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HTML & Browser Wish List

What simple changes would you like to see?

kaled

11:02 am on Oct 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

With IE development restarted and Firefox beginning to be taken seriously, perhaps now would be a good time to start a wish-list. Maybe Brett (or others) can get representatives of these developers and standards bodies to read this thread.

I will kick off with the following suggestions :-

1) Deprecate event attributes such as onclick.
These should be replaced by a general script attribute thus :-

<a href="mypage.html" script="onclick:'a++; return doSomething()'; onchange:'alert(''oops'')'">

The only minor problem with this is the handling of embedded quotes.

In addition, specialist script attributes could be defined such as javascript3.1 so that events are only assigned if the browser can understand the code. Using multiple script attributes, different handlers could be attached to events for older/newer browsers.

2) Create a client-side include method.
The obvious method is :-

<div src="myfile.htmf">This page requires a newer browser</div>

Within the backward-compatibility text, a link could be added to download a newer browser.
This would be trivial to implement but I would suggest the following :-
- the .htmf extension is adopted for html fragments.
- optional <head> and <body> tags.
- optional <style> tag before any other tags (or within <head> tag)
The style sheet and scripts should be inherited from the parent page but have no effect outside the <div>.

I am only a part-time/amateur webmaster so maybe these features exist in newer or draft versions of HTML, but I've not heard of them.

Kaled.

Gusgsm

1:15 pm on Oct 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Wouldn't it be better for the 1st one a syntax like script="whatever.js" to link external scripts or a script="head:script1" (or something similar) for script placed at the head (like document styles)?

kaled

3:53 pm on Oct 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Gusgsm,

It took me a while to understand what you meant. Yes, there is probably room for both concepts just as style sheets can be external / inline / defined-in-head.

Kaled.

Reflection

5:38 pm on Oct 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

If I had to choose one single improvement, it would be proper support of the min/max-width and min/max-height properties.

mincklerstraat

6:16 pm on Oct 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Legal browser - OS separation. OS's may come with a basic free browser that's limited in functionality like wordpad - think of something like Dillo - and is open source, a source which can be compiled multi-platform for similar multi-platform rendering and behavior. Besides that, browsers can't be bundled with other software, creating a greater awareness and conscious choice behavior on the part of the user when it comes to selecting a browser. Browsers which rise above 20% of market share must raise price, browsers which reach 30% of market share must provide versions for all platforms making up more than 0.5% of desktop market at the equivalent price of the browser on the 'home' OS. Browsers have become part and parcel of the public network of information exchange, and given the historic problems of proprietary markup wasting untold amounts of time and bandwidth, some means of keeping browsers up to standards, and preventing coercion to use a particular operating system in order to design for the web, is in the public interest.

misha

6:18 pm on Oct 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I think xhtml 2 with standards how they should be is a great idea. I think the w3c should hire someone to write its recommendations in a way that isn't impossible to understand :).

I think backwards compatibility is unnecessary. At this point how many computers can't use a modern browser?

I had a computer from 1993 that could only run netscape 4.08; how many of these are there still?

Web design is a mess because not all browsers render code the same, especially with css-p. This, and getting better possiblities with css (ability to snap divs together, ability to allow divs to contain fully, ability to position by percentage better, ability to have multiple backgrounds), are crucial.