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http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.myspace.com

Neatness is irrelevent, but the validity of the HTML is pretty close to the mark.

That's odd, there's a whole section on interactivity in the SVG 1.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/interact.html

Not to mention one for animation, and another for scripting, and one on extensibility. (embedding whatever, even flash if you wanted.) Either you don't know what you're talking about, or you should have specified that you were referring to what's commonly implemented in viewers at the moment. Or I could be confused, and just not quite realize what you're talking about, in which case feel free to fill me in so that I can learn something. Or was this just a quick troll?

RTFM

<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html #h-12.2">RTFM</a>

http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/

Ever heard about validators? http://validator.w3.org/

I'd like to see XForms support. It's a great technology for Ajax-ish websites which has tremendous capabilities and allows to drastically reduce the amount JS required for many types of web applications.

Mozilla is already at an advanced stage in working on an implementation. The current progress is available via an extension.

The reason people are against 'allowing' .xxx is because they realize that nobody just wants to allow it. Anyone who wants to regulate "smut," who are the main proponents of .xxx and similar schemes, must necessarily eventually want to make its use required by all porn sites, since without this requirement it has no value.

(Obligatory Godwin's-law-violating analogy: it's like somebody arguing that there's no problem in just building a concentration camp, since they're never going to require that anyone actually go there. Sometimes you should look at what's being created, regardless of what the people creating it are saying. If the two don't match: actions speak louder than words.)

Without a legal requirement that porn couldn't be in the regular TLDs, .xxx is just an additional advertising vehicle for pornography and a revenue source for the registrars.

If .xxx were created, it would only be a matter of time before its use was mandated (or attempted to be). It's just too tempting. You get an election year, and some politicians decide they can rile up their base by putting all the porn 'where it belongs.' Sure, it would be stupid; sure, it could never work -- but the adverse effect it could have on free speech would be enormous.

Thus -- because creating .xxx would serve only to tempt idiot politicans (see the article on the Hon. Senator from Alaska) into making its use mandatory -- it is a Pandora's Box better left unopened.

There are also a host of other valid reasons, aside from the political ones, why creating additional TLDs is a bad idea. Anytime you create a new one, you force anyone with a recognizable brand name to buy from it (in order to protect their brand -- e.g., Coke would almost certainly have to immeditately buy coke.mobi and coca-cola.mobi, if such a thing was instituted). The W3C Technical Architecture Group agrees: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD; not to mention RFC 3675: .sex Considered Dangerous.

Hint: thats not a standard way to show dates. Try 1983-09-26 next time. That way people will know what you're talking about.

ISO 8601 "describes a large number of date/time formats. For example it defines Basic Format, without punctuation, and Extended Format, with punctuation, and it allows elements to be omitted. ... The aim is to simplify the use of ISO 8601 in World Wide Web-related standards, and to avoid the need for the developers and users of these standards to obtain copies of ISO 8601 itself."

Disclaimer: I don't know much about XML

Because ODF is XML-based, there are fast standard techniques to verify whether a given document is 100% ODF compliant or not.
This would mean that a lot less "cheating" is possible than with a difficult-to-implement binary format.

To be fair, the same would hold for Office Open XML (that's what Microsoft calls their format -- i wonder why), so if that also becomes a standard you'd be able to choose :-)
On groklaw I read a discussion on the legal and technical merits of both:
(DISCLAIMER: its written by people from the OpenDocument fellowship, so it's understandably biased towards ODF)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511251 44611543

And this is what I could find on validation on the W3 consortium website (as I said, I don't know anything about XML):
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/#concepts-schemaC onstraints

I stand corrected. However, the tag simply renders quotation marks before and after the enclosed text (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html# h-9.2.2), and is therefore more or less useless, unless you're using it for proper quotation of another language (still not sure if it's really even useful then, as some browsers probably won't handle that properly). If someone else can point out its usefulness, by all means, do so. I'd like to know.

What I meant was a footer that will always be at the bottom of a page "in dependance of the content" (as I mentioned). That means, it's at the bottom of a viewport until the content gets larger, which would then push down the footer accordingly.

One possible way of addressing this is to use float: bottom. This construct is described in the recently published CSS3 module: Generated Content for Paged Media. In the draft, it only applies to paged media, but it seems quite intuitive that it has the effect you describe in continous media. What do you think?

Cheers,

-h&kon

Why doesn't CSS allow web designers to specify styles per user agent?

Why didn't the W3C provide a compliance test to allow browser developers to determine if they were implementing CSS properly?

Why does CSS order content according to "top-down left-right" page flow?

Does the W3C consider CSS to be a success, given the number of people that have to resort to browser hacks to use it?

Why doesn't CSS allow web designers to specify styles per user agent?

Why didn't the W3C provide a compliance test to allow browser developers to determine if they were implementing CSS properly?

Why does CSS order content according to "top-down left-right" page flow?

Does the W3C consider CSS to be a success, given the number of people that have to resort to browser hacks to use it?

Nope! The problem here is really the SVG spec, though, in that markers can't exactly inherit useful properties from the line they're being marked on.

My reading of the marker section in the SVG spec says that "fill: inherit" and "stroke: inherit" should be cause the colors to inherit off the parent element.

However: With arrow-heads, the arrow is being filled with a color, and the line is being stroked with a color. Even if Inkscape allowed markers to inherit stroke/fill properties from their parent, the best you could do is have a black arrow-head with a red line around it.

Even so, it's still possible to create red arrows with a red tip, just not easily. First create your normal arrow and set the tip onto it. Note the name of the arrow head you used. Next open up the XML editor. (Yeah - we're heading into tech-land here.) At the very top of the tree there should be a node marked "svg:defs". Open this up, and find the "svg:marker" element that has the same ID listed as the arrow head you used.

Click on it and then click the "duplicate node" button (it's the third from the left on the toolbar). You'll now have a new marker with a new, weird ID. You can edit the ID to be something like "red arrow head" or something useful.

Anyway, click on the "svg:path" element located within the "svg:marker" element. Click on the "style" attribute listed in the right pane. Edit the "fill" attribute listed below, changing it to match the color value of the line you want to use. Press Control-Enter to commit this change.

Then, finally, select your original arrow in the document. This will highlight the node for the path. Edit the style attribute here and change the appropriate "marker" element to point to the new ID of your new arrow head.

You may now optionally curse both Inkscape for making the process this boneheaded and the SVG spec for offering no way to suggest that maybe, just maybe, a marker might want to be filled with the same color the path it's being placed on was stroked with.

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

Actually, at the moment SVG doesn't support CMYK. However it is proposed that it will at some point. What you cited there was the proposed draft requirements from over four years ago. I think they might be getting close to finally putting 1.2 out, but even in the last rounds of finalizing SVG 1.1 they dropped things, so one mustn't count one's chickens before they're hatched.

In fact, back in April of 2005 they pulled back their draft 1.2 spec and replaced it with a simple placeholder stating that things were in flux. So we're all now just sitting, waiting with baited breath.

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

Actually, at the moment SVG doesn't support CMYK. However it is proposed that it will at some point. What you cited there was the proposed draft requirements from over four years ago. I think they might be getting close to finally putting 1.2 out, but even in the last rounds of finalizing SVG 1.1 they dropped things, so one mustn't count one's chickens before they're hatched.

In fact, back in April of 2005 they pulled back their draft 1.2 spec and replaced it with a simple placeholder stating that things were in flux. So we're all now just sitting, waiting with baited breath.

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

It would have been a hideous omission not to include it in the standard, they'd never get anyone working in print to use SVGs without it.

They can't write proper HTML to save their jobs. Can you say, “protectionism”?

Not only does Internet Explorer not support it, as far as I know, nobody has ever implemented it. That's why font-size-adjust is no longer part of CSS 2.1.

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand what you are saying about the x-height and how it makes text more readable, but the thing about the web is that you can't know that the reader is actually using that font. Sure, you can suggest Verdana, but if they don't have it on their system, or they prefer another font, the x-height you assume to be in use usually ends up being much smaller.

It was about having a layout with three or more columns that share the same height.

The point of the answer is that you can achieve this using display: table; and display: table-cell; without having to have irrelevant tabular markup in your document.

FWIW, one of the biggest weaknesses in webdesign is user-font dependence. It should be easy to fix with CSS

Yes, which is why downloadable fonts were added to CSS in 1998. But nobody bothered implementing it, so it was taken out again.

Despite the generated jokes about dogs and the French, and the "oohing and aahing of the crowd at the AIBO robotics soccer games broadcast on U.S. national television, this is not merely "cute". This may be the most important research that you have ever read about.

Researchers Luc Steels and colleagues at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory in France have performed a series of remarkable experiments demonstrating the development, from naught, of spoken language among robots. Words, grammar and semantics evolve spontaneously among cooperating robotic agents initially programmed with a small base set of ground perceptions and behaviors. And from the development of language arises cooperative group (intelligent) behavior.

Enhanced AIBOs are initially programmed to recognise simple stimuli from their surprisingly limited hardware sensors. Over the course of several hours or days, the AIBOs learn to distinguish objects and how to interact with them. A built-in curiosity system ('metabrain') continually directs the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks and to cease activities that are not fruitful. In time they develop more complex tasks, just as do human children.

Like children, the enhanced Sony AIBOs initially babble ("argue?") until two or more settle on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment. Over time the group gradually builds a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate. Agreement on word usage spreads through the population as terms for similar meanings compete for acceptance. For example, the robots develop the language structures to express that a red ball is rolling to the left. Just as human twins sometimes develop a unique language in which only they can communicate, the enhanced AIBOs (which are clone-like and similar to twins) develop their own language.

Language analysis and generation are part of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) and have been studied extensively for decades by AI researchers. In the past several decades GOFAI was challenged by Nouvelle AI (Situated AI) championed by Hans Moravec and Rodney Brooks. This alternative approach holds that true AI will not arise from formal mathematical systems but instead from robotic behaviors which have a subsumption architecture as an overall organising principle for the individual robot. This architecture consists of layers of behavioural modules, each capable of carrying out a complete but simple task. Steels' enhanced AIBOs are embodiments of just such a subsumption architecture and provide strong support for Moravec's and Brooks' hypotheses

Prior to Luc Steels' experiments, no one had experimentally demonstrated how language develops among intelligent agents. Steels' experiments are no less than stunning: in a controlled environment AIBO robots develop their own words and grammars for objects in their environment. All aspects of human language development are mirrored in these experiments: words compete for acceptance in the population, new words are created, and grammatical structures arise spontaneously. Steels' work also addresses the idea of a "robot culture", since it is in the context of a population of cooperating agents that language becomes most useful.

Contrast this with the W3C's Semantic Web effort, which has received much more interest and money in recent years due to the growth of the Internet yet has proven far less fertile. In the Semantic Web there are multiple competing "ontologies" (roughly, data dictionaries wherein all terms are strictly defined by specialists from their

<div class='overContainer'>
  <div class='containerRow>
  <div class='contentColumn1'>Links</div>
  <div class='contentColumn2'>Content</div>
  <div class='contentColumn3'>Ads</div>
  </div>
  <div class='containerRow'>
  <div class='footer3Colspanner'>Site Footer</div>
  </div>
</div>

...which is why we have the W3C test suite. Your underestimation of Acid2 is also typical of somebody who has never worked on a browser. One of the worst (it's difficult, tedious, and you feel like a moron doing it) parts of the job is to find out and mimic what IE does with bad markup, because the real world is full of such, so if IE passes Acid2 there will be that much less for everybody else to do. Note also that while it's obviously easy for IE to do whatever it does with a piece of bad markup, trying to remain compatible on a browser with a different parser or renderer may not be easy at all.

Why don't they work with browser makers to "chop up" the specs into point releases that focus on just a few features at a time?

Because truly competing browser vendors do not synchronize their development schedules. They pick the features that they think their customers will want most, and implement those first. Eventually, you hope they'll all arrive at CSS 2.1 someday, but they'll get there through different paths.

Also, each browser is likely to have unique architectural weaknesses that makes it very hard to implement a portion of the spec. While the vendors all know that a substantial rewrite is inevitable, they're not going to do that kind of fix until they're ready to.

He said aliases disadvantages seemed greater than their advantages in CSS1.

So this means that they weren't even considered in CSS2?

No, I think it means most people realised through practical experience with CSS 1 that such things really weren't as necessary as you first imagine.

Now we have @imports, i think that if whole styles conflicts are resolved with these, aliases could, too.

@import has always been part of CSS, right from CSS 1. He was saying that things like @import make aliases more complex than you first think.

And yes, they probably could spend a bit of time and get aliases working nicely with @import etc. But that would raise the complexity of implementations for very little gain. I'm sure that if every other thing about CSS was perfect, they'd get around to aliases, but at the moment, there's much more important things for them to be working on, both the W3C that are writing the specs and the browser developers who are implementing them.

Maybe i'm completely wrong, but aren't Java applets just Java programs thrown into a browser window in a secure context? I agree with you, in my opinion it *is* rather disturbing that people are trying to make Javascript do just that, as AJAX, without any standard mechanism for doing so in place (Hence all these AJAX frameworks popping up).

The problem with Java applets (as far as I'm aware) is they don't integrate smoothly into the DOM, play nicely with stylesheets and can't be extended as easily to access all that juicy browser functionality. What people want from AJAX is the best of both worlds. Java can't do that (yet?) but, although it's distusting and ugly, Javascript can to a degree at the moment

This is why standards like XSLT, 'Web Applications 1.0' and new versions of Javascript are coming into existance, there is now an apparent need for smoother and more standardised integration between a user's interaction with a client side document, client side data or state, and the server side (database backend).

Of course the side effect of doing more work on the client side is you have less and less data hitting the server you cannot trust and XSS, SQL injection attacks and God knows what other vulnerabilities are going to play and larger and larger role in 'Web 2.0'

No, it got established because several years ago, it sucked less than Netscape and innovated faster.

It's very trendy around here to slam Microsoft for being convicted monopolists, yada yada yada, but it's not like you wake up one morning and suddenly find your business has a monopoly without doing anything better than the competition. How they've maintained that position is dubious, to be sure, but then again until the much more recent past no-one was seriously trying to compete with them anyway.

As for de jure standards, you're basically making an appeal to the W3C's authority, which brings us back to where we started. If the dev teams behind, say, IE, Firefox, and Opera sat down and wrote out a spec together that was going to be followed by three of the biggest name browsers in the market today, that would be a de jure standard worth something.

The web is, and was intended to be, graphical, and RSS by extension is the same way.

The web is, and was intended to be, graphical, and RSS by extension is the same way.

Better yet, get involved in the development of the standard and put your ideas on the table along with everyone else's.

CSS3 is still a working draft, there is no point in implementing everything, as it might come changes or that behavoirs for properties change. Currently Gecko supports several CSS3 properties, especially they have implemented support for several css3 selectors.

As CSS3 is still under development mozilla use vendor-specific extentions to those properties. This is not a bad thing, it is also the correct way to implement things according to w3. You can see it is a reminder that you use those propties of your own choice and that they might change over time as they are implemented for testing purposes. Take the opacity property as an example, it was first implemented in Gecko as -moz-opacity, which took values from 0 to 100, later it changed to take values from 0.0 to 1 according to the specs. Now you can use opacity without the -moz- extention as it probably wouldn't change in the draft for css3. So I see nothing wrong in using such extentions for testing purposes, it is much better than what Microsoft does it just adds its own css-properties without any use of vendor extentions.

You cry for better support for standards yet you want them to implement the non-standard "document.all" ? You have to make up your mind ;) If you don't like it take it up with w3 not mozilla.

One can discuss whether or not IEs supports this feature or that it is just a bug, as it allows you to assign width and height to any inline element . In my experience the rendering of inline-block hasn't been consistent between the different browsers, this might have changed since I last tested.

Technically CSS2.1 is still a working draft, it was pulled back to working draf on June 13, 2005 after it was had been Candidate Recommendation since February 25, 2004. You can read more about this in Anne van Kesteren's blog

Primarily because it confuses tools that try to suss out the structure of the document by looking at tag types and then make decisions based on that (HTML-to-audio conversions can get really boned by overuse of tables, for example -- algorithms for sensible renderings of tables-as-tabular data can really mess up when presented with tables that aren't).

It's probably best to think of this as a conflict between people who think HTML tags should have inherent meanings (it opens up a lot of opportunities for writing useful software, and it was the original idea with HTML anyway), and people who simply choose HTML tags to achieve particular visual effects (because that's all that was possible for a long time). CSS only comes into this because it fixes that latter problem, so the former group has largely pinned their hopes on it for a resolution to the conflict.

Anyway, CSS2 does offer a solution for the table case too[1]-- you can assign the layout behaviors of tables, table rows, and table cells to any element. In principle you could do table-style layouts using only CSS and DIVs. Too bad browsers don't uniformly support that part of CSS. So, sometimes using tables for layout is a necessary evil. Just be aware of the downside. At least support for CSS tables has improved markedly in recent browsers, so perhaps they'll be a real option soon.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html#q2

According to the CSS spec:

Any @import rules must precede all rule sets in a style sheet.

What is the technical reason for this? Is it possible to relax this so that import rules can be embedded in a style tag anywhere in the page, similar to how Javacript includes can be inserted anywhere?

This can be used by users of publishing systems to mix different 3rd party styles into the page, where they are not allowed to modify the HTML HEAD section - for example, Livejournal, Blogger and Wordpress. Javascript has benefited a lot by this feature.

"Padding outside the box is so wrong and IE is actually doing it right."

Per http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1, Section 4:

"The size of the box is the sum of the element width (i.e. formatted text or image) and the padding, the border and margin areas."

Yeah, I'd say it is a problem to pad outside the box being that you can't because the spec says a box width/height is the sum of the parts. If you define your width to be, say, 100px and start adding margin, padding and border, your actual box is more than 100px.

Why are aspects of text handling like word wrapping not adequately addressed by CSS2? And yes, I know that IE supports word-wrap, but that is a proprietary attribute (wish MS would have instead spent time implementing the standards correctly, you know?) Are there plans to improve text handling with CSS?

Yes, there are. http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work, see Text Layout. Note that this is incredibly hard to spec, because doing so properly for all languages requires knowledge of all languages. And not just basic knowlege, but detailed knowledge about the writing systems. The people writing this deserve huge amounts of respect.

If you're iterested, see a post by one of the writers (temporarily down, so use the google cache).

To answer your question so he doesn't have to: Layout is a part of style. CSS is definitely lacking in this area (the main property used for layouts, float, wasn't even intended to be used that way, and 99% of uses on the web are hacks). The CSS Advanced Layout Module is being designed to fix that. So no, another language doesn't need to be designed, CSS just needs to get the features it's lacking.

So one question is "You have float: left, and you have float: right... why no float: center?"

Because that's not what floating is for!!

Floating is for one specific use case: columnar content, with a section taken out of flow but still within the column. Think of a newspaper, with an image and its caption. They don't interrupt the text but they're physically still within the column. CSS 3 does in fact introduce new float values, but they're for use with the new multicolumn features, like floating something partway in one column and partway in another.

All other uses of floats are hacks, in the bad sense. And yes, that does mean there's no good way in CSS 2.1 to do complex full-page layout. The CSS 3 Advance Layout Module is designed to fix that.

>> their protocalls, and whatnot should be the de facto standard, if not the official one, right?

Let's start with one important fact, Microsoft is a memeber of the W3C. They are involved in approving the official standards that everyone is complaning that they don't support. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List

>> ahy are we going after MS to change IE rather than adapt new browsers to the IE "standards"?

Why should everyone follow the standards that MS chooses to implement rather than following the official standards that MS helped establish?

>> Are IE "standards" not widely used because they are closed and opaque to developers, thereby locking any developer into using their tools?

Some of their stuff would require other browsers to license the technology from MS(such as ActiveX).
Some of their suggested standards are declined in favor of other suggestions that are either easier to use or more flexible

>> Does IE follow any standard?

Sort of, they follow the parts of the offical standard that have been accepted when they begin development on a new version of their browser. They also implement all of the pending approval suggestions they have made to the W3C. Whether or not their version of the standards are approved they will generally be implemented in the next release of their browser. They also tend to continue to support these alternate standards through several successive versions

>> Has the W3C standardized on things that are easier to use and will age more gracefully?

Generally yes to both. They also reject standards that would pave the path for a browser monopoly

There already is a solution in CSS3: the nth-child pseudo-class

Is there a way to specify the version of CSS that a certain CSS file follows? The W3C validator, for some reason, defaults to 2.0 instead of 2.1, and when I use features that exist only in 2.1 I have to specify the version in the URL to the validator. That is, instead of http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer I have to do http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer?p rofile=css21. That is not neat. It should be able to extract that information itself. (Go on, by the way, check the links to see how well Slashdot is doing in the validation.)

Equally non-neat is that, when reading a CSS file, one has to _guess_ the character set (!) to be able to read the "@charset" rule. At lest that's what I've heard. Is it true? Did _you_ come up with that? Have thou yet punished thyself? Do you want some help with that (the punishment)? Of course, the whole charset rule contains only ASCII characters, which is compatible with many (but not all) other encodings. Still, this is not what you would expect from a W3C standard.

Is there a way to specify the version of CSS that a certain CSS file follows? The W3C validator, for some reason, defaults to 2.0 instead of 2.1, and when I use features that exist only in 2.1 I have to specify the version in the URL to the validator. That is, instead of http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer I have to do http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer?p rofile=css21. That is not neat. It should be able to extract that information itself. (Go on, by the way, check the links to see how well Slashdot is doing in the validation.)

Equally non-neat is that, when reading a CSS file, one has to _guess_ the character set (!) to be able to read the "@charset" rule. At lest that's what I've heard. Is it true? Did _you_ come up with that? Have thou yet punished thyself? Do you want some help with that (the punishment)? Of course, the whole charset rule contains only ASCII characters, which is compatible with many (but not all) other encodings. Still, this is not what you would expect from a W3C standard.

the tabindex spec, however, states:

Those elements that do not support the tabindex attribute or support it and assign it a value of "0" are navigated next. These elements are navigated in the order they appear in the character stream.

i would say, however, that IE & firefox's non-conformant behaviour is actually more functional than that defined in the spec, since it allows you to change the tab order of those elements that don't support tabindex.

In what version of W3C's HTML have you found tabindex on <div> element?

CSS2 has some very cool properties for interfacing with Assistive Technology (AT) such as JAWS and WebEyes.

For unfamiliar readers, the speak selector could be used with amazing effectiveness, eg:

.initalism {
speak:spell-out;
}

<abbr title="Strucuted Query Language">SQL</abbr> is very popular in the <abbr title="United States" class="initialism">US</abbr>

Unfortunately, implementation of these features does not seem to be a high priority for AT manufacturers. What efforts, if any, do you know of to get features like these incorporated into future versions of AT products?

.. your CSS doesn't validate?

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?profi le=css2&warning=2&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.opera.co m%2Fhowcome%2F

Is the difficulty of producing a layout that consists of three or more columns of equal height justification for adding some new feature to the specification to make this easier?

They added that feature to CSS over eight years ago. Nobody uses it because Internet Explorer hasn't caught up to 1998 yet. No, not even Internet Explorer 7.0 will handle display: table-cell. Maybe Internet Explorer 8.0 if we are lucky.

What would you like them to do - add a duplicate feature and hope Microsoft implements it this time?