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Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete?
citizenkeller writes "Zeldman is at it again: " Though their owners and managers may not know it yet, 99.9% of all websites are obsolete. These sites may look and work all right in mainstream, desktop browsers whose names end in the numbers 4 or 5. But outside these fault-tolerant environments, the symptoms of disease and decay have already started to appear.""
Backwards compatibility means it works in older browsers. As Zeldman mentions, it always has some cutoff point, such as Netscape 3 or IE 2.
Forwards compatibility means that it works in newer browsers. There is not necessarily any cutoff point, as long as you have constructed the website correctly. Structural problems and other typos in the HTML, proprietary and deprecated tags, and versioning can all limit the forward compatibility of the page.
Read the article and you'll see that Zeldman is arguing that web designers should be developing with forwards compatiblity in mind. Unsurprisingly, yours is one of the 99.9% of all sites that have not.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
They're called standards for a reason.
Well, no, they're not called standards, and for a reason. From the w3c home page:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
No mention of standards.
Take a look at the HTML specification page:
W3C produces what are known as "Recommendations". These are specifications, developed by W3C working groups, and then reviewed by Members of the Consortium. A W3C Recommendation indicates that consensus has been reached among the Consortium Members that a specification is appropriate for widespread use.
Again, no mention of standards.
The W3C is a vendor consortium, primarily a group of big players who are trying to reduce their cost of busness by hammering out some common formats. The W3C is not a standards body, and they do not produce standards. While there are smart, possibly altuistic people on W3C working groups, by and large the W3C as a whole is intersted in promoting the welfare of its member companies, not that of the general developer community. Typically, though, these interests overlap, but that doesn;t change the purpose of the W3C.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
The W3C standard says that ALL attributes are required to have quotes. Umm... which standard says this, exactly?
HTML4.01 recommended using quotes as a best practice. XHTML (being a reimplementation of HTML using XML rules) by inheritance from XML requires attributes to be quoted.