1995 HTML (was Forum Name)

I don't want to defend the quality of Carl's HTML in this case -- I suspect that what you see is the result of about an hour's work to publish the world for the non-World users who want to follow the beta test as it develops. Not what he might have done if he had had the time. And I reckon that many of us could, with a day or so to spare write a very useful Altme-to-html publisher that would provide all sorts of goodies. But I will take a paragraph to explain Carl's approach to HTML. I've emailed him about it in the past (I think I called his HTML "quaint"). He responded with his experience of keeping HTML basic so that it will work across an enormous wide range of platforms and browsers -- Amigas, BEOS, you name it. A much wider spread than the IE 5.0 vs Opera 7.xx spread that usually informs cross-platform compatibility discussions. Me, I take an opposite approach (feel free to kick holes in my HTML by taking a peek at www.rebol.org) -- I aim at validation to HTML 4.01 Strict, and I want an (almost) clean sheet from accessibility checkers like Cynthia Says: http://www.contentquality.com/ There are limitations in both of our approaches, but at least we both have some solid reasoning behind our strategies. The REBOL world is a small but highly diverse community, so I guess other website owners have hit various cross-platform compatibility issues. I'd be interested in hearing others' approaches. Sunanda<

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Thanks for the context and your thoughts. I really do appreciate that Carl has *much* better things to than futz with any html. I respect him enormously no matter I agree or not. But with his skills I'd like to think that 1 hour or less could transform that page into something much more useful for many people. And rebol.org is a terrific resource and going definitely in the healthy direction. thank you. Cross-browser html is a nightmare and an expensive time-sink for about 10 years now. However I also remember c.1995 how one could embed non-formatting tags in html to do cool things. CSS is a good way to go. The tragedy of so many current presentation technologies is how they throw away the valuable semantic data that has been put in at *the source* when it is much easier to filter for presentation. I'd argue that benefit of adding even a few tags easily justifies the number of people possibly lost by that. But as you point out any of us with skill and time could take a sample AltME session block and parse up intelligently , then submit to Carl.S Relatively, Rebol's web presence is weak and its community small so time is very precious, but so too is the need for wider access to encourage new users and web visitors. I guess the irony is that rebol is really an alternative information space from the web, yet could benefit much more from it. cheers - Jason