At 03:26 12/02/2001 +0100, Marc Lehmann wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 03:13:55AM +0100, Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>wrote:
>> I don't think so. The browser would be right to treat ® as an entity,
>> not ®.
>
>But why? It's not HTML in the first place, so expecting from clients to
>interpret it in one way or another is not sensible.
Either a client has heuristics to deal with broken stuff or it hasn't. If
it does, I'd expect it to go the whole way on a simplistic case as the one
above.
>> If it had proper heuristics for dealing with poor HTML, it'd
>> detect that there is no ; in sight for the next n chars, or that reg= isn't
>
>While one might rgue that clients should apply heuristics, given the large
>amount of borken html out there, one has to remember that the source for
>this broken html WAS sloppy html parsers with heuristics. If netscape and
>mosaic had flagged syntax errors nobody would expect browsers to implement
>heuristics today :(
It's a chicken and egg problem. See how Netscape 6 / Mozilla is being
bashed by designers out there. They all think it's a broken browser because
it won't take their broken HTML. It tries hard (if you don't put a doctype,
or put an old one) to emulate Netscape 4 brokenness, but it can't go all
the way. As a result all those people are not using it, and are telling
everyone not to use it. When you think that most of the time those people
are considered "experts" in HTML/the web by others around them you can tell
that a browser won't get accepted if those braindead pseudo-experts aren't
happy with it.
The only way out is careful education, and that's going to take time.
>> However, I agree that people should try their best to write proper html. If
>
>Especially since you can only choose between theoretically incorerct and
>in practise sometimes not working AND theoretically correct and working
>alway sin practise I think the choise should be clear ;)
True. It's really easy to produce html that does whatever you want and is
correct. And is accessible. The main argument I use when convincing people
(and I have to do that a lot) is forward compatibility. If it's correct now
it'll always be. Today's heuristics may disappear with the next browser
version.
>> somehow despise it. Think twice: take out the html, what's left of your
>> site ? XHTML clearly forbids such wrong constructs (won't even parse if you
>> get it wrong) and that's cool. It's like use strict for HTML.
>
>Which is exactly my point ;) Implying this is a browser bug will only make
>more people insist on outputting "correct" code. After all, the clients
>must be fixed ;->
We are in agreement :-) That isn't a browser bug and should be removed from
the list.
-- robin b.
"Windows may be pretty. And easy. But it has no depth or soul. It's like
the one-night stand of operating systems. You feel cheap after using it."
-- Steph, in User Friendly
