On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 11:51:53AM -0600, Kent West wrote: > Sorry for the Off Topic post, but I have a lot of confidence in the > opinions/knowledge of the folks on this list. > > I am not a web developer; know next to nothing about it. > > I have a co-worker who is developing some web pages. I've encouraged him > to pass his work through the W3C HTML validator. He says it fails, and > that if he recodes to pass, his work appears differently on different > browsers. For example, he has two frames next to each other that he > wants to have look like one piece, but Netscape 6.x puts a buffer around > each frame unless he inserts a non-W3C-approved tag, so that there's a > gulf between the two frames. > > So my question is this: > Are the W3C standards insufficient to allow the web > designers to do what they need to do, or is my > co-worker missing a technique that he needs to know? > > In other words, are the W3C standards sufficient to provide a > browser-agnostic world, with all the features that designers need? Yes and no. Different browsers are *allowed* to render the same HTML in different ways. Partly because of underlying constraints (e.g. missing fonts, only 16 colours), partly because the end-user can always override e.g. colours, stylesheet, window size, fontsize etc. And probably for other reasons too. IMHO if your co-worker wants *absolute control* over how things are rendered, then he's figthing a loosing battle. Essentially you only have absolute control if you have one big image per page. (Extremism is good for proving a point :-) And then you're still fighting the colour maps, window sizes. Never mind download speed. After all, html is only a *markup* language. Yes, stylesheets allow you to specify most things in pixels, but stylesheets can be disabled by the user. Treat them as *hints*. If your content *depends* on a stylesheet, then you're abusing stylesheets. Booh. Hiss. But making it look *sensible* in all browsers is not difficult at all. Stick to the standard stuff that W3C knows about. If you write to the standard, then all (compliant) browsers will render it in a sensible way. Who cares if there's an extra 2 pixels around the edges? People will be interested in *the content*, won't they? Achieving that last bit of control is a lot of effort and testing. And you may well end up excluding e.g. text-only browsers (say bye-bye to potential customers who happen to be blind!). Excluding 5% of web = excluding *a lot* of people. Do that a few times and... > does the W3C-approved label simply mean that the page is coded to the > least common denominator, and is therefore not practical for > PHB-oriented web sites? Hm. Least common denominator does not necessarily imply "not suitable for PHBs". I firmly believe content is king. > > Thanks! > > Kent The above is mostly my opinion and my (little) experience speaking. Not facts. -- Karl E. Jørgensen karl@jorgensen.com www.karl.jorgensen.com ==== Today's fortune: If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.
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