Netscape Basher wrote:
> Brian Heinrich typed:
>
>> Netscape Basher wrote:
>>
>>> Jonas J�rgensen typed:
>>>
>>>> blackbox wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> �What make them qualify to be categorized and be named 'standards'?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If they are accepted by a recognized, trustworthy, independent,
>>>> standard-defining organization. For instance:
>>>>
>>>> Internet Engineering Task Force Request For Comments:
>>>> http://www.ietf.org/rfc
>>>>
>>>> World Wide Webconsortium Recommendations:
>>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/#Recommendations
>>>>
>>>> /Jonas
>>>>
>>>
>>> Which Netscape only started to care about when they became the
>>> minority in the browser market, then they started to cry foul.
>>>
>>> It is MS Explorer that defines the standards used, not the w3c.
>>> The w3c means nothing.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Kyle, Kyle, Kyle . . . : You /know/ that argument is hog-wash, 'cos
>> the only way in which you can legitmate it is by reference to market
>> share, which results in the tautology: IE is standard because it has
>> the biggest market share; therefore, because it has the largest market
>> share, it is the standard.
>>
>> 'Standard' in this case stands apart from any consideration of market
>> share. Standards (in this case, largely defined by the W3C) are
>> something browsers (IE, NS, Moz, Opera, whatever) are supposed to
>> implement in a consistent manner so that /mark-up/ will be displayed
>> consistently; hence, the issue isn't 'standard' /per se/ but rather
>> /compliance/ with those standards. Not to have standards -- let alone
>> a consistent implementation of those standards -- will not only result
>> in chaos.
>>
>> I, for one, don't want to go back to the days of proprietary tags and
>> extensions. Further, the problem in allowing IE to 'be' or 'define'
>> the 'standard' is that you end up marking up around the quirks of the
>> browser (that is, the lapses with its standards compliance), and the
>> moment a newer version of IE, say, implements standards better, or a
>> more standards-compliant browser becomes the dominant browser, those
>> IE-defined standards will come back to bite you.
>>
>> Here endeth the lecture.
>>
>> Brian
>>
>
>
> Brian, the days of proprietary tags are still here. And if Netscape were
> still the market leader, they would still be pushing their own
> propprietary tags. If Netscape becomes the leader again, which it won't,
> they would once again, push proprietary tags.
>
> Explorer defines what is done because they are the majority. For a
> webmaster to make a page that looks like garbage on IE is suicide. The
> good thing about Explorer is that it does a great job in displaying
> pages that are w3c compliant.
>
I'm not saying there /aren't/ proprietary tags. There are. Right now,
however, M$ is the major offender when it comes to things proprietary
(/e.g/, <marquee>) and with extensions (ActiveX, anyone? -- how about
VBScript?). What happened in the past is largely irrelevant in this
context. The rest of your first paragraph is pure supposition.
The W3C (which /isn't/, as you suggest, based on a hatred of all things
Microsoft) kind of lost control over things somewhere between HTML 2.0
and HTML 3.2 and tried, with some success, to re-assert that control
with HTML 4.0/4.01, CSS, the creation of XML (as a simplified subset of
SGML), and the creation of XHTML as a 'reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML
1.0 application' (I believe that's the wording).
I can (and have) designed pages that display /properly/ in NS 6+,
Mozilla, and Opera 6, and which /don't/ display properly in IE 6. There
are no errors in the style sheet, and the XHTML validates (as Strict, no
less). The best I can do in a case like that is either find a
hack/work-around to make IE do something it doesn't want to do (and I'm
far too new at this game to even think of attempting that) or to rethink
my design so that it will display decently in IE as well as the other
browsers. (You'll note a distinct lack of mention of even attempting to
support NN 4.x.)
In other words, I'm put in the position of having to rework things so as
to have pages display properly in IE, because /IE/ has certain problems
with CSS, and to do so while still ensuring that the pages look good in
browsers that /don't/ have IE's problems with CSS.
Pages, BTW, aren't 'w3c compliant'; pages and stylesheets (there's also
some accessibility stuff I haven't checked in to) are either /valid/ or
/invalid/; they either /validate/ or the /don't/. All this means is
that your pages follow the 'rules' of CSS or of a given version of HTML
or, with HTML 4.0/4.01 and XHTML 1.0 (I don't think you /can/ validate
for the XHTML 1.1 modules, but I haven't gotten that far yet), a certain
DTD 'flavour'; all your opening <p> tags have closing </p> tags tends to
be the most obvious example, simply because a lot of old-school web
authors didn't /use/ the closing tag.
Of /course/ you can't 'afford' to design pages that look like shit in
IE; by the same token, you shouldn't be designing pages around the
quirks in IE, either. But that's another matter altogether. . . .
Brian
--
We sail tonight for Singapore | We're all as mad as hatters here
I've fallen for a tawny moor | Took off to the land of Nod
Drank with all the Chinamen | Walked the sewers of Paris
I danced along a colored wind | Dangled from a rope of sand
You must say goodbye to me
-- Tom Waits, 'Singapore'
