On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 11:51:53AM -0600, Kent West wrote: > So my question is this: > Are the W3C standards insufficient to allow the web > designers to do what they need to do, or is my > co-worker missing a technique that he needs to know?
I'll try not to start ranting here, but... You're asking the wrong question. HTML was originally conceived as a content description language, not a page layout language. A significant part of that identity is that the client displaying the HTML document is allowed to interpret it however it chooses, whether that means displaying frames seamlessley adjacent to each other (the IE default, based on my reading of your post), displaying frames with borders (the Netscape default, again based on my reading of your post), or even displaying each frame as a separate page (which is how lynx handles them). IMO, the majority of the web's current problems are the direct result of "web designers" and graphic artists deciding that they must have complete control over every detail of how their HTML pages appear to the end user, rather than allowing the user to tell his browser how he wants things. This leads to such monstrosities as pages which put bright yellow text on a white background (or other such invisible combinations) if you turn off loading of background images, text presented in Flyspeck 3pt if you don't have the right font installed, and, perhaps worst of all, sites that abandon HREF tags in favor of javascript event handlers that are functionally identical, aside from breaking if javascript is disabled. The entire concept of "graceful degradation" appears to have been forgotten. Odder still, we have arrived in a state where "browser independent" has somehow come to mean "uses a variety of highly browser-specific techniques to ensure that it always looks the same" rather than "it doesn't care what browser you're using". (So much for trying not to rant...) Anyhow, to come back to the question you asked: No. If your objective is to create a page that looks the same no matter where it is viewed, standards-compliant HTML is not the appropriate tool for the job. Nonstandard HTML extensions may make it possible for you, but if you really want/need absolute consistency, I've heard than PDF is a much better option. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss
