On Mar 21, 2006, at 6:23 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Ian Hickson wrote:
...
Unfortunately, the study Google did on Web authors showed that
authors cannot spell the word "language", and I see no reason to
believe that they might spell "gauge" either.
But unlike the almost entirely useless "language" attribute, gauge
will actually have a noticeable result in future browsers and so if
it's typed incorrectly, the author would not see the result and,
hopefully, go and fix it. Whereas if they mistype language, they
won't notice the error until they validate.
That makes it easier for them to correct it, but it doesn't make it
easier for them to type it in the first place.
...
Does that mean the HTML and CSS specifications are badly designed when
they use the word "color"? (Or that one of the early Risc OS Web
browsers was correct in recognizing the "colour" attribute as well?)
Sometimes the best word for something is one that's often misspelled,
and I agree with Lachlan it's not a problem in this case. People leave
language= misspelled only because it has no obvious effect. With
<gauge>, as with "color", the result will be very obvious and the
correct spelling quickly learned.
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
