Re: summary of resolutions from last 2 days

Apologies for being late to this debate.

On 15/06/05, Matt May <mcmay@w3.org> wrote:
> The very problem is that we are living in a world where HTML 
> producers "don't know what they are doing."

And we should be living in a world where HTML producers do know what
they're doing. In evaluating the correctness of HTML documents out
there, we're probably being skewed by personal websites that may well
be interesting, but aren't commercial and do not necessarily offer a
service to the general public. Surely our real concern is with
commercial websites and/or websites that offer a service to the
general public? It seems that every time the topic of standards comes
up, the working group hides behind the fact there are billions of
websites out there that are invalid. Most of us agree that while a
standards compliant website doesn't ensure accessibility, it is
definitely a leap in the right direction.

On 15/06/05, Matt May <mcmay@w3.org> wrote:
> How did the Web become popular? It was because ordinary people 
> learned they could do it. Most of them have never figured out what a 
> doctype is. Most of them have no idea what CSS is, or that it can 
> do more than set fonts and colors.

Of course, and it's great that so many people have found a
communication medium that allows them to voice their opinions,
interests, or anything else they want to talk about. The concern is
that the standards used by hobbyists are being applied to people who
build professional websites that are meant to serve the general
public. I also think it's great that I can go down the local builders
yard and buy some bricks and cement. Thankfully, building regulations
mean that I couldn't build a house for someone unless I show
demonstrate some sort of proficiency. It's great that "ordinary"
people can build websites; it's a shame that these same people can
also offer their services to professionals and be advocated by WCAG as
standards are considered an ideal, and not a baseline for best
practice.

On 16/06/05, Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org> wrote:
> That distinction would certainly be true for something simple 
> like unencoded ampersands in URLs

Unencoded ampersands can and do cause errors that may not be noticed
by developers who test their work with Internet Explorer running on
Windows. For anyone using a decent browser, all of the entities
defined in the W3C's character entity references [1] will cause
problems if they're used as query string parameters.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html#h-24.2

Best regards,

Gez


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Received on Thursday, 16 June 2005 21:48:47 UTC