Re: (fwd)
MegaZone (megazone@livingston.com)
Fri, 10 May 1996 19:43:38 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199605110243.TAA00365@server.livingston.com>
Subject: Re: (fwd)
To: www-html@w3.org
Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 19:43:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: MegaZone <megazone@livingston.com>
Once upon a time Mike Meyer shaped the electrons to say...
>> They never existed officially! It is BAD practice to assume just bacause
>> a tag is proposed that it will ever be ratified and official.
>
>That is indeed true, however, it's lot better to use a proposed tag
>that is implemented in one or more browsers - especially when there is
>no alternative with that functionality - than to use tags that just
>appeared in some browser with no format proposal, and the complete
>documentation being a short note on what it does, and no discussion of
>what contexts it's legal in, what things are legal inside of it, etc.
>Since the latter is a very common and popular practice, berating
>people for the former seems inappropriate.
I do more than just berate people for the latter. I think it is bad
practice to leap blindly towards some new tag when it is jsut out. Just
like I don't rush out and upgrade to to "New FUBAR 3.0!" the day it is
released because experience shows me that if I wait a couple of weeks I
can pick up "New FUBAR 3.1!" with most of the painful bugs fixed. And if
the system I'm using does what I need, I don't mess with it (I still have
Win 3.11 on my notebook. I use it primarily for word processing and as
a color web browser from home - I have an SGI on my desk, and I'm writing
this on an X-tube slaved to a machine at work. Why should I put 95 on it...)
Two wrongs don't make a right, and just because something is worse doesn't
mean the lesser of two evils is acceptable.
I have to deal with this stuff enough with internal pages. I recently
got some things off of my back so I had time to look closer at the web
pages I run. I was dissappointed to find a few screwups in my area, but
rather upset to find problems in scores of docs from Marketing. Some
blatant technical errors, but others just bad style - including the use
of some tags I asked them not to use, or inappropriate use of tags.
So I'm not living in a bubble, I know what is going on, I also work with
several people outside and I've had a few people ask me to do pages for them.
I try to discourage what I see as bad practice, I'm stronger about it here
because I think we're all technical people, I know as an engineer I much
prefer direct talk to soft sell. And my experience is most engineers aren't
overly sensitive - they can take heat as well as give it without making it
a personal issue.
-MZ
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