Monday, August 01, 2005

Standards compliance won't happen without you!

Why does standards compliance matter? Because, we all like to use different hardware (eg. PCs, Macs, Mobile phones), different software (Firefox, Safari, Konqueror...), and we all expect the Internet to work on all of them. Standards tell the hardware and software manufacturers how to make things interoperable. One reader may be using Windows, one reader GNU/Linux, and another BSD, but all of them can interact with this global network using the same TCP/IP. There are a number of standards that define how web pages are interpreted and rendered, mostly administered by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

And, that's how we get to Blogger. Notice that I no longer use the automatically generated profile on the right. Why? A simple missing / character causes XHTML incompliance. I received an automated reply from Blogger support, and have heard nothing back since then. The cascading stylesheet (CSS) that I use on my page *is* standards-compliant CSS 2.0. But, the Blogger navbar has its own CSS that has a number of errors (try validating the CSS on my page, and you'll see the errors). After a Google search, I found that the problem was reported half a year ago and is still there. So, take a few moments to send a nice email over to Blogger support asking them to fix the navbar! Bug-fix priority is likely dependent on the number of complaints they get.

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Comments:
Well, Google owns Blogger and generally Google doesn't see CSS/XHTML compliance as much of a priority unfortunately - most their apps have pretty woeful HTML.

Luckily though the stuff they make works very, very well.
 
Bring back the blink tag!
 
There is something that I am very glad is deprecated. And it should be deprecated to hell (if that can happen)!
 
Deprecated? It still renders perfectly on Firefox :-).

And speaking of tags unfairly maligned, I miss the marquee tag. I'm already going to apikorus hell, I may as well sign up for web-design hell, too :-).
 
Deprecated doesn't mean it doesn't work. It means that the standard doesn't support it anymore, and there's no requirement to support it. (I don't think blink and marquee were ever supported by standards; aren't they Netscape inventions, cursed be their inventor?)

As for what to do with the blink tag:
Location: about:config
browser.blink_allowed = False
 
I know, I know. I was just kidding around. I've read enough RFCs to know my MUST NOTs from my SHALLs and SHOULD NOTs. Tags aren't the only things that are self-deprecating. :-)
 
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