In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Paul Bergsagel wrote:
> I have a limited knowledge of HTML. As I navigate to many web sites,
> even I notice sloppy html coding. I know that Mozilla handles HTML 4.01
> and through the quirks modes Netscape 4.0. Is this enough. Does Mozilla
> need one more mode that allows for many cases of coding I will simply
> call sloppy.
No.
> Can Mozilla be tweeked to deal better with sites that
> forget to close end tags for example.
>
> Here is what I am really getting at: many sites contain sloppy code and
> are tested only with IE and if it passes no corrections are made to
> correct the sloppy coding. Since Microsoft IE will render many pages
> with sloppy coding, shouldn't Mozilla have a mode for sloppy coding. If
> Mozilla doesn't have such a mode will there be many sites Mozilla is
> shut out of?
OK. "Quirks mode", the mode which Mozilla uses to render HTML which it
believes to be written in a non-standards-compliant way (based on
DOCTYPE), is not a "Netscape 4.0" compliance mode: it renders common HTML
coding mistakes in general in the way that authors intended. So a new
"feature" to handle bad code shouldn't go into Quirks mode unless it turns
out that a lot of pages break badly without it.
There are several reasons we're not interesting in producing a "quirks
mode" that reproduces all the bugs in IE and NS 4.x:
1) We'll forever be playing catch-up trying to mimic all the bugs in IE.
2) It encourages people to keep writing pages in Quirks mode forever; if
people's broken code always works in Quirks mode, there's no incentive to
write proper HTML.
If you find a page that breaks in Mozilla because of bad HTML on the page,
file a bug; if we don't want to deal with the particular HTML error that
causes the breakage, the bug will get sent to Evangelism, who will notify
the site owner that their page is broken and help them correct it.
--
Chris Hoess
