[wp-hackers] Wordpress and Web Standards

[Matt Mullenweg]

Pierre-Henri Lavigne wrote:
> I define the Web standards as a way to apply truly and realistly the 
> specifications from the W3C. The Web Standards Project (WaSP) fights for 
> standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while 
> increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site 
> published on the Web. (From http://www.webstandards.org/about/) WASP and 
> other communities are helping to use those web standards.

As a member of WaSP, I agree with your concerns.

> I define standard(s) (not standards as the shortcut for web standards) 
> languages or technologies that are using the approach to define the 
> basics every developer should follow. Following this way, developers 
> agree and unify themself to use those resources. There are not 
> especially and automatically references to the web world.

Yes, but it's important to be wary of 
standards-for-the-sake-of-standards, or ones that do not provide 
meaningful benefit over current standards-based conventions.

Lots of standards "suck", HTTP has mispelled "referrer" longer than I've 
been on the web, but changing things to make them "more correct" is a 
bad idea. (*cough*frakincommentsRsS*cough)

If something doesn't solve a real-world problem, I'm not particularly 
interested in it.

> users and hardware is to support a unique format for each feed. Here is 
> a wiki link to compare RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 :
> http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared.

That document is mostly FUD, very little of it applies to us. I'm not 
sure which of the points there, or the points later in your email, are 
meant to apply to WordPress. RSS 2.0 can be ambiguous in parts, which is 
why we follow conventional RSS:

http://thresholdstate.com/threshold/4166/conventional-rss

If there was an aggregator which could not parse any of the feeds that 
we produce, that would be a good reason to re-examine things, but by 
definition such an aggregator would probably never reach a point of 
success that we would care.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
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