- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 07:26:59 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
> and he refused to > even look at the w3c standards and instead wanted to see a guide that was > easier to understand. He's not a web developer, he's a meteoroligst student, That's pretty standard for software developers++ in all fields. In the many fields, there is also the problem that you can't go into a bookshop and buy an international standard off the shelf, and if you could, it would be more expensive than the "Made's Child Play" (intended as a ficticious book series) book on the subject. You only have to go into any bookshop to see that what developers want is basically cook books from which they can copy code fragments. Book publishers are in a commercial world and need to supply what people want, not what is good for them. It was always the case that standards documents were very rarely found (not just in software) and vendors own manuals tended to be shared across teams of 20 or more, but there has been a large increase in the number of dumbed down programming books in the last 15 to 20 years. ++ Also, people reselling non-software products that claim compliance to standards, even quite high in the supply chain, are unlikely to have the standards documents, and may not realise that a supplier's claim of compliance is voided by the way they combine with other things (EMC might be an obvious example of where a component can comply but a system might not).
Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2003 02:26:59 UTC