On 01 Jul 2001 23:57:29 +0200, infos wrote:
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i don't think you can blame webdesigner to focus on making "cool" stuff instead of fighting netscape's buggy implementation of web standards... Sure you can. is the point of the site to look cool, or to get osmething done? if the point is to get something done, then coolness is secondary, and focussing on coolness is faultiness.
when designing this kind of websites (game/community), the main point *is* coolness (this is what the client buys).
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i've made a lot of webdesigns and evrytime i could i made it netscpae/macintosh/etc... friendly, but sometimes you just have to get rid of netscape 4.x because it is such a piece of junk that you simply can't work with it... Actually, if you look at it, NS 4.x follows more standards. IE made it's popularity by ignoring invalid HTML. The big, big, problem people have with Netscape's handling of *HTML* is that it will quite often not render incomplete table definitions. Just as it should be.
this is a JOKE, netscape's implementation is less compliant (check http://www.webstandards.org/upgrade/index_n4.html as marc suggests...). yes, ie handles pages that are incorrect and that's definitely *not* a good thing, but netscape actually forces you to use bad code just to circumvent its inherent bugs. the worst example is maybe the dreaded dhtml position on reload bug (http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/column21/addendum2/col21addII2.html) which is the best example of baaaad design.
An again, an example of something separate from HTML. no matter how much you may like to believe otherwise, DHTML is NOT a standard. DHTML is NOT HTML. CSSW, is a _different_ standard than HTML. Oh, and BTW, one thing you leave out is the _fact_ that the way IE behaves is different on MAC than it is on Windows (In many cases, the MAC behaviour is correct, btw). Again, I _have_ done the research, thank you very much. I have hundreds of bugs I can send you to on IE 5,/5.5, and 4.x. I can also show you how many of these are not bugs, in either browser, but are in reality, simply differneces in implementation of incocnlusive, incomplete, or vagueness in the original standards. yet, for some reason, people like taking a browser that renders incorrect HTML, and use it as teh standard of behaviour in things that are _not_ defined, and then take it further and insist that many of the peculiarities of IE are the way the standard says, when they are flat out wrong. And, from my position, browsers displaying incorrect HTML are far worse than browsers that have quirky implementations you code around. There is no reason for people to learn the correct way, when there is no 'penalty' for doing it the wrong way. "Why close the table when it displays in the browser anyway?" "It doesn't display in all browsers.""Well then those are buggy, I won't worry about them" That is the real-world effect. That is a newbies introduction to the world of standards. What good are standards when failure to follow is ignored ? Oh, and just for fun, I took a trip back to the w3 website to see if by some chance, somebody slippe din a DHTML standard. nope, there is not one. Since oyu cannot lay claim to a DHTML standard, you cannot lay cliam to a particular browsers means of handling client-side scripting as a bug, simply because it differes from another. DHTML is a marketing term, not a standard.
--- Other than that, it does have nasty issues with javascript. Though, in fairness there are a lot of cross-browser libraries that handle most of the differences. ---
but having to put in an additional 12k of code just to circumvent bug is really annoying... and those css issues... aaarararaggghhhh... :-(
Please, this is such a weak argument on many fronts. I'll put my straight HTML up against your javascript anyday, and see who has a smaller download. People concerned about a one-time download of a javascript library, are not using DHTML. The cycle is returning to substance over style, and the use of cross-browser scripting is but one herald and earmark. In addition, these libraries provide more functionality than one itty bitty bug workaround. They provide a set of widgets and functionsin an API that allow the developer to develop widgets that are cross-browser, and do so with much more ease than developing them from whole cloth for a single browser. This argument also is tantamount to this statement: "I know that there are ways of solving my problem, but I don't care, I'd rather make the end-user suffer because I was too lazy to use them, and to make it better,I'll blame it on slow downloads, thus making it look like I am doing them a favor." The big hype of the internet is finally being realized for the hype that it is,and thus we see the fall of many sites that were just a little bit of content wrapped in a huge pretty wrapper. In the rush to dominate, many companies bought into the propganda, and are now reaping the result; dying dot coms. Look at the more popular user-interactive sites, the ones that have survived the fallout, and you will see that most of them are: a) Cross platform b) Cross browser c) Dominantly server-side d) presenting substance over style You will note that even MS makes their pages look the same in IE and NS/MOZ. Yu can bet they don't rewrite everything for each page/site.
--- So what does that have to do with HTML?? Dhtml is NOT html. it is javascript. If you code "out of the w3 book", you are _not_ doing dhtml. You are doing some sort of client-side scripting. ---
div positioning is definitely xhtml.
Note the X in XHTML. XHTML is not HTML. XHTML is a stricter set of HTML, reformulated to be an XML application. XHTML is the current _recommendation_ for the next generation of HTML. As such, it is not HTML. SGML is an application of SGML. Why the change? According to the w3, it is because there are becoming more ways of accessing internet data. This means multiple kinds of clients, as well as multiple implementations. In HTML 4.0.1 (aka, the current standard), div is not a positioning tool: """ The DIV and SPAN elements, in conjunction with the id and class attributes, offer a generic mechanism for adding structure to documents. These elements define content to be inline (SPAN) or block-level (DIV) but impose no other presentational idioms on the content. Thus, authors may use these elements in conjunction with style sheets, the lang attribute, etc., to tailor HTML to their own needs and tastes. """ Positioning is an aspect of style application. The w3 HTML 4.x standard doe snot indicate div is to be used for positioning. if you want to complain about a browser not positioning it the way anotehr does, or the way you think it does, your argument lies with the browser's implentation, or lack thereof, of CSS/CSS-P. In either event, we are getting verrry off topic (as if we were on topic to begin with ;). Cheers, Bill