Dear Future Gamer,

Nice mag... kinda cutesy, but nice.

One slight irritant however. The use of the 'marquee' tag... like, hello? Do you know just how irritating this proprietal tag actually is? This is merely re-enforced by the fact that this obscene little tag does not appear in w3c's HTML 4 standard.

Its use merely demonstrates a complete disregard for those of us who do not willingly subscribe to the plans for global domination by the Dark Overlord himself, Darth Microsoft (or Bill Gates, son of Satan, as he's also known).

But seriously, it is kind of annoying to be confronted by such obsequiousness (big word for the day - yeah!). The reason we have standards is so that things are the same regardless of whether you are in Grimsby or Guadeloupe, and the use of non-standard tags merely encourages the likes of Microsoft to disregard those pre-agreed standards and thereby run roughshod over everyone.

But, of course, it would appear that you're using FrontPage to cobble together those pages (removing the relevant title comment tags doesn't exactly fool anyone), so I suppose that this is a grumble that will fall on deaf ears.

Oh well, I suppose that I'll just have to stop worrying and come to love the beglassed one.

Anon

P.S. It might be a good idea to check closure on tags - I've noticed a few slip-ups here and there.

FG: Sorry, I wouldn't know a 'marquee tag' from a very large tent. Future Gamer was built by the technical crew here at Future Publishing and they designed the mag to be as accessible to as many people as possible. That includes everyone using Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Future Gamer's Technical Editor adds:

The marquee tag is, as you say, non-standard - but your comment about the HTML 4 spec is a little irrelevant, since the majority of browsers don’t support it yet anyway. If it's irritating you, you're obviously using Internet Explorer, since in all other browsers the unrecognised tag is ignored and a simple list of links is shown.

As for your comments about Front Page, you couldn't be further from the truth - we wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot poking thing. Future Gamer is generated by pulling data from a database into dynamic hand-built pages, which are then converted to the flat HTML files you see by a whizzy Perl script. And if you could see the complexity of some of the pages involved, you'd perhaps forgive a few missing tag closures (after all, browsers do).

Thanks for telling us, though. I think we've now sorted out the stray tags (one problem on each page was due to an over-zealous search-and-replace merging two tags into one).