As for Flash it really has no place as a page element outside of illustration or product zoom/review capacities. Using any linear scripted interface for navigation and core page elements is a mistake, and general is only done by folks who either don't have large user groups or don't know any better. Of course Flash MX is a little better in its support for database access, etc., but I still stay away from it.

This was my point the entire time. MVP's use of Flash was probably a costly choice (given how glitzy the whole thing looked), and the whole time it was (IMO) a completely wrong choice. I don't know if it's still up, but it was up at www.mvpvolvo.com.

But if you want to discuss HTML compliance here goes.

Yes, I know the vast majority of the people out there are using some version of MSIE. Usually 5.5 or 6.

No browser, Mozilla included, implements everything perfectly. Indeed, one of the reasons I dislike Opera is for its horrible table rendering. I'm using MSIE 5.x on MacOS 8.6 as my main graphical browser. Yes, I'm fully aware of the really odd things that some of these browsers do. However, I'll still point at wired as a site that is standards compliant, and still completely useable on both my mac and whatever ssh console I've got open. It's not rocket science, and it is possible

You talk about spec compliance, but what 'specs' are you talking about? There are many many standards from the w3c floating around. No browser has fully implemented CSS 2, and already CSS 2.1 and 3 have been released or are being worked on. With XHTML, the w3c is taking a rather, IMO, foolish approach to tables and frames. But XHTML 1.0 Transitional was a huge step in the right direction. There are a lot of specs to choose from, and yes, it can indeed be confusing (and maddening when they decide to drop support for something in favor of a completely unuseable and unimplemented replacement).

Most of what chaps my ass has nothing to do with how the HTML has been coded, but rather the browser detection that's been implemented. In 9 out of 10 sites, the browser detection is completely unneeded. Bank of America is a fantastic example of this. Their site renders fine and would be useable with Konqy, but they will not let any browser who is not emulating MSIE or Nav (even as old as 4 x is okay with them) use their site.

The rest of my irritation is indeed comprised from poorly hacked together HTML. However, a lot of it is dead simple to fix, and hardly rocket science.

Take a link that opens into another window. Instead of putting the link in its usual href attribute, and then calling whatever js function from the onmouseclickevent attribute.. many sites will fill the href attribute with something like 'javascript:void(0)'. There's no real reason to hide the target that way, and all that's accomplished is that it's more difficult to use the site without a js interpreter (while links does JS, it doesn't seem to do cookies.. w3m seems to do the reverse).

But your arguing that it's just too difficult smacks of lazy web designers. Of course doing the job right costs money.. but usually even the lazy incompetent people who churn stuff out with frontpage will charge a pretty penny.

- alex