Re: View Source

Doug Schepers wrote:
> There are UI features everyone today counts on, merely on convention... 
> the status bar, tooltips, alerts, scrollbars, etc.  If we are trying to 
> create a rich and compelling development platform, I see no harm in 
> specifying such conventions, even if only as a SHOULD.

The specification only needs to specify what is needed for 
interoperability.  A view clean source feature is not required for 
interoperability and has no business being mandated by HTML5, even as a 
SHOULD requirement.

Such a feature is something that browser vendors can develop to compete 
with each each other, in this case, to attract web developers, and is 
something already provided by the HTML Tidy extension [1] in Firefox.

Besides, not all developers find it useful.  I find it much more useful 
for View Source to show me the actual source, rather than having it 
attempt to clean it up for me.  My experience with HTML Tidy in the past 
has helped me realise that automated source code clean up tools are not 
entirely reliable and can end up making things even worse.  When I was 
doing web development professionally, viewing the actual source was 
significantly more valuable to me than some automatically cleaned up 
alternative.

[1] http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

-- 
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/

Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2009 11:36:01 UTC