As I said I don't know why I bothered.

Bob
http://totallyfreeads.com

I never test my pages with the W3 Validators, Paul. And it doesn't suprise me that it gives you errors.

The nature of my main web page (www.fbagroup.co.uk) could never ever be W3 compatible, due to that stupid line going up the left hand side.

I blame it on these graphic designers that keep nagging in my ear ;-)

- wil

Not really, Paul.

I see Mosiac kicking off a big storm with developers. I think it's the developers choice to be honest with you.

And if we are to believe the broadband hype, we can expect to see a lot more WebTV users.

Your problem is that that you don't remember the net in the early days of Mosaic (the browser that IE is based so poorly on) and Netscape.

I have to agree with , I don't understand your fixation with Microsoft products, and the fact that they have a monopoly must make them a good product. Have you ever driven a Ford?!!!!!

A very good quote comes from Linus Torvalds (the man behind Linux) :

That was a quote from Cisco systems interviewing him (saw this on Slashdot).

Wil



- wil

....out roll the excuses..... The doctype is the first thing you should add...you don't need a validator to tell you you missed it.


Lets not forget Mozilla that Netscape is so poorly based on

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I don't have a problem if you like Netscape.

I don't like Netscape. I like Mozilla. And I like gecko which it is based upon.

There are no excuses with me Paul. I know that my pages will not pass. Well, that paticular site, because it was built using Dreamweaver by our design team who are not familiar with the world wide web.

I then had to convert these into more browser friendly pages, which gave me a real headache. Ever tried working with a bunch of print designers who really don't have a clue what the web is all about? 'So what's wrong with a high-res, 79mb image ???'. << shudder >>.

When I have the time I'll redoe the site using layers, which should allow me to redo what the designers orignally had in mind (overlapping images and so forth). Until then, the site can be viewed on all browsers that visit the site, so I don't have much of a problem.

I have much more of a problem with the Flash files on my site actually, and the fact that a lot of information is within the flash graphics. This, in my opinion, is very very bad. Especially as this is a site for a PR company trying to get the message out to a maximum audience.


- wil

I recently installed NT 4 and it came with IE 2 (or was it 3?). I thought "Oh, I'll zip over to Microsoft and download 6x." Guess what? You can't get to Microsoft's web site with a 2x browser. You'd think of all people in the world, M$ would make it's own sites compatible with it's own products.

Eliot will be pleased to know his site came up (although at 640 x 480 & 16 colors it wasn't pretty).

I view javascript as a 'personal option' like cookies, so if my javascript works and you choose to turn it off, then that is your personal choice so my page may not work properly, but that doesn't mean it's 'broken'.

However, at work we do have a target audience and we flat out tell them that they need IE 5x or higher, and it may or may not work with NS 6x. We view it as installing software, you have minimum specifications to make our software (website) work if you want to use our services. (legal docs).

I remember having that same glitch when I installed NT4. It comes with IE3 (otherwise known as a complete rip off of Mosaic).

I had to FTP in the end.

- wil

Mmmmm what's going on with your html?

You have name attributes in table and image tags.

Been using FP again?

Yes, I know...

Here are my design specs for AnthroTECH sites:

Web Browser: NS 4.X (with some level of degradation going back to NS 3.0)/IE 4.X (with some degradation going back to IE 3.02)

Operating System: Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and Macintosh 8.0 and 10.0

Screen Resolution: 800X600 (yet browsable with 640X480)

Colors: 256

Basically, these specs are the same at my "real" job (business school), but Macs will be taken out of our testing procedures by Feb. 2002, when my boss and co-workers move to PCs/Windows 2000. The percentage of Mac users will go down to .5% (which doesn't warrant extensive testing on that OS).


========================================
Buh Bye!

Cheers,
Me

Um. No. Elaborate ?

You can stick a name attribute in anything you want, especially if you're using javascript/stylesheets.

- wil

No you can't.

Well they aren't needed in your main page and also w3.org has a great dislike for them

Why not? If I want to change an image, say a rollover with javascript, or I want to insert text into a SPAN field, then I need to name that area?

- wil

You can do rollovers without name=""

Anyway all I said was it spews errors with w3.org

OK. Where on my pages do I name elements where I shouldn't have?

- wil

Put it this way, I made a copy of your main page, added a doctype, fixed up some other errors and removed the name="" and the page validated. (and still worked as normal)

Yeah, I just can't find the TABLE nad IMG that have NAME/VALUE attirbutes attached to them.

- wil

<table width="95%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" name="main">

<img src="/images/fbalogo.gif" border="0" width="120" height="53" name="fba_logo">

Those were just two I quickly found.

Aha.

I see the main TABLE with the tag NAME="main" attached to it.

I remember now! That's still there from when I tried to have the left hand nav bar move in on open using DHTML. I scrapped the idea in the end, in favor of less gimicks and more user friendly pages.

What I didnt' scrap, was the redundant tags.

Thanks for the heads up.

Cheers

Wil

- wil

I completely sympathize with the MS-hating here, but it seems to be warping some minds. MSIE is *much* easier to develop for, especially for more advanced client-side stuff like DHTML, but we can't drop Netscape YET....I make a mix of corporate identity and ecommerce sites for various fortune 500s, and netscape 4x users are down into the single digits now but still there.

What gives me hope, actually, is NS6.2.....I am blown away at the amount of code that I wrote for IE that works great in ns6.2; I would save a good 10% of my development time if all those NS4x users would make the switch.

As for the 'sloppy coding' question, I'm with you in spirit but the fact is that one browser, the one nearly everyone uses, does it's best to show you the page you're trying to look at even if it's not perfect, and MOST of the web isn't and never will be perfectly coded. THAT'S THE BROWSERS' JOB, to show you webpages, not to enforce some abstract coding standard that only we programmers will ever give a rats ass about.

When I am looking for information on the web, I want to see the page, not watch Nutscrape flicker and reload and flicker and reload and finally stall because some tag isn't closed

6.2 is definitely a step in the right direction but even if Windows XP came with Netscape pre-installed I'd still delete it and install something else :)

As for the strictness with html, on the one hand it is good as it forces webmasters to use better html, but in reality, no-one has the time or patience to make the html 100% perfect and so it ends up being a hinderence rather than a benefit.

I reckon many more people would use Netscape if it wasn't so strict with html, because at the end of the day, surfers want to see a really nice looking site and don't really care what the code looks like but with Netscape you end up with a blank page or something really awful looking and even though that isn't the fault of Netscape it puts people off using the browser :)

I use netscape 4x for the mail client, because of the security issues with outlook and old habit...but you couldn't make me use windows XP without applying some seriously barbaric tortures....

>>
you couldn't make me use windows XP without applying some seriously barbaric tortures....
<<

Such as?

Hey, forget Netscape ... Mozilla is a few weeks away from stable release of it's first ever version 1.0. Even AOL are developing a browser based on the Mozilla open-source Gecko engine. This is the way ahead!

- wil

>>
Even AOL are developing a browser based on the Mozilla open-source Gecko engine.
<<

I thought about starting one myself but I doubt I'd finish it.

Jeepers, good luck! Mozilla is definitily worth a look, though. Some real hard work gone into that and it looks rock solid. I've been following it for the last few months since .9.6 and it looks great.

- wil