Conforming to the W3C standards—redux
In my previous conformance statement, I was saying that bmt-online would display the same on every XHTML 1.1 conforming browser. This is still true. However…
The sad reality is that as I write this, browsers that support XHTML 1.1 are only a
handful—that would be recent versions of Mozilla and Fire[Bird/Fox]. When vendors
choose to not implement current standards, I guess, being standard-compliant still
is vendor-specific 
fri 2004-03-26
Conforming to the W3C standards
All the pages published on this web site are conforming to the W3 consortium standards, as indicated by the following tags:
What this means is that this page is stripped out of all the fancy buzz-technology that runs around the Internet, and that it will be happily displayed on any XHTML 1.1 conforming web browser. In particular, no proprietary HTML construct was used on the page.
This is to show that the author of the page is commited to produce quality, hand-crafted HTML code. It is not optimised for any version of any specific browser. It will be equally interpreted by Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Lynx or your cell-phone WAP browser.
2003-07
How it came to be
When I started to compose this web site, early november 2002, I already had had some experience of creating my own web pages. It went along two lines:
- On the one hand, I had already tried to create it by hand, and had only gotten myself drowned in the apparent complexity of HTML, as well as big page setup issues.
- I had also tried to use WYSIWYG editors, MS Word not being the least of all, only to find out that the output code was... ugly as hell !
So this time, I decided that there would be no WYSIWYG editor in the process. I said to myself: I want none of that ! The problem was then to find a good resource on how to write correct (or at least correct enough) HTML code.
I think quite by chance, I came across the ALL HTML web site: a french resource web site for webmasters, offering a complete enough collection of information about all the tools that a webmaster can come across when designing his own website: HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc.
So there I went, putting my first shot at the employment web site, following the good enough advice nicely published on ALL HTML. The end result was quite satisfying and things could have stayed as they were. However, while still having the website in mind, I came across the web page of a friend—Olivier Aubert [1]—which led me to the HTML validator of the W3 consortium.
So that's when I realised what had been bothering me all this time: I have the strong conviction that it is not the tool that makes the language, but the specification. I had been developing my web page with the only satisfaction that it was being interpreted as I more or less wanted by a web browser. What guaranty did I have that the code I had written was portable across browsers ? None. So I had my answer: there was indeed a specification for the HTML language, and there were tools to check the validity of a piece of code.
2003-07 last revised: 2004-04-16
[1] I used to know Olivier's home page address, but he has moved without notifying me. If you happen to know about his new cyber-whereabouts, please drop me a line.
