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

On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 11:38:42AM +0000, Connor Lane Smith wrote:
> 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
>
>

I completely agree.
Received on Mon Apr 05 2010 - 11:43:31 UTC