RE: HTML and support in products.

Karl

I do not use any of the products - I teach web design and use a
standards only approach - hence all my students are told to use Firefox
for browsing and either Amaya or HTML-Kit for construction. I tell them
that it is easier to design for standards then tweak for IE rather than
designing for IE and hoping. All our code (XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS2) is
passed through validators - at least that's what they're supposed to do
before submitting it. This way we get rid of the coding mistakes and can
concentrate on the design and content.

I have to use HTML email here - even though text is so much more
economical. It does have the advantage of information being formatted
correctly as I use quite a number of tables for data when I communicate
with students over their performance or attendance.

I posted because for a long time I wanted to believe that Microsoft,
being a member of the Standards body, was going to move towards using
standards. I was wrong. I do not have the time within my teaching
schedule to investigate further. Sometimes I need to sleep. (that is a
comment on our workloads)

John

John Colby 
Support Tutor (Mathematics), Learner Support Centre (G312),
The Business School, Galton Building, Birmingham City University,
City North Campus, Perry Barr,
Birmingham B42 2SU
Tel: +44 (0) 121 331 6937
Birmingham City University is the new name for the former University of
Central England in Birmingham (UCE Birmingham). 
Essential Website - http://essential.tbs.bcu.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Dubost [mailto:karl@w3.org] 
Sent: 23 October 2007 04:14
To: John Colby
Cc: public-evangelist@w3.org
Subject: Re: HTML and support in products.

Hi John,

John Colby (22 oct. 2007 - 17:57) :
> From http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/? 
> p=530&tag=nl.e138
>
>  Doesn't give me much hope.

Thanks for the article link.
Could you give a bit more of context? On your personal expectations?
Do you use the products cited in the article?
Did you experience troubles and more important how did you solve them  
or tried to solve them?

Noticing is good, but helping to move forward is better.



For email, there was a W3C workshop recently about [HTML in email] 
[1]. During the workshop the designers have expressed their  
frustrations with regards to the support of html and css in email  
clients. They are willing to go full CSS, but they can't for now, and  
are forced to rely on table layout design.

Another interesting statistics was also when you give the choice to  
all users to receive newsletters by email as text only or HTML, most  
of them (90%) request the HTML version. It seems with the new version  
of mailers we will see more and more HTML emails with predefined  
templates. A need for interoperability is quite important.

One way to help is to create HTML test cases for authoring tools and  
to make report about the way tools and libraries are producing HTML.  
I had started a document in July about this, but I will be happy to  
had test and stuff from people. It might help to push implementers  
and also feed the HTML WG with some needs from the authoring tools.  
There might be requirements in the specification which are just  
difficult to handle in an authoring tool or a CMS.




[1]: http://www.w3.org/2007/05/html-mail/
[2]: http://www.w3.org/2007/07/html-authoring-tools/

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***





Birmingham City University is the new name unveiled for the former University of Central England in Birmingham
For more information about the name change go to http://www.bcu.ac.uk/namechange/official_announcement.html

Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2007 09:30:49 UTC