[thelist] What is wrong with this site?

Tim Fountain tim at incutio.com
Wed Aug 20 07:45:00 CDT 2003


Tuesday, August 19, 2003, 8:23:50 PM, Jeff Howden wrote:
> From: Tim Fountain
[Rendering documents sent as text/plain as HTML]
>> The reason we have standards in the first place is to try and tie
>> all browsers together so they behave in roughly the same way.

> *yawn* standards is not what this conversation is about.

I think it is, kinda. The specs say the browser should render the
content as whatever is specified by the content-type header. When
browsers start second guessing the developer you inevitably end up
with up unpredictable problems that are extremely difficult to track
down. And that's if you notice them at all.

>> However if all browsers were 100% standards compliant, as long as
>> your page was standards compliant as well you could be pretty sure
>> it would work the same in all browsers. It's impossible for
>> developers to check sites on _all_ browsers, there are hundreds of
>> them.

> you contradict yourself in the passage above.

I do? I'm saying if all browsers were 100% standards compliant you
wouldn't need to check sites on lots of browsers as it should look the
same on each. This is good because it's _impossible_ to check sites on
all browsers.

> there isn't a single browser on the market that's 100% standards
> compliant; not one. even the ones that are close have added their
> own proprietary garbage to html, css, etc. making the reality of
> 100% standards compliance getting the job done a serious joke.

It's a problem but I think you make it sound worse than it is. The
extensions added to older versions of IE and Netscape did make things
a little difficult, but if (as you mentioned in a previous message) by
extensions to Mozilla you mean things like the -moz selectors, these
are more experimental features which shouldn't cause any problems for
other browsers.

>> say you've got a messy HTML page with lots of missing </table> and
>> other tags to the point where it's not obvious how it's meant to
>> look. The browser may "guess", but one browser's guess isn't
>> necessarily going to be the same as another browser's

> validating your code would solve that problem immediately.

True, but it would be a pain to have to validate a site after every
little change.

-- 
Tim Fountain | Web developer | Incutio Limited | www.incutio.com
email: tim at incutio.com | Tel: +44 8708 700 333 | Fax: +44 7092 181 581



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