Re: CSS & tables

Paul M Foster wrote:

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 08:12:29PM -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:

Stephen wrote:

My sites are still viewable, and can be navigated. They just look strange. Government workers are used to strange :) Stephen

My experience is that government web sites are often the worst, frequently designed in MS word using brutally illegal html that only works in IE. They have fixed most of it, but one awful example was certain parts of the Shasta County website - MS word produced an html document involving really weird namespaces (illegal in html) that looked OK in IE - but in any other browser, you were presented with images of the text - images that then were scaled so you couldn't even read the text was written unless you clicked on an image and chose "view image" to see the image at it's native resolution. That's why government sites need regulation about web design. Often they would rather let their secretary do the site in word than use some of their budget to hire someone who actually knows what they are doing. Laws that force them to meet certain standards forces them to hire someone who knows what they are doing.

Are you the same guy who was lobbying for the licensing of PHP/HTML programmers? Argh.

No - not me. I do like w3c compliant code in most cases (I could care less if, say, a custom attribute that means nothing to display is used w/o defining a custom DTD), but I don't want any kind of licensing program. Such a program even if it had good intentions would be impossible to enforce given the international nature of the web. I do however feel that government sites need to work in any reasonably modern browser. Commercial sites - those with poor design will often ultimately lose business. Government sites though provide information that I as a citizen and tax payer have a right to access regardless of what operating system and browser I use. The information needs to accessible whether I'm using the latest browser or lynx.