On 19 Nov 2002 at 15:22, Fringe Ryder wrote: > At 10:53 PM 11/19/2002 +0000, Robert O'Connor wrote: > >On 18 Nov 2002 at 21:43, Laurens M. Fridael wrote: > > > complying with W3C standards is hardly a priority or > > > even a consideration. > > > >I would tend to differ on that point. > > > >Over the next few years, Plucker is going to become the dominant force as > >it continues to > >mature and the commercial alternatives wither. AvantGo, in particular is > >on the downgrade, with > >a delisted stock, layoffs, CEO resignations, and sagging sales. > > > >As Plucker continues to rise, I would offer that Plucker chooses the best > >practices, in the > >form of documented W3C and ISO standards, instead of picking up the bad > >practices of the > >withering commercial off-line browsers. > > Hmm... what about those of us who want the tool to work in as many cases as > easily-possible, rather than being holier-than-thou and refusing to work on > sites because they have innocuously-broken code? > > (This doesn't refer to the "back" functionality; I don't care about > that. I use Plucker for content, not for buttons. It just refers to the > board-mentality that Plucker should be less tolerant of errors than any > browser, instead actively refusing to touch sites with even the most minor > of transgressions.)
*I* am not going to: (a) work on crap non-standard proprietary non-HTML. (b) offer support on mailing lists on how to use crap non-standard proprietary non-HTML. (c) maintain the extra work to maintain compatibility of crap non-standard proprietary non-HTML, as they change underfoot since they aren't standard. (d) document them all and how to make them work. (e) maintain the docs. If *you* (or others) want to work, support, and maintain, document, and maintain the docs of the crap, here is a short list of crap: -An eclectic mix of named colours that some browsers thought should be supported once upon a time. -Illegal non-HTML comments, like the garbage spit out from MS Office without their patch: the <![garbage]-->. -AvantGo pods://. -Others: maybe the "marquee" tag from MSIE 3.x days, and all the other non- standard crap that has come and gone over the years. I would ask however, that there would either be a separate branch for these in CVS, or ./configure options that can remove them from the source, so that there is a non-polluted standard set of parsers available so the pure parser doesn't break on account of supporting the crap non-HTML. There are two issues here: (1) These non-standard things (especially when an equivalent way of doing the same thing exists in a standard way), is often done deliberately by a corporation with market share to try and fracture the market to protect position. Note specifically on the <![crap]> MS Office garbage. That breaks a HTML syntax parser because it is so far off the mark of what HTML is. Why bloat our own parser and make it slower supporting that when even they themselves had to release a patch--I don't plan to be the maid to clean up other peoples' crap. If you want to take that role, by all means. (2) HTML content is a cut-throat business to be in. If there are two providers of news: one has crap non-HTML that looks bad or has broken links (or has a AvantGo-only block), and the other that uses standard HTML that thus works in all off-line browsrs (and is open to all browsers), the latter gains more readers. Supporting crap removes the incentive to gain more readers by not using crap when designing an offline site. It is not that the Plucker shouldn't touch sites that have non-HTML, it should report a meaningul error as to what is broken in the file and how it should be corrected to make it into what HTML is. If I try to feed a .RTF file through an HTML parser, I wouldn't expect the parser to have extra bloat to try and make something meaningful out of something that isnt't HTML. Best wishes, Robert .---~~~~~~---. ________________________________________ / \ / \ MedicalMnemonics.com | __ | .-------+` `+-------. A free non-profit online searchable | | () | | database of medical mnemonics to help `-------+.__.+-------' remember the important details. (| O O |) ^\ /^ http://www.medicalmnemonics.com \ \ / / [EMAIL PROTECTED] \ ~~~~ / ________________________________________ `-_ _-' ~~~~~~ _______________________________________________ plucker-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
