On Tue, 13 Aug 1996, Tony Gill wrote:
> I have to agree with Stuart here, adherence to standards should be a means to
> an end (or ends), not an end in itself; if the various 'scheme-scheme kludges'
> work for people/every common browser/robots, should we worry if a few
> validation services pick up on a small number of invisible HTML-crimes? I
> certainly won't be losing too much sleep over it.
You might do if you try to load your naughty non-HTML into an HTML editor
that is strict about the DTD and it refuses to play ball. Or if the robot
uses an SGML parser on the HEAD of the document to try to retrieve the
metadata and barfs on the non-standard META attributes. Or if you use a
validation service on your software to ensure that the HTML is likely to
do sensible things on the majority of the browsers that it hits. Or if
you keep your documents in another format (maybe another SGML format) and
you want to use an SGML tool to generate the HTML. Or, well you get the
idea why I'm keen on doing this (I never thought I'd be the champion of a
propoer SGML DTD approach. Lou must have slipped something in my tea at
Warwick... :-) :-) ).
> Besides which, as long as a *consistent* approach is used, it should be
> relatively trivial for your friendly local hacker to practice their arcane art
> by converting the 'kludges' to a standard format, should consensus be reached
> at a future date.
Yep I'd like a consistent approach as well, but I'd also like one that
doesn't break the HTML DTD or software that might use it. For me,
consistent == standard.
> Jon could then use the extra income from this programming work to pay for
> additional counselling ;-)
Heh, the amount of counselling that I need would require a fair bit more
money than I could make from programming kludge conversion. It would be
useful extra beer money I guess... :-) :-)
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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