Nice Prog but Firefox is much better.

Uwe

“Why can’t you offer backward compatibility?

Old software does not support standards. Didn’t we mention that already? It would be swell if we could have backward compatibility and pure standards compliance. But we can’t. We have to choose. For years, most of us have chosen backward compatibility. But is this really the best choice?

For years, we’ve been taught to be good little web designers, building sites that work in browsers that don’t. Each site we build the old-fashioned way becomes one more dung heap of bad code, one more web destination that will eventually stop working as browsers and standards evolve.

The longer we do it, the more doomed sites proliferate. Thousands of new sites premiere every day. Most of them are built to support bad browsers intead of standards. It’s an epidemic. Enough already. We finally have good browsers. Let’s use them.”

coming from To Hell With Bad Browsers, February 2001

HTML comments were supposed to be readable comments – relevant to the code, Daniel. SGML has a goal to be both readable and typable, you know.

I do understand your point. However, if I’d write my comments in some secret language no one else understood. Would they be technically invalid as well?

Let me spell it out loud, once and for all: Microsoft deserves broken rendering in their browsers.
And Let me spell out what is important, once and for all: It’s only important that one use Web Content Recommendations that is available to all through some browser.

Honestly, I completely understand your point of view. I think it’s the wrong one though.
Let me spell it out loud, once and for all: Customers and visitors of your website should be your top priority. Not some hateress agains Microsoft (even if they deserved it).

I’m sorry, but I don’t like intolerants, Ian. So you’ll be thankful to hear I won’t comment here anymore. Since you daren’t learn anything from deviating opinions (and people with a different vocabulary than your own), what’s the point me commenting here, really, anyway?

Note that I didn’t ask you not to express an opinion, nor did I say anything that suggested I do not value your opinion. All I asked is that you have a little self-restraint as far as the profanities are concerned. That has *nothing* to do with having a rich vocabulary – it’s simply a measure of politeness. One can have a discussion without resorting to swearing, or at least in this arena, and in my experience, this has always been the case.

Am I being unreasonable asking for you to cut out the profanities?

And Let me spell out what is important, once and for all: It’s only important that one use Web Content Recommendations that is available to all through some browser.

Now. Get this into your brains!! Please?

W3C didn’t add comments for Microsoft to use as browser negotiation hacks. They are for explanatory expansions of what the HTML code is for.

Without them modern CSS-based designing would be a lot harder (or probably more dirty).

Or one could just use CSS2.1 according to W3C recommendations, that’s supported in several free, good browsers?

Sigh. Stop frickin’ working around everything for the sake of Microsoft! They’re bad – so let ‘em be, and give them what they deserve! Broken rendering in their shitty browsers.

I actually quite agree with a lot of what you say, eg. CCs are technically invalid, and yes, they are a hack.

Why are CCs technically invalid?
There’s only one CC-Syntax that is truly invalid (because it’s no comment at all) and I’ve never seen it in actual use.
Comments are comments, they may contain almost everything. The syntax of CCs is in no way a problem for parsers or validators.
Invalid is the interpretation of it’s contents in MS products. However, in later versions of Internet Explorer they should be obsoleted by the better standard compilance.

In my opinion CCs are a great invention. Without them modern CSS-based designing would be a lot harder (or probably more dirty).

–
* I’m using mail.ru as an example since it’s one of few really big sites – Alexa Rank #31 – with public stats.

I can just state – from my own experience – that most of my projects (that only have about 10 000 unique users in total / monthly, but still) already have about 60% compliant browsers (20% Opera, 40% Gecko), 30% Internet Explorer 6+ users, and 10% other (older or unknown) browsers. And I don’t think there’ll really be a problem converting most of those 40% to switch when I start working actively with gving them credit for doing just that – in exchange for giving me less work for bugchecking and instead providing a better user experience overall.

Currently even I spend a few 100 dollars a year on Internet Explorer. But I’ll rather spend this money on converting my 4000 “web standards ignorant” users. And I’m sure it’ll be worth at least a dollar a head, in the end.