Yeah, but people have fought long and hard to set
standards and really it is up to us to adhere to those standards.
I personally do think that it's great that NS and Mozilla will not display your page properly if you miss a closing tag. It is important that we all code correctly and properly or things are going to get way out of hand.
I can appreciate what IE has done with the early days of the net. They have even adopted the <CENTER> tag in the latest releases of their browsers (ughghghg!) and it does make pages more accessible to the majority.
But then again, does it? It encourages lazy coding, and people using special browsers for various disabilities they may have, or lack of system resources they are able to afford, will not be able to view your pages. And that's what TBL and others have all fought hard for against the big corporations for years. It is proven that it does cause major problems for people with screen readers, audio browsers, and text-only browsers. The latter I know from personal experiences.
Quote:
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
-- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
I think this will become a lot more evident with the widespread use of XML. Simple facts like XML must be properly nested (which is extremely important, IMO) and elements must be closed (even empty ones). The value assigned to an attribute must be enclosed in quotes. You must have a DOCTYPE header. And so forth ...
With the way a lot of developers are currently coding; the jump to XML will be difficult and will cause a lot more headaches than necessary. But the W3 are standing their ground on this, and insisting that you do adhere to the standards, and have actually written it into the specifications.
Anyway, just trying to get a few of my beliefs as a designer and developer across.
Back to work ...
- wil