The other day I saw a post over on Surfin' Safari that was discussing Safari's 'misrendering' of Chris Lydon's weblog. This came about because of a post over on Scripting News about Lydon's blog (I think, it may have actually originated someplace else, but I'm not sure). The end issue was a poor use of CSS and IE being very forgiving of it.
I started wondering why browsers started being forgiving of bad HTML (and CSS) to begin with. It first started with things like not closing table tags correctly, and moved on to all kinds of other things. But why? Why not just refuse to render it correctly from the start. Most people check their site in at least one browser before making stuff live, so why not just eliminate the problem right there. Because now we have this problem where if someone interprets the HTML/CSS the way defined in the spec, it is wrong because IE chooses to just ignore the parts that aren't right. This further causes problems because it seems that we won't see an update to IE until Longhorn comes out. So it remains an issue for a considerable length of time.
There's also second post over on Surfin' Safari from yesterday that talks about quirks in browsers and rendering that also made my head spin a bit. All of these issues seem to boil down to the same thing, web designers being lazy or not checking their work well enough. It's like putting together a puzzle, either you put all the pieces together right and you see the picture or you don't and you see something that doesn't look right.
