Re: Netscape 6 preview release 1

At 08:50 8/04/00 -0400, Craig T. Harding wrote:
>This is all very well and good, but which HTML standard or doctype are
>you going to adhere to? A loose or strict doctype? Do you think that the
>client browser ought to fail to render the page because of a missing
>doctype?

No - and with the change to XHTML, browsers may NO LONGER have an innate 
knowledge of HTML specifications.  It is therefore VERY IMPORTANT that the 
pages be "well formed", NOT necessarily that they validate.

If you are really looking to the future, you won't be worrying about "loose 
or strict", but "profiles, modules and transformations".  At present this 
is cutting edge technology!  It will happen however!  Look at the number of 
computers per household and the number of mobile phones per household and 
you will very quickly see where the larger market is.

>A doctype is a required element of an HTML instance of an SGML
>document. How about the failure to close a TD tag?

For HTML browsers with innate knowledge of HTML - that's OK. For the new 
browsers trying to infer the document structure, your missing tag will 
cause the page to crash (or do something totally unexpected instead 
:)  Been there, done that!

>They also are too slow to adopt new
>technologies that allow  better interactivity such that companies such
>as MS and Netscape are often forced to extend HTML to fit the needs of
>users.

Actually, the W3C has the standards coming out faster than the browser 
manufacturers can keep up at present.  It is now possible (using IE5 and I 
hope NN6) to create whatever tags you want and have them render using CSS.

>So, if you "fix" your HTML or CSS, hoping to get your page to render,
>what standard (doctype) do you fix it to?

XHTML 1.0, with allowances in Appendix C for backward compatibility.

Chris Higgs
http://conference.hyperwrite.com.au/
Check out the agenda for Thursday 2:30pm :-)

Chris Higgs <c.higgs(at)landfood.unimelb.edu.au>
Institute of Land and Food Resources
University of Melbourne http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au

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