Programmers Who Don't Know HTML
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gavindon wrote:
very basic knowledge mainly from the web design class
Eureka! That may be where my prejudice comes from. I guess I assume that all developers have a similar background to me, but as one of the CP polls showed, a good amount of developers never went to college for a degree related to programming, and hence never had to take the "this is a webpage" class.
As one of those whose degree predates the web when we learnt theoretical computing, I have never been on or seen the need for a "this is a webpage" class. Any idea can be expressed in any language albeit not always elegantly. I am including HTML as a language as that is what the 'L' stands for. What does confound me is the plethora of people who use amazingly convoluted tools (e.g. Visual Studio / ASP.Net / Eclipse) to produce reams of code mixing multiple tools to generate something that could be written as a simple single line of HTML.
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Naruki wrote:
If the visual cue doesn't change the nuance and/or meaning, then don't use it.
That's nonsense. There are dozens of contextual reasons for using bold and italics that do not require that the words be emphasised. For example, If citing a book, you don't want to emphasise the title of the book, but you must italicise it in the text; and if quoting someone's words -- perhaps a whole paragraph of them -- do you really want the reader to read it out Emphasising. Every. Word?
Naruki wrote:
HTML is supposed to be semantic.
The Hell you say. XHTML is semantic; HTML is display only. If you want semantic, use the right tool; don't try to appropriate and pervert the wrong one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Mark Wallace wrote:
That's nonsense.
No, but your assertion about the purpose of HTML is. Seriously, you are a lunatic if you think you can rewrite 20 years of history with one insane assertion that HTML is not what HTML has always been... until now. I made clear a couple times that HTML 5 is no longer SGML-compliant, which means it is free to violate the semantic-only nature that HTML has always been intended to comprise. This is why the I and B tags were always problems in HTML, because they violated that nature. And this is why good HTML developers use CSS if they need to change the appearance of book titles and other such things without causing screen readers to go crazy. And guess what? There has to be some way of informing the screen readers that they are reading a contextual element such as a BOOK TITLE that should in some way convey more information than just the next word in a sentence. Because sometimes blind people won't know that you are talking about a book title since they can't parse the visual-only world you wrote for. Don't talk to me about perverting tools when you clearly don't know squat about the issue, and I won't teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
Narf.