Ian Hickson wrote:
Consider that essentially every page generated by Blogger, Moveable Type
or WordPress is not hand authored.
Actually, all those _are_ hand authored. They all use templates that were
very carefully written by HTML authors by hand.
Almost every page at sites like Amazon.com or walmart.com is not hand
authored.
Again, most of the HTML on those pages was hand-authored. Sure, it was
written in Perl scripts (or whatnot), but it was still, at one point,
hand-authored, and not generated by a markup editor like Dreamweaver.
I disagree with your implicit definition of "hand authored". To my way
of thinking, hand authoring means someone opened a text editor, and
typed out the static HTML of the page. Furthermore, the same person who
wrote the content, wrote the markup. If a professional developer wrote
templates to be used by others, then the pages built from those
templates aren't hand-authored. However, clearly both exist; so let's
avoid arguing semantics and instead define two terms:
1. Strong hand-authoring: static HTML written fully in a plain vanilla
text editor with tags in view
2. Weak hand-authoring: templates hand-authored, content not
My point then becomes, very little content on the web today is strongly
hand authored, and the proportion continues to decrease.
People who strongly hand author, or who create weakly hand-authored
systems are competent to create well-formed markup if they choose to do so.
People who merely use weakly hand authored systems do not see the
markup, and do not need to be considered in our deliberations on this point.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
