the documents do need to be well formed and valid, but I'm looking for arguments of why, as the argument of why it's okay to use XHTML 1.0 as text/html - "it works in both browsers" is exactly the same as the one used by people arguing for invalid content. >So Jim and others, if your point is to say: W3C is not perfect and there >are issues in specifications. No, my point is that it's not perfect, and we have to recognise the imperfections, and not continue banging our heads against the broken bits pretending they're good. XHTML 1.0 is broken when served as text/html, let's accept that, if there weren't sensible alternatives then it would be a good compromise, but there is a more than acceptable alternative, and focusing the evangelism arguments on that would be much more sensible. >Le 05-05-20 à 14:16, Jim Ley a écrit : >> Bjoern was just asking for similar help with XHTML guidelines. >> Arguments seem rather thin on the ground other than "well it works in >> both browsers so all is okay" which is something I can't agree with. >:) It's where we have a strong disagreement. So you're saying that "it works in both browsers" is a perfectly acceptable argument? I disagree, I would say that "it follows where possible a standard", "it works in the tested user agents", "it doesn't rely in error recovery for the majority of its features", "it's as predictable as we can be in what future user agents will do with it" etc. are acceptable arguments, just that it works in Internet Explorers and it's copycat admirers is not something I believe we should use as an argument, it doesn't move anything forward, invalid crazily nested crap works in those. >>> Do you know a user agent which is unable to do c) ? >> >> Yes, Internet Explorer 6.0, I gave the file (with corrections) in the >> previous example. >So you are saying that IE 6.0 doesn't display (render) XHTML 1.0 served as >text/html ? I am indeed saying that, which is why it's not a good idea to evangelise to content authors the use of XHTML 1.0 - I would also say that it probably means that we should evangelise to users that they use another browser that can render more content types, but that's a seperate issue to this thread. Cheers, Jim.
Received on Sunday, 22 May 2005 23:25:01 UTC