Re: Support Existing Content

On May 4, 2007, at 12:23 AM, Gareth Hay wrote:

> On 3 May 2007, at 20:40, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>> On May 3, 2007, at 12:07 PM, Gareth Hay wrote:
>>
>>> On 3 May 2007, at 18:07, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>
>>>> On May 2, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Gareth Hay wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm not trying to make lives easier on any side.
>>>>> The web is a mess, even you concede this point with your  
>>>>> rantings about external advertising content.
>>>>> Do you want it to continue like this? or do you want to pro- 
>>>>> actively fix it?
>>>>
>>>> What's the point of "fixing the web" if it doesn't make anyone's  
>>>> lives easier? This is a totally serious question - a lot of  
>>>> people seem to be advocating the forcing of valid markup  
>>>> regardless of whether it helps or hurts people. Surely the  
>>>> reason for abstract goals like use of conforming markup is to  
>>>> have good concrete effects.
>>>>
>>> It only hurts the lazy, or the uneducated author. Either can  
>>> change easily.
>>> I'm not advocating we make HTML rocket science or brain surgery,  
>>> it doesn't have to be hard, at the moment it /is/ hard because it  
>>> id broken, new authors find broken ways of doing things and see  
>>> nothing wrong "because it works".
>>
>> OK, that's an example of the kind of people it will hurt. (Besides  
>> that I'd add browser developers, users accessing content that was  
>> only tested in a browser that doesn't do strict checking with a  
>> browser that does, and content authors who want to improve their  
>> markup incrementally). But who will it help? If it hurts some  
>> people and helps nobody, what is the point?
>>
> Do you honestly think that by encouraging people to write more  
> correct code is not a help to anyone?

To answer for myself: yes, I think encouraging people to write  
conforming content is somewhat helpful (though less so than  
encouraging them to actually test in multiple browsers). But I do not  
think /forcing/ people to write conforming content is a help to  
anyone, especially if author mistakes then become problems for the  
end user. And when we are talking about draconian error handling to  
the point of refusing to render, we're talking about forcing, not  
encouraging.

So I'd say that I don't think "pro-actively fix[ing]" the web is a  
help to anyone, if that is taken to mean an attempt to force  
conformance.

What's your answer?

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 07:44:55 UTC