[thelist] What is wrong with this site?
Simon Willison
cs1spw at bath.ac.uk
Mon Aug 18 16:45:38 CDT 2003
Jeff Howden wrote:
> again, as evidenced by the original request, the developer doesn't always
> intend for their work to be sent as text/plain. ie is doing its best to
> protect the user from this mistake.
"Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce" is
fine for some purposes, but in web browsers it is a down right
liability. The reason, as I touched on before, is simple: a web browser
is a development tool. Most people adding content to the web are only
testing it in a single browser - if that browser is silently fixing
their mistakes for them, they'll think that their page is correct and
will consider it a job well done. When a browser comes along that
doesn't fix that particular mistake the site will be broken, but the
original author will have no idea that there's a problem.
This in turn leads to a downwards spiral. These days, if you want to
write a new web browser you have to not only implement a number of large
W3C specifications, but you also have to reverse-engineer Internet
Explorer's thousands of undocumented "fixes" or your browser will be
unable to render the vast majority of the web, and no one will use it.
It's not just bad practise, it's down right anti-competitive, and
unfortunately the market has got to a point now where the situation is
irreversible (browsers can't get sticter because old pages will break).
XHTML was meant to save us from this by starting anew with strict rules
and the all important requirement that invalid pages should refuse to
render, but unless the next version of IE (ha! there's a joke) does
proper XML parsing on pages served with an XML doctype (as Mozilla does
at the moment) even that will be lost.
Silently fixing mistakes is NOT an aid to developers. If you've left out
a closing table tag and the page fails to render (or even better fails
with a warning message telling you you forgot to close the tag) you fix
it, save and reload. If the browser silently fixes it for you you never
even realise there's a problem. Can you imagine the state the world's
software would be in if some C compilers "guessed" what you meant and
re-added missing braces and semi-colons for you? Sure, they'd work - but
no one who looked at the source code would know why! HTML should have
been the same, but smart thinking by browser vendors doomed us to an
endless cycle of undocumented "enhancements" and badly formed web pages.
</rant>
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update and makes available an XML file which you can download to your
own site once an hour and use to generate a dynamic blogroll showing
your favourite blogs in the order they last updated.
</tip>
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