Emperor’s clothes department
A couple of days ago, Dorothea Salo linked to David Weinberger’s “good-natured jab at HTML validation.” She asked: “What good is it, in other words, other than as some kind of geek badge of honor?” And immediately answered her own question: “Lucky me. I don’t need to answer that. The WaSP and Mark Pilgrim are around to do it for me.”
This morning, making a comment, I wanted to quote the item on WaSP’s Buzz site about Owen Briggs’ 264 screenshots demonstrating text sizing problems and failures in IE, Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape. I tried to select the relevant text, only to find that (in ie6win) it’s not possible. I downloaded the Buzz style sheet and, sure enough, they’re using absolute positioning for the main content DIV, triggering “a bug in several versions of IE that prevents copying and pasting text” (to quote Mark Pilgrim). An earlier version of my own site design suffered from the same problem because I (mistakenly) assumed that absolute positioning was the only way to create the layout I was after.
Given that weblogging as a medium relies heavily on quoting from other sites, is it unreasonable to suggest that the Web Standards Project’s weblog should facilitate copying and pasting text in the most widely used browser, rather than making it almost impossible?
I think WaSP is terrific but this kind of inconsistency makes it easy to understand and sympathize with David Weinberger’s skepticism.
Dare one suggest that Microsoft freaking get something right once in a while? IE/Win is such garbage.
I do sympathize, however. Possibly writing to the WaSP would get an appropriate response.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo on 15 June 2002 at 02:36 AM