Re: CSS1 and tables (fwd)

Once upon a time Douglas Rand shaped the electrons to say...
>Never.  Not in a million years.  Between HTML being edited about 70%
>of the time on text editors and the plethora of other editors which 

text editors != non-compliant HTML

It is quite possibly to hand code complex documents in a text editor and
be fully compliant.  I've been doing it for years.  I'll run a couple of
checkers on my finished work - most errors end up being typos of some
sort.

I tend to find more errors in HTML generated by GUI tools that are weak
on rules checking.  The worst I'd ever seen is Netscape Navigator Gold.
It produced absolute crap.  I haven't played with Composer much.

The original FrontPage was lame too.  It improved later, but still had
some issues - no quoting attributes with special characters, defaulting to
percentage widths on table cells, etc.

PageMill I gave up on so I haven't seen the last release.

HotMetal PRO has always been decent - but I wish they'd provide a finer
control over rules checking.  I'd love to be able to load in my own
DTD - I've been doing things like forcing ALT text on images for a while.

>than in dictating compliance.  HTML,  de facto,  does not follow
>the W3C DTD in a meaningful way.

Which is not something I'm willing to accept as unchanging.  Mostly this
is due to the terribly weak checking in browsers and authoring tools to
date.  If authoring tools spit out crap, you can't expect most new authors
to know better.  If we make an effort to tighten checking in the tools,
and code browsers so that solid code looks BETTER than the hack jobs, 
users will shift because it is in their best interest.

It is annoying on any level to be forced to do things in a non-standard way
because some big company decides their way is good enough.  I have to
deal with that enough with certain modem makers broken signalling, or a
software giant inventing their own version of networking standards for no
apparent reason.... ;-)

>But can I do that in our (almost unknown) browser?  Not on your life.
>I have people doing things like:
><PRE>
> 
><P>....
><P>...
></PRE>

So I'd igore the <P></P> tags and display the contained text without
adding any of the effects from 'paragraph'.

-MZ
--
Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs
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Received on Monday, 13 October 1997 11:27:48 UTC