Web - Usability - Humor
Sunday, March 24, 2002[1:50:07 PM]
Fear the librarian [librarianavengers.com].
[12:21:49 PM]
The problem with the W3C vision for HTML is XML. XML is very rigid about how you use tags. That's well and good for people who write software, but it's very bad for people who write prose.
If you type HTML tags when you write, why should you care about XML syntax -- things like nesting? For example:
<b>bold <i>bold and italic</b> just italic</i>
...is "wrong" because in XML -- and even the original HTML -- you are supposed to "nest" properly:
<b>bold <i>bold and italic</i></b> <i>just italic</i>
... is "right".
The thing is, why not let the browser sort this out, rather than making every author in the world deal with it? Isn't handling this sort of minutia exactly why we have computers?
In short, the thing to do is to make HTML match the way people use it, not try to force people to use anti-productive XML. This would be easy: browsers would read in HTML, and convert it to what they call the Document Object Model. If your HTML leaves out a required tag, the browser knows what it would have been, and acts as if it were there.
HTML should be designed for the convenience of the author.
The other fundamental point is that the browser is owned by the reader. The browser should do its best to present the webpage that the reader wants to see.
The W3C folks tend to see this backwards. Many XML enthusiasts want the browser to display a page badly, in order to convince people to use "standard" HTML. This is wrong-headed. Browsers should be designed for the convenience of the reader.
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