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Sure Microsoft.com makes the list. The developers of the site are lazy. All they care about is that it 'works' with IE and Firefox and a few other browsers. They do NOT care one bit about W3C compliance. Do you think they put the site through the validator? I DOUBT it. Otherwise, they'd fix the 176 errors .

And then there are web developers for big companies that do the same thing. Amazon.com: 1580 errors, eBay: 226 errors and a big one for a lot of us on Slashdot I am sure (US based people), Newegg.com: 566 errors. What is so hard about validating to the standards in place? If you do it from the start, you have no problems. But developers of these sites clearly do NOT care as long as the site 'loads'.

Do not forget so many of these sites rely upon Microsoft's ASP.NET, ASP and/or IIS.

Also just wanted to add that the US english version of Mozilla passes with flying colors and Slashdot gets a big fat flunk with 170 errors. But considering all the funky "web 2.0" stuff they've been messing with that really isn't surprising.

Also just wanted to add that the US english version of Mozilla passes with flying colors and Slashdot gets a big fat flunk with 170 errors. But considering all the funky "web 2.0" stuff they've been messing with that really isn't surprising.

Not even Slashdot is compliant. This article alone scores 49 errors.

W3 validation of this article

How can people complain about compliance when little of the web is in itself compliant?

Using -moz-* properties is not against the CSS standard; indeed, the standard itself defines them. An application should simply ignore properties it does not understand.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot.org

In the list, there's "mozilla.com"... but...

w3.org mozilla

Maybe, Microsoft didn't want to have "microsoft.com" all alone...

According to the W3C validator Mozilla.org passes with 1 warning, Wikipedia.org passes with flying colours but Google.com fails miserably with 65 errors.

According to the W3C validator Mozilla.org passes with 1 warning, Wikipedia.org passes with flying colours but Google.com fails miserably with 65 errors.

According to the W3C validator Mozilla.org passes with 1 warning, Wikipedia.org passes with flying colours but Google.com fails miserably with 65 errors.

validating Google.com. Don't think google ever tried to be compliant.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

Yes, it's called HTML5.

The reason something like Facebook works is that they can design a database schema to facilitate a complete experience that just kind of... works.... Across mini-feeds, status walls, applications, etc.

Doing that in a way that's completely decentralized requires standardization on interfaces and data that would be hard to do for a couple of reasons:
- Agreeing on the architecture; how many "really" RESTful interfaces are out there? Netflix has a great one, but Flickr doesn't.
- What's the syntax? JSON, XML, YAML, ... ?
- How about a data model? Will people want to go beyond syntax into being able to do queries like what SPARQL gives you?

But beyond the technological hurdles, there's the business angle. Social media isn't exactly rolling in revenue, it's rolling in VC funding at best. Why interoperate when can try to claim a monopoly position? Or aim to be the defacto standard?

So, in the end, I woudn't say we're moving backwards ... we're just progressing through the usual stages of how standards and openness has evolved online. We start with well-funded walled gardens (CompuServe, Prodigy, your local BBS, etc.) , people eventually get fed up and build out interoperable bridges that cross them (e.g. FIDOnet and NNTP in the old days of bulletin boards). Now we have to do the same for the web....

Making a 3D game and using hardware openGL acceleration is tough to do in with HTML5 :)

Today, probably. Tomorrow, not so much. From HTML5 draft, section on the CANVAS element:

"A future version of this specification will probably define a 3d context (probably based on the OpenGL ES API)."

So it looks like DN4E will be written in JavaScript.

shit, here's the link: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sql

As far as the main thrust of the topic, of course bundling helps--a lot--but maybe the exec just meant that bundling can't suppress good things forever...

Anyhow, the question of what to do if Firefox does gain a 2/3 market share is still valid (and even before that).

My hope is that more aspects of the Firefox browser can become or contribute to their own standards--and that Mozilla will itself adhere to them. XUL, the interface language used in the browser itself and extension building, might be such a candidate for standardization (or at least a subset of it), assuming other browser makers would be interested.

Perhaps there's a lesson somewhere with XBL, assuming it ever goes anywhere (the extensibility of XBL is great, but again, there should, I feel, be some standard for the more frequently recurring bread-and-butter requirement of describing browser elements, as XUL provides).

Likewise, it'd be great for XPCOM functionality to somehow become accepted as XBCOM (cross-browser). Perhaps FUEL API's could be joined with other browser makers' libraries into a standard, again assuming interest. At the very least, I hope other browser-makers-which-allow-extension-of-the-browser may agree to standardize on Mozilla's useful JavaScript module importation so that such code can also be reused cross-browser without modification.

One concern I have is with an existing attitude in Mozilla where repeated mention has been made by prominent Mozilla developers of a distinction between the web and non-web, and arguing against following standards which were conceived without the web in mind. While that may well be true, this can also set up a false dichotomy and introduce exceptionalism. If there is a non-web use for a technology (e.g., support for external DTDs in (especially document-centric) XML for simple localization), then there well is also a web-use. Likewise was such an argument against certain standards made toward not implementing DOM Level 3, even though parsing and serialization from or to strings or the DOM is a pretty basic requirement across browsers (and the API, as with the rest of the DOM, is not that terrible so as to make it impossible to work around, as we all do with levels 1 and 2 of the DOM). I hope such existing cross-browser issues can be addressed, even as new standards if need really be (again, without falsely assuming that non-web uses such as serializing to streams, etc., can't find web (or browser) uses and dumbing down the standards).

I'm also concerned with another topic impinging on the Mozilla-as-gatekeeper concern: modularity within Firefox itself. Firefox should, I feel, quickly make good on its plans to enhance its extension dependency system, so third parties can supply independent modules and have extensions automatically trigger such downloads upon installation. Otherwise Mozilla stays as the albeit friendly gate-keeper within the community (not to mention for other browsers) and either gets bloated or left insufficiently extensible. For example, for dealing with the sparseness of built-in JavaScript functions to handle many common tasks, while using an already familiar API, PHP.JS could eventually be made as such a module. Mozilla expressed openness to allow modules to be added, but it would, I feel, be more extensible and sustainable into the future (and not contribute to browser bloat), if the community "market" could more

And by the time IE9 is out, there will be something else to support

Actually, by the time Internet Explorer 6 was out, there was something else to support. The DOM 2 Events specification, an intrinsic part of modern JavaScript, was published in 2000, almost a year before Internet Explorer 6, and even the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 still won't have support for it. That's why all the modern JavaScript libraries like jQuery have workaround code to translate the Internet Explorer event model into the standard event model shared by all the other browsers.

So yes, there will be plenty to work on for Internet Explorer 9, but it will be yet more stuff that other browsers implemented years ago, not a moving target.

they're doing more to undermine web standards with things like Silverlight than they have ever done to support them?

Oh, you mean giving competition the alternative to Silverlight, the extremely web-standards savvy and committed Adobe/Macromedia Shockwave/Flash? That doesn't even have a really XHTML standardized way of being embedded yet? link to w3's entry on embedding flash

I guess I should stop using Apache. It's funded by MS :) On the other hand, I refuse to take the "karma" approach to companies, and will praise MS on their good actions and complain about their bad actions. I will not complain about their good actions because I am still sore from their bad ones...

Indeed, the page in question actually validates as XHTML Transitional which is something that is remarkably rare and shows a concern for craftsmanship.

I noticed that, too. The CSS however does not validate. Still I take your point. APS.NET is not the tool I would use, but they have done well with the tool of their choice.

The author states that CSS sprites are "somewhat involved to implement". Unless you're really new to CSS, it's very easy to do.

What I find sad is the poor choice of image formats, i.e. all the graphics of the blue border should have been in 24-bit PNG, not JPEG.

I do applaud them for having clean URLs. Most of them anyway.

Fortunately, it's valid HTML.
Unfortunately...
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en

for the author to show his superiority to the Internet. None of what he cites really matters.

True enough. Indeed, the page in question actually validates as XHTML Transitional which is something that is remarkably rare and shows a concern for craftsmanship.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/video.html

Dear Java Hating Slashdot Editors,

Java is not responsible for "generating class loader errors", any more than Perl is responsible for all the HTML errors on the Slashdot front page.

Here's the link to the W3C HTML Validator, go get yourself a clue.

You are correct. However Java applets are an incredibly brittle technology for provisioning software services.

I would go so far as to argue that Suns initial attempts to introduce Java as a technology for creating dynamic web content has been the single greatest thing working against the adoption of Java in the industry.

Java is a very powerful language and it definitely has its place in my tool-belt, but it certainly ain't for client-side applets.

Dear Java Hating Slashdot Editors,

Java is not responsible for "generating class loader errors", any more than Perl is responsible for all the HTML errors on the Slashdot front page.

Here's the link to the W3C HTML Validator, go get yourself a clue.

This is the Internet! We don't need no stinking spell checkers! I make so many errors usually I can't really comment about anyone else's grammar anymore without feeling bad.

Seriously, you have some interesting ideas. What is a URL though? Uniform Resource Locator. Using http you can request information from a URL, or post information to the same URL. A website can post information to this URL, and then receive information back (in this case authentication). A URL doesn't have to have a single expression. That's what methods like POST, GET, DELETE, and PUt, etc are designed for in the first place ( http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html ). The default is GET for browsers, which might be confusing for some people, but who really understands most of the technology around us? I have only a vague idea of how my TV actually works, but I can use it without any problems. I have to trust other people to understand it well enough to make it, and websites are the same way for most people.

So, we will start seeing 402 errors now?

I've got a coworker that is an IE fanatic. He keeps pointing out that IE uses less memory than FF, he's right. He also tallies up whenever I complain of a crash vs when he complains of one... and he's winning (as in fewer crashes).

I love being anti-m$, but you can't just dismiss their product as second-rate because you want it to be.

If firefox supported as little as IE, it would likely use much less memory. Is it not more appropriate to measure a browser by how well it supports the web standards that browsers are built to read? MS can't even be bothered to implement all of the standard html tags. IE 8 will finally support the frickin' <q> tag from HTML 4. That's a hard one too... replace the <q> tags with quote characters. It's rocket science really. No wonder it has taken MS more than a decade to support it. Next, run IE through a CSS support test page. Maybe give Acid3 a shot with it. Things aren't looking so pretty for IE, are they? Now try opening an XHTML page with it. Oh, sorry... IE is unable to read xhtml. It just downloads it to disk. It also doesn't support SVG, or MathML, or ruby. Firefox on the other hand, does.

Of course IE isn't second rate. It's not even good enough to qualify as third rate. I'm sure that's the primary reason MS is bleeding browser share at an accelerating rate.

Will be a book about basic HTML authoring; the importance of setting text color when they set the background color, making pages work without javascript where there's no requirement for it. Like I said, the basics.

Perhaps then (no disrespect intended to Zalewski) I'll take google branded advice seriously.

http has built in mechanism for last update known as last-modified response header.

See: caching under http:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.3.1

See: http response headers:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.29

cheers

http has built in mechanism for last update known as last-modified response header.

See: caching under http:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.3.1

See: http response headers:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.29

cheers

There already has existed such a feature in Internet Explorer since at least 4.0 which uses W3C's PICS Labels. There has been the Internet Content Rating Association that has been around for a long time promoting that webmasters use PICS Labels to rate their own site and it is completely up to them on how to rate their own sites, of which has its pros and cons (such as webmasters intentionally misrating their site to be assholes).

I just checked firefox 3.0.5 and it doesn't even support PICS Labels, so anybody knows about the other web browsers? I personally have the web content rating disabled in IE because I don't want it, but I could parents might have a use for it, but it is a bit of a mistrust though if webmasters don't correctly rate their site as mentioned above as an example of a con to this concept. in IE at least if a web content rating is enabled and a website does not have a PICS Label then parents can simply deny their child access to the site or it can give a warning.

I disagree that the reading level of sites should be brought down to a 9th grade reading level [w3.org]. A reading level rating would be more appropriate. Most of the internet, slashdot included, will not have a problem with that; the web content worth reading, slashdot included, are well above that.

According to the linked page, "popular software" can determine the reading level of text in multiple languages. A quick Google search revealed a PHP project php-text-statistics; it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between highly moderated comments and some of the reading comprehension metrics.

Crawl-delay directive

Several major crawlers support a Crawl-delay parameter, set to the number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server: [1] [2]
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10

Further, not only do the Google crawlers obey the robots.txt described above (or other standards for robot exclusion), they also use HTTP's if-modified-since to make a conditional request. The file is only returned to the crawler if it has been changed. That saves a lot of time and bandwidth.

PC World will also lose out if double-dipping is allowed.

The thing is with Opera being known for its standards compliance, I'd guess it has got there through continuous improvement and no just drinking kool aid like certain web(kit) rendering engnines. Personally i use firefox and am happy that minefield passes css3 test suites (well one anyway) before acid3 (that should come naturally when the standard is properly implemented). Ofc its a shame it still fails at css2.1

18. On information and belief, persons other than Psystar are involved in Psystarâ(TM)s unlawful and improper activities described in this Amended Complaint. The true names or capacities, whether individual, corporate, or otherwise, of these persons are unknown to Apple. Consequently they are referred to herein as John Does 1 through 10 (collectively the âoeJohn Doe Defendantsâ). On information and belief, the John Doe Defendants are various individuals and/or corporations who have infringed Appleâ(TM)s intellectual property rights, breached or induced the breach of Appleâ(TM)s license agreements and violated state and common law unfair competition laws. Apple will seek leave to amend this complaint to show the unknown John Doe Defendantsâ(TM) true names and capacities when they are ascertained.

Legalese really is the most dry textual representation of ideas possible... not only are we threatening you with all manner of unpleasantness but the very act of reading our threat saps your will to live.

I far prefer the xml 'spec' for ease-of-reading..

There should be a law which states that Lawyers are not allowed to [ab]use text.

Oh, not to mention that the invention of the WWW was a bad example - in 1989, Tim Burners Lee was at CERN as an engineer (CERN is a research institution without a University, so no undergrads there), and as he is now a Full Professor, has a Ph.D.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Read up on the plain view doctrine. It is what allows you to be arrested for marijuana possession if you have a bag of it sitting on your desk when the cop is in your house for some other reason (like a warrant). As long as he is not taking any action that does not pertain to the warrant, then when he sees that bag of marijuana, you can get arrested. Glancing around a room from a position the warrant allows is an action that is allowed. Searching for the thing mentioned in the warrant is allowed. He may not be searching for anything not on the warrant, but happening to see something not on the warrant that is clearly illegal can be used, as long as only allowed actions were used to find it. Do note that the thing has to be clearly evidence immediately upon viewing. If any uncertainty occurs, such as having to run an outside check or to make closer inspection of any type, then that is not immediately apparent, and is disallowed.

Two defining cases here are as follows: In the first case, a robbery occurred, with known weapons and stolen goods. A warrant was issued for the goods only. When the officer went to the residence with the warrant, he happened upon and seized the weapons as evidence. It was permissible to do so, as the weapons were clearly evidence, in plain view, and the officer was lawfully present.

In the second case, police entered a residence as a result of a shooting, and in the course of their actions, noticed some stereo equipment and ran a check on the serial numbers. They were stolen, and they were seized. This is not legal, as the equipment was not immediately apparent as evidence.

Some links:
http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/plainv.htm
http://www.policelink.com/training/articles/2043-plain-view-doctrine-
http://people.w3.org/~djweitzner/blog/?p=77
http://www.google.com/search?q=search+warrant+plain+view+doctrine

Patenting the use of IMAP to retrieve an e-mail message if that message can be displayed on a secondary device.

HTML4 and XHTML That followed it were DESIGNED with the goal and one of the major objectives of device independence and portability in mind.

There is nothing "novel", no "invention" in using a standard for one of its intended and well-publicized applicable purposes.

The real-estate developer is essentially patenting use of the public standard in a very basic manner that the standard is expected to be used for by its designers.

The "invention" involved in their patent is HTML and XHTML. So a group of protocol designers can spend YEARS and thousands of man hours, and hundreds of thousands of $$$ in resources to develop standards, BUT it's still perfectly permissible for a third-party to come up with a (clearly anticipated) use for those file formats, and patent it as novel???

For over 3 years, it has been considered so important that the W3c has a working group dedicated to the objective of a device independent unified web.

I'll patent the idea of using a Microsoft .DOC file to store a contract in.

It's essentially a convenient document system that can be used for storing contracts. I can even include the concept of a program that can archive signed documents combined with use of a scanner that converts documents to .DOC or .PDF.

Surely these are just as great inventions as using something like XSLTPROC to trim down a HTML document and render a reduced XHTML version.

Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - "Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?" This proposal provides an answer to such questions. Firstly, it discusses the problem of information access at CERN. Then, it introduces the idea of linked information systems, and compares them with less flexible ways of finding information.

It then summarises my short experience with non-linear text systems known as hypertext, describes what CERN needs from such a system, and what industry may provide. Finally, it suggests steps we should take to involve ourselves with hypertext now, so that individually and collectively we may understand what we are creating.

This being said, I'd say that the LHC has already paid for itself a thousand times over.

It looks like crap and it doesn't even validate (94 errors).

The embed tag is one of the official new elements in HTML5.

We're not in an era anymore where the specs or validators can keep up with the advancement in browser technologies. Should we not use ARIA attributes to mark up our content to provide better support for assistive technologies because the W3C validators do not pass them as valid, despite the ARIA specification saying that they should be?

We are in an era where both worlds can be meshed together. Put your content inside of the newly created video tag to first allow people to choose the player they want. Inside of that use the embed element for a Flash video, because that has a higher market share then any other way of doing things. That way you have covered your philosophical base covered first, then your practical base covered next. Everyone is happy.

Amaya. Test, laugh, rinse, repeat.

How about people actually validate their websites? Something like only 3% of the web is valid xhtml. http://validator.w3.org/

You forgot Poland^WAmaya. It has its own engine, and is "html spec complete" by dint of being the browser used as a testbed for standards development.

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

"It supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, many CSS 2 features, and includes SVG support (transformation, transparency, and SMIL animation). You can display and partially edit XML documents. It's an internationalized application."

"Amaya includes a collaborative annotation application based on Resource Description Framework (RDF), XLink, and XPointer."

I.e., Amaya bleeds XML if you cut it. And then the W3C will blow up your car, shoot your dog, kidnap your family, and torch your house.

Just because nobody uses it regularly is not a reason to discount it, considering its role in the standards processes. Feel free to discount other browsers as you like.

HTML5? I haven't been watching for awhile but last I'd heard HTMLx.xx was ended and superceded by the xhtmlx.xx standards. What happened?

A lot. XHTML 2.0, which is a clean redesign of HTML from scratch, happened, and noone bothered to implement it. Meanwhile, people and companies behind Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, Safari, and many others, have gathered together to improve on HTML in a more "pragmatic" way - basically, by standardizing what's already commonly accepted, and by adding extensions for things that are clearly widely used (such as streaming video, and the "canvas" element for free-form bitmap rendering in client-side JS). The result they call HTML5. Initially, it was developed outside W3C, but then the latter was convinced that, for the failure that is XHTML 2, an alternative development of the HTML line is sorely needed... so now HTML5 is a W3C working draft.

More details on Wikipedia, as usual.

The point of the object tag is that it can fall back on a nested element if the preferred object can't be displayed.

A video tag sounds like a terrible idea, when XHTML is heading in the direction of replacing image tags with objects.

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt

The <menu> tag has been around since the beginning. Check the date - 1993.

There's no reason not to use menu tags to mark content as being a menu, rather than to use divs or spans. Same as, if your data is really a table of information, there's no reason not to use the table tag - it's "the right thing to do" since it really IS a table, and not just being used for hacking a layout.

GPS support in a Web browser via a standard navigator.geolocation API is in a W3C Editor's draft http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html , and implemented in latest Firefox code or the Geode plug-in (with appropriate user privacy controls).

And people are talking about standard browser access to accelerometer and camera.

Don't bet against the browsers.