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Domain: w3.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to w3.org.
Comments · 6,785
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Re:What do they mean, "XML 1.0 chokes"?
Actually it's not, but I'll admit that my "most of the time" was -- I was mixing thinking about attribute values with thinking about element content. Outside attribute values, though, I repeat, I don't understand what the problem is supposed to be. If you've got a Unicode NEL in your UTF-8 encoded XML document, by and large the parser's going to pass it through to to your application. What will happen is that it'll fail to get marked as white space. I'm sure there are people for whom that's hugely relevant, but I bet for the majority of XML applications it's not. If I'm wrong, somebody post a link.
Actually your understanding of whitespace in XML is almost completely incorrect.This comment about external parsed entities is much more relevant. I don't use them in any of my XML applications, but I suppose they could get someone in trouble. However, I still don't see how this qualifies as choking.
This is all clearly explained in the standard itself (W3c XML pages).
Dude, you can't just say "it's clearly explained" and point to an enormous mountain of documents. Why didn't you point to the relevant part of the spec? -
Re:What do they mean, "XML 1.0 chokes"?
Actually your understanding of whitespace in XML is almost completely incorrect.
Many XML applications ignore whitespace (after parsing). XML parsers are prohibited from deleting any whitespace that might be part of the data in a document. The xml:space attribute allows a document to indicate places where the author or encoder encourages normalization of space in some way.
This is all clearly explained in the standard itself (W3c XML pages). -
Re:What? No newline?Where did you get that awful idea of using
/>? The proper way is to inclose the paragraph in p-tags like so:
<p> Your text here</p>
Using the paragraph tags as large linebreaks is a very bad habit from the bad old days of the web. Please head to W3C and study the recent standards, and validate your documents before publishing (using a validator, not a browser).
Ohh... And this is actually an issue about XML 1.1 unicode support, so worrying about HTML is quite premature (XHTML is still XML 1.0, and will remain so untill XML 1.1 becomes a standard (or recommendation in W3C-speak). -
Re:What? No newline?Where did you get that awful idea of using
/>? The proper way is to inclose the paragraph in p-tags like so:
<p> Your text here</p>
Using the paragraph tags as large linebreaks is a very bad habit from the bad old days of the web. Please head to W3C and study the recent standards, and validate your documents before publishing (using a validator, not a browser).
Ohh... And this is actually an issue about XML 1.1 unicode support, so worrying about HTML is quite premature (XHTML is still XML 1.0, and will remain so untill XML 1.1 becomes a standard (or recommendation in W3C-speak). -
Re:What about poor old Acorn users?
I like how you get +5 Informative for this
Yeah, I was rather astonished! It's down to 4 now, though, and not unfairly!
Does the XML spec define any sort of byte ordering?
The XML spec says this:
"Entities encoded in UTF-16 must begin with the Byte Order Mark described by Annex F of [ISO/IEC 10646], Annex H of [ISO/IEC 10646-2000], section 2.4 of [Unicode], and section 2.7 of [Unicode3] (the ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE character, #xFEFF). This is an encoding signature, not part of either the markup or the character data of the XML document. XML processors must be able to use this character to differentiate between UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded documents."
I think that means, you have to encode byte ordering info in the document. -
The proposed changeRather than reading through the whole spec:
here is a summary of just the proposed change.
It seems to comply with unicode just fine, I dont see what the controversy is really. -
Karma, please
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Complain
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Complain
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Re:Link prefetching
The W3C recommendation does not mention <LINK TYPE="prefetch"> as a link type, but it is allowed to add new link types.
The W3C recommends adding a profile attribute to the <HEAD> element to sepcify this. -
Re:Link prefetching
The W3C recommendation does not mention <LINK TYPE="prefetch"> as a link type, but it is allowed to add new link types.
The W3C recommends adding a profile attribute to the <HEAD> element to sepcify this. -
Re:Link Pre-fetching is a baaad idea...
You mean a recommendation like this one?
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Prefetch works with many existing documentsThe Mozilla approach could actually work. If any designers ever decide to use it.
The Mozilla approach already works on many documents on the web that have "rel=next" link tags -- especially documents generated from structured markup (DocBook, other SGML). If you're using Mozilla 1.2 beta, you can try it on various W3C recommendations or the GTK programmer's reference, and thousands of other structured documents on the web.
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Did you actually read the page you referenced?From HTML 4.01 link rel types:
Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification.
Other common linktypes not mentioned there include "Search", "Author"/"Made" and "Icon"/"Shortcut Icon". -
Re:Good work now ......HTML is supposed to represent the semantic aspects of the document. That includes things like sidebars (explanitory material related to the main document, but not in the flow of the main document), drop quotes (sentences from the document that form a summary), and so forth. How these things get displayed is a matter for CSS, but there's no way in HTML to specify that this section is a sidebar, or that a sentence should be used as a drop quote.
I'm not clear why you think that you can get a sidebar by "floating a div". First, that's specifying presentation, not semantics. Second, I couldn't find a site that does that: the New York Times uses a table, CNN uses a table. In fact, the W3C uses a table on their front page. If the W3C uses a table on their front page, even though they say:
Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media.
probably there is no way to do it using HTML correctly. -
Prefetching & Standards Complience
Maybe I'm missing the standard for it (I'm not on the bleeding edge of things), but I was looking at the HTML 4.01 link rel types and can't find "preload". Fortunately, according to the FAQ, "next" will do just fine.
This is a not nit-pick, but with all the touting of how 100% standards compliant Mozilla is, I'm wondering what the philosophy is on extending the standard, if "preload" isn't in some later HTML standard that I don't yet know about us. -
Some useful links
I'd check out material from Google, Amazon, The HCI Bibliography, NASA, the W3C, and Joel for starters.
While some may scoff, the ACM has an article on the Windows 95 interface, a little bit aged by now. Though many in this forum dislike Microsoft for its other faults (the constant crashes, draconian business practices, etc.), a big part of their current success comes from the fact that their user interface is simply easy to use. They do their homework when it comes to that.
My mom couldn't spell WWW when I set up my parent's computer for them a couple years ago. She complained that IE wouldn't go to the website after she typed in the address. It took me a while to realize that she wasn't pressing Enter when she finished typing the address in. That's why they have that little "Go" button next to the address box that I always get rid of right away.. Duh!
This is a noble quest, young hero. God speed. -
Re:Simple answer: Don't
I also agree with that. HTML was designed as a platform and device neutral method of document presentation, not as an applications development platform.
That said....If you really must:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ -
Re:Never understood until...That's a very important point!
I think it was a very severe mistake by the W3C WAI to say that accessibility is an issue only for those with disabilities. Gigadollars really doesn't matter a lot if they're not among your target audience anyway.
However, what does matter, is that if I want to use a TV to read your web page, then the web designer is stupid if he does not allow me to. If I want to use a cell phone, he should allow me to do that too. If I want to sit back comfortably and use an 18 pt font, he should allow me to do that as well (I happen to do exactly that, and you can't imagine how many sites doesn't like me to do that).
The problem is that many, if not most, web designers think that they know better than I, what I find appealing. Accessibility is a lot about leaving to me to decide what I find appealing. That might be a concern for the big masses of web users, if they ever had the choice. Most don't even know what they're missing. I'd like that choice.
On a related note, see my User Empowering Browser idea on ShouldExist.
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Re:http://www.diveintoaccessibility.org/
Some times Mark's server is inaccessible, in that case, here is a mirror of the document at Vincent Flander's Fixing Your Web Site : Dive Into Accessibility.
There is also a pretty interesting example of usability gone wild at Chris Davis' - Sillyness spelled wrong intentionally who's site validates as XHTML 1.0 strict
I've often wondered if sometimes we're not all hooked into usability for usability sake, sometime forsaking compelling content? Not so much in the case of Chris Davis, but of some other sites claiming to be diciples of 'the Pilgrim'. -
Re:http://www.diveintoaccessibility.org/
Some times Mark's server is inaccessible, in that case, here is a mirror of the document at Vincent Flander's Fixing Your Web Site : Dive Into Accessibility.
There is also a pretty interesting example of usability gone wild at Chris Davis' - Sillyness spelled wrong intentionally who's site validates as XHTML 1.0 strict
I've often wondered if sometimes we're not all hooked into usability for usability sake, sometime forsaking compelling content? Not so much in the case of Chris Davis, but of some other sites claiming to be diciples of 'the Pilgrim'. -
Re:Let's get something straightWhile I suspect you ov being a troll, I will respond to the last line of your message:
Blind people can lead rich, full lives. - in environments that don't require a dependancy on EYESIGHT. The net IS one of those environments.
The web should be one of those environments. It's not like it's particularly hard to do. Unless it's a photo gallery, the majority of your webpage content is (should be) text. Since you probably have images, just plain text won't do everything you want. That's where the 'ALT' attribute comes in to play. Those who chose not to use them are just plain lazy.While there is more to accessiblity than using ALT tags, they are a start, and would probably improve the majority of pages on the web.
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Re:Jumping Ahead
You mean like the W3C HTML standards
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Re:Save some time...
If you know how to design HTML pages*, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by visiting W3C. They have a great HTML validator [w3.org] which will help you in your goal of accessable web pages.
Let's validate your website:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww + automatically%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitiona l
OK. You're an idiot. -
Re:Lemme guess...
Tables are fine; it's NESTED tables that give some browsers fits.
BTW, the W3C HTML validator checks out your code and will tell you what's not standard. To make sure your code is syntactically correct, make your page XHTML 1.0 compliant, and you'll be in good shape. (XHTML requires many of these 'optional' attributes, like 'alt' attributes for images, and closing 'p' tags, etc. It's very handy; it makes your code cleaner, and it turns HTML into an XML document.) -
Re:We don't nee more legislation
I think the way to go about writing univerally readable pages is to incorporate it into W3C HTML specs
Although it isn't part of the HTML specs, the W3C does address the issue. -
Re:Why buy the book...
Why read the HTML 4 specs when you can validate your page?
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Re:Why buy the book...
Why read the HTML 4 specs when you can validate your page?
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Save some time...If you know how to design HTML pages*, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by visiting W3C. They have a great HTML validator which will help you in your goal of accessable web pages. The NYC Public Library has a great page on making your web pages accessable.
* That doesn't mean using Dreamweaver or any other GUI HTML design software. Real HTML-ers write it by hand. Real Men use vi from what I hear but I like BBEdit for UNIX.
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Re:Boring Web
Web accessibility doesn't prevent beautiful pages. The Web Accessibility Initiative by the W3C has information on making web pages that degrade well. This means that you can have all the flash, Javascript, ActiveX, and everything else you want, and still let someone using Lynx and a screenreader hear what you have to say.
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Re:the uk?
How about this:
Tim Berners-Lee - invented the web
Alan Turing - pioneer in computing
Stephen Hawking - international physics genius
Not lessening the acheivements of the USA, but get some world perspective! This is exactly why so many Brits get pissed at so many Americans.
And Einstein (German) had a reasonably large involvement in the development of atom bomb physics. -
An iteresting point.
I am required to make any web pages I create for my eductaion institute W3C compliant as part of a policy in place. In most cases, all un-compliant pages are missing is the alt tag. If this case is based on W3C compliancy, then a large number of web pages that breach it, Microsoft's page for instance. Have a go, enter an address in the W3C validator and see for yourself.
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Re:Justice prevails
There was no announcement on the W3C's front page
Then you do not visit it often enough, because it was announced there like everything. It was in fact on the homepage on August 20th, that is, long before the flood that the articles of The Register and
It is indeed excellent that this is the turn-out, but there is no reason to imply that the W3C was Bad[tm] in this respect. TimBL made it very clear in his book that software patents posed the greatest obstacle to innovation, yeah, and BTW:
2002-05-12 09:59:23 TimBL Speaks Up Against RAND (articles,patents) (rejected)
So, why didn't
Thanks, Bruce and others for the great work you've done!
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It depends on which standard
Yes, following the HTML 4.01 standard is not a guarentee that your site will be ADA complaint. However, I believe if you follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, also published by the W3C, then you should be fine. In fact, the Australian government enforces the use of this standard on all their sites.
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Re:I think the answer is easyLet's take a look: here's the W3C validator's report on that site.
It's complaining because you've missed 3 ALT tags, and you haven't quoted 4 attributes. Both of these are trivial: getting your site up to spec should take you about a minute, including the time taken to think of the text for your ALT tags.
So - I'm genuinely curious here, because I rely on this daily and find it an excellent tool - what were these "stupid things" which make you want to ignore it? Have you considered submitting feedback to the W3C with some possible improvements?
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Re:I think the answer is easyLet's take a look: here's the W3C validator's report on that site.
It's complaining because you've missed 3 ALT tags, and you haven't quoted 4 attributes. Both of these are trivial: getting your site up to spec should take you about a minute, including the time taken to think of the text for your ALT tags.
So - I'm genuinely curious here, because I rely on this daily and find it an excellent tool - what were these "stupid things" which make you want to ignore it? Have you considered submitting feedback to the W3C with some possible improvements?
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Not W3C compliant, I can't subscribe...
They aren't W3C compliant so I can't feel right about giving them money.
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Re:All Sites
as simple as putting a link to a text-only page as the very first link at the top of the homepage. I've seen it in enough places. That's not tough, it's not expensive,
The idea that making a text-only version of a website is all that's needed to make a website accessible is a myth. Its the same myth that provokes other webdesigners to construct "Netscape" and "IE" duplicates of websites - its ludicrous and involves some serious overheads in keeping multiple versions of a website in synch and up-to-date. You can bet your bottom dollar that the text version of the site is the first to be left behind and overlooked when it comes to updating.
Creating an accessible website is not difficult. The recommendations and guidelines have been available on the web since 1999 - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is there for website authors to create accessible content. There's nothing in there that's remotely difficult.
I'm amazed at the level of complains from so-called "creative artists" about the Web and how they don't want to follow the standards path. Other artists in other media work within the constraints and boundaries of their chosen media and deliver work of high quality. And then they use the media to its full use.
But when it comes to websites, these so-called artists cannot understand the web beyond what they see in their browsers. They limit their imagination and scope and refuse to make their creations accessible in a public medium.
They are "so-called artists" since its clear they do not understand the breadth and depth of the World Wide Web. The ability to build accessible websites should be a mandatory skill requirement before embarking on a professional career in web design - its as important as the ability to write legibly. -
Justice prevails
I have been waiting long for this, and I'm glad it didn't turn out the other way round.
Those who were involved in the outcry would recall the proposal for RAND [non-free] standards was done in a rather suspicious manner. There was no announcement on the W3C's front page [I visit it regularly] but a proposal for RAND was quietly drafted, a ludicrously short deadline for feedback set and a mailing list for the same created. Why, then, is it suprising that only thirteen posts were recorded until a week before the initial deadline, ten of them spam?
Then the story broke [on The Register, IIRC] and the mails flooded in. And what a flood it was *smiles* - 755 in Sept and 1686 in Oct. My mailbox was getting a good beating.
Many voiced their opinions strongly, and with an exception or two [one of which was obvious astroturfing], they were all soundly against the inclusion of non-free patents in W3C standards [check out the archives and spot the famous names]. Under this tremendous pressure, the W3C had little alternative but to extend the deadline. I am sure certain * ahem * special interest groups were disappointed - but hey, it's for the best. Really.
And now we have this. Brilliant. Common sense and justice have won this round.
Special thanks to Bruce Perens, Daniel Phillips, Adam Warner and Gervase Markham for their dedication to this cause. -
Justice prevails
I have been waiting long for this, and I'm glad it didn't turn out the other way round.
Those who were involved in the outcry would recall the proposal for RAND [non-free] standards was done in a rather suspicious manner. There was no announcement on the W3C's front page [I visit it regularly] but a proposal for RAND was quietly drafted, a ludicrously short deadline for feedback set and a mailing list for the same created. Why, then, is it suprising that only thirteen posts were recorded until a week before the initial deadline, ten of them spam?
Then the story broke [on The Register, IIRC] and the mails flooded in. And what a flood it was *smiles* - 755 in Sept and 1686 in Oct. My mailbox was getting a good beating.
Many voiced their opinions strongly, and with an exception or two [one of which was obvious astroturfing], they were all soundly against the inclusion of non-free patents in W3C standards [check out the archives and spot the famous names]. Under this tremendous pressure, the W3C had little alternative but to extend the deadline. I am sure certain * ahem * special interest groups were disappointed - but hey, it's for the best. Really.
And now we have this. Brilliant. Common sense and justice have won this round.
Special thanks to Bruce Perens, Daniel Phillips, Adam Warner and Gervase Markham for their dedication to this cause. -
Re:Human Rights
Because if you knew what the fuck you were doing WRT HTML, it would work for disabled people with zero effort. But since you don't, and are too stupid to learn better, it's now a "big deal".
So many clueless people, so little time.
Actually, it is you that is clueless. It isn't that easy to write a page (bar a simple one) that applies the currect w3.org standards that works in 3 major browsers. Have you ever tried? From your above statement, I'd say NOT.
But since you don't, and are too stupid to learn better, it's now a "big deal".
Again, you sound like an idiot with no experience here too. Have you ever tried coding a single page to conform to 8 different 'standards'? Go on! Make your crappy little homepage with 12 pages multifunctional: now lets see you do that with my website that I work on for my company: over 1200 pages, more than 20 major departments and they all need to 'conform' to all these standards. Why don't you cruise over the the checklist page and see how YOU do?
Oh. I forgot. You're just another clueless piece of crap who thinks they know everything because you can 'code' HTML.
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It's not that hard
A couple of years ago, when I was in production support, I had to respond to our VP level concerning complaints from our clients who could not use our site with the standard screen readers. This was a novel issue to me at the time and I quickly familiarized myself with screen reader technology and the W3C's accessibility quidelines.
I suggested that it would not be a terribly huge undertaking to bring our site into a minimum level of compliance. Nope, this was deemed too costly relative to the small segment of our clientele who were disabled. Failing that, I suggested that we could simply ensure that all new development going forward implemented the accessibiltiy guidelines.
Well, two years and a new redesign later, and this still hasn't been implemented. I mean, how hard is it to include accessibility in the business requirements for the new development being farmed out?
Here's a web app that validates a URL against the W3C's accessibiltiy guidelines.Most sites will generate a ton of errors, but you'll also notice that this accessibility boils down to simple things like using *correct* html, making sure you supply text in alt and title tags, etc.
I'm not certain, but I think accessibility concerns was a reason that has caused the W3C to want to deprecate the use of framesets: screenreaders have a hell of a time trying to present essentially two different documents at the same time with any level of coherance.
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Re:Yet another thing to think about
It's getting to be alot of hassle to design websites.
Not if you stick to the standards, and get rid of stupid stuff like flash buttons. Or at the very least, provide both flash and non-flash versions of your site.
If you can't stick to standards, you shouldn't be writing a web page anyway - at least not one that you want to make sure people are able to read.
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Re:bad page! bad page!!http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#q3
My bad...."blink -- Text blinks (alternates between visible and invisible). Conforming user agents are not required to support this value"
I knew it was in the CSS specs, but I thought it said encoraged instead of required.
I'm a bit suppired at Mozilla to. But then again. It's not really a bad spec....Just another abused tool.
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An earlier article
I read a better article quite some time ago by Tim Berners Lee, entitled Cool URIs don't change, in which he discusses the designing urls properly ie. what to leave out of a url (things like
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Government and more flexible signed assertionsThis is the situation where we need the government to step in. We're all getting driver's licenses from the government, passports, etc., and these are really the only real-world pieces of identification people accept. What we need is for the government to step in and issue digital ID's, to individuals and corporations. These ID's would tie us to whatever electronic identifiers are appropriate (domain names and/or e-mail addresses), and appropriate delegation would be permitted from there.
We just need the a trusted authority (for certain definitions of 'trusted' and for the definition of 'authority' that is ubiquitously recognized instead of decided by the highest bidders in the browser wars) to make digital assertions.
You'd start with certifying identities: my state might sign a certificate certifying my name, maybe driver's license number, perhaps address and even a photograph. I should now be able to sign e-mails with this now independently of my e-mail address. The resulting signed message could carry whatever signed assertions I wanted to put on it. (Probably my name and maybe my photograph.) I can't forge these, because these components are signed by the state in connection with my identity. A posting to a self-help group might just assert my identity in the form of a photograph and an unsigned nickname.
Taking this a step further, I should be able to use this ID to sign other things, even web sites. This will require changes to the way users perceive an "authenticated" web site. If I go to a bank at www.example.com today, they have a certificate that basically states "www.example.com is Example Bank, and their identity is certified". What my own signed web site might assert is "www.example.com is Joe User". User agents need to give more weight to the name here and less weight to the fact that the domain name matches what's in the certificate.
Extend this now to corporations. When a corporate charter is created, a digital ID for that corporation is created along with it and signed by the state of incorporation. That corporation can now sign assertions like "Joe User is the CEO of Example Corporation".
So now, when Joe User sends an e-mail, he can include this information:- Joe User (signed by the state of residence)
- (Joe's picture, signed by the state)
- Job Title: CEO (signed by Example Corporation)
Some of these concepts will require a re-thinking of the way we approach authenticated online identities. We need to stop placing so much importance on online identifiers (like domain names and e-mail addresses) and start paying attention to who is making those assertions. I can sign an assertion stating that my e-mail address is 'joe@example.com', but unless that's really my e-mail address, it's not going to do anyone a whole lot of good. If I go around forging e-mails from joe@example.com and including that signed assertion, everyone should be able to take one look at that and say, "Who the hell is this guy claiming to be joe@example.com?". Only the guy with the certificate stating the assertion that he is "joe", signed by "example", signed by a valid registrar for ".com" would be able to say that with any authority.
A lot of this can be done today with signed/encrypted XML, provided we have a common framework to start sharing the assertions. -
Tim Berners-Lee
A good basic guide from the founder of the web is at http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html. (Note that URI doesn't follow its own advice, heh)
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Re:Alternative Input
Actually, the accesskey attribute will help...
accesskey
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Re:what about the w3c ?
Also, apparently 4.0 transitional (which I thought was an older, frozen standard) suddenly doesn't allow the use of the unterminated paragraph tag. Hey, I read the docs, it's deprecated but still supported. Suddenly I have to use the terminated version, or change them all to two page break tags! grrr
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On a related note - the LINK tag...
I was glad about a year ago when Slashdot added the LINK tag to help with navigation.
For web authors out there - imagine an easy place to define where your home page is, and some basic navigation links, including a copyright page and an author link.
For browsers that support it, iCab on the Mac being one, it is a nice addition to a site when I find them.