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What needs emphasizing is that the standards we use to communicate must be in the public domain. If not, if an industry standard controlled by a company becomes widespread, the company can put in such clauses in effectively prohibit certain unwanted kinds of speech, typically we will see first speech that critizes the company.

Now, mark that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically grants the right to express yourself in any medium. If, say one company owns an industry standard that is the only way to communicate by speech, this human right does no longer exist.

That is why Ogg is so important. It will make a standard for the public domain, and this standard is the only thing that saves free speech in the multimedia age. No Ogg, no free speech.

Similarily, we must make sure that similar bodies, working on other public domain standards, such as the W3C are successful. Without them, we're screwed.

An for those saying that "just don't use FP", well, you see, we all know M$ wants to control these commodity protocols, and M$ hardly cares about a bunch of geeks anyway, so us boycotting M$ doesn't help. Joe Sixpack must understand the problem, cause if he doesn't, they'll win, and turn the web into their network, and make sure FP is the only authoring tool you can use. It'll be the end of free speech too...

Ensuring that the standards are in the public domain is even more important than that software is Free (as in speech).

This document could be all the more interesting and useful if it were marked up with SMIL. Using this, we could synchronize the display of a transcript, including the names of all the speakers. Last fall at the Virginia Center for Digital History I saw a demo of a similar treatment of some audio surrounding Kennedy's administration and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

that's what in it for you. hailstorm is essentially a platform to host components (like EJBs). passport makes it possible for components in hailstorm to exchange exposed data so that they can interoperate.

Actually hailstorm is a set of web services (which is SOAP over HTTP) which are basically a set of core services (like calendaring, document storage, a wallet and other stuff - see this). The platform to host components like EJBs is really more what ASP.NET/.NET Frameworks are for (which of course includes C# and all that fun stuff (there's a quick summary here).

an example. if your bank uses hailstorm and you authenticate with passport and amazon.com uses hailstorm and passport authentication - you would be able to (once your've authenticated with passport) just click buy and amazon's components could invoke components on your bank with your passport id and say "give me the money now".

Well, this could be done through a web service, but it doesn't necessarily have to be hailstorm. For example, your bank could have a web service running on their Linux box with Apache, or thier IBM mainframe, or whatever... They just need to communicate via SOAP, and it's documented and standardized. It's all XML, so no one should have too many problems with it.

i know you can save your profile and everything on amazon and so you may still ask "so what's in it for me". that was just the first example that came to mind and if you can see the advantages of such an interoperative infrastructure then here. [thinkgeek.com]

And so the profile is one of the Hailstorm web serivces ("myProfile").

and, yes, there are probably risks and stuff involved but lets let it evolve and give it a chance.

The definition of <button>. Of particular interest:

type = submit|button|reset [CI]
This attribute declares the type of the
button. Possible values:
* submit: Creates a submit button. This is
the default value.

Mozilla's just finally gotten around to what is _very_ plain in the spec. use type="button" if you want it to be just a button.

Well, I think XML is a generalization of HTML because of the repetition of HTML extension.

XHTML, on the other hand, is what happens when you marry HTML's docment types to XML's rulebase. This is an exceedingly rare example of how inbreeding isn't necessarily a bad thing.

My office email is filled with people mailing MS Word documents to me for Web-related projects. Often there's nothing in these documents but plain text and some bolded topic headlines. If I try to convert them to HTML to make my job easier, it doesn't work, because MS litters Word-generated HTML with styles and nonstandard tags that only IE5 can understand, all to make the Web page look as much like the Word doc as possible.

You can grab binaries for several OSs, binaries of other programs which have incorporated Tidy into themselves, or get the source. Hope that this works for you.

My office email is filled with people mailing MS Word documents to me for Web-related projects. Often there's nothing in these documents but plain text and some bolded topic headlines. If I try to convert them to HTML to make my job easier, it doesn't work, because MS litters Word-generated HTML with styles and nonstandard tags that only IE5 can understand, all to make the Web page look as much like the Word doc as possible.

You can grab binaries for several OSs, binaries of other programs which have incorporated Tidy into themselves, or get the source. Hope that this works for you.

The W3's Amaya lets you open two windows onto the same document, one a nice gui editor/browser and the other xhtml plain text. Saving in one window updates the other. For collaborative editing, see their Jigsaw with WebDAV.

For searching my docs, i use Apache and ht://Dig. And for quick, organized access to the same docs i created a PHP4 application that allows me to easily create categories, assign docs to them, and to title the documents. That app, with an ht://Dig search field, is my home page, and it works great. Basically i re-created the functionality of a Lotus Notes db i used to use at work (w/o collaboration or replication features) while keeping all the data accessible to any other app that speaks xhtml.

If there's interest i'll post the PHP4 code somewhere. (If i can ever get just get this message posted. /. has been on a /long/ lunch break.)

OK, time to play the devil's advocate (I am actually a big XML fan): here are the problems you should expect when switching all your docs to XML:

• the DTD/schema will never please everybody: in an old-fashioned word processor if someone is not happy with the template you are using they usually find a way to change it and there is nothing you can do about it, with XML you can (and you will most likely have to) coerce people into sticking to the company policy. People usually don't like it.
• editing XML is still either painful or expensive, tools like FrameMaker (you need the SGML version to do XML) or Adept editor are outrageously expensive, even more recent tools like XML-Spy are not eally cheap, and not everybody wants to use emacs,
• encoding problems: XML doesn't actually force you to use Unicode (actually UTF-8 or UTF-16) but it heavily suggests it. A lot of tools will only output UTF-8 for example. THis might make it difficult for your documents to be used in the rest of your tools, as most likely few of them are Unicode friendly.
• math is a real problem, the only sane way to represent math in XML is Math ML, which is not widely supported.
• XSLT: you will most likely be drawn to writing XSLT "stylesheets" to transform your documents. Don't be fooled by the name stylesheet, these are programs, written in an angle-brackety user-unfriendly functional-hell language. Even if you happen to like XSLT (did you guess I don't? ;--) it _is_ a new language that you will have to learn.

In short XML is probably a good choice, it gives at least independance from the word processing software and allows you to include/retrieve data automatically in/from your documents, but don't underestimate the trouble you will have to go through to get to your "integrated-wonderful-all-encompassing system" (which doesn't exist right now, so you will get it in version 1.0...

For links between document, use the w3c's XLink Specification

I work at an ISP ... (not AOL, not MSN) We have a whole department who's in charge of writing up procedural documentation, walkthroughs, how-to's, FAQ's, to solve just about any problem you could ever encounter on almost any platform and operating systems under the sun on your way to getting connected to the internet.

As soon as XML standards and derived technologies and languages (XSLT, DOM, and more) started to be strongly established nearly 2 years ago, we moved whatever existing documentation we had into XML, conforming to internally developed DTD's and specs, after a couple guys and I built a handy HTTP-based authoring tool that leverages technologies built-in Internet Explorer 5.0 which I've previously described right here, allowing writers to not have to know anything about XML, and simply click their way thru easy interactive forms, in a fairly compelling user interface ...

With all of our information stored in XML, we can easily present it to various audiences, may it be our members who can search it by keywords to help themselves in our online support area or our technical support reps who can browse directory trees to specific XML documents and have access to more detailed information about hardware and platform configurations, document revision information and more.

The bottom line is this system works really well. And we have the amazing peace of mind of having GREAT information in a format that can never become completely obsolete, and that is always a couple XSLT stylesheets away from fitting just about *any* need.

Whether you make up your own DTD's or follow existing standard DTD's like DocBook mentioned in other posts, as long as you put some thought into structuring your XML data at the beginning, you can only win in the long run: XML documents can easily be processed into other XML DTDs/formats to represent the information in a way that better fits another application, and/or transformed into other documents made of a markup language meant for presentation like HTML or WAP.

yea. XML is nifty. :)

XML is a complement to HTML
XML is not a replacement for HTML.

I disagree rather strongly with this. I don't know what your experience is with XML but there are lots of shops that use XML for both presentation and data interchange because of its versatility. An XML document can be presented using an XSLT stylesheet or parsed using a DOM, SAX or whatever API. So the same document that can appear on a website because it has a stylesheet to transform it to HTML to maker it viewable is the same document that is used by your applications as a config file, data file, database updategram, etc. with zero modifications to the file.

This is a very, very powerful aspect of XML. In my opinion, HTML is dead and considering that there's been an XHTML Recommendation for close to two years I wonder why people are still clinging to XHTML (Yes, I know it's because the browser developers have dropped the ball).

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flash/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flash/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flassh/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flassh/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Appendix J: Minimizing SVG File Sizes

SVG Enjoys Broad, Continued Industry Support

Correct me if I'm wrong, but not a single current browser supports the format natively.

Of course "Adobe is very pleased that the SVG specification has been officially approved as a W3C Recommendation. SVG is a fundamental element of Adobe's Network Publishing strategy." You must download their flaky, propietary, plug-in. To even check it out...

If you know a program that has one, let me know. And I'll tell you why it doesn't cut it.

OK, you're on: try the Amaya (it's open source, IIRC) and then come back to this forum to tell me why its Structure View facility "doesn't cut it".

Now, I do not use this program to create my documents, but I often use it to understand how a document is laid out, especially when it contains funky SVG and MathML, or just really perverse HTML; I find that its document structure view facility is great, albeit not the most comfortable for the mouse-disinclined, like me.

By the way, Amaya supports collaborative annotation, external to the document being annotated, courtesy of the Annotea Project. You're welcome to comment on this facility, too; let us know how it measures up to Word's offering.

By the way, did I mention that Amaya aims to be, and largely is, strictly standards compliant? That it is available as a Windows port, too? In binary form? With an installer? Yes? Well, what are you waiting for, st. augustine? :-) Seriously, though, tell us how it went when you're done, if you would. Thanks in advance.

If you know a program that has one, let me know. And I'll tell you why it doesn't cut it.

OK, you're on: try the Amaya (it's open source, IIRC) and then come back to this forum to tell me why its Structure View facility "doesn't cut it".

Now, I do not use this program to create my documents, but I often use it to understand how a document is laid out, especially when it contains funky SVG and MathML, or just really perverse HTML; I find that its document structure view facility is great, albeit not the most comfortable for the mouse-disinclined, like me.

By the way, Amaya supports collaborative annotation, external to the document being annotated, courtesy of the Annotea Project. You're welcome to comment on this facility, too; let us know how it measures up to Word's offering.

By the way, did I mention that Amaya aims to be, and largely is, strictly standards compliant? That it is available as a Windows port, too? In binary form? With an installer? Yes? Well, what are you waiting for, st. augustine? :-) Seriously, though, tell us how it went when you're done, if you would. Thanks in advance.

Well, here's what the W3C says:

5.1 Internet Media Type
As of the publication of this recommendation, the general recommended MIME labeling for XML-based applications has yet to be resolved.

However, XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in Appendix C, "HTML Compatibility Guidelines" may be labeled with the Internet Media Type "text/html", as they are compatible with most HTML browsers. This document makes no recommendation about MIME labeling of other XHTML documents.

Which implies that a text/html type would be more appropriate in this situation.

Although, I agree that there's something fishy about IE. Considering that it parses all sorts of strange MIME types (including text/plain) as HTML if the file starts with <HTML>, it ought to handle this, even if it can't groak the namespace.

EMBED is not a standards compliant way to embed information, and why the hell hasn't Apple gotten off their lazy asses and ported Quicktime to any other platforms while they had the luxury of this wonderful, "cross platform," non-standards compliant way of doing it? I mean, why should MS make a more standards-compliant browser, when they can bow to the wishes of a dead, profitless arm of AOL? Clearly MS is being irrational here....

I've done loadsa 'xhtml' sites. XHTML is just a HTML living upto XML rules. Most browsers support it without even knowing it.

As for why mozillaquestquest doesn't work, I'm assuming that the reason is that it sends that data down the line marked as text/xml, and not as xhtml. See for yourself here. If it was sent down as text/html, or possibly text/xhtml (is that valid?) then IE would render it correctly. AFAIK, the namespace shouldn't be used to define a document, but a DTD.

In conclusion, IE renders it as xml, where as Mozilla eroneously renders it as xhtml.

Hehehe... Nice try to you, too!

If you actually did research for your facts, you'd know what you're talking about.

XHTML1.0 is simply a re-engineering of the HTML4.01 standards into XML. The W3C standard was written by the W3C HMTL Working group on which Microsoft has ample representation. According to the acknowledgements section of the XHTML standard at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#acks, Microsoft has 2 reps out of the 24 members who worked on the standard. Seems to me that if they helped form the standard, they should also implement it.

Sorry but XHTML is a W3C standard based on XML. The MS buzzword of the century. I find it interesting that IE can't properly render an XHTML file since they like to tout their XML support.

These errors are the most irritating, since the html doesn't read as invalid when you are writing it.

If a page isn't valid, it isn't valid. And if a web designer is so unprofessional (s)he can't write a valid web page, that's not the browser's problem.

• Opera
• Konqueror
• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Skipstone
• Netscape

The article did not review a number of browsers. Here are a some more that you may want to try:

• Arena
• Amaya
• Chimera
• MMM
• Emacs/W3
• Lynx (text based)
• Links (text based)
• Debris (text based)
• w3m (text based)
• Libwww (text/line based)
• HowJava
• Express
• Armadillo (was Gzilla)
• Mnemonic
• Kde (file manager with builtin browser)
• mMosaic
• QtMozilla
• QWeb
• Mosaic
• Arachne
• Beest
• Beonex
• BrowseX
• Grail
• Dillo
• NetRaider

And how the disclaimers: The list above by no means complete. The browers above were listed in j-random order. Some browsers are in early alpha stage, some in Beta and others are in full release. Some of the browsers may suck, some are OK and some are good. Your mileage may vary. Sorry If I left out your favorite browser. IE was left off the list for obvious reasons. Good while supply lasts or until Bill Gates takes over. I'm not a member of the FCIA. Void where cast as (void).

• Opera
• Konqueror
• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Skipstone
• Netscape

The article did not review a number of browsers. Here are a some more that you may want to try:

• Arena
• Amaya
• Chimera
• MMM
• Emacs/W3
• Lynx (text based)
• Links (text based)
• Debris (text based)
• w3m (text based)
• Libwww (text/line based)
• HowJava
• Express
• Armadillo (was Gzilla)
• Mnemonic
• Kde (file manager with builtin browser)
• mMosaic
• QtMozilla
• QWeb
• Mosaic
• Arachne
• Beest
• Beonex
• BrowseX
• Grail
• Dillo
• NetRaider

And how the disclaimers: The list above by no means complete. The browers above were listed in j-random order. Some browsers are in early alpha stage, some in Beta and others are in full release. Some of the browsers may suck, some are OK and some are good. Your mileage may vary. Sorry If I left out your favorite browser. IE was left off the list for obvious reasons. Good while supply lasts or until Bill Gates takes over. I'm not a member of the FCIA. Void where cast as (void).

The form uses the GET method so you can encode a validation request in a URL. Let's try validating:

• http://slashdot.org/
• this article

For more information see Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications.

The form uses the GET method so you can encode a validation request in a URL. Let's try validating:

• http://slashdot.org/
• this article

For more information see Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications.

The form uses the GET method so you can encode a validation request in a URL. Let's try validating:

• http://slashdot.org/
• this article

For more information see Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications.

I, for one, won't miss the EMBED tag. I'd also
be willing to go without IFRAME, MARQUEE, and
BLINK.

The blink element is already gone.

IFRAME has been adopted by the W3C as part of the HTML 4.01 standard.
Information on how to use IFRAME.

From the changelog:

* KHTML: extended compatibility with IE's parsing and tokenisation fallbacks for really malformed HTML.

This really disappoints me. A web browser needs to follow the spec and do exactly what the web author says, not necessarily what the web author thought he/she said. One reason for this is interoperability: web authors never know which browser people will be using to view their site. For instance, in a few years, many people could be web browsing from their cell phones using "Nokia Integrated Browser" or something. So, web authors must get the idea that the only long term solution is to write valid code -- and having web browsers that "guess" at what the web author "intended" to write in their code doesn't reinforce that.

The beauty of WebServices, at least in the .NET model, is that they use strictly W3 specifications to communicate, UDDI for discovery, WSDL for service description (kind of like XML IDL,) SOAP for RPC, and XML for data transfer. If anything Apache should be capable of becoming an excellent performer in the WebService market. The only question is how. IIS with ASP.NET makes WebServices insanely simple, as the following code generates a fully functional webservice:

<%@ WebService Language="VB" Class="MyMathLib" %>

Public Class MyMathLib

<WebMethod(Description:="Add two numbers.")> _
Public Function Add(ByVal X As Integer, ByVal Y As Integer) As Integer
Return (X + Y)
End Function
End Class

When IIS compiles this (fully compiled and cached as a native image, not scripted nor interpretted,) it generates all necessary information to execute it, a WSDL file to describe it's use (to automatically build SOAP proxies,) and IIS also will provide a default webpage to test it's functionality, complete with SOAP, HTTP POST, and HTTP GET examples of how to call the WebService.

If anything, Apache might get hurt if WebServices become very popular if they don't have a simple method to build them like ASP.NET will have. But Apache can and always will be a player given the only information you need to build a functional WebService lies at W3.

1. Webservices are simply RPC via XML over HTTP which can be implemented in any language with a sockets library and on any platform with a web server.
   
   
2. The predominant web services protocols and standards are open and are in fact W3C recommendations or are soon going to be including XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.

1. Webservices are simply RPC via XML over HTTP which can be implemented in any language with a sockets library and on any platform with a web server.
   
   
2. The predominant web services protocols and standards are open and are in fact W3C recommendations or are soon going to be including XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.

1. Webservices are simply RPC via XML over HTTP which can be implemented in any language with a sockets library and on any platform with a web server.
   
   
2. The predominant web services protocols and standards are open and are in fact W3C recommendations or are soon going to be including XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.

>Isn't it just a tad ironic that these people can do things with amigas and peecees that no sane person would ever require of them, but can't make a web page that validates.

Isn't it just a tad ironic that the person pointing this is out can't do it either? :)

- Join the EFF today.

Isn't it just a tad ironic that these people can do things with amigas and peecees that no sane person would ever require of them, but can't make a web page that validates

validator.w3.org has a field day with the MSNBC article!

I just have a few comments regarding netscape 6.1/mozilla.

Standard compliance : Netscape is the most standard complaint browser out there, even the internet explorer 6.0 beta fails to render pages correcly. For example just go to W3 CSS page and compare the pages rendered my mozilla/ns and ie. Note the position of the toolbar as you scroll down the page in both browsers. Also you can choose alternate stylesheets on that site using View->Use Stylesheet

Speed : Performance is comparable to that of IE now.. If you want faster than IE browsers use Galeon or skipstone which are based on mozilla

UI issues : Unfortunately mozilla/ns does not support some features which used to work in NS4.x. Dynamic Font issues bugs 52746 Ugly list items ON LINUX 91816

Thanks you for saying that.

Validation should be server-side, pages should work, and be accessible to everyone. And US government agencies have an extra responsibility.

(I just checked the section 508 website. They are using the ALT tags for holding long descriptions. Tut tut. And they have a big spiel about Javascript requirements and popping up new windowss. Both are naughty evil things to do. Hypocrites.)

I could've sworn I saw something on the W3C about SOAP?
I don't see what's so bad about judiciously applied XML. If you'd like to piddlefart around with obscure offsets and byte counts in binary transfers, knock yourself out. XML doesn't bloat transmissions up that much (argue about node overhead, then remember filler columns) and every machine in existence speaks text.
Of course it's not all things for all people, but in the right place at the right time, it's just fine.

XML is a very wasteful and generic file format.

So what if it's wasteful ? Bytes are cheap. The entropy content of XML isn't inefficient (as could also be said of ASN.1), so low-level compression algorithms can equally well compress them. The message "Your Amazon order has billed your credit card $23 and sent you a copy of 'Fly Fishing'" compresses down to much the same size in either encoding.

If your network transport layers don't do compression, blame the network not the content.

Secondly, when did "generic" become a criticism ?

Thirdly, XML isn't just a serialization format. Admittedly it is now, was even more so in the early days, and the "XML For Morons" books get it entirely wrong, but the XML Infoset WG are trying to steer it back. Think data model, not just bytes on the wire - that's the real reason why ASN.1 is an inappropriate comparison.

ASN.1 is like EDI and Read Codes. It's an application-level solution to byte squashing. The things are nightmares to work with, and simply not needed any more.

Ever heard of mod_gzip? It compress anything that goes trough your Apache webserver and it is supported by most browsers. With everything running over http theses days, this is the way to go...

First of all, this seems a bit off topic. Second, you can read about HTTP compression on the W3C website. It's definatly not a HUGE impact (and has some bugs with certain browsers base on my own tests). Finally, AFAIK, ALL major web servers have this built in as it is part of the HTTP1.1 spec. Nothing to see here, move on please :).

The story mentions "nearly 10^9 urls", so duplicate documents would be counted multiple times.

<pedant>Actually, it might be more accurate to say that if they're talking about "documents", then they are talking about 10^9 URIs, not 10^9 URLs. A URL merely identifies the "site", while a URI identifies a specific document. There's a difference.</pedant>

Or, then again, who cares?

FUD.

you won't need "certain software/drivers/protocols that are controlled by only MS". you'll need to use the SOAP protocol, which is quite open.

IE 5.0 was way ahead of its time with support for XML parsing, XML DOM, XSL-T, XML Schemas on top of the usual very strong support for Cascading Stylesheet, JavaScript and VBScript, HTML DOM and HTML 4.0.

Since the W3C was taking forever to release the definitions of what are now well-established standards, IE5.0's XML-technologies were mainly based on microsoft-defined standards which were already pretty close to standards in the making within the W3C. All those components were part of what was called "MSXML 2.5".

What did that platform give you? Absolutely *everything* you need to build an entire very complex browser-driven application, whose main functionality would live on the client rather than the server. This means that once you "loaded" a "page", you could interact with form inputs, links or anything else on the page, and see changes being reflected "on-the-fly" on the presentation layer while also affecting an in-memory XML DOM representing some user-specific XML data.

Shortly after IE5 came out, the company I work for wanted to build a comprehensive platform for technical writers to build "walkthroughs, FAQs, and HOW-TO's" pieces of documentation. They wanted that documentation to be stored in an XML format so it could be saved in a platform/presentation-neutral way, so it could be represented in various ways internally as well as externally to the company's millions of customers as a big "knowledge base".

The traditional way to build such a platform would have been to hire a couple of Java or C++ programmers who would manually create complex GUI components to give the application the interactivity and intuitivity it needs on top of a complex data-handling layer. You're talking about months and months of design and hard-core coding. They wanted it done it 3 weeks. So I said a couple of guys and I could make it all work within IE5 and a couple perl scripts on the server. All the GUI components would be built using HTML 4.0 and CSS. The data layer would be handled with IE5' support for XML parsing and XML DOM. Interaction between user, GUI and data would be handled via JavaScript and HTML events. Once a user would be done editing a piece of documentation, hitting the "save" button would simply HTTP POST an XML string to a perl script which would save all that into a file into some well-defined directory structure.

So we made it happen. Granted I didn't sleep much for a while due to the countless feature creeps that turned the application into a very complex one. But it's very cool and it works really well.

The tech writers have built well over 3000 pieces of documentation used company-wide and by our users. All that documentation is in XML and usually presented in various HTML formats for the various audiences, thru series of batch XSL-T processing.

Since then Microsoft has released "MSXML 3.0" which is a pretty-much standards-compliant version of all the XML technologies supported by IE. I'm not sure they're 100% yet but it's pretty darn close. And I believe the upcoming IE6.0 will be even more standards-compliant.

The main drawback of this plaform is that all those cool features currently only work in IE5+ for windows, the Mac version doesn't support all that stuff yet.

Microsoft should look into turning all those IE5-specific features into a separate browser plug-in that could work within other browsers. Still, in light of all this, Curl doesn't impress me too much yet.

Can anyone get Mozilla 0.9.3 (or 0.9.2 for that matter) to render http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt? Mozilla seems to strip all formatting so it appears as just plain text...