Re: [dev] [sw] Suckless web-framework

Hey,

On 4 April 2010 07:57, Mate Nagy <mnagy_AT_port70.net> wrote:
> This means that making your page respect an imaginary standard gives no
> results except than a pretty badge. Rather than striving towards such an
> ideal, I find it much more useful (dare I say suckless) to make your web
> markup as *minimalist* as possible (e.g. no closing tags, no quotes
> where you can skip them, no CSS, no JS, the simplest <=HTML4
> formatting). This will make your page work on all browsers forever, and
> as a bonus, make it easily processible with external tools (and the user
> can still specify any kind of custom style they want).

Websites like this are extremely difficult to parse. "Is this <p> the
end of a paragraph or the beginning? Let's test both!" In making your
HTML not at least resemblant of XML (that is, all tags close) you
aren't making things simpler, you're just producing more complexity
elsewhere.

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.

You may say that, yes, all modern browsers can parse fucked-up HTML.
But what if we at Suckless were to attempt to write an HTML parser (oh
god) like htmlfmt? It would help quite a lot if we had fewer demented
websites out there. Be kind to your fellow hackers: make simple
websites, not ones which skimp on characters in the name of quirks
mode.

cls
Received on Mon Apr 05 2010 - 11:38:42 UTC