Re: Support Existing Content

On 5/1/07 3:20 PM, "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs@apple.com> wrote:

> If writing nonconforming content is easier, then why is writing conforming
> content? Can we articulate the advantages in a way that will be convincing to
> content authors? If not, then what is the point? This is a serious question.
> Your messages all seem to assume that "valid" content is an end in itself, but
> surely, specific markup techniques are the means to achieving some practical
> goals.
> 
> Personally I think writing conforming content does achieve practical goals,
> and we can continue to make those clear to authors and provide them with easy
> access to conformance checking.
> 
> Regards,
> Maciej
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First, a little about me.
I started with frontpage (1998-1999?). Read the help files. Made some pages.
Grew to hate the font tag.
Moved up to dreamweaver. Really hated the font tag. Read the help files.
Still haven¹t heard of W3C. Still haven¹t read anything about how html
really should be used that was written by someone who actually knew what
they were talking about. Writing tag soup and not validating and not
referring to the specs when things don¹t work and still reading Dreamweaver
help files right on up to 2003.

Early 2004, get a job with people who validate their html. Within 5 days I
was writing valid html in a text editor. Easy as pie.
Start experimenting with CSS and Javascript (after 4 years of failing
repeatedly to do anything with javascript). Just the basics, everything
works.
Revisit some of my much older sites. CSS goes wrong, Javascript goes wrong.
(lightbulb!) ³hmm...maybe I should validate these pages². Hundreds of
errors. Fix a few pages with tidy. This breaks the appearance of a few
things, but nothing I can¹t fix with css....²$#!+ that¹s a lot of tables, I
can¹t believe I spent so long in frontpage making all of them and then still
editing them in notepad to still not get what I really wanted.²....strip out
a ton of tables. Fix everything visual properly with CSS ­EXACTLY- how I
wanted it to look (pixel perfect in ff/win & ie/win). 1/2 the markup, 1/2
the time, none of the getting lost in the code, 1/2 the maintenance
headache, climbing DOM trees like a monkey and throwing poop at IE for being
the only time consuming part.

CSS saves time and money.
CSS on broken html wastes time and money.
Making a complex form with broken html wastes time and money.
Example: A single missing (Œ) made IE submit the form values totally wrong.
Took me 3 days to figure out what was causing it. It was in a pass worded
admin system so normal validating wouldn¹t work because it would just
valudate the login page and at the time I didn¹t know about uploading the
html to the wc3 validator to check it that way. But once I found that out
and changed the doctype to strict the validator pointed out the quote
problem.
Finally, I¹m not javascript expert but it really seems to me that trying to
do certain things with javascript works a hell of a lot better when you have
totally valid markup.

Can¹t call it ³articulate² but that¹s my 5 cents.

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