Re: LYNX-DEV don't give a damn?

[Hiram Lester, Jr.]

On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, David Combs wrote:

> And what about a NEW browser from MS or NS or someone else
> that isn't as forgiving of errors.  That they'd want
> THAT  browser to read their pages OK.

A perfect example is Netscape 1.x's missing closing quotes on HREF's.
When they fixed it in Netscape 2.x, lots of pages "broke" (they were
really already broken, but...).  With Microsoft making a commitment to
adhere more strictly to the standards (check out
http://www.microsoft.com/internet/html.htm), we may see some changes in
the way IE handles invalid things...  Netscape might even jump on the
bandwagon...

> Maybe educational too: point them to web documents that
> show common html errors; style documents, etc.  Lots out
> there, I think.

I attended a conference this weekend called the Church Internet Conference
that was aimed at getting churches online and such.  One of the classes
was "Advanced HTML", and it was being taught by a friend of mine.  I was
very pleased when he mentioned validation, and a number of other things
that have been kicked around on this list from time to time.  I still
contributed where I thought he skimped a bit, but his web philosophy is
very similar to mine and probably most of the people on this list.  It was
an excellent presentation.  Full notes and URL's from the whole conference
will be available soon, and I'll post the URL. 

The main reason I started posting this is that in that Advanced HTML
class, he used a page from the web that did a very good job of covering
some advanced topics while throwing in some stylistic comments where
appropriate.  I'll bet the author is conversant with Lynx. :)  I don't
have the URL with me right now, but I'll post it soon.

> Point to some good books, too.
> 
> (Especially "How not to write web pages", discussed before
> as something that this group could write.)

:) If we could find some really good books out there to recommend... I've
never really looked at any of them to see if they adequately cover some of
those points that people need to hear.

I found an interesting HTML editing tool for Win 3.1 that might bare
mentioning here.  It's called Webber.  It is not WYSIWYG, but it will
allow you to jump to a browser (or several) to view your work.  It is
intended for those wishing to work directly with the HTML, and includes a
spell checker (in the registered version), a DTD based validator
(2.0, 3.0, 3.2, NS and MS... recommended and deprecated versions of all!
These things DO catch invalid comments!), a tag reference in Windows help
file format (with examples and a compatibility chart to show which DTD's
that tag is part of), several tools (forms, tables, tags... the tags tool
brings up the tag of your choice with all of it's possible attributes
listed in a fill-in-the-blank manner and can be set to show only tags
which are valid in your current context), and of course all the normal
editing features with some features geared toward HTML (tag locking).  It
also allows you to set up certain tags to be included as sort of a
template HTML document.  The only error I found (in my 2 days of playing
with it. <g>) was in the tag help for LINK: they said that LINK was not
implemented by any browsers yet.  I plan on sending them a comment that
Lynx has implemented a portion of LINK for sometime.  It seems that I came
across a month or so ago with LINK's to next and previous and Lynx
displayed them.  Was this just my imagination?  If not, I'll send in that
info as well.  It would be nice to get Lynx listed as the only browser
that supported something in a tool like that. :)

Man, I hadn't intended to rave on about that thing. :)  I don't normally
use such tools, but thought it might be of interest to those who do, and
since it seems to be geared so much toward producing *GOOD* HTML in the
bargain... :)

   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
   | Hiram W. Lester, Jr.               | E-Mail: address@hidden    |
   | Computer Science                   | Home page:                    |
   | Middle Tennessee State University  |   http://pobox.com/~hwlester/ |
   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+

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