Well-formedness, and yet another validity plea (was: Re: Summary of arguments FOR validity -- and another against -- and a third of alternatives)

>    "Thus, I can live with a requirement at level 1 that my code is
>    well-formed - that is good coding practice and can help
>    accessibility.

Are we really doing us a favor if we include yet another dimension in this
anyhow "challenging" validity discussion?

What are the advantages of well-formedness? I slap myself remembering that
we already had this discussion months ago, and that it apparently didn't
work out. I also bite in the edge of my table that we now just have the same
debate as with validity per se, and that's why I question to include another
dimension right now.

Committing to standard compliance (and that's not "well-formedness") helps
accessibility by binding tools and authors to a common grammar, which in
turn benefits users who at one time or another don't need to worry anymore
about parsing, layout, and finally access problems. P1 validity sets a
signal, and it is one little thing to make the guidelines more reliable and
future-proof.


-- 
Jens Meiert
Information Architect

http://meiert.com/ < Reloaded

| Webdesign mit CSS (O'Reilly, 228 pages, German)
| In theatres November 28th: http://meiert.com/cssdesign/

Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2005 10:41:26 UTC