Paul Hartman wrote:
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Paul B. Gallagher
<pau...@pbgdashtranslations.com> wrote:
Martin Feitag wrote:
I've never seen a major website which causes problems for
Seamonkey 1.1.x _without_ having fatal errors.
Well, I guess there's a philosophical question here -- are we
attorneys or are we programmers?
The sticklers are right, of course, to say that these pages are
chock-full of errors. But end users don't care if you're right,
they want to see the content. So if they have to choose between a
program that displays a reasonable facsimile of the author's intent
and one that displays hash, they'll choose the program that shows
the content.
So would you rather be right, or would you rather be popular?
In an ideal world, I'd like to see SeaMonkey show a disclaimer (the
way it does in the mail app when it blocks remote content) saying
something along the lines that "this page contains fatal errors in
its coding, but we've done the best we could to divine what the
designer wanted, and we're showing you that but we might've guessed
wrong." ;-)
Yes, the problem is that the author of the page in question
specifically declared his page as being XHTML 1.0 Transitional and
then violated all the rules. He could have just as easily left off
the doctype and left it up to the browser to interpret the page in
quirks mode or however it saw fit. By displaying buggy pages
correctly, incompetence and laziness is rewarded. In fact a proper
XHTML page served with application/xhtml+xml mime type will not
display at all if there is a single error in the markup.
Who are you punishing? The end user, dissatisfied with being unable to
view a page, will often switch to the other browser, "rewarding" the
incompetence and punishing the stickler. I know that's what I do when I
really need the content. The only time I give up and move on is when I
don't care about the content.
For example, in my work for my political party, I monitor home sales and
deaths in my county, the former so we can send someone to welcome new
homeowners and strike the move-outs off our lists, and the latter so we
can strike decedents and not disturb their grieving families. The county
websites work only with Internet Exploiter, so I have to choose between
doing this valuable work and using the "right" browser (which BTW is my
default and my favorite). I choose to do the work.
<http://rodviewer.montcopa.org/countyweb/login.jsp?countyname=Montgomery>
<http://propertyrecords.montcopa.org/Search/SalesSearch.aspx?mode=sales>
I would rather be right than popular :)
Be careful what you wish for. ;-)
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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