Re: [CSS21] response to issue 115 (and 44)

* Rijk van Geijtenbeek wrote:
>Joe Web Designer just uses his local Windows copy to create a style sheet,  
>and adds some comments in his own language, adds his name, maybe adds a  
>copyright symbol, saves his file in the local windows charset and uploads  
>without thinking much.

That's exactly why I want clear and simple rules.

>It works for HTML, after all. For HTML, if he does something wrong, a few  
>funny characters show up in the text. This happens all the time. With CSS,  
>you want to punish him by assuming UTF-8, which will garantee lots of  
>stylesheets will not be applied.

It would be very helpful if you share your implementation experience
with the HTML Tidy maintainers, so far we did not manage to implement
what you suggest and I somewhat doubt that our users are fine when Tidy
converts their names or whatever into funny characters.

Authors are already "punished" by the same rules for all XML based
formats and quite a number of non-XML formats, as they are "punished" by
things like color:rgb(10%,70%,255) or color:ffffff; considered invalid;
not to mention what happens if they have unmatched brackets or quote
marks, if the style sheet is not delivered as text/css, if the server
admin configured the server to send text/css;charset=iso-8859-1 but
their style sheet is not iso-8859-1, etc.pp.

If I as an author add some text to an XML document but don't ensure the
document is properly encoded, my XML processor will complain, I fix it
and everything is fine. I feel be no means "punished" by my XML
processor or authors of the XML Recommendation. I *do feel punished* by
inconsistent results in browsers and browsers that to not adhere to web
standards, such as Opera and Mozilla. For example,

  a) http://www.bjoernsworld.de/temp/iso-8859-1-without-decl.xhtml
  b) http://www.bjoernsworld.de/temp/iso-8859-1-with-us-ascii-decl.xhtml

Both documents are not well-formed, 

  * http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.bjoernsworld.de/temp/iso-8859-1-without-decl.xhtml
  * http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.bjoernsworld.de/temp/iso-8859-1-with-us-ascii-decl.xhtml

hence it safe to assume that these documents look similar to

  c) http://www.bjoernsworld.de/temp/illformed.xhtml

in any browser claiming to support relevant web standards. They do not
in Mozilla 1.6 and Opera 7.23 but a) looks different in those browsers.
What could be worse?

Received on Friday, 20 February 2004 12:04:56 UTC