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But I just find the table-tag very useful for layout

Indeed, it is very useful, here in the real world where IE6 is the browser used by 90% of the people and table hacks have to be done to make up for IE's limitations (in my case, the lack of a max-width that works).

make the center column 400px wide, but allow it to grow if the cell contains a wide image, pushing the right column

The tag in question is min-width, and, although this is broken in IE6, IE7 will have support for this. It's one of the few things in CSS Microsoft is actually bothering to implement.

a empty summary -attribute on a table could for example be used to signal that the table is for layout only

Or, better yet, just have the table be in the CSS instead of the HTML.

Aaargh! You imply that developing a website using web standards takes longer. False! It _does_ require that you exercise more care.

Sorry. If you're doing something more complicated than building a 10-page static site, or even something with a little PHP-driven database, then it will take longer. It'll limit your choice of available third-party modules, and you'll have to evaluate each one you consider for its standards compliance. You'll have to hire more competent developers when you outsource. You may have to redesign legacy code that's already on the site (I've just finished doing this for a text-html autoformatter that was in use on a number of sites my company maintains, and which produced the most horribly non-standard html you can imagine rendering correctly -- two days' work, and if I hadn't been able to justify it in terms of being able to extend the range of formatting options it supports, I'd never have got the finance to do it).

If WAI is an issue, you'll have to examine the text that has been supplied by people other than yourself, going through it and putting expansions of abbreviations and acronyms in place for screen readers using ABBR and ACRONYM tags, for example.

And developing a CSS-based layout that fits the specification the graphic designer has handed to you, rather than a deprecated table-based one, is often quite tricky.

No, for anything beyond trivial requirements, meeting web standards can be time consuming. Sorry.

Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ :

"I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve http://ask.slashdot.org/:

403 Forbidden"

IMG: end tag forbidden
OBJECT: end tag required
BR: end tag forbidden
HR: end tag forbidden
META: end tag forbidden
LINK: end tag forbidden

I'd like to know what validator you're using, because it's not validating against the last known standard for HTML (HTML 4.01 strict). As far as I know, HTML/SGML didn't have self closing tags.

Browsers, of course, try to take all sorts of crap that get thrown at them. It doesn't make them correct though.

IMG: end tag forbidden
OBJECT: end tag required
BR: end tag forbidden
HR: end tag forbidden
META: end tag forbidden
LINK: end tag forbidden

I'd like to know what validator you're using, because it's not validating against the last known standard for HTML (HTML 4.01 strict). As far as I know, HTML/SGML didn't have self closing tags.

Browsers, of course, try to take all sorts of crap that get thrown at them. It doesn't make them correct though.

IMG: end tag forbidden
OBJECT: end tag required
BR: end tag forbidden
HR: end tag forbidden
META: end tag forbidden
LINK: end tag forbidden

I'd like to know what validator you're using, because it's not validating against the last known standard for HTML (HTML 4.01 strict). As far as I know, HTML/SGML didn't have self closing tags.

Browsers, of course, try to take all sorts of crap that get thrown at them. It doesn't make them correct though.

IMG: end tag forbidden
OBJECT: end tag required
BR: end tag forbidden
HR: end tag forbidden
META: end tag forbidden
LINK: end tag forbidden

I'd like to know what validator you're using, because it's not validating against the last known standard for HTML (HTML 4.01 strict). As far as I know, HTML/SGML didn't have self closing tags.

Browsers, of course, try to take all sorts of crap that get thrown at them. It doesn't make them correct though.

IMG: end tag forbidden
OBJECT: end tag required
BR: end tag forbidden
HR: end tag forbidden
META: end tag forbidden
LINK: end tag forbidden

I'd like to know what validator you're using, because it's not validating against the last known standard for HTML (HTML 4.01 strict). As far as I know, HTML/SGML didn't have self closing tags.

Browsers, of course, try to take all sorts of crap that get thrown at them. It doesn't make them correct though.

IMG: end tag forbidden
OBJECT: end tag required
BR: end tag forbidden
HR: end tag forbidden
META: end tag forbidden
LINK: end tag forbidden

I'd like to know what validator you're using, because it's not validating against the last known standard for HTML (HTML 4.01 strict). As far as I know, HTML/SGML didn't have self closing tags.

Browsers, of course, try to take all sorts of crap that get thrown at them. It doesn't make them correct though.

I don't think you understand exactly what "W3C compliant" means. It's not a rating system, nor is it any sort of flashy or "insecure" technology. The W3C's HTML 4.01 standard is over six years old, and it has been proven to be more than adequate. The W3C defines the standards for languages like HTML and CSS; "W3C compliant" just means that your HTML/CSS is valid, according to the standard. There are no "artificial ratings" to it; code is either compliant or it isn't. Why should you care? Because, if you write standards-compliant code, any web browser that can read standard HTML will be able to read your code.

Sure, maybe at the moment, everybody in your family uses IE 6.0, and you can throw together sloppy code that would make a validator cry; just wait until somebody decides to try out that new "Firefox" program they've heard of, or maybe somebody else decides to buy a Mac and use Safari, and suddenly everybody wants to know why your web page is the only one that doesn't look right. Nobody will understand your points if they can't even read them. What will you do when your grandma's sight gets bad enough that she can't read text on a monitor any more, or if somebody goes blind, and your pages can't be parsed by a text reader for the blind? Don't answer with, "I'll just make everything compliant whenever that happens." It has been proven repeatedly in the world of engineering that it's much easier to just do something right the first time rather than do it wrong the first time and then fix it later.

Try looking around on http://www.w3.org/ for more information about why standards are good.

...I should write a book about XHTML/CSS/web usability. I've read the standards, I know the standards, and I know how to avoid browser bugs rather than hack around them after the fact.

heh heh heh... 208 errors

You are correct. I absolutely loathe Flash. But I am trying not to let that taint my responses to you.

1) The W3C recommendations do not preclude Flash being optional. They include the object element specifically for such technologies. The object element gracefully degrades to something the user can view, if used properly. Here is a link to the definition in the HTML 4.01 recommendation -- http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#ede f-OBJECT

2) On the Dreamengine site, click the "Heliosphere" icon (the only thing I have clicked on). It takes at least two seconds for the content to show after then menu has changed locations (I am on 3Mb/s DSL). Even if the content loaded immediately, changing the location of the menu is a very bad thing to do. The user has to reorient to the page.

Ignoring my prejudice against Flash, using Flash for content is a very bad thing. Not everyone that uses the internet can see colors, or even see at all. As far as I know, Flash completely breaks screen readers and will completely lock out those who have to use them. I really can't say that for sure because I don't use Flash.

Microsoft.com passed without issue. Google.com failed with 47 errors. Slashdot.org is forbidden.

Microsoft.com passed without issue. Google.com failed with 47 errors. Slashdot.org is forbidden.

Microsoft.com passed without issue. Google.com failed with 47 errors. Slashdot.org is forbidden.

Nowadays, about 60-70% of my pages validates automaticlly on the first try.

Shame your homepage doesn't ...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .mjoelkbar.net%2F

I won't go into why validation is important, others have covered that well. Instead, here's just a couple of thoughts from the trenches.

Compliance is simple when you have full control over the site and all data that is input. In business reality, this is impractical. Fact is, editors, salespeople and the CEO will want to make website changes. Now, you could make it your job to clean up the garbage HTML sent by these folks. What you'll figure out quickly though, is that suicide is a more attractive option. So we of course now have content management systems so our bosses, et. al. can change what they like at 2 in the morning.

The thing is, these people will do horrible, horrible things. They will paste the most evil non-ASCII characters you could ever imagine into your lovely system. If you've only (gasp) given them a textarea in which to paste HTML, things are even uglier - they will paste the worst hackjob code you can imagine into there. Or worse, they'll paste the output of the MS word HTML export (yikes!). So now what you have is a lovely framework / skin for your site with pristine tags for navigation and advertisements, with a nice steaming heap of dog doo in the middle of it.

So now you're not compliant. Not because of anything you did directly yourself, but because you just handed the keys to the kingdom over to the vilage idiot.

Here's how I deal...

    1) DON'T ALLOW FOREIGN HTML. This can easily be achived if your CMS provides an in-page HTML editor which produces valid code. You may be able to upgrade an existing CMS with something like "HTMLArea": http://sourceforge.net/projects/itools-htmlarea which is a replacement for a textarea tag.

    failing #1,

    2 Run W3CTidy (as others have mentioned) on the INPUT to your CMS. Give the jackass a preview. If it's borked, they'll try to fix it or call you if they really can't do it.

Happy webmastering!

--graveyhead

(cred)

Mod parent up.
My university recently just hired someone for a newly created "Web Accessibility" coordinator position. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act is important to public schools and government.
Dreamweaver--and I imagine similar web dev suites are in the game--have accessibility featuers built in to help make sure you specify alt tag for all images and so on. A lot of WAI requirements are good web practices to follow anyway. Information wants to be free (accessible) ;)

There shouldn't be a body enforcing browser makers to follow the standards, it should be up to the browser makers.

The W3C is a consortium. Maybe you should take a look at the list of members. You'll notice that Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera are all present and accounted for. It is up to the browser makers, as well as a few other interested parties.

I not only validate my pages, but I also don't use any HTML or CSS "hacks". Sometimes this means using tables for non-tabular data. Sorry to trample on current web dogma, but users won't notice "semantic code" - they will notice a site that doesn't render properly in their browser due to CSS hacks. I didn't have to change a thing to make my sites work in IE7. If you use hacks, you probably can't say the same.

Besides, if you truly want a semantic web, you should code your pages in OWL! It's the logical conclusion of the current trend. I specialized in knowledge representation and reasoning and I could never understand what that language was getting at.

I've yet to see any layout that's "impossible" with divs (though it took a long time to figure everything out, and some of the code is VERY confusing)

5.3 Do not use tables for layout unless the table makes sense when linearized. Otherwise, if the table does not make sense, provide an alternative equivalent (which may be a linearized version).
[Priority 2]

Proof Nobody W3C Validates All The Time:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .nobodyforpresident.org%2F

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=h ttp://www.nobodyforpresident.org/

No error or warning found
Congratulations!

Valid CSS! This document validates as CSS!

[snip]

sIFR-flash {

        * visibility : visible !important;
        * margin : 0;

}

[snip]

Note on page: "Non W3C Browser - can't see above animation? - Click here"

Source: http://www.nobodyforpresident.org/

Proof Nobody W3C Validates All The Time:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .nobodyforpresident.org%2F

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=h ttp://www.nobodyforpresident.org/

No error or warning found
Congratulations!

Valid CSS! This document validates as CSS!

[snip]

sIFR-flash {

        * visibility : visible !important;
        * margin : 0;

}

[snip]

Note on page: "Non W3C Browser - can't see above animation? - Click here"

Source: http://www.nobodyforpresident.org/

Squiggly line not included.
And while I've not used it Nvu looks interesting.
Of course, real mean use emacs^Wed.

P.S. Captcha sucks fat donkey balls, and ain't exactly standards compliant...

More specifically, if you run the article page through the validator it fails with 60 errors. The truth is that the vast majority of pages out there will fail. It's a catch-22: as long as browsers are not compliant, web-pages won't be compliant... and as long as web-pages are not compliant, what's the point in standards-compliant browsers?

And Fielding et al. made the HEAD method: and it was so.

If you actually looked at the source from the article (which was generated using word), it looked clean and readable. Nothing like the HTML we used to see from Word.

Yawn... wake me when it can generate valid HTML...

(MySpace profile picked as the first one when I clicked on the browse button)

Is it W3C compliant?

Nope. And that's after he hand-tweaked some of the output.

You can blame the HTTP Post mechanism for this. Do you want your confidential details appearing in a URL? No? Then you can't use GET, you have to use POST. And what does the POST spec say? Responses to this method are not cacheable. Not that this would work anyway; consider this, when you click back, is the old data still current? If you've just transferred money out of your account, then definitely not. The only way to ensure that customers don't see incorrect figures (which would draw too many complaints and possibly lawsuits) is to make the posts expire.

I'm sorry, but something better than HTTP/POST/HTML and a web browser is required to solve this problem. Perhaps some sort of interactive web site client which is designed from the ground up to support applications and not just static pages like was the original intent with web browsers.

I love the design, it will need some work to make it display the same in all browsers but that really isn't all that difficult. I found that making a good cross browser display is just a matter of testing and tweaking. Unfortunately, many developers are just lazy. My site stats for our companies web app is running each month about 60% IE, 33% Mozilla based browsers and safari, konqueror, opera etc take up the rest. Who wants to chase away 40% of your customers? Getting good customer usage stats is critical in any website, the results can be enlightening. Running your site through a validator is always a great way to start.

Actually, Web 2.0 is typically characterised by big fonts. I don't see anything 2.0 about either of the designs that haven't been Slashdotted (Michael Johnson and Peter Lada); after all, Slashdot's home page is just a static page with textual content, which is about as 1.0 as it gets, and is all that's necessary.

I've never understood designers' obsession with small fonts. They don't seem to realise that, while they work with a professional quality 21" monitor, hooked up to a Mac with anti-aliased fonts, the vast majority of people (normal people, not nerds like us) don't have such good equipment or such young eyes. Maybe when they're older, with bad eyesight and a crap display bought out of their pension, they'll finally abandon the arrogance that leads to pages whose font size can't be adjusted or which break if you bump the browser up to 32px fonts (which is still too small for some partially-sighted people of my acquaintance).

Neither of the two designs I could reach cope with a change in font size; areas of the page overlap if you increase the font size on Firefox or Safari, and the font sizes are set in pixels (at least some of them), meaning that for IE6 users the text can't be resized at all. Granted, this is an IE6 failing, but it's one that web professionals need to avoid.

With basic accessibility issues like this having been ignored, I don't think either of these designs is ready for prime time. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were first published in May 1999, seven years ago, yet in my work as a web developer I regularly encounter web designers who don't know the first thing about them - or decide they're not important if it threatens them with changing their beloved "vision". Learn your craft first, people; then you can call yourself a professional.

Projects are not formats. Projects will win on merits (eventually). Formats can be quashed forever if a monopoly player leverages their power.

Microsoft has done this before, and is in the process of doing it again with e-ink formats. The open InkML format http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML/ and the Jot interchange format http://unipen.nici.kun.nl/jot.html format, which Microsoft even participated in developing, have been abandoned for their own closed, proprietary and patent encumbered format in Tablet PCs.

Remember, this is the binary Ink format which ODF does not support, and which Microsoft states is one of the reasons they won't support ODF. This is all about leverage. Microsoft is leveraging its desktop monopoly to quash Jot. They're leveraging their monopoly to quash InkML. They're leveraging their monopoly to try to quash ODF.

They're doing this so that their customers cannot migrate to better alternatives when they're available, and developers like myself don't even try to compete, because we know those customers we might attract are nailed to Microsoft by those proprietary formats. That's wonderful for Microsoft, but bloody awful for customers and competitors.

Ok, I agree to some extent that the problem in quesiton is not relevant to the Open Document Format but that is not the whole point. Looking around at other widely used formats I cann't help but look at HTML. Checking the standards for it that there is an entire section on accessibility http://www.w3.org/WAI/

So as a non programmer, would it be fair to say that there should be space in the specification to addess accessibility issues?

Mark Cuban and Thomas Friedman get awarded "Special Achievement" status? All Cuban does is wax inspid on his blog and yell at basketball referees. Friedman wrote a rambling tome extolling in mixed metaphors and incredibly poor prose his abiding love and faith in globalism, and how technology is bringing us into an age of equality, even though warfare, genocide, concentration of wealth, poverty, and starvation are worsening. A World Bank (an organization responsible for much of the above) Website gets an award for "activism?" I don't think so. A client-side app gets several awards (Google Earth)? The whole site is essentially Globalism propaganda mixed with other forms of idiocy, ignorance, and ineptitude.

And on top of all that, the "Web"by site's not even valid HTML. These guys are supposed to be authoritative, and their own house is in disarray.

Absolute garbage.

And the code that does this, and AsTeR, which is a package that speaks LaTeX (including complicated formulas) was done by T.V. Raman, who is blind himself, and has been using and developing open source code for quite some time.

There may be an emacs mode already done for OpenDoc format, perhaps someone who follows emacs more closely can say.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.