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Re: FW: HTML - <abbr> and <acronym> settings

for

From: Tim Beadle
Date: Mar 24, 2006 8:00AM

On 24/03/06, Karl Groves < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> What a great vision it would be if all of a sudden browsers refused to
> display invalid markup (and what a great pay raise we'd get when our sites
> were among the unfortunate few that actually still worked!)

That version/vision of the WWW would be technically excellent but
rather limited. The growth of the web stems from HTML's low barrier to
entry. You don't *have* to put your tags in the right order (or even
the right place!) for your page to work.

If Joanne Public, Amateur Web Publisher got Mozilla's
beige-screen-of-xml-parsing-death every time she misplaced a tag, she
would soon find something less challenging to do instead. HTML is,
therefore, a double-edged sword. It's easy, but therefore open to
abuse and neglect.

It would be nice if major authoring tools (*cough* Apple iWeb, Google
Page Creator *cough*) created valid, semantic, accessible code, but
it's not an easy thing to achieve. If Google can solve search, I'm
sure they could solve WYSIWYG -> semantic/structured HTML.

Tim