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Sadly they got rid of the inline style atribute i.e. span style="color: blue;" - http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/#absent-attributes

1) XML is case sensitive, not lowercase. XHTML is lowercase in the main*, but hey, that's what those lil' angle braces are for, decent commenting, and syntax highlighting. uppercasing for "readability" is stupid.
2) HTML5 is not a replacement for XHTML - it is a complementary tech, and XHTML still can do things HTML5 cannot do.
such as embedding SVG, ODT, MathML or other XML into the document as needed.
3) No one uses center anymore. Except you I guess, and rest of your post puts your knowledge kind of in doubt.
http://dorward.me.uk/www/centre/
At least you put that CSS2 qualifier in there, btw. But even there you are wrong since what you really mean is IE compatible CSS2 - which is a rather reduced subset (see below "display: table-cell")
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center

* not all the time 'cause it is XML and can hook into other definitions. You may end up with a lot of perfectly legit XHTML docs using the attribute schemaLocation for example.

If there is anything that I have learned in the past 10 years of writing code (since before high school), I have learned that the following sequence of learning is ideal.
1. HTML/CSS/JavaScript - Get acquainted with web programming. None of that Nambly-pambly BBCode crap that they offer on MySpace.
2. Python - I wish I had got into this before I learned C++. Good for learning about shells if you decide to switch to Linux or BSD, especially if you decide to create your own website through a webhosting provider that uses SSH.
3. C/C++ and/or PHP/MySQL. - Playing with the big-boy toys at this point. The safety net that points 1 and 2 provided has been lowered.
4. OpenGL or Assembly Programming. - Really advanced programming! OpenGL is high-level. Assembly is low-level.
From there on, the sky is the limit.

But how do you even get to the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> unless you know what encoding you're working with?

Off topic, but you don't need marquee tags with CSS, you can apply the marquee attribute to any tag's style.

The SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is a query language and protocol for RDF

Anyway, FOAF + SIOC + Policy Aware Web comprises pretty good solutions to the data portability and privacy considerations people have been screaming about lately.

Schweini: agreed re. the need for awareness-campaign.

And often an average web citizen may ask: "so what's in there for me?". If you can play with SPARQL queries yourself, on some data that are of interest to you, that would be another thing entirely.

As for getting interesting data to work on, you can use some of SIOC export plugins for WordPress and other blog/forum engines. Then collect data (that will require some crawling of data pages) and run queries over your own content. This data would be richer than simple web feeds and yet simple enough to be fun to work with.

One thing which is maybe overlooked is that SPARQL can query a web of data coming from different sources. An advanced SPARQL query could very well combine data from your blog, DBPedia and also from your existing RDBMSs / info systems exposed to SPARQL queries.

Schweini: agreed re. the need for awareness-campaign.

And often an average web citizen may ask: "so what's in there for me?". If you can play with SPARQL queries yourself, on some data that are of interest to you, that would be another thing entirely.

As for getting interesting data to work on, you can use some of SIOC export plugins for WordPress and other blog/forum engines. Then collect data (that will require some crawling of data pages) and run queries over your own content. This data would be richer than simple web feeds and yet simple enough to be fun to work with.

One thing which is maybe overlooked is that SPARQL can query a web of data coming from different sources. An advanced SPARQL query could very well combine data from your blog, DBPedia and also from your existing RDBMSs / info systems exposed to SPARQL queries.

And after reading the standard, most of the articles, and looking at a couple of implementations, not only have I hit arbitrary but fairly high limits on what I will put up with before my eyes glaze over, I've also hit the 'don't give a s--- limitation as well.

One of their projects reports having indexed and interlinked "over two billion RDF triples, which are interlinked by around 3 million RDF links (October 2007)". Well frabulous. And so what??? Even looking at their graphic for all of the different databits that they have linked in, I don't find myself all that interested for a simple reason: to use the information with any kind of speed, I still have to take the data I can acquire and convert it into something that I can structure into a high speed high power database locally.

Which means secondarily that really what I want more is for other smart people to take the interlinked documents and the associated data and mine it and put it out in some location where I can use the data en-masse and at high speed for my own purposes. Not to learn yet another SQL variant that on it's best day will still be dog-slow.

I guess what I am saying is that -- while I understand the goals and purposes of the semantic web and the tools including SPARQL that are being developed for it-- I don't know when or even if the glaze factor will ever be low enough to capture my interest enough vs. looking for or maybe even buying the data that someone else has aggregated from the Semantic web. Thoughts?

They could at least spell XHTML correctly...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Falpha.search.wikia.com%2F

Not even slashdot passes that test
Looks like some unencoded ampersands and style attributes.

The site is ugly.

It looks like the marketing guys got into the buzz of Web 2.0 and told their Windows programmers that they wanted that for their site. The result? A .NET site with Wordpress knee-jerked inside. The site (as most of .NET crap) doesn't even validate. Even the blog, based on Wordpress, must have been so messed up that it doesn't validate either.

And what an awful theme! Where do these guys get their webdesigners from?

Although I think they still have a lot to learn about using open source, I have to applaud at least their try. Although it's one step back, it's two forward. :-)

The site is ugly.

It looks like the marketing guys got into the buzz of Web 2.0 and told their Windows programmers that they wanted that for their site. The result? A .NET site with Wordpress knee-jerked inside. The site (as most of .NET crap) doesn't even validate. Even the blog, based on Wordpress, must have been so messed up that it doesn't validate either.

And what an awful theme! Where do these guys get their webdesigners from?

Although I think they still have a lot to learn about using open source, I have to applaud at least their try. Although it's one step back, it's two forward. :-)

Some guidelines I wrote (for an assignment for an HCI course I just took) for color selection are:

1. Do use dark backgrounds, and light text.
2. Don't use adjacent colors of similar lightness.
3. Don't use Blue as a background or for fine detail.
4. Do use shades of Purple, Violet, Red for background. AND Do use shades of Green, Yellow, Orange for foregrounds
5. Do make sure black-and-white and monochrome versions are legible.
6. Don't rely on color alone.
7. Do give high-priority data high contrast.
8. Do use tools to check your contrast.
9. Do check colorblind compatibility

Some resources to look into from my bibliography:

"Luminance Contrast Color Guidelines." Arend, L. Logan, A. Havin, G. Color Usage Research Lab. Nasa Ames Research Centre. 7 Oct 2007 http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/guidelines_lum_cont.php
"Color & Contrast: Web Checkpoint 12" IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Centre. 1 Jun 2007. IBM. 7 Oct 2007. http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/webcolor.html
"Effective Color Contrast" Dr. Artidi, A. Lighthouse International. 2007. Lighthouse International. 7 Oct 2007. http://www.lighthouse.org/accessibility/effective-color-contrast/
"Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0." World Wide Web Consortium. 5 May 1999. W3C. 7 Oct 2007 http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT

well.. i really meant Google's API. I've read enough 'bout that, but it doesn't seem to be widespread as it should in their creator's mind. There has been lot of talk, but so few apps built on top of those APIs make me think about the need we have for it.
No, really, what we need is not just another aggregator, maybe the opposite

Invisible hand of the market!

I see at least 3 solutions:

1. (The market solution) Offer to pay them (or someone else more willing) more, or get everyone you know to boycott them and their advertisers until they meet your demands.

2. (The State solution) Talk your congressman and other world legislatures into mandating CC for video on the web!

3. (The technological solution, which was already mentioned and scoffed off) Either via mechanical turks (crowdsourcing) or fully automated voice recognition.

Case 2 sounds like the solution you want, but seems wildly unlikely in the near term. It's really a race then to see if the tech solution obsoletes the government solution before it comes to pass. The web, globally, has largely resisted accessibility for the blind (how many pages do you visit with style sheets for screen readers or braille? That's view->page style in Firefox). Internet and software businesses have largely resisted legislation for accessibility, insisting their self-regulation is working. For the blind, the technological solution is the one they are betting on -- screen readers, and web browsers that can present user style sheets for better screen reader compatibility for sites without accessible style sheets (i.e., nearly all of them... including this one).

See also: http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/

The CSS specifications mandate how bad input should be handled; they define the error handling. The Acid 2 test intends to test that error handling. If browsers handle errors differently from how the specifications mandate, they are not compliant with the specifications, so they may fail the test.

If the result of errors was undefined, you'd have a good point. It would make no sense to test what is undefined in the specifications. But that is not the case. Errors in CSS are supposed to be handled in a specific way, and testing that is entirely reasonable.

If you're interested, you can always have a look at the specifications for yourself.
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The CSS specifications mandate how bad input should be handled; they define the error handling. The Acid 2 test intends to test that error handling. If browsers handle errors differently from how the specifications mandate, they are not compliant with the specifications, so they may fail the test.

If the result of errors was undefined, you'd have a good point. It would make no sense to test what is undefined in the specifications. But that is not the case. Errors in CSS are supposed to be handled in a specific way, and testing that is entirely reasonable.

If you're interested, you can always have a look at the specifications for yourself.
CSS level 1
CSS level 2
CSS level 2 revision 1

The CSS specifications mandate how bad input should be handled; they define the error handling. The Acid 2 test intends to test that error handling. If browsers handle errors differently from how the specifications mandate, they are not compliant with the specifications, so they may fail the test.

If the result of errors was undefined, you'd have a good point. It would make no sense to test what is undefined in the specifications. But that is not the case. Errors in CSS are supposed to be handled in a specific way, and testing that is entirely reasonable.

If you're interested, you can always have a look at the specifications for yourself.
CSS level 1
CSS level 2
CSS level 2 revision 1

To ensure that new properties and new values for existing properties can be added in the future, user agents are required to obey the following rules when they encounter the following scenarios:

        * Unknown properties. User agents must ignore a declaration with an unknown property.
        * Illegal values. User agents must ignore a declaration with an illegal value.
        * Malformed declarations. User agents must handle unexpected tokens encountered while parsing a declaration by reading until the end of the declaration, while observing the rules for matching pairs of (), [], {}, "", and '', and correctly handling escapes.
        * Invalid at-keywords. User agents must ignore an invalid at-keyword together with everything following it, up to and including the next semicolon (;) or block ({...}), whichever comes first.

With all the puling about IE not being compliant with the arbitary standards set by a bunch of MS-haters...

That thing you say about the table less approach makes you look like you don't cara about accesibility that much, do you?

You dont understand the problem. HTML injections are from users like me posting busted HTML as a comment to slashdot.

You're right. I don't understand why this should be a problem. Tidy the tainted HTML, so you end up with clean, reliable XHTML.

The comment injects evil bits of javascript into the output when the page gets displayed.

So remove the bits of javascript. Script tags and event handlers are easy to find, and links can be cleaned up.

Using XHTML and having the browser choke and die on the output is just another security loophole as far as i'm concerned. Being able to get the end browser to choke on XHTML errors is a DOS. Imagine how much trolls would like it if they could get firefox to not even display this page because their evil XHTML caused this page to no longer validate?

Exactly. So clean it up! Do not trust user input. Use Tidy or JTidy. It's really not hard to find. Hell, there's even a web-based version! This is all extremely standard stuff. Use it!

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2007/ED-xhtml2-20071024/conformance.html#strict, even.

A lot of this came up in the silverlight discussion a couple of days ago, but until html/javascript or some new standard provides for:
* Video Playback
* Audio Playback

I do flash/flex dev, as well as RoR. A site I did that wouldn't be doable in AJAX/HTML currently: http://www.pinktogether.com/

As it stands, with both XHTML 5 and XHTML 2 using the same namespace, it is only possible to support one of the two.

Not true. They have different namespaces, so a processor can know exactly which language it is dealing with.

From the HTMLv5 working draft (section 1.1.2 "Relationship to XHTML2"):

"XHTML2 and this specification use different namespaces and therefore can both be implemented in the same XML processor."

When using HTMLv5-as-XML, the namespace is "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml".
The XHTMLv2 namespace is "http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/".

Heck, you could even mix (X)HTMLv5 and XHTMLv2 in the same document, though it might be a bit perverse. I can't think of a good use-case off the top of my head.

As it stands, with both XHTML 5 and XHTML 2 using the same namespace, it is only possible to support one of the two.

Not true. They have different namespaces, so a processor can know exactly which language it is dealing with.

From the HTMLv5 working draft (section 1.1.2 "Relationship to XHTML2"):

"XHTML2 and this specification use different namespaces and therefore can both be implemented in the same XML processor."

When using HTMLv5-as-XML, the namespace is "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml".
The XHTMLv2 namespace is "http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/".

Heck, you could even mix (X)HTMLv5 and XHTMLv2 in the same document, though it might be a bit perverse. I can't think of a good use-case off the top of my head.

> There are major sites on the web which lack even proper HTML/HEAD/BODY tags.
All three of those tags are optional in an HTML 4.01 document (see the DTD for HTML 4.01).

From the HTML 4.01 spec, section 7.4.2:

"Every HTML document must have a TITLE element in the HEAD section."

So HEAD is "optional", TITLE is mandatory, and TITLE can only appear in HEAD. Right. Somebody should submit a DR on this, I suppose.

According to the IBM paper html 5 is being done independently of the W3C. "In April 2007, the W3C voted on a proposal to adopt HTML V5 for review" is about as much as W3C has with html 5.

From his own site:

there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)

Microsoft actually made the first webbrowser with decent CSS support (IE3).

No, the first browser with decent CSS support was Internet Explorer 5 on the Mac, which used a completely different rendering engine to Internet Explorer for Windows. Internet Explorer 3 was the first major browser with any CSS support, but it was terrible; for instance, 1em was treated as 1px. Even Netscape 4 had better support for CSS than Internet Explorer 3.

Back then Netscape with their huge market share had no intent to support CSS.

To be fair, that was because they were betting on JSSS instead, which they submitted to the W3C, who chose CSS instead. So it's not like they eschewed a standard stylesheet language, it's just the W3C preferred CSS instead so they had to scramble to catch up with Netscape 4 by transcoding CSS into JSSS.

There is an HTML WG at the W3C chartered to create a new version of HTML. A basis for review means, in W3C language, a starting document that will then be reviewed and changed as needed.

The idea of modular XHTML is a nice one

It's not an idea, it's been a published Recommendation for over six years.

this new XHTML modular thingy we are talking about would still need to be supported by the browser, right?

No. If the server validates the untrusted data, what's the point in the browser doing it too? Validation is deterministic, you don't get double the security by doing it twice.

Can you name any existing XHTML modules implemented by both browsers?

All of them. XHTML 1.1 is XHTML 1.0 Strict broken up into modules.

Er.. atom or rss?

Those are not XHTML.

XHTML V2 and related modules are officially supported by the W3C, and the related modules are becoming key ingredients for other XML specifications that the W3C maintains. Unfortunately, official W3C approval is no guarantee of support by major Web browsers.

It wouldn't be the first time browser vendors were ahead of official recommendations.

The FAQ doesn't even try to give a serious answer about the expected date of approval

Current browsers support both HTML V4 and XHTML V1.

Similarly, future browsers might support both HTML V5 and XHTML V2.

• Safari: For a long time, the HTML standards process has been moribund; the W3C's HTML Working Group has focused almost exclusively on XHTML2, a new standard that was highly incompatible with existing practice. The people working on the major browsers have largely abandoned the HTML Working Group.
• Opera: So, I don't think XHTML is a realistic option for the masses. HTML5 is it.
• Mozilla: In the near term, only Mozilla-based browsers come close to having all the integrated infrastructure needed by XHTML 2, and not all bundled by default. There is no sign of XHTML 2 support from Microsoft, Apple, and Opera.

HTML 5 is aiming to support various things needed for web applications (in fact, the current draft is formed of two documents: Web Applications 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0). Also, see http://www.w3.org/2006/appformats/admin/charter.html.

When did the W3C try to challenge IE?

When they released Amaya? :)

(The people defending Microsoft's wayward ways - and IE in particular - are just deluded. Why they come to Slashdot where they will be lambasted for their Microsoft-loving paranoia is a mystery.)

I like Opera (using it now) but this standards thing is ridiculous.

E.g. now people complain that IE doesn't support SVG. There's a reason for that - in 1998 Microsoft, Visio and Autodesk proposed VML as a standard, already implemented in IE 5.0. Everyone else hates Microsoft so they decided to standardise on an SVG instead which is as different from VML as possible. It took them about 4 years, until 2001 so there was no chance of it being in IE 6.0 (released in 2001). It's not exactly widely used on the web as far as I can tell. MS decided not to bother supporting it in IE 7.

If users want SVG, they can download a free plugin. Actually websites using SVG could make a web page that autodownloads a signed ActiveX control like flash does. Flash isn't natively supported by IE either, and yet virtually all sites use it. Or like Google maps they could use VML instead to render vector content on IE. I don't see what the complaint is really.

And what about websites that work on Opera but not on Firefox? Or Safari?

Name one.

More to the point, you're not an actual web developer, are you? It is much easier to build a webpage that will work in Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, iCab, even lynx, than it is even to build a webpage that will work in Firefox and IE.

You know why? Because Opera follows the standards! In fact, just about every browser on Earth is better at following these standards than IE is.

Sooner or later, all this talk of "standards" is bullshit since no one is willing to even acknowledge the fact that IE is the de-facto "standard" already.

...

You know what, fuck Godwin's law. In Nazi Germany, Aryans were the de-facto standard. That doesn't make it right.

Never, IE got VML already. But to be honest, I like VML more than SVG.

Opera's developers need to admit that their "standards" are nothing but the constructs of the companies who failed to challenge IE so they took their ball and went home. "I'm going to invent my own internet. That'll show those meanies"

You are aware that Microsoft is a member of the W3C, right? And that they contributed to the development of such standards as CSS2? And that Microsoft pledged to support these standards back in 1998, and yet somehow their competitors support considerably more parts of that spec than they do? (I suspect ceasing all development other than security fixes for 3-4 years had quite a bit to do with that.)

A bunch of companies didn't get together and say, "We don't like how Microsoft does the web, let's design another one." A bunch of companies including Microsoft got together and said, "Here's how we're going to design the web," Microsoft signed off on it, and then went off in their own direction.

Disclaimer: I'm an Opera fan. I'm currently using Opera 9.5 build 9665.

Opera is absolutely faster than anything else in Javascript and rendering speed.

However its CSS support is not perfect. The ACID2 test is not really useful to test CSS completeness.

If you see the list here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

try this test:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040103-ident-03-c.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040105-import-01-b.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-ex-len-00-b-a.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-rel-len-00-b-ag.htm

My point is: The ACID2 test is meaningless. Opera should strive for total completeness of the standard. I demand nothing less from my chosen browser.

Disclaimer: I'm an Opera fan. I'm currently using Opera 9.5 build 9665.

Opera is absolutely faster than anything else in Javascript and rendering speed.

However its CSS support is not perfect. The ACID2 test is not really useful to test CSS completeness.

If you see the list here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

try this test:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040103-ident-03-c.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040105-import-01-b.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-ex-len-00-b-a.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-rel-len-00-b-ag.htm

My point is: The ACID2 test is meaningless. Opera should strive for total completeness of the standard. I demand nothing less from my chosen browser.

Disclaimer: I'm an Opera fan. I'm currently using Opera 9.5 build 9665.

Opera is absolutely faster than anything else in Javascript and rendering speed.

However its CSS support is not perfect. The ACID2 test is not really useful to test CSS completeness.

If you see the list here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

try this test:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040103-ident-03-c.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040105-import-01-b.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-ex-len-00-b-a.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-rel-len-00-b-ag.htm

My point is: The ACID2 test is meaningless. Opera should strive for total completeness of the standard. I demand nothing less from my chosen browser.

Disclaimer: I'm an Opera fan. I'm currently using Opera 9.5 build 9665.

Opera is absolutely faster than anything else in Javascript and rendering speed.

However its CSS support is not perfect. The ACID2 test is not really useful to test CSS completeness.

If you see the list here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

try this test:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040103-ident-03-c.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040105-import-01-b.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-ex-len-00-b-a.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-rel-len-00-b-ag.htm

My point is: The ACID2 test is meaningless. Opera should strive for total completeness of the standard. I demand nothing less from my chosen browser.

Disclaimer: I'm an Opera fan. I'm currently using Opera 9.5 build 9665.

Opera is absolutely faster than anything else in Javascript and rendering speed.

However its CSS support is not perfect. The ACID2 test is not really useful to test CSS completeness.

If you see the list here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

try this test:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040103-ident-03-c.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040105-import-01-b.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-ex-len-00-b-a.htm

or this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/html4/t040302-c61-rel-len-00-b-ag.htm

My point is: The ACID2 test is meaningless. Opera should strive for total completeness of the standard. I demand nothing less from my chosen browser.

Easy: \n and \t are recognized as whitespace in XML documents, but stripped out as superfluous by the filter. If your document contains a tag whose attributes are only separated by linebreaks, but not by trailing spaces, the filter will remove essential separator space and break well-formedness.

I have since realized that this can be fixed by adding normal spaces to my document, which I will get around to eventually. Still, it's a goof by the filter, as the characters it removes can be essential for the XML document.