The Death of HTML and Antiquated Browsers

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The Death of HTML and Antiquated Browsers

Should we still be coding for the 1% that never gets the word?

cyril kearney

7:44 pm on Feb 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

As most of you probably know <HTML></HTML> as a tag has become depricated in favor of the <!DOCTYPE . . .> element in HTML 4.0.

<HTML></HTML> is now purely optional and serves no purpose any more. It is on its way to oblivion. The scripting language HTML has been radically changed since v 1.0 especially with the inclusion of Cascading Style Sheets.

Problems exist because we are still writing to the old standards and for the non-standard implementations of old obsolete browers. Old Netscape browsers will not display a page not framed with <HTML></HTML>. Layering is a mess too in these old browsers.

Have we reached the point that we need to do some housekeeping (mental as well as physical pages)? Does it make sense to code to HTML 4.0 standards dropping all the optional clutter, use CSS and forget about the 1% of traffic that will have difficulties.

My question is "If we stop coding to the lowest common denominator what kind of impact will it have on your site"?

mdharrold

8:22 pm on Feb 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

Have you read Brett's Post [webmasterworld.com] on how to become a successful site?
The pages should validate and be usable in everything from Lynx to leading edge browsers. eg: keep it close to html 3.2 if you can. Spiders are not to the point they really like eating html 4.0 and the mess that it can bring.

Marshall

8:30 pm on Feb 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

I think you're assuming too much when you say 1%. Across the many sites I manage, the visitor stats show on average that 15-25% are older browsers. I don't think that figure will drop to 1% for at least two years.

bird

8:51 pm on Feb 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

As most of you probably know <HTML></HTML> as a tag has become depricated in favor of the <!DOCTYPE . . .> element in HTML 4.0.

Do you have any official reference for that "depreciation"?
As far as I can tell from the w3c standards documents it has always been recommended practise to use both the SGML declaration and the <html></html> tags, as neither is a replacement for the other. I expect that to remain the case for the forseable future.

Btw: The <html></html> have been optional starting at least with HTML 2.0, as standardized in Nov. 1995 [ietf.org]. There is some confusion here because they didn't mark tags as optional in the early days, but marked all non-optional ones as mandatory instead.

And as a last point, what exactly are you losing by including 13 additional characters in your files, which are probably aleready present in most of them? It's not like it would take hours of extra time to keep our well formed page templates as easily parseable as possible to all browsers and spiders...

The scripting language HTML

Uh, what? ;)

bird

9:21 pm on Feb 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

A little digging just brought me to the Normative Definition of XHTML 1.0 [w3.org]. If I understand this correctly, then the <html> tag has been declared mandatory for the first time in history with XHTML 1.0, as it is the vehicle for the XML name space declaration.

An XHTML page without a <html> tag containing an xmlns attribute doesn't validate. And since the document needs to be "well formed", that makes the closing </html> mandatory as well.

So I just learned something too from this thread... ;)