But anyway, as long as the browser can display it, I don't care how unacceptable it is to an HTML expert like you...

but tell me something: do you want your HTML split across a bunch of components so that you can no longer edit an HTML document? How would you deal with something like that?

But anyway, as long as the browser can display it, I don't care how unacceptable it is to an HTML expert like you...

Arghh! This is the kind of attitude that made the web the mess it it today. This is why XHTML is such a good thing.

What do you mean by "the browser"? You site will (hopefully) be visited by large numbers of people using many different browsers. The kind of HTML generated by most so-called "wysiwyg" (a meaningless term on the web, btw) editors will probably break on most of them. Front Page is, for obvious reasons, the worst culprit.

Hand crafted HTML that adhers to the W3C standards will degenerate gracefully in less capable browsers.

Remember, the most important visitors to your site are probably the search engine web crawlers. They don't use the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Whoever first made the decision that Mosaic would "do its best" with invalid HTML should be made to personally clean up every invalid HTML page out there on the web.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."

While any HTML that displays in any browser can be considered 'good', it's typically better to try to aim for HTML that is small and efficient. Notably in the days of the first WYSIWYG HTML editors, the editor would fill the resulting HTML with excess FONT, BR, nbsp entities, and other bastardizations of HTML; some found that nice small, text-and-minimal-graphics pages to balloon to 250-400% of their original size when saved by the HTML editor than as opposed to the hand-written stuff. Today's HTML editors are much better in that regard, but some still use tags that are being depreciated as we speak, such as FONT. In addition, they still place a lot of emphasis on pixel-perfect placement using fixed-width tables (this is a major HTML designer no-no; if you want pixel-perfect, use PDF). It's much better to make use of CSS and styles to format a document, and while I know the editors are capable of that today, I don't necessarily see a lot of designers using that. But the end result of a good CSS design is that your resulting pages will be smaller and more efficient (meaning less time for your end user to download), and it's much easier to change one aspect of an entire site by changing one line in a site-wide style sheet than to edit each document (static or template HTML) to fix it.

And there's actually good reason to split HTML up in some points; it's the usual trick of setting up common elements on pages that can be used by something like SSI or a dynamic template generator. That said, these elements *ought* to be valid HTML or SGML; all open tags are closed before the EOF of the snippet, unlike the example that was at the top of this thread. This way, if using SSI, for example, and there was a problem including this snippet, the layout of the rest of the page would not be drastically affected because it's not waiting for a tag to be open, or a tag previously open to be closed.

(Please note that I'm not trying to put a grudge down on princepawn; just that one that's followed the world of HTML from the start, I just needed to point out certain aspects from his parent node).

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

While any HTML that displays in any browser can be considered 'good'

Uh, oh, I don't think I can agree with that. To me a 'good' HTML page has a DTD declaration and conforms with that.

I don't necessarily see a lot of designers using that [CSS].

Just have a quick look at your webserver's logfiles and (depending on your content, of course) you'll maybe find that many of them still come with netscape 4.x (which at least when running on linux displays CSS only when JavaScript is enabled), furthermore a not neglectible amount of surfers still uses netscape 3.x!
Thus you need to find a way of mixing old and new style formatting and staying close to standards plus make it look good. Hell, it's really a sucky job sometimes (good that I do that just as a sideshow :-)

(this is a major HTML designer no-no; if you want pixel-perfect, use PDF)

That is a thing that may be hard to 'sell' to the managers of your company (e.g. when they don't understand much of that silly computer stuff). We tried to do that on our pages <a href="http://www.novelscience.com">.</a> but still some elements (like the navigation bar) should be placed exactly.

There is no golden way. At least to got to keep in mind (and need to really know) what is your target group of people and what are they equipped with.

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion