[CLUE-Tech] Is this true?

[Jeffery Cann]

On Thursday 25 April 2002 09:21 pm, BOF wrote:
> I found the following comment on a web page and wonder if it is true.
> What basic code is the webmaster alluding to?

DHTML -- I tried the www.msaa.com site in Mozilla 0.9.9 and the menus work 
fine.  In fact it is the DHTML code that causes problems in some browsers.  
It is _not_ the Microsoft Conspiracy that is so popular on Linux email lists!

I agree that their message about Netscape support is somewhat misleading.  NS 
4.0 and IE 4.0 both supported DHTML, but IE has a better document object 
model than NS 4.0, so doing the 'really cool' stuff with DHTML works in IE 
4.0, but not NS 4.0.  So, their statement is true about NS 4.0 vs IE 4/5/6.  
However, Mozilla 1.0 / NS 6.0 does support DHTML, including the cool features 
to generate menus like those on the msaa.com site.   Their warning message 
needs to be updated.  See below for more info about DHTML.

You can argue that folks should not use DHTML or JavaScript (ECMAScript) or 
any other user-friendly feature for web sites.  I disagree and luckily to 
this point in the life of the internet, really popular features tend to 
become standards -- e.g., JavaScript --> ECMAScript.

While I share everyone's enthusiasm for protecting W3C standards, I think 
that denigrading the web master personally is not a productive way to make 
your point.  In fact, when folks go off on a Microsoft tangent (that is not 
even valid in this case), their ignorance of the situation becomes laughable. 
 The result is that your (valid) comments will be ignored by the msaa.com web 
master(s).

In this case DHTML is in the W3C standards process.  (DHTML FAQ at 
http://www.devx.com/dhtml/dhtmlfaq.asp).  I agree that they probably should 
have an alternative menu system for browsers that do not support DHTML so 
maybe that is a better point to make. 

I do like the idea of boycott / protesting sites that are not accessible by 
non MS browsers.  If this were a VBScript problem, then flame on...

Later,
Jeff