Re: HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

[David Cuthbert <dacut@xxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, I definitely *should* care.  But, eh, engineering anything decent
always includes a chapter on working around annoying constraints, so
while I can sympathise with the problem, I just chalk it up to "just
another imperfect system one can work around."  The annoyances of
dealing with quirky hardware far outstrip the quirks of web browsers.

Personally, I limit myself to simple tables and font styles.  Oh, I
know about the advantages of CSS and such; but preprocessed HTML works
much more reliably.

Of late, I've even foregone much of that, limiting myself to Wikis and,
when a Wiki isn't available, wrapping everything in <pre> tags (see
http://www.kanga-da.org/ for example).

<shrug>  Maybe if I were a designer, instead of an engineer, in a
different life.

Dave

James Frazer wrote:
> You should care.  If more people cared about web designers using proper 
> markup then browser designers (microsoft) would be more willing to make 
> their browsers so that they don't suck.   Consequently the web designers 
> could spend more time on content and less time fixing strange Internet 
> Explorer rendering problems.
>
> Web designers use a number of 'sick' hacks to make things display 
> properly on bad browsers - IE5/IE6 - there is a lot of overhead in 
> dealing with strange IE problems.
>
> I think this time could be better spent on improving the overall content 
> and features of the site.  Unfortunately users don't care about valid 
> markup, nor do they care whether or not their browser impliments things 
> properly.
>
> So yes, valid markup is important.
>
> --James
>
>
> David Cuthbert wrote:
>
> > Eh.  As a user, I don't care whether the underlying site is valid XHTML,
> > HTML, XML, SGML, PDF, EBCDIC, ..., just so long as it's visually
> > appealing and I can read it.
> >
> > There are arguably 30-40 other concepts/sites which are equally
> > compelling to link.