[feldon23]

NTLDR said:
If your following proper standards, which as a webmaster you should, the DOCTYPE is required for all HTML documents and the " are required if you use XHTML and therefore should be included if you want all users to be able to view the site correctly.

(donning flameproof underwear)


You are a respected member here, but I must jump in (months late, granted) with my opinions...


First, w3.org are not gods. They are a committee, an organization. They are also out-of-control and need to be reigned in. They are trying to turn HTML into a page description format, but not the correct way. The monstrosity they have created is the wrong thing to introduce now, since Acrobat PDF is now ubiquitous.

They're giving HTML so many disparate layers that it is difficult or impossible to debug. Why is the W3 not holding protests in front of Microsoft HQ for IE not supporting PNG correctly? PNG is much more exciting to me than ripping apart the current tolerable TABLE system we have now.

I firmly believe that if you follow w3.org 100% you will end up in a straightjacket.

Any time you start using CSS, you cannot use it partially--you have to use it 100%. It does not co-exist peacefully with HTML because of the nightmarish inheritance.

It took me 3 HOURS to get a simple page looking the way I wanted with CSS. I should have just done a nasty search-and-replace and put manual font tags on everything. The tutorials on the web are horrible. They tell you what the tags do, not the when/where/why/how.

Look at the PHP manual. That is a COOOOOL manual. Everything has little notes about why you should or shouldn't use 1 command over another. Every command has links to examples of what situations this command is used for. There is no way I could have figured out arrays without a simple page like they wrote.

You know why I put the W3C-certified logo/button on that page? Because I felt I had accomplished something by wrestling CSS under control long enough to put out a page. If I did not have a use for this code for many other websites, I'd be furious.

Maybe I am just stupid, but I think I tried 50 different ways of assigning styles to the text on that page and they all had various inheritance problems until I explicitly laid out everything. First, I tried <h1> thru <h9> tags and it made pathetic attempts to marry the standard HTML <h1> - <h6> specifications with the CSS I was giving it.


If I add this as a style at the top of my page:

#feldon26 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica; }

it makes all kinds of assumptions about what kind of linespacing, letterspacing, margins, etc. about any text you put inside:

<div id="chattext"></div>

I guess Microsoft is their role model?

HTML and CSS are supposed to be 100% explicit, 0% implicit. It should assume very little, and CSS assumes a whole hell of a lot.


Can I ask who is writing XHTML? I write fairly complex pages and I've never even heard of it. That's the great thing about standards. There are so many to choose from.