- From: Joseph McLean <joseph@secondflux.com>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 16:12:45 -0700
- To: Tom Gilder <tom@tom.me.uk>
- Cc: public-evangelist <public-evangelist@w3.org>
At 3:11 PM +0100 7/8/02, Tom Gilder wrote:
>...the W3C Style site - <http://www.w3.org/Style/>. In IE6 for Windows,
>the links near the top ("What are style sheets?" in black, "Press
>Clippings" in
>green, etc) are extremely buggy.
>
>There is actually a very easy (although slightly hackish) work-around for
>this,
>which is to very simply to force IE6 into backwards-compatible mode by
>inserting
>any non-whitespace chars before the doctype
Non-standard workarounds are always a little spooky to me....
>But the question is this: should the W3C give in to browser bugs, and employ
>hacks like that?
Absolutely not, I hope. Standards are what defines these bugs as "bugs" in
the first place -- compliance standards are powerful because they don't
compromise. Once a standard begins to patch itself to accommodate the
behavioral quirks of the browser industry, we slip right under the table
again, into the days of "hack it until it works".
And if the W3C doesn't hold Microsoft to spec -- who will?
>But on the other hand, if someone who is just investigating web standards
>visits
>the W3C Style site and finds it doesn't work on his or her brand-new browser,
>they might well be inclined to think "well if this is what using web standards
>does, I can't be bothered with all this!" - not good for evangelism in
>general.
It's better to declare the emperors's lack of clothes than pretend
otherwise, I feel. You might lose face in front of a few ill-informed
people, but others will realise that the opposite is true -- the _browser_,
not the W3C, is wrong.
-Joseph
Received on Monday, 8 July 2002 20:22:38 UTC