[WEB4LIB] Re: browser differences

[Chris Gray]

Dreamweaver, for its MX release, co-operated with the Dreamweaver Task
Force <http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/dwtf/> set up by the Web
Standards Project (WaSP).  WaSP's statement is "Macromedia released
Dreamweaver MX in May 2002, offering vastly improved standards compliance
and accessibility over previous versions."

Another area where non-standard code still lurks is in the HTML
automatically generated by various Web application platforms (ColdFusion,
Zope, etc.).

Chris Gray
Systems Analyst
University of Waterloo Library

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Thomas Dowling wrote:

> 
> >
> >So instead of coding for the browser of the moment (or the year),
> >why not code to W3C specification and demand that the browser vendors
> >support the spec?  ("Demand" in multiple senses: tell them they must;
> >don't use their browser if they don't; etc.)
> 
> 
> As an old hand-coder, I find myself in the dark about what mass-market page 
> editors do in this regard.  In vi, emacs, textpad, etc. we can code to any 
> standard we choose.  But if someone drops a copy of Dreamweaver or 
> Frontpage on your desk and says, "you're the new library web designer" what 
> options do you really have?
> 
> A couple years ago, I tested copies of several of the popular HTML editors 
> of the day and came to the conclusion that most of them generated invalid 
> HTML by default; several were incapable of being made to generate valid 
> markup in any circumstance, all were willing to allow invalid markup, and 
> all encouraged presentational hacks (<blockquote> for indenting, etc. - 
> which I'm appalled to see is still in Mozilla Composer).
> 
> I greatly fear that the bad coding practices fostered by bad browsers now 
> mostly gone away have been entrenched if not perpetuated by editing 
> programs that A) sacrifice good code for overdone backward compatiblity, 
> and B) try to put a Word-like editing interface on something that is very 
> much not a word processing task.
> 
> 
> Thomas Dowling
> OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
> 
>