Re: Issue 31c: Meta generator

Sam Ruby, Sat, 19 May 2012 08:18:18 -0400:
> On 05/19/2012 04:01 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> On 2012-05-19 09:43, Daniel Glazman wrote:
>>> ...
>>>> Do you have any opinion or knowledge of what other tool vendors might
>>>> do under this same circumstance?
>>> 
>>> In short, you're asking tool vendors to remove the only hint in the
>>> markup that will let the viewer of the source of a given page know that
>>> the page was created by their tool?-) Honestly, no, I don't want to
>>> remove that and I suspect other editing tool vendors will have the
>>> same opinion, at first glance. The HTML WG will have to be extremely
>>> persuasive to change that opinion, IMHO...
>>> And I don't see why it should have to be persuasive. HTML5 is here to
>>> make html grow on the basis on common practice. Common practice is that
>>> the generator meta tag is used w/o constraints at this time. Adding
>>> constraints to it seems to me contrary to the design of html5 and the
>>> needs of the industry.
>>> ...
>> 
>> Absolutely. I use the generator information to embed version information
>> (which version of my XSLT code, and run by which XSLT processor); this
>> is extremely useful when trying to find out where problems in a
>> generated page come from.
>> 
>> I do not plan to change this; even if this means that no alt checking
>> will take place in the future.

To my dismay the info I gathered from Softpress last year, and which I 
think said essentially the same thing that Daniel and Julian said 
(namely that they are not going to remove the generator despite its 
effects on validation), was not included in the reopen request (the 
CP): [1]

]] In Freeway's case, the proposal won't actually make any difference 
to the code that we generate. The generator string is optional as far 
as Freeway is concerned. It's there by default, but users can remove it 
if they want. We need to build pages that will validate regardless of 
whether this string is present or not. [[

That Softpress said that they will generate the same code regardless of 
the generator exception, also goes shows that the following 
justification from Ian for why the generator exception was created, 
does not hold water: [2]

]] "to discourage markup generators from including bogus alternative 
text purely in an attempt to silence validators." [[

Please include in the next reopen request ...

> In case anybody missed it, these are statements by authors, and can 
> certainly be cited by request to reopen based on new information.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2011May/0345
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jul/0050.html
-- 
Leif H Silli

Received on Saturday, 19 May 2012 14:02:48 UTC