<quote name="Stuart Jansen" date="Wed, 11 Jun 2008 at 06:45 -0600">
> On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 01:04 -0600, Von Fugal wrote:
> > "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
> > 
> > Words to live by.
> 
> Actually, some argue that the Web has done a pretty good job of
> discrediting that theory.
> 
> On the one hand, ultra-liberal browsers created a giant mess that is
> taking us years to recover from. On the other hand, some argue that the
> Web would never have become so popular if it hadn't been so easy for
> people to create Web pages without to learn how to do it right.

Then again, things like dreamweaver weren't very conservative in what
the put out. Neither were the miriad of web "authors" nor was Microsoft.
You can't see one side of the philosophy being followed and correlate
failure with a faulty philosophy.

I would suggest that the conservative out side would mean people were
at least careful with what they wrote, while browsers would still
forgive mistakes here and there. Microsoft would have been much more
conservative with their non-standards. DreamWeaver wouldn't give you so
many darned tables everywhere.  the real problem here is there _is_ _no_
standard way to do what people have hacked web pages to do, such as
perfect layouts and so forth.

Seriously, all in all, I'm not sure exactly what mess you are referring
to in the first place. People can still write valid html and even xhtml
and it works. Just because "bad stuff" works doesn't mean "good stuff"
doesn't. When you refer to this big mess, the main thing I think of is
that firefox poster "Don't hurt the web, use open standards." If that's
the mess of question, then saying a unix philosophy is bad because
Microsoft didn't play nice, well...

Changing gears, having said "words to live by" I think there's a great
non-programming side to this as well. It means to me, be tolerant of
your fellows whatever their beliefs, but hold true to your own values.
Yet here in this day we walk a very dangerous road. Activism rages in
which the tolerance side is pushed so heavily that to tolerate means to
completely endorse and abandon any opposing values you have. Again I
say, please don't truncate the second half. It is of utmost importance.

Von Fugal

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