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Originally Posted by Forrest
I'm saying, why go back and support a dead standard?
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Primarily because the issues the page illustrates are part of XHTML, as well (as demonstrated by my own version of the page).
As for supporting HTML properly, it would be a big violation of the original spirit of the web if browsers stopped rendering pages simply because they weren't composed with the latest and greatest standards. Non-standard pages, sure, but any page compliant with a standard should be rendered for the sake of data integrity. For example, I have plenty of pages comprised of HTML 2.0 and the like, and I want these to work.
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I just took a quick look at it, but things like <td><td>. I've mucked through a lot of bad code that was written just poorly enough to work in IE. Really the author wanted <td></td> or <td></td><td>. If other browser display this as the code is written, then many sites would be broken in those browsers.
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No. In HTML 4, that is perfectly well-formed--and very common--code, and its use has nothing at all to do with IE. Basically, certain closing tags are optional, since their placement can be deterministically calculated by the rendering engine. Another example of such a tag is the <p> tag, which in older pages could often be found on its own between paragraphs, as though it were a paragraph break tag; this use makes no sense semantically, but it's definitely valid (well-formed) and even now in widespread use.
Implicitly closed tags, however are
not valid XHTML, since the XML part of XHTML's lineage requires that all tags be balanced.
If you want to see the same page in XHTML without implicitly closed tags, then take a look at the version I posted.
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On the note about click on the text next to a form element, I have noticed that the apple store has this working with WebKit. I haven't looked to see how they did it, however. I've also noticed IE does this too on some MS sites. I'm guessing neither of them are standard.
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It can be done with JavaScript, but the (X)HTML standard itself has for years included markup to enable this. We just need browsers to support it - and the fact that Apple and MS themselves are implementing workarounds demonstrates just how badly it's needed. (Along with being a usability issue, this is also an essential accessibility issue.)