[whatwg] markup as authored in practice

[Elliotte Harold]

James Graham wrote:

> I'm totally lost about your point. You seem to have changed from saying 
> "producing valid XML is easy - any non-bozo can do it" to "well it's not 
> easy but the tools will save us all".

The allow me to summarize. There are two basic classes of web authors

1. Those who prefer to hand author HTML in text editors and are 
competent to produce well-formed XHTML.

2. Those who do not have the level of skill necessary to hand author 
HTML in a text editor, and therefore must use tools.

I do not believe in the existence of a significantly large third 
category of users who have the skill to hand author tag soup in a text 
editor, but who are not able to easily learn the few simple rules for 
making markup well-formed.

There's also of course a fourth category of people who build content 
management systems and blogging engines; i.e. tool vendors. Surely we 
can agree these people are capable of producing well-formed output, 
whether or not they choose to do so. How to motivate them to do so is a 
different question.

Also, let me once again distinguish between well-formed and valid. I'm 
happy once the document is well-formed. Valid I can live without.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
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