Boris Zbarsky wrote:
Why not use something like UTF8 instead?
Some reasons for not using UTF-8 on www.mozilla.org:
* Many American and European contributors use Emacs but haven't bothered to figure out how to make it use UTF-8.
If UTF-8 documents were allowed, Emacs users could easily
introduce invalid byte sequences to the files.
* Currently the pages served by www.mozilla.org don't come with a proper charset parameter, which is bad. Using any encoding besides ISO-8859-1 while at the same time banning the <meta> thingy would make matters even worse, because then even Americans and Western Europeans would have an unpleasant encounter with the Character Encoding menu (which would not need to exist if people used HTTP features right). Of course, the right way to approach the issue would be migrating to Apache with contributor-
writable .htaccess files, but I've been around for long enough to remember the time when Gerv was drafting the newsgroup reorg document, so I'm not overly optimistic.
* Doctor isn't UTF-8-aware. It isn't ISO-8859-1-aware, either. (Dodging this same issue early on has come to haunt Bugzilla later...)
wouldn't &#xXXXXX work better?
| Add meta description and keywords to help indexing.
What's the concrete use case that justifies this requirement?
The fact that we may want to write
Is it appropriate to require author effort until the piece of software justifying the requirement has actually been written?
an indexing tool that does a better job of searching _documentation_ in particular than Google does. Google indexes a whole lot of non-documentation crap on the Mozilla.org site.
how about "recommand" instead of "require"? Some pages need meta data, others don't, and it's up to the author to write the approprate summary & keywords if s/he has time
