Re: Cleaning House

Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
> Or, some bright person/people come up with a tool that reads the badly
> form content and converts it into a well formed site with the click of a
> button. The tool could show the person where the potential fixes are and

You mean like HTML Tidy <http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/>?

These days with DOMs, and XML libraries that serialise to HTML, it just 
needs one parser to implement the full error recovery rules and allow 
the internal DOM to be written.

The problem area with all of these would be scripts, using 
document.write.  HTML4 requires that the document be valid with or 
without the document.writes executed, but I think the HTML5 rules allow 
the script to generate unbalanced tags.

An alternative, also with a script problem, would be to require HTML5 
browsers when running with permission to write to the local machine 
(i.e. not in kiosk mode) to force a user dialogue offering to save a 
corrected version on the completion of document loading (or page exit if 
the page was incompletely loaded - some pages are open ended).  That 
would shame the author as well as making it easy to fix.  It would 
require that a DOM without script manipulations be maintained, in the 
case of well behaved scripting.

The big problem with the naming and shaming approach is that the first 
browser to opt out is likely to gain market share.

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 06:34:47 UTC