- From: Jim Ley <jim.ley@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 23:51:40 +0000
On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 23:42:04 +0100, H?kon Wium Lie <howcome at opera.com> wrote: > Neither do I. Street HTML is a slightly humorous term we use at Opera > to describe the mess we wade through. We don't encourage it, nor > propose to build web applications on it. Indeed, our efforts in WHAT > WG is meant to ensure that tomorrow's applications are *not* written > in an undefined dialect. Current web applications use HTML almost exclusively as a rendering language, they're not even using the document semantics available in HTML, it's just script and CSS dangling off of the HTML elements you need. Increasing the amount of HTML elements and form tipes out there doesn't change this fact, they're not going to do quite enough - There's the eternal problem of the declaritive, it can only go 80% of the way there, so you end up employing scripters who are much happier doing it all in script, the disciplines being different. If the WHAT WG's aim is to improve Web Application authoring, then it's scripting that needs to be helped, tweaking at the edge isn't going to do anything. If the WHAT WG's aim is to discourage what they call street HTML, then removing the ambiguity and the mess of the existing HTML and de-facto specifications into something well grounded will be a lot more useful than simply introducing more stuff that'll end up in the variously implemented bin. > XML's draconian > "stop-processing!" rule does not mix well with the natural laziness of > authors or the last-minute quick fix required by their managers. Just because there is one ridiculous rule in XML when used for user centric languages, doesn't mean that just building on a mess of ill defined HTML is appropriate. Sure the XML processing rules make it near useless for use on the web if they're adhered to, but we can get more rigourous than the HTML mess. Jim.
Received on Sunday, 9 January 2005 15:51:40 UTC