At the risk of over Zeldmanning the discussion... My previous comment was probably (ok definitely) influenced by Zeldman's August 12 posting Silence and Noise http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0804b.shtml The original idea behind the Web Standards Project which really kicked off the whole web standards thang (and so WSG) was to make the web better for everyone (as I noted previously). They did that by raising grass-roots support amongst designers and by lobbying browser makers and other software developers to bring their stuff into line with the W3C. It's been pretty successful--IE wouldn't be the wonderful thing it is without all that work. As Zeldman points out, plenty of people get caught up in nit picking the code and forget about the bigger picture--making cool stuff that looks cool and communicates well on all levels. However there is still a way to go. Just as before IE5/Mac you couldn't get good CSS support there still needs to be a better way of doing things for Flash. Macromedia has come to the party by making Flash much more accessible (as Rimantas said). However, at the moment there doesn't seem to be a perfect way of putting Flash in a valid page. I've used Ian Hixie's method, because it seems to be the least problematic. So I don't think it's lying to use a doctype on a invalid page anymore than it's lying to add a file extension to a Mac file so you can open it on a Windows machine. You need the doctype so that the browser will display the page properly. It would be lying to write "This page is valid XHTML" on the page (or even "This page is not valid XHTML" on one that is). Rimantas is absolutely right about the standards, but if a client says they need Flash, until there's a better alternative, that's the best we can do. We can petition Macromedia or Microsoft or Apple or Opera or the W3C for a better way. Or we can contribute to the discussion on lists like this and find a solution ourselves, which is the fun part :) David
PS: I'd just like to note (in case there's anyone from the Oxford Dictionary on the list) that this may be the first time anyone's used the word "Zeldmanning". -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ian Fenn Sent: Friday, 24 September 2004 11:32 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Re[2]: [WSG] Embedding Flash Ric wrote: > Hello Rimantas, > Well said and, IMHO, absolutely correct. Anyone notice Zeldman's recently announcement of happycog's redesign of the KC Chiefs site? He wrote that the website is standards-compliant but added a disclaimer that read: "Attention XHTML nit-pickers: We are still in the process of cleaning up the site's last remaining compliance errors. With over 4500 articles produced over ten years, there are plenty of things to fix. You don't need to tell us, 'cause we know." Source: http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0904c.shtml He pretty much sums up how I feel on the issue. All the best, -- Ian ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/ Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004 See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ****************************************************** ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/ Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004 See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
