Cergorach said:
First of all which HTML standards? 4.0? W3C?
Maybe Mozilla/Chimera is best supporting 'pure' html, but IE seems to be the most popular (95%+ market share).
Well, if it were up to me, HTML4.0, HTML4.0 Transitional, HTML4.0+CSS1, or HTML4.0+CSS2 would all be perfectly acceptable. IOW, anything the W3C recognizes. Personally, i design for HTML4/CSS1, and don't use gifs.
As for designing for IE: it's pretty much hopeless. I abide by the standards, and do my best not to do anything that is known to break it. But i can't even count on it to render a valid JPEG, so how can i design for it?
Drawmack said:
You should also run it through a validator: http://validator.w3.org/
Everybody who's doing HTML development of any sort should have a copy of HTMLTidy.
Drawmack said:
Opera is 100% w3c compliant http://www.opera.com/
Last time i checked, while all of the browsers claim to be 100% HTML4.0 compliant, none of them are. Almost all of them have little things that gakk them--usually something involving optional tags. Also, IE6 does a really amazing job of failing to render jpegs, pngs, and sometimes even gifs that no other application i've tried can find any problem with.
However, i should clarify my original point: where browsers *really* fall down is in CSS support. Not only do they all only claim partial CSS1/CSS2 support, but often they have even less support than they claim. Frex, IE5/6 claims to support absolute positioning of background images. Problem is, it does it wrong.
kreynolds said:
Personally, if I did an HTML version, well...I only support IE6. Nothing else. I'm a snob that way. 
How is designing for the overwhelming majority being snobbish? Isn't that closer to designing for the lowest common denominator? (though, not really, in this case, since there are other browsers out there with poorer standards support.)
Dimwhit said:
The fact that Microsoft all but refuses to work with any standard that they haven't created throws a wrench in it. I know Safari is built to use the true web standards, but chances are, IE would screw something up. But the world has been Microsoft'd, so if you want anyone to use it effectively, you have to mess up your code a bit. 
Two things, here:
First, MS had a huge hand in the development of the HTML4 and CSS standards. They're not ignoring them because they didn't create them.
Second, i think MS is merely sloppy, not malicious, in this area. They seem to have reformed from the "our ideas are BETTER than compatibility" stage of IE development . Instead, the problem is just sloppy implementation--they implement the standards, but do it poorly. Sort of like older CD players that won't play burned CDs, because the manufacturers chose to handle only what most pressed CDs did, rather than the broader standard.
