Yep. I don't agree with the premise, and I'm never reaching for the pre tag as they seem to do, but the content is informative and goes into a lot of details. The topic is very well researched.
I think HTML whitespace handling is a good compromise. It has drawbacks but they are workable. I wouldn't want the quoting solution (suddenly you'd need an additional escaping mechanism, which complexifies things, and I do believe it would make authoring HTML harder). And I'm not sure how could HTML do better without such a quoting solution.
I'm particularly not convinced by the CMS argument:
- A CMS can let users write stuff in HTML with a wysiwyg editor
- A CMS can trim printed strings, and replace new lines with br elements. If you need people to be able to break lines while writing, you can use something like markdown or whatever HN does.
As for prettifying HTML with automated tools in the editor, I never bothered. That scares me exactly because I'm afraid they will break my careful handling of whitespaces or do ugly stuff, I just prefer doing it by hand.
XML and SGML ought to have a deintent syntax that would allow indenting the code without indenting the content in the pre tag, though.
I think HTML whitespace handling is a good compromise. It has drawbacks but they are workable. I wouldn't want the quoting solution (suddenly you'd need an additional escaping mechanism, which complexifies things, and I do believe it would make authoring HTML harder). And I'm not sure how could HTML do better without such a quoting solution.
I'm particularly not convinced by the CMS argument:
- A CMS can let users write stuff in HTML with a wysiwyg editor
- A CMS can trim printed strings, and replace new lines with br elements. If you need people to be able to break lines while writing, you can use something like markdown or whatever HN does.
As for prettifying HTML with automated tools in the editor, I never bothered. That scares me exactly because I'm afraid they will break my careful handling of whitespaces or do ugly stuff, I just prefer doing it by hand.
XML and SGML ought to have a deintent syntax that would allow indenting the code without indenting the content in the pre tag, though.