Re: Which DTD?

"Philip J. Bailey" wrote:

> ...I could not aggree more,  Luckilly I can, it seams have my cake and eat it.
> One reply indicated that I can save my own modified DTD to my web site and
> declare that  on line one of the document.  kind of defeats the object, but
> it now should mean that seamless frames and EMBED will validate...

I am very disappointed if that does work. I thought that the entire point of the W3C HTML validator is to independently verify that you have stuck to the W3C standards. What are you proving by validating against a non-standard DTD ? That you have stuck to SGML ?

If you put the "Valid HTML 4" sticker on a page that isn't valid HTML 4, then you are making that sticker meaningless...


> ...Mind you, the validation that I rely on mostly, is checking it on more than
> one browser.  MSIE 5, NS 4.5, Opera 3, Sun's Hot Java, and for non frames
> browsers Mosaic.  If it displays OK thats what matters...

And what about Lynx, Web TV, Macs, Unix machines, Palm tops, WinCE machines etc... ? Netscape and IE with JavaScript turned on and off, Java on and off, Style sheets turned on and off etc... ? There are many releases of IE 3 and IE 4, most of which render HTML slightly differently... How about high colour, low colour and monochrome devices ?

A full test suite would have to cover several dozen programs/configurations over several dozen platforms. Many, many combinations - prohibitively expensive...

Alternatively you can stick to the W3C standards on HTML, CSS, accessability etc. Then your pages will be usable on most programs/platforms, by many kinds of users, and will also be future proof to some degree.

--
Chris Nappin, INRI UK Ltd.
Tel: +44 (0)1703 760484 Fax: +44 (0)1703 760483 Web: www.inri.co.uk
INRI is a subsidiary of Logicon Inc, a Northrop Grumman Company.

Received on Tuesday, 1 June 1999 06:01:39 UTC