On 18/1/09 00:24, Henri Sivonen wrote:
No. However, most of the time, when people publish HTML, they do it to elicit browser behavior when a user loads the HTML document in a browser.
Most users of the Web barely know what a browser is, let alone HTML. They're just putting information online; perhaps into a closed site (eg. facebook), perhaps into a public-facing site (eg. a blog), or perhaps into 1:1, group or IM messaging (eg. webmail). HTML figures in all these scenarios. Browsers or HTML rendering code too, of course. But I don't think we can jump from that to claims about user intent, and more than their use of the Internet signifies an intent to have their information chopped up into packets and transmitted according to the rules of TCP/IP.
The reason for my pedantry here is not to be argumentative, but just to suggest that this (otherwise very natural) thinking leads us to forget about the other major consumers of HTML - search engines. Having their stuff found and linked by other is often a big part of the motivation for putting stuff online. HTML parsing is involved, impact on the needs and interests of mainstream users is involved; but it's not clear whether all/any/many users 'do it to elicit search engine behaviour when indexing the HTML document'.
Aren't search engines equally important consumers of HTML? Perhaps they're more simple-minded in their behaviour than a full UI browser. But from the user side, there's only slightly more value in being readable without being findable than vice-versa...
cheers, Dan -- http://danbri.org/
