Re: HTML compliancy [was: Where are wd0s1, wd0s2, wd0s3?]

[Brian Poole <raj@cerias.purdue.edu>]

Quoting Generic Player (genericplayer2@home.com) from  9 August 2001:
> 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

I don't see a problem with most of the standards, in fact there are few
cases where I have just gone 'Well, why the heck did they do xxx?' with
the basic HTML 4.01 Transistional standard. It makes sense.

Writing compliant HTML is not a waste of time in my opinion because it
promotes a common standard. If there was an opposing standard, that was 
commonly followed, I would evaluate between the two and choose the 
superior, but in this case there is only one common HTML standard and 
W3C has it.

If no one follows standards you get what we are continually progressing
towards today, browsers that are all hacks to try and deal with broken
HTML as best they can. If there was a strict code of what was allowed 
and browsers only followed that there would be a much more common 
display of web pages than there is today.

> 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

Use &, is that really so hard? & is special in HTML, deal with it.

> define background colours for things that should be inherited in CSS

I'm not going to go into discussions about CSS because I don't personally
use them all that frequently and thus I'm not educated enough to argue 
about it. Anyways, as OpenBSD's web pages are all plain old HTML and I've
no intent to change that.. I don't see the relevance, except that in 
saying sometimes standards are wrong and should be changed, which I will
agree with. I just don't feel that to be the case with the vast majority
of the HTML standard that is relevant to OpenBSD's web pages.

> (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.

Again, irrelevant at this point. The standard is ahead of the support. So
what?  Isn't this always the case? The standard has to be ahead of wide
spread support because otherwise the people trying to support it don't 
know HOW to support it.

And we aren't trying to make that our standard. We are just trying to
standardize on good old HTML 4.01 Transistional or a similar HTML 
standard. Nothing fancy.

Standards are a good thing, otherwise everyone tries to do their own 
thing and it gets ugly. A thousand different ways of doing it, you 
try supporting that and displaying it consistently.

The only problem to standardizing the web pages in my mind is in the
few cases where you have to make the HTML a little awkward to read to
provide the same look as currently is given. Thats OK though, it is 
going to happen in some places like that and thats just the way things
work. What standard hasn't caused someone a little pain somewhere in 
the line, where you say 'but we could do X instead of Y'? From my 
experience, most of the changes needed are not of this variety, but
rather of a simpler, slightly off syntax. I think the most common thing
making us miss that nice little stamp of standard was that there are 
places where we need to quote values. Another common one is that HTML 
tags aren't terminated properly.. these aren't big controversial 
changes we are talking about here.


-b