- From: Andi Sidwell <andi@takkaria.org>
- Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:29:52 +0000
- To: public-html@w3.org
John Foliot wrote: > Which bring us to the current problem: in virtually every other > programming language available to application developers today, > failing to write the ‘code’ to the code’s specification results in > the application simply not working - in other words a catastrophic > fail. Applications don’t “sort-of” work, they simply don’t work - > full stop. As in any other engineering endeavor, the more complex and > sophisticated the project, the more important it is to ensure all the > requirements and details are correct, or else your end result is a > failure. Failing to write code to a syntax specification results in the code not compiling, true, but you're conflating that with the functionality of the software--code can be syntactically valid whilst still being a mess of half-working, buggy, crash-prone ideas. I am not aware of any programming languages which fail to compile if the resulting program would be buggy or inaccessible, so while it sounds like you're saying something quite sensible and obvious, you're actually proposing something extremely radical, and indeed, mostly unparalleled in software development history. You suggest that if content fails for someone, it should fail for everyone. Here are some more apt analogies which I think illustrate your point well: - no concerts (or conversations!) without sign-language interpreters present - no movies shown where someone hadn't written captions (this includes watching just-recorded footage on the screens of video cameras) - no-one using stairs to a building unless there were also a ramp to the same building - no books or written texts without braille equivalents - no smells (for there are people who cannot smell things and there is no equivalent to that for other people) etc. Andi (with apologies to Mark Pilgrim)
Received on Sunday, 22 March 2009 16:30:31 UTC