Re: professionalism and wysiwyg

At 03:49 p.m. 10/09/98 -0400, MIchael Channing wilson wrote:
>You even made a point for me yourself in a reply when you posted "If
>your English class thinks semi-colons are stupid, and 80% of the class
>won't use them, that's good enough? ". By this I mean that, the W3C are
>a group of minds that have decided on, without asking me I might add,
>what HTML is and is not.

Well, it's an interesting analogy, though.  It's rather like, "Would
you release advertising copy that was misspelled, used poor grammar,
and contained typographical mistakes?"

In general, the average user of a human language isn't asked their
opinions on grammar or spelling.  I wasn't polled as to how "conceive"
should be spelled.

>Does that make them right 100% of the time.
>Maybe, but if I want to have a certain look and feel to a site or add an
>option that is only obtainable from the use of NN 4.04, then I will.

Well, that's definitely your choice as to what you choose to do.
However, you have to keep in mind that choices have consequences.
One consequence of this decision might be "you crash browsers that
are NN 4.01 or 4.02".  Another might be "you make this page unusable
in non-GUI web browsers".  A third might be "you prevent a person
with a disability from accessing the site, and thus you get an
ADA complaint filed".  Or it might just be something as simple as
"you may cut out 45% of your potential audience."

Consequences happen, and it's important that you are -aware- of what
those might be.  You can't just stick your head in the sand and
claim, "well, I don't agree, so they won't happen to me" -- since
they could.

>Instead of giving me the big
>W3C Validation lecture, why don't you give Microsoft and Netscape a ring
>and tell them to get their act together and make their browsers exactly
>alike.

This is pretty much what the Web Standards Project (www.webstandards.org)
is working on.  Standards, you see, go several ways.  The whole web
depends on the concept that if the AUTHOR creates a certain type of
document, the BROWSER will be able to display that in a meaningful way
to the user.

So there's a shared responsibility between the web authors and the
browser programmers -- this is why the Web Accessibility Initiative
(www.w3.org/WAI/) is working on several types of guidelines including
one for page authors and one for browser programmers.

You may want to check out the WSP or WAI sites quoted above, and see
that the concept of asking Netscape or Microsoft for improved
standards compliance is not as ridiculous as you may think.  Both
of them _have_ pledged to support the standards, and as I understand
it, both actively have development teams working on that goal in one
way or another.

>I'd think you'd find yourself the days joke at lunch! They are in
>it for the money and they are gonna do it their way and only work with
>the W3C when it's in their best interest.

Right, but it's in the best interest of EVERYONE, from users with
disabilities to page authors to browser programmers to search engines
to mobile access hardware creators, that we have an interoperable and
usable web.  The way to achieve that is for everyone to realize the
value of standards as something that can PROMOTE creativity and
increase usability, rather than as some trivial concern of a handful
of MIT computer geeks.

(Fair warning:  XML is looming in the future, and if you learn the
concepts of validation, DTDs, etc now, you won't be playing catch-up
in two years.  These concepts will be MORE important as time goes by,
not LESS.)

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn(at)idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
Enroll now for my online stylesheets (CSS) class! http://www.hwg.org/classes/
The voice of the future?   http://www.hwg.org/opcenter/w3c/voicebrowsers.html

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