Slashdot Mirror

"he only reason Microsoft doesn't support CSS properly is that they don't OWN it."

Considering Microsoft has sucessfully patented CSS, I don't see how they don't "own" it. Even if they have given W3C a license to it.

No browser supports CSS2 in its entirety (only KHTML browsers supports text-shadow, for instance), but CSS2.1 is fully supported by Opera 7.5, and Mozilla supports about 99.9% of it (and the parts they don't support aren't really important - counters are nice but far from essential)

One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a flawed standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it

But CSS 2.1 is already out?

And then, when 2.1 or 3 came along, they'd support that promptly.

Thus, I hope that I speak for all of us when I say: If you think CSS 2.1 is better than CSS 2, just go ahead and implement it. I sure won't mind if you choose 2.1 over 2.

I love your qualifier of "quite reasonably" when talking about how well Slashdot adheres to HTML 3.2. Since we can't check at the W3C's Validator due to the fact that Slashdot doesn't want us to check, we'll have to use something else like Validome.

And what do you know, it fails even 3.2 validation.

Host: Dave (Microsoft)
Q: ali : Will the next release have full CSS 2 and CSS 3 support?
A: Hi Ali, It's too early to make any commitments as we concentrate on implementing the features that make most sense to our customers. CSS2 is actually a flawed standard that nobody has full support for. CSS2.1 is currently in draft recommendation to fix this and we hope to improve out support there in the future.

And from the W3C's page on the subject:
CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a "snapshot" of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably at the date of publication of the Recommendation.

So it looks like they are intending at least some form of growth in this direction. They did fix the box model problem with IE 6, so I'm inclined to take this statement at face value.

Has anyone ever justified these claims that CSS is a flawed standard?

CSS 2 is clearly a flawed standard; it had pages of errata, then CSS 2.1 got released as a maintenance release. You can't implement a standard fully when it isn't self-consistent.

The big problem was that, for once, the standards people were some way ahead of what was supported by the browsers. That's dangerous, because you really want at least two independent implementations of a standard to see if there is any ambiguity.

The problem is self-perpetuating. If you take the attitude of not starting on implementing a standard until it's finish, then you're providing no feedback to the standards process.

Maybe this page would be worthwhile reading?

What a load of crap! CSS3 builds up upon CSS2.1, and even though CSS2.1 is still a candidate recommendation, it's being pushed as the standard by the W3C (as evidenced by the fact they are linking to CSS 2.1 in the navigation menu of their CSS page)

Of course, some people are actually in favour of IE not supporting CSS any better than it currently does - with IE7 being unavailable on platforms older than XP, and any attempted improvement to CSS being likely to add more than it's share of CSS bugs, it would just make another browser developpers need to work around. The evil we know might just be better...

This specification defines Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2). CSS2 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.

CSS2 builds on CSS1 (see [CSS1]) and, with very few exceptions, all valid CSS1 style sheets are valid CSS2 style sheets. CSS2 supports media-specific style sheets so that authors may tailor the presentation of their documents to visual browsers, aural devices, printers, braille devices, handheld devices, etc. This specification also supports content positioning, downloadable fonts, table layout, features for internationalization, automatic counters and numbering, and some properties related to user interface.

more here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/

Support CSS 2.1. We're really not picky. Anything is better than nothing.

Actually, they DID set the CSS 2.1 standard. See Tantek Çelik's name there, under Editors at the top, right next to where it says microsoft.com? He also contributed a lot to the CSS 3 specs. Microsoft won't even comply with the standard that they helped build. That's probably the most asinine part of the whole story.

Did you even look at the membership list of the w3c? It doesn't have anything to do with a browser having market share, and everything to do with a standards body publishing a standard.

I said Microsoft is a member of the w3c and do not follow their standards, and you start talking about browser stats. WTF? There are actual standards, not just things that are that way because they happens to work in a particular browser.

This is my last reply to an anonymous coward.

Many Slashdot users with vision impairments must post as Anonymous Coward, and here's why.

Fiji or New Zealand will be cracking down on P3P sites

yeah damm those P3P pirates, let me guess they are Americans right ?

If they really want to win the browser wars, why don't they jump the gun on the Firefox/Mozilla crew and implement full CSS3 spec support as well as CSS2.1?

If they don't, and as it seems, web developers get tired of having to write code just for the IE family of browsers (I know that I am, and just use IE7 right now to get it to play nice), how long do you really think that it'll be before you start to see a huge ammount of those "Get Firefox" buttons on the bottom of even some of the major websites?

If they really want to win the browser wars, why don't they jump the gun on the Firefox/Mozilla crew and implement full CSS3 spec support as well as CSS2.1?

If they don't, and as it seems, web developers get tired of having to write code just for the IE family of browsers (I know that I am, and just use IE7 right now to get it to play nice), how long do you really think that it'll be before you start to see a huge ammount of those "Get Firefox" buttons on the bottom of even some of the major websites?

<!ELEMENT P - O (%text)*>

<!ELEMENT table - - (caption?, tr+)>

The de facto standard is what people use, not what some commitee decide on.

No, a de facto standard happens when people agree on a protocol without the existence of a formal standard. When the formal standard exists, (and came about with input and support from Microsoft) the other becomes known as "the wrong way".

> There is none.

Actually, there is. The W3C offering is XForms, which is indeed being implemented in Firefox. Together with CSS, it's quite powerful.

It also has _tons_ of unclosed LI tags.

the spec explicity defines behavior for undefined attributes and tags

Really? Where?

HTML 4.0 mentions a few guidelines, but they are non-normative, and do not appear in the HTML 3.2 specification as far as I can see.

It should be a warning that you may be relying on non-standard behavior, but the standard does not prohibit them.

No, using element types that don't appear in the specification is always a deviation from the specification. You can't just make shit up and call it compliant.

Even the missing table end tag may be permitted under the standard, although I'd have to do some digging to check. There's something about block level elements and implicit closing by a new block element that I'd have to get the exact wording on.

The rules are simple. If the element type is defined as to have an optional end tag, you can leave it off. The parser can figure out when an element ends in one of two ways - either the parent element is closed, or an element is opened that cannot be a child of the current element. The HTML 4.01 specification has a handy table that lists which end tags are optional.

It's why you don't need a close tag for P elements in HTML 3.2, for example.

You don't need a closing tag for P elements, because it is defined as such in the specification. It's defined in that way, because a smart parser can figure out for itself where P elements close - since P elements can't contain other P elements, the sequence "<p>foo<p>bar" is unambiguously two sibling elements.

the spec explicity defines behavior for undefined attributes and tags

Really? Where?

HTML 4.0 mentions a few guidelines, but they are non-normative, and do not appear in the HTML 3.2 specification as far as I can see.

It should be a warning that you may be relying on non-standard behavior, but the standard does not prohibit them.

No, using element types that don't appear in the specification is always a deviation from the specification. You can't just make shit up and call it compliant.

Even the missing table end tag may be permitted under the standard, although I'd have to do some digging to check. There's something about block level elements and implicit closing by a new block element that I'd have to get the exact wording on.

The rules are simple. If the element type is defined as to have an optional end tag, you can leave it off. The parser can figure out when an element ends in one of two ways - either the parent element is closed, or an element is opened that cannot be a child of the current element. The HTML 4.01 specification has a handy table that lists which end tags are optional.

It's why you don't need a close tag for P elements in HTML 3.2, for example.

You don't need a closing tag for P elements, because it is defined as such in the specification. It's defined in that way, because a smart parser can figure out for itself where P elements close - since P elements can't contain other P elements, the sequence "<p>foo<p>bar" is unambiguously two sibling elements.

It also has _tons_ of unclosed LI tags.

The closing tag for LI is optional and always has been. If omitting the closing tag screws up the display, that's the user-agent's fault. TD and TR are now closing -tag optional as well. Of course, TABLE sure as hell ain't -- it won't even render on Netscape 4.x and earlier!

http://validator.w3.org

Yes, it's called W3C specifications.

Like the one for xHTML 1.0. The one that currently has IE in my doghouse is CSS2 support, especially the Box Model. Firefox gets it right. Opera gets it right. But IE gets it totally wrong, forcing web designers to use unsightly hacks to get CSS to behave the same way in IE.

The web community has always had this consensus, going back to HTML 3.2 and even further back. It's the browser makers that can't seem to come to a consensus, which is ridiculous because the W3C tells you how a user agent should behave.

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/?

The funny thing about that is, they're the ones who granted the patent to the W3C to use in the first place.

Easiest way to fix it is to not follow 302's since 302 means "The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI."

I would imagine that this could cause a problem with getting a website into the listing that is in the process of moving, but if Google simply waited until it's an actual 200 status code, then redirections would get ignored (since they're not .

From the W3C document:
The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).

Again, and since even the temporary URI doesn't have to be given, 302's should be ignored. Even 301's and 303's are not acceptable since the new URI doesn't have to be given.

The harder way to fix it is to only accept 3xx response codes that give the new URI in response. Even then, I assume it's possible to still fake a 200 response code if you modify the http daemon, and make a transparent redirection... thus fooling the search engine in every respect.

In my opinion, I don't see a way around it unless you include signature files or such... but even if you used and SSL connection, it's probably still exploitable.

I guess you're damned any way you look at it.

This isn't an exploit against end users. This is an exploit against the Googlebot allowing a site operator to usurp another site's search result rankings by taking advantage of the fact that Googlebot honors the HTTP 302 status code as a temporary redirect (as it's supposed to do).

Please read the article before commenting.

Then click back twice fast. Works in Opera. Or you could just open the history on the back button and select the page before the redirecting one.

OR...people could take the time to write websites correctly.

What Microsoft is attempting to do is patent one of the uses intended for XML from the very start

Prior art probably goes back into the 1960's, way before MS, if you also consider GML as well.

I cite http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-li nks :

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

Nothing wrong with defining your own link types as far as I can tell. There are many interesting uses for this even beyond applying standards such as DC (Dublin Core). One such use you might find interesting is XFN.

For some more information on profiles, see http://gmpg.org/xmdp/.

In any case, I think that Microsoft's categorical abuse of standards is beyond comparison.

"nofollow" is not part of W3C's Link Types, but what a heck... we love Google... now, if Microsoft did the same to an open standard, we would tear them apart, wouldn't we?!

google still doesn't pass the w3c validator

There seem to be a lot of confused comments on this, but hey, it's slashdot :-)

If you mostly deal with the sort of data for which relational databases are generally optimised, you'll probably not be very interested in XML solutions, as they are solving problems you don't have.

If you routinely get questions like "how often is part 1976 mentioned in the same repair procedure as part 2001?" or "which of our 150,000 documents have chapters containing five or more subsections any of which does not yet have a summary?" then the XML approach becomes more interesting.

In my book on XML databases (1999 so I don't recommend going out and getting a copy today) I talked about using a hybrid system, with metadata picked out of XML whenever a changed version is stored (e.g. you might use a CVS commit script) and stored in a relational database.

With a relational database you have a lot of flexibility to change your queries but the data representation has to be static. Even changing the type of a column can be difficult in an RDBMS.

Queries may be a little harder with the XML system, but the data storage is more flexible and you have native knowledge of sequence and hierarchy that are traditionally absent using SQL.

More recent versions of SQL have added some XML support, understanding the different sorts of queries that people typically run against such very different sors of data. There has been a lot of research over the past 30 or 40 years (hierarchical databases predate the relational model) on hierarchy, sequence and thesort of irregularity that RDBMS people call semistructured data and the rest of us call XML :-)

XML Query is a query language designed to run over both relational and XML-native data sources (and others, for that matter) and to be optimized very efficiently, so that people like IBM (makers of DB2), Oracle, BEA, Software AG and othes can have efficient implementations. There's also standards work on how to embed XML Query expressions in SQL.

The public XML Query Web page is at www.w3.org/XML/Query and lists quite a large number of implementations. Software AG have participated in the XML Query development.

You might like to look at the XML Query use case document and see how close the examples map to your own situation.

Disclaimer: I work for the W3C, participate in the XML Query WOrking Group, and maintain the XML Query Web page. But it sounded like it's the sort of information you were looking for.

I can't comment on the quality of Tamino, as I have not used it, but I will also note that if you stick to openly-defined standard query languages wherever you can, there's a good chance you could move to a different implementation if you needed to with relatively little cost. This is similar to SQL, of course.

There was lots of hype around XML, but that doesn't mean it's all false, nor that it was all true. XML is a good way to interchange structured, hierarchical imformation, but it probably won't cure acne :-)

Liam

[slashdot::Ankh -- Liam Quin, W3CXML Activity Lead]

What's more, you're going to face action in multiple jurisidictions; a Utah court may slam you for classifying a site as not porn, and a California court may slam you for classifying that same site as porn.

PICS already exists to allow both the sites themselves, and an external classifying body, a software independent content description method (this site has total nudity, no violence, no sex, while this site has partial nudity, lots of violence, allusions to sexual activity). An admin can either run filtering software directly on each PC, or on a border web proxy (or both).

PICS has been a complete failure despite being integrated into Internet Explorer. The reason? No gatekeeper for access; sites weren't going to the effort of classifying themselves until it was a requirement to be seen, and ratings bureaux did not pop up to handle it, partly due to the liability issue, and partly due to the lack of demand for censorship software from consumers (at least, at the prices that make it worth doing).

WinFS will allow you to add more meta data to those images, storing the Location, Date taken etc information right there with the image, rather than in the filesystem tree. This allows you to get rid of folders altogether, and have a situation more similiar to the labels system in Gmail - a photo can now be in several 'folders', eg location, resolution, project, allowing you to group dissimiliar items together without having to maintain seperate copies of an item, or symlinks etc.

Hmm to get rid of directories the tagging system would have to be riggidly defined or it would easily lead to complete chaos. Do you have any information whether they are going to use the semantic web framework to tag files?

CSS is not a standard

As you were saying....
and, oh, XHTML is also a standard.

CSS is not a standard

As you were saying....
and, oh, XHTML is also a standard.

CSS is not a standard

As you were saying....
and, oh, XHTML is also a standard.

So why not have a small popupbar (just like when FF blocks a pop-up) on NS 8 that says something like...

The web page you are browsing does not comply with W3C standards! Do you wish to email the page author to inform them of this problem?

While I think it's too hard a problem to solve, if the email not only included the problems with the page but suggested a possible patch to bring the page into compliance, that would be most excellent.

i would have thought Google would have better HTML than that.. "" i got 40 errors with the W3 Validator.

Yeah, well you get 49 errors with www.google.com.

So 40 errors is an improvement :)

Google has never shown much interest in validating code.

Even the Firefox Start page they host doesn't validate.

They probably save untold gigabytes just by not putting a doctype, type attributes, alt tags, etc.

Hopefully flash will die.

But what will replace it?

I find it strange that /.ers aren't clamoring more for SVG growth and development. I understand that SVG is under the radar because development tools are rare. I can't see how we can tout standards in many other aspects of the internet but not this.

There is an alternative. It's called Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG). It's a W3C recommendation, and adobe already has a free viewer on every important platform.

No need to set up CAWG, we have SVG. Unfortunately, the only way to use it with Mozilla based browsers is non-standard builds or even worse, an adobe plugin. Basic javascript and xhtml to handle anything that flash or shockwave can do, no buggy (or non existant) players.

ISOC Official Page
IETF Official Page
IESG Official Page
IRTF Official Page
IAB Official Page
RFC Editor Official Page
ICANN Official Page
IANA Official Page
W3C Official Page
W3C encyclopedia article
ICANN encyclopedia article
IANA encyclopedia article