Richard,
you wrote:
I think the decision has more to do with maximising the expectation
that your design will appear the same on any browser than to do with
the features that are available. Also allowing that expectation to
continue as standards and browsers move forward and browsers
implement standards more fully.
Let's get rid of all possible misunderstandings here: I use standards
for all they are worth -- all the time, but I won't let standards put
limits on what I can do -- ever.
I have made my decision: to take standards as far as I can stretch them
-- and maybe a bit beyond. My designs *do* appear the same in all
standard compliant browsers, and even in some "not very standard
compliant" ones.
My expectation may be a bit too influenced by reality. No matter how
good the standards are, we still have to get our web pages -- design and
all -- through those browsers. My preferences happens to be Opera,
Safari and Firefox (in that order) at the moment -- *in standards mode*,
but that won't quite cut it as we all know.
I hope you don't mean that I should leave out some *standard-features*,
just because "some" browsers can't handle them. Wouldn't be much left of
W3C standards if I followed such a line.
Instead: once there's _one_ browser that can handle a standard-feature,
it will be tried and tested to see if I can make any use of it.
I never use any browser-specific features, unless I need them as tools
for simulating standard-features. Everyone who know Internet Explorer
understands what that means.
This being achieved by conforming to W3C specifications rather than
the whim of each browser developer.
Fine, but there is *no real standard mode* in IE6. It just so happens
that the old IE5.0 quirks mode and the W3C standards are fairly
identical -- apart from the box model, and IE6 has both box models.
Not a big deal in my opinion.
All other differences are related to incomplete and/or not too well
defined standards, and a few hundred thousand browser-whims, flaws and
bugs. What's a "whim" or a "flaw" or a "bug" doesn't matter all that
much as long as I can get through.
In an ideal future we would have left behind browsers and browser
versions that relied on Quirks mode behaviours, and no hacks or
workarounds would be needed to display pages on different user
agents. That may be a way off yet, but I don't see it happening at
all unless we take the first steps in that direction. So I try to use
standards mode whenever I can (which for me tends to be almost all
of the time).
I do to, but Microsoft's IE6 browser do something it isn't supposed to
do. It makes standards mode conditional by using a standard part of my
page code as a trigger, thus ignoring standard mode.
I've chosen to ignore this "whim of a browser developer", as it is not
me who are at fault here. I have no influence on IE6' mode moods.
IF Microsoft wants their browser fixed, they can do so themselves. I
don't expect that to happen in my lifetime, but it doesn't bother me.
Also, as far as I know: the DTD isn't supposed to act as a mode-switch
either, but that's what it is used as by the browsers.
Guess they don't have much of a choice really, since there are still a
lot of non-standard web pages being produced on top of all the old stuff
that's rotting out here.
Actually: I hardly ever write a DTD or an xml declaration. HTMLTidy do
it for me while checking that I haven't left any "human bugs" in my
source code. The W3C validator is a good tool for catching "human bugs"
too, but it hardly ever finds any in my source code.
HTMLTidy is the only useful piece of software I've found for web page
development, and I use it to clean up my pages and get proper encoding
of my Norwenglish lines of text into numeric entities (UTF-8) where needed.
Practical implications of that are that on our i18n site XHTML 1.0
pages that are served as text/html are normally uploaded without the
xml declaration but in utf-8*.
So, your pages on the W3C site are "tuned" to follow the whim of a
browser developer. Doesn't exactly prove any point. On the other hand:
this is the real world, and it is far from being ideal.
I read available information on the W3C site regularly since that's the
only source I find somewhat reliable and in some details. I'm more
interested in how a conforming browser should behave than in guidelines
for web site developers. If no browser can render it, then those
guidelines will just have to wait.
Most browser have changelogs which I check to see how far they are
supposed to have come. That's only of interest when they fail, which
they do all the time.
That's when the fun begins. :-)
regards
Georg
--
http://www.gunlaug.no
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