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Everyone who cares about the net should read the text of the original proposal. It is found at http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html. This shows us what the original intent of the net was, a storehouse of information. No wonder he always speaks of a semantic web, that's really the original vision. I guess we always knew that, but seeing it in the original text is quite interesting.

>Can you imagine how difficult it would be to read a newspaper that spanned articles across the entire page?
True. Even a webpage that has text lines these long can slow down reading...
On a side note, CSS styles really could honor a few more known typographical rules and functions. It appears we get flowing columns with CSS3 but ligatures, selection of words or chars - 'first three words in UPPERCHAR bold style' - choice of quote style depending on page language etc etc is missed by the same fraternity your speaking of. Much of this can achieved with scripting but if it were a part of styles the life of any one working with screen typography would be easier. Yes we do have 'first-letter' 'first-line' selectors but that only handles a few cases.

I am pretty sure they mean something like the W3C's message transmission optimization mechanism (MTOM) which is the optimized way to send binary data/large SOAP messages over HTTP protocols ("web services"). I didn't RTFA, but if any of the claims made involve the specific method of transmission for said data files, MTOM is probably prior art.

Other prior art may include the Microsoft research done with web services and data storage used in the Microsoft TerraServer project. Dr. Jim Gray and Microsoft had basically proposed an idea pretty similar to this a while ago (see his presentation of grid-computing based web services - careful that's a powerpoint presentation!).

-SixD

Given the person's stated background, I'm not even the least bit surprised he reached this conclusion. That being, that as someone's educational background is more exposed to restricted admissions universities such as MIT, the more they want to implement that as an end-run around the public. The only clear misinformation out of this was with the W3C.

Now, could someone have informed him clearly about who foots the bills for the building? It's not like it's run by a organization who insists on exclusivity even though it is known for being "open"?


They'd serve well to be more truthful about their openness, or the lack thereof.

Somehow, every "new search technology" comes to back to the same idea, which is tagging objects with categories outside description of their traits in the online world (keyword, address, memory location). This guy is no exception, except that he's put a psychotic business model on top of it, instead of finding a way to evangelize RDF to the web at large (in my view, a good idea).

Hasn't this guy heard of the URI? (see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html)

The problem isn't coming up with systems to name things the problem is how to
associate semantics (i.e. meaning) to the things that are named that allow programs to operate
on them. I think some guy (Berners-Lee or something) has been working on this -:)

The writers of client software should be aware that the software represents the user in their interactions over the Internet, and should be careful to allow the user to be aware of any actions they may take which may have an unexpected significance to themselves or others.

In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods should never have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods should be considered "safe." This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.

The W3 does not recommend hyperlinks on verb phrases.

The 'em' unit is equal to the computed value of the 'font-size' property of the element on which it is used. The exception is when 'em' occurs in the value of the 'font-size' property itself, in which case it refers to the font size of the parent element.

A few weeks ago, I started to see how well candidates' sites held up under the W3C Validator, but I got bored quickly. I'm hoping someone else has already checked this out.

fix and uh, there's more of it

fix and uh, there's more of it

My stuff is writen to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards. If it doesn't work on the iPhone, it's not my problem.

Your grasp of W3C's standards seems very limited then. W3C has been pushing accessibility across devices for years. It's nothing new that there are "hoverless" devices, even CSS spec says it excplicitly:

Some conforming user agents supporting interactive media may not be able to support this [:hover] pseudo-class (e.g., a pen device).

My stuff is writen to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards. If it doesn't work on the iPhone, it's not my problem.

Your grasp of W3C's standards seems very limited then. W3C has been pushing accessibility across devices for years. It's nothing new that there are "hoverless" devices, even CSS spec says it excplicitly:

Some conforming user agents supporting interactive media may not be able to support this [:hover] pseudo-class (e.g., a pen device).

My stuff is writen to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards. If it doesn't work on the iPhone, it's not my problem.

Your grasp of W3C's standards seems very limited then. W3C has been pushing accessibility across devices for years. It's nothing new that there are "hoverless" devices, even CSS spec says it excplicitly:

Some conforming user agents supporting interactive media may not be able to support this [:hover] pseudo-class (e.g., a pen device).

Umm, the title is buggy; the summary says it passes the CSS3 selectors test, not all of CSS3. It's impossible to support all of CSS3, there's chunks not even started - e.g. scoping. TFA does mention text-shadow will work with Opera 9.5 though.

Umm, the title is buggy; the summary says it passes the CSS3 selectors test, not all of CSS3. It's impossible to support all of CSS3, there's chunks not even started - e.g. scoping. TFA does mention text-shadow will work with Opera 9.5 though.

Well, CSS 3 selectors is done, so it should be supported by all web browsers.

No, it's not. It's been flagged for "Last Call" since the end of 2005 and is still aways from full recommendation status. CSS 2.1 (farther along, but similarly mired) to date is patchily implemented by all — some moreso than others, for various reasons — so why should one expect full support for this CSS3 Working Draft?

(Some do say the W3C is a bit byzantine, and yes, they are cranky about it. You, too, can be the judge of that.)

Well, CSS 3 selectors is done, so it should be supported by all web browsers.

No, it's not. It's been flagged for "Last Call" since the end of 2005 and is still aways from full recommendation status. CSS 2.1 (farther along, but similarly mired) to date is patchily implemented by all — some moreso than others, for various reasons — so why should one expect full support for this CSS3 Working Draft?

(Some do say the W3C is a bit byzantine, and yes, they are cranky about it. You, too, can be the judge of that.)

Well, CSS 3 selectors is done, so it should be supported by all web browsers.

No, it's not. It's been flagged for "Last Call" since the end of 2005 and is still aways from full recommendation status. CSS 2.1 (farther along, but similarly mired) to date is patchily implemented by all — some moreso than others, for various reasons — so why should one expect full support for this CSS3 Working Draft?

(Some do say the W3C is a bit byzantine, and yes, they are cranky about it. You, too, can be the judge of that.)

Actually the spec says that the only properties that apply to columns are border, background, width, and visibility. The fact that IE6/7 support for other properties (e.g. text-align, and color) on this element is a bug.

KHTML is more compliant than webkit in both javascript and css3.

As a spec, and on the whole, CSS 3 doesn't appear to be anywhere close to completion, so I'm not sure what to make of half the above claim if it were to be true.

It's a partial simplification of terms. The 2 is actually an exponent. They could just as easily called it P3. Here's the RFC not to be confused with P4.

Just because Microsoft has chosen to stay with supporting the HTML 4.0 standards over the CSS3 standards in places they conflict

"Just"? Are you kidding? Internet Explorer has been fucking up standards long before CSS3. Take the box model bug in IE 5's CSS1 implementation that is fundamentally different from what is described in the spec, and still has to be compensated for in IE 6 and 7. In any event, I'm not saying that IE doesn't adhere to any standards. My point is that rendering the web the same way as any other browser (which one assumes is the point of having standards) is not among Microsoft's aims. That is the competition I was pointing out. Perhaps I should have used the term "interoperable" instead of "standards-compliant", but I don't see why there should be a difference.

They just follow a different set of standards that are also provided by the W3C.

The distinction is irrelevant. It is still Internet Explorer's unique and incompatible quirks vs. the rest of the world.

FF isn't innocent either (Last time I checked - CSS didn't include -moz-border-radius-topleft to round your corners).

You don't know what you're talking about. Vendor-specific properties (i.e. "-moz-") are in CSS 2.1, while "border-radius" is in CSS3. The vendor-specific tag is there because the spec isn't finalized and currently different implementations work differently. "-moz-border-radius" doesn't allow irregular curves, for instance, while "-webkit-border-radius" does. This is incompatibility done in a compatible way. When the spec is final, they will support "border-radius" in the way defined in the spec.

Just because Microsoft has chosen to stay with supporting the HTML 4.0 standards over the CSS3 standards in places they conflict

"Just"? Are you kidding? Internet Explorer has been fucking up standards long before CSS3. Take the box model bug in IE 5's CSS1 implementation that is fundamentally different from what is described in the spec, and still has to be compensated for in IE 6 and 7. In any event, I'm not saying that IE doesn't adhere to any standards. My point is that rendering the web the same way as any other browser (which one assumes is the point of having standards) is not among Microsoft's aims. That is the competition I was pointing out. Perhaps I should have used the term "interoperable" instead of "standards-compliant", but I don't see why there should be a difference.

They just follow a different set of standards that are also provided by the W3C.

The distinction is irrelevant. It is still Internet Explorer's unique and incompatible quirks vs. the rest of the world.

FF isn't innocent either (Last time I checked - CSS didn't include -moz-border-radius-topleft to round your corners).

You don't know what you're talking about. Vendor-specific properties (i.e. "-moz-") are in CSS 2.1, while "border-radius" is in CSS3. The vendor-specific tag is there because the spec isn't finalized and currently different implementations work differently. "-moz-border-radius" doesn't allow irregular curves, for instance, while "-webkit-border-radius" does. This is incompatibility done in a compatible way. When the spec is final, they will support "border-radius" in the way defined in the spec.

2007-05-15: Toward More Transparent Government: Workshop on eGovernment and the Web will be held 18-19 June in Washington, D.C., USA, at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Attendees, invited speakers and panelists will discuss how the Web works for citizens and governments and how it can best achieve their goals. Co-sponsored by W3C and the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), the Workshop is free and open to all but registration is required. The deadline was extended to 22 May for position papers which are strongly encouraged. Read the press release, the report of the first W3C eGovernment symposium, and about Workshops.

Given the person's stated background, I'm not even the least bit surprised he reached this conclusion. That being, that as someone's educational background is more exposed to restricted admissions universities such as MIT, the more they want to implement that as an end-run around the public. The only clear misinformation out of this was with the W3C.

Now, could someone have informed him clearly about who foots the bills for the building? It's not like it's run by a organization who insists on a large Far Eastern presence.

The rest of us got a 417 response - "Expectation Failed"

It does state that the workshop doesn't require W3C membership but participants require registration... so did this reporter register? (note registration window closed on the 7th of June)

http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/eGov-policy

"Space is limited and priority for registration is given to those who have submitted position papers. If you request registration without sending a position paper we suggest that you wait to make any non-refundable travel arrangements."
"W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the Workshop."
"The total number of participants will be limited. To ensure diversity, a limit might be imposed on the maximum number of participants per organization."

Weitzner, a lawyer and Washington insider before moving to the W3C, said making an event discussing government transparency less transparent was necessary because government officials could then speak more freely "without wondering how the press would interpret what they have to say."

Position papers received for the Workshop will be posted publicly on the Web. In addition, a final document summarizing the outcome of the Workshop and the suggested future actions, will be posted publicly. Conversations and results are public.

Well I'm glad it passes a test that claims "Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification." and not some of the published tests - example

Maybe we just have a different definition of 'perfect'.

And 'fanboi'

Well I'm glad it passes a test that claims "Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification." and not some of the published tests - example

Maybe we just have a different definition of 'perfect'.

And 'fanboi'

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .google.com - 51 errors on their minimal home page. What were you saying about standards?

The W3C advises against using "ecce hic" as link text.

-Peter

Yech, way too bloated. I still run WorldWideWeb.app on my NeXTStep box.

For instance, visual browsers frequently display the title as a "tool tip" (a short message that appears when the pointing device pauses over an object). Audio user agents may speak the title information in a similar context.

title != alt

I would get excited about about Safari on the PC, it's a fine browser, but it seems that they've royally screwed up the rendering engine. Many pages show royally fucked up (including wikipedia, which is completely standards compliant). I realise that this is still beta (which is why I don't really mind it crashing), but if they've got THAT much work to do just to get a web page to render correctly, it has a LONG way to go.

As well as Flash, you can do HTML and JavaScript and graphics in <canvas> – I experimented with an FPS engine a while ago, and developed it just with desktop versions of Opera and Firefox, and reportedly it actually works on the Wii too. (Recent nightly builds of Safari also support it – it's nice when browser interoperability works.)

It's quite horrifically inefficient doing all this in a web browser rather than C++, but there's still a lot you can manage that's within the bounds of feasibility, if you use some imagination to simplify what you need the technology to do for you.

Incidentally, I like the idea of supporting open standards like <canvas> and <video> rather than proprietary platforms like Flash, particularly given that everyone using the Wii browser has to (indirectly) pay for licensing the Flash player from Adobe.

For anyone who was unsure as well, the author is not TimBL.

the entire UI is written in XML and JavaScript doesn't exactly help. I have been thinking very seriously about starting to write my own web browser

In particular, I cannot find any exact specification of exactly how things such as CSS "float"ing elements are supposed to be treated ... If someone can point me to reliable documentation on that, I'd be really happy.

So it seems that good coding and a good gui is in order: try amaya

Equation writers are historically very bad, especially industry leader Mathtype; they're proprietary, clunky and generally unfriendly. OpenOffice Math is suitably primitive, forcing users to type their equations in a non-standard markup language before they are rendered.

Enter Office 2007 with a new and much improved equation editor. Like WordPerfect has for years Microsoft has included a crippled yet somewhat capable version of MathType, complete with ads for an improved version (that's not so improved), However, in Office 2007 Microsoft has bothered to create a very new and streamline equation editor. Furthermore, it blows out the market for MathML generation tools in terms of ease of use. Coupled with new first class support for managing Works Cited and other academic essentials, Word is an outstanding academic word processing program.

Lets review, Word 2007 is:

• User friendly for the non-computer geek (yes, that's right, not every academic is a computer science geek)
• Optimized for serious academic word processing without a huge learning curve, complete with generous pricing for academic endevors
• Open, standards compliant equation editor
• The best word processor ever (okay, that admittedly arguable and a larger debate)

Yet these journals want people to use inferior software. I can only conclude that these publications are either new-technology-phobics, insisting on using obsolete Word software (odd, considering the nature of Science). Or they're pushing an agenda, as indicated about comments to use "ODF". It seems strange that they'll accept ".doc" and suggest that people use older software even though ".docx" is far more open and free to use in other software. Perhaps they're trying to dissuade people from even trying Office 2007 to see that it's vastly superior to freeware alternatives and even previous versions of Office...

HTML 3.2 adds widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, while providing full backwards compatibility with the existing standard HTML 2.0.

You sure about that? It looks to me like it's in the HTML5 working draft to me:

http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/html5/spec/Overview.html? rev=1.29#storage

"This specification introduces two related mechanisms, similar to HTTP session cookies [RFC2965], for storing structured data on the client side.

The first is designed for scenarios where the user is carrying out a single transaction, but could be carrying out multiple transactions in different windows at the same time.

The second storage mechanism is designed for storage that spans multiple windows, and lasts beyond the current session. In particular, Web applications may wish to store megabytes of user data, such as entire user-authored documents or a user's mailbox, on the clientside for performance reasons."

;-)

Oops, should've previewed my post. Angle brackets in my query examples. See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/#specDataset for the real thing plus the corresponding resultsets.

Re the "very very very important question of where it comes from" and RDF, ...

See the RDF query spec, SPARQL, specifically the "FROM" clause in the query language.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/#specDataset

Section "8.3.1 Accessing Graph Names" ...take a look at the example query there:

PREFIX foaf:

SELECT ?src ?bobNick
FROM NAMED
FROM NAMED
WHERE
    {
        GRAPH ?src
        { ?x foaf:mbox .
            ?x foaf:nick ?bobNick
        }
    }

The spec gives the resultset table, which basically says that according to http://example.org/foaf/aliceFoaf the nickname is "Bobby", and according to http://example.org/foaf/bobFoaf the nickname is "Robert".

It's a mistake (although understandable ... better tutorials and demos are needed) to assume that RDF and SemWeb ignore this problem space.

There's an online SPARQL demo at http://xmlarmyknife.org/api/rdf/sparql/query and another at http://librdf.org/query to get a feel for how some of this stuff works. There are also tools like SquirrelRDF and D2RQ that wrap existing (SQL, LDAP, ...) datasources and make them look like SPARQL too, so your apps can be couched in terms of globally-used schemas rather than per-datasource schemas. It's also worth keeping an eye on what Oracle have been up to ... http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_tec hnologies/index.html ... no SPARQL yet but some serious RDF support.

You're confusing the word "metadata" with the HTML tag . In this case (the semantic web) metadata would be in RDF. More clues here. What TFA is proposing is to semantically process and index websites content, rather than have the websites (or a third party) tag the content with RDF. What both of them are lacking is any kind of a universal ontology (or even standardized specialty ontologies).

I once attempted to create a page-rendering engine, starting with XHTML. Eventually, I got a decent-working rendering engine. Unfortunately, anytime there was an error (even a minuscule one), my engine would completely fail. I can't even being to imagine the hell Gecko goes through to render a site like MySpace. I've often thought about a better way to implement a rendering engine, but most involve fixing the web developer's crappy code before attempting to render it, which is not possible in most cases. In C++, you can't compile with an error. Perhaps development software that isn't notepad (my software of choice) should add in validation service in the same way Visual Studio 2005 does.

The internet: We have the tools to rebuild it, but we don't want to spend a lot of money.

Java is not any kind of standard.

don't know what you're talking about with HTML, Microsoft has been a member of the W3C since its inception.
You are suggesting that they joined W3C BEFORE they ripped off their brower from spyglass? MS did not join for the first 2 years of W3C's history.