Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Web browsers still don't work
Author: James R. Dezendorf Posted: 3/28/1999; 1:27:11 AM Topic: Build interfaces with xml: XUL (cnet article) Msg #: 4608 (In response to 4593) Prev/Next: 4607 / 4609
[note: this may be a bit of a rant, because I had to work on Saturday on problems relating to this and I'm still pissed about it]I'm really going to have to agree with Dave on this one, I've been coding sites for a long time, and I'm still waiting for a browser that fully implements the complete HTML 2 feature set:
Bad things that still happen: [note: when I say 'no browser', I mean no browser that any of my clients would care about]
1. No browser acutally ignores white space completely. This has been in the HTML spec from the beginning.
2. No browser implements tables corretly. In fact, Netscape, which was the first browser to support tables is actually worse than IE at this point. Try to create a table with the width and height tags in place but no contents at all.
3. No browser supports the full implementation of PNG, a standard that is both superior to existing bitmap [gif, jpeg] formats in features [file size, alpha channel] but is also completely free.
4. Ditto for CSS.
The fact of the matter is, if Netscape and Microsoft both stopped trying to take over your computer and make the web a 'richer' place and got their acts together on *existing* technologies, us graphic designers would stop annoying you backend people because something was 'one pixel off' [I can't tell you how many times I've had to say that]. Even if they just got tables right it would be a boon to all of us. And I can't even start telling you the kinds of benefits being able to layer alpha-channeled graphics could have for interface design.
Dave's also right about