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Posted by Stewart Gordon on 01/13/06 18:19
GreyWyvern wrote:
<snip>
> Here, I will quote you the relevant part of the article with my reponses:
>
> "This whole big mess of code [the WYSIWYG block] serves only to insert a
> blank paragraph for vertical spacing, accomplishable via <P></P>. All
> the other tags are useless."
>
> According to the spec, empty <p></p> tags should be ignored completely.
> This is error #1: *All* the tags listed are useless.
Yes, I pointed out that error once but the correction didn't make it in
for some strange reason. However, it's still correct that all other
_tags_ are useless, since is not a tag.
> "They're added because the editors are so dumb that if you have stuff
> like font settings enabled they insist on adding them even to blank
> spaces. The editors are also pretty dumb about failing to collapse
> redundant tags. Even if the various font changes above were actually
> needed to make sure that blank space was rendered correctly, you could
> have done it with:
>
> <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica" SIZE="+1"
> COLOR="red"><B> </B></FONT></P>"
>
> This is error #2. This is certainly not the furthest you could distil
> an empty paragraph tag down to while including all of the formatting
> given above.
<snip>
> However, even this is spurious, since the entire section of code, both
> CSS and HTML, is completely unnecessary. You may respond to this
> saying: "Hey, it was only an example to collapse redundant tags, not a
> recommendation as to what coders should actually use."
Exactly.
> Aha, well, I offer you the next paragraph of the article:
>
> "Note how the three different centering tags were reduced to an
> attribute of the single paragraph tag, and the three different font
> settings were made into attributes of one FONT tag. This produces a
> shorter, cleaner, more logical piece of code, showing the advantages of
> coding by hand instead of using some silly editor!"
Yes, it's an advantage as far as it's a first step in cutting down code
bloat. A similar argument could probably be applied to
program-generated versus human-generated CSS code.
> So, with this confirmation, WYSIWYG'ers come away with the idea that the
> use of the tags above is both correct and acceptable. This is not a
> good thing.
It is "correct", at least if the (X)HTML flavour specified in the
DOCTYPE declaration has "Transitional" in its name.
It is "acceptable", at least as far as all validators and web browsers
I've seen are concerned.
Whether it's the approach recommended by the authorities is another matter.
>>> No. I think that if someone is going to switch from WYSIWYG to
>>> hand-coding, they shouldn't start with WYSIWYG code and prune down
>>> from there. Rather they should start with a blank text editor (and
>>> perhaps an HTML/CSS reference guide or two) and work their way up.
>>
>> Assuming that, if they had made it look very "fancy" in the WYSIWYDG,
>> then they don't mind that the site'll look more basic until they've
>> learned the particular bits of CSS to achieve the desired level of
>> fanciness.
>
> "Fanciness" is overrated. Accessibility isn't.
Good point.
Stewart.
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