RE: How to be 3.0 browser compliant and still validate?

At 10:48 AM 8/8/1999 , Kevin Berkheiser wrote:
>I wanted to get the author's site to actually validate using the HTML 4
>Transitional DTD.
>I was hoping someone out there would know a way to do the same thing the
>author was doing without CSS since that would break in Navigator 3.  The
>author is adamant about not breaking the site in 3.0 browsers.

How do you define "break"?

>It is too bad that HTML 4 validation eliminates the users ability to
>give their page a consistent look since different browser
>implementations have different default settings for things like margins.

It sounds like you are defining "breaking" as "not displaying certain
things that it doesn't have the capability to display".  That is an
unuseful definition of break, especially since by that definition
nearly all pages break on certain browsers, such as lynx or pwWebSpeak.

I tend to view "breakage" as any time that there is a loss of 
information.  If a margin does or does not appear, I fail to see how
that actually "breaks" as no information is lost; if link colors
fail to change or if content is rendered unreadable, THEN you have
a case of a broken page.

Therefore, I think you're rather off-target in saying that pages 
made with CSS and HTML 4.0 "break" in certain browsers.  It may not
display exactly what's desired by some misguided web page creator,
but in such a case the problem really is with the designer who
simply doesn't understand the concept behind the World Wide Web.

Feel free to pursue this line of discussion with me off-list or on
a more appropriate forum as it now has little to do with the
validator anymore.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
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Received on Monday, 9 August 1999 20:47:30 UTC