Re: DTD driven browsers and real world HTML

In-reply-to: Your message of Wed, 20 Jan 1999 12:43:18 +0000."
             <199901201243.MAA31835@saracen.bts.co.uk> 

> I did this before posting to the Amaya list, but Lynx users have been 
> doing this for years and the commercial reality is that many page 
> authors only care that their pages look impressive on one or both of 
> IE4 and NS4, and most only care about compatibility with NS and IE 
> products.  Amaya and Lynx users are at best a nuisance.  There are 
> reports of quite hostile responses to reports to webmasters from Lynx
> users.

I guess it's important to react today and don't let MS or NS kill the Web.
With HTML, people applauded to have a universal and open format to exchange 
information. Maintaining and encouraging invalid HTML is a manner to come back
to proprietary solutions.
In theory all W3C members, including MS and NS, agree to increase the quality 
of
Web pages. In fact the future should be a XML version of HTML (Voyager) which 
will reject invalid documents.

Users are actors on the Web as well as tool providers. Interests of both
parties are not necessary the same. If users think that open formats are good 
for them, they have to defend their position.

> So basically I agree with you about what should happen in an ideal 
> world, but I don't think it will. Incidentally, I suspect your terms 
> of reference don't really permit you to go into direct competition 
> with the commercial browsers.

That's true. Nevertheless I hope we can show that a free and open solution is 
viable and very helpful. There are countries and domains (education for 
example)
were people cannot or mustn't pay for commercial products.

> I've championed the do it right position on the Lynx mailing list, 
> but the majority view tends to be towards making Lynx work in the 
> real world by trying to track de facto error recovery.

Sometimes, it's necessary to maintain a minimum of contact with the reality :-(
Regards
  Irene.

Received on Wednesday, 20 January 1999 10:39:25 UTC