RE: 2 HTML documents in one

As this is now the third message quoting that line of mine (directly or indirectly) and trying to explain to me why this attitude is wrong, I'll assume that the heavy sarcasm that I originally embedded into that phrase must have been lost in the electronic aether...
To clarify: I am a fierce supporter of standards-based coding (I'm currently shifting our University's site to xhtml1.0 transitional + css2, and removing pretty much any table used for non-tabular information, as well as including a variety of accessibility features - accesskeys, taborders, site navigation links, etc).
So, to reiterate, my line
"In the end, it comes down to the usual question: why stick to standards, if
my browser still shows it as I want?"
was the sarcastic reply to the original question (which, to paraphrase, was "now that we've established that that document is completely borked, what kind of problems would you have with it ?")

P
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
WWW Editor
External Relations Division 
Faraday House 
University of Salford 
Greater Manchester 
M5 4WT 

Tel: +44 (0) 161 295 4779

e-mail: webmaster@salford.ac.uk
www.salford.ac.uk

A GREATER MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

-----Original Message-----
From: John Foliot - bytown internet [mailto:foliot@bytowninternet.com]
Sent: 03 April 2003 22:47
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: 2 HTML documents in one



Just in this thread... Patrick (see his posting):

"In the end, it comes down to the usual question: why stick to standards, if
my browser still shows it as I want?"

Just because it works in *his browser* is not the point... if you want it to
be truly accessible it must "work" in every browser, nay-sayers and scoffers
notwithstanding.  There are those who claim that developers won't "eat their
own dog food" to which I can only reply "does two wrongs make a right?"

JF
(regular eater of my own dog food)




> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of James Craig
> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 10:47 AM
> To: phil potter; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: Re: 2 HTML documents in one
>
>
>
> phil potter wrote:
>
> >Yes, I've tried it in WDG's validator and  the double HTML tag was
> >picked-up, which was pleasing. I've also reviewed the HTML specification
> >that gives a typical use of the HTML tag, which is one opening tag and
> >one closing tag - super, that all makes sense, and I agree with you that
> >it can't be acceptable for the reasons that you outline.
>
> Not just that, but *ANY* HTML or XML document can only have one root
> element. The only things allowed outside that element are the XML
> declaration and the DTD tag.
>
> I'm not sure who was claiming the "if it works" school, but without
> proper standards in place defined and used, no user-agent or parser can
> be expected to work properly. Also, markup-compatible technologies such
> as CSS and the DOM could behave unexpectedly.
>
> James
>
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 4 April 2003 03:26:01 UTC