HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

[David Cuthbert]

Oh, I definitely *should* care.  But, eh, engineering anything decent
always includes a chapter on working around annoying constraints, so
while I can sympathise with the problem, I just chalk it up to "just
another imperfect system one can work around."  The annoyances of
dealing with quirky hardware far outstrip the quirks of web browsers.
Personally, I limit myself to simple tables and font styles.  Oh, I
know about the advantages of CSS and such; but preprocessed HTML works
much more reliably.
Of late, I've even foregone much of that, limiting myself to Wikis and,
when a Wiki isn't available, wrapping everything in <pre> tags (see
http://www.kanga-da.org/ for example).
<shrug>  Maybe if I were a designer, instead of an engineer, in a
different life.
Dave

James Frazer wrote:
You should care.  If more people cared about web designers using proper 
markup then browser designers (microsoft) would be more willing to make 
their browsers so that they don't suck.   Consequently the web designers 
could spend more time on content and less time fixing strange Internet 
Explorer rendering problems.

Web designers use a number of 'sick' hacks to make things display 
properly on bad browsers - IE5/IE6 - there is a lot of overhead in 
dealing with strange IE problems.

I think this time could be better spent on improving the overall content 
and features of the site.  Unfortunately users don't care about valid 
markup, nor do they care whether or not their browser impliments things 
properly.

So yes, valid markup is important.

--James

David Cuthbert wrote:

Eh.  As a user, I don't care whether the underlying site is valid XHTML,
HTML, XML, SGML, PDF, EBCDIC, ..., just so long as it's visually
appealing and I can read it.
There are arguably 30-40 other concepts/sites which are equally
compelling to link.