SeriousPHP

Sorry Frank. That article is simply a disinformation article with quite a political bent. It really is a shame that the making of claims that the table somehow is not valid xhtml is acceptable. I mean when you lie like the author of your link does about screenreader accesibility or pda issues regarding tables you are discredited entirely. In fact the moan is about the demise of these devices which cannot do a $500+ job for the user in favor of, you guessed it, MS products that handle the content rather than illuminate the deficiencies in the sites the guy who paid $500+ is trying to visit. Why does he do this? Well in the business we all know why. It's part of being in the anti-Microsoft clique.

There is an interesting history behind the entire matter of "web standards". Most people do not realize that Microsoft was the pioneer in css. In fact when I started doing web work as opposed to terminal work the competing browsers had no idea of even simple concepts like absolute position. After MS had taken the lead in not only defining but also implementing both html and css along came a group of academics hateful of corporate America declaring a standard. Of course they had no authority to declare a "standard". What they did have was a presumption that the company that made the PC useful should not have a say in this standard. Interestingly enough the W3C actually sells links on their web site. Kind of a cottage industry growing up out of dictating a standard from a appropriately windowless university office. Therein lies the rub and the anti-MS crowd will say anything to make their case.

Tables are in the xhtml spec. I-frames, on the other hand, are gone by xhtml 1.1. This becomes a problem for many realtors saddled by MLS rules and technology that make this their only real choice for displaying idx. In terms of usefulness "web standards" serve as a throttle to bring us all down to the level of the least useful software available. There can be little argument that MS J-Script is vastly superior to the amatuer Javascript.

For those who feel I'm making something out of nothing here is an example. The "alt" attribute of an image has traditionally been used to produce a tooltip. Actually this is not the "correct" usage of the "alt". It is meant to produce something useful for non-graphical browsers such as text based and screenreading browsers for the blind. The correct attribute to produce a tooltip is the "title" attribute. When the Firefox browser came out the decision was made to teach people a lesson by taking away the tooltip function from the alt attribute so as to force the use of the title attribute. This did not serve the user. A japanese fellow came along and made an extension for the ole fox to show the alt tag as a tooltip in FX. He was made into a pariah and his extension broken and dropped from the directory at every opportunity.

Here is another example of the political war. Since no one but MS was writing implementation of elements and tags like my personal favorite the fieldset MS figured their own way to render it. Years later the W3C dictates a "standard" and MS becomes a villian for not abandoning its customers who came to rely on its rendering engine. Tainted statistics from dishonest sites all across the web suggest that the "Firefox phenomenon" is sweeping the world at an amazing rate when the truth is many segments of the web have seen nearly no increase in alternative browser traffic. It is an incredibly bold statement to say that anyone will lose business by not bowing to the W3C dictates without consulting the individual site logs first.

Am I anti "web standards"? Of course not. In fact seriousphp.com is 100% pure xhtml 1.1 and CSS2 with the little click on icons on the bottom that will take you to the validators showing NO errors at all. In this case I did not need the extra power of the MS browser. The point is that the "web standards movement" is much more than an attempt to come up with a set of standards. It is an attempt by a group of people who have never sold anything more than links on their web site to define a set of edicts meant to level the field at its lowest level. Do you need to roll your site to this standard? Have a look at your logs. If you have few non-MS browsers visiting your site spend your money improving your site elsewhere first.