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Two things

https://www.w3.org/blog/news/a...
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Facebook is already behind. They have the user base today but they have nothing supporting it in the long term. Ancillary tech such as gTalk and Facetime and with Microsoft its Skype. Facebook's relevancy is only propelled by trend and not fundamental technologies (handsets, operating systems etc).

I said years ago that when the Facebook (HTC) phone failed that was the end of FB's relevancy in the market. Besides WhatsApp which I feel was a smart acquisition made by FB (over priced or not) represents open communication standards such as XMPP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP) again propelling a decentralisation of communications standards inevitably meaning that WhatsApp's relevancy is on the chopping block in the long term also.

Free Basics is FBs attempt at getting into actual communications market but its a terrible attempt because all they are doing is telling the world that communications providers should be offering their services for free (which is what made Mark Zuckerberg rich in the first place). But we all know networks and servers (and data) costs money. Whereas a LAMP server storing peoples photos and comments isn't all that costly. So with FB is price pointing network infrastructure at ridiculous levels "I.E Free" which is totally unsustainable will fall in a huge heap around them

Just remember, if your a network admin and you earn $(X)XX,000 per year FaceBook's Free Basics has just told the market that you're not worth your pay check and what you do for a living should be given to people at no charge.

Some form of web payments would be ideal, but looks like it's not ready yet.

Oh. Now I get it. Your brand of linguistic pedantry doesn't even accept the RFC, even while trying to use their numbering scheme. You're over-simplifying 4xx a bit if you say it's just "user error."

2xx is used when the client's request was successfully received, understood, and accepted.. In the case of a missing page, only the first two of the three are satisfied. You can't accept a request and successfully respond if the content is not there. Success is defined by the retrieval of the content, not the state of the transport.

4xx means the clientmay have erred (which is true in the sense that what they want isn't possible and they could possibly have known that in advance). Which is an acceptable assumption. Otherwise most of 4xx is entirely useless.

> because 403 is relaying constraints affected upon the target site path from the -browsers configuration-

Are you thinking of 406, which indicates the client (browser) configuration wouldn't accept the response?

403 is access denied for -any- reason other than authentication failure. It could be the resource is only available 9:00 - 5:00 (business hours), it could be restricted by IP address, it could be available only to the 93rd caller. The server explicitly is not required to indicate why access has denied; meaning you don't know if changing the browser configuration would have any effect or not.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rf...

Javascript has been a necessary component of almost every browser exploit over the last decade. Blocking javascript is one of the most effective ways to stop attacks in their tracks and unlike ad-blockers it also protects against the case of a site itself being compromised and made to serve up exploits directly.

Web devs take note -- NoScript is essentially tied for 4th most popular firefox extension. If you aren't using some form of progressive enhancement to make sure your website's core functions work without javascript then you are putting your users at risk.

The World Wide Web has existed for about 25 years - quarter of a century. When it was first created, Tim Berners-Lee and his collaborators made a careful and considered decision to give the specifications away free (as in speech and as in beer). Not only was that the right thing, the ethical thing to do; it was in the spirit of the (then infant) FOSS movement; and last but not least, it was the best way to give the new-born Web wings and enable it to spread rapidly until it became truly worldwide.

Today the Web has, at the very least, 47 billion pages (based on Google statistics). How many links do you think the average page has? This proposed legislation would destroy all possible confidence in using any one of those links. It would be the Internet equivalent of magically removing the foundations of every building in New York City. The effect on the Web would be similar to the effect of 9/11 on the World Trade Center - except that it would affect over a billion people and virtually every business and government in the world.

If anyone does not wish to have people view his Web pages through links from other pages, he has a simple remedy: DON'T PUT UP A WEB SITE. If you do choose to gain the benefits of putting up a Web site, then DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE WAY IT WORKS.

Here is TBL's considered view of the status of links, posted in 1997:

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues...

TBL wrote: "The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else... Users and information providers and lawyers have to share this convention. If they do not, people will be frightened to make links for fear of legal implications. I received a mail message asking for "permission" to link to our site. I refused as I insisted that permission was not needed".

And here is his conclusion:

"There are some fundamental principles about links on which the Web is based. These are principles allow the world of distributed hypertext to work. Lawyers, users and technology and content providers must all agree to respect these principles which have been outlined.

"It is difficult to emphasize how important these issues are for society. The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for example, addresses the right to speak. The right to make reference to something is inherent in that right. On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective - like speaking but with a paper bag over your head".

The path as shown in the WG's wiki suggests the possibility of this. It provides the option for payment processing to happen on the payee side or on the payor side. Once it gets to "Send Payment Response," the payee has the option of performing processing, and if not, it goes to the payor to be processed, perhaps using a signed, token-based architecture. A payment-complete notification is then sent to the payee, completing the transaction.

This seems like it would fulfill your requirements.

> and is useful if you are using webmail,

No it isn't. There already exists an API in HTML5 to display popup notifications when needed.

Yes, that is what we are talking about. What are YOU talking about?

> and is useful if you are using webmail,

No it isn't. There already exists an API in HTML5 to display popup notifications when needed. This notification center is nothing more than the continued desire to turn desktops into fucking smartphones.

These are great for us technical folks.

I'm a systems engineer; when I'm doing a new web-site, I just go to http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-colo..., and select one of the fancy names, and see how it looks.

If it doesn't match with the rest of the colour scheme or just looks off, I scroll the list until I see another colour and name that I like.

Better than in the old days where you had to use hex number or a palette, plus with these fancy names, you can be guaranteed that the colours would be consistent and at least somewhat maintainable.

http://protege.stanford.edu/ Java Desktop Application.,Used to define/manage ontologies. Not sure if they have a web version meanwhile and if comes close to what you need. However it supports plugins, perhaps the frontend can be adapted to access a centralized DB. Oh, found it: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/We...égé.html

This is a info page with an overview about various tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Did you stumble over this: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki...? Dozens of various tools mentioned.

Another tool, I stumbled iver, but did not use it yet: http://oboedit.org/

And then there is https://jena.apache.org/docume...
But that is more a programming API to dynamically create classes to store/manage data in an ontology described database. (Did not use it yet, but looks promizing)

And then we have this: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/To...

BTW, I can offer remote programming/assistance in such tools.

That has been attempted several times. One attempt is compact HTML

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE...

Off course not. There are way too many organizations waiting for new attack vectors to snoop on user behaviour. In the future, you can tell what somebody is doing by just reading the battery usage parameters. Funny thing is that some battery monitoring standards say that the privacy implications are low (see The Battery Status API in JavaScript for example). This is now going to change for the worse.

Wow. As if Mozilla couldn't get any more stupid.

I love that Tim Berners-Lee called them out on their bullshit:

* Web Security - "HTTPS Everywhere" harmful

And Andrea Ronchetti gives perfect use case that this retarded move would break:

But if i want to see an html page which is saved in my hard disk, can i do it? And with software as EasyPhp there will be some problems?

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

Why isn't this post modded up?? This is the most hilarious post I've seen on Slashdot all year. And that includes Bennetts drivel.

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

Why isn't this post modded up?? This is the most hilarious post I've seen on Slashdot all year. And that includes Bennetts drivel.

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

Why isn't this post modded up?? This is the most hilarious post I've seen on Slashdot all year. And that includes Bennetts drivel.

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

For instance, introduce a specialized tag in HTML that allows the display of a static image, embedded links, and some anonymous token to help count unique visitors, but NO JAVASCRIPT. It's the notion of running arbitrary script that's so insanely dangerous. Plus, a tag like this would help to ensure that ads don't misbehave, like popping up, animating, or playing audio or video.

Iframes alredy exists, apparently there's an HTML5 extensions which allows restrictions to be set.

The sandbox attribute, when specified, enables a set of extra restrictions on any content hosted by the iframe. Its value must be an unordered set of unique space-separated tokens that are ASCII case-insensitive. The allowed values are allow-forms, allow-pointer-lock, allow-popups, allow-same-origin, allow-scripts, and allow-top-navigation.

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

There have been efforts underway to standardize acknowledgement of data that came from other scientists. Most of us in the field have been calling the concept 'data citation' for a while (but it also refers to the act of linking, plus the string of text in the paper ... so it's a bit of a polysemous term at this point).

The basic idea is that for each grouping of data (I won't get into trying to define what a 'data set' is) that's being released, the group that's doing the release puts out a web page of information describing the data.

It would have the DataCite fields to specify how the data should be listed in the reference section of your paper, plus the w3c DCATterms to explain how to obtain the data. The DataCite schema allows you to acknowledge many different roles for people, allowing you to more clearly describe what different people's contributions were ... instead of just a long list of people, you'd have something more like movie credits.

This would solve much of the super collider issues, as you'd separately acknowledge the people who obtained & processed the data, who might have had no hand in the specific research that the paper describes. In my opinion, the authors should be people who agree with the findings that are being presented -- the folks who made the data should be acknowledged, but if they've had no chance to review the research that's being published (or have no ability to understand the researcher), they should not be listed as an author.

If you're interested in the topic, here are a few links that might be of interest:

• (2014) Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, a manifesto merging principles from a few different groups (that we could all live with, as some were overly restrictive on larger data volumes)
• (2013) Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data, a paper on the deeper issues of citation & acknowledgement.
• (2015) Achieving human and machine accessibility of cited data in scholarly publications (a paper that I was a co-author for, that explains some of the technical issues in implementing 'data landing pages')
• (2015) How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications, a longer overview discussing more of the issues, with a long list of references (and actively maintained over the years)

If you're interested in participating in these efforts, either find a group in your research area, or for wider efforts, the Research Data Alliance's Data Citation Work Group.

I should also mention that there are similar efforts going on with scientific software. I've participating in some workshops (eg, RENCI's on data & software), but I'm not as active in that field. Some RDA have discussed starting up a group on software issues, but I think they'll be focusing more on Software Carpentry issues; for software citation I'd suggest contacting the Software Sustainability Institute.

ps. I've been included as a 'co-author' on papers where I've never had a chance to review the paper first. I think that all journals should check with all listed authors if they approve of the paper. (I've also peer reviewed a paper that had so many grammar errors in it that I suspect that none of the co-authors (most were native english speakers) had reviewed it) ... and it didn't reference the co-authors' earlier related articles). PeerJ does this and it also requi

As my monitor, HDTV and receiver are. Once again I'll have to upgrade. The first time was when HDMI came on the scene and I lost a sound system -I have since been given a clue by a /. user that it's possible to use the (Protected) audio output and convert to HDMI.
HTML5 Differences from HTML4 http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-dif...

You do need special considerations for XML files though - there are several solutions

The weakest solution is to rely on the ability of the target user to spot diffs and correctly merge XML files. And also not to use automatic merging, ever, because the nature of XML files means that conflicting changes may not occur in adjacent lines.

---

The next (and inadequate) solution is to order the XML consistently - you can do this in your diff tool, or you can write your tools to produce a reliably ordered file in the first place.

Many tools that work on XML files exhibit what I call "juggling" - the elements and attributes change order when you change the value of them or their siblings, because the software is directly using the DOM to manipulate the file - and does this by creating new objects and removing the old ones from the collection. This is a real PITA for text-based diff tools because not all the changes will even conflict with each other (element sequences are often spread across multiple lines, more so if you put attributes on their own line to enhance the ability to merge).

So, you can either write your code to write a consistent order - usually by serializing a fresh XML stream from a model when you write the file.

Or you can add a layer that re-orders the document when you diff it - many of the available diff tools will let you do this. For some files, I used to write an XSLT sheet (to re-order elements consistently). For attributes, I wrote an extra option for Tidy that sorts attributes - doing that plus laying them out on separate lines is sufficient for many files. I've gone as far as writing custom tools that unpack HTML written into an attribute (with all the escape sequences that entails) into a CDATA section for clarity, runs it through Tidy, and then repacks everything after you're done.

---
Intermediate : I've thought of taking this a step further and converting the XML to a directory tree of text files designed to merge well, principally to make things clearer for end-users who currently have the kind of diff-tool-plus-converter described above but still occasionally make merge errors.
---
The next step is to write tools to specifically diff your model. This is probably a bridge too far for most developers, because we have the kind of brain that can abstract a text representation of the model and map it to the actual model that will be created. For end users, it may well be advisable.

Diff / merge tools are a field that need more work - currently the main users are developers who can cope with them being a bit immature. But we will increasingly see collaborative tools based on the kinds of version control that we take for granted, and normal users will need to be able to do this stuff too.

The HTML5 introduction states that XHTML is one of the two syntax forms of HTML5.

Seems to be well-respected - hopefully this was an anomaly. EFF Honors Paid Eolas Patent Expert Witness: Doesn't seem like Felten's ongoing efforts as a paid expert for Eolas that helped return a $521M judgment against Microsoft for infringing on a web
plug-in patent jibe too well with the EFF's raison d'etre, which includes Patent Busting. In a letter to the USPTO, previous Pioneer Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee termed the Eolas patent 'a substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web.'

You mean it's there now. Going back through previous version of the XMLHttpRequest spec, it wasn't added until June 2007.

Who knows when it finally made it into enough browsers to be safe to use. By now no one uses it more out of momentum than anything else, but it wasn't a part of the spec originally, and people writing tutorials would use "4" because that would work even in browsers that hadn't been updated to use the latest spec.

Yes, typewriters (and word processors) usually have adjustable tab stops. At some point (before I started using either -- pre 1970s), most considered every 8 characters as the standard. As the story goes, it was because it was easier for early word processors and electric type writers to use a number that was easy to handle in base-2, but I don't have a reference for you. It was what was taught to me in typing class in high school, and what the pcs of the time (IBM, Apple, Atari) used as well as all the major printers understood (hp, star, a few others). It's also the default for DOS (and windows), and the web. http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-te...

DNT was DOA.

What site in their right mind would actually honor - and I mean fully, including through any third party content (and yes by that I mean ads) or 'accidental' methods via supercookies / sharing of information at the backend of several sites within one's control - something that's merely a 'request' by a user (regardless of whether they were semi-automatically opting into making that request) and has no legal stick behind it?

If anything, Microsoft making it the default in Windows' installation express settings just exposed exactly this issue when sites started saying they would ignore the setting "because Internet Explorer". That was always a completely transparent bullcrap excuse.

Just have a look at what countries with strong 'cookie' laws have going on. Are there some sites that do disable the tracking cookies while leaving cookies for functionality up? Sure, of course they exist. And for every single one of them, there's dozens that will throw a banner in your face suggesting that you have a choice: allow the tracking cookies, or piss off.

Some might say "so piss off and go to another site" - except there often is no such other site, and most people given the choice between being able to consume and not being able to consume at the expense of intangible tracking will happily be tracked so the sites never feel it in their bottom line either.

This is the sort of thing that I would expect to happen with DNT as well: A banner with something like "You currently have DNT enabled - to access the rest of this article, please disable DNT or click here to allow our servers to store information about your visit this once.", which eventually gets old and users disable DNT.

And yes, that sort of thing is facilitated in the DNT spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-...

DNT was never going to get anywhere particularly useful for end-users while adding a layer of headache on the server side. Browsers' default behavior and browser extensions have done far more to inform users of the issues of ads and tracking and how to mitigate those issues.

In my opinion governments should require that their sites are passing the HTML Validator and CSS validator tests.

Of course - it won't help for JavaScript dependencies (or the horror vbscript that's entirely IE specific).

In my opinion governments should require that their sites are passing the HTML Validator and CSS validator tests.

Of course - it won't help for JavaScript dependencies (or the horror vbscript that's entirely IE specific).

A quick check and wow! Snappiest page loads I've ever seen. Tons of great info too, thanks!

But for me the kicker is: their pages all pass http://validator.w3.org/check. I've never seen that anywhere else.

If my work didn't give me a laptop for free, I would be tempted to snap up a new Chromebook Pixel.

The self-anointed tech pundits are all scratching their heads. "Why such a luxurious laptop to just browse the web?"

"Just browse the web." That's the first lie. Web browsers, especially Chrome, no longer just browse the Web. It is no less than a modern GUI toolkit and practically a whole operating system. HTML 5 specifies that web browsers can run background processes, run offline, open and save local files, stream video, support instant chat, draw raster and vector artwork (<canvas> and SVG), and put up a large variety of widgets from just a little bit of code.

Chromebooks don't just browse the Web, they aren't useless offline --- or actually, Windows and Macs offline are just as useless, the way we use them today. About the only thing I'm still waiting on in a Chromebook is an offline video editor. Everything else --- word processing, spreadsheets, drawing, photoshopping --- are now available and pretty good. In fact, I think they're better, maybe just because they're newer, made by programmers who are wiser.

And who wouldn't want all the nice things in a Google Pixel: a solid build, a nice screen, a good keyboard, long battery life. The only point I agree on is that the processor is a waste, for most people. I would rather Google had gone for an ARM processor while keeping everything else the same, resulting in 24-hour battery life. I would rather get away with forgetting to charge my laptop one night than have that much speed.

All of that depends on his browser's current settings and what other software he has installed on his system.

Provided that suitable "other software" is available for the user's preferred platform and the user has permission to install it.

And in which timed text format?

A standard one. And by "standard" I mean a documented, actual, standards-compliant, honest-to-god standard.

What standard might this be? W3C's Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) is "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track". Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) appears to be supported only in IE; other web browsers that support HTML5 video need shims written in JavaScript.

It's called "a webpage full of links to files that can be clicked in sequence and that a secondary user agent will interpret as audio or video".

So as I understand it, the flow without M3U support would be as follows:

1. The user follows a link to a chapter.
2. The handler for this URL saves the date and time when this download began and redirects to a video "First a message from our sponsors," followed by a sponsor message, followed by "Now follow the link in your browser once more to view your presentation."
3. The user follows the same link to a chapter.
4. If enough time has elapsed for the user to have viewed the sponsor message associated with this chapter, the handler for this URL redirects to the chosen chapter. Otherwise, go to step 2.

The flow with M3U support would be as follows:

1. The user follows a link to an M3U file.
2. The M3U file opens in a video player.
3. The video player opens the first URL in the M3U file.
4. The handler for this URL saves the date and time when this download began and redirects to a video "First a message from our sponsors," followed by a sponsor message.
5. The video player opens the second URL in the M3U file.
6. The server keeps the connection open until when the sponsor message video should have finished playing and begins to send the chosen chapter.

But without script, how can the web site determine whether or not the user has a compatible secondary user agent installed?

All of that depends on his browser's current settings and what other software he has installed on his system.

Provided that suitable "other software" is available for the user's preferred platform and the user has permission to install it.

And in which timed text format?

A standard one. And by "standard" I mean a documented, actual, standards-compliant, honest-to-god standard.

What standard might this be? W3C's Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) is "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track". Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) appears to be supported only in IE; other web browsers that support HTML5 video need shims written in JavaScript.

It's called "a webpage full of links to files that can be clicked in sequence and that a secondary user agent will interpret as audio or video".

So as I understand it, the flow without M3U support would be as follows:

1. The user follows a link to a chapter.
2. The handler for this URL saves the date and time when this download began and redirects to a video "First a message from our sponsors," followed by a sponsor message, followed by "Now follow the link in your browser once more to view your presentation."
3. The user follows the same link to a chapter.
4. If enough time has elapsed for the user to have viewed the sponsor message associated with this chapter, the handler for this URL redirects to the chosen chapter. Otherwise, go to step 2.

The flow with M3U support would be as follows:

1. The user follows a link to an M3U file.
2. The M3U file opens in a video player.
3. The video player opens the first URL in the M3U file.
4. The handler for this URL saves the date and time when this download began and redirects to a video "First a message from our sponsors," followed by a sponsor message.
5. The video player opens the second URL in the M3U file.
6. The server keeps the connection open until when the sponsor message video should have finished playing and begins to send the chosen chapter.

But without script, how can the web site determine whether or not the user has a compatible secondary user agent installed?

This is in no way a complicated issue! There is no "wrenching of hands as to which way to go". There is a standards committee: w3c, also known as the world wide web consortium. And their sole purpose in life is to build standards for internet browsers, and to test the w3c compliance of those browsers. There are even tests for html5. All that is needed is to abandon the "lock-in", "incompatible" model that microsoft has plagued the computing industry with for the past 35 years (including their own software not compatible with older versions of their software), and there will be no problems.

Hmm, apparently Slashdot eats "to the second power" marks also. Hooray for Slashdot's excellent unicode support!

Some character entity references do work (for example, ae ligature: æ), but neither &sup2; () for superscript 2 nor &THORN; () works.

Thanks for bringing up SKOS. This kind of semantic thesaurus has become an increasingly important tool in researching the literature of any field. This is especially true when the researcher might be following citations that lead him/her outside their particular area of expertise or into a natural language where he/she is not fluent.

Of course if the thesaurus is wrong, then literature that might otherwise be very important to a research project might well be overlooked. So building taxonomies-- classification hierarchies-- that are compatible with SKOS concepts is quite important. Especially at this time in the history of science where the most profound discoveries are no longer those that build the silos higher or deeper, but those that find the connections between silos. Such as the work that is being done by geologists and biologists into the role of some clays in the protobiotic formation of some proteins.

The IAU definitions of "planet", "dwarf planet", and other denizens of the solar system is not SKOS compliant. It should be, but it cannot be. The IAU defined this terminology in 2006. But SKOS did not become a completed W3C Recommendation until 2009; it had not even reached the stage of Recommendation Proposal in 2006.

So evidently the astronomers did as best they could with the tools available to laymen in the information management field in 2006. I think we can expect that the astronomers will revise their schema to better fit with the worldwide community of scholars when they next meet. Almost certainly they will bring some expertise in information management to that upcoming meeting. In the meantime, it is useful to keep in mind that the current definitions and taxonomy are not necessarily going to be regarded as valid, or even useful, a few short years from now.

Many of these exploits and xss-worms would not have been effective if people had implemented the suggestion I made more than a decade ago:
http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.se...
http://osdir.com/ml/security.w...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/P...

Plenty of people suggest libraries to sanitize stuff, but when people keep creating new "GO" buttons and never a single "STOP" button - how can you be sure you've disabled every possible "GO" button? With my proposal, a "STOP button" could even disable future yet to be invented "GO" buttons.

Anyway since the Mozilla bunch supposedly have a better idea, how about getting on with it: https://developer.mozilla.org/...

Oh, your signature proves beta _IS_ better:
http://validator.w3.org/check?...

W3C ORTC. Before you complain please research the standards. blog.webrtc.is/ is a great place to start.

I don't get it. How would Accept-Language be wrong? Unless you are setting yours up incorrectly, use a subtype language (like fr-CA (Canadian French)) without also listing the base language if you can handle it (like fr (French)), or the server just does not have the document in any of the languages in your list or even supports that feature? See: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities.en.php

What really seems needed is just continued pursuit of refinement of the HTML5 standard and work towards making it syntactically regular

If you want something syntactically regular, you can always use the XHTML syntax of HTML5.

Amaya would also like to say hello.

When your markup language lets you to write a file by sending it to a remote server and downloading it back, but not by writing it locally, then you know that something is seriously wrong.

AC talked about the discontinued FileSystem API, so the correct link would be http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/ .

HTML5 isn't an operating system, it's a markup language.

File API is a different specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

You're welcome.

But it's easier to parse HTML5 than it was any previous version of HTML, as there is now an actual specification which details the process exactly rather than relying on each browser's interpretation. It can't be that difficult given the number of working parsers and validators out there for HTML5.

Plus, HTML5 can already be written using XML syntax, aka XHTML5. And searching for xhtml5.xsd or xhtml5.rng gave me plenty of links to schemas for validating XML-syntax HTML5.

If you need to store validated documents, then you shouldn't be storing them in HTML format! Store them as XML documents with well-defined schemas (Relax NG of course!), and then use XSLT or possibly XQuery to turn them into HTML fragments for display.

Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

Answer: there is no schema. Validating documents seems to have gone out of fashion. Writing a parser for HTML5 is extremely difficult. Basically the broken parsing behavior of old browsers is now standardized in a crazy arcane description of how to parse HTML5 documents.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syn...

Who benefits from such crazy parsing rules? The current browsers. This raises the bar for entry.

The article is 404'd and I'm not seeing any other news of this. Did someone jump the gun? The w3c page still says "proposed recommendation".