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RE: The truth about standards...

• To: 'Frank Richards' <frank@t...>, Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>
• Subject: RE: The truth about standards...
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 16:48:17 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Yes, I've read the Gosling article.  S.O.P., 
or, digital life as we know it.

Another way to look at it is to ask oneself 
what the footprint and overall reliability 
of IE would be if it were XHTML-only. In other 
words, remove all the code that allows invalid 
or malformed HTML per the XHTML DTD/Schema, 
and then ask what is the overall effect of that 
(other than enabling broken pages to fail)?

Or what would an XML-conformant, clean sheet 
web browser for compliant XHTML be?  Well, 
trouble to start.

For a standard to make a difference, it has 
to be affective before the spec'd lab experiment 
gets out of the lab, but if one waits that 
long to get it right the first time, one risks 
obsolescence or loss of market.  That is the chinese 
finger puzzle of technical work.  The answer of some 
is to only do simple standards for easily understood 
pieces and let the overall framework "emerge" bottom 
up.  It sounds good in theory, but in practice, 
it gets us a system that barely interoperates and 
has lots of glue APIs.  Call it "churn" and think 
about how hard it is to get hot entrees out to 
a banquet fresh for each diner.  Heck, just keep 
a Shoney's buffet table fresh.  JIT is SNAFU. 

Is there are better way?  Not as far as I know.  It 
comes down to individuals and recipes for each 
meal being cooked.  From 50k ft, reality is, for meals 
this big with this many cooks, one lives with some 
bad potential combinations, just like the buffet, 
for all of the good ones.

Ever mistake the ranch dressing for the biscuit 
gravy just because they were side by side in 
the buffet tray at Shoney's at 3AM?

len

From: Frank Richards [mailto:frank@t...]

On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 17:07, Dare Obasanjo wrote:

> PS: Reading the linked Zeldman.com article I couldn't help but be
> puzzled by "XHTML 1.0 brought consistent rules to traditional web markup
> and helped it play well with XML applications. These standards made
> sense because they solved real problems.". In hindsight, are there
> people who truly believe XHTML 1.0 solved any real problems besides
> making HTML buzzword compliant? Honest question not flamebait.  

Depends on how you're defining real problem. If you mean has it made a
whole new class of things effectively possible like say XSLT did, no.
Has it saved me and many others a few hours here and a few hours there
of annoying gruntwork, yeah. It's a defined vocabulary that can be
processed with both XML and HTML tools. Nothing really hard, but it
avoids renegotiation and stupid oversights.

It's especially helpful because it partially avoids the very-real-to-me
problem of Internet Explorer's massively broken CSS implementation.

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