Suzanne — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 14:32:08 +0000

I'd guess probably not -- I'm not even going to test it. Here's why:

1. It's a CMS and the moderators and admin would have to edit it directly if the engineers and programmers who created the code didn't make it valid coding (and that's the second leg of the standards, drive, I think, first the browsers, then the tool makers, then the web professionals themselves).
2. There is a ton of legacy coding in here because the forums are a few years old.
3. The nature of forums means the use of many nested tables. Some could be removed, of course, but see #1.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can go through and edit a CMS's output. I have done it (a lot). But it's easier to hire someone like me to create the wireframe in the first place up to spec, then code/program around that.

It doesn't happen a lot yet, but it's starting to happen more. I'd hope to see entirely valid forums coming up soon. EZBoard is a step in the right direction.

Renegade — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 04:43:58 +0000

so does TWF validate ? hehe is this forum "up to standard?" lol

Suzanne — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 00:58:30 +0000

Sometimes I think there are a bunch of engineers thinking "how can we break Suzanne's brain?" heh.

I'm not sure about the almost-standards support in current browsers (I don't use table layouts with images very often, so it's not an area I've researched), but it does sound hopeful.

Busy — Mon, 25 Nov 2002 21:29:58 +0000

also note xhtml 1.1 is xhtml 1.0 strict without the "strict" in the DOC tag, not many changes, can't use lang:en in the html tag ...

Megan — Mon, 25 Nov 2002 15:39:00 +0000

Okay, so this means no more display:block fix, correct? As long as you're not authoring in xhtml strict. That's a bit of a relief.

Suzanne — Mon, 25 Nov 2002 15:30:58 +0000

More on DOCTYPES and a new rendering mode in Gecko (Netscape) which is really exciting:

http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/almost-standards/

Busy — Sat, 23 Nov 2002 08:09:28 +0000

thats one horrible page to look at in IE, three words per line, bold and big spacing between letters. ::

Thanks for the link, some really good examples in other pages about browser differences on even simple CSS issues.
quote from one of the pages
"Sigh. We really still have a long way to go before we have interoperable implementations of Web standards"

Suzanne — Sat, 23 Nov 2002 04:33:59 +0000

While doing some mindless surfing tonight, I happened upon this very excellent explanation of how current browsers render your non-standard HTML markup. It may help explain why things go so horribly wonky.

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1037910467&order=-1&count=1

It's a wee bit technical if you're not used to the DOM, but it shouldn't be over anyone's head.

Megan — Fri, 22 Nov 2002 16:11:11 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by Suzanne
The <?xml ... > is optional -- it also kills php/asp pages, though I'm not sure WHY exactly, probably because <? is a short cut (instead of <?php or <?asp) so it gets stuck not knowing what this command "xml" is.

A co-worker of mine tested a page (that I coded using DW MX) with this tag in it on a Mac and said it caused problems there too, although I don't know much more than that so who knows...

DW MX really is wonderful for standards support IMO. It's got a built-in validator which makes it really easy to fix things quickly AND it's got a "Convert to xhtml" command, so you don't have to go through all those old pages and add the closing tags and stuff by hand. I'm really glad to have it around when I come across an older page.

Suzanne — Fri, 22 Nov 2002 15:30:08 +0000

DWMX I hear is great -- it's only the JavaScript that's a bit iffy...

Now that it's dropped using 4 bazillion tables for positioning, of course.