Re: Shaming compaines into improving their HTML

From: "Kynn Bartlett" <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
> At 02:38 PM 5/24/2001 , JohnTNYC wrote:
>>Nor do I.  One thing I would like to see, however, is an indication on the
>>browser status bar when a page has coding errors.  IE does this when a
page
>>contains a flawed script now.  If all browsers had some kind of indication
>>of poor coding, it may embarass the sites into coding correctly.

>Why does anyone think that embarrassment is going to produce any
>changes?  Education is the key; publicly humiliating someone by
>saying "ha ha, your web site works perfectly fine in our browser
>BUT it doesn't meet technical specifications that the vast majority
>of WEB DEVELOPERS don't know, let alone the general web-using
>public" is pretty silly.
>If there's no reason to use valid HTML beyond avoiding the "nyah
>nyah" factor from a small handful of HTML purists (that's us),
>then of -course- there will be no change.

Actually, the indicator would be a way of saying to the user "this page
contains some improper code and, therefor, may not display correctly within
this browser".  Browser rendering engines go through changes, revisions,
etc, and just because it works in the current rendering engine, doesn't mean
it will work correctly in the future.  So, if a developer writes buggy code
just to get it to display at a certain pixel in a company's current engine,
doesn't mean it will show up correctly in the next revision.  Granted, the
company may only have the symbol show up when it is broken "in their view".
But the way IE displays pages even when they are a mess of unclosed table,
row and cell tags isn't doing anyone any favors.

BTW - I agree that us saying Nyah, nyah isn't going to have much effect.  I
think what we need to do is get the word out on WHY it makes sense to have
proper pages, etc.  Add some more things to the validator that makes sense
for business... ie... instead of just linking to the results, maybe have a
nice page explaining what the symbol means and why it matters and how good
it is that the company took the time to do it.  This could, possibly come up
above the validation results and be an optional page to hit (in addition to
the standard validation page).  Just a thought.

Regards,
John

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2001 17:59:21 UTC