Re: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! (was: RE: margin element s)

Tantek said:
"Pretty much every time a user asks me why a web page doesn't look
right, I tell them it's because the web page isn't standards compliant."

That is a very valid and important point, and furthermore, one of the
ironies that also hurts Netscape 6. I saw something about a company
analyzing Netscape 6 as to whether they should support it, as in, should
they consider Netscape 6 compatibility when designing a website, and said
that they could not get their site to work at all in it, so it must be a bad
browser.

Looking at the source code for the site they used in the test, I noticed
that their javascript started with the typical browser sniffer. They used
Javascript pull-down menus (as in CSS show / hide div's), and to carry that
out, the javascript said to use the Netscape document object model
(document.layers) if the browser was netscape 4 or higher, and the IE
document object model (document.all) if the browser is IE4 or higher. Since
Netscape 6 uses the w3c DOM, the javascript breaks Netscape 6 compatibility,
and these "web professionals" didn't seem to know this ahead of time.

Of course, to avoid looking hypocritical, I am not "Mr. I know all browsers
on all platforms," and I acknowledge that.

Just cross-referencing a related fact. I've had too many off-topic posts in
one day, I should bar myself from posting for about a week. :)

In a vain effort to make this on-topic, I suppose that's why it is important
to a.) parse XHTML as XML,  and b.) parse it according to the dtd / schema,
or else we'll end up with stupid, terrible compatibility errors like the one
I mentioned, not just in the DOM, but in all aspects of web markup!

Daniel

Received on Thursday, 14 December 2000 23:23:29 UTC