Re: DTD driven browsers and real world HTML

> Amaya is not moving towards a browser. We added the possibility to prevent

This point was not really aimed at you, but at the increasing number 
of the people on the list who see Amaya as a potential free and open 
source competitor to the big two commercial browsers.  Personally, I 
only use Amaya as an extra verification on HTML I write, and it was 
just because I was in Amaya at the time that I decided to try the 
Altavista access.


> What I would prefer is that 
> users
> ask altavista page providers to build valid HTML pages and avoid these errors.

I did this before posting to the Amaya list, but Lynx users have been 
doing this for years and the commercial reality is that many page 
authors only care that their pages look impressive on one or both of 
IE4 and NS4, and most only care about compatibility with NS and IE 
products.  Amaya and Lynx users are at best a nuisance.  There are 
reports of quite hostile responses to reports to webmasters from Lynx
users.

> The HTML structure is not so complex. It takes two minutes to put the <FOPRM>
> </FORM> around the Table, but days of work to understand at parsing time what 
> the
> author wanted to do.

Unfortunately most authors these days cut and paste from other broken 
HTML and don't know how to read a DTD.  They then test against IE and 
NS and that is commercially good enough for their purposes.

So basically I agree with you about what should happen in an ideal 
world, but I don't think it will.  Incidentally, I suspect your terms 
of reference don't really permit you to go into direct competition 
with the commercial browsers.

I've championed the do it right position on the Lynx mailing list, 
but the majority view tends to be towards making Lynx work in the 
real world by trying to track de facto error recovery.



-- 
David Woolley - Office: David Woolley <djw@bts.co.uk>
BTS             Home: <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
Wallington      TQ 2887 6421
England         51  21' 44" N,  00  09' 01" W (WGS 84)

Received on Wednesday, 20 January 1999 08:15:50 UTC