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.