Funny you should mention (target="_blank") - several weeks ago I noticed that your links to other pages opened in new windows, and I thought "that's cool, I would like that to happen on my page too", and so I viewed your code and compared it with the default code (as set up by blogspot.com) on my own page, and I concluded that it must be that very phrase which caused your links to open in new windows. (Still haven't got round to amending my code, though).
Mind you, as you say it's going to be discontinued, I suppose I'll have to find out what the other ways of doing it are, now....

I like it because it makes it very easy to specify which links open in new windows and which don't.

HTML (and more importantly, XHTML) standards are there for a very good reason. They are an attempt to apply consistency across web browsers. Standards are a good thing. If all web browsers conformed to them, then we wouldn't need to write multiple versions of the same code.

These standards are also important for another good reason: accessibility for those with disabilities. By conforming to the W3C standards, you can ensure that someone with a visual disability can still use your website via a text-only browser or screen reader.

HTML has always been loose, interpreted differently by different browsers and had the potential to be full of errors. With XHTML, the W3C are trying to make things more consistent and to aid accessibility/usability. In my opinion, this is a good thing.

HTML was always supposed to be strict. It's just that browsers let web designers be lazy and get away with mistakes. XHTML is a move in the right direction.

>>If all web browsers conformed to them, then we wouldn't need to write multiple versions of the same code.

You're answering the wrong question. Standards are a good thing (usually) for that reason. Changing standards for no apparent reason is not a good thing.

>>It's just that browsers let web designers be lazy and get away with mistakes.

Yeah, they do. Why not?

It isn't surprising though. Won't be long before the standards change to stop browsers allowing you to see the code at all. In case you steal it or something.

> They are an attempt to apply consistency across web browsers.

That's something I came out very clearly in favour of in my post, I think. But it's certainly not what all the standards changes are about.


> browsers let web designers be lazy and get away with mistakes.

Whether this is a bad thing depends on the mistake. In the example I gave — the inverted commas — it simply doesn't matter. If size=3 and size="3" had two different meanings, that would be fair enough; we'd want to avoid confusion between them. But they don't, so what's the problem with forgiving the mistake? In fact, why not change the standards so that it isn't even officially a mistake, and allow both? Plenty of programming languages contain synonyms, so it'd hardly be unprecedented — the inverted commas could be like the word IS in Cobol: put it in if you like, but you don't have to bother. The only reason to punish this mistake is so that anal-retentive programmers can pat themselves on the back for not making it while life is made more difficult for beginners.

Meanwhile, like I said, the fact that browsers let designers get away with mistakes is why the Web has taken off. You think a Web built entirely by programmers would be popular? Feh.


> HTML was always supposed to be strict.

And it was. All the problems are problems with browsers, not with the language. If a browser interprets the language wrongly, changing the language doesn't fix that problem.

I'd be fascinated to hear your explanation of how the change from <br> to <br /> helps people with disabilities or of how discontinuing target="_blank" — a non-buggy code that all browsers already interpret in exactly the same way — will improve cross-browser consistency.

Oh, and in amongst all these supposed improvements to the standards, have they managed to come up with a consistent or convenient code for the common dash, a daily, everyday part of language? Nope. I have to keep typing bloody &#8212; — and that comes with a warning that it might get changed into some other character in the future. So much for consistency, compatibility, and accessibility.


> Won't be long before the standards change to stop browsers allowing you to see the code at all.

If that happens, I think a lot of designers will deliberately put their code online. And the ones who don't can fuck off.

You know, I dont have a damn clue what this is all about. Computers are like my car; I can make them work, but I have absolutely no clue why they work. I suppose, just on the basis of what I've read here so far, that my original thesis of there being a small gnome inside the desktop who writes all this stuff down with a IBM electric typewriter and a ballpoint pen is probably incorrect, isnt it?

S2, you should check out John Gruber's Smartypants; not only will it change all of the weird and wonderful dash characters to the HTML equivalent, it also converts straight quotes into cool "smart" quotes the HTML way.

I seriously doubt it. Conversion from straight quotes to smart quotes has been shown to be incalculable, I believe. Any "solution" would drive me mad, as I'd have to go through and correct its corrections. I'll stick to the convention of just using straight quotes on the Web.

Incidentally, it's lazy typewriter designers that we have to thank for this problem. The apostrophe and the inverted comma are two separate and different-looking characters, and should have been given two separate keys. If they had, we'd have two separate keys on computer keyboards to this day.

Don't get me started on the ignorant tunnel-visioned gits who came up with ASCII.

OK, I'll admit that the way I do it is as follows:

Client sends me copy in Word format. I copy and paste into BBEdit. I then select all and use "Straighten smart quotes" to convert all of Microsoft's weird and wonderful bumpf into normal ASCII. I then use the Smartypants plugin to convert all the straight quotes, dashes etc. into perfect HTML. It works fine. Of course, if you aren't using Unix tools to create web content, I would argue that you are making life unnecessarily difficult...

Well, yes, converting smart quotes to straight is easily doable (and easily doable with a mere find-and-replace in any text editor on the market, including Word). It's the other way round that's worth avoiding.

Remember typewriters that didn't have a "1" key? You were supposed to use a capital I. Were the keys really so expensive?