Broken browsers?

Hi there! First off a quick hello - can't really be bothered to write a full
"Why I'm here" message, but it is really the same as everyone else. I thought I
might try and get a discussing going with an interesting issue...


Clearly it is in the W3C's interest to educate other people about web standards.
This has to include practical examples of where they are helpful, and how they
can be used best.

But what happens when popular browsers don't render W3C pages correctly? For
instance the W3C Style site - <http://www.w3.org/Style/>. In IE6 for Windows,
the links near the top ("What are style sheets?" in black, "Press Clippings" in
green, etc) are extremely buggy.

If you roll the cursor over them, the sides of the page vanish into thin air,
and some of the links are unclickable. This is a result of IE6's very buggy
standards-compatible mode, and this behavior was not present in IE5.5.

There is actually a very easy (although slightly hackish) work-around for this,
which is to very simply to force IE6 into backwards-compatible mode by inserting
any non-whitespace chars before the doctype (such as an XML prolog, or an empty
comment like <!---->).

But the question is this: should the W3C give in to browser bugs, and employ
hacks like that?

Personally, I can come up with reasons for both sides of the argument. Adding
hacks to work-around browser problems is a bit like waving the white flag and
giving in to buggy browsers.

It is sort-of going back to table layouts and spacer GIFs for much more broken
browsers like NS4 - or is it? Adding a comment before a doctype doesn't
invalidate the page. It doesn't have any side-effects that I know of.

But on the other hand, if someone who is just investigating web standards visits
the W3C Style site and finds it doesn't work on his or her brand-new browser,
they might well be inclined to think "well if this is what using web standards
does, I can't be bothered with all this!" - not good for evangelism in general.

So, what should the W3C do..?

-- 
Tom Gilder
http://tom.me.uk/

Received on Monday, 8 July 2002 10:11:30 UTC