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

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mar 24, 2006 11:30AM

Karl Groves wrote:

> We're in a vicious circle - user-agents don't support specs because
> authors don't, either. Authors aren't inclined to follow specs if it
> renders in their favorite user-agents.

Assistive technology could, however, do something similar to the DOCTYPE
switching in browsers. If a page is old-style tag soup, it's very likely
not to be following the HTML spec, so process it by trying to divine
meaning and context through heuristics etc. If a DOCTYPE is present,
give preference to using HTML's features that can unequivocally define
meaning and context, rather than guesstimating.

> What a great vision it would be if all of a sudden browsers refused to
> display invalid markup

I've often pondered what it would be like if widely used browsers such
as IE had a (subtle, but still quite visible) warning sign for tag soup
sites (similar to the warning triangle you get for javascript errors,
but a bit more visible and obvious). I could imagine discussions between
web developers and their bosses (head of marketing or similar) along the
lines of "why does our site bring up that warning, while our
competitor's site doesn't?" (this obviously focussed on developers who
don't care about standards and work in a corporate environment).

P
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Patrick H. Lauke
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