|
|
Posted by Jim Higson on 10/02/05 19:14
Alan J. Flavell wrote:
>> Browsers tend to compensate for bad HTML more than bad CSS because the de
>> facto rules on what bad HTML to accept were created in the 'wild west'
>> early days of the web, when browser makers regularly disregarded the
>> specs.
> There's something in what you say, but CSS is older than you seem to
> be making out...
I didn't realise how old CSS was!
{snip}
>> Specifically, disregarding invalid CSS rules is good because it makes
>> future compatability easier.
>
> Just so!
Another neat benefit is it allows vendor-specific CSS 'extentions' to be
added without causing too many problems.
In the content layer (HTML etc) this would be a bad thing, but if browsers
that don't recognise proprietary style rules ignore them, the degrading can
be pretty graceful. For example, recent Gecko builds (FF1.5 etc) provide an
early draft of css3 column support (try -moz-column-width etc) while the
W3C are still working on the spec. This way they clearly mark their
implementation as experimental and subject to change without notice but can
still put it in official builds for testing and not interfere with other
browsers.
It also allows some very ugly stuff to be added, for example the filter
property in MSIE that never really took off (I'd bet they drop support
after IE7). But at ignoring what you don't recognise isolates other
browsers from trying to interpret hacks to force IE to show transparent
PNGs.
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|