- From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:28:22 -0800
- To: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- CC: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, www-international@w3.org
On 2/9/2010 11:38 PM, John Cowan wrote: > Leif Halvard Silli scripsit: > > >> (1) It should be mentioned that in SGML based mark-up, such as HTML4, >> one may omit the ";" in NCRs.... >> > > On the contrary, I would not document that you can drop it, particularly > when you can't always. > > Many documents are not only read to understand how to generate documents, but also to understand existing documents (perhaps with a view to modifying them). From that aspect, it's important to not only cover "best practices", but to adequately cover even deprecated constructs, let alone fully legal ones that are only to be avoided for sake of clarity, simplicity, symmetry, consistency or other types of convenience. If you have a good reason to avoid a certain practice, you can nevertheless write something like: "In many existing documents you will also find...." followed by a summary description and, perhaps, by a short example pointing out how such usages are tricky to get right. That's the kind of document that isn't either "dumbed down" or "politically correct", but actually helpful in the face of real world scenarios.
Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2010 10:29:08 UTC