Quote:
Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj
Some years ago (I don't remember when) a programmer from Poland (that's why I remember the event) annoyed with web browsers that crashed randomly on many pages made a tool for generating random HTML pages, which were nearly correct (ie. they were generated correct, and then the program randomly made one of two changes in each generated page, like switching places of two closing tags, removing a closing tag, adding a random opening or closing tag in random place, adding a randomly generated bytes in random place in the file. And made this tool public with a blog post (or something similar). It got in the news, and shortly after that all the browsers rather quickly stopped crashing on any such pages.
Perhaps if there existed such a tool for generating nearly correct ePub documents, with faults and unexpected data in as many places as possible, more device/software manufacturers would test their viewers more extensively with it? As it is, they probably write a small set of tests, or test the documents on a few random pages, and that's it, as they never have time for more testing. If they could generate 10000 broken docs, run the software on each of them overnight, get a set of pages on which it crashed, then fixing each crash bug is 5 minutes of work, no more.
|
I kind of disgree with you.
It's the publisher's job to make ePub that respects the standard, just as it is the developers job to make html that respect standard.
Not that long ago I made a web-page. Firefox works fine, IE get some weird display. First reaction "Damm you IE". Then looking at the code, I realised that IE was the one doing things right. It was yelling at me for a perfect reason. Firefox fixed a mess it shouldn't have bother with.
What's the point of norms if you don't respect them ? Norms are not there for your convenience. They are there to make sure everyone speak the same language. You can't say "screw them" because you're too lazy to make proper html.
And yes, i wish firefox said me "to the hell with you", when i'm stupid enough to send weirdo html. If it did, maybe developers would pay more attention in following the norms.