Mark Anderson wrote:
>
> "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.
Your the first person to actually attempt to explain the use of Layers
and why W3C hates them and wants them baned.
Now i know more than I did - which is an improvement.
Thanks.
--
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Phillip M. Jones, CET |MEMBER:VPEA (LIFE) ETA-I, NESDA,ISCET, Sterling
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If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!
