You're right that screen scrapers benefit from XHTML. But when I've written the HTML in the first place, I've never seen it be in my interest to encourage screen scraping. Besides which, when I have to screen scrape, I'm generally paranoid enough not to believe that things are XHTML, and I think that anyone else screen scraping probably (should at least) make the same assumption.

As for your comment about browser bugs, I'd frankly be astonished to encounter a workplace where you can get away with saying, "My webpage is fine but IE 6 happens to be broken. Complain to Microsoft." As long as IE is the bulk of the market, any website that is broken in IE is going to be considered broken, no matter what the official standards say.

Generally speaking, I find that if I develop against Mozilla and then fix occasional breakages with IE, I'll wind up with something that works reasonably well on most major browsers. Running through a basic HTML validator looking for unclosed tags takes care of most of remaining browser differences. By contrast, as many complaints out there attest, producing a sophisticated web page using all of those juicy CSS standards typically results in a website that doesn't render right for most people (who, like it or not (I don't) use IE).

In reply to Re^3: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by tilly
in thread Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by Your Mother

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