Re: Hosting Servers!

Just look at Yahoo Geocities's banner code appended at the end of all html
documents. Ugly, huh? It is intentionally made invalid, it has a bunch of
closing tags so as to stop any *possible* attempt to disable the banner
system. Can you make it valid? Hardly, even if you add all the missing
opening tags, it'll still be invalid.

The vast majority of such free hostings don't care about html being valid.
All they care about is that pages work in the two mainstream browsers,
complete with their banners or whatever. When I was using one such free
hosting, I informed them about their banner code being invalid, but to no
avail - they disregarded my comments on the importance of valid html, while
in that particular case it was just a matter of a few minor changes to the
code, which I also provided and explained...

The problem is, it doesn't hurt them to have invalid code ranging from
harmless omitted or nonstandard attributes to utterly invalid monstrous
constructs.. they know IE and NC will handle it. Banners must be served to
the user by all means, because there are many smart guys who'd be happy to
hide them. So you have bad guys on one hand, equally bad hostings on the
other. The smartest thing is just to get out of the way and find a
reasonably priced paid hosting, if you can afford it. Remember, you get what
you pay for, and it's hard to complain when you don't pay.

Also think of this. Many of the pages on servers in question are personal
homepages, designed by people who often don't have the slightest idea about
what it's all about, and they don't have a concept of html, let alone valid
html. They just use some authoring tools provided by the service, which is
another story. Those who do know html and want it to be valid, are few. So
almost nobody knows or cares. And this is because of the nature of the
service, so there's little you can do. It just works that way. Only when
many people become concerned, will something change for the better.


> Why?! The document is just not valid. Change your webspace provider or
> ask your webspace provider if he could modify his scripts so that
> they're valid.

Received on Friday, 12 October 2001 04:44:37 UTC