Re: Balancing the myth-busting.

Hi David,

On 09/08/05, David Dorward <david@dorward.me.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 08:55:24PM +0100, Gez Lemon wrote:
> > > You already have done so this evening.
> >
> > I've already put words in your mouth, or I've already said that
> > education isn't important?
> 
> The former.
> 
> > I wasn't aware I had done either. Could you please be more explicit
> > so that I can either apologise and retract my statement, or defend
> > what I actually said.
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2005JulSep/0304.html
> 
> "So we agree there's a problem. The only difference is that I would
> like to see the problem addressed."

Please accept my apologies, and allow me to rephrase my response:

"So we agree there's a problem. The only difference is that I would
like to see the problem addressed by the W3C validator team, and you
would prefer it to be done through education alone", which I couldn't
possibly have known at the time, as you didn't mention education until
I did, at which point you used it against me. In fairness, the only
thing I had to go on at the time I made my response is that you
thought my opinions were "rubbish".

> I decided to take a look at the script you pointed to earlier as an
> example of why you think the feature is needed. There are lots of
> things in it which would be hard to implement to implement in a
> validator.

Fail it then. I'm not defending that script; far from it. In terms of
standards, it's as far away as you could get. I respect Bobby van der
Sluis, and appreciate anyone who contributes so much of their free
time to make things work, but I dislike that script. It won't work
with application/xhtml+xml because it's not standards compliant. Being
flagged as not standards compliant by a validator is a good thing in
my opinion.

> I suppose it is just about possible to do what you want. It would have
> three major problems though.
> 
> 1. It would be very difficult and require a /lot/ of man hours of work
>    to create

I strongly disagree. If you already have a document tree, what can be
difficult about inserting nodes and attributes? Getting the document
tree in the first place would be a much more difficult task. Inserting
elements and attribute after the event is a trivial exercise.

> 2. It would be very difficult to present the information to the user
>    since there are dozens of different documents outputted by the
>    script that would be validated.

If valid arguments are not available, default values will do. That's
what programmers are taught to do, and it would be suitable in this
situation.

> 3. It would be very expensive (in CPU terms) to run

More expensive than the recursion required to create a valid document
tree? Catering for DOM injection would be done after the document tree
has already been created, where elements and/or attributes are merely
inserted into the resulting tree. Anything above and beyond creating
the initial document tree is obviously going to take a bit more
processing, but nothing that could be described as too intensive.

Best regards,

Gez

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Received on Tuesday, 9 August 2005 21:18:02 UTC