Does anyone pay attention to standards?

[Isaac Grover]

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

Isaac

Are you losing $14,200.00 per year without your knowledge?
http://bigmoneyandfreetime.web1000.com

[Whitecrest]

In article <ni************ ******@news.opt us.net.au>,
gu***@myemail.c om.au says...

Just under %90 of Australian Internet users are on dialup
and pages with lots
of non standard bloat make for a very unpleasant and fustrating surfing
experience.

But you have the koala!
--
Whitecrest Entertainment
www.whitecrestent.com

[Brian]

Whitecrest wrote:

To many of the purist here, but in the real world (fortune 500),
<yawn> These appeals to get in the "real world" are entirely unconvincing.
it is the exact opposite. Now if they change, then I will change
too.
When did your authoring come into the discussion? What relevance does it
have to standards and search engine results?
they see no financial gain from doing so, and neither do I.
There isn't much financial gain to be had from lots of web sites.
Article or not, if it were true, then Coke would be the first link
you saw if you searched google for "sparkling cola beverage"
No. Coke would be the first link if you searched for cola. And it is.
You seem to have a misunderstandin g about how Google works.

A simple search for "sparkling cola beverage" in google does not
have a link to any of the leading brands of cola beverages in the
first 7 pages. Why?

Brian wrote:

But if they *did* search for it, wouldn't they search for "coke?"

Whitecrest wrote: Ah yes searching for the name of the company.

That's a dodge, since a search of "cola" also shows coke first. Surely
someone looking for cola websites would search for "cola" before
searching for "sparkling cola beverage," which you seem to have thought
up solely to make a point that doesn't bear any weight.

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Stan McCann]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

SGML is an ISO standard. HTML is a W3C recommendation. XHTML is a
W3C trademarked product. Hence or otherwise deduce which are
literally standards.

That's why I read a lot and post a little here. I enjoy sharing my
knowledge when I can, but I learn so much more. Someone else yesterday
posted about the difference between standard and recommendation which
got me researching last night. I still think, IMHO, that most of the
difference is just semantics but your short statement helps explain. I
guess the differences to me are: which is most useful? I haven't delved
deeply into XHTML so find HTML most useful.

--
Stan McCann
Tularosa Basin chapter ABATE of NM Cooordinator, Alamogordo, NM
'94 1500 Vulcan (now wrecked) :(
http://surecann.com/Dcp_2068c.jpg

[Brian]

Whitecrest wrote:

Todays "standards" are yesterdays innovations, and they were almost
always browser specific.

Most browser innovations were badly thought out (frames, dtp junk);
those that have been added to recommendations are, well, not really
recommendable for the simple reason that they don't work very well.

Compare that to stylesheets, which were ignored by Netscape when first
proposed, but became a recommendation anyways, because they *do* work.
(That is, the principle is a good idea for the www; whether browsers
have implemented them in a robust or useful way is another matter, but
not really what I see being discussed here.)

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Stan McCann]

Whitecrest wrote:

In article <40********@new s.zianet.com>, st**@surecann.c om says...

You and I don't set the standards.

I do. This page:
http://www.goddamn.co.uk/help/textsize/
uses my very own HTML standard (based on HTML 4.01 Strict).

If you are the only one using it, it's not a standard.

It is a standard for him (I am being facetious)

:)

--
Stan McCann
Tularosa Basin chapter ABATE of NM Cooordinator, Alamogordo, NM
'94 1500 Vulcan (now wrecked) :(
http://surecann.com/Dcp_2068c.jpg

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Stan McCann wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

SGML is an ISO standard. HTML is a W3C recommendation. XHTML is a
W3C trademarked product. Hence or otherwise deduce which are
literally standards.
I still think, IMHO, that most of the difference is just semantics

Most of the arguments are about semantics, certainly. There are
plenty of folk who use the term "standard" to mean whatever they want
it to mean. There's no "service mark" to guarantee that the term is
used correctly. All along, I've known the term "industry standard" to
mean "whatever the dominant vendor's dirty tricks department can
manage to come up with to prevent effective interworking with products
from their competitors". At different times that dominant vendor has
been a different company, but there was usually a DoJ or equivalent on
hand to set a limit to the relevant vendor's worst excesses.

Meantime, organisations like ISO, or like the IETF's standards-track
interworking specifications, are making rules for avoiding unnecessary
incompatibiliti es between products, and plenty of honest vendors are
doing their best to adhere to them.

The W3C, on the other hand, isn't a standards making body as such, but
an industry consortium, funded by the subscriptions of its members. It
has some well-intentioned folks in its fold, no mistake about it, but
when push comes to shove, they can't go against the common will of
their influential members. So they politely publish a low-profile
usage note hinting that "some implementations " (unnamed) are failing
to conform to this or that requirement of the specification, instead
of naming and shaming the dominant vendor who is doing it.

Sure, they lost control of "HTML" at a time when the majority of its
users came to believe that "HTML" was defined by whatever the
"Netploder" vendors chose to implement, no matter how (in)appropriate
to the aims of the WWW.
guess the differences to me are: which is most useful? I haven't delved
deeply into XHTML so find HTML most useful.

Well, HTML/4.01 is "most useful" in the actual field, for composing
web pages. But there's a wide range of different use profiles of
HTML4.01, so by saying that, one isn't pinning-down the options by
very much.

[Brendan Taylor]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 02:23:38 -0700, Ulujain wrote:

And what purpose does <q> serve? Short in-line quotations...so mething
that typing out "this is a quote!" couldn't do to begin with?
No wonder browsers were slow to pick that one up.

For that matter, what purpose does <p> serve? You could just as easily use
<br><br>.
<h1>? <font size="+3">
Or <ul> and <li>? Paragraphs with images for bullets, or tables.

With any luck, someday I'll be able to go to a search engine and search
specifically for quotes, or headings, or items in a list.
The more people that use these things, and use them standardly the quicker
this day will come.

[Brendan Taylor]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 07:14:03 -0400, Whitecrest wrote:

In article <ZRhic.242357$o R5.38644@pd7tw3 no>,
te**@fungoid.do t.dyndns.dot.or g says...

If browsers supported standards as they were supposed to, it would make
everybody's life easier.

Todays "standards" are yesterdays innovations, and they were almost
always browser specific. So if everyone were forced to follow the
standards, how would we see the innovations?

But today's innovations are useless because browsers don't support
them. The :before and :after pseudo-elements, for example; IE is the only
modern browser that doesn't support them. I know they'd make my life
easier.
And we've already got tomorrow's innovations on the table; rounded
borders, opacity, etc. Mozilla's already got them - meanwhile, IE doesn't
even support translucent PNGs.
We won't be able to use these things for years, so we're stuck making
compromises between what we want to do and what is possible, and using
horrible hacks for things that should be possible with a line or two of
CSS.

As web designers there's not much we can do to encourage progress besides
supporting the standards that exist.

I'm not opposed to extending standards (as long as using the extensions
doesn't wreck things for browsers that don't support them), and I'm not
going to claim that the W3C is infallible or that validation is the most
important part of the website.
But most people don't even *attempt* to meet the standards, even when it
would be obscenely easy.
Thats exactly what Microsoft haters say is one of the biggest problems
with Microsoft.

This has nothing to do with hating Microsoft, it has to do with hating an
out-of-date browser that should have been fixed a long time ago but won't
be for years.

[Toby A Inkster]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 09:49:53 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

However, the cited document isn't useful in SGML terms without some
way for users to get a copy of the author's MyHTML4 DTD.

The DTD is at the URL given in the DOCTYPE:
http://www.goddamn.co.uk/help/MyHTML4

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me - http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/?page=132

[Brian]

Toby A Inkster wrote:

The DTD is at the URL given in the DOCTYPE:
http://www.goddamn.co.uk/help/MyHTML4

Can't go there using my default browser. The file "is of type
text/x-dtd, and Mozilla does not know how to handle a this file type."

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/