On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 11:38:42AM +0000, Connor Lane Smith wrote: > Hey, > > On 4 April 2010 07:57, Mate Nagy <mn...@port70.net> wrote: > > This means that making your page respect an imaginary standard gives no > > results except than a pretty badge. Rather than striving towards such an > > ideal, I find it much more useful (dare I say suckless) to make your web > > markup as *minimalist* as possible (e.g. no closing tags, no quotes > > where you can skip them, no CSS, no JS, the simplest <=HTML4 > > formatting). This will make your page work on all browsers forever, and > > as a bonus, make it easily processible with external tools (and the user > > can still specify any kind of custom style they want). > > Websites like this are extremely difficult to parse. "Is this <p> the > end of a paragraph or the beginning? Let's test both!" In making your > HTML not at least resemblant of XML (that is, all tags close) you > aren't making things simpler, you're just producing more complexity > elsewhere. > > I'm not even sure how "fewer characters" equates as "simpler": LOC is > only an approximation of how suckless our code is. When given a > trade-off between two simple lines or one complex one, write two. A > paragraph makes sense as <p>text</p>: it opens, it closes. Quotes are > nice too. I'm not saying it should validate as XHTML, but simplicity > is more profound than wc. > > You may say that, yes, all modern browsers can parse fucked-up HTML. > But what if we at Suckless were to attempt to write an HTML parser (oh > god) like htmlfmt? It would help quite a lot if we had fewer demented > websites out there. Be kind to your fellow hackers: make simple > websites, not ones which skimp on characters in the name of quirks > mode. > > cls > >
I completely agree.
