Regarding the technical issues - I'm thinking of something like VNC and Voice-over-IP.
Why re-invent the wheel and keep creating a square one? With an accessible and valid website, you have instant compatibility with Voice XML. Then you can take a web page convert it into VXML which can allow someone to _phone_ a webserver and interact with it like a normal conversation.
All it takes is an accessible and compliant website - something that's not difficult at all.
Overall, this seems cheaper to the US economy than forcing every business in the US to redesign their web site.
What's remotely difficult and expensive about doing the job of building a website correctly the first time? Accessibility is not difficult - never has been. The guidelines for accessibilty have been around almost from the inception of the World Wide Web, heck even the City of San Jose have their accessibility guidelines on their websites for quite a long stretch of time.
The whole point of accessibility is that it makes websites more accessible to more people in more locations, more situations and more devices than without accessibility. It allows your company access to a larger audience. Its not expensive or difficult to implement accessibility. Anyone with common sense can do it.
When a company gets serious and makes its website fully accessible, it benefits not only people with disabilities, but also allows their website to be accessible to mobile computing devices such as the Pocket PC and handheld computer -- this is going to be such a huge market, the pervasive web. If you can't sell accessibility to a company with this advantage, then I guess you have a website that isn't worth anything to anybody.
as simple as putting a link to a text-only page as the very first link at the top of the homepage. I've seen it in enough places. That's not tough, it's not expensive,
The idea that making a text-only version of a website is all that's needed to make a website accessible is a myth. Its the same myth that provokes other webdesigners to construct "Netscape" and "IE" duplicates of websites - its ludicrous and involves some serious overheads in keeping multiple versions of a website in synch and up-to-date. You can bet your bottom dollar that the text version of the site is the first to be left behind and overlooked when it comes to updating.
Creating an accessible website is not difficult. The recommendations and guidelines have been available on the web since 1999 - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is there for website authors to create accessible content. There's nothing in there that's remotely difficult.
I'm amazed at the level of complains from so-called "creative artists" about the Web and how they don't want to follow the standards path. Other artists in other media work within the constraints and boundaries of their chosen media and deliver work of high quality. And then they use the media to its full use.
But when it comes to websites, these so-called artists cannot understand the web beyond what they see in their browsers. They limit their imagination and scope and refuse to make their creations accessible in a public medium.
They are "so-called artists" since its clear they do not understand the breadth and depth of the World Wide Web. The ability to build accessible websites should be a mandatory skill requirement before embarking on a professional career in web design - its as important as the ability to write legibly.
first checks the incoming http request and then responds with content tuned to match the rendering abilities of 90-95% of the user agent variations out there.
There's a lot of useful information within the HTTP Request header, such as accepted mime-types etc. but the user agent string is not mandatory, and there is a large deviation between what a browser claims to be and what it is.
You remember the MSN blocking any browser running on a platform that IE was available for? How many people just shrugged and changed their user agent string?
User agent strings lie precisely because certain website owners made false assumptions about browsers, and since there is no requirement for it to be correct, it should never be _relied_ on for content delivery.
Did it ever occur to this guy that perhaps it's 5 percent of browsers that are obsolete, rather than 99.9 percent of web sites?
Probably not, since that 5 percent includes Googlebot which brings in traffic to websites; Yahoo editors who add your site to those directories which again brings traffic to your website; Pocket Internet Explorer that runs on the Pocket PC (so you can read your mail while waiting for the Tube), cell phone to check directions to tonights game.
Maybe you should block Google and Yahoo from traversing the net -- all in the interests of the other 95% of your audience?
I ignore the CSS, FONT and other stuff and stick to H, H1, H2 and P tags for most everything.
Sounds like you know what structured markup is. Why not use CSS to suggest the presentation for browsers that can tolerate it, and keep the same HTML for the rest of the browsers.
Its the old Web authoring rule: Start with valid HTML, then enhance.
The reality is that 90% of all web users use IE 5+. 95% use IE 4+. IE works, and is consistent,
How many high-quality search engine spiders use Internet Explorer to index websites? Google uses Googlebot, not Internet Explorer.
Now how many people use Google? And how much traffic does Google generate for other websites?
Are you getting the picture that Internet Explorer isn't a key component of bringing traffic (which is key to generating income) to your site yet?
If you are relying on your website to generate an income to live on, and you believe that Internet Explorer is the standard - then I dare you to block everything that isn't Internet Explorer (including Googlebot) and then see how long you will last.
Googlebot may only be one percent of your traffic, but how many Internet Explorer users does it bring in for you? How many of those users tell others to have a look at your site? Both directly and indirectly, search engines bring in traffic to your website.
Are you prepared to sacrifice Google ranking in affirming your belief that the Web belongs to Internet Explorer?
The web is browser independant. It always has been, and always will be. Internet Explorer websites are dieing a death. Just as Netscape Navigator was toppled, Internet Explorer will go the same way.
The.001% of users on cell phones are doing specific activities with mostly packaged content. These users are novelty users.
This argument is only perpetuated because there isn't enough standards compliant HTML content on websites. There are not many users because 99.9% of webpages are tag-soup instead of structured HTML.
With structured HTML on all the main websites, the content is more accessible on cell phones, thus more people will be able to find useful stuff on their phones.
The low number of cellphone devices surfing the web is a _symptom_ of tag-soup, not the _justification_ for tag soup.
It's safe to assume that Yahoo, NYtimes, etc., know how to properly write CSS.
It would help if you actually read the chapter referred to in the Slashdot story. Zeldman quotes examples of where Yahoo and ZDNet go horribly wrong in their markup. So its _not_ safe to assume Yahoo know what they are doing - and that is the gist of why 99.9% of websites are obsolete, and the source of the problems you claim to have.
just the insane complexity that we've gotten from the W3C crap. Take a look at the HTML4 spec, then look at previous version of HTML. It is needlessly complex.
The previous HTML specification before HTML4 was HTML 3.2 (Wilbur), which was largely derived from the Netscape and Microsoft introduction of presentational-only elements. W3 had introduced HTML3.0 but that was ignored by _those_ two.
HTML4.0 deprecated most of the presentational only elements, so it largely simplified the bloat that was HTML 3.2. HTML4.0 was largely an acceptance that HTML3.2 was untenable as a markup language, and thus markup "standards" forced on us by browser manufacturers were not to the benefit of the Web community.
HTML 3.2 convincingly demonstrates the danger of just letting Microsoft and Netscape run amok.
CSS is a pain in the ass. If I wanted to change the font size of a particular section in an HTML document, I would simply put a tag (or change a tag) at the beginning and end of that section.
Take a 10,000 page website, and make the same change. You prefer altering 10,000 pages of HTML, I'd much rather prefer changing one line of CSS.
HTML markup adds only semantic and structure information to the document, CSS suggests a presentation based on elements used.
Before CSS, if I wanted to print out an HTML document, I would save it to disk, then edit it to remove unneeded crap (tables, ads, navigation bars, etc), and change the formatting where I wanted to do so. Now, it's easier to just copy the text of the entire page, paste it into a new document,
Sounds like you are printing out a tag soup document not an HTML one. A proper HTML document tends to have a clean structure that is easy to manipulate with your own stylesheet.
Am I impressed that CSS saves bandwidth?
Yes, its called caching. You can't take advantage of the cache by removing doctypes or closing tags. You can't take advantage of presentation caching if you are relying on nested tables and attribute clutter to suggest your presentational requirements.
Then you should be correcting that perception. It is _not_ more expensive to create an an accessible website. Even the Australian Courts took this view in MacGuire vs SOCOG.
Kludging and browser-specific markup hacks takes a lot more time than doing the job right the first time.
we instead request that the minority of weirdos who choose to use non-standard browsers simply start using either IE or Netscape?
What makes you think that only browsers are allowed to use the World Wide Web? Surely Googlebot and another scripts have as much right to use the information on the World Wide Web? Why not approach Google and tell them only to use IE or Netscape when indexing websites and see how long it takes them to stop laughing.
[standards compliant Websites working in more user-agents] I wish you were correct on this point. It would be great if modern HTML were 100% backward compatible
Its not the backwards compatability that concerns me, its the _sideways_ compatability that's more important to me. The authored HTML tends to work in a range of Netscape browsers, a range of Internet Explorer browsers, and sometimes in a range of Opera browsers. Anything other than that is random.
A standard's adhering HTML document could be used in all the browsers above, plus all the other user agents out there that support the standard followed. So text-to-speech browsers, indexers, spiders, content aggregators -- all the silent user-agents suddenly have access to structured content.
These are the useragents that are overlooked by the typical public website. People don't tend to notice that structured markup scores a lot better in google than font-flavoured tag soup, precisely because h1 defines a first level header, and font defined some weird presentational style but nothing semantic that a search engine can use.
I don't believe browsers will be the user-agent of choice in the coming years - we'll automate all the manual intensive process of trawling through websites looking for information, and we'll delegate it to some sort of intelligent agents that do the work while we do something more enjoyable.
RSS Aggregators like AmphetaDesk show a very basic inkling of what can be possible with structure and the value of content out there on the Internet.
But we need structured markup to add semantic meaning to the content, and then we can leverage that content into something truely useful. (Yes, I'm a dreamer longing for something practical)
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.
Reduce revenue by modernizing your website thereby making it inaccessible to older browsers and thus reducing your potential customer base and save money on bandwidth usage
If by "modernising your website" involves using HTML for describing content structure, and CSS to suggest the presentation, your above statement is incorrect.
Modernising your website makes the content _more_ accessible to _more_ user-agents (not just browsers) than the brittle tag-soup that's currently "in vogue". Yes, tag-soup seems to work in _browsers_ that are in use today, but its a devil of a job to take content from the web and manipulate it for other purposes (like present it in a non-visual form).
Who ever uses an older browser ussually isn't a power user to start with and isn't looking for the latest fluff anyway.
Who ever said a Compaq IPaq running Pocket Internet Explorer, or a Sharp Zaurus running Opera at a max screensize of 320x200 is "an older browser"?
When HTML and CSS are used correctly, optimally and compliantly the resulting websites are far more accessible in more user-agents that the mere crop of bloated OS based browsers.
Last time I checked lynx wasn't going to show images anytime soon
Lynx handles images by using an external program - essentially like a plugin. Plus, for maximum accessibility you should be providing textual alternatives to rich media types anyway - thats a priority 1 checkpoint of WCAG.
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
No. Well structured HTML (as in _this_ is a heading, _this_ is a paragraph, _this_ is a quote), and using CSS to style the presentation (whatever the output destination: screen, printer, aural devices, holograms).
The article just points out that many web sites have mark-up errors in them. Big deal. To go from that to saying that 99.9% of sites are obsolete is just dumb.
What percentage of websites pass cleanly through an html validator such as W3? Surely those sites that do not validate are because there are errors in the HTML markup?
Zeldman probably believes that 0.01% of sites validate correctly, so his figure of 99.9% obsolete isn't mathematically that far off.
Zeldman... says that sites like Yahoo! are important because of what they offer not how they look. So QED a site that relies on it's content is not obsolete.
If Yahoo could offer its content free of the tag-soup additions, it would last quite a bit longer than its current incarnation, purely because the content would be a lot more accessible to more browsers and user-agents than at present. (Take a peek at the HTML source and tell me honestly that the markup matches the structure of the content).
Inaccessible content is just as bad as no content at all. Machine-readable markup has enormous benefits, and RSS just doesn't match up. Given clean markup, you'll be finding a lot more useful applications of the Web framework, but at the moment we are stuck in a browser only, keyword only environment. The Web offers us so much more than that.
Zeldman is looking forwards. Today doesn't matter tommorrow. The browsers you test your site on today are outdated. You think IE will still be king of the hill in a few years from now? Did you also believe the same about Netscape Navigator a few years ago?
The Web evolves, but at the moment tag-soup markup is what's preventing us from reaching the full potential that Tim Berners Lee saw at the very start.
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x?
I'm using Konqueror 3.0 which came with Suse 8.0. Googlebot is version 2.1 according to my logs. The point is that it shouldn't matter what browser you are using, and we shouldn't be fudging markup into tag-soup in an effort to keep certain browsers happy. Rather markup a document cleanly, and use CSS to present the markup -- that way less capable browsers can strip away the CSS and have a default view of the content - which they can markup or manipulate themselves.
Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera?
No, I don't care about the rendering, but a page would be much more interesting to my little scripts if the markup described the structure of the content appropriately.
Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
Slashdot Mirror
Why re-invent the wheel and keep creating a square one? With an accessible and valid website, you have instant compatibility with Voice XML. Then you can take a web page convert it into VXML which can allow someone to _phone_ a webserver and interact with it like a normal conversation.
All it takes is an accessible and compliant website - something that's not difficult at all.
What's remotely difficult and expensive about doing the job of building a website correctly the first time? Accessibility is not difficult - never has been. The guidelines for accessibilty have been around almost from the inception of the World Wide Web, heck even the City of San Jose have their accessibility guidelines on their websites for quite a long stretch of time.
The whole point of accessibility is that it makes websites more accessible to more people in more locations, more situations and more devices than without accessibility. It allows your company access to a larger audience. Its not expensive or difficult to implement accessibility. Anyone with common sense can do it.
When a company gets serious and makes its website fully accessible, it benefits not only people with disabilities, but also allows their website to be accessible to mobile computing devices such as the Pocket PC and handheld computer -- this is going to be such a huge market, the pervasive web. If you can't sell accessibility to a company with this advantage, then I guess you have a website that isn't worth anything to anybody.
The idea that making a text-only version of a website is all that's needed to make a website accessible is a myth. Its the same myth that provokes other webdesigners to construct "Netscape" and "IE" duplicates of websites - its ludicrous and involves some serious overheads in keeping multiple versions of a website in synch and up-to-date. You can bet your bottom dollar that the text version of the site is the first to be left behind and overlooked when it comes to updating.
Creating an accessible website is not difficult. The recommendations and guidelines have been available on the web since 1999 - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is there for website authors to create accessible content. There's nothing in there that's remotely difficult.
I'm amazed at the level of complains from so-called "creative artists" about the Web and how they don't want to follow the standards path. Other artists in other media work within the constraints and boundaries of their chosen media and deliver work of high quality. And then they use the media to its full use.
But when it comes to websites, these so-called artists cannot understand the web beyond what they see in their browsers. They limit their imagination and scope and refuse to make their creations accessible in a public medium.
They are "so-called artists" since its clear they do not understand the breadth and depth of the World Wide Web. The ability to build accessible websites should be a mandatory skill requirement before embarking on a professional career in web design - its as important as the ability to write legibly.
Neither. Its thawte
Michael Abrash (of ModeX and graphics optimisation ilk), and that dotnet bloke... Anders Hejlsberg (of Turbo Pascal and Delphi fame).
Even today, CSS is broken in Netscape 4,
Netscape 4 doesn't support the @import directive, so why not hide the stylesheet with
<style type="text/css">
@import url(/path/style.css);
</style>
Then Netscape 4 doesn't see the stylesheet, but other CSS supporting pages can use the stylesheet.
first checks the incoming http request and then responds with content tuned to match the rendering abilities of 90-95% of the user agent variations out there.
There's a lot of useful information within the HTTP Request header, such as accepted mime-types etc. but the user agent string is not mandatory, and there is a large deviation between what a browser claims to be and what it is.
You remember the MSN blocking any browser running on a platform that IE was available for? How many people just shrugged and changed their user agent string?
User agent strings lie precisely because certain website owners made false assumptions about browsers, and since there is no requirement for it to be correct, it should never be _relied_ on for content delivery.
Did it ever occur to this guy that perhaps it's 5 percent of browsers that are obsolete, rather than 99.9 percent of web sites?
Probably not, since that 5 percent includes Googlebot which brings in traffic to websites; Yahoo editors who add your site to those directories which again brings traffic to your website; Pocket Internet Explorer that runs on the Pocket PC (so you can read your mail while waiting for the Tube), cell phone to check directions to tonights game.
Maybe you should block Google and Yahoo from traversing the net -- all in the interests of the other 95% of your audience?
I ignore the CSS, FONT and other stuff and stick to H, H1, H2 and P tags for most everything.
Sounds like you know what structured markup is. Why not use CSS to suggest the presentation for browsers that can tolerate it, and keep the same HTML for the rest of the browsers.
Its the old Web authoring rule: Start with valid HTML, then enhance.
The reality is that 90% of all web users use IE 5+. 95% use IE 4+. IE works, and is consistent,
How many high-quality search engine spiders use Internet Explorer to index websites? Google uses Googlebot, not Internet Explorer.
Now how many people use Google? And how much traffic does Google generate for other websites?
Are you getting the picture that Internet Explorer isn't a key component of bringing traffic (which is key to generating income) to your site yet?
If you are relying on your website to generate an income to live on, and you believe that Internet Explorer is the standard - then I dare you to block everything that isn't Internet Explorer (including Googlebot) and then see how long you will last.
Googlebot may only be one percent of your traffic, but how many Internet Explorer users does it bring in for you? How many of those users tell others to have a look at your site? Both directly and indirectly, search engines bring in traffic to your website.
Are you prepared to sacrifice Google ranking in affirming your belief that the Web belongs to Internet Explorer?
The web is browser independant. It always has been, and always will be. Internet Explorer websites are dieing a death. Just as Netscape Navigator was toppled, Internet Explorer will go the same way.
The .001% of users on cell phones are doing specific activities with mostly packaged content. These users are novelty users.
This argument is only perpetuated because there isn't enough standards compliant HTML content on websites. There are not many users because 99.9% of webpages are tag-soup instead of structured HTML.
With structured HTML on all the main websites, the content is more accessible on cell phones, thus more people will be able to find useful stuff on their phones.
The low number of cellphone devices surfing the web is a _symptom_ of tag-soup, not the _justification_ for tag soup.
It's safe to assume that Yahoo, NYtimes, etc., know how to properly write CSS.
It would help if you actually read the chapter referred to in the Slashdot story. Zeldman quotes examples of where Yahoo and ZDNet go horribly wrong in their markup. So its _not_ safe to assume Yahoo know what they are doing - and that is the gist of why 99.9% of websites are obsolete, and the source of the problems you claim to have.
just the insane complexity that we've gotten from the W3C crap. Take a look at the HTML4 spec, then look at previous version of HTML. It is needlessly complex.
The previous HTML specification before HTML4 was HTML 3.2 (Wilbur), which was largely derived from the Netscape and Microsoft introduction of presentational-only elements. W3 had introduced HTML3.0 but that was ignored by _those_ two.
HTML4.0 deprecated most of the presentational only elements, so it largely simplified the bloat that was HTML 3.2. HTML4.0 was largely an acceptance that HTML3.2 was untenable as a markup language, and thus markup "standards" forced on us by browser manufacturers were not to the benefit of the Web community.
HTML 3.2 convincingly demonstrates the danger of just letting Microsoft and Netscape run amok.
CSS is a pain in the ass. If I wanted to change the font size of a particular section in an HTML document, I would simply put a tag (or change a tag) at the beginning and end of that section.
Take a 10,000 page website, and make the same change. You prefer altering 10,000 pages of HTML, I'd much rather prefer changing one line of CSS.
HTML markup adds only semantic and structure information to the document, CSS suggests a presentation based on elements used.
Before CSS, if I wanted to print out an HTML document, I would save it to disk, then edit it to remove unneeded crap (tables, ads, navigation bars, etc), and change the formatting where I wanted to do so. Now, it's easier to just copy the text of the entire page, paste it into a new document,
Sounds like you are printing out a tag soup document not an HTML one. A proper HTML document tends to have a clean structure that is easy to manipulate with your own stylesheet.
Am I impressed that CSS saves bandwidth?
Yes, its called caching. You can't take advantage of the cache by removing doctypes or closing tags. You can't take advantage of presentation caching if you are relying on nested tables and attribute clutter to suggest your presentational requirements.
1. Do it right.
To PHB's, #1 is too expensive.
Then you should be correcting that perception. It is _not_ more expensive to create an an accessible website. Even the Australian Courts took this view in MacGuire vs SOCOG.
Kludging and browser-specific markup hacks takes a lot more time than doing the job right the first time.
we instead request that the minority of weirdos who choose to use non-standard browsers simply start using either IE or Netscape?
What makes you think that only browsers are allowed to use the World Wide Web? Surely Googlebot and another scripts have as much right to use the information on the World Wide Web? Why not approach Google and tell them only to use IE or Netscape when indexing websites and see how long it takes them to stop laughing.
[standards compliant Websites working in more user-agents] I wish you were correct on this point. It would be great if modern HTML were 100% backward compatible
Its not the backwards compatability that concerns me, its the _sideways_ compatability that's more important to me. The authored HTML tends to work in a range of Netscape browsers, a range of Internet Explorer browsers, and sometimes in a range of Opera browsers. Anything other than that is random.
A standard's adhering HTML document could be used in all the browsers above, plus all the other user agents out there that support the standard followed. So text-to-speech browsers, indexers, spiders, content aggregators -- all the silent user-agents suddenly have access to structured content.
These are the useragents that are overlooked by the typical public website. People don't tend to notice that structured markup scores a lot better in google than font-flavoured tag soup, precisely because h1 defines a first level header, and font defined some weird presentational style but nothing semantic that a search engine can use.
I don't believe browsers will be the user-agent of choice in the coming years - we'll automate all the manual intensive process of trawling through websites looking for information, and we'll delegate it to some sort of intelligent agents that do the work while we do something more enjoyable.
RSS Aggregators like AmphetaDesk show a very basic inkling of what can be possible with structure and the value of content out there on the Internet.
But we need structured markup to add semantic meaning to the content, and then we can leverage that content into something truely useful. (Yes, I'm a dreamer longing for something practical)
Do advertisers want to sell to people that refuse to use the latest and greatest thing?
Well it seems like they have no interest in selling to people _with_ the latest and greatest devices. How many big website stores work on a pocket pc?
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.
Reduce revenue by modernizing your website thereby making it inaccessible to older browsers and thus reducing your potential customer base and save money on bandwidth usage
If by "modernising your website" involves using HTML for describing content structure, and CSS to suggest the presentation, your above statement is incorrect.
Modernising your website makes the content _more_ accessible to _more_ user-agents (not just browsers) than the brittle tag-soup that's currently "in vogue". Yes, tag-soup seems to work in _browsers_ that are in use today, but its a devil of a job to take content from the web and manipulate it for other purposes (like present it in a non-visual form).
Who ever uses an older browser ussually isn't a power user to start with and isn't looking for the latest fluff anyway.
Who ever said a Compaq IPaq running Pocket Internet Explorer, or a Sharp Zaurus running Opera at a max screensize of 320x200 is "an older browser"?
When HTML and CSS are used correctly, optimally and compliantly the resulting websites are far more accessible in more user-agents that the mere crop of bloated OS based browsers.
Last time I checked lynx wasn't going to show images anytime soon
Lynx handles images by using an external program - essentially like a plugin. Plus, for maximum accessibility you should be providing textual alternatives to rich media types anyway - thats a priority 1 checkpoint of WCAG.
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
No. Well structured HTML (as in _this_ is a heading, _this_ is a paragraph, _this_ is a quote), and using CSS to style the presentation (whatever the output destination: screen, printer, aural devices, holograms).
We design our web pages not to be constantly cutting-edge, but to be compatible and useful.
Compatible with what? Testing in available browsers today only gives you compatibility for yesterday.
Compatible with standards such as the XHTML Recommendation and CSS Level 1 & 2 Recommendations offers you compatibility tommorrow too.
Surely anything that helps your website to be accessible tommorrow is to your advantage?
The article just points out that many web sites have mark-up errors in them. Big deal. To go from that to saying that 99.9% of sites are obsolete is just dumb.
What percentage of websites pass cleanly through an html validator such as W3? Surely those sites that do not validate are because there are errors in the HTML markup?
Zeldman probably believes that 0.01% of sites validate correctly, so his figure of 99.9% obsolete isn't mathematically that far off.
Zeldman ... says that sites like Yahoo! are important because of what they offer not how they look. So QED a site that relies on it's content is not obsolete.
If Yahoo could offer its content free of the tag-soup additions, it would last quite a bit longer than its current incarnation, purely because the content would be a lot more accessible to more browsers and user-agents than at present. (Take a peek at the HTML source and tell me honestly that the markup matches the structure of the content).
Inaccessible content is just as bad as no content at all. Machine-readable markup has enormous benefits, and RSS just doesn't match up. Given clean markup, you'll be finding a lot more useful applications of the Web framework, but at the moment we are stuck in a browser only, keyword only environment. The Web offers us so much more than that.
Zeldman is looking forwards. Today doesn't matter tommorrow. The browsers you test your site on today are outdated. You think IE will still be king of the hill in a few years from now? Did you also believe the same about Netscape Navigator a few years ago?
The Web evolves, but at the moment tag-soup markup is what's preventing us from reaching the full potential that Tim Berners Lee saw at the very start.
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x?
I'm using Konqueror 3.0 which came with Suse 8.0. Googlebot is version 2.1 according to my logs. The point is that it shouldn't matter what browser you are using, and we shouldn't be fudging markup into tag-soup in an effort to keep certain browsers happy. Rather markup a document cleanly, and use CSS to present the markup -- that way less capable browsers can strip away the CSS and have a default view of the content - which they can markup or manipulate themselves.
Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera?
No, I don't care about the rendering, but a page would be much more interesting to my little scripts if the markup described the structure of the content appropriately.
Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
Not too hard at all: http://browsers.evolt.org/