Sinful Browsing
October 28th, 2004 • Rants
So now standard-compliant browsers are sinners?! What happened to all the talks?!
A while ago there was a long debate about whether to be strict or loose when it comes to invalid markup, both camps had their points, and the problem is there is no right or wrong here, it’s all relative. Strict parsers have their advantage, namely making developers play by the rules, obey the standards, and make life easier. The catch? The user gets it, if a parser finds invalid markup that it won’t display, then it’s absolutely useless to the user. Users (oh great users) don’t care what the word markup means, what a parser is, or what’s with all the W3C hype; they expect results, and results they should get.
So does this leave us with loose parsers? After all, they deliver results too. But we’ve seen how Microsoft’s IE let all site-hell break loose, developers and designers started depending on IE being too forgiving, and now browsers like Opera and Mozilla bust their butts off in trying to understand the crappy markup of most IE-dependent site. Do we want that to happen all over again?!
Once nice solution I came across was FeedDemon’s. FeedDemon doesn’t punish the user for a site owner’s mistake, it still parses invalid feeds and displays them, but that doesn’t stop it from complaining, it pops up a message telling the user that the feed contains invalid markup but it will add it anyway. See, that’s what I like, don’t cause me trouble over someone else’s mistakes, tell me about it, but don’t make me curse and bad-mouth people.
So Firefox has a nice shiny orange RSS icons in the status bar, and I assume that Firefox, like the rest of the browsers, can know when the markup is valid or not, so why not display a shiny black icon with a skull announcing that it came across a bad site but it will display it anyway, no guarantees though. I don’t think many I’ll like it if my site made browsers tell everyone that I’m an idiot who can’t get their XHTML right, I would fix the markup for one sole reason: “Keep that hideous icon off my eyes, please!”, not because I care about the standards, not because I don’t want to hear endless debates on how obeying W3C can save our lives, but only because I don’t want anyone complaining.
Does this make IE right just because it doesn’t complain about invalid markup?! No it doesn’t. Should we follow its lead?! You betcha! If Firefox wants 10% market share, then it’s better start working on it now, and that includes being harmed and wounded by “razor-sharp” markup, crashing on NULL pointers, going to XHTML rehab centers until it can satisfy all of W3C, web designers, accessibility and usability experts, cry-babies, and above all, us users.
3 Responses (Add Your Comment)
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“Does this make IE right just because it doesn’t complain about invalid markup?! No it doesn’t. Should we follow its lead?! You betcha!”
Are you suggesting that other browsers should be as lenient with HTML as Internet Explorer is? I don’t think that they should be. HTML is flexible enough that avoiding proprietary elements and nesting tags correctly is simple to do. It also teaches the web designer not to rely on one browser’s quirks and not to assume that the same quirks do exist (or, as you are suggesting) will exist in other browsers as well.
… Unless I am misinterpreting your words, which could be the case. :)
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Turns out spell-check doesn’t always work :) Thanks Tom for pointing out those typos, they’re fixed now.
Well, I’m not suggesting that other browsers should add a load of proprietary extensions and tags, I hate the quirks mode, you never know when it might come back to haunt you. What I’m suggesting is that other browsers should be at least as forgiving as IE about faulty markup, make it HTML, XML, *ML, but still notifying the user about it. This way, not following standards makes it the developer’s loss rather than the user’s.
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You don’t have to post this comment, but I thought I would comment on two errors that I saw:
I hate to be picky, but I thought you should know. :)