John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > James G. Sack (jim) wrote: >> John H. Robinson, IV wrote: >>> I dislike how [the W3C] retroactively change standards. I had most, >>> if not all, of my public webpages W3C compliant. Then they changed >>> the requirements, and then my proudly displaying compliant pages >>> weren't. I was none too pleased. >> I'm curious about your bad experience. >> Do you recall the circumstances? > > I had made some HTML 2.0 and 3.x something compliant pages that pased > the parser. Then, later, I ran them back through. They failed, because > they did not have a now-required doctype header: > > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN"> > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"> > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"> > >> Was this something about withdrawn standards or proposals? >> Maybe you're just saying the later standards are more complex? >> Or seem harder to validate against? > > I am saying that they had standards for HTML 2. The valid pages would > parse, and be good. Then, later, the standard for HTML2 would change. > Previously compliant pages would now *fail*. > > Ex post facto-esque failure. Very unhappy. > > -john
Yeah, pre-3.2 was kinda-ugly. Some of your problems might properly be blamed on bad validators. I think I recall seeing some gui tools that would internally validate basic html 2, but can't seem to find them now. The current validators still do not offer much in the way of user-friendliness if you leave off the doctype. Raggett has a nice short chapter about html standards history http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
