Busy — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 11:51:22 +0000

Thought my ears were burning
Sorry if I come across as if berate JeevesBond, as you say it's a difference of opinion and not personal.

I'm all for standards, but everyone (well some) have a different interpretation of the levels of standards, example XHTML, I personally wish everyone used it, but no where is it written that tables can not be used with it, tables are great if used correctly, CSS is awesome too, maybe better. Using tables with valid XHTML (trans or strict) with CSS is not wrong. Using CSS with very little XHTML is not wrong, not using CSS at all is not wrong and can all be validated.

My biggest problem I guess is people think XHTML is a new (text) language - it's not, it's old, it's IMO how HTML should of been released. The biggest hurdle old HTMLer's have with XHTML is lower case and closing tags, XHTML is a tidy language. People have to relearn how to write the tags tody, this makes people think it's new. The only real difference between HTML and XHTML is XHTML is all lowercase and single tags like , and etc have to be closed with a slash (/). There are no new additions, some retraction suggestions (ie font, center etc) but nothing new.
CSS on the other hand has come leaps and bonds since first released (which is also very old), CSS can just about be used as a stand alone (probably will end up like that) which is great as it gives cleaner more design friendly coding.

Forums and tutorials for years have been trying to guide folks to do the real thing but then you get one big site saying write all HTML tags in uppercase and it's all wasted. Sites and webhosts suggesting the use of frontpage and even publisher (even seen one way back suggesting word) put the cause back years.

YES write tidy code
YES validate your code
YES use CSS
YES smile at strangers

Tables are here to stay, written tidily there is nothing wrong with them, IE on the other hand should be wiped out, but will never happen

JeevesBond — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:12:18 +0000

Oh and I don't think people like Busy are necessarily wrong, just a difference of opinion is all that's happening. Let's face it, if we all had the same opinions the world would be very boring

JeevesBond — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:10:13 +0000

andyh wrote:
So shouldn't forums like this be encouraging people to use XHTML+CSS and showing them how to avoid features (such as tables) that cause the most problems.

I absolutely agree with you Andy! This is an ongoing discussion for many of us though, some feel we should push people towards XHTML/CSS, others feel this is too complicated for people just starting-out with Web Design. I will always advocate standards, whilst people like Busy will berate me for doing so. Do a search and you'll see this very discussion cropping up time and again, I don't believe we have a firm policy on this yet at TWF, as with many things this policy - if we ever make one - will be derived from popular opinion.

andyh — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:12:05 +0000

I think it was when Netscape Communicator first came out that you could wrap the desktop within the browser as an option. It was also an option of Opera up to v6 to do this.

Clearly the way ahead is to use XHTML+CSS. This combination has been specifically designed to allow you to create sites that 'work' for everyone, even those with accessibility problems, and yet still lets designers create stunning looking sites if they wish.

Also by separating presentation from content in this way pages are easier to write, easier to maintain or completely revamp the look and feel, and less likely to have basic problems - you'd be amazed at some of the issues with pages tested at my site.

Okay there are discrepancies between what CSS features browsers support, but the work arounds tend to be well-known (it's been out for years), and tend to be easier to account for than patching HTML 4 to support many browser/platform combinations. Maybe if more people preferred writing in XHTML+CSS, tool/browser developers would provide better support so the problem would reduce?

So shouldn't forums like this be encouraging people to use XHTML+CSS and showing them how to avoid features (such as tables) that cause the most problems. Or have I missed some great failing of XHTML+CSS ??

JeevesBond — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:47:58 +0000

Quote: who is stopping netscape from making their own OS and including their browser with it

Believe it or not MS were very worried NS would do exactly that (and there were plans to do it as well), they were worried that Windows would become just an API that NS would wrap with it's own sexy web-based interface. Can't remember exactly but this might be why they brought out the active desktop and all that channels crud (that everyone ignored).

demonhale — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 18:37:51 +0000

Thats Why its should start from us to advocate standardization...
Kinda figured out to make sites quite uniform in all borwsers it became art for me now...

Greg K — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:20:10 +0000

Busy wrote: Netscape does as it's told where as IE will guess what you mean.

Right there is why there are so many bad pages, IE, allows "crap pages" so people mass build them, and think they are right. Imagine if the browsers all were strict about code! What a wonderful net it would be!

I remember a few years ago, back when netscape still had the lead, an article that said that like 50% of the size of browsers was coding to figure out web pages that were not written properly. Imagine how tiny IE could be if it followed strict standards for displaying pages and got rid of its own "unique" codes for crap created in Front Page and Office documents! I feel bad for the poor fools who think they are making good web pages with these!

Now, on the other had, as for the complaint people had that IE came with windows, I always said "who is stopping netscape from making their own OS and including their browser with it". This isn't to say MS didn't do crap to shut down other competitors programs, but that is a different issue.

Anyhow, back to the topic. This is just one of the many things you have to live and deal with (properly) to earn the title of "Webmaster". I'm currently adapting a tables MESS over to css. Boss insisted "make the text as wide as it is on my screen!", to get a quick fix, I cheated and added

's to narrow it down. Well in IE, you do that enough, it blows out table widths.... Sigh, Had to learn CSS sometime...

-Greg

demonhale — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 07:16:53 +0000

Well if you have all the time in the world, be nit picky, make it work for moz, then hack your way to other popular browsers to make it look the same, I did this before and it seems to work... Mix and Match codes...

Neutron2k — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 14:05:05 +0000

you could use the age old method of javascript determining the browser type. and then output different tags depending on the browser type.

That way you could have it draw a different sized table for each browser and make the slight adjustments in each to get it looking identical in each one.

Never tried this tho and probably wouldnt. Seems a bit of a bodged way to do things, not to mention it would add a fair bit of code to your pages depending on how many things u need to adjust.

Just a passing thought.

steve40 — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 23:12:19 +0000

If anybody figures a way to make your website look alike, with every browser. Please let me know!.