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I am hearing a lot of complaints that making a web site accessible is not easy. IMVHO that is a total cop out. If you use strict HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 you will find that your sites:

• Look really good in multiple browsers
• Load faster cause you don't have silly font tags all over the place
• way easier to maintain and modify in the future

CSS is really the ultimate solution to all of this, as it seperates layout and display from content, which is the way it really should be. w3.org highly pushes the use of CSS because of this. (CSS has different media types, so in theory a text or voice browser could request a different style sheet then the one you are going to pass to 4.x or 5.x visual browsers)

Go thee now to w3.org and read the w3 web accessibility guidelines. They aren't that hard, and if you take them into consideration from the start, you will find that making web pages takes way less time. And if nothing else AT LEAST go and get HTML Tidy and let it mangle your HTML back into something that is near standards compliant. If people at least used it, the web would be significantly more multi-browser friendly than it is now. (Note: HTML tidy currently picks up 364 errors/warnings on the slashdot front page.)

P.S. To add a bit of flamebait here, any thoughts about a CSS version of slashdot, as it would be nice to get out of the nested table jail.

I am hearing a lot of complaints that making a web site accessible is not easy. IMVHO that is a total cop out. If you use strict HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 you will find that your sites:

• Look really good in multiple browsers
• Load faster cause you don't have silly font tags all over the place
• way easier to maintain and modify in the future

CSS is really the ultimate solution to all of this, as it seperates layout and display from content, which is the way it really should be. w3.org highly pushes the use of CSS because of this. (CSS has different media types, so in theory a text or voice browser could request a different style sheet then the one you are going to pass to 4.x or 5.x visual browsers)

Go thee now to w3.org and read the w3 web accessibility guidelines. They aren't that hard, and if you take them into consideration from the start, you will find that making web pages takes way less time. And if nothing else AT LEAST go and get HTML Tidy and let it mangle your HTML back into something that is near standards compliant. If people at least used it, the web would be significantly more multi-browser friendly than it is now. (Note: HTML tidy currently picks up 364 errors/warnings on the slashdot front page.)

P.S. To add a bit of flamebait here, any thoughts about a CSS version of slashdot, as it would be nice to get out of the nested table jail.

Indeed, this is a must-read for anyone who gets paid to do websites.

What angers me most, is that I consider all these points to be a side-effect of good design. I'd like to know exactly who gets paid to make sites that don't work.

My rule of thumb is that if it works and looks good in a lynx, it'll work anywhere.

There are some excelent resources available for those who wish to incorporate accessibility into their web design.

The Trace Research And Development Center has a set of guidelines for designers of all types, including web-designers and software developers.

The WWW Consortium (www.w3c.org) has a set of guidelines as well.

I wish a little more attention were paid to the status of Unicode in the various web browsers.

Consider for example this Unicode test page I wrote. While it is acceptable for a browser not to have the appropriate fonts for the rendering of Sanskrit (the Devanagari alphabet, one of the most complex parts of Unicode, together with Arabic, because of the ligatures and the reversal of position of the vowel i), it should at least offer a transcription of it: yes, there are quite a few million people in the world who use the Devanagari alphabet (it is used in Hindi). Also, the fact that the different kinds of spaces are generally not correctly displayed is quite inacceptable.

Perhaps Unicode status does not attract much attention because of the erroneous belief that Unicode is not useful for typesetting English texts. That is wrong: the em-dash, the en-dash, the English quote characters (as opposed, e.g. to the French quote characters), the ellipsis, and various similar punctuation characters are not found in the standard ISO-8859-1 character set but only in ISO-10646/Unicode.

Netscape is probably the worse of all (though the little I have seen of w3m indicates that it tries hard to compete with it). For example, it selects the display font according to the document encoding, which is an absurdity, in contradiction to the fact that all web pages are ``at the bottom'' in Unicode (and all Unicode characters are always accessible through the &#xxxx; encoding, whatever the document character encoding). The (related) fact that Netscape does not recognize — and such has always driven me out of my wits. Amaya, despite the fact that it is the W3C's own web browser, used to be quite bad at Unicode; it has made much progress recently (but I think it still cannot use an ISO-10646-1 font even if you have one). Mozilla is also still incomplete in this respect. Lynx and Links are both quite good. In fact, Lynx in a UTF-8 xterm (compiled with --enable-wide-chars) with a fixed-width ISO-10646-1 font is still the best we have in the matter of a true Unicode web browser; but since UTF-8 breaks ncurses, it will sometimes behave strangely; and the combining diacritics, which have to be handled specially, are not so.

We are still very far from the beautiful rendering I show as png images on the test page I mention above. Sigh.

• embedded linux - including Red Hat Tools for Embedded Developers
• 
  EL/IX Application Programming Interface - an embedded application programming interface
  Graphical IDE - cold fusion
  Hard Hat Linux - os for embedded appls
  mobile linux - allows linux to work on very small devices
  

I am also working on the concepts of a networked vector-based user interface system, where the graphics is based on SVG. The project would become much more than just vector graphics. Very early stage, no webpage. Mail me if you are interested in participating.

You mean like innerHTML?


/_____\
vvvvvvv../|__/|
...I../O,O....|
...I./. .......|
..J|/^.^.^ \..|.._//|
...|^.^.^.^.|W|./oo.|

I never thought of that.

Neither did I until it bit me.

I thought it wasn't well-formed XML if there was a space before the backslash.

Nope. Take a look at rule 44 in the XML spec

[44] EmptyElemTag ::= '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '/>'

The place you can't have a space is after the slash and before the tagname in an ending tag: </ P>

XHTML is by and large compatible with existing browsers, if some simple guidelines are followed. Though it is not exactly backward-compatible with HTML, it comes very close, and you don't need to do much to convert a valid HTML 4.0 document to XHTML.

The reason I want to use XHTML is to add XML functionality to my web pages. This will be nothing grand -- at least in the beginning. I will probably start out with some RDF metadata.

XHTML might not be a thrilling DTD in itself, but its power lies in the fact that it is made of XML, so you can use other XML throughout your document without violating spec. IMHO, that's a pretty nice improvement over straight HTML. And XHTML has to be well-formed, which is a Good Thing.

A week and a half ago, I began converting my site from HTML 4.0 to XHTML 1.0. Thanks to the W3C's validator, it was pretty easy to do.

Aside from changing the DOCTYPE and adding an XML declaration, all I had to do was make all elements and attributes lowercase, quote all attributes, and close all standalone tags (<br/>, <hr/>, <img src="tweet.jpg" ... />, etc.). It only took a little further tweaking to make it display nicely in Netscape 4.7, IE 5, and even lynx!

Unfortunately, it seems that XHTML chokes Mac IE 4.5 (and presumably surrounding versions). That browser just displays the page source without rendering it. Since I want my site to be viewable by anybody on any platform (and IE5 is not yet out for Mac), I had to go back to HTML 4.0. Argh!

I really like XHTML so far, though, and will probably convert to it as soon as Mac IE supports it (4.5 users: tough luck). If you want to see one of my preliminary XHTML endeavors, go to moby.org's mailing list archives page. Try it with any browser. AFAIK, it works fine with almost all of them.

A week and a half ago, I began converting my site from HTML 4.0 to XHTML 1.0. Thanks to the W3C's validator, it was pretty easy to do.

Aside from changing the DOCTYPE and adding an XML declaration, all I had to do was make all elements and attributes lowercase, quote all attributes, and close all standalone tags (<br/>, <hr/>, <img src="tweet.jpg" ... />, etc.). It only took a little further tweaking to make it display nicely in Netscape 4.7, IE 5, and even lynx!

Unfortunately, it seems that XHTML chokes Mac IE 4.5 (and presumably surrounding versions). That browser just displays the page source without rendering it. Since I want my site to be viewable by anybody on any platform (and IE5 is not yet out for Mac), I had to go back to HTML 4.0. Argh!

I really like XHTML so far, though, and will probably convert to it as soon as Mac IE supports it (4.5 users: tough luck). If you want to see one of my preliminary XHTML endeavors, go to moby.org's mailing list archives page. Try it with any browser. AFAIK, it works fine with almost all of them.

A week and a half ago, I began converting my site from HTML 4.0 to XHTML 1.0. Thanks to the W3C's validator, it was pretty easy to do.

Aside from changing the DOCTYPE and adding an XML declaration, all I had to do was make all elements and attributes lowercase, quote all attributes, and close all standalone tags (<br/>, <hr/>, <img src="tweet.jpg" ... />, etc.). It only took a little further tweaking to make it display nicely in Netscape 4.7, IE 5, and even lynx!

Unfortunately, it seems that XHTML chokes Mac IE 4.5 (and presumably surrounding versions). That browser just displays the page source without rendering it. Since I want my site to be viewable by anybody on any platform (and IE5 is not yet out for Mac), I had to go back to HTML 4.0. Argh!

I really like XHTML so far, though, and will probably convert to it as soon as Mac IE supports it (4.5 users: tough luck). If you want to see one of my preliminary XHTML endeavors, go to moby.org's mailing list archives page. Try it with any browser. AFAIK, it works fine with almost all of them.

tidy -asxml yourfile.html > yournewfile.xhtml

Get tidy here.

XHTML is specifically designed to work in existing browsers if you follow the considerations in Appendix C of the spec. You can code your pages in XHTML now and they will continue to work. Good luck trying to do a cross browser layout using only XHTML-strict and style sheets though.

Incidentally, I don't see any support for such tricks as using tables to lay out a page. Will this force people to recode their layouts with CSS (which they probably should do anyway), or just give coders another excuse to ignore W3C recommendations?

What Miguel is missing is that Aqua is not about transparency, it's about Quartz, the Display-PDF rendering system.
The NeXT display postscript system and Sun's NeWS could also handle alpha easily, but does anyone think that the
only useful feature of Display Postscript or Quartz is being able to render alpha?



Miguel is intelligent enought to know we're not just talking about alpha channeling. He was saying that libart provided the necessary tools. In case you are unaware, libart is a library for high-performance 2D graphics. It is the antialiased rendering engine for the Gnome Canvas. It supports a powerful imaging model which is basically the same as SVG or Java2D. It does Vector Paths, Bezier Paths, RGB and RGBA images, Sorted Vector Paths, MicroTile Arrays, and Affine transformations.


The best innovations are built on the shoulders of others, and if Miguel would spend more time learning and stealing
technology from Apple, Microsoft, and even the KDE team, and less time dismissing everything and trying to reinvent
it, maybe GNOME wouldn't be so buggy and unusable.


This exact approach has been what Miguel has sought after. He is frequently quoted as wanting to take the best ideas from companies like Microsoft, get rid of the bad parts, and integrate them into Gnome. I've personally conversed with him about this exact issue while waiting to watch Phantom Menace on opening night. He says that he doesn't like it when everyone goes around saying Microsoft sucks and that's the end of the story. Microsoft, Apple, and others, have made great strides with their Desktop technologies, and Miguel has been borrowing from them, believe me.
----

Well apparently your karma just went up because of your bogus post. ;-)

Netscape does NOT do it WRONG.

The /TABLE tag (which is what the user was talking about) is required. See the spec.

The /TR and /TD tags are part of the HTML spec. They are optional. See the spec.

Now you should get moderated out of existance :)

Well apparently your karma just went up because of your bogus post. ;-)

Netscape does NOT do it WRONG.

The /TABLE tag (which is what the user was talking about) is required. See the spec.

The /TR and /TD tags are part of the HTML spec. They are optional. See the spec.

Now you should get moderated out of existance :)

You should look at the new vector graphics XML formats. The W3C's anointed format is SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) ( SVG spec ). It is fairly complete and tends to be much smaller, in terms of file size, than gif or jpeg.

HTML and XML are related formats; in fact, HTML can be defined as a subset of XML.

This is a bit of a peeve of mine. HTML is an application of SGML, not a subset of SGML, and definately not a subset of XML.

A lot of stuff that's in HTML is not legal in XML, like the IMG tag and the OPTION tag:

Which is why XHTML was created.

XML is one of these words everybody's talking about yet no-one really knows how to use it in specific applications or server technologies

I disagree. Check out the W3C's SVG standard. This is for real.

If you've ever had to muck about with all of the different proprietary flavors of vector graphics formats, you know what a great thing this will be.

That said, I personally *don't* believe in across-the-board XML standardization panacea. Some things deserve standardization, others don't.

Accountants all adhere to accepted standard accounting practices. This is what makes it possible to encapsulate their work into shrink-wrapped database products that pretty much any accountant can use. But this only works because the process is so well known.

So I disagree vehemently that business-to-business transactions, for example, are ripe for XML standardization. Why? Because who the heck is such an expert on these kinds of transactions to be telling everyone else how to do it? There's a lot of trial-and-error to go through before anyone should start proposing standards.

And remember: "You can't vote for anarchy". ;~)

Well that's unfortunate. A very quick trip straight to the Web Consortium shows their pages on XML straight up, complete with links to the XML FAQ and of course, just what you always wanted, the XML 1.0 Spec. If that's not an adequate definition, read the source for your favourite parser!

Well that's unfortunate. A very quick trip straight to the Web Consortium shows their pages on XML straight up, complete with links to the XML FAQ and of course, just what you always wanted, the XML 1.0 Spec. If that's not an adequate definition, read the source for your favourite parser!

Well that's unfortunate. A very quick trip straight to the Web Consortium shows their pages on XML straight up, complete with links to the XML FAQ and of course, just what you always wanted, the XML 1.0 Spec. If that's not an adequate definition, read the source for your favourite parser!

See here for how to in html.

 tag). Check my other post in this thread to see how to do umlaut, grave, and acute correctly in html - I don't know the rest of the special characters off hand, but they're all at w3's page

Does this indicate Macromedia is shedding some enthusiasm for the SVG format? Flash is already the de facto vector graphics standard. I understand and appreciate the fact that the W3C (with reps from Macromedia as members of the working group) is working on a standard for vector graphics, but I don't think it will ever take off, especially if Macromedia does open-source the Flash format.

I understand there are philsophical differences between SVG and Flash, but I just can't find any benefits to using SVG. Flash is small, comes with the browser, and very powerful.

Thanks W3C for all your work, but if this article is true then it will all have been in vain. Maybe the Flash format will change in the future to incorporate the XML DOM so that it will be more in line with what the W3C is shooting for, but who knows?

Hal Abelson and I taught a course between MIT and Harvard Law School. Half the students were MIT, half were law students. They were split into groups, each group half-and-half, and each group was assigned a policy problem (privacy, identity, etc.). The assignment in each group was to write a white paper that addressed the policy problem, and the intuition was that the problem could be solved either through law, or through technology, or through a mix of both.

The papers were great, though I found it the most difficult class I had taught (and I did an awful job teaching it.)

The hardest thing was to get both sides to understand a bit of humility. There is something to what law is about: there is a bunch of insights about behavior, and about rights, etc. And there is something to what technology is about: related insights, and important values. What we tried to get both to see is the value in each, and more importantly, the need to integrate the insights of each.

Reagle is a good one from the tech side who is trying this integration. There are a scad of lawyers trying to do the same. But I do think lawyers have the advantage here: the best know they don't know anything, and so the best learn humility as a first lesson.

The W3C made a tool to clean up HTML called HTML Tidy. Just for kicks, I tried it on Slashdot. It blew a fuse after logging several thousand violations. :) Usually works great though.

Any idea if Slashdot's code will ever be cleaned up? Would open sourcing help things?

I believe not too many people are interested in expending that kind of effort to get into a mac, what with there being such a greater percentage of unix/linux and nt out there. Also, note most exploits against Windows do not use the shell, instead injecting code, or employing social engineering and/or scripting exploits. I don't see any reason why these techniques are any less applicable to Mac. Maybe, just maybe, it's the relative obscurity Mac enjoys that motivates hackers to look elsewhere.

BTW Not to push your professor under the bus, but I beleive he is repeating what he read here.

The problem with CSS is that none of the major browsers correctly implement even CSS1, which has been a standard since 1997.

There are two general classes of problem:

1. Simple non-compliance. Take a look at the w3c style sheet "acid test" in whatever browser you are using. Unless it is M12, it will probably be wrong. I've tested this on:

• IE5
• Netscape 4.7
• Opera 3.61
• Amaya 2.4 (!)
• Mozilla M12

2. Worse, at least NS 4.* has a implementation so buggy that styles often crash the browser.

One may say that browsers will be forced to follow, but try doing that now in a real-world commercial situation. "Sorry, dear client, but since we are big on style sheets, we are going to build your site such that only users of a pre-alpha browser will be able to properly view it. Oh, and yeah, about 30% of your visitors browsers are going to crash while visiting your site."
"Why? oh, because we think that your web site should perform a public service, even if it means you lose business and visitors. But just you wait until the browsers catch up!"

CSS works a lot better in intranet setups. That's what I have our corporate intranet using, because we have influence over the browsers used on the network and understand that things are going to look somewhat different in IE/NS/Opera/M12. Plus, we understand (unlike clients, god bless them) that CSS will, eventually, work, and that we will benefit from having plenty of internal experience. But that won't be for a while.

Perhaps you should just point them to the W3C verification tools, or the Web Interoperability pledge.

Heck, the WIP is even on ZDNet, which should be familiar to your local PHB.

You can also grab screenshots of the various browsers in dual boot situations. Another option is to show them the access log of the webserver (for the past x years) broken down by user age. But I'm sure just Opera, Netscape, and IE under Windows (which should be available :0)) will be enough to convince them.
---

Considering plains, my homepage isn't at all that plain and if it isn't fancy enough, it's not because of the standards is strict. And you can validate it on http://validator.w3.org

However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya browser.

Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
1. Is a browser as well as editor
2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
3. Amaya is easily extended.
Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
4. Support of MathML protocol.

But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright which is fully compatible with the GPL

Why not give it a try?
Binary Distribution
Source Code
RPM distribution

However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya browser.

Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
1. Is a browser as well as editor
2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
3. Amaya is easily extended.
Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
4. Support of MathML protocol.

But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright which is fully compatible with the GPL

Why not give it a try?
Binary Distribution
Source Code
RPM distribution

However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya browser.

Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
1. Is a browser as well as editor
2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
3. Amaya is easily extended.
Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
4. Support of MathML protocol.

But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright which is fully compatible with the GPL

Why not give it a try?
Binary Distribution
Source Code
RPM distribution

However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya browser.

Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
1. Is a browser as well as editor
2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
3. Amaya is easily extended.
Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
4. Support of MathML protocol.

But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright which is fully compatible with the GPL

Why not give it a try?
Binary Distribution
Source Code
RPM distribution

However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya browser.

Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
1. Is a browser as well as editor
2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
3. Amaya is easily extended.
Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
4. Support of MathML protocol.

But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright which is fully compatible with the GPL

Why not give it a try?
Binary Distribution
Source Code
RPM distribution

Illegal HTML should trigger an automatic mail message to the offending site.

You can take care of filtering by file extension very easily: don't put the file extension in the URI. It's a very bad idea; it effectively puts the type of the object in its name, so if you ever go to change the type (as GIF to PNG) or the server handling (as .html to .shtml to .asp to .php) you have to change all references to it. And Cool URIs don't change.

However (there's always a however) there's the metadata catch. If you divorce metadata from content, then it becomes easy for site admins to lie in their metadata in order to attract vistors. Remember the keywords spamming that used to occur? Now, imagine if thats extended to being able to lie completely about the content of an entire site. Unless you're in an environment where you can trust the providers of your metadata, by and large you're in trouble.

Cheers,

Simon.

guarentee that 90% of the people reading this are safe.

I think you are wrong. A lot of people install ssh from the ssh rpms available on rpmfind. The us versions here are compiled with RSAREF. But I think the latest version fixes this. See my other post.

This is a field where Linux could be leading the pack, but is instead an example where I think we are lagging behind. (I hope someone can point me to a group that is bringing XML deep into the linux os)

Not so, fortunately. A certain very large telco (which I'm not yet allowed to name) is now running its Intranet directory on an XML/XSL application which I've written. The application was developed on Linux and is currently running on Linux, although the customer intends to move it to Solaris.

My XML intro course is online; it's a little out of date at the moment but will be updated over the next few months.

XML and particularly RDF do have a lot to offer for search engines - see my other note further up this thread.

Is it even possible to index dynamic pages? They don't really exist until the page is generated.

Yes, for a very large category of dynamic pages, it is. For example, in an online shop, the actual number of a particular product in stock at the moment may very from minute to minute, the price of that product in the user's preferred currency may change from week to week, but the product itself doesn't change much over months over months or years. It makes perfect sense to index the product page, because although some of the contained data may be transient, a great deal more is not.

Or take another example: the weather forecast for a particular area. The forecast itself may change regularly, but the page always contains a current forecast and that fact is worth indexing. The best technology available for this sort of thing is probably RDF and the Dublin Core metadata specification. Of course, the search engines still have to be persuaded to take heed of this...

I was just about to ASK SLASHDOT about XML. XML will solve the search problem (or at least help make it better) Working drafts of XML have been drawn up by the W3 Consorium and XLINK, XSL, etc... are coming. There are almost no XML applications available yet though!!!!! most of what is available is in java. This is a field where Linux could be leading the pack, but is instead an example where I think we are lagging behind. (I hope someone can point me to a group that is bringing XML deep into the linux os)

I want to know if Linux is on top of this. Microsoft has an XML notepad available and I hear that it's going to be all over Win2000 (in the registry even). XML will be the foundation of the new internet and we don't want microsoft to have a technology edge there do we? Perl has XML modules, as I am sure other languages do too (python). Lets get some apps written!

What about Gnome and KDE? this could help make their projects easier. Especially KDE with all of the object similatrities between Corba and XML and Object RDB's. All Config files could be theoretically stored in XML. We need to push this one people!

-pos


The truth is more important than the facts.

I was just about to ASK SLASHDOT about XML. XML will solve the search problem (or at least help make it better) Working drafts of XML have been drawn up by the W3 Consorium and XLINK, XSL, etc... are coming. There are almost no XML applications available yet though!!!!! most of what is available is in java. This is a field where Linux could be leading the pack, but is instead an example where I think we are lagging behind. (I hope someone can point me to a group that is bringing XML deep into the linux os)

I want to know if Linux is on top of this. Microsoft has an XML notepad available and I hear that it's going to be all over Win2000 (in the registry even). XML will be the foundation of the new internet and we don't want microsoft to have a technology edge there do we? Perl has XML modules, as I am sure other languages do too (python). Lets get some apps written!

What about Gnome and KDE? this could help make their projects easier. Especially KDE with all of the object similatrities between Corba and XML and Object RDB's. All Config files could be theoretically stored in XML. We need to push this one people!

-pos


The truth is more important than the facts.

I was just about to ASK SLASHDOT about XML. XML will solve the search problem (or at least help make it better) Working drafts of XML have been drawn up by the W3 Consorium and XLINK, XSL, etc... are coming. There are almost no XML applications available yet though!!!!! most of what is available is in java. This is a field where Linux could be leading the pack, but is instead an example where I think we are lagging behind. (I hope someone can point me to a group that is bringing XML deep into the linux os)

I want to know if Linux is on top of this. Microsoft has an XML notepad available and I hear that it's going to be all over Win2000 (in the registry even). XML will be the foundation of the new internet and we don't want microsoft to have a technology edge there do we? Perl has XML modules, as I am sure other languages do too (python). Lets get some apps written!

What about Gnome and KDE? this could help make their projects easier. Especially KDE with all of the object similatrities between Corba and XML and Object RDB's. All Config files could be theoretically stored in XML. We need to push this one people!

-pos


The truth is more important than the facts.

Today, there are two methods used when a site is added to a search engine database. The first relies on information submitted by the site, the second relies on information (e.g. keyword fields) found by crawlers. As more sites switch to dynamic content, the sites offer no easy way for a crawler to find information about content. This could be solved by developing some method for storage and retrieval of the data. For an example, look at how the "robots. txt"-mechanism works. /Joakim Crafack

You bring up an interesting point about alternatives to Cookies. My view on the matter is that HTTP looks kinda like this:
Connect-Get-Disconnect
Untill that changes, cookies will be used as a way of maintaining state over multiple connections. With HTTP 1.1 in broad deployment, it's going to a be an incrimental change rather than a radicle one.
The best proposition on the table right now is RFC2109 (at:http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2109/rfc 2109)
Also there's more about HTTP at:http://www.w3.org/Protocols/Specs.html#RFC