RE: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

On Saturday, January 13, 2001 12:35 PM, Tina Marie Holmboe wrote:
"Why does Frontpage use <p>&nbsp;</p> to produce a 'newline' when the BR
element is there to do exactly that?"

Actually, the BR element is not intended to be used as a spacer. It's a line
break, forcing a newline at the end of the current line. If you try to use
it as a spacing element, you will be a bit surprised by what happens in
Lynx: it will break the current line, but repeated BR tags will not generate
extra space. This may be true in other browsers as well.

The best way to build web pages, IMO, is to start with the structure of the
content and code in pure XHTML Strict. Then use CSS to apply formatting.
This will result in very plain pages in older browsers, but they will at
least be very readable and will work in pretty much all older browsers. With
careful use of CSS, you can get pretty close to the same effect in all
CSS-enabled browsers (except IE3 and Netscape 4, which will, we can only
hope, soon disappear from the scene).

[An aside: While non-standards compliant authoring software has certainly
hurt, Netscape Navigator 4 must take responsibility as the worst thing ever
to happen to the Web. The implementation of CSS in Nav 4 is broken beyond
belief, and Netscape's unwillingness to fix the problems in any of the
dozens of minor versions combined with the years of delay in producing a
successor have not only set back the advancement of the Web by years,
they've also forced web site developers to waste an enormous amount of time
coming up with hacks to "fix" the layout of otherwise valid code in Nav 4.
Netscape should be deeply ashamed.]

Received on Saturday, 13 January 2001 16:36:31 UTC