[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [PATCH] Development (Was: Clean up

Wed Feb 27 19:20:22 CET 2002

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 03:53:05PM +0100, Gabucino wrote:
> Daniel Egger didn't RTFM :
> > > > Nope, it's missing a DTD declaration,
> > > Heh?
> > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> What for? It won't change page's appearance, and browsers care not.

That's not entirely true.  I only know the details for Mozilla, but I am
quite sure other browsers handle it equally (IE does).  There is a
"standards mode" and a "quirks mode".  If a doctype declaration is missing
quirks mode gets triggered and the browser enters a compatibility mode that
emulates the rendering of previous browser generations, the 4x series,
mostly.  Rendering *is* different in both modes.

> > > > tags are wrongly nested and
> > > Huh?
> > There are rules which tags may appear within others and the have to
> > be closed in exactly reverse order.
> > <p> <b> Test </p> </b> 
> Still better than if it wasn't closed at all :))

Performance should be better if tags are closed correctly because the error
routines of the browser will not get triggered.

> > I'm lacking an example here because I'm offline, but the validator
> > showed me that you used some attributes in tags which are not
> > allowed to contain them.
> So what? It works.

Yes, it works.  I don't mean to sound negative, you did some great work with
the docs.  I do not want to nitpick, I just want to point out that there is
some truth behind Daniel's claims.  The new docs will change the situation,
anyway...

While I am at it, I volunteer to help in the documentation rewrite.  I know
English, German, Spanish and a little French, am a tenacious proofreader and
think I have some talent for (technical) writing.  Feel free to contact me
for help.

I believe an XML solution would be best in the long run.  This will be
convertible to all other formats.  I use LaTeX for writing papers, but I do
not believe it will be the best solution for software documentation.
Regards

Diego