28 March 2006
An exercise for the reader?
I get annoyed by tech articles with code examples that contain basic errors. The latest I read is Kurt Cagle’s recent instalment on understanding XForms.
He has two examples of XML documents that are not well-formed: a cardinal sin for a tech article about XML. He and the O’Reilly editors must at least test all XML examples in an XML editor to check well-formedness.
One of the examples also has a namespace prefix misspelt. Then Kurt describes how many people find XML namespaces difficult to read and understand. No wonder!
Correcting errors should not be left as an exercise for the reader.
I agree with your point: authors should try to avoid syntax errors in the code quoted in their articles. But I guess that sometimes it just happens. Getting to the syntactic to the semantic level, what did you think of the article?
Alex
I think it is very good: the series of articles is revealing, one step at a time, how XForms works and how it can be used. I am excited by Kurt’s proposition that XForms provides a declarative way of doing what is currently done procedurally using AJAX (often in a very messy fashion).