[thelist] Web standards (was: The Web's future: XHTML 2.0)

Jay Blanchard jay.blanchard at niicommunications.com
Mon Sep 23 07:08:01 CDT 2002


[snip from many replies]
...standards that everyone follows....actual standards....standards are
there to be followed....actual standards get no attention at all....the
W3C....People have been ignoring large swaths of the standards since html
2....it deserves to be a standard....it's not a problem with the standard
though....it's a problem that needs to be addressed in the standards....it
is possible to generally support the standards movement....I merely want the
standards to become better. They aren't perfect yet.
[/snip]

And they are not "standards". Web developers are allowed to ignore them and
browser manufacturers are allowed to ignore them (such as when NN and IE
went head-to-head in the tag wars what now seems like a long time ago),
which is why you often see so much garbled "code".

The documents and specifications coming out of the W3C are
"recommendations". There have been many arguements on this list (and many
others) that there need to be standards because it would make life so much
easier. That is why you see large groups of developers adhering to the
recommendations like glue in hopes that they will influence the browser
manufacturers to make their product more compliant with the recommendations.

I also found the '1984' reference funny, but unfortunately it seems to have
little relevance to mark-up and programming languages where it has always
been ideal to seek out the most terse (tersest? :^]) bits to perform
functions. But funny none the less.

Jay

YODA: "Code!  Yes.  A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability.
      But beware of Perl.  Terse syntax... more than one way to do it...
      default variables.  The dark side of code maintainability are they.
      Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write.  If once
      you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny,
      consume you it will."

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