On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 15:29, Dave Sherohman wrote: > 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,
Probably not. It will make it possible on a very reduced number of browsers (usually IE and/or Netscape), the others often will display the page, if they display it at all, in much awfuller manner as without your non-standard tags. Definitively a very bad choice. Michel. > 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 > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
