Slashdot Mirror

Number one- Was I identifying with the geek community when I was 19? No. I'm still only saying I'm a quasi-geek, quite possibly because the "geek elite" such as thyself (Who undoubtably has perfect HTML) would pounce upon me and claim I'm not up to par.

Number two- google is geeky correct? And how about slashdot.org? Then there's, of course, php.net,mysql.com, and quite a few others. In fact, pretty much every page I tested came up with multiple errors, including http://www.w3.org

And while it's longer and doesn't have QUITE the number of errors as my 19-year-old-girl page, wouldn't you say that Linus should at least be closer to your standards of geeky perfection?

In short, get the bug out of your butt and find more important things to do than critiquing HTML that is 3 years old at this point. (More, actually, because at that point I didn't even feel like writing HTML and just edited the text that was in the last index page.)

Oh. One final thing. In my "I am not a geek" years just prior to going downhill at 19 and posting that abomination of a website, I did actually make intense use of syntax-checking tools on the web. I just didn't really feel like doing it for the last little while because I became quite jaded on the entire concept of HTML. I think that everyone has, with the exception of you, Your Geekiness.

Oh, one final thing- you're never going to a.) sound intelligent while attacking someone personally or b.) get anything short of a rabid-frothing at the mouth response from anyone whilst attacking them personally.

Particularly when the post you were responding to was only half-serious.

-Sara

The site works fine in Mozilla 1.0, but try this.

Visit slashdot, hit ctrl-I and notice the rendering mode. "Quirks mode" instead of "Standards compliant mode".

Slashdot should follow web standards and set a GOOD example for the community, especially considering their prominence, influence, and the appearance of hypocracy if we preach about standards and do not follow them.

Try going to validator.w3.org and entering slashdot.org.

It is quite disheartening to see just how non-compliant the site is.

... compliant...


just try it on this site.

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ I'd say a browser isn't standards complient when it doesn't render the w3c.org website properly...

The things you're complaining about are not things the standards people have control over.

• The HTML spec doesn't know anything about JavaScript (which creates popups, resizes windows, nags you about the Flash plugin, and so on) other than creating a general-purpose way for people to embed scripts in their pages.
• The "whole page" is made up of the HTML page itself and, usually, various images that are embedded in it with IMG tags. It's up to the web designer, not the standards people, where to get those images. The HTTP standard definitely lets you get the whole page in one connection if the designer has put all the images on the same server.
• The standards do demand a text description for every image. People just don't do it.

The standards are reasonably easy to read. I suggest you have a look at their web site and learn more about it. The people who think about these things understand these issues, and do the right thing, but the people who don't want to think just ignore them. That's the whole point of this article.

> doesn't-that-burn-your-bottom

Yeah, especially since /. doesn't validate as proper HTML. Slashdot is one of the premier OSS sites; if we don't follow the standards, why should anyone else?

I really hate to say it, but in at least this one case my CSS presentation would have "looked better in IE" because IE actually implemented the standards correctly, and Mozilla blew it. I hate it when Microsoft is right!

I really hate to say it, but in at least this one case my CSS presentation would have "looked better in IE" because IE actually implemented the standards correctly, and Mozilla blew it. I hate it when Microsoft is right!

I've been expecting this article for a month now. What most people fail to realize is that when the webdesigners are forced into making an "artsy" website (most customers expect such things these days) we're forced to comply to the most compliant browser. My personal webpages as well as others I do for free are simple in nature. Everythings organized with paragraph and headline tags, and seperated by horizontal rules and divs. From there it's a simple matter of adding CSS to render the page in a half attractive matter. Using this method a browsers ability to display the page comes down to its CSS capability, a W3C standard.

I was saddened to see that Mozilla (yes 1.0 and higher) is less compliant than Internet Explorer with CSS2. This, of course, is important due to CSS2's positioning capabilities. Due to a certain Mozilla bug on the box model accurately positioned elements with borders are impossible to display in both IE and Mozilla. The problem is that mozilla measures alignment instructions from the edge of the browser (or parent element) to the edge of the padding, which is incorrect. It should measure from the edge of the parent element to the border. Meaning that if I say an element is 32 pixels by 32 pixels with a sixteen pixel border, the content of this element is not seen, and is instead filled by the border. I'm sad (you have no idea how much of a dissapointment this is) that IE 5.5 (the most widly used web browser) does this correctly while mozilla instead chooses to render the content and draw the border around that, making alignment between various elements difficult, if not impossible.

This was, of course, a pain in the ass and necessitated my using an unacceptable number of graphics in my last "artsy" page to make it look even somewhat acceptable in Mozilla.

It was from that day forward that I decided "to hell with working for browser standards." I will work within W3C's HTML 4.01 specifications (yes I actually read their reccomendations while working on a webpage, not some half-assed book reference). If browsers want to render my pages correctly they'll comply to set standards.

When it comes right down to it, mozilla and IE are nothing more than comparable when it comes to standards compliance. They both contain approximately the same amount of errors when rendering markup. Thus the only thing setting them apart is how many people use them. Given these facts it's not hard to understand why other web designers opt for IE over mozilla more often than not.

In short, STFU, stop blaming web devolopers and tell the organizations that create this software to invest more time in standards compliance. Then, and only then, will it be the web designers fault that you can't read penny-arcade. Because only then, will we not be forced to choose who we're writing this cursedly obfuscated markup for...

From the article:
"What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs."

A quick trip to the old trusty w3c validator and you'll find that the front page isn't even compliant!

Bad Russ. Anyone have Russ's email address? He needs to learn how to use the resources of this thing called the "web".

The Any Browser Campaign has been around for a while to help with this. Read their stuff, it's sane and helpful. Follow their guidelines and write polite, informative email messages to the webmasters of non-conformant web sites. Include a link to the W3C's Validator along with a comment on how many HTML DTD violations their page has.

Follow through on your own site and add an AnyBrowser button and a W3C Valid HTML button to the footer of all of your pages.

Finally, here's a web page that I found this weekend that really does seem to be "yearning for the bad old days" is MenuScape. All you get from their site is a notice that you should be using IE! Although I wasn't as polite to them as the Any Browser Campaign suggested, I did point out that if they meet their customers expectations, the customers will be happy, but probably won't tell anyone. If they do stupid things like make their page IE only, then some disgruntled customer (no names mentioned) will probably out them on slashdot ;). Don't be too mean to them because, now that I've tested my link on the preview of this post, I've discovered that this message only appears on the first load. If you're persistent, they'll let you in even without IE.

the w3c validator.
Sometimes the webmasters of the site even respond and are surprised that such a thing exists. If people would keep doing that, web desingers might use the validator as well.
The real problem are those so-called authoring tools which produce invalid html in the first place. Everybody who bought such a program should complain to the manufacturer.

If you meant some other "Bobbie", then I'm obviously talking rubbish and should be ignored :)

Slashdot comes up with a good hundred or so errors when put through the W3C HTML validator.

This is a link to the report on http://slashdot.org through the W3C validator.

Interesting.

Steven

> I usually design web pages using w3c documentation
Do you validate your HTML?

All the DHTML sites I visit are using standards compliant code so it just seems to work. In alt.javascript I've noticed people mostly give responces which follow the DOM standards.

I have found a few corperate web sites which don't work with my web browser. ati.com (Now it works, but it didn't in the past), electronic arts (Site redesign fixed the problems) and the government of canada's (un)employment insurance web site (It has a warning for nav6 users but I never bothered to look into it). But those are the exception to the rule.

In general, I don't really see this as that big of a problem. Just asking the web designer to fix the web site usually works. And if you need help figuring it out, the w3c always has their Evangelism mailing-list and Bugzilla has tech evangelism bugs where they will notify the author of a particular web site sending them information on how they can make their web site work in w3c compliant web browsers.

All the DHTML sites I visit are using standards compliant code so it just seems to work. In alt.javascript I've noticed people mostly give responces which follow the DOM standards.

I have found a few corperate web sites which don't work with my web browser. ati.com (Now it works, but it didn't in the past), electronic arts (Site redesign fixed the problems) and the government of canada's (un)employment insurance web site (It has a warning for nav6 users but I never bothered to look into it). But those are the exception to the rule.

In general, I don't really see this as that big of a problem. Just asking the web designer to fix the web site usually works. And if you need help figuring it out, the w3c always has their Evangelism mailing-list and Bugzilla has tech evangelism bugs where they will notify the author of a particular web site sending them information on how they can make their web site work in w3c compliant web browsers.

Who set these mythical "standards"?

Who set these mythical "standards"?

Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML 3.2.

If one uses standardized HTML, it displays well in IE, Mozilla, and even (mostly) in Netscape 4. I guess most web developers are too lazy to bother to standardize their code, even though the W3C helps you.

Actually, the current HTML spec (dated 26 January 2000) is XHTML 1.0 -- and close tags are required for <tr>, <th>, <td>, and all other elements. XML, of which XHTML is an application, doesn't allow implicit closure of elements.

Interesting? People don't close tags ... Tsk Tsk. They should be more careful.

Yeah, tell me about it. (I apologize for selecting a DTD for you.)

You get your own *buzz* now.

Maybe I ought to have stated that I find it interesting (still) that obvious markup errors persist when several diagnostic and corrective tools exist. Somehow, I think that point would be lost on you. :p

Signed,
Puzzled over Neuroticia's death and apparent rebirth.

Interesting? People don't close tags ... Tsk Tsk. They should be more careful.

Yeah, tell me about it. (I apologize for selecting a DTD for you.)

You get your own *buzz* now.

Maybe I ought to have stated that I find it interesting (still) that obvious markup errors persist when several diagnostic and corrective tools exist. Somehow, I think that point would be lost on you. :p

Signed,
Puzzled over Neuroticia's death and apparent rebirth.

What is this mysterious data that can't be expressed in HTML???? Blipverts!!!??!!?? Maybe they'll put cartoons into the bill--to help explain why they passed it. Oooo...maybe they can put in complex equations so everyone will think they are smart.

I think some people just believe XML is some sort of magical file format that should be used no matter what. I expect MPEG 5 will be in XML, then they'll wonder why the files are so much larger and takes 10x the processing time and memory to decode.

XML may be useful in some places, but not everywhere. Replacing it with binary formats is bad because it will unnecessarily increase the filesize and resources to decode them. Using it for config files will require all programs to run an XML parser and make the config files less human readable. Using it to express laws will just make them inaccessible to the common person by requiring them to have expensive proprietary software (or software made by an illegal monopoly) to even view them.

If they want bills to be searchable, they should be designing database tables for them, and allow the public to export the database (or subsets of it) in a standard database format. For online viewing, they could easily export the data into HTML (or XML) using PHP.

Using "Microsoft Word and a special converter to do the job" is just stupid. Creating a program that allows some intern to key the data into the database would probably be easier and more effective in the long run.

What is this mysterious data that can't be expressed in HTML???? Blipverts!!!??!!?? Maybe they'll put cartoons into the bill--to help explain why they passed it. Oooo...maybe they can put in complex equations so everyone will think they are smart.

I think some people just believe XML is some sort of magical file format that should be used no matter what. I expect MPEG 5 will be in XML, then they'll wonder why the files are so much larger and takes 10x the processing time and memory to decode.

XML may be useful in some places, but not everywhere. Replacing it with binary formats is bad because it will unnecessarily increase the filesize and resources to decode them. Using it for config files will require all programs to run an XML parser and make the config files less human readable. Using it to express laws will just make them inaccessible to the common person by requiring them to have expensive proprietary software (or software made by an illegal monopoly) to even view them.

If they want bills to be searchable, they should be designing database tables for them, and allow the public to export the database (or subsets of it) in a standard database format. For online viewing, they could easily export the data into HTML (or XML) using PHP.

Using "Microsoft Word and a special converter to do the job" is just stupid. Creating a program that allows some intern to key the data into the database would probably be easier and more effective in the long run.

What is this mysterious data that can't be expressed in HTML???? Blipverts!!!??!!?? Maybe they'll put cartoons into the bill--to help explain why they passed it. Oooo...maybe they can put in complex equations so everyone will think they are smart.

I think some people just believe XML is some sort of magical file format that should be used no matter what. I expect MPEG 5 will be in XML, then they'll wonder why the files are so much larger and takes 10x the processing time and memory to decode.

XML may be useful in some places, but not everywhere. Replacing it with binary formats is bad because it will unnecessarily increase the filesize and resources to decode them. Using it for config files will require all programs to run an XML parser and make the config files less human readable. Using it to express laws will just make them inaccessible to the common person by requiring them to have expensive proprietary software (or software made by an illegal monopoly) to even view them.

If they want bills to be searchable, they should be designing database tables for them, and allow the public to export the database (or subsets of it) in a standard database format. For online viewing, they could easily export the data into HTML (or XML) using PHP.

Using "Microsoft Word and a special converter to do the job" is just stupid. Creating a program that allows some intern to key the data into the database would probably be easier and more effective in the long run.

XML is dependent on unicode
Whoops, wrong! It is true that XML uses Unicode as its default character set, but you can choose whatever encoding you like. See this part of the XML spec.

XML is dependent on unicode, as the US Government site's reference states. Follow the W3C to unicode ,

Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646.

Unicode is owned by Unicode Incorporated and all of it's documents and standarts are issued under a restrictive license with a unilaeral change clause:

Modification by Unicode Unicode shall have the right to modify this Agreement at any time by posting it to this site. The user may not assign any part of this Agreement without Unicodes prior written consent.

Dare I compare this evil arangement to ASCII and other predecesors? To have IBM, M$, Sun and other OWN the very format your data takes and to be able to change it and break previous implimentations at whim, and YOU may not? Who wants to be a plump nickle that any thing vaugly resembling unicode in the future will be called a "derivative" and it's distribution halted? Is this not a collusion of comercial software vendors to control information at it's most basic representation? Does anyone else here see this as the ultimate extention of copyright? Evil, Evil, Evil.

I'd rather see the US government continue to publish in the American Standard for Information Interchange. This extensible standard is no standard at all.

• http://www.schemavalid.com/faq/xml-schema.html#a4
• http://www.netcrucible.com/xslt/msxml-faq.htm#Q13
• http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/XMLData-Reduced.htm
• http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-XML-data/

Web service

[Definition: A Web service is a software
application identified by a URI, whose interfaces and binding are
capable of being defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts
and supports direct interactions with other software applications
using XML based messages via internet-based protocols]

Web service

[Definition: A Web service is a software
application identified by a URI, whose interfaces and binding are
capable of being defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts
and supports direct interactions with other software applications
using XML based messages via internet-based protocols]

Q: Why use reinvented tools for reinvented tasks?
A: To reinvent the solution!

Makes perfect sense to me. If you are wondering, XML is nothing more than flawed S-expressions and Java is a reinvention of a P-code interpreter. Combine the two and you have more reinvention. All paths lead back to the future...

IE's PNG support sucks balls.

As of version 5.5.2, Microsoft Internet Explorer will view almost any non-transparent PNG image and almost any binary-transparent indexed PNG image. IE 5.5 and 6.x work well with my site, which uses PNG and JPEG exclusively.

CMYK encoding

According to this page, PNG supports CMYK color space.

YCbCr, L*a*b

I couldn't find anything one way or the other about these color spaces.

Resolution Metadata, Extensible Metadata

The PNG format contains a field for the physical (pixels per meter) resolution of the image.

I would like to suggest an extension to the <ul> "HTML" tag. I propose a new qualifier be added - img src - to allow overriding the default list symbol.

I have absolutely no idea what that has to do with Jboss, but I'll shed some light on that for you anyway.

[X]HTML is trying to get away from becoming a pile of cosmetic tricks for UI that inevitably fail to have the same visual side effects from one browser to the next (and different versions of the same browser).

In doing this, all visual detail aspects of html have been deprecated, and Cascading StyleSheets have taken on the responsibility of managing visual detail.

To address the functionality you're looking for, this can already be done. See the list-style-image selector for CSS. You can set a default for all UL lists, or you can use CSS classes to apply different images to different lists.

The Access-Board has some helpful Guidelines on 508 compliance.

W3C publishes a handy wallet-sized quick reference card with 10 quick tips.

I'm surprised that your experience is that accessibility and usability are mutually exclusive. Our experience is the opposite.

No it does not.

It stands for XML Key Management Specification. And although there have been discussions on it in many fora, the latest draft uses examples from email. Unfortunately the one on the site is a little older.

Sounds to me like you are trying to whore some points--somebody mod this guy down

Sounds to me like you either don't have a clue and could not be bothered to do the simplest of research or you don't like one of my other posts for some reason but don't have any mod points.

He did no such thing. Shannon's law demonstrates that the information bearing capacity of a communication line is limited by the signal to noise ratio.

It is quite amusing to see how such basic observations are transmorgaphied by the game of Internet chinese whispers.

Spam will be addressed as a problem as soon as the pain barrier becomes high enough. With PKI it is possible to identify an email sender by means of a digital signature. The current problem being that there is no good way to locate public keys bound to email addresses. There is a lot of good work going on in this area, in particular the W3C XKMS group recently discussed a working draft that describes a mechanism for accessing public keys via DNS SRC records.

So under this system what would happen is that when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list. This would probably include the individuals you know (Cmdr. Taco etc.) and also whole domains (ai.mit.edu) you might trust. if the mail is not in the list it goes into the 'low priority' pile.

There are email clients that do this at the moment but the spammers are using counter measures, such as scanning email list archives and sending out SPAM with fake sender addresses taken from the archive. With PKI and a means of determining whether the person actually has a public key or not this type of filtering becomes much more robust. Incidentally the mechanism does not require S/MIME to work, it can also be used with PGP.

To deploy the solution all we need to do is to persuade email client writers to support XKMS register and locate functions and ISPs to provide XKMS services along with their existing SMTP server. Oh yes and finish the XKMS spec I guess.

Actually, the current HTML spec (4.01) states that </TH>, </TD>, and </TR> are all optional.

Actually, the current HTML spec (4.01) states that </TH>, </TD>, and </TR> are all optional.

Actually, the current HTML spec (4.01) states that </TH>, </TD>, and </TR> are all optional.

i went there and i wanted to see their privacy policy before i used the engine, but i had to actually use their search engine before able to see a link, this was after the site had tried to place 2 cookies on my system,
one from teoma and one from a 1x1 gif webbug from askcm.com, after performing a search the webbug transmitted what i had searched for and a GUID to the askcm.com address as well in the form of a hash.
nearly every way of tracking your behaviour has been implemented on their site.

Of course it does finaly provide (after using) it mentions they will take if they can personally identifying info and they share it with 3rd partys (with permission) (yeah right like yahoo/hotmail did)

On using Internet Explorers "privacy report" feature (which uses the webstandards w3c p3p privacy method) it came up as not supporting that either

pretty un-professional if i cant view a privacy policy before using their service, isnt that what its for ?

not that google is any different of course as it too doesnt support the w3c privacy standard and tries to set a cookie, but it doesnt use webbugs to thirdparty sites and set 2 cookies so i guess thats an improvement.

Looking at the toolbar they offer i have to agree to the the same terms as their website!, which seems strange as they expect me to install software without a explanation of what its gonna do to my system (spyware anyone ?).

Teoma (ask) is yet another classic venture of YOU are the product not the search engine so selling you to the highest bidder takes more importance than the technology ever will.

Flash isn't the be-all/end-all of vector graphics. There's also SVG, an xml-based open standard for vector graphics. It's too bad the open source offerings for it are lagging behind the commercial ones though. I don't even think they had a head start on that one, or am I wrong?

After the introduction of the Google API, some people, especially from the REST camp, criticized the the use of SOAP, claiming it just adds superflous bloat and is generally "unwebby". What do you think about this?

Do you expect widespread usage of RDF/DAML/OWL/TopicMaps for explicit meta-data annotation of web resources, or will it be used only in small circles of specialized content providers like academia, or maybe not at all?

How will Google react? Do you plan to use meta-data provided by web resources if found, and how will you decide if it isn't just made up to get people on some bogus pr0n site (like with those <meta>-Tags today)? Will it someday render the brute-force approach of full-text-indexing obsolete?

Do you expect widespread usage of RDF/DAML/OWL/TopicMaps for explicit meta-data annotation of web resources, or will it be used only in small circles of specialized content providers like academia, or maybe not at all?

How will Google react? Do you plan to use meta-data provided by web resources if found, and how will you decide if it isn't just made up to get people on some bogus pr0n site (like with those <meta>-Tags today)? Will it someday render the brute-force approach of full-text-indexing obsolete?

Do you expect widespread usage of RDF/DAML/OWL/TopicMaps for explicit meta-data annotation of web resources, or will it be used only in small circles of specialized content providers like academia, or maybe not at all?

How will Google react? Do you plan to use meta-data provided by web resources if found, and how will you decide if it isn't just made up to get people on some bogus pr0n site (like with those <meta>-Tags today)? Will it someday render the brute-force approach of full-text-indexing obsolete?

>Mozilla also doesn't support M$ inline frames or iframes or any of the other M$ created tags or CSS stuff they created because they didn't want to take the time to make ASP compliant.

hm. thats funny. the w3c html 4.1 standard includes iframes right here [w3c.org]

heaven forbid microsoft implement something useful or good.

1. They will simply ship Netscape with their software, and probably modify the AOL software itself to use gecko for rendering HTML. (It might be interesting if they did the entire AOL suite in XPCOM, but I wouldn't hold my breath.)
   
2. They will repackage Mozilla, much like Netscape has, and brand it The AOL Browser or something like that. This is far less likely though, as since they own Netscape, they've already got a browser to use without hiring programmers to redo it all.

> googles language filtering is somewhat broken
I think Google's filtering relies on web authours putting the appropriate tags in their pages. Since many web authours couldn't care less about proper HTML, as long as they sell whatever it is they're selling, they don't bother.
Personally, I'd like to see search engines which automatically rejects anything which isn't Valid HTML