This is actually a question I ask myself often, so I'm really glad you opened it up to public discussion.
The internet has undeniably established communication between the whole world. Since the dawn of the net, distance has become something almost negligible, because we can pass information from anywhere to anywhere else at a great speed and at almost no trouble! It is truly hard to describe the magnitude of this global network, but I think everyone who browses these forums has experienced the digital link tying the whole world closer together.
I think that the main problem with the internet today is that everything happens so fast, and no one has a chance to prepare themselves! At the beginning, HTML was only used to display information. Very soon the need for proper presentation arose, and the designers of HTML implemented the
font and
color tags, among some other now-deprecated means of styling text (can anyone say "blink"?). This change happened so fast that no one had time to prepare himself for the devastating effects these changes would have on the web. Now everyone could create flashing and horribly-colored web pages, and the net was adorned with blinking text and badly-written HTML.
Then came the time of enlightened CSS designers, and the ugly HTML formatting tags were a thing of the past... in theory. "Bad" web pages are still
everywhere, and they are halting the growth of the web. How is it that I, a Firefox user, cannot access a web site just because its developers only bothered to check their creation on Microsoft's proprietary Internet Explorer? This is blasphemy to the gods of the digital age, where everything is supposed to be accessible to anyone.
So yes, only a few numerous browsers support the
acid test (but most of the other browsers, except IE, are on the right path), but most of them have pretty great support of
most of (X)HTML's and CSS's features. Only if you want to create abnormally complex web pages you need to resort to using invalid code. (Unless of course we're talking about IE... but there many many hacks for that!)
I think validity from web pages is rightfully demanded, as the internet should be something that can work on any browser, and operating system and any computer in the world!
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