Can standards compliancy be automated ?
I mean can any body use an application like the new Microsoft Expression Web Designer, to get a web standards compliant page without touching the code ?
I highly doubt that, Why? because HTML is all about giving meanings to content by wrapping some of it's components mainly text by tags like <p> for paragraphs, <a> for links, <h1> for heading etc... and this meaning part is lost from machines I mean how will a machine distinguish between tabular data to put it in a table or a list or will it be more meaningful as a definition list.
Even the W3C Validator don't know wether a site is really compliant or not, you could see a valid (X)HTML page while it's main layout is formed by tables.
Any way HTML and CSS are not designed for advanced users or coders but for authors, it's easy enough only text wrapped with tags to add a meaning, CSS is easy too simply defining selectors then adding some values to it's properties, so I still prefer and recommend for designers and authors to code manually, I use Dreamweaver but I use the code view only as it make it easier by suggesting a list of tags when you type < and auto close it when you just type </ and because it colorize the code differing between tags, attributes & values etc...
What drops this post idea in my mind is a discussion between me and Rida about authoring tools and if any of them could ever be really standards-based, my opinion was what you just read standards compliancy will never be automated but he has a different respectful vision, he think in the near future computers will be able to determine meanings that might sound weird now but he gave an example of voice recognition, few years back no body could imagine that computers will ever be able to hear and understand a human voice, well I say when we have the technology that Rida is speaking about, maybe I could reconsider.
May 19, 2006, 07:13 AM | Web standards , tools
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1 | May 19, 2006 03:04 PM, Gareth said:
I guess it is the difference between the explicit meaning of standards (ie. CSS, XHTML, XML) and the wider Web Standards movement - which has fingers in everything to do with web best practice.
It is possible for things like expression to generate standards compliant code (just use HTML Tidy to post process) but to get them (and more importantly the editors) to think in terms of semantics is difficult.