"Noel J. Bergman" wrote:
John Hinsley's table example is very ill-formed.
No it's not! It's -- as Ned points out -- absolutely valid and weblint verified. If you want to argue that pre pseudo XML HTML is ill-formed, you'll have one hell of a lot of valid sites to re-write! (Then you can start on the genuinely ill-formed ones ;-) ).
Tidy is a nice tool. My main objections to it are that it balances tags where they really don't need to be balanced -- unecessarily increasing the length of documents is _always_ a bad thing -- and that it inserts its own meta tag (see above, plus it's rather rude).
What I like about HTML is that I can read a page written to the earliest standards in the latest browsers. (Scamper excepted!) If someone sends me a Word 2000 .doc as an email attachment I can always reply and tell them to send it in another format (if I'm feeling particularly awkward, I'll ask for it as dvi). Were my browser to refuse to read HTML to earlier standards, I'd be buggered. (Seems to me that this may be exactly what Microsoft want.)
(Incidentally, I know of at least one post-grad course where people are still taught to hand craft 3.2 HTML with vi -- I was accused of cheating because I found a copy of gvim -- built against Motif -- yuk! -- on one of the servers and thus had the advantage of coloured syntax highlighting.)
But as I'm not in a position to do any work on it, I wouldn't want to enter into any argument about what course Scamper's development should follow. Follow your heart, Karl: by doing the work, you've earned that right!
Cheers
John