[OH-Dev] Need some guidance on how to handle Issue 971

[Eeshan Garg]

Hello!

First of all my apologies for the delayed reply. Thank you both for
replying and a huge thanks for the great advice. The advice that you both
gave me actually led to a bit of research and as a result I learned some
important bits that are definitely going to help me later on.

And also, I very well understand and respect that paulproteus is a busy
person. And one of the most amazing things about him is that even though I
bugged him a lot during the PyCon sprints, he always replied with a smile.
If it hadn't been for him and his encouragement, I probably wouldn't have
made those tine little commits to oh-mainline and it would have been
impossible for me to get started contributing this early.

As for the backwards compatibility, I complete agree with you ehashman. I
did a bit of research and found these pages <
http://htmlref.com/reference/appa/tag_kbd.htm> and <
http://htmlref.com/reference/appa/tag_samp.htm>. According to these pages
and some other resources that I came across, the <kbd> and <samp> tags go
as back as far as HTML2. So, I do think that in this regard, the <kbd> and
<samp> tags sound okay. As for employing kbd and samp appropriately, I can
think of one valid solution but it's a bit hard to implement. What we can
do is use three tags for different purposes, the tags are var, kbd and
samp. We can use <var> for variable names(that's what its meant for
actually) and for directory names and we can use <kbd> for things meant to
be typed by the user as most of the places where <tt> is used is when we
ask our users to type a command for example. So <kbd> can represent things
like terminal commands. And <samp> can represent sample output. I
completely agree that doing things this way would actually lead to a
semantically richer HTML document. Why this solution is hard to implement
is because <tt> tag is actually the tag used for all the three purposes
described above. And according to "git grep --name-only '<tt' ", the <tt>
tag is scattered across 280 different files in oh-mainline. So going
through the 280 files and actually determining whether a <tt> should be
replaced with <var>, <kbd> or <samp> can take a long time. I would actually
enjoy making this contribution if I get a +1 from you guys.

Also in the issue tracker <http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue971>, I actually
proposed a second solution. At the PyCon sprints, I wrote a section called
"Usage instructions for the code, pre and tt tags" in the Front-end style
guide <https://openhatch.org/wiki/Front-end_style_guide>. As you can see
there is not much difference between the CSS properties  for <pre> and
<code> and we could easily modify the properties for <code> to represent
what the <tt> tag is currently used to represent. And doing this would also
maintain the semantics of the document. :)

My apologies for the length of this reply, I have a tendency to take things
too seriously sometimes. :)

Let me know what you guys think. I would be willing to implement a solution
to this and I think it would be a great learning experience for me.

Thanks & regards,
Eeshan Garg
<https://github.com/eeshangarg>



On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 8:51 PM, Carol Willing <
willingc at willingconsulting.com> wrote:

>  Hi Eeshan,
>
> I'm glad that you reached out to the larger OpenHatch development list.
> Super nice to see you continuing to contribute after your help at the PyCon
> sprints :-)
>
> I'm sure that paulproteus will chime in when he is able. A couple of the
> wonderful things about him, which you probably noticed at the sprints, are
> that he's very committed to sharing his knowledge and insights with others
> and he will respond thoughtfully and generously when he is able. Sometimes,
> I wonder if he ever sleeps :-)
>
> As for direction, I think Elana has giving you some good guidance about
> thinking those without a fully compliant browser. I'm more of a back-end
> developer so I'm not able to give a concrete answer on approach. In
> addition to Elana's comments, I would search the OpenHatch wiki,
> readthedocs documentation, and the issue tracker since sometimes that can
> lead to nuggets of technical direction.
>
> Please keep asking questions either here or on IRC. We'll do our best to
> help you get the information that will help you move forward :)
>
> Regards,
> Carol
> aka willingc
>
>
> On 5/9/14, 7:49 AM, Elana Hashman wrote:
>
> Hi Eeshan,
>
>  Though I'm not paulproteus I have a couple of thoughts for you.
>
>  First is one of backwards compatibility. While tt tags may be deprecated
> in html5, this does not mean everyone visiting our site will have a
> compliant, up-to-date, html5-supporting browser. So whatever solution you
> determine, we should make sure it doesn't break the site for people not
> running the latest and greatest. I'm not sure what our compatibility policy
> is for fixes like this; perhaps willingc or paulproteus knows.
>
>  Second, kbd vs samp gives more information than tt, so I'd recommend
> that they're used appropriately if you decide to employ them: that is, use
> kbd for tt elements that represent user input, and samp for output. It
> wasn't clear to me if you wanted to pick one over the other from your bug
> report.
>
>  Once you figure out what the best policy is in terms of backwards
> compatibility for browsers still supporting the tt tags, I'd say you're
> good to go!
>
>  - e
>
>
>    *From: *Eeshan Garg
> *Sent: *Friday, May 9, 2014 10:37 AM
> *To: *devel at lists.openhatch.org
> *Reply To: *OpenHatch development
> *Subject: *[OH-Dev] Need some guidance on how to handle Issue 971
>
>    Hi!
>
>  I am a new contributor and I created an issue a couple of weeks ago
> regarding the <tt> tag (deprecated in HTML5). More details at: <
> http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue971>. I proposed some solutions to this
> problem and needed some guidance as to whether they were okay and worth
> implementing, but there was no activity on the issue. So, I asked for
> advice on IRC and was told that I should ask aldeka or paulproteus about
> this.
>
> On IRC, I was also told that the solution that I proposed (link above) is
> okay but was advised to get a +1 from paulproteus first before making a
> commit. I tried to contact paulproteus on IRC but I guess due to the time
> differences, didn't hear back from him (I also checked the IRC logs). I was
> told on IRC that if I couldn't contact paulproteus on IRC, I should post my
> query to the mailing list.
>
>  So I would really appreciate it if paulproteus could give me a little bit
> of guidance as to what I should I do next. I am really looking forward to
> put in the time and effort to work on and resolve this task, but as I am
> new to programming and open source, I just need a pointer from time to
> time. Also, a big thanks to the OpenHatch community, you guys are amazing,
> I am learning a lot and having a lot of fun. :)
>
>  Thanks & regards,
>  Eeshan Garg
> <https://github.com/eeshangarg>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
> --
> Carol Willing
> Developer
> Willing Consulting
>
>
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