Re: Flickr and alt

David Poehlman wrote:
> easy is a cop out.

Making things hard for the sake of making them hard is silly, though.

In fact, even making them hard for good reasons might not be desirable.

I sense more fundamental disagreements over the way the world works here...

> compliant is compliant.

That's a content-less statement.

> the spec should be written to 
> achieve an end which is to provide clear information of syntactical 
> correctness.

No.  It should be written to achieve the end of facilitating information 
exchange between the document producer and document consumer.  Syntax is 
a means to this end, not an end in itself.

> If we fork the spec, the fork of least resistance and most likely, less 
> accessible in this case will be the one most travelled.

Who mentioned forking anything?

Note that the path of least resistance will be traveled no matter what: 
that's just what happens when large numbers of people make independent 
decisions.  Our goal (not just this working group, but the HTML 
community in general) should be to make the path of least resistance be 
the path that produces optimal results, by a combination of spec text, 
authoring tools, mindset education, etc.  In other words, reduce 
resistance in the directions that would help.  Note that reducing 
resistance is much easier than increasing it, since we can't very well 
force people to do things the hard way: we can only provide easier ways 
of doing things.

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 19 August 2008 14:36:19 UTC