Re: Browser compatibility with implementation bugs

On Tue, 19 May 1998, Victoria Rosenfeld wrote:

> Uh, ok, as the voice of John & Joan Anybody, who *gives* a crap(!) about
> things being SGML compliant. Oh, you "real" authors can bandy it about all
> day long, and ... sooo ... I've been a "real" author for enough years,
> sites, companies that I feel like I "count" in the elitist use of the
> words.

I'm not sure I see the validity of your arguments. I'm not arguing anything
about SGML. What I'm saying is that user agents should comply to W3C
recommendations. I don't really see how this would complicate anything.

HTML is not SGML. HTML is an application of SGML. This is convenience, not a
feature or a restraint. HTML could be defined without the use of SGML (and
AFAIK before 2.0 it was). If 'us "real" authors' where interested in
bringing SGML to the Web, nobody would have made XML.

I too am a professional web designer. I get paid by people who want the
latest bells and whistles on their pages, and will hire someone else if I
don't deliver. And so I want a simple way to know how I can implement
everything, without creating tons upon tons of failsafes in my pages so that
new feature X will work on (or at least not break) both the latest version
of Netscape and Explorer, older versions of Netscape and Explorer, lynx,
search engine robots, and (this last one because I have something I think of
as "integrity", though perhaps my English isn't up to par and it's not the
right word) the elusive, entirely theoretical, imaginary
recommendation-compliant browser. If popular browsers followed the
specifications instead, I would be able to do my job in a tenth of the time.

-- Stephanos Piperoglou -- sp249@cam.ac.uk -------------------
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of `true'.
                         - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
------------------------- http://www.thor.cam.ac.uk/~sp249/ --

Received on Tuesday, 19 May 1998 17:37:46 UTC