[thelist] Re: WebReview responds to WaSP browser death march

Mon Feb 26 15:38:52 CST 2001

>"complies" with some "standard."  As Andrew points out,
>
><body bgcolor="#ffffff" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" topmargin="0"
>leftmargin="0">
>
>... ain't compliant but is used by a lot of folks. So?

Because the other options are just a little too problematic to 
justify... I'd almost always use CSS to set similar properties as 
well ... but that stuff is more of a failsafe than a personal protest 
against standards. I'd quite like not to have it there.

>Until the people writing the standards are the people writing the browsers,

Interestingly Flash is a technology in just this situation -- and 
it's come a long long way largely as a result of their owning the 
technology they are developing for, and their listening attentively 
to user feedback. This is ammunition for Zeldman in his article to 
point at the poor response by browser manufacturers to standards. I 
guess you could say that html could be flashier than flash, and a lot 
more useful and accessible besides, if browsers had kept up with and 
pushed the standards, rather than lagging behind and moaning about it 
all being too hard.

>The end user doesn't give a hoot as to what the code behind it looks like.
>If it works for the users, then the code is good.

That's the point -- these two things are not mutually exclusive. Bad 
code does NOT equal happy users necessarily, nor does good code 
necessarily mean the users are shafted, nor that it has to look 
something like www.w3.org. In fact the argument here is that the 
better the code is, the better, faster, easier to maintain, and more 
reliable the site tends to be. WYSIWYG tools have to make *generic* 
code (more or less) out of drag and drop operations and menu choices. 
WYSIWY(Almost Never)G tools are almost a crutch for learning how to 
do your job properly -- except that some people do find them great 
for learning, for prototyping, for 'visual thinkers' (<vomit />), and 
it exposes children to the foundations of internet design so that's a 
good thing too.

>  It's that I can't be bothered to change. I simply discount
>validation as a criteria.

Good for you... wonder what your sites will look like when browsers 
really do take validation seriously also?
-- 
Andrew Forsberg
http://www.thepander.co.nz