Wanna see what Fallout was BEFORE it was released?

[Brother None]

ratty: i'm discovering some sites will render in firefox and NOT in IE these days, so even mozilla is getting some "smarts" in their rendering

No, Mozilla isn't getting any "smarts"

See, Ratty is right, what you describe as "smarts" translates as "Oooh, you fucked up HTML? Well, don't worry, the browser will fix it"

Mozilla doesn't. Thank gawd. If a page will render in Firefox and not IE, that's because the page's designer got fed up with IE too

Remember, compatibility is a fucked up thing. A webmaster has to work very hard to have a complex site compatible with multiple browsers. Most don't bother. We certainly don't

 

[Rev. Layle]

no, i clearly had an error in on of my <input> statements rending a form (and extra double quote that would cause the quote count to go out of whack, so-to-speak)... firefox rendered it perfectly, IE would not show those form elements.

IE must have been parsing on the quotes and then igonred the final " />" i had, and firefox must have specifically looked for the " />" instead.

ok

maybe NOT smart, just a different way of parsing HTML

and EITHER WAY, my XHTML was malformed...

 

[Ratty Sr.]

That example just shows Mozilla's markup interpreter has better error recovery, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. What *is* a bad thing is when the browser tolerates major errors in markup, errors that aren't simple lapsi calami, but originate from the developer's poor familiarity with his language of choice. As a result everyone stops conforming to norms, write messy code "because it works" and their tags blink for all eternity.

Why are you using XHTML, anyways?

 

[Rev. Layle]

why not? plus it's the standard we use at work anyways. just allows proper termination of all (x)html elements, plus if we ever needed to parse our HTML documents with an XML parser (which the need is coming soon), any DOM or SAX parser can give a correct representation of the document, and making changes on the fly will be easier.

yeah, javascript and a browser has access to a DOM, but server-side scripts need libraries installed, and an XML parser is way easier to find and is more versitile than a specific HTML parser