Re: LYNX-DEV HREF pedantry

[David Woolley]

> 
> But what should Lynx do without any heuristics?  Just give up?
> Should Lynx become a validator?

It is the fact that virtually nobody uses a validator other than their
browser (or rather, these days, assume that what FrontPage generates must
be valid) that gets us into this sort of problem in the first place.
Lynx started off being much more strict, and, whilst it has to have
the heuristics in order to cope in the real world, to the extent that
it is possible to isolate and disable them (probably its too late now)
it could mean that anyone who was willing to provide Lynx compatibility
would be made aware of the bad HTML without running a validator

It would be much better if MSIE had a strict mode (strangely, the MS 
support newsgroups seem to be indicating that Netscape is finding more
broken HTML at the moment ("Why doesn't my ASP page work on Netscape?",
tends to be answered by saying that Netscape is more strict) in spite
of their reputation in the Lynx world for tag soup).  But I I suspect
that Lynx gets run on more pages than do formal validators.

I don't know how MSIE is internally structured, but Lynx (2.7) is structured
as an SGML parser with deliberate compromises, rather than as a tag soup
formatter.


ASP - Active Server Pages - Microsoft's server side scripting engine
MSIE - Microsoft Internet Explorer
FrontPage - the Microsoft premium web authoring tool, but the comment probably
applies to PageMill, LiveWire, Netscape Gold, Word 97, etc.
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