Re: Removing support for generating XHTML in roundup templates

* Peter Funk <[email protected]> [20191026 12:37]:
> 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.

changeset:   1952:c40ed9113285
user:        Richard Jones <[email protected]>
date:        Sat Dec 06 00:00:54 2003 +0000
summary:     Applied Stefan Seefeld's html4/xhtml patch with some changes.

And the corresponding change of CHANGES.txt contains:
- HTML generated is now HTML4 (or optionally XHTML) compliant (sf feature
  814314 and sf patch 834620)

The corresponding tracker entry is:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=402788&aid=814314&group_id=31577
but SourceForge is currently half-down due to a DoS attack, so
reading this isn't easy.

From what I have seen in the mailing list archive, the feature
request was to make Roundup pages comply to standards for HTML4 and
XHTML (because were common back then), so that the w3c checker
wouldn't complain. It was decided to only fully implement HTML4, so
only one set of templates has to be maintained, but the code to
allow switching between HTML4 and XHTML was already written.

So there never has been an template for XHTML included in Roundup,
the only chance someone has such a template would be to create your
own. And if you create your own template, you would always have to
update it for new Roundup versions as they are almost guaranteed to
break during updates.

-> Nobody should use XHTML templates with Roundup, and I really
doubt that there are any existing XHTML templates for Roundup.

> 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"™!

I'm slightly younger, but I have suffered from removing features as
well, but in this case I would say: Getting rid of it causes less
harm than keeping it.

> Even if a particular feature looked absolutely ugly, outdated,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.

Then we at least know that there are people who do such things :-)

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

But bogging down the development of a product won't help with the
popularity.

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

What? You want to force me to upgrade to Netscape Navigator? :)

Regards,

Thomas

-- 
Thomas Arendsen Hein <[email protected]>
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