Re: Thought on future of XMLC

Hi Arno!!

Arno Schatz <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> what you wrote is exactly what I did the last 3 years using XMLC. However,
> on the various projects with XMLC i have seen

>   - HTML developer mostly don't produce legal HTML (often I educate them
> what legal HTML is and want not)

Are these people actually producing HTML by hand or using an authoring tool?

>   - HTML developer don't use HTML Tidy, even if I install it on their
>    desktop.

Umm, that is prety lame.  Maybe you need to fire them :-)

>   - there are some cases where illegal HTML is wanted, like the
>    'absmiddle'-attribute.  Netscape and IE support some proprietary HTML
>    attributes, which will cause warnings in JTidy.

XMLC has an option to tell jtidy about non-standard attribute (and
even tags).  I think jtidy has built-in knowledge of what the netscape
and IE attribute.  

> HTML developers have a hard time already getting their code to run on all
> desired Platforms (IE, Netscape 6, Netscape 4,...) which is a big pain. Now
> we are asking them that their code should additionally be compatible with
> the W3C HTML 4.0 spec.

It would seem to me that a problem with portability is the fact that they are
producting invalid HTML and using proprietary extensions.  Perhaps they need
stick to what the tools are designed to do.

IMHO, this is why so many web sites look nice, but are difficult to actually
use.

> The way HTML developers work is to view their HTML in all different browsers
> and if it looks good then its ok.

That's part of the problem; I bet they don't check in all of the different
browsers, just IE and netscape.  Opera? Galeon?  etc...

> And nobdy cares about the summary attribute in table-tags, which will cause
> warnings in the compile process.

Dave Raggett thinks it's important (author of tidy and the html spec).

> Java developers also refuse to fix them, because there are so many of them
> and they always are in a hurry. So the compile process is always full of
> JTidy warnings, and it is just too easy to overlook the important ones.

I really think that jtidy should be configured to treat things it wants
to change as errors rather than warnings.  Things like summary would
be warnings, but invalid document structure, etc would be errors.
It's just guessing at what is expected, and this is not really a good
idea. This was something I was intending to do but never got to.

> That is why I like to see XMLC change the original HTML code as little as
> possible.

Since XMLC converts a document to an object hierarchy and then format's this,
it's difficult to impossible to do `right thing' with invalid HTML.  Trying
to support it will only compound the problem.

If the goal is to use invalid html and just do string subtitution on it, XMLC
is the wrong tool for the job.  It's a design goal of XMLC to only support
valid documents.
 
> does that make sense to you?

Your explanation makes sense, their attitude doesn't make sense. 

Mark