[whatwg] Graceful Degradation and Mime Types [was: trailing slash]

[Elliotte Harold]

Mike Schinkel wrote:

> So what we have is people who will be contributing content to an app where
> their markup needs to be integrated into the markup of the application.  And
> these people will likely have no clue which version of (X)HTML the site they
> are contributing to is running, and even if they did there is huge chance
> they will have no clue what the difference means in terms of the syntax
> required for the markup they need to contribute. Which means they will
> contribute to a (potentially) conforming site markup that does not conform.
> 
> So what are the various answers to this solution?
> 

This isn't hard, and it is a solved problem. Keep in mind that many 
commenters on non-technical blogs do not know how to hand-author HTML at 
all, today, irrespective of HTML5 and XHTML issues.

Consequently these systems implement some sort of markdown format that's 
simpler and allows users to enter data in plain text or increasingly 
with a WYSIWYG editor. All that's needed is for these systems to 
generate valid markup, and we're done. Mot users don;t need to know any 
details of this.

For an extra layer of checking, pass the output through TagSoup or Tidy 
to clean it up.

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