Write to standards, not to browsers.
The reason for creating standards for the World Wide Web is for the browsers to follow uniformly, and, as mentioned in another rant, the browsers should follow the standard. Hopefully, they someday will, but until then many people are working around the browser and writing away from the standard. This is not helping! This just makes the browser companies write less to the standard. Thus I say, write to the standard and ignore the browser.
I know this will be tough, but logically it will work the same. This is because the current standards were created to fail gracefully and to use the latest accessibility principles. That is, a document correctly written to the HTML 4.0 strict standard will work not only on any web browser that supports HTML 4.0 strict, but even on browsers that only half support HTML 2.0.
Promote standards! Write all of your documents exactly to the standard, then test it, if only to check that you wrote it correctly. Or better yet, validate it against an official validator. Another way to promote web standards is to promote the Web Standards Project, using their banner images or just a text link. I have one available in the WWW standard format of the Portable Network Graphic for download.
Remember, accessible pages written to the standard work perfectly.
I love the Web Standards image I had made. Banner images!
This is interesting in that I argue from a collectivist, forward-looking perspective: let's all write Web pages according to the standard, and then the browsers will have to keep up with us. Hidden in this is a subtext of power: browsers have power over the Web designers and we must unionize in order to take it back. I don't disagree with that, still.
I remember consciously and pointedly referring to JavaScript as "ECMAScript" because that was the name of the standard and I wanted to talk with people about standards. It took nearly two decades but now other people do that too, thanks to ECMAScript version 6.
I used a definition list for my "See also" section. That doesn't make sense, but I'm going to leave it because I probably spent a lot of time debating with my younger self about it.
