Ahhh, the wonderful world of browser writing. I've gotten to the point
of just telling the people 'Well they do it wrong!', but then I don't sell
my browser. :)
> We're probably going to go the route of Arena and put up a big red
> "ILLEGAL HTML" sign whenever we hit something, and maybe offer to pop up
> a bug report form detailing exactly where and how the page is illegal.
I think more browsers should do this - I've had a 'debugging' feature in
emacs-w3 for a while now that did just this, and its pretty helpful. I
wish arena had the option of doing a split-window and seeing source and
HTML at the same time, with the bad areas marked in red or some such.
Having to launch the editor to see the offending areas is a bit of a pain.
> I think you'll see vendors starting to enforce strict SGML compliance
> just as soon as the WWW community at large decides it's a feature instead
> of a bug.
One thing that will help bring this on is a good WYSI(sortof)WYG HTML
editor for dirt cheap or free, that validates against a DTD. HoTMetaL is a
good one, and psgml (if it was easier to set up). This is on the drawing
board for both emacs-w3 and Arena as well.
> We can get away with taking a stronger stance than some vendors because
> we don't make all our money off of HTML software, but even we have to be
> pragmatists or we lose sales and reputation. We spent about twice as
> much time getting our parser to swallow common illegal HTML than we did
> getting it up and running on legal content.
Only twice as long? You must have forgotten something then. :)
-Bill P.