Re: COBOL FAQ *moved*

HTML and related technologies (XHTML, CSS, etc.) are standardized by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). If you care about standard compliance, the
W3C has a page where you can validate your HTML for compliance:
http://validator.w3.org/

In my experience, when Firefox and IE differ in their interpretation of
HTML and especially CSS, I find that usually Firefox is implementing the
(W3C endorsed) standard and IE is deviating from it (or equivalently, is
implementing the "defacto standard").

An example of this is the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. The IMG tag
looks like <img src="myPicture.jpg" alt="text1" title="text2"/>. In older
versions of IE (they fixed this recently), ALT and TITLE were essentially
interchangeable and both contained the text that should be displayed when
the mouse hovers over the tooltip (i.e. mouseovers), and the text that
should display if the image cannot be displayed for some reason (e.g. the
image file doesn't exist, or the user is blind and using a screenreader, or
the user just decided to disable images).

In Firefox (and in more recent versions of IE now), the two tags have
different semantics. ALT is the text that should be displayed if the image
cannot be displayed, and TITLE is the text that should appear during mouse
overs. These semantics also happens to be the semantics that W3C describes
in their standards document for HTML.

The problem is that before Firefox came along, almost nobody knew about
the TITLE tag and everyone was using the ALT tag, sometimes explicitly for
its mouse-over behaviour. So there was a big debate about whether Firefox
should stubbornly stick to the W3C standard, or whether it should "emulate"
IE (as almost all other browsers, e.g. Opera, have been doing up till then).
It seems that they chose to go with the former.

Now there's a big argument as to whether IE should switch to using the
W3C semantics rather than its own. On the one hand, IE's non compliance is
holding back further development of HTML and related technologies. The W3C
is working on CSS3, but it's almost a big joke, because IE doesn't even
support CSS2 yet, and IE has something like 90% marketshare. So 90% of
Internet users aren't even reaping the advancements in CSS2. [*]

On the other hand, because IE has 90% marketshare, a lot of web
developers make sure their sites work in IE first, and Firefox second. As
such, if IE did switch to the W3C semantics, then a lot of web developers
would have to redesign their sites, possibly almost from scratch, depending
on how much IE-specific behaviour they were depending on.

- Oliver

[*] If you want to see some demonstrations of the truly beautiful things you
can accomplish with CSS2, check out Zen Garden http://www.csszengarden.com/
(using Firefox or some other CSS2 enabled browser). It's the same HTML
content, but with different CSS2 style*** applied. One of my favourites is
killer style
(http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://adjustafresh.com/zen/mozattack.css)
where I was really impressed of how the author managed to create the effect
of a blade slicing through the page as you scroll down. For those who do
some of web developing, note that this is pure CSS and no JavaScript, DHTML,
Flash, Java, QuickTime, or any other plugin was used.


.