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6 is a rather arbitrary number. It also makes it more difficult to generate HTML since you need to what the previous heading level which can cause problems if you ar generating HTML recursively (I believe that term is the it makes HTML a non-context free grammar ???). Sometimes you only need two levels of headings, sometimes all 6, sometimes even more. It is better to replace it with a more flexible format where heading level is determined by the user-agent by nesting. Have a look at it. It should provide you with everything you need and more with imposing any extra burden.

They read the spec and interpreted it one way, the wrong way. This can happen, and the spec isn't always so clear.

No, the specification is very clear on this matter, with examples and pictures. This isn't a case of differing interpretations.

The real blame is that, KNOWING this, they still haven't fixed it in 7 years.

They fixed it in 2001, with the release of Internet Explorer 6.

They read the spec and interpreted it one way, the wrong way. This can happen, and the spec isn't always so clear.

No, the specification is very clear on this matter, with examples and pictures. This isn't a case of differing interpretations.

The real blame is that, KNOWING this, they still haven't fixed it in 7 years.

They fixed it in 2001, with the release of Internet Explorer 6.

Erm... either "agnostic" doesn't mean what you think it means, or, more likely, you don't understand that SALT is about as "agnostic" as .NET or NTFS. SALT is part of the MS "ecosystem."

Go to http://www.w3.org/Voice/ to learn about "agnostic" standards for speech.

As has been said. With a table. Where are you getting the idea that tables are not allowed in XHTML? They're not supposed to be used for layout, but they are supposed to be used for tabular data. Tables themselves haven't been deprecated. Using tables for layout has been, as it were.

If you run this page: http://www.oneofakindpasta.com/winemenu/default.as p through the HTML validator at http://validator.w3.org/ it valides as Strict XHTML 1.0.

It is the only table in the entire site. The layout is done with CSS of course and was much easier for it, including, of course, changes and printing.

Apparently you (and Microsoft) read a different spec than I did. It shows EXACTLY how the box model should be displayed and describes how its dimensions should be calculated. They interpreted it differently because they thought it was a good idea.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1.html#formatting-mode l is W3's spec with an example of how boxes should be renderered.

From that page: The size of the box is the sum of the element width (i.e. formatted text or image) and the padding, the border and the margin areas. There is nothing complicated about that sentence.

All that said, you're absolutely correct. The could've fixed their box model in IE 5.0, 5.0, 6.0 or SP2. But they didn't.

It is not two words but one word:

Google even agrees with me. What kind of idiot does not know what "dome" means.

PS: I should get bonus points for actually using <DL> tags appropriately.

Xhtml and CSS are supposed to be implemented in a wysiwyg manner. The only thing that has stagnated this is M$ Internet Exploder. Microsoft has no reason to support these standards at all simply because it is not profitable. As it is microsoft has spent so much time sitting on it's ass on the subject they would effectively break the internet for most users if they suddenly went fully standards complient. What we are looking at is truly the problems caused by a monopoly, microsoft quit innovating in this area and the development of the internet has been arrested as far as anything related to the browser goes.

Internet Explorer is the most detrimental piece of trash the internet has ever seen. Unfortunately, the only option people have is to exclude the larger market share. Or, take back the Internet use firefox.

CSS took the totally simple CENTER tag and "improved" it with kludgy auto-width margins that don't work in IE5/Win.

text-align: center;

What CSS does is seperate style from actual content, and also seperate style intended for monitors from, say, style intended for a printed copy of the page. Once you start to think in this mindset, it makes a lot more sense than using HTML to define both the content and style in the same place, all mixed in together.

It can also save a lot of time. For example, with CSS you can specify that every h1 element should be centered with a single line of code, which is much quicker than specifying the alignment of every single h1 element by hand in every page, one at a time.

That and it saves a lot of bandwidth, as each page can link to the same CSS file.

SVG has support for it, and it's not even a programming language.

Of course, one could argue whether that's a good thing or not...

From: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#table :
The start tags for TH and TD are always needed but the end tags can be left out.

Any Web site offering you an account of some kind requires authentication, invariably in the form of username and password. Many users will just reuse the same username and password. Those that don't must use a password manager, whether it's the Web browser's autofill or a real, live, dead-tree notepad.

Most of these sites require you to transmit your password in the clear. So not only does the Web site operator have your password (which could be used to compromise your account on other sites if it's the same), but so does anybody sniffing your network.

Both of these problems would disappear if we used public keys to authenticate. You generate a key pair, and supply the same public key everywhere when creating an account. Your browser acts as the key agent (or connects to one like ssh-agent) and uses the private key to respond to an authentication challenge. No password is sent to the server, ever.

HTTP Digest authentication also neither transmits nor stores cleartext passwords, but the Web site operator does have to have it to set the password in the first place. HTTP authentication in general currently suffers from the problem that there's no specified way to log out. A solution to this problem was proposed through the W3C about six years ago, but it hasn't been implemented that I'm aware of.

"javascript is pretty benign and to have to whitelist sites is hugely annoying, even if it takes only 10 seconds."

Don't worry, it takes between 2 and 3 seconds.

"i haven't gone so far as to code slideshows without js - too painful waiting for refreshes even on fast connections (heck even on localhost)"

Bad or lazy coder or just a troll?

1) Just use the tricks that have been around for ages. One page x you just have a 0x0 img of the next image. Only drawback is that the first page takes longer to load.
2) use the link element to specify the next page (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12 .3). Decend browser will preload that page.
3) add all the scripting you want on top of that.

Results in a fast slideshow without the need of scripting, when clientside scripting is enabled the user may even have a better experience. Added bonus might be better indexing by searchengines.

14.30 Location

The Location response-header field is used to redirect the recipient to a location other than the Request-URI for completion of the request or identification of a new resource. For 201 (Created) responses, the Location is that of the new resource which was created by the request. For 3xx responses, the location SHOULD indicate the server's preferred URI for automatic redirection to the resource. The field value consists of a single absolute URI.

Location = "Location" ":" absoluteURI

An example is:

Location: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People.html

            Note: The Content-Location header field (section 14.14) differs
            from Location in that the Content-Location identifies the original
            location of the entity enclosed in the request. It is therefore
            possible for a response to contain header fields for both Location
            and Content-Location. Also see section 13.10 for cache
            requirements of some methods.

14.30 Location

The Location response-header field is used to redirect the recipient to a location other than the Request-URI for completion of the request or identification of a new resource. For 201 (Created) responses, the Location is that of the new resource which was created by the request. For 3xx responses, the location SHOULD indicate the server's preferred URI for automatic redirection to the resource. The field value consists of a single absolute URI.

Location = "Location" ":" absoluteURI

An example is:

Location: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People.html

            Note: The Content-Location header field (section 14.14) differs
            from Location in that the Content-Location identifies the original
            location of the entity enclosed in the request. It is therefore
            possible for a response to contain header fields for both Location
            and Content-Location. Also see section 13.10 for cache
            requirements of some methods.

• Accessibility - With all that in-line formatting and in-line images as navigation? - Fail
• Valid HTML/CSS - Fail

Not pretty, but if space and processing power is truly at such a premium...

At this point I'll point out that the original poster was talking about deploying an entire HTTP server with HTML in the device. If it was even possible to do that, then we know the device was in a class that would allow such waste as an XML export. His idea of pushing HTML from his device to the browser is perhaps one of the single worst ideas I've ever heard. If this is a one off project that nobody cares about, then fine, but if anyone is going to have to live with this product... pushing HTML from an embedded device is a horrifically bad idea.

Text is beautiful in that it never suffers from endian or other platform issues. It is, however, larger and requires parsing. If you use the markup language you won't have to map the datagrams between Ada and C and Irix and Linux on the x86 in 12 years when your original embedded data source is still in use but your middle teir servers that parse the data source are utterly obsolete.

Text may cost more, but proper use of text would have saved at least one embedded system I know of. When we're talking about applications that will live decades and when we're talking about a system where an embedded HTTP server isn't outlandish... text makes sense. Text doesn't suffer from endian issues, cryptic formats, or the random undocumented datastructure.

There are reasons for each type of data representation, but, for this type of use text is king.

If we were really talking about a system with no networking on it then talking about XML would be silly, but no more silly than talking about an HTTP server on such a device. Never ever, ever never, never ever use a binary format to transmit data you're just going to plop on a web-page. Never embed an HTTP server and HTML documents onto a device if you can at all help it. If you find yourself stuffing HTML onto a device give yourself a way to do maintenance. Somebody might think your webpages are ugly.

As it stands I never said anything to suggest the XHTML variants handle it differently.

When you said that "Under XHTML 1.0 Transitional that only generates a warning." you seemed to be implying that it being just a warning had something to do with it being XHTML Transitional. I guess I read too much into that sentence.

I just stated that MY page is marked as transitional and that it only generates a warning when ampersands aren't escaped in body text.

How is any of that NOT true?

While it's true that the validator only generates a warning, it misses the point somewhat. The validator doesn't define what is valid and what isn't, it merely tries to determine whether a particular document is valid or not. The fact that the validator treats it as a warning is pretty irrelevant. It's an error, and the validator should have reported it to you as an error.

You can consider this to be a bug in the validator. There's a thread about it on the www-validator W3C mailing list, and a bug report in their database that has been fixed in development versions. Remember, validators are just tools, they don't have the final say in deciding whether something is an error or not.

As it stands I never said anything to suggest the XHTML variants handle it differently.

When you said that "Under XHTML 1.0 Transitional that only generates a warning." you seemed to be implying that it being just a warning had something to do with it being XHTML Transitional. I guess I read too much into that sentence.

I just stated that MY page is marked as transitional and that it only generates a warning when ampersands aren't escaped in body text.

How is any of that NOT true?

While it's true that the validator only generates a warning, it misses the point somewhat. The validator doesn't define what is valid and what isn't, it merely tries to determine whether a particular document is valid or not. The fact that the validator treats it as a warning is pretty irrelevant. It's an error, and the validator should have reported it to you as an error.

You can consider this to be a bug in the validator. There's a thread about it on the www-validator W3C mailing list, and a bug report in their database that has been fixed in development versions. Remember, validators are just tools, they don't have the final say in deciding whether something is an error or not.

As it stands I never said anything to suggest the XHTML variants handle it differently.

When you said that "Under XHTML 1.0 Transitional that only generates a warning." you seemed to be implying that it being just a warning had something to do with it being XHTML Transitional. I guess I read too much into that sentence.

I just stated that MY page is marked as transitional and that it only generates a warning when ampersands aren't escaped in body text.

How is any of that NOT true?

While it's true that the validator only generates a warning, it misses the point somewhat. The validator doesn't define what is valid and what isn't, it merely tries to determine whether a particular document is valid or not. The fact that the validator treats it as a warning is pretty irrelevant. It's an error, and the validator should have reported it to you as an error.

You can consider this to be a bug in the validator. There's a thread about it on the www-validator W3C mailing list, and a bug report in their database that has been fixed in development versions. Remember, validators are just tools, they don't have the final say in deciding whether something is an error or not.

The author seems to want us all to know that his site is ajax free; and being so diserves a Piece of Flare (tm). Well, I'd like the author to know that the w3c says his website is awful:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3 A//www.usabilityviews.com/ajaxsucks.html.

So I guess he's just blatently against any standards as well as any interesting advancing technologies.

We can't ignore the fact that the exciting part of the web is moving away from documents and into applications.

It's possible to make DHTML/AJAX/Javascript applications act like desktop applications with respect to keyboard navigation (on IE and Firefox) and support for accessibility tools (currently Firefox only). This was part of the accessibility code that IBM contributed to Firefox.

Information and examples here:
http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml/

W3C roadmap for the developing standard here:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/roadmap/DHTMLRoadmap11050 5.html

The big problem is that, unlike books, the Web is digital and dynamic -- what you read at a given URL today can be moved, edited, deleted, or p0wned by the time you get there tomorrow.

Sure, it can be moved -- but that doesn't mean it should be. Keeping a page at a particular location makes it much easier for people to find it, whether via search engines, their own bookmarks, links on other sites, etc.

This doesn't mean it can't change. Linking to, say, a product page on Amazon is extremely useful. You can expect the price, reviews, recommendations, etc. to change over time, but you should expect the same product to be there the following year as long as they still sell it.

• Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema and/or RelaxNG or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes for things like "date" or "number"?
• Could they not give a formal description of mapping from the general schema to a "simple" subset in which there are no defaults?
• Do they have to use ad hoc paraphrases like "the name of the property (without any namespace)" instead of the standard XML Namespaces "local part" (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the element, without the prefix , as it could never have the namespace in it because namespaces are URIs)?
• What does a <cf:group> with a label attribute but no element attribute group by and/or what does it allow one to filter by?
• Do people at MS not provide references?
• &c.

"This specification is designed to be as simple as possible."

Yup. Great. Sigh.

• Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema and/or RelaxNG or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes for things like "date" or "number"?
• Could they not give a formal description of mapping from the general schema to a "simple" subset in which there are no defaults?
• Do they have to use ad hoc paraphrases like "the name of the property (without any namespace)" instead of the standard XML Namespaces "local part" (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the element, without the prefix , as it could never have the namespace in it because namespaces are URIs)?
• What does a <cf:group> with a label attribute but no element attribute group by and/or what does it allow one to filter by?
• Do people at MS not provide references?
• &c.

"This specification is designed to be as simple as possible."

Yup. Great. Sigh.

• Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema and/or RelaxNG or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes for things like "date" or "number"?
• Could they not give a formal description of mapping from the general schema to a "simple" subset in which there are no defaults?
• Do they have to use ad hoc paraphrases like "the name of the property (without any namespace)" instead of the standard XML Namespaces "local part" (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the element, without the prefix , as it could never have the namespace in it because namespaces are URIs)?
• What does a <cf:group> with a label attribute but no element attribute group by and/or what does it allow one to filter by?
• Do people at MS not provide references?
• &c.

"This specification is designed to be as simple as possible."

Yup. Great. Sigh.

• Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema and/or RelaxNG or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes for things like "date" or "number"?
• Could they not give a formal description of mapping from the general schema to a "simple" subset in which there are no defaults?
• Do they have to use ad hoc paraphrases like "the name of the property (without any namespace)" instead of the standard XML Namespaces "local part" (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the element, without the prefix , as it could never have the namespace in it because namespaces are URIs)?
• What does a <cf:group> with a label attribute but no element attribute group by and/or what does it allow one to filter by?
• Do people at MS not provide references?
• &c.

"This specification is designed to be as simple as possible."

Yup. Great. Sigh.

• Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema and/or RelaxNG or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes for things like "date" or "number"?
• Could they not give a formal description of mapping from the general schema to a "simple" subset in which there are no defaults?
• Do they have to use ad hoc paraphrases like "the name of the property (without any namespace)" instead of the standard XML Namespaces "local part" (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the element, without the prefix , as it could never have the namespace in it because namespaces are URIs)?
• What does a <cf:group> with a label attribute but no element attribute group by and/or what does it allow one to filter by?
• Do people at MS not provide references?
• &c.

"This specification is designed to be as simple as possible."

Yup. Great. Sigh.

The ACs (in /. parlance) apparently have various motivations and excuses, but all of them stink.

Including "I can't sign up for an account because I'm blind"? The W3C has some things to say about that.

That's the beauty of it, the alternate text is the actual content of the element. The alt attribute was stupid anyhow. Take a look at the spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-embedding.html#s_e mbeddingmodule

I assume you meant <object/> is replacing <img/>. This is incorrect. In the current working draft <img/> still exists but only as a place to hang the src attribute. As the src attribute can appear on pretty much any element, you don't need <object/> as an <img/> replacement either; <p src='img.png'/> will do essentially the same thing.

Not that it matters in this case, it'll be a cold day in hell before IE supports XHTML 2 anyhow. They don't even support XHTML 1, and AFAICT have no intention to (although I commend the IE team for not just supporting it brokenly).

Sure it does. Assume there is a web page that has some invlaid markup. According to the standard, all user agents (i.e. web browsers) should handle the errors in a consistent way. Internet Explorer demonstrates the importance of these rules. Instead of handling an error in a predeictable way, Internet Explorer tries to guess what the author intended to write. This may sound like a good idea, but the problem is that people will write bad code ,view it with IE and assume that is how everyone will see their page. But since IE's error correcting process is proprietary and inconsistent, other browsers cannot will display the page as the author intended.

Of course this assumes that you are using a standards complient browser.

Try http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/
to see some real-life examples not specifically
fixed to work in firefox.

Wait, they don't work.

Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.

At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.

It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.

Actually msn.com is not so bad :
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3 A//www.msn.com/

Does anyone know where you can find the technical details of any of these systems? I'd like to know how they're representing their knowledge and how they're doing their reasoning (a.k.a. song selection).

I've done some work in knowledge representation using the OLW specifications from the W3C and the Racer reasoning engine, but I had never thought of applying it to music. As a music buff and computer geek, the application of knowledge modeling to music seems a natural fit to me, and I'd love some pointers to any ongoing research in this area or thoughts on future directions for this technology.

Oh yea, and if anyone wants to front a couple million for me to form a startup that would be cool too. I know several bright people who could really dig into something like this.

Of course, only a crazy masochist would run Amaya! It's worse than Safari!

IE, i believe, has a proprietary method for implementing this that violates quite a few specs. Also: it is part of the spec for css3 (background-size property) as seen here: http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-css3-background-20050 216/

text-shadow is already a property in CSS2

Unfortunately, because nobody bothered implementing it, it was removed from CSS 2. It'll probably be back in CSS 3 though.

text-shadow is already a property in CSS2

Unfortunately, because nobody bothered implementing it, it was removed from CSS 2. It'll probably be back in CSS 3 though.

Drop shadows are terribly overused nowadays, but they can be enormously helpful sometimes to emphasize elements or set them apart from busy backgrounds, e.g. captions over a photo. text-shadow is already a property in CSS2, and they're considering adding a "glow" or "outline" to the next recommendation.

Firefox doesn't support text-shadow (or, totally apropos nothing, display: inline-block for that matter), but Safari does, and tastefully applied, it's great to have around. Why IE doesn't pair its proprietary filters to standard CSS properties like these is beyond me.

Here's what the W3C thinks of his code:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.rojak pot.com/bog.aspx

gewg_

The canvas is W3C compliant. Read this. It works in Safari, Firefox 1.5+ , and I heard Opera 9.1 beta or something like that. Its better than forcing users to use a plugin, an FPS in javascript is really cool (in a geek kind of way). I've done some work with the canvas too here in case anyone is interested.
Regards,
Steve

Not in HTML4, nor in XHTML1.0 or 1.1

Canvas is a semi-proprietary element (originates from Apple, who first implemented it for Dashboard) that currently is in the under development HTML5/Web Applications 1.0 standard from WHATWG, but is (as far as I know) not part of the W3C's XHTML2 draft

Anybody know if Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a member of the Royal Scority?

Yes.

You sir, should never program.

Always validate all input provided by the user that is used in any way. If it's in a database you're smart enough to escape it (or use query replacement methods that do it for you). If you're sending mail, you damn-well be sure it's an e-mail address. You have RFCs to guide you on this:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/
      A field-name consists of one or more printable characters (excluding colon, space, and control-characters). A field-name MUST be contained on one line. Upper and lower case are not dis-tinguished when comparing field-names.

It defines what characters are valid, and if you are about to pipe whatever data you accept into an e-mail, that's something YOU decided to do.

IT IS YOUR JOB to make sure that what you put beside FROM: (or anything in that parameter) is an e-mail address. It shouldn't have a newline. It shouldn't have escape characters. It should probably contain only a limited regex. Would you put an SQL query someone enters into a database? Then why an e-mail address to sendmail?

On a side note, the only way around this is to have a programming language that tags data as tainted if it came from or was derrived from user input and not allow it for input, and having functions that sanitize data and remove that flag. This is first off slower and second not optimal in many situations.

Okay, if the users wanted keyboard shortcuts, why didn't the web developers include them? It's not as if HTML doesn't have support for this.

A properly constructed GUI application should be just as usable with the keyboard as older applications. Web applications throw up a couple of minor hurdles, but no real showstoppers. The question seems pointless because you can have the best of both worlds easily.

A few people have asked whether DB2 is going to support XQuery, or said that it won't, or that putting XML in databases is stupid, or that there are no advantages to having XML in relational databases.

The IBM article does say that their Viper product will support XML Query (it's also known as XQuery).

So yes, looks like they will be supporting XML Query.

Is it a good thing? Some pretty smart people seem to think it's a good idea, so maybe it's worth at least taking the time to listen to them.

If the only XML you've dealt with is the result of marking up relational tables, you might not see much advantage.

If you have a lot of XML documents, though (say, five million) that all validate to an XML Schema, you know some things about them. You might know, for example, that all of the price elements contain numbers. You might know that the description elements may contain embedded partnumber elements intermixed with the text, and that those partnumber elements contain part numbers formatted a particular way.

A database can build an index based on this sort of information, and can do very efficient searches and "joins".

You might also think about what you could do if you had all of the XHTML documents from some major Web site (perhaps an Intranet corporate site, or maybe your own personal site) stored in a database in such a way that you could easily make different views of the information.

I think the real niche for XQuery might be as middleware: the ability to run queries against multiple databases, whether XML or relational or flat file or whatever, without caring about how the data is stored, can be very interesting, not to say useful.

ISO SQL has also standardised on how to map between SQL and XML Query data types, and on how to evaluate XML Query expressions embedded in SQL expressions. The Java Community Process has been working on XQJ, a way to reach out to XQuery data stores from within Java.

The XML Query Home Page (disclaimer: I maintain this) lists some 45 implementations, both proprietary and open source. Not all of these are complete, but, as others have noted here, XML Query is a W3C Candidate Recommendation: we're asking for public feedback from implementors, and trying to make sure that the specification is clear and precise enough that implementations all work the same way.

I think XML Query support in SQL databases is likely to become pretty widespread. Until it is, you can also use some open source implementations that support JDBC, as well as one or other of the commercial implementations that support query optimisation over external SQL-based data stores.

In fact, I'd say it's extremely foolish to think they'll do anything other than subvert the standard in a way that's designed to most benefit them.

"Anything but subvert" seems a bit harsh. Every day I work with at least one standard that Microsoft took a role in the development of. One with the apparent intent of specifically avoiding lock-in in several respects. The (arguably) best implementations isn't Microsoft's own, and in most cases they communicate with each other quite happily. And, similar to this latest proposal, it's based upon existing standards which might help in curbing abuse.

"RSS" is not a form of RDF. Only "RSS 1.0" is a form of RDF, and it is, by far, not the commonly-used version. SSE is built on RSS 2.0 which is not RDF at all.

RSS 2.0 supports XML namespaces. This defines such a namespace. RDF is not involved.