[LINK] Bad government web sites

[Rick Welykochy]

Eleanor Lister wrote:

> 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.

Heh ... I challenge you to implement TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP or any of a myriad
of Internet protocols by not conforming to the straightjacket of the
standard.

A case in point. Microsoft's Exchange (email) server kinda implements
SMTP and POP3, but none too well. This causes no end of frustration
and problems when you connect the damn thing to the Internet. There are
countless other examples of near compliance to standards.

I do agree that there is an acceptance of the concept of "graceful
degradation" where web browser rendering is concerned which does make
HTML (XHTML) less of a straightjacket than most other standards.
This allows browsers that range from text only (links,etc) through
to mobile (WAP) and fully featured bloatware all to do roughly the
same job: get the message to the user via the web, even with the
most badly coded markup.

I grudgingly do accept that the web would not be as popular and in
such widespread use today if the HTML standard was not so loosely and
forgivingly interpreted by browser technology. The situation simply
goes against everything I have learnt and deploy in computing.


cheers
rickw