Re: why TITLE, not TITLE?

> The TITLE of a document has a very specific purpose. To UNIQUELY identify
> the document in human-readable terms. That's a very important property that
> most designers ignore. I've seen whole sites that use the same TITLE over
> tens of pages. A document's TITLE is obviously required and should be made
> as unique as possible, so as to distinguish it from others.

I thought about this, but the TITLE isn't unique.  It's not 
like a filename, since the URL serves that purpose. 

> This is where your problem is, Chad: user agents should be very lenient in
> what they accept. The DTD has nothing to do with what a browser would
> recognise. A good HTML viewer should be EXTREMELY fault tolerant. The whole
> philosophy is being strict with what you serve and lenient with what you
> accept. It is the author's responsibility to follow the rules when writing a
> document.

One view is that the parser (if it's dtd driven) is the DTD+parser code, so in
order to make the parser more lenient, you can choose which one you
want to modify. I know people cringe when there's talk about hacking
the DTD :)  There's the argument that if you modify the DTD, you'll
have to modify every DTD that comes out next -- but the same goes for
modifying the parser.   If I modify the parser to be more lenient, then
I have to modify the parser again (potentially) when a new DTD comes out
in order to be more lenient w/ that DTD.

I'll probably have to modify the parser anyway, becuase there's some
things I can't handle by only modifying that DTD.  So there's a good
argument for 'if you're going to modify someone, keep all of the 
modifications in one place - the parser code (and leave the DTD alone)'

I'll either end up creating a 'lenient DTD' and/or a 'lenient parser'
- I'll go off and think about it and see how hard it is to modify the
parser itself.  I guess this is the problem of having the HTML 'browsers' come
out before the HTML 'generators' :(

Cheers,

-Chad

-- 
Finger me for my pgp public key
Today's random buzzword: fault-tolerant network

Received on Friday, 9 May 1997 15:28:38 UTC