- From: Allan Odgaard <Duff@DIKU.DK>
- Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 18:15:20 +0100
- To: WWW-Style@W3.Org
On 20-Feb-00, Matthew Brealey wrote:
> By releasing the incompliant product, they commit themselves to
> incompliant software forever [...]
So very true! And they also force other people to make their products
non-compliant because Joe User is learning by doing and when his browser show
the page correct then he thinks that he's mastering HTML -- I even saw a
webpage that discouriged the use of the browser I work on, because it didn't
show all his tables as he wanted it to (needless to say that his tables where
far from what's in the W3C specs).
As a result I've had to add support for dozens of bugs, which is very
irritating because it makes the code complex and it's also difficult when the
mainstream software doesn't even document how they alternatively allow e.g.
colours and entities to be specified -- I've had to figure this out by looking
at broken pages which has revealed this dilemma, apparently there exist
browsers which tolerate the following 3 bad mark-ups: (or people who doesn't
even test their pages before they upload)
<Img Alt=" --> ><Br> (omitting the last apostrophe)
<Img Alt=" --> " <Br> (omitting the tag-close char)
<Img Alt=" --> "><Br> (not escaping the greater-than char)
The correct mark-up naturally is:
<Img Alt=" --> "><Br>
Can it really be that there is one browser that supports all of the 3 bad
cases? Cause that's a rather advanced heuristic they're using then... but the
3 pages could also have been created with 3 different browsers which again
illustrates how bad it is when browser authors decide to add features like
auto-closing tags etc...
Regards Allan
--
URL: http://www.diku.dk/students/duff/
<sb>
Experience is directly proportional to the value of equipment destroyed.
-- Carolyn Scheppner
Received on Sunday, 20 February 2000 12:22:58 UTC