At 10:54 PM 6/4/2003 -0400, David A. Desrosiers wrote: > It's not there to be enforced, and yes, because it comes out of the
W3C, it _does_ become the standard. Microsoft supports their decisions, and so do those from the Mozilla project and other projects and companies.
David, how are you defining "support" such that you can, with a straight face, say Microsoft is supporting the standard rather than either ignoring or subverting it? (Same used to go for Netscape, more so really, but now they're irrelevant.)
IE is not a standard, nor is it a reference platform for determining standards-compliance. In fact, quite the opposite. It may be the most widely used browser on a desktop machine, but that does not make it a standard. In fact, the latest IE still fails to support a lot of things browsers like Mozilla and Opera have supported for _years_ now.
By definition it IS a standard. This is the third definition (the first two are flags) for "standard" from a convenient dictionary:
... 3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example
Given that more people use IE than read W3C, IE has more "general consent". In this situation, since Mozilla and Opera also support the same functionality, it's nearly universal consent. You can't get much more standard than ubiquity.
The claim of IE being the most-widely-used is subject to great skepticism these days, since a growing majority of surfers forge their browser's UserAgent string to mimic IE (myself included), just so they can make purchases online and use their online banking institutions.
I'll grant you that; I do the same thing. My primary browser is Opera, set to identify as IE. However, it too supports spaces in the URL... and most other non-W3C-conforming but IE-conforming behaviors. IE isn't the issue, at least to me, so much as dominant behavior is. Intentionally locking out interesting content that every major browser supports out of dedication to a standard that is poorly reflected in the online world is the issue.
The target client/audience is a Palm device, not an IE browser, in
this case. If Plucker works best with validated, standards-compliant content, then that is what we should require or cater to.
I don't understand this statement. In my mind, if Plucker doesn't work well with content I want to pluck, I'll fix Plucker, not rely on third parties to fix their pages. When I got involved with some of the coding last autumn, it was to make Plucker work to my satisfaction, not to make it more finicky.
You stated several times that the issue is what to do about the problem of defective webpages. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm way past trying to convince web site authors that their pages need rewriting even though they work fine with every browser they can find. I agree that spaces in URLs are "bad", and that they don't meet the W3C standard, but I don't agree that the W3C standard holds more water with corporations, web authors, and users than what their browsers do. That's like saying that water that meets federal standards is good drinking water regardless of taste; it uses standards over reality.
That doesn't mean I don't support standards, but it does mean I'm not religous about them. That's an important distinction. Just as with projects in my commercial environment, where I may WANT to do something the architecturally-elegant and extensible way, but the project scope, requirements, and budget point to doing it more pragmatically, bordering on a kludge but a reliable one within the defined parameters. Leveraging standards is valuable, Idolizing standards is destructive. This group more than any other I consort with often slips into zealotry about such things.
This is really a moot discussion though. The standards aren't going to go away, just because the most dominant browser in the desktop market chooses to ignore them.
"Go away"? No, but they will, as they already have, follow rather than lead. They will continue to adopt what the marketplace has already enacted. And I'm not saying that's a good thing, only that it's reality.
The goal is to not burdon the end user with the inadequacies of the website or website designer. Putting things like spaces in urls and using backslashes for paths in the URI can be easily fixed and compensated for, but they are definately _wrong_ in the context of HTTP as a delivery mechanism for that content.
I agree completely with this statement. Doing such things, as a web author, is wrong. And without visible consequences for them right now. And unfortunately common.
My point is that, given that it IS common and supported invisibly by all major browsers, resisting supporting those same evils with a collection tool sacrifices usability to no good end. It may FEEL "right", but it doesn't accomplish "right". Even though what it's doing is refusing to work with what's "wrong".
Respectfully,
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