[whatwg] markup as authored in practice

[Elliotte Harold]

James Graham wrote:

> For example, the majority of people who are likely to want to 
> publish mathematics on the web are professional scientists or engineers. 
> However, in my experience, the fraction of such people who are competent 
> to reliably produce valid XML is tiny[1]. 
> [1] See, for example 
> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000564.html for one of 
> the few examples of where a scientist (who happens to also know an awful 
> lot about markup) /has/ managed to work with XML, and to see just how 
> far from "Hello world" it really is.
> 


That's an interesting and useful story. Thanks for the link. However 
what it describes is not close to hand authoring code. Instead, this 
competent person is patching a specific blogging engine. That's a much 
bigger task. However:

1. He is competent to do it.
2. It only has to be done once. Then it just works for everyone else.*

* Well at least it does if the main developers accept the patches back 
into the trunk. It seems they haven't done that:

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000865.html

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/