Matthew Thomas wrote: > > That's not wrong. Computer programs are supposed to do what people want > and expect. That's what they're *for*. If they don't do what a majority > of their users want and expect, they're wrong.
Arg! This is getting circular. Yes, that was the point you made it a while back. What I was trying to sa, and I'll say it again, is that having a browser displaying an unstyled XML document as a tree is *not* what *I*, and others expect it to do. Don't forget us, we're users too. Obviously, there are others out there which may (for some unknown reason) expect it to be displayed as a tree. That's fine, but Moz should allow the user to make that choice. It doesn't even matter what the default is, just so long as it is customizable. Even a hidden pref would do. > The same thing as for HTML or XML: showing the unadulterated source of > the file. Mozilla currently doesn't do this, which is a major bug. Eh? How so? > [snippage: good suggestions for displaying text/plain] > This would be very useful when > reading text/plain e-zines, for example, since they often link to other > Web pages. Yep, look, I agree. Damm fine idea. >>containing XML or HTML markup is served as text/plain? Moz renders it >>as text and view source displays the same thing as the browser window. > > At the moment, yes. > Ahh, and according to the W3C, that's the way it supposed to be. This is good behaviour - getting the browser trying to do content sniffing and ignoring the mime type the server sends leads to a world of pain. > No, the reason Mozilla applies style to HTML is because that is what > users expect. Mozilla 1.x applied style to HTML back in the days when > Mosaic and Cello and various other Web browsers had noticable market > share amongst Web users, and to a large extent all the browsers rendered > HTML in different ways. The style certainly was not well known in those days. > > >> The HMTL REC defines and suggests style for HTML elements, > > No, it does not. (There are a few exceptions, mainly media-specific > presentational elements like B and I.) Just to be a pedantic git, from <http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224>: 7.4.1, The HEAD element. "User agents do not generally render elements that appear in the HEAD as content." 9.2 Structured text. "Generally, visual user agents present EM text in italics and STRONG text in bold font." And so on. In addition, the CSS specs provide sample style sheets for user agents displaying HTML. >>You can't call it correct though, >> > > I can, and do. I can see we're obviously going to disagree on this then. You'e not convincing me, and I'm not convincing you. >> and at >>least make it configurable, >> > > It is configurable. If you want the stream of text, hit Ctrl+U. If you > want the tree, don't hit Ctrl+U. Ahh, come on Matthew, configurable my arse. For development work that will be about as useful as saying to a user, "if you don't want javascript activated for particular site, go disable it in your prefs, then when you're done, reenable it". It's a completely useless suggestion. Also take into account the target audience of people viewing XML with no explicit or implicit style; developers, not Joe Public. > No, because the amount of work required for those masochists who prefer > unstyled XML to appear as a meaningless stream of text to hit Ctrl+U on > those occasions where they felt agitated enough I think you'll find that the masochists who get agitated enough are developers that during the course of building, debugging, testing and maintaining a web application that uses XML "natively" get sick of hitting Ctrl-U constantly when wanting to see the raw XML output from the application. Like I said, Joe Public won't care if it is or isn't styled as a tree, they'll think "what the hell??" and hit the back button. Developers are the only ones who will care about this, they are the only ones who will benefit from actualle seeing XML in the browser, and the ones who are most likely to want to be able to apply other default style. Given this, then replacing the current, useless rendering of XML with a tree like representation is going to give most developers a marginal gain because they're going to have to hit Ctrl-U anyway. > considerably less than the amount of work required to implement and test > and maintain a hidden pref to control whether or not unstyled XML was > shown as a pretty tree when in the browser rather than the source view. I would have though that a good way to implement this would be to just include some XSLT + CSS Moz's chrome, then have the app use that when displaying XML with no explicit or implicit style. Then, implementing the pref is just configuring the URI of the XSLT and CSS. Fairly easy, I'd imagine, and yep, I'm quite happy to volunteer my services to implement this, and it looks like that is the approach Heikki has taken in bug 64945 anyway. Why are we arguing about this again? > Hmmm, perhaps I should have drawn that last sentence as a tree. > Maybe. 8) -- Mike Gratton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Every motive escalate." Blatant self-promotion: <http://web.vee.net/>
