I spend a negligent amount of time in forums, much less then what I used to, which was a great deal. These days I mostly read forums regarding webdesign and client-side markup-languages, for no other reason than they're more entertaining than the server-side ones.
That might come to change though, unless I develop an appreciation for tearing my hair out in frustration.

My latest can't-get-over gripe is people clinging to bad markup and "tricks" to get their webpages to "work" in Netscape 4. The other day a person asked how to remove that annoying margin around forms. Several suggested putting the <form> tag between the <table> tag and the <tr> tag, I suggested using stylesheets to specify a zero pixel margin.

- But, will that work in Netscape 4? A certain troublemaker asked.

The gap between markup discussions in the blogosphere and in closed forums is tremendous.
That kind of reasoning usually leaves me dumbfounded for a while; advocating bad markup, resorting to ill "tricks" in favor of a steadily declining minority browser and contributing to the problem rather than the solution. I mean, where do one begin?

Others of the same opinion as he claimed that being well-informed on the proper standards was a good idea, but that websites that actually worked in practice required these sort of tricks. Supposedly, "quirks-mode" is a more reliable mode if you want cross-browser consistency. This from people who only use a <DOCTYPE> because Dreamweaver will auto-insert it and cling to table-based layouts when they're actually more cumbersome and requires more "tricks" and yet more bad markup in the end.

The problem is not that popular browsers don't support standards sufficiently yet, they do, while not nearly perfectly. The problem is that too many webdevelopers think of HTML as something they've mastered, something they're done with. Well, it isn't. Unless their websites fall through w3's validators they've got some catching up to do.
They themselves are the reason they "need" to resort to tricks and bad markup.

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