"Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T." wrote:
>
> All of this is well and good the question hasn't been answered what
> exactly to do layers do why tey are so easy to do and why because they
> were so easy to do did W3C decide they were to easy and therefore
> shouldn't be used?
>
> I'm still dense. And really want to learn.
The W3C was producing the HTML 4.0 spec at about the same time Netscape
shipped 4.0. Netscape invented layers originally because there *was* no
standard at the time (HTML 4.0 didn't come out until 4 months or so
after the release of Communicator 4.0). When they figured out that the
W3C was headed a different direction, they deprecated layers (I've heard
tell this was even in the beta cycle of 4.0). There isn't much
difference between them and the standards way of doing things, to my
knowledge. It's simply a different way to approach the same problem.
The reason that they became so popular is that despite their deprecation
they were much more reliable in 4.x than the standards way was. DIV and
SPAN features didn't always work correctly, so layers made an acceptable
alternative, since Web developers knew they'd have to develop
browser-specific content for this anyway (because IE's support was
different from Netscape's and both were different from the W3C's). But
now that the standards more or less work in both (the same code will
generally work in IE5 and Netscape 6 and Mozilla), there's no excuse for
not using it. Except that it breaks IE4 (which supports document.all
but not document.getElementById()).
Long story short, this argument mostly boils down to a bunch of Web
developers who are mad because they didn't read the documentation.
Their old pages will still work, and with minor modifications to scripts
(use document.all for IE4 and the standards way for IE5 and Mozilla),
they'll work properly. But they don't want to make these changes. It's
a no-win scenario for Mozilla (the WASP wants standards, other Web
developers want backwards compatibility, others want Mozilla to render
IE's code, W3C be damned, and so on). Can't please all of the people
all of the time.
