On Mon 05 Apr 2010 at 08:29:24 PDT Connor Lane Smith wrote:
On 5 April 2010 15:13, Uriel <lost.gob...@gmail.com> wrote:
Actually, modern browsers parse HTML much faster than XHTML (yes, I
was fooled by the XML scam once too, and it was not until recently
that I discovered even the myth of it making parsing of webpages
faster was totally bunk).
My point was not that we should write XHTML, but that we should write
simple HTML, and that simple does not solely mean "fewer characters".
(Nor does it solely mean "efficiency". I have a dog on my shelf
telling me: simplicity, clarity, generality.) I was considering from
the point of view of the author of a new, say, htmlfmt. To quote,
On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Connor Lane Smith <c...@lubutu.com> wrote:
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.
While pondering the import of your message, and thinking about how
ordinary language uses quotation marks to both open and close a quote,
it struck me that my email client was giving me an elegant example of
how the need for a closing tag can be eliminated. See how the '>'
character is used?
As for paragraphs, separating them with blank lines always made more
sense to me than <p> tags, and here again, no closing tag is required.
I agree with Uriel: XML and XHTML are monstrosities. But so is HTML.
;)
