IanKelley - 9:43 am on Jan 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

XHTML

I never jumped on the XHTML bandwagon, it didn't improve anything so there was no reason to go back and change a lot of code. It was not as if original HTML was going to suddenly stop working in the foreseeable future.

The real world issued a wake-up call.

Exactly! The web is a work in progress. As developers we want perfect standards and strict interpretation because that's how programming languages work.

Well that and cross browser testing sucks.

But HTML has allowed the web to decide it's own fate, and go in unexpected directions, because implementation has been loose and dynamic.

Hacking is good. Who cares if tables weren't meant for layout? It was a great way to implement something that wasn't part of the "standard" at the time. Should we have waited for CSS?

We all knew (I would hope) that consumers were never going to use a browser that forced strict interpretation and thereby broke half of the web.

I guess I'm straying a little off topic... My point is that it really doesn't matter what the browser makers and standards bodies do. Developers will continue to come up with novel ways of accomplishing things, and browser makers will continue to try to render the largest possible percentage of pages in a way that looks good to their users.

Which is not to say that browser makers couldn't do a better job of implementing standards. They can, maybe even will, but making pages look like as much as possible like they were intended is always going to be the primary goal.

Instead of worrying about uniform error recovery they should suggest browsers report errors - that way they might actually get fixed!

You and I might like this idea, but the general public has no interest in it. Why should they? A web page is a user interface, not a development environment.