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This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.

Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy

This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.

Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy

This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.

Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy

This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.

Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy

We in Canada also tend to pay higher prices for many goods, even though our dollar is nearly at par with the US dollar. Case in point, a pair of Levis jeans at JC Penney costs $33 US (even less if you find a JC Penney coupon online). The same jeans at Sears Canada cost $85 CDN. And JC Penney is forbidden to ship Levis to Canada (I know, I phoned them and asked).

Notice how it's not qualified in any way. "Thetoadwarrior" literally thinks that you should be forced to entirely understand XHTML before you should be "allowed" (by whom?) to create a webpage. He's being a total asshat, so please don't attempt to defend him.

Well creating a web page is different from creating content. If you want to voice your opinion but be bothered properly format the code then use facebook or some other blog software.

Except that's wrong, because XHTML existing doesn't make HTML4 go away. Browsers will have to render HTML4 until the end of time, if only for backwards compatibility purposes-- given that, bad web developers used to HTML4's quirks and idiocies will simply continue to code in HTML4 and ignore XHTML altogether.

And... gasp... after years of XHTML, that's exactly what's happened. The existence of HTML4 hasn't helped this site improve any, and it's one of the most popular e-commerce sites on the web.

What I don't get is why so many people who were behind XHTML believed that it would make HTML4 go away. Either they didn't bother thinking about the situation for more than 10 seconds, or they are entirely clueless about human psychology.

HTML hasn't gone away yet but it will. Who's using HTML 2.0?

If you shop at JC Penny,that's not going to help people's image of you. ;)

Just because some people do things wrong doesn't mean they should be allowed to. HTML/XHTML are still languages. We wouldn't accept any old English gibberish within a professional environment so why should we accept gibberish HTML?

JC Penny has no reason to be writing such bad code. Even if they are using a CMS there is no excuse. They have a broken form tag, two opening and closing body tags and that's just two big ones I've noticed a very quick glance. Those aren't mistakes from automation, they're just bad mistakes that should not be made and developers shouldn't have to waste their time accounting for web developer incompetence. The only correct outcome that people should get from viewing that page is that it breaks and doesn't display. Then the web developers fix it. If they can't fix those problems they don't deserve their jobs.

I'm not surprised they use ASP. They clearly aren't the best coders by a long shot so it's only natural they pick a shit language like ASP.

It's no wonder companies want to outsource work to other countries. If the locals won't code it right then who cares if anyone does a bodge job. So you might as well get it done cheap. People need to show that they're worth that extra bit of cash by doing a proper job.

IFRAMEs make entire industries that could not have existed before possible. One of the huge errors of XHTML Strict was not including IFRAMEs, which breaks an enormous range of analytics and ad-serving tag packages. IMO, the W3C is entirely run by people who have absolutely *no* idea how to actually write or maintain a website. (At least commercially.)

I-Frames work in XHTML transitional. No one said you must use XHTML strict at all times nor did anyone say they would never be replaced.

1) HTML was designed to be extensible. In a sane world, people wouldn't care if IE added a MARQUEE tag because browsers that didn't support it would simply ignore it. Even ActiveX was an extension allowed by the very design of HTML. (Now, it turns out that in retrospect, that making HTML extensible was a bad idea, but you can't fault browser makers for using the capabilities given to them.) In short, Netscape and Microsoft aren't satan because someone told them HTML was extensible and they extended it.

2

You're conflating 'putting content on the web' with 'writing HTML'. They don't mean the same thing.

Except that's not what the parent I was replying to said. He said this:

"Anyone too lazy to code nice neat xhtml shouldn't be allowed to create web pages."

Notice how it's not qualified in any way. "Thetoadwarrior" literally thinks that you should be forced to entirely understand XHTML before you should be "allowed" (by whom?) to create a webpage. He's being a total asshat, so please don't attempt to defend him.

XHTML would have forced makers of stupid (i.e. non-XML-compliant) software applications to fix their engines. That would have required lots of effort, but the value of such an effort is philosophically similar to enforcing health and safety standards on manufacturing processes. Yes, it's cheaper to create quick and dirty implementations, but the public good is better served by enforcing minimal levels of quality. It increases the cost of production, but increases the value of the product, too.

Except that's wrong, because XHTML existing doesn't make HTML4 go away. Browsers will have to render HTML4 until the end of time, if only for backwards compatibility purposes-- given that, bad web developers used to HTML4's quirks and idiocies will simply continue to code in HTML4 and ignore XHTML altogether.

And... gasp... after years of XHTML, that's exactly what's happened. The existence of HTML4 hasn't helped this site improve any, and it's one of the most popular e-commerce sites on the web.

What I don't get is why so many people who were behind XHTML believed that it would make HTML4 go away. Either they didn't bother thinking about the situation for more than 10 seconds, or they are entirely clueless about human psychology.

HTML5 tries for a middle road wherein the parser tries to be more forgiving while at the same codifying the ways in which it should fail. It tries to make the failure modes as graceful and predictable as possible. It's sold as a more pragmatic approach to Tag Soup, a problem that's bedeviled us since FrontPage first reared its zombie head.

And exactly what W3C should have done instead of wasting everybody's time on XHTML in the first fucking place.

For my part, I think it's the wrong approach. I don't think it's as wrong as some of the sins committed by Netscape (, frames, etc.) and Microsoft (iframe, marquee) in the early days, when they treated the W3C as their bitch, foisting all kinds of stupidity into their browsers, never making more than a token effort at interoperability and openness.

IFRAMEs make entire industries that could not have existed before possible. One of the huge errors of XHTML Strict was not including IFRAMEs, which breaks an enormous range of analytics and ad-serving tag packages. IMO, the W3C is entirely run by people who have absolutely *no* idea how to actually write or maintain a website. (At least commercially.)

I mean, it took CSS until version 3 to get columns. Version 3?! COLUMNS?! Christ.

I'd also like to point out that:

1) HTML was designed to be extensible. In a sane world, people wouldn't care if IE added a MARQUEE tag because browsers that didn't support it would simply ignore it. Even ActiveX was an extension allowed by the very design of HTML. (Now, it turns out that in retrospect, that making HTML extensible was a bad idea, but you can't fault browser makers for using the capabilities given to them.) In short, Netscape and Microsoft aren't satan because someone told them HTML was extensible and they extended it.

2) The reason those extensions became critical parts of the web infrastructure is because the W3C moves fucking slow.

I need only point to the mountain of good content lost in a morass of excreta passing for markup for evidence.

Wait, slow down a second-- "lost?" Can you explain how content can be "lost" simply because it contains bad markup? Am I missing something? JC Penney's product pages are fucking horrible, but none of the content in them is "lost."

Here's the one I got messed up in.

The bride tells me we need new curtains for the living room. We surf, and shop, and surf, and shop and end up at JCPenny. I use my debit card and the bride got new curtains.

JCPenny turns around my info to a subsidiary called Stonebridge, and I get spammed for insurance, and other stuff. Other stuff like a bullshit 'membership' which somehow I failed to opt-out of that charges my card $10/mo. Well, 3 months later I finally get that charge removed, with large amounts of swearing on the phone (hey, if 2 months of 'nice' phone calls won't work, break out the profanity).

I still recieve Stonebridge insurance scams in my snail-mail, after months and months of calling them and asking (yep ... more swearing too, although unsuccessful so far).

Never do business with JCPenny as they appear to have other instances, and multiple ways to rip you off.

This is all idiocy anyway.

IE has now fallen under the same spell that the rest of the web standards community has fallen under, namely, the illusion that old web sites will be upgraded for newer browser. Here's a hint, W3C, Mozilla, and now Microsoft: They won't.

Large commercial websites (for example, this one: http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx ) are coded using the 1998 method of lots of tables and hardly any CSS. And that's a page that's:
1) Been updated every single day for the last 5 years at least
2) Could have massive, massive bandwidth and render-time savings if they switched the layout.

And that's one site. And that's just one site that's actually maintained. There are thousands of others, still written using the same methods. Many of those are entirely orphaned or unmaintained. Many of those contain critical information that you can't get on any other sites.

Any web standard that isn't written with this in mind (for example, XHTML) will fail. It'll just be one more standard for browsers to support until the end of time, until browsers are so bloated it takes twenty minutes to render Yahoo.com.

People on this site who hate Microsoft actually should be applauding this decision, since users upgrading to IE8 will simply think IE8 is fundamentally broken. Of course, the tears'll start flowing when Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all the browsers Slashdotters like have the same problem. My personal guess is that Microsoft isn't going to let this happen, and they'll make super-strict mode off by default.

IMHO, the HTML 5 spec is a move in the right direction. We all agree that web standards suck, but whatever we do, we need to ensure backwards compatibility.

I don't think continuing to develop their browser can truthfully be characterised as "taking their ball and going home", and I don't see what your point is. You tried to make out that Microsoft's and Netscape's actions were the same thing. I pointed out they weren't.

It doesn't matter whether or not they continued to develop it, the point is that neither company released anything browser-wise for several years. From my point of view, their actions were the same thing: no new browsers were released.

Now you are attacking Netscape again. Why? What point are you trying to make? Or are you just looking for an excuse to bash Netscape? Your further complaints about them aren't relevant to what I said, which is that Microsoft's and Netscape's actions were very different.

Yes they were. Microsoft built a fast and stable browser, while Netscape added so much crap to their browser that it could hardly run an hour without crashing, then sued when they lost marketshare.

Is it a bad thing that IE7 was so long in coming? Yes, yes it was. But I don't give Netscape/Mozilla developers much credence when Netscape 6 was equally long in coming... it just makes them hypocrites.

Circular logic. "Let's all use a complex document format because we all use a complex document format! Let's ignore planning for the future because the only thing that's important is what's happening right now!" Yes, with your attitude, we'll be stuck with HTML 4 for life. How inspiring.

It's called realism. And pragmatism.

Hell a lot of large, commercial Internet retailers have no doctype declaration at all in a jumbled mess of code. HTML 4 would be moving up for them.

And that's not even considering all the thousands of archived sites... the content of the site might still be perfectly relevant, but you can no longer view it because your new shiny browser doesn't like the version of HTML it uses? That goes against everything the Internet stands for, as far as I'm concerned.

Ditch? No. Factor out into legacy middleware to aid maintenance? Why not? And why are you judging the W3C's decisions in 1998 as if they had information available in 2008?

Either way it has to ship with the browser, so I don't understand the difference between that and what I said.

And, for the record, I think W3C's decisions were stupid by 1998 standards... they should know from the study of other Internet protocols that once something's out there on the Internet, it'll be out there until the end of time. Ignoring that fact, yes, that's stupid.

Are you familiar with how markup parsers work? It's not just the speed that matters. The complexity of the parsing code matters as well. Try comparing code to parse HTML with code to parse XHTML.

Ok, the browser can do it in .6 milliseconds instead of .8 milliseconds. Big whoop.

The "complexity" of the parsing code is set via the lowest bar, like the site above. It doesn't matter how new and shiny XHTML 1 or 2 or 10 is, you'll still need to render that site, and you'll still need all the same code you have in Firefox and IE now to handle it.

Now explain the benefit to me as a web developer or as an end-user. The W3C has never bothered to explain why I suddenly need to make my pages XML-- will you?

That only helps producers of HTML 5. The people consuming it need to deal with that crap too.

It's not consumed by people, it's consumed by computers. Computers can deal with that crap in a matter of milliseconds.

Besides, if you can use HTML 4 to separate markup and style, you can use HTML 5 to as well. If you don't like tags like FONT, simply don't use them and everybody's happy.

Now there's no denying that what is immediately visible is valuable screen real estate, but that doesn't change the fact that the width is virtually always the limiting factor in a design. Why do you think it's always

I'm not THAT upset with it. Javascript + DOM is a good tool, but I feel the real problem is that the designers of these technology don't listen to previous solutions to the problems encountered on the web.

Why did it take until CSS 3.0 to get easy-to-use columns? The New York Times has been using columns for 150+ years; why did the CSS implementers feel they should just dump all that publishing experience in the toilet and do things their own way?

Likewise, CSS which is supposed to free us from table-based layouts is really terrible at reproducing some effects which are trivial with tables. For example, centering content vertically on the page. (It can be done with CSS, but it's a hack.) If you're going to sell CSS as a replacement to table-based layouts, you need to first make sure that CSS is capable of doing all the things table-based layouts can do easily. (Columns, another great example; awkward in CSS, almost trivial with tables.)

Javascript + DOM has "getElementById", "getElementsByTagName", "getElementsByName"... but for some headache-inducing reason it doesn't have "getElementsByClassName". Why not? WHY NOT!? GAH!

Why doesn't the spec define one of the fundamental differences between Mozilla and IE in the DOM: should non-displaying text in the original HTML document appear as text nodes in the DOM? IE says no; Mozilla says yes; web developers say make up your damned mind, I keep having to write workarounds for this crap! (Personally I like IE's implementation better. If it doesn't display on screen, it doesn't need to be in the DOM.)

In short, I think there's far too much theory and not enough practice in these technologies. What we need is *practical* development. Which is why I'm all behind HTML 5, BTW, it focuses on the practical realities of the web and not some pie-in-the-sky idea you'll never get anybody to follow. Do you seriously think a webpage like, say, this: http://www2.jcpenney.com/jcp/ProductList.aspx?deptid=25439&pcatid=25864&catid=27010&cattyp=DEP&dep=Housewares&pcat=COOKWARE&cat=Stainless+Steel&refpagename=WindowSolutionHOM%252Easpx&refdeptid=25439&refcatid=25864&cmAMS_T=H9&cmAMS_C=C5&CmCatId=25439|25864 will ever meet the XHTML ideals?

That hipster idiot can get one at JC Penney's. Some of their models have a CD and tape player built into a retro cabinet, it's pretty cool.

Agreed!

Get Mobile Pants, they are truly excellent. I have 4 pairs, and I were either cargo pants or Mobile Pants almost every day. They have a total of 8 pockets, and are completely indistinguishable from regular dress pants. They would work for you quite well, as shown:

2 back pockets (wallet, etc)
2 front pockets (keys, change)
2 zippered pockets behind normal front pockets (Cell phone)
2 thigh pockets (GBA, PDA)

Also, I don't know how, but the pockets are designed to be invisible, so you don't have a large lump on the side of your leg like you do with regular cargo pants.

Here is a link to them at JCPenney

Hmmm, tiny little artists' cooperative gets squashed for their "Art Inside" gallery, but what about J.C. Penney's "It's All Inside" slogan?

Found a nice mirror.