Greetings:
The world, it's-a-changing. At
an increasing rate, new browser releases are less
and less tolerant of old HTML coding techniques.
Most websites - even those that have been recently
created - are not compliant with W3C rules and as
a result, do not render consistently in all browsers.
I've seen some pretty strange behavior with web
pages, even on RF Cafe. Therefore, I'm going to
do something about it.
Throughout 2009 I
will attempt to update all of the pages on RF Cafe
to comply with the HTML 4.01 translational DTD (document
type declaration). The pages now are loosely in
the HTML 1.0 translations format now, but I use
the word "loosely" loosely.
As with
most bureaucracies, the
W3C
Consortium has dictated fundamental changes
in HTML coding that has totally rendered some very
common and oft-used tags as unsupported (aka "deprecated").
For instance, the <font> tag is totally gone.
The <b> tab for creating bold text has been
changed to <strong>. Some of the properties
with the <table> tag no longer respond as
they originally did, making rewriting of table tags
necessary. It is utterly stupid what has been done.
Not that long ago, you could get
away with "sloppy" coding and your web page would
look OK anyway. But, as mentioned, it is getting
harder and harder to get away with it. Aside from
the potential of a faulty rendering there is another
penalty to be paid for non-compliance: quirks mode.
When a browser rendering engine looks at a web page,
the first thing it wants to find is a Document Type
Declaration (DTD) to tell it how to decode the HTML
code. If it finds no DTD, it immediately enters
what is called "quirks mode," which takes longer
to process and therefore longer to display the page.
If a DTD is declared, the rendering engine speeds
along until it encounters a non-compliant instruction.
Once it enters quirks mode, it never backs out.
So, if your page is faulty near the beginning, you
will pay a display time longer than if it had no
errors.
A lot of web pages are so
simple that the user never notices any difference
in display times. RF Cafe pages are not so simple.
So, I am attempting to reconstruct all the pages
so that the rendering engines are never required
to enter quirks mode. It ain't gonna be easy.
So far, the home page and a few others
have passed the 100% compliance test as determined
by running them through the code checker on the
W3C website. My CSS file (Cascading Style Sheet)
is 100% as well. That is a good start. As I create
new pages or update others, I work on getting them
all into compliance as well. It will take some time.
As part of the process, I have been
testing the pages in the latest versions of Internet
Explorer (MS), Firefox (Mozilla), Chrome (Google),
Opera (Sun), and Safari (Apple). The display is
very consistent, although some slight differences
can be found. That is with 100% compliant pages,
so the variations are due entirely to the browser
rendering engines. Table borders seem to be the
area having the most variation, but that is minor.
I just thought you might like to
know why you will be seeing some changes. Thanks,
as always, for your patronage.
