Re: OT: Web Standards
On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 15:29, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 11:51:53AM -0600, Kent West wrote:
> > 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?
>
> I'll try not to start ranting here, but...
>
> You're asking the wrong question.
>
> HTML was originally conceived as a content description language, not
> a page layout language. A significant part of that identity is that
> the client displaying the HTML document is allowed to interpret it
> however it chooses, whether that means displaying frames seamlessley
> adjacent to each other (the IE default, based on my reading of your
> post), displaying frames with borders (the Netscape default, again
> based on my reading of your post), or even displaying each frame as a
> separate page (which is how lynx handles them).
>
> IMO, the majority of the web's current problems are the direct result
> of "web designers" and graphic artists deciding that they must have
> complete control over every detail of how their HTML pages appear to
> the end user, rather than allowing the user to tell his browser how
> he wants things. This leads to such monstrosities as pages which put
> bright yellow text on a white background (or other such invisible
> combinations) if you turn off loading of background images, text
> presented in Flyspeck 3pt if you don't have the right font installed,
> and, perhaps worst of all, sites that abandon HREF tags in favor of
> javascript event handlers that are functionally identical, aside from
> breaking if javascript is disabled. The entire concept of "graceful
> degradation" appears to have been forgotten.
>
> Odder still, we have arrived in a state where "browser independent"
> has somehow come to mean "uses a variety of highly browser-specific
> techniques to ensure that it always looks the same" rather than "it
> doesn't care what browser you're using".
>
> (So much for trying not to rant...)
>
> Anyhow, to come back to the question you asked: No. If your
> objective is to create a page that looks the same no matter where it
> is viewed, standards-compliant HTML is not the appropriate tool for
> the job. Nonstandard HTML extensions may make it possible for you,
Probably not. It will make it possible on a very reduced number of
browsers (usually IE and/or Netscape), the others often will display
the page, if they display it at all, in much awfuller manner as without
your non-standard tags.
Definitively a very bad choice.
Michel.
> but if you really want/need absolute consistency, I've heard than PDF
> is a much better option.
>
> --
> When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
> have already won. - reverius
>
> Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss
>
>
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