gabriel rosenkoetter on Tue, 18 Dec 2001 02:00:31 +0100


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Re: [PLUG] interesting experiment


On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 02:12:29PM -0400, Arthur S. Alexion wrote:
> I use Opera a lot, and had been led to believe that it was relatively 
> high in standards compliance. The article points out that MS was 
> disengenuous in blaming Opera blocking on lack of standards compliance 
> since MSN, itself, is not compliant. It doesn't address whether the MS 
> statement was also false with regard to the extent of Opera's 
> compliance. Does anyone know?

First off, and this isn't a rant focused on you, Arthur, at all:
it's kind of irrelevant, imho. The point of HTML standards, as the
W3C has been writing them for eight years or so no, is that they
degrade gracefully. Even if you have a non-standards-compliant
browser, you'll be able to get some kind of content (provided that
content at least partly comprises regular text and images; don't
get me started on flash). It may not follow the "design spec" of
the company that created the web page, but creating web pages to
such an exacting design spec is ludicrous based on the history and
functionality of HTML and its kin today. If I'm using, say, Netscape
1.1N on a mac, I'm probably doing it because I want to, and it's
really not the web page's business to refuse to serve me. (It's
welcome to take the time to browser detect, but it's default can't
be "We won't help you, sucker!") It's just going to make me shrug
and not bother if someone tells me "you can't see this with your
browser." This is why any browser-based detection is moronic and
irritating.

With that said, Opera Software is glad to answer your question in
excruciating detail:

  http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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