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What's your opinion about the Section 508 laws in that they almost ignore the existence of the work developed by the W3C's WAI group?

Why have the USA created a different set of rules? We all have learned that having several standards is always worst than a single one. Developers don't want to worry about which standard to implement

Why haven't they done the same as other countries that simply adapted WAI standards?

From W3C's comment on Section 508:

In diverging from evolving consensus on Web accessibility, the provisions in the NPRM have the effect of fragmenting the industry standard rather than harmonizing with voluntary consensus industry standards as advised by a U.S. Government directive. Should the proposed provisions go into effect as is, Sec. 508 would not only fail to take advantage of supporting provisions for accessibility in Web-based authoring tools, browsers, accessibility checkers, and existing training materials; but also complicate implementation of accessibility features in these products, potentially increasing the cost of compliance.

What's your opinion about the Section 508 laws in that they almost ignore the existence of the work developed by the W3C's WAI group?

Why have the USA created a different set of rules? We all have learned that having several standards is always worst than a single one. Developers don't want to worry about which standard to implement

Why haven't they done the same as other countries that simply adapted WAI standards?

From W3C's comment on Section 508:

In diverging from evolving consensus on Web accessibility, the provisions in the NPRM have the effect of fragmenting the industry standard rather than harmonizing with voluntary consensus industry standards as advised by a U.S. Government directive. Should the proposed provisions go into effect as is, Sec. 508 would not only fail to take advantage of supporting provisions for accessibility in Web-based authoring tools, browsers, accessibility checkers, and existing training materials; but also complicate implementation of accessibility features in these products, potentially increasing the cost of compliance.

How do you feel about the Web Accessibility Initiative ?. Do you support it, are you a part of it ?. Do you think that accessibility-aware standards are the way to go (even though some software companies try to stick their own closed protocols instead of open standards)?

First, I would have the owner of the "average site" in question check their site logs. In both my personal and work sites (which serve very different audiences), version 4 browsers became a less than 10% minority over a year ago. IE 5 dominates, IE 6 and Mozilla-based browsers are gaining ground, and the percentage of Netscape 4 users continues to shrink.

By the way, you can have a site that's still "table-based" and yet complies with standards. All the table tags exist in the latest W3C specs. Accessibility can still be achieved with a table-based layout.

If you need more ammo to convince a boss or client that building to standards is wise, go to MACCAWS (Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards) to get some ammo for your argument.

What do you think of slashdot's poor implementation of conform code ? Apparently, the w3c validator is not even allowed to have an opinion on the matter.

Dive In To Accessibility

WAI

Colour blind checker

ISU

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

In the BSD world, we believe in making available trap-less software
which anyone can use for any purpose. Even if they wanted to put our
operating system into baby mulching machines or cruise missiles. We
expose no ethic except our own of transitive freedom in sharing. We
make no demands except credit.

Theo DeRaadt, OpenBSD

>I wonder why HTML forms are still so primitive, they've been around for years now and no-one's bothered to add more exotic widgets

XForms might be what you are looking for. Previously coverages on Slashdot: Release Candidate and Approval.

Still no widgets, as widgets are possible interpretations of the form, nonetheless...

I'm surprised that: A) this is considered a serious bug--who actually uses DHTML? and B) they're "recalling" the release, as it were. Tainted Mozilla meat.

Is it not enough reason that this is a bug? We should stop release for all bugs! But seriously....

A big reason is that DHTML is pretty much just a way of saying the W3C DOM and a few DOM Level 0 (no spec) APIs. This bug effectively cripples our standards support and I would definitely call that serious.

On top of that, with every release, there is a chance that some embeddor will want to base their product off of it. Embeddors generally like DHTML, and this would be a show stopper for them.

Using "Click here to complete your purchase" as a regular hypertext link (i.e. href="foo") would be a violation of the HTTP protocol, so any sites that do that are broken, and should not be used. (see further reading, if you're interested.)

In general, it sould be safe to prefetch any URLs using HTTP's GET method.

I am very happy to hear about prefetching in Mozilla -- I have been wanting this feature for years!

As many people have already stated, IE uses proprietary tags that are not part of the W3C standard. Mozilla simply doesn't want to promote MS's code or any other sh1tty code. If you're going to code a page, either code it right or don't bother bitching about how Mozilla doesn't support your fscked up code.

HTML sucks for printers. (Especially when it comes to page seperation )

HTML sucks, but the forthcoming CSS Paged Media won't.

Type a document in word, put 7 large images, save as .doc and as .rtf now compare the file sizes.

Now zip both files. If they're about the same size, you've found a solution to the problem.

They wrote a schema as well as a DTD (which has the usual namespace validity problems). XSD may be big and ugly, but the designers would have noticed if it couldn't even describe itself.

They wrote a schema as well as a DTD (which has the usual namespace validity problems). XSD may be big and ugly, but the designers would have noticed if it couldn't even describe itself.

XML is good for industry standards bodies. It's open, there are open implementations, and you can irrefutably lay down the syntactic and semantic law in a schema without any ambiguity.

FpML, ArApXML, MDML are good examples of industry-specific XML standards. Going into the wider space, you get ebXML, SOAP and more.

XML is the new-world replacement for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and it's biggest uses are B2B and company-internal, with a small B2C following starting up for things like weather data, news feeds etc. It's not surprising you've not come across it... and until you go and work for a megalithic corporation on the IT side, you probably won't.

there's no such thing as braille computer monitors

Actually they're pretty common - here is an example of what they look like.

I also know that many visually impaired people use Emacs Speak (which supports Aural Style Sheets for web browsing)

There are a lot more blind people on the internet than you think...

Maybe if they weren't paying insane licensing fees to run Windows 2000 on their servers, they wouldn't be in such a budget crunch...

Gotta wonder how much they pay their Web Developer who writes non-compliant HTML and ASP in "QEDIT and some old-fashioned typing" [Check their html source] too.

And you know hosting those 30 gaming (oops. sorry, they're "Virtual Reality") servers has to be a big money maker, right?

g4dget wrote: "The open source community should not touch either of them.".
Opens source development often follows the very successful strategy of finding a standard that works and re-implementing it and building upon it. It is possible to reimplement standards based on proprietary products but due care should still take place

GNU/Linux is a implementation based on Unix and the Posix standards. Unix was proprietary licensed by AT&T, and early open source BSD386 (what became FreeBSD and NetBSD ) development, which replaced the remaining proprietary AT&T code in BSD, was greatly hampered by threats and lawsuits from AT&T. Early Linux development escaped legal entanglement precisely because the developers took steps to insure no such code mixing with AT&T's source took place. However, this took place before software patents were in widespread use, in fact it was not until 1991 that most software companies took any interest in software patents at all.To quote Bill Gates May 16, 1991 email "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

Does this mean that the open source development community should avoid any and all frameworks and patented methords? NO - There is a better way.

The solution is to start a negotiation "dialog" with all the parties involved, getting them to actually support open source implementations and licensing based on their proprietary products. How? It's not easy but it is possible.
1) Win-Win: demonstrate how it is in there best interest to work with the open source community - using open source developed code to ad value to there own products
2) Reward : Any relatively good behavour, incomparison to other players, reward - say thank you and promote them.
3) Converted partners : When you have made a "convert" to open source, such as IBM and SAP, them to badger other partners into also adopting open source friendly licenses.
4) Comparison : play one against the other, Get Microsoft to open it's .NET spec and patent licensing by continualy comparing them to Sun's terms.

5) Badger, Badger, Badger them with the truth : Long conversations and confontations are tiring but it forces the other side to truly consider the issues.

In the long term, does it work? Yes. With the X Window System, in 1998 the Open Group releases X11R6.4 under restrictive licensing, after months of haggling and bitter arguing, The Open Group rescinded the restrictive licensing. On November 14th of this year, again after months of similar haggling and bitter arguing, the Patent Policy Working Group of the W3C announced the Royalty-Free Patent Policy.

It's ironic, but the open source friendly licensing model actualy bring about a solution to the software patient problem proposed by Bill Gates himself in the same email, patent exchanges - "The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can". Since no company can aparently truly trust the competition in long term relationships, open source friendly licensing provides a methord where competing parties can build upon each others patents.

g4dget wrote: "You think everybody who isn't enamored with Sun must be a Microsoft shill?"
Well, the tactics you employ under the shear weight of contradictory linked evidence is a tactic I find often applied by members of the Microsoft Shill persuasion. No, I don't work for Sun, IBM or any other vendor in the IT industry, but I do admire and promote postive behavour when I see it.

See the list of implementations. Here are some highlights, in answer to your question:

• XForms in Mozilla has been assigned to an implementor; you can track its status in bugzilla, as has been reported here a few times.
• As for IE, when W3C issued the recommendation to begin implementing, there was already a plug-in for IE and a server-side XForms to Flash transcoder, which means that XForms works on anything that supports Flash.

That should tide us over until support for mobile phones, pdas, appliances, net-connected office equipment, workflow systems, and other browsers pick up support.

If you are implementing XForms yourself, please do send implementation feedback.

I think this is a very important addition to Internet Programming. IMHO forms and client side programming are currently HTML's weakest point and standardizing this areas growth is very wise.

I think we are heading towards a richer standards friendly front end for our web browsers.

One year from now I will probably be building web apps in JavaServer Faces + SVG, that are just as responsive and fast as using all the evil proprietary IE goodies.

The thing with rumours is that, like sex, you should check past history before sharing with someone new.

Short verson SVG is Royalty Free

Longer verson SVG is Royalty Free and here is why ...

The SVG Working group is chartered to be a Royalty Free working group. It was the first one at W3C, in fact. That did mean, though, that we asked all members of the working group for their license terms on patents that they might not even know they had ;-) which scared some people at the time of the Big RAND Wars which slashdotters will remember ... its seems that reading "company X has US patent 12345 and gives the following royalty free license" or "company Y has no patents and gives a RAND license to them" etc was too confusing.

So we simplified and clarified. In the SVG 1.1 and Mobile SVG specs you will find a link fromthe 'Status of this Document' to the patent page. There is one patent number there, from Kodak, along with a legal statement from Kodak that it is not needed for implementing SVG. We still have to tell people about it, of course, since they told us.

So yes, SVG is Royalty Free

The thing with rumours is that, like sex, you should check past history before sharing with someone new.

Short verson SVG is Royalty Free

Longer verson SVG is Royalty Free and here is why ...

The SVG Working group is chartered to be a Royalty Free working group. It was the first one at W3C, in fact. That did mean, though, that we asked all members of the working group for their license terms on patents that they might not even know they had ;-) which scared some people at the time of the Big RAND Wars which slashdotters will remember ... its seems that reading "company X has US patent 12345 and gives the following royalty free license" or "company Y has no patents and gives a RAND license to them" etc was too confusing.

So we simplified and clarified. In the SVG 1.1 and Mobile SVG specs you will find a link fromthe 'Status of this Document' to the patent page. There is one patent number there, from Kodak, along with a legal statement from Kodak that it is not needed for implementing SVG. We still have to tell people about it, of course, since they told us.

So yes, SVG is Royalty Free

The thing with rumours is that, like sex, you should check past history before sharing with someone new.

Short verson SVG is Royalty Free

Longer verson SVG is Royalty Free and here is why ...

The SVG Working group is chartered to be a Royalty Free working group. It was the first one at W3C, in fact. That did mean, though, that we asked all members of the working group for their license terms on patents that they might not even know they had ;-) which scared some people at the time of the Big RAND Wars which slashdotters will remember ... its seems that reading "company X has US patent 12345 and gives the following royalty free license" or "company Y has no patents and gives a RAND license to them" etc was too confusing.

So we simplified and clarified. In the SVG 1.1 and Mobile SVG specs you will find a link fromthe 'Status of this Document' to the patent page. There is one patent number there, from Kodak, along with a legal statement from Kodak that it is not needed for implementing SVG. We still have to tell people about it, of course, since they told us.

So yes, SVG is Royalty Free

SVG doesn't have audio capabilities because audio isn't, well, vector graphics. You can add audio, though, by using SMIL, another W3C standard. Or you can once someone supports SMIL. (RealPlayer supports SMIL, but AFAIK not SVG.) I suppose you could also probably use some JavaScript stuff to get audio.

See also W3C XForms, which has just become a Candidate Recommendation (one step before PR). XForms updates HTML forms to be XML-based, and plays well with other standards, adding forms to SVG and other XML applications. There are already about a dozen XForms implementations, ranging from those for hand-held devices to standalone clients and popular browser plug-ins. (And a Bugzilla entry for Mozilla that is entertaining reading, though a link from Slashdot won't work anyway.)

Disclaimer: I am one of the editors of the XForms spec.

See also W3C XForms, which has just become a Candidate Recommendation (one step before PR). XForms updates HTML forms to be XML-based, and plays well with other standards, adding forms to SVG and other XML applications. There are already about a dozen XForms implementations, ranging from those for hand-held devices to standalone clients and popular browser plug-ins. (And a Bugzilla entry for Mozilla that is entertaining reading, though a link from Slashdot won't work anyway.)

Disclaimer: I am one of the editors of the XForms spec.

Repeat after me:

"I haven't read the XML spec, I haven't read the XML spec..."???

Section 1.1, "Origin and Goals":

"The Design Goals for XML are...
6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear."

Geez guys! Run it through the w3c validator!

We're suppossed to be promoting the standards right?

This is linked to right from their main news page, too. Introduction indeed.

Don't you feel safer when you know that your Internet standards are in good hands?

Jouni

This is linked to right from their main news page, too. Introduction indeed.

Don't you feel safer when you know that your Internet standards are in good hands?

Jouni

If you were wondering what they're talking about, it might be:

in this submission

An article talks about it on
ZDnet

which I probably found on an old slashdot article.

What is XML Encryption, btw?

W3C XML Encryption Working Group

Finkployd

Amaya

I'm all for standards, but they should have a basis in reality (read: working implementations) and not be some committee's idea of a good idea.

Your example is a bit disturbing ... in that they don't declare a DOCTYPE at all!

That said, when I want ahead and chose 4.01 Transitional for them, it got back almot 4 dozen HTML errors. Similar results for other DocTypes as well. OOOFTA!

You'd think if they took to time to rewrite the sucker, that'd they at least take the time to VALIDATE it!

You've got to be kidding me. You've never used the W3C validator? I couldn't live without that thing...

http://validator.w3.org

Actually, IE6 does a decent job. Their DOM1 support is good, their CSS1 is more or less complete, but their CSS2 is pretty crappy. Fixed positioning doesn't work, selectors like E[attr] are missing, etc.

Lately I've been working on an app for a company's internal use, which means the delightful situation of being able to dictate minimum browser requirements. As a result, the app is designed for IE6/Mozilla. All development has been in Mozilla, and a lot of DOM use goes on. And it all works in IE6, no browser checking anywhere. My only regrets is I can't make use of the more advanced selectors provided by CSS2, so the HTML has a few more class attributes than it would need otherwise. But, overall, not bad.

Another positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml. So at last, XHTML documents can be sent with the proper mime type.

So despite being a Mozilla (Galeon) user, as a web developer who makes heavy use of modern standards, I look forward to seeing IE continue to catch up to Mozilla so that I can worry even less about browser-specific issues.

I don't think that's necessarily true. It's a given that Microsoft's track record in terms of standards compliance has been exceptionally poor relative to Mozilla and other similar efforts, but "MS HTML" is somewhat closer to w3c's standards at the present than they were previously.

Also, while IE is the most popular browser, it's not the only one, and a not insignificant proportion of the population uses Mozilla, Opera, and other browsers. Somewhat hypocritical of me, since I'm currently using IE on my Windows partition, as opposed to Mozilla on my FreeBSD partition, but on purely technical merits, IE isn't really the best browser, and the optimist in me is convinced that the greater portion of the online population will eventually go for the better solution. On the other hand, if they don't, why should we worry about it? The proletariat can do as they please. So long as "MS HTML" doesn't somehow become entirely proprietary, we retain the ability to access it, plus we get to view properly-rendered pages. Whee.

Don't forget, either, that Microsoft actually is a member of the w3c. Microsoft can be accused of many things, but blatantly violating one's own standards is a rather stupid thing to do.

Ernst & Young have a regular P3P Dashboard Report[PDF] that summarizes adoption of P3P by large Web sites.

Privacy is a difficult issue; P3P has been derided because it doesn't do enough (actively negotiate or protect your privacy), because it does too much (intrusion into the browser, difficult to implement) and generally because it's too complex.

As a result, it's a compromise that noone is 100% happy about, but it does give us something to work with. Standards that try to do everything for everyone almost always fail.

The W3C is, next week, holding a workshop to look at the future of P3P; I haven't had a chance to read the position papers yet, but the fact that they're holding a workshop shows that they know there's more work to do.

http://validator.w3.org/

Go there now... Make your site compliant... Resistance is futile... (Slashdot doesn't pass)

Also for folks using Windows IE (the majority) ATT&T offers up their free eternally-beta AT&T Privacy Bird which gives folks visual and auditory feedback (both controlled/turned off in Prefs) on site's P3P settings. Quite informative actually, I discovered just how awful Yahoo's policies are when I used their headline aggregator (just who are they selling my newsreading habits to?) [rhetorical question]

The P3P folks have put together a great website at P3P Public Overview which is chock-full of useful information. On the other hand here is an interesting critique and here another, suprisingly both by lawyers. Security guru Richard Smith also has an important (though hopefully now fixed?) page on supercookies and how MS IE 6's touted protections can be got around.

Mozilla of course supports P3P and it's useful to understand just how MS IE 6 suppports and applies P3P and cookies.

Have you read the SOAP 1.2 specification lately? Nevermind the XML Schema and HTTP 1.1 specifications which SOAP also uses. These specs are far from "simple". SOAP seems to be slowly turning into an XML version of CORBA. XMLRPC, on the other hand, is simple. The Jabber protocol is even simpler yet - no HTTP transport. Something that starts off simple is usually transformed into something quite different after committees of software development firms get a hold of it. It's in their interest to keep the barrier to entry high.

Have you read the SOAP 1.2 specification lately? Nevermind the XML Schema and HTTP 1.1 specifications which SOAP also uses. These specs are far from "simple". SOAP seems to be slowly turning into an XML version of CORBA. XMLRPC, on the other hand, is simple. The Jabber protocol is even simpler yet - no HTTP transport. Something that starts off simple is usually transformed into something quite different after committees of software development firms get a hold of it. It's in their interest to keep the barrier to entry high.

Ehhm

I might be a bit stupid here, but wasn't math-font-problem why the w3c came up with MathML?

Why not simply use that?

I don't know who Tim Bernard Lee is, but the inventor of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee is still alive and kicking as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium.

I don't know who Tim Bernard Lee is either. In fact, I am pretty sure he meant Tim Berners-Lee, one of the key people behind the creation of the World Wide Web.

Hardly obscure. The man has a Google Category all to himself.

For example,SVG - an XML standard for Vector Graphics - expects all conformant viewers to be able to handle gzip/gunzip compression.

They compress down as small as binary Flash (.swf) files.

"a process for encrypting data and representing the result in XML. The data may be arbitrary data (including an XML document), an XML element, or XML element content. The result of encrypting data is an XML Encryption element which contains or references the cipher data."

XML is slowly but surely turning into the huge beast from where it came, SGML, I thought the point of XML was simplicity...forget the open standards of data exchange everyone is talking about, the bickering of the major players will never allow XML, or any specifications dervied from it to become the "one" format for efficient data exchange

MSXML
SunXML
IBMXML

..get used to it, and more articles like this.

You really shouldn't use tables for layout, and in fact, it violates the HTML specification for tables. Tables are for presenting tabular data, not layout. Using them for layout, expect breakage (not to mention, your code is completely invalid HTML).

I'd start there, and you might see an improvement in the results you get from your PDA users.