Re: On ampersands.

"Shane P. McCarron" wrote:

> Speaking as someone who develops formal test suites for a living, I
> think that HTML 4 is a huge improvement over HTML 3.2, but is still
> terrible from a conformance perspective.  It uses phrases like "many
> browsers do..." or "often this means...". Those are not phrases you
> expect to find in a formal standard.  Also, the fact that HTML 4 bent
> over backward to accommodate non-visual browsers means that it has
> almost no guidance for visual browser creators.  This means that they
> are free to implement things pretty much however they wish. That is not
> really a good way to promote interoperability and application
> portability (where, in this case, an application is an HTML 4 conforming
> document).

I am writing as someone who is THRILLED with the HTML 4x references for
non-visual browsers, still "bent over backward to accommodate" does not
seem like a fair characterization of the specifications.  Is there anything
there that gets in your way?

I am sure you can imagine the outrage from Netscape and Microsoft (and many
other others) if the W3C had the audacity to suggest proper behavior for
GUI browsers!  In any case, those kind of recommendations certainly do not
belong in content authoring guidelines!  The descriptions of screen reader
and non-visual browser behavior that do exist in the HTML specs are there
only to help explain why the rules are what they are.

There are, of course, W3C afiliated groups which work on standards for
browser and authoring tool behavior.

Received on Thursday, 6 July 2000 15:24:07 UTC