Even McMahon fails validation

[dorayme]

....

Deprecated, obsolete, who cares. Browsers will continue to support these
features until the cows come home. That's all that matters.

Deprecated schmecrecated eh?

Well, it is not quite all that matters generally; but perhaps you
mean it in relation to something in particular. The distinctions
between formal goodness, best practice, browser error correction
have a mildly important status in the scheme of things.

It is probably a good rule of thumb for folk to treat these
distinctions with more caution, the less experienced they are. An
experienced person will more confidently let the formal go in
order to have the advantages of using some particular doctype
(and not bothering to make his or her own).

It is probably not a good idea for inexperienced people to allow
anything that relies on error correction to go ahead in their
work for the simple reason that there is a real slippery slope
here, they do not know which errors all browsers correct
similarly and which do not.

You, being a Mac person, I tell you an anecdote: when I started
using Safari and OS X, I was surprised that it made mince-meat or
simply refused to display things where the HTML or CSS was rather
wrong in various ways. My previous experience had been with more
tolerant browsers, especially Mac IE.

 

[Tim Streater]

Deprecated schmecrecated eh?

Well, it is not quite all that matters generally; but perhaps you
mean it in relation to something in particular. The distinctions
between formal goodness, best practice, browser error correction
have a mildly important status in the scheme of things.

It is probably a good rule of thumb for folk to treat these
distinctions with more caution, the less experienced they are. An
experienced person will more confidently let the formal go in
order to have the advantages of using some particular doctype
(and not bothering to make his or her own).

You're probably right about this, but I'd say that the solution is for
the validators to consider only the existence or otherwise of the html5
doctype. From what I've read, there was some years ago going to be an
attempt to clean up the web by forcing everyone to use xhtml. Browsers
would *not* do error correction - by order! Sanity now seems to have
prevailed, since as we all know the number of correct sites is probably
vanishingly small. But the corollary is that all browsers will continue
(indefinitely as far as I can tell) to support all these obsolete and
deprecated features. May as well stop referring to them in that way,
then.