RE: How to be 3.0 browser compliant and still validate?

Well, basically the author's definition would be something like "if
moving to standard tags and CSS would cause the page to look different
than achieved with the invalid tags"..

Anyhow, this is a moot point.

I spent some time on the errors and I managed to eliminate the invalid
attributes and replace them with their equivalent CSS tags.  The only
real problem that came from this was Navigator's lack of support for
margin=0 CSS attribute on the Body element.  I had to move one of the
background images out of the table and into body so it would flow past
the body margins.  Its not a perfect solution since the author had a
second image that should have flowed past the margins too, but it does
not look too bad.

If someone is really willing to spend time trying to find out how using
CSS impacts the look of a site when compared with the non CSS attributes
you can accomplish quite a bit.

In the end using CSS in this case had no real effect on Navigator 3,
since the invalid tags that were used were either not supported by
Navigator 3 or the tags had little impact on the look.

I could not test the changes with IE3 because I could not uninstall IE4.
Formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows NT was not an option
for this.

Thanks

Kevin Berkheiser


-----Original Message-----
From: Kynn Bartlett [mailto:kynn@idyllmtn.com]
Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 20:37
To: Kevin Berkheiser
Cc: W3C Validator
Subject: RE: How to be 3.0 browser compliant and still validate?

At 10:48 AM 8/8/1999 , Kevin Berkheiser wrote:
>I wanted to get the author's site to actually validate using the HTML 4
>Transitional DTD.
>I was hoping someone out there would know a way to do the same thing
the
>author was doing without CSS since that would break in Navigator 3.
The
>author is adamant about not breaking the site in 3.0 browsers.

How do you define "break"?

>It is too bad that HTML 4 validation eliminates the users ability to
>give their page a consistent look since different browser
>implementations have different default settings for things like
margins.

It sounds like you are defining "breaking" as "not displaying certain
things that it doesn't have the capability to display".  That is an
unuseful definition of break, especially since by that definition
nearly all pages break on certain browsers, such as lynx or pwWebSpeak.

I tend to view "breakage" as any time that there is a loss of
information.  If a margin does or does not appear, I fail to see how
that actually "breaks" as no information is lost; if link colors
fail to change or if content is rendered unreadable, THEN you have
a case of a broken page.

Therefore, I think you're rather off-target in saying that pages
made with CSS and HTML 4.0 "break" in certain browsers.  It may not
display exactly what's desired by some misguided web page creator,
but in such a case the problem really is with the designer who
simply doesn't understand the concept behind the World Wide Web.

Feel free to pursue this line of discussion with me off-list or on
a more appropriate forum as it now has little to do with the
validator anymore.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet
http://www.idyllmtn.com/
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