Re: Proposal for developing HTML 5 materials for Web *authors*

on 11/21/07 7:02 PM, Ian Hickson at ian@hixie.ch wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Nov 2007, Karl Dubost wrote:
>> 
>> The fact for example to say you should write
>> <p class="boo">Š</p>
>> or <p class='boo'>Š</p>
>> does not change anything to the parsing algorithm, doesn't change
>> anything to the implementation of browsers.
> 
> I've been having trouble working out exactly what you were proposing in
> this thread so far. But it seems that you are actually proposing that we
> change the spec to disallow unquoted attribute values (and presumably,
> attribute names without attribute values), and in general disallow
> anything that is incompatible with the XML syntax.
> 
<big ole snip>
> 
> While it is absolutely fine to have writing conventions and style guides,
> they should not change the actual language itself. We have no interest in
> the XML serialisation, and being forced to be compatible with it is of no
> use to us. On the other hand, we _do_ want to make our documents as small
> as possible. HTML's various syntax shortcuts are a big help here. They
> should continue to be allowed.

I'm not in favor of changing the spec, but refining a preferred convention
and more precise style guide would be very valuable for those of us who deal
with input from a variety of sources.

Getting code from a variety of different producers, at a number of different
companies, and having little feedback on what you're getting, is a reality
for those of us in the news biz.

We get ad code from all over, crazy RSS markup from all over, lousy iframes,
output from the CMSs of various news orgs, and have to attempt to make it
all play nice together.

If there were a more focused "recommended" way to code, this might be a tad
easier.

Not that we should change what's allowed, or restrict rendering, but a
smaller subset that says,"Please do it this way" is something I'm in favor
of.

FWIW, I'm for double quotes and the use of a solidus, myself.



Dylan Smith

Received on Thursday, 22 November 2007 02:29:17 UTC