Re: HTML (WAS: MF having issues?)


"Oliver Wong" <owong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Today I was grabbed by an enthusiastic person in my workplace who had
used SharePoint to build an Intranet site. It looks totally professional
and he is rightly proud of it. It is the sort of thing we couldn't even
dream of in 1995. Even though he is only serving up static HTML pages and
has no idea how they work or the fine points of the language, he has a
very professional looking site that he built in about an hour. It is
shared on the intranet and will be very useful for teams to share
information and news. He is thrilled and the technology has empowered
him. (I looked at some of the code and it is like what happens when you
write HTML in MS Word... Horrific! but who cares? It does what he wants
and he did it easily without any special knowledge.)

This is a minor gripe of mine, so feel free to ignore this post if the
issue of standards-conformance and HTML does not interest you.

First off, Oliver, I ALWAYS read your posts. :-)

Secondly, although I may have issues with COPBOL standards, the W3C is
osmething else again. I am interested in your post.

Bad HTML versus good HTML might be subjective, but I dislike invalid
(non-standard conforming) HTML.


I think that would be the consensus from most of us who spend time doing web
pages. I know that a little while back, Daniel helped sort out some
non-standard code I had, and so did Richard and others. They first drew my
attention to the point you are making. I had checked the site with
Dreamweaver and it reported it was OK for Netscape (I knew it was fine for
IE), but it wasn't. To be fair, this was a pretty old edition of Dreamweaver
and I have recently replaced it with the latest Dreamweaver in Studio 8
which seems to do a much better job. These days I check pages I do in
Firefox, as well as getting DW to check for various Browsers.

From http://www.webstandards.org/about/
<quote>
The Problem

Though leading browser makers have been involved in the creation of web
standards since W3C was formed, for many years compliance was observed in
the breach. By releasing browsers that failed to uniformly support
standards, manufacturers needlessly fragmented the Web, injuring
designers, developers, users, and businesses alike.

Lack of uniform support for W3C standards left consumers frustrated: when
using the ?wrong? browser, many could not view content or perform desired
transactions. Among those most frequently hurt were people with
disabilities or special needs.

Quandaries and Costs

At the same time, lack of uniform support for W3C standards left
designers, developers and site owners in a terrible quandary: could they
afford to implement multiple versions of every web page in order to
accommodate incompatible browsers? If not, which browsers should they
neglect, and how many millions of potential visitors were they willing to
turn away? Either way, the cost was too high. It still is.
</quote>


That last paragraph was a very real dilemma for me. Having spent almost 1000
hours developing and meticulously checking in IE that everything worked how
it should, it was a major problem to then find that it simply didn't work in
Netscape (for example...)

It is not enough for the website to simply "look okay" on any one
particular browser; the HTML should be structurally correct, and the tags
used for their semantics, rather than how they render in one particular
browser. The <em> tag, for example, stands for "emphasis", and using it to
render text in italics because that's how your particular browser visually
renders emphasis is incorrect.


I agree and don't do this. But it goes way beyond that. Table renditions,
JavaScript, ASP code, can all render differentloy in different Browsers. It
is a problem. It is tempting to just decide to develop for IE (line of least
resistance and over 90% of hits on my host's web server), but that does
leave a bad taste, even for someone like mself who has no axe to grind with
MS.

For example, perhaps you have a style guide which says quotation
attributions should be displayed in italics. You should note write the
HTML as:

"Bla bla bla" - <em>some guy</em>

One reason is that a different browser might not render them as
italics; another reason is that browsers for the visually impaired will
interpret the HTML to mean that "some guy" should be spoken with emphasis,
clearly giving the complete wrong effect to those users.

From
http://www.law.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/View&c=LawArticle&cid=1032128683422&t=LawArticleTech
<quote>
When Robert Gumson logs on to the Internet, he uses a software program
that converts Web site content into speech. But when he logged on to
Southwest Airlines' Web site to make a reservation, Gumson, who is blind,
found that the site was incompatible with his screen-reader program.

So Gumson and a Miami Beach, Fla.-based disability rights group, Access
Now, filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Miami in June and July
against Dallas-based Southwest and Dallas-based American Airlines under
the Americans with Disabilities Act.
</quote>


Hmmmm.... here we may part company. :-)

While I have every sympathy for Mr Gumson's affliction, I think this is
litigation gone mad. If he was unable to make a reservation on their web
site then that, in my opinion is simply bad luck. What if the server was
down? Should everybody who couldn't make a booking sue the airline? What
about people who are "disabled" by being unable to read? Or everyone who
doesn't have internet access? Or people who only speak Swahili or Hottentot?

My point is that when you build a web site you don't guarantee that the
entire planet can access it (even though you hope they will, and this drives
you to make it as open as possible.)

Mr. Gumson could have used a telephone or some other channel to obtain his
reservation. Only in America (where litigation is a multi-billion dollar
industry) would someone think of suing, for something that is not an
intended discrimination. You use a web site at your own risk. Even if you
CAN read it, it may contain false information...

You might as well sue the milkman because he has no low fat milk this
morning. There is no contract that says he must have, any more than there is
a contract that says the airline's web site must be usable by everyone.

While I sympathise with web standards that try to get as much as possible
working across as many platforms as possible, I don't think there is cause
for litigation if it falls down. (If the web was the ONLY channel and it was
a matter of life or death, there might be, but under those circumstances, it
would be a very brave man indeed who would build the web site...)

Pete.


.

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