Re: webwatch-l New Web Standards Advocacy Project

At 07:33 PM 8/9/98 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

>How petty is it of me to notice that nearly all of the sites linked
>to from http://www.webstandards.org/members.html member bios don't
>pass validation according to http://validator.w3.org/?  I shudder
>to think of what Bobby would make of 'em.

Part of the message that WSP is trying to get across, is that the demands
of design sometimes require implementations that don't validate: in part,
because of inconsistent support of the standards in the major browsers.
IOW, to make a design present consistently, what otherwise might be seen as
"bad habits" and "invalid HTML" may need to be used. 

WSP is not about "validation before anything else." It is about educating
those responsible for producing user agents that the divergence in support
for the standards results in developers jumping through hoops that cost the
entire web community a significant investment of time and money. If all
browsers fully supported the standards, there'd be more to the fact that
some of these sites don't validate. 

Regarding this specific post: 

While a founding member, Steve's time with WSP was limited when it came
time for the steering committee to form so he wasn't privy to the SC's
plans to incorporate full HTML4 complience into the website based upon the
draft site created with current tools.  He was, present, however in the
beginning discussion when WSP was forming in which we were all lamenting
the fact of just how difficult building websites were without breaking the
standards that we should all be able to use and it's quite easy to see how
his personal opinion may have grown from those discussions. 

And finally, the site was scheduled for launch tomorrow. I suggest anyone
with concerns about the validation behavior of the site check back in after
official launch time. 

Ann

Received on Sunday, 9 August 1998 22:31:59 UTC