[LINK] Bad government web sites

Eleanor Lister eleanor at pacific.net.au
Mon Aug 20 09:44:27 AEST 2007


Rick Welykochy wrote:
> Ivan Trundle wrote:
>
>> The worst part of this (and it's pretty clear that more than one
>> person has coded the site in question) is that no policies exist to
>> ensure that code is at least uniform, or built using the same tools.
>> This can only lead to bigger problems down the track.
>
> You're not wrong.
>
> Of course this problem should go away if XHTML became the lingua franca
> since XML should not accepted by an application unless it is well formed.
> That's the XML policy.
>
> Unfortunately web browsers do not enforce this policy and do accept
> crap XHTML.

well, we all understand why the browser makers do that, and if i made
browser(s) i would too, of course, gotta render as many pages as
possible, so as not to piss off the customers ...

but it's really not too bad.  the point of standards here is not to act
as a straightjacket forbidding other practice, but to define a common
subset of actual practice that is guaranteed to perform in a particular
way on all leading browsers - this is useful!

so standards do cause best practice to flourish, and the automated page
production software can be updated to produce standards compliant code.

of course there's no defence against excessive egotism or plain old
fashioned stupidity. ;)

regards,
    EL

------------
Eleanor Ashley Lister
South Sydney Greens
http://ssg.nsw.greens.org.au
webmistress at ssg.nsw.greens.org.au




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