Re: Removing support for generating XHTML in roundup templates

Hello John,

John P. Rouillard schrieb am Freitag, den 25.10.2019 um 11:33:
> Hi all:
> 
> I was reviewing outstanding tickets and one of the themes I saw as
> issue when trying to generate/support XHTML.
> 
> Given that XHTML is kind of a dead end, I am considering removing
> XHTML support and updating the templates to support only HTML 5.
> 
> How many of you have configured your roundup install to generate xhtml
> (look for html_version in the main section of config.ini)?

I just looked.  In our company the last change to config.ini was in 2016
and the section you refered to contains the following paragraph:
  +----------------------------------------------------------------
  | # HTML version to generate. The templates are html4 by default.
  | # If you wish to make them xhtml, then you'll need to change this
  | # var to 'xhtml' too so all auto-generated HTML is compliant.
  | # Allowed values: html4, xhtml
  | # Default: html4
  | html_version = html4

> Quips, comments, evasions, questions or answers?

People tend to keep default values in their config most of the time.  

HOWEVER:

This feature was added at some time in the past because obviously 
someone saw the need for XHTML.  It is probably difficult to find 
out who this was and whether they stopped using XHTML by now.

From my general point of view: I'm now 60 years old and in my
career as a software developer I learned from experience that
removing any feature from a software package (during refactoring
or whatever) was almost always a "very bad idea"™!

Even if a particular feature looked absolutely ugly, outdated,
superfluous and redundant: Someone out there exists who makes
use of it.  This poor guy will not follow any mailing list,
forum, announcement or whatever and will get caught by surprise
after updating his software without knowing.  Also no one
bothers to read lengthy release notes before updating. ☺

And for sure this guy will speak out loud and angry after the fact.

Keeping backward compatibility to older versions of a product is a
precious value in itself to enhance the popularity of a product.

That does not mean, that we should try to make all Roundup templates
compatible with NCSA Mosaic from 1994 ☺.

Best regards,
Peter Funk


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