Text formats are for people

[martinthomson]

Draft

Closes #453.

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Preview | Diff

[hober]

Looks good to me.

[LeaVerou]

This is not about comprehensibility, but ease of editing / error prevention.

Might be good to link to the robustness principle somewhere.

[martinthomson]

I literally wrote an RFC that says that the robustness principle harms interoperability: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9413.html

I have friends who like to troll me with the phrase "Postel was wrong", but I'm guessing that didn't know :)

Either way, I think that this would be a mistake for the reasons stated in that document (see this bit). I think that your point about this being an example is a good one though. I've suggested something below.

[LeaVerou]

Suggested change

	People expect some amount of flexibility in terms of how their edits are processed.
	Allowing flexibility in whitespace, quoting, delimiters, and other syntactic elements ensures
	that content is still comprehensible.
	Syntactic [robustness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle)
	typically improves the usability of textual formats.
	If user intent is unambiguous, flexibility in whitespace, quoting, delimiters, and other syntactic elements
	makes the syntax less error-prone and creates a more pleasant editing experience.

[martinthomson]

Suggested change

	People expect some amount of flexibility in terms of how their edits are processed.
	Allowing flexibility in whitespace, quoting, delimiters, and other syntactic elements ensures
	that content is still comprehensible.
	People expect some amount of flexibility in terms of how their edits are processed.
	Clearly defining syntactic flexibility--
	such as in white space, quoting, or delimiters--
	could ensure that content is both easy to edit and produces consistent results.

[hober]

I think it might be worth adding a sentence linking this principle to EWP §2.10 The web is transparent. Something along the lines of this old blog post from Edd Dumbill:

This is one reason that people prefer RELAX NG over XML Schema, for instance. Where markup is concerned, it turns out that the excuse "only computers will read it, and we'll provide tools to generate it" doesn't cut it. The web's had a view-source mentality since it started, and the aesthetics of markup matter a great deal.

That is to say, we operationalize 2.10's We will always make sure it is possible to determine how a web application was built and how the code works by making textual formats easy for humans to read and write.

[LeaVerou]

I was just reminded of this PR after reading this comment in the csswg repo.

I think we should actually remove the specific guidance this currently has like:

Allowing flexibility in whitespace, quoting, delimiters, and other syntactic elements ensures that content is still comprehensible.

Adding specific guidance in there muddles the core point of the principle, which is to consider human users and not design syntaxes that you expect to be consumed entirely by tooling. WRT what to do to make the syntax easier for humans, that is literally what the whole Design Principles document is for!

Specific guidance implies scope, it implies that if you do these things mentioned here, you've complied with the principle. This is a higher level principle, we can't possibly list all the ways that a syntax is human-unfriendly in there.

That said, we could perhaps list syntax flexibility as an example. But it's far from the only one, or even a core one. E.g. the SVG path syntax is actually quite flexible syntactically, but is dreadful for humans.

[martinthomson]

I literally wrote an RFC that says that the robustness principle harms interoperability: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9413.html

I have friends who like to troll me with the phrase "Postel was wrong", but I'm guessing that didn't know :)

Either way, I think that this would be a mistake for the reasons stated in that document (see this bit). I think that your point about this being an example is a good one though. I've suggested something below.

[martinthomson]

Suggested change

	People expect some amount of flexibility in terms of how their edits are processed.
	Allowing flexibility in whitespace, quoting, delimiters, and other syntactic elements ensures
	that content is still comprehensible.
	People expect some amount of flexibility in terms of how their edits are processed.
	Clearly defining syntactic flexibility--
	such as in white space, quoting, or delimiters--
	could ensure that content is both easy to edit and produces consistent results.

[martinthomson]

Suggested change

	Textual formats also improve [transparency](https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#transparent).

[hober]

👍

[hober]

👍

whoops, this was just a review of a one-line change mt proposed.