From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>
Date: 2002-03-21T01:47:48+09:00
Subject: Re: web templating for static sites?

* Albert Wagner (alwagner@tcac.net) wrote:

> On Tuesday 19 March 2002 05:49 pm, you wrote:

*slap*, use a proper attribution :)

> > * Albert L. Wagner (alwagner@uark.edu) wrote:
> > > How do you Ruby/HTML guys deal with the different versions of HTML
> > > and browsers?
> >
> > Semantic XHTML 1.1, biodegradable CSS 2, to hell with people who
> > expect me to directly support broken half-decade old browsers.
[..]

*slap*, trim quotes too :P

> You're probably right.  But it seems so damned elitist.

Not really, it covers 100% of browsers; recent ones get the full
graphical look, older ones get a progressively reduced look, until they
get to basic but usable HTML:

Mosaic et all: HTML 2.0 with XML '/' "attributes" ignored, along with
the unknown and ignored HTML 4.0 tags such as <abbr> and <acronym>.

NS3, IE2(?), Voyager, iBrowse, AWeb: Unstyled HTML to various degrees.

NS4, IE3(?), IE4, Lynx, Links(?), W3M(?); font and basic colour, plus
more complete HTML (yes, lynx supports CSS, dunno about the other tty
browsers).

NS6, IE5+, Opera 5+; full graphical layout, overrideable through user
CSS.

Aural, Braile, Screenreaders etc; Well flowing HTML, semantic content
(link titles, table summaries, correctly defined headings, acronyms and
abbreviations defined, etc).

Search engine spiders; easily parsed HTML with headings and sections
correctly defined to help more accurate indexing.

Of course, this comes more from following the WAI guidelines than just
using CSS any which way (so you use <h[1-6]> as opposed to <span
class="title"> etc)

> BTW, I went to your site: you're a bigamist;

I keep meaning to redo aagh.net; I haven't touched it in about 6 months
aside for about 10 different layouts I never bothered making live.

> Hanging around the Ruby list and cavorting with PHP at home. tsk-tsk.

Yeah, and Matz is a bigamist for writing Ruby in C as opposed to a
self-hosting Ruby interpreter. tsk-tsk :)

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
		-- John Keats