[LINK] Re: Webstandards Now!

[Rick Welykochy]

Ivan Trundle wrote:
> 
> As always, the dream lives on that one day someone will use style-sheets
> in the way that they were intended...
> 
> >>> <jeff.evans@dsd.vic.gov.au> - 30/03/01 2:16 PM >>>
> Following up a previous thread regarding the "upgrade your browser now"
> campaign (I've deleted the messages & the LINK archive hasn't caught up
> yet...) comes this detailed article from A List Apart (ALA), a site which
> practiced what it preaches.
> 
> <http://www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/>

The "upgrade your browser now" campaign seems a fantastical dream.

The reason that MS I.E. went from 0% market share in 1996 to just
on 90% by 2001 is simple: MS foisted it on to the desktop with each new
version of its O/S. There are now 100's of MILLIONS of PC's that have little
hope of a browser upgrade. Yes, we boffins and technocrats might buy
into upgrading software by downloading it off the Net. But ask Joe Consumer
how often they perform such a task: you'll come up with a number close to
zero percent.

My own recent experience in the area of standardising on style sheets and HTML
4.0 was disappointing. Last month, I created a beta for the Linux Documentation
Project Review Working Group.  "Ah, chance to do it right" I thought to meself.

The first version of this site was released as an alpha version, using CSS.
Quickly, members of the working group got back to me reporting on such severe
readability problems using a variety of V4.0/5.0 browsers that I backed off, dropped
style sheets altogether and settled on using XHTML, an HTML 4.0 XML application 
defined at <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/>. This allowed me to at least
run the source through a DTD validator and also guarantee that the web pages
I created were 100% valid on a wide variety of platforms and browsers using
the services of <http://validator.w3.org/>. I had to restrict the HTML to a
reasonable subset I deemed "common" and eschew CSS altogether.

Interestingly, all pages that pass XML validation come up with a clean bill of
health when submitted to validator.w3.org. I've had to script some style-conscious
and -conscientious features that CSS would have handled, but the result is
satisfactory.

Rgds
Rick W


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