Matthew Thomas wrote:
>
> Mark Anderson wrote:
> >...
> > I still wish HTML validation was required to publish a page. This
> > kind of thing would never have happened if browsers hadn't started
> > letting shoddy HTML through the cracks.
> >...
>
> And if pages had always been required to be perfectly valid, the Web
> would be about a tenth of its current size and usefulness, if that.
>
> Because in the 1993--1996 era, when if you wanted to put something up on
> the Web you pretty much had to hand-code it, most of the ordinary people
> (not programming types) -- who were just trying to get some useful
> information on the Web at all -- would have got sick of chasing down the
> last missing </ul> tag or misspelled attribute.
Which is why the Web didn't really take off until about 1996. Remember
when Netscape.com was the most popular site on the Web?
> Sure, a few would have stuck it out to produce a valid page. But the
> rest would have said `oh, stuff this', and gone and put their content up
> on some more forgiving proprietary network, or not bothered to put it up
> anywhere at all. The Web would not have achieved the initial growth
> which it did. So there would never have been the market for those
> authoring tools (even those which produce valid markup) that made it
> even easier for other people to publish more information, the
> information which has made the Web as useful and as popular as it is now.
There was always plain text or gopher.... :)
> The Web loses some usefulness in people not being required to author
> perfectly valid, perfectly accessible, well-indexable pages. But it
> gains far, far more usefulness in the resulting ease with which people
> can put up information *at all* for other people to read.
Which is why HTML generators should have been required to put out
standards compliant code in the first place. The very people who hand
code nowadays (in the era when the majority of information available on
the Web is not academic, as it was before about 1995) are the ones who
care about the specs.
But this, of course, is a moot point and ancient history (hindsight is,
after all, 20/20). And with regards to the topic at hand, since it's
been shown that older browsers don't even show a differentiation between
the wrong URLs and the syntactically correct ones, I think we should go
with Duane's interpretation but have some way to flag it (just accepting
an incorrect URL as correct still strikes me as wrong) as incorrect.
Thankfully, XHTML can get off on the right foot and fix the current
problems somewhere off in the future. (This bleeds over into that
n.p.m.editor thread on making Composer separate structure from content.
:) )
