Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
We lawyers have a saying to the effect that we cannot go about breaking open peoples' heads to find that what they intend. We need to gather intentions from words acts and deeds.
And technologists _needn't_ be the most articulate. Unfortunately, that's just the way it can be. The rest of the world will have to deal with it.
And javascript removes control from my hands. I want only one window open at a time; and have twenty or thirty tabs open in Mozilla firefox at a time. It is irritating when a page opens in a new window. I have disabled permission for pages to open new windows.
Java and JavaScript are in no way related. Java is an object oriented programming language created at Sun Microsystems. JavaScript is an object oriented scripting language commonly used in websites. It was originally developed by Netscape.
This is where I have a problem. W3C standards compliance does not necessarily imply ease of use, accessibility or anything like that.
W3C standards is not merely HTML 4.01. It goes much beyond that. W3C has standards for CSS. CSS prescribes standards for visual and aural styles.
I didn't say HTML or any other specific standard. I said "standards compliance". I repeat, you can find W3C and other standards compliant ((X)HTML, CSS, 508, aaa ...) sites that are absolutely horrendous to use.
That is a human error. For example, look at the fsf.org.in pages. They are W3C html compliant. But use tables to control layout. That is deprecated by the W3C. W3C recommends that people use stylesheets to control layout, and suggests that tables be used to display data. FSF's pages pass the html 4.01 `strict' dtd when run through W3C's HTMLtidy; but, the trouble comes when people with disabilities try to use them.
Explain to me how css based positioning is easier on people with disabilities than table based positioning. Unless you're suggesting everyone (with vision or other problems) strip every site of all its design, and replace it with a custom stylesheet with huge fonts and extremely contrasted colours. Overriding the site intended aesthetics is the only place where I can see relative positioning and relative font sizes winning over hard coded tables. But technically, there is nothing preventing something similar being done for tables also.
But would this lead to multiplicity of standards?
Standards are good and important and we all know that. And yes, multiplicity is not good. It's just, when the people who are really responsible for the technology have needs not always met by the standards or when the standards body fails to keep up with current technology I fail to see the point of those standards. Eventually, through a survival of the fittest scheme, the relevant one will survive.
A tidbit related the whatwg site I linked in the last reply.
"Another reason for working outside the W3C could be the rift between Mozilla/Opera and other W3C members over what technologies Web applications solutions such be based on: Mozilla/Opera favour a backwards-compatible HTML-based standard, others are looking towards to XForms and SVG. It will be interesting to see if any other browser developers jump on board WHATWG."
Got the point?
Of course I did. All I was trying to say is, chide them for the obnoxious ad, or how inconsiderate they seemingly are to people with disabilities (or those that run much larger font sizes than they originally intended). Don't make this about "standards compliant". Because they can very well be (W3C) standards compliant and still be "evil" in all those respects you seem to find wrong with them.
My point in all of this being, a good site is a good site, and a bad one's bad. A fully standards compliant one has a better probability of being good, that's all. Breaking something small (for instance XHTML fails to validate on <br> but is fine with <br />) is not always a horrendous crime, considering the standards and current technology (and the people behind them) needn't always be in sync.
Harish