[WEB4LIB] Re: Future of HTML

Thu Apr 15 09:37:56 EDT 1999

> >
> > For what it's worth, the browsers I consider
> > "stylesheet-capable" - Netscape 4.x, IE 4.x and 5.x (but not 3.x),
Opera
> > 3.5x - routinely make up more than 90% of our traffic.
>
> This reminds me of the chicken and egg problem.  Do they make up more
than
> 90% of your traffic because the people who use other browsers can't view
> your site properly and therefore don't visit after awhile?  Or do most
> users really use just netscape and ie?
>

Cite a URL where a sensibly designed stylesheet prevents users from
viewing the page properly in a browser without stylesheet support.  More
to the point, cite one on the OhioLINK web site, and I will revise it
immediately; I take seriously my professional obligation to maintain a
browser-independent, backward-compatible web site.

No offense, but this canard has been trotted out too many times in too
many CSS threads to have any merit.  CSS was designed from the ground up
to be completely transparent to browsers that don't support it.  To
suggest that sane use of CSS prevents older browsers from seeing a site
"properly" indicates either a misunderstanding of how CSS works or a
fundamental disagreement about what "proper" viewing might and can be on
the Web.

Quite to the contrary, it is the presentational HTML hacks that are
essentially guaranteed to screw up somebody's browser.  Consider these two
snippets of markup:

<body style="background: #FFF; color: #000">
<td style="background: #000; color: #FFF">
This will work on old browsers.
</td>

<!-- Presentational hack -->
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<td bgcolor="#000000">
<font color="#FFFFFF">You can't be too sure about this.</font>
</td>

The first version will reliably render *either* as white-on-black or
default text-on-default background; the second version may render as
either of those, or quite possibly as white-on-white (if it knows <font
color> but not <td bgcolor>) or as black-on-black (if it knows <td
bgcolor> but is set to ignore font colors).

As I have said before, any tool as powerful as CSS is capable of being
abused, and there have certainly been pages where authors used CSS for
some spectacular effect the blew up in non-CSS browsing environments (see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/ for a now mostly
disavowed example).  These are not the kinds of hacks I have in mind when
I refer to sane or sensible stylesheet design, and they are not what I use
when I write stylesheets.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu