[thelist] CSS id or class?

Simon Willison simon at incutio.com
Thu Aug 1 13:06:01 CDT 2002


At 11:43 01/08/2002 -0600, Kid Stevens wrote:
>NS has gotten so bad that it is sluggish, buggy and still not compliant.  I
>can't see why AOL even tries to keep it going anymore.  P.S. Mozilla for
>the Mac is almost Identical code byte by byte with Netscape 6.

I'm afraid that simply isn't true. I use Mozilla on Windows for all of my
daily browsing and find it rock solid, completely standards compliant and
able to render pretty much every page I visit - in fact the only sites it
fails to view are the ones with legacy browser sniffing code that turns it
away for not being IE. Mozilla is /meant/ to be byte-for-byte identical to
NS6 - they are pretty much the same software. Netscape 6 is Mozilla
rebranded as Netscape with a few extra features (AIM support and a spell
checker) thrown in to the  mix. This is to be expected, as Mozilla is the
result of Netscape open-sourcing their browser back in 1998.

>Without standards you could not watch TV, call someone in another state or
>connect to the web.  The Web is the worse for compliance.  The war between
>standard writers versus compliant end user applications continues.

Actually standards compliance is beginning to win through. Browser
manufacturers are no longer competing to add weird propretary extensions,
instead they are boasting how standards compliant their browsers actually
are. Opera, Mozilla and even Microsoft have all commited to supporting the
W3's recommendations and support gets better with every browser release.

My blog uses standards compliant XHTML and CSS for layout (not a table in
site) and I haven't had a single complaint about it not displaying, despite
getting over 300 visits a day (and rising). My company's site recently
switched to XHTML/CSS: www.incutio.com. Lycos are rolling out an XHTML/CSS
version of their European portal in the near future. More than half of the
weblogs I visit regularly use CSS for layout. www.webstandards.org are
campaigning to educate developers to the benefits of standards, and
www.maccaws.com (a group of which I am proud to be a member) are putting
together a kit to help web developers convince bosses and clients of the
benefits of web standards.

The year is 2002, Netscape 4 is five years old and standards compliant web
development is very much a reality.

Regards,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/




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