Re: "image analysis heuristics" (ISSUE-66)

Ian Hickson, Sun, 7 Feb 2010 10:06:58 +0000 (UTC):
> On Sun, 7 Feb 2010, Steven Faulkner wrote:

"People" versus "competent engineers":
 
>> As a general rule, people don't follow references.
>> 
>> Can you provide support for this statement?
> 
> Sure. Over the years I've worked for Netscape and Opera, as well as 
> contributing to the Mozilla, WebKit, and Chromium projects, and regularly 
> advising Microsoft. In all of these cases, I have repeatedly seen 
> competent engineers [...]

This says very much about who you see yourself as having written the 
spec for. Those engineers are, btw, hardly the ones to be the typical 
Web _authors_.

FWIW, the spec very often appears as a "teach yourself the Unicode 
names of the ASCII letters" manual (can be useful of course ...):

]] 
Comments must start with the four character sequence U+003C LESS-THAN 
SIGN, U+0021 EXCLAMATION MARK,  U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, U+002D 
HYPHEN-MINUS (<!--).
[[

There is of course no loop whole for the devil to creep in in that 
sentence ... But the "meat" in that sentence is found in the 
parenthesis at the end. And so it is throughout the spec - someone who 
tries to read the spec will have to teach him-/herself ways to jump 
over lots of redundant stuff.

There were, in the editors draft of today, 3340 - three thousand and 
nine - occurrences of such unicode names/references. In comparison, 
CSS2.1 has only 50, and presented in a much more reader friendly way 
(with the Unicode name/references inside parenthesises). If you want to 
make the spec more readable for "people"  - or if you want to make sure 
that "people" read the readable parts of the spec - then there are many 
fundamental things that should be changed ... 

Steven Faulkner, Sun, 7 Feb 2010 11:15:25 +0000:
> If you are concerned about people not reading the referenced text, why not
> quote the relevant bit inline?
> 
> or provide a link phrased in such a way that it encourages people to follow
> the link, [...]

Indeed. If the spec gives the clear impression that it is _not_ self 
contained, then even the most competent engineers will not think it is.
--
leif halvard silli

Received on Sunday, 7 February 2010 14:18:42 UTC