Bundy wrote:
> Brian Heinrich typed:
> 
>> Bundy wrote:
>>
>>> Karl typed:
>>>
>>>> Mozilla 0.9.9  doesn't display www.drudgereport.com correctly. One of
>>>> the most popular Web sites.
>>>>
>>>> Karl
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bug that deals with the horizontal line <hr> within a table tag with 
>>> height attrabutes. The tag is W3C (like they matter) complaint 
>>> although the site isn't, like most site.
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Kyle
>>>
>>
>> Um, Kyle, lemme ask you this:  Can you imagine trying to design a web 
>> site if all there were were proprietary tags?  The W3C matters.  A lot. 
> 
> 
> Not to a lot of webmasters. What matters is if the page looks good on MS 
> Explorer while using Front Page to compose it. Heck,  mozilla.org isn't 
> totally compliant. Why waste time (which is money) trying to get your 
> website to work for a small minority of web surfers? Drudge could very 
> easily fix the site by getting rid of the height tag on those two tables 
> that don't load right and make no sense to the outlook of his page. But 
> then again, since they are compliant, why should he?
> 
> 
>>    So do standards.  Think of all the [insert favourite denigrating 
>> term here] who're still using NN 4.x and wondering why pages don't 
>> display correctly, &c.  And, slowly, there seem to be more and more 
>> sites that use valid mark-up, which seems to me to be a good thing.
>>
>> — Brian
>>
> 
> 

Unfortunately, you're right.  Too many Web authors fixate on how things 
appear in IE.

Don't use FrontPage, so I can't comment, though a friend of mine excused 
some bad mark-up on his site by referring to some 'old HTML' that 
'wasn't necessary in FrontPage' (?!), like FrontPage was a mark-up 
language that had somehow superceded [X]HTML.  The same guy has also 
said that IE's dominance of the browser market makes /it/ the /de facto/ 
standard, and that W3C standards therefore don't matter.

That's a problem that needs to be addressed and publicised.  Using valid 
[X]HTML and CSS on your pages and publicising the fact is one place to 
begin.  Something like the WaSP's browser up-grade initiative is also 
helpful; so, perhaps is the 'Any Browser' initiative (though I haven't 
had a chance to do more than bookmark the page).

Something more concrete than that is needed, however.  I could care less 
if a surfer uses IE or NS 6+ or Moz or Opera 6 (NN 4.x is another 
matter, however); I /do/ care, however, that IE mis-renders my CSS.

Just /how/ to get that information out is another matter.  Netscape and 
Mozilla are at least honest enough to tell you what known 
problems/issues there are with their browsers; M$ doesn't even bother to 
tell you that IE launches to quickly 'cos it hi-jacks a chunk of your RAM.

Any thoughts on how to make information like this more readily 
accessible to people?

— Brian

-- 

‘We have seen the enemy and he is us’ — Walt Kelly’s Pogo


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