On 10/08/2011 10:16 AM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
On 11-08-09 04:14 PM, John Elliot wrote:
On 10/08/2011 9:08 AM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
I can't even find the spot in the HTML4 or
XHTML1 spec where it says
that a perfectly fine marked up list is invalid if it doesn't contain
any items.
Well you could save yourself some trouble and let
validator.w3.org
guide
you in that matter.
Guide?
You mean link to that information so I have the actual words of the spec
that browsers are supposed to implement? It doesn't give any link.
Why are you telling me?
http://validator.w3.org/feedback.html
You mean take the validator's interpretation as
the absolute an
unequivocal authority that it's wrong without seeing the information in
the actual spec saying it's wrong? Like hell... If I accepted a
validator's narrow (potentially incorrectly implemented) interpretation
of something I wouldn't be using CSS vendor prefixes like
-moz-border-radius since last time I checked the css validator says
they're wrong, even though vendor prefixes are a valid part of the spec.
If you'd seen Pirates of the Caribbean, you'd understand that there's a
difference between rules and guidelines.
Of course some of us take the guidelines rather seriously.
That's actually a pretty good direction to take
explaining the fallacy
of validators and badges for them.
Our css includes output like:
.foo { background-image: url(data:...); background-image: url(...) !ie;}
Strict interpretation wise, that's invalid css because !ie is not valid
inside the background-image. Are we going to remove that? Hell no, if we
did versions of IE people are still using would stop displaying
background images because they can't handle data uris.
Again, I think it's reasonable to engineer a system where policy
decisions such as this are at the option of the user.
I'm a user of MediaWiki, and I care more about strict compliance with
open-standards than I do about supporting antiquated browsers, so I
should be able to take the decision to not support that.
Likewise with HTML what matters is NOT that a strict
validator says it's
ok, but that it's well-formed so that all browsers have the same
interpretation of it, and conforms to understandable patterns either
de-facto or detailed in external specs (like the RSD spec, Universal
Edit Button, etc...).
Again, there will be a class of MediaWiki users who have a different
opinion.
eg: EditURI is part of RSD [Really Simple Discovery],
it's a standard
way of letting software discover the api endpoint(s) for a page. In the
future not having that could mean that a tool one of your users may use
could break because it can't find the api.
There is a process for this defacto standard to be integrated with
web-standards, and by not supporting it until it has gone through that
process you provide incentives for its proponents to ensure they do
things in an amiable and collaborative fashion.