Re: HTML compliance

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck@snew.com>]

Nice attitude.  Key problem being "if it works".

Let's a take a greater view of the net.  What's the dominant
browser?  Mozilla?  Konquerer?  I think not.

I used to work with a guy who could glance at html and
say "this doesn't render write for BrowserX on PlatformY"
(iCab for the Mac or Mosaic on OS/2 - whatever).

HTML is a SPECIFIC language.  Why is this key?  Let's take
the next step:  TCP/IP.  You don't really have to follow
the "standards" - who cares about the IETF.  If the packets
get to the other machine and do what you expect, so what?

The final stop, of course, is Microsoft Internet.  Running
patended SMB/IP and speaking MSHTML.  Can't read it? sorry,
get Windows XP and run your approved programs.

(anyone recall when MS-Mail gateway wouldn't work with a
standards acceptable 2 line SMTP greeting?  Microsoft's
reaction to "you're not standards compliant" was "We don't
FOLLOW standards, we make them").

Bottom line:  Try to do good HTML.  If you can fix it, please submit
patches.  If you are developing and happen to not know HTML inside
and out, keep doing what you are doing; life will continue and
hopefully the HTML savvy will tune the HTML for you.

Quoting Generic Player (genericplayer2@home.com):
> > I am all too aware of this already, unfortunately. Correctness is not
> > a sometimes thing though, IMO, and it boggles my poor mind that a
> > group so anal about their C can be so dismissive of correctness with
> > respect to writing HTML. Just because most major browsers get it right
> > most of the time is not an excuse to be writing sloppy, non-compliant
> > HTML. You will get a more consistent, more quickly parsed web page if
> > the web page actually follows the rules that it is supposed to.
> >
> 
> Considering how stupid some of the standards are, I think being w3c
> compliant is a waste of time.  Write html that works, and forget about
> w3c anything.  I mean, if you link to a cgi script and pass a variable
> to it, you just lost your standard compliance.  If you don't explicitly
> define background colours for things that should be inherited in CSS
> (its called cascading for a reason), you lost your compliance.  And you
> can write w3c validated sites that won't work with *any* current
> browser, css2 is barely supported at all anywhere, but its still
> perfectly valid as far as w3c standards go.
> 
> I would like to see the site re-organized a little better though, so
> things are located a little more logically, and its easier to find
> everything on the site.  Is it worth going ahead and doing some work in
> that respect?
> 
> Adam