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If, instead of using <a href="#" onclick="foo"> or <a href="javascript(foo)"> type constructs, web designers would use <a target="_blank" href="something.html" onclick="javascript(stuff)"> type constructs, then if the user HAS Javascript active, then the web master can micromanage the newly created window. If not, then the user STILL gets a new window, just not one that the web master can remove all the chrome from.

Sorry, this is incorrect. For better or worse, according to the W3C, opening windows via JavaScript is the only proper way to create new windows. In fact, the target attribute has been removed from standard HTML since at least HTML 4.01 strict.

If you remove the target="_blank" from your second example, you'd actually be doing it right. In this case -as you said- the user would get to the new link regardless. If they had JavaScript turned on, they would get whatever niceness the web developer wanted. If not, they would just get the raw page.

David

Actually, Canada has decent accessibility laws that might cover font sizes :)

Tim B-L says Cool URIs don't change.

You wrote:
That's not google's fault, it's your responsibility to fix broken links.

It most certainly is Google's fault--they could have put in redirects to the new site if they chose to. (According to the OP, it sounds like they tried to, but screwed it up.)

As a website developer, I don't know all the sites that may link to me. Maybe if I know about some I might accomidate the links but most I don't even know about. And to be honest, I don't really care in most case.

If you don't cere if people's links to your site work, why are you bothering to publish a site at all? (Or if you're working for someone else, why are they hiring a "website developer" who doesn't care if visitors can get to their site?)

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.

I used this to bitch about the non-standard HTML coming out of their site, and an actual human responded a few days after an auto-responder did.

Of course, their HTML still doesn't validate...

Say i'm developing a webpage, it validates with the W3C validator and I want to make sure it renders correctly in IE as well as gecko based browsers; this would mean I could load the page up in Netscape, view it with the gecko rendering engine, followed by IE. I'd then modify the CSS so that it renders reasonably in IE then switch back to gecko to ensure it still works correctly with it. This would mean less clutter for me when testing on Windows as it means I don't need Firefox & multiple instances of IE on my taskbar; instead there'd just be Netscape containing a bunch of tabs.

I hate any form of excess clutter in my desktop environment/window manager.

Oh yeah and the fact that the person designing their site is an idiot...

[input type=hidden name="ip" value="xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"]
[input type=hidden name="httpref" value=""]
[input type=hidden name="httpagent" value="Bastard (X1; fireball; Unixware i286) Gecko/20061125"]

Why claim to be xhtml compliant when the pages fail miserably? http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.opens ourceconsortium.org/contact/index.html

This is either fake (like linuxinsider) or the work of somebody that thinks his 1337 design skills, honed on gaming sites are somehow suited to a political organization.

I'd never sign up to something like that unless I got free pr0n, rad dudez lol, OSS r0X0rz ... WTF!?!?

validator.w3.org http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .opensourceconsortium.org gives this response:

This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

... and it ain't even slashcode ...

On the ASCII sort "bug", he writes dates have to be reversed to sort correctly. No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly! ;-)

Actually, YYYY-MM-DD is ISO 8601 date format. It is the standard.

ISO 8601 has the nice effect of also being ASCII sortable.

Having 61 validation errors isn't very flawless...

Not really, just make sure your web pages are W3C valid and state that on the web page.

If a browser cannot render a W3C valid page correctly (ie. IE) then people should be made aware.

There needs to be an active enforcement of CSS and HTML standards that ALL browser manufacturers have to adhere by, or be forced to eat their balls, or something equally horrific.

There is, W3C again, just that Microsoft ignores it when it is convenient for them, bad tool breeds bad code.

Not really, just make sure your web pages are W3C valid and state that on the web page.

If a browser cannot render a W3C valid page correctly (ie. IE) then people should be made aware.

There needs to be an active enforcement of CSS and HTML standards that ALL browser manufacturers have to adhere by, or be forced to eat their balls, or something equally horrific.

There is, W3C again, just that Microsoft ignores it when it is convenient for them, bad tool breeds bad code.

The simple solution is to encourage sites to generate valid HTML.

Only if a page is valid does it make sense to compare how different web browsers render it.

It's not helpful to make a C compiler accept something that is not valid C source code. Why shouldn't the same reasoning apply to HTML?

Well, it's obvious that what you really want is Amaya.

Have fun!

Funny, seeing what you get when running /. through the validator.

Is this a cover up? *grabs tinfoil hat*

As to the first issue of the above comment taken from the article, the reason FireFox can't open some sites is because the sites themselves are not coded correctly or require ActiveX *cough*SAP*cough*

Run a page through the W3C HTML Validator and you'll see how poorly those sites are coded or are hacked about to render correctly only in IE.

As far as the second issue is concerned, since when are plug-ins part of a browser? The very definition of a plug-in means they are something to added after the fact to do something.

Maybe the author meant Extensions for FireFox.

As far as I'm concerned FireFox does exactly what I want it to do right after the install. Other than making a few tweaks to turn things off and on, just like you would have to do in IE, FireFox runs as right as rain.

1) I've never noticed the bad HTML ("it works in my browser") but it is pretty sleazy that they've blocked the W3C validator (it gets 403 Forbidden). Will this post should now get modded down into oblivion for mentioning it?

2) You mean the "overrated" mod? I agree: that shouldn't affect the poster's karma.

3) Ooh---this is highly subjective and could be the fault of Slashdot's readers too!

4) I agree but it's not too serious.

No.

Gloat when you can manage a simple page of HTML that validates successfully.

Here's my set of software predictions. Some more detail to fill in for that other guy's blog entry.

Here we go:

• Refactoring Browsers - let you change the name of a class, method, whatever- and have perfect replacement across the project. This is important, because it means that our API's can feature consistent naming schemes, without a whole lot of upfront planning. These exist today, but not in common use.
• Spatial Code Browsering - The ability to organize our textual code in a shared diagram, so that we can arrange it the way that we think of it. Most of our code is text, for various reasons. But we tend to think of spatial relationships between blocks of code. There's no reason why we can't lay out the files spatially, share those spatial layouts, and browse those spatial layouts.
• Replay Debugging - You can make programs run in a virtual machine that tracks deltas over time, or keeps time slices. You can "rewind" or "fast forward" a test execution, introspecting into the state of variables at different points of time. If your debugger is smart enough, it can answer the question: "now how did THAT come to happen?" "Why did you do X? Why didn't you do Y?"
• Publish-Subscribe - Is it just me, or is publish-subscribing becoming more important? That's because we're going to component systems.
• Tuple Space(s). By my limited understanding, this is a model of programming where you have: A gigantic data store, and little micro-programs that pull and push data to the store. For example: Let's say you have a web-app. The web server receives a request, and pushes it into the store, in the form of a graph. So, for instance, you get the "request" node, and it links up to a node representing the time it was received, and it links up to the URL, and it links up to the response to be filled out, etc., etc.,. Then if a program knows how to fill out the response, it starts filling out the response as much as it can. For things that aren't at it's level of abstraction, it leaves for other programs. When things are fleshed out enough for those programs, they automatically jump into play, and fill out the rest. When it's all fleshed out, the web server recognizes that the "done" flag's set, takes the whole thing, ships it out, and then clears everything. What's new here is that what triggers programs/procedures is the state of the tuple store, the shared graph- programs register states that they can metabolize, and then when conditions are right, the programs are invoked. Your programs are collections of traps. Mixes declarative programming with imperative programming, in step with development of the semantic web.
• Non-boxy interface, Deep visualization - Our GUI tools are all "boxy," and there haven't been any real UI advances since MFC, and I do blame the API. It's easy to imagine API's that allow you to specify call-outs, how icons that contain icons are specified, the ability to compose and connect icons, etc., etc.,. But we're still in the images, rectangles, buttons, and tree views days, as far as easy-to-use API's are concerned. As SVG matures, I believe that our API's will get less rectangular, and give us visual and interactive power on the cheap.
• Social Help Documentation - I think we'll see integrated help documentation linking up with things like wiki and programmer's forums. So you'll be able to read a function's documentation, and see 17 examples of real use of the function and commentary. It won't be a seperate open-a-web-browser and search thing, it'll be easily available and connected with the deployed documentatio

Heh, methinks they're a tad embarassed of it:

403 :)

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

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

This is obviously some strange new meaning of the word 'valid' that I wasn't previously aware of...

They probably don't want to be embarrased.

Slashdot main page

this discussion page

121 errors in the former, 111 in the latter. Nice.

They probably don't want to be embarrased.

Slashdot main page

this discussion page

121 errors in the former, 111 in the latter. Nice.

I wonder why it returns 403 when loaded into the w3 validator? :)

This is why we need <INCLUDE> tags. It's time we thought about the future,
as in 5-10 years from now -- not next week. The internet's bandwidth will
grow, and the speed of computers will increase. We needn't worry about
network traffic or display times.

We need to concern ourselves with the future and the maturation of HTML.

Steve

PS: This "since 2 requests have to be made" thing bugs me, because it's obvious there's a lack of understanding about HTML/HTTP here. Each page
generates multiple requests to begin with, if it has images. Each image is a request. That image doesn't have to be at the same site as the page.
So many requests are *already* being made; an tag wouldn't particularly add any.

This is why we need <INCLUDE> tags. It's time we thought about the future,
as in 5-10 years from now -- not next week. The internet's bandwidth will
grow, and the speed of computers will increase. We needn't worry about
network traffic or display times.

We need to concern ourselves with the future and the maturation of HTML.

Steve

PS: This "since 2 requests have to be made" thing bugs me, because it's obvious there's a lack of understanding about HTML/HTTP here. Each page
generates multiple requests to begin with, if it has images. Each image is a request. That image doesn't have to be at the same site as the page.
So many requests are *already* being made; an tag wouldn't particularly add any.

AOL will add some proprietary plug-ins. Change the look and feel, add a new skin and you have the AOL/Netscape branded Fire Fox. However there is a possible bright side to all of this. They may contribute to the project.

There is a possible bright side even if they don't contribute anything. More people using non-MS browsers will mean that more webmasters will have to start designing portable websites with standards in mind, instead of only making sure it works in one particular browser.

whats wrong ? why everything is wrong

• Color
  [just published this past August]
  ISBN:1585422193
• Drawing on the Artist Within
  ISBN: 067163514X
• New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
  ISBN: 0874774241

I also purchased the following at Linuxworkd NY this year and found it a good read that would be germane to your needs:

• The Art of Interactive Design
  by Chris Crawford
  ISBN: 1886411840

• Adobe is on the SVG Working Group
• The standard utilizes aspects of Illustrator for rendering the:

• Edges;
• Spaces;
• and Relationships;

• Aspects of Photoshop for rendering:

Relationships (yes there is some crossover);

Lights and Shadows

Gestalt

Web standards doesn't change nearly as often you would think and sites that use them change even slower. XHTML 1.1 was last revised in mid 2001, CSS 2 was "finished" in mid 1998, CSS 2.1 (mostly a bug-fix update) to CSS was finalized in February 2004 which was a 6 years of development time. Not that any of that matters because XHTML 1.0+ and CSS 2.0 are still minority technologies right now. Most sites you encounter will be using HTML 4.01 and a handful of CSS 1.0 rules: both specs haven't changed since 1999 and despite what standards advocates would love to see, that statistic isn't likely to change in the short term future.

5 years of life and counting out of a $40 product sounds doesn't sound too bad to me. I still don't want to use the browser, but not because it's expensive.

Web standards doesn't change nearly as often you would think and sites that use them change even slower. XHTML 1.1 was last revised in mid 2001, CSS 2 was "finished" in mid 1998, CSS 2.1 (mostly a bug-fix update) to CSS was finalized in February 2004 which was a 6 years of development time. Not that any of that matters because XHTML 1.0+ and CSS 2.0 are still minority technologies right now. Most sites you encounter will be using HTML 4.01 and a handful of CSS 1.0 rules: both specs haven't changed since 1999 and despite what standards advocates would love to see, that statistic isn't likely to change in the short term future.

5 years of life and counting out of a $40 product sounds doesn't sound too bad to me. I still don't want to use the browser, but not because it's expensive.

Web standards doesn't change nearly as often you would think and sites that use them change even slower. XHTML 1.1 was last revised in mid 2001, CSS 2 was "finished" in mid 1998, CSS 2.1 (mostly a bug-fix update) to CSS was finalized in February 2004 which was a 6 years of development time. Not that any of that matters because XHTML 1.0+ and CSS 2.0 are still minority technologies right now. Most sites you encounter will be using HTML 4.01 and a handful of CSS 1.0 rules: both specs haven't changed since 1999 and despite what standards advocates would love to see, that statistic isn't likely to change in the short term future.

5 years of life and counting out of a $40 product sounds doesn't sound too bad to me. I still don't want to use the browser, but not because it's expensive.

Web standards doesn't change nearly as often you would think and sites that use them change even slower. XHTML 1.1 was last revised in mid 2001, CSS 2 was "finished" in mid 1998, CSS 2.1 (mostly a bug-fix update) to CSS was finalized in February 2004 which was a 6 years of development time. Not that any of that matters because XHTML 1.0+ and CSS 2.0 are still minority technologies right now. Most sites you encounter will be using HTML 4.01 and a handful of CSS 1.0 rules: both specs haven't changed since 1999 and despite what standards advocates would love to see, that statistic isn't likely to change in the short term future.

5 years of life and counting out of a $40 product sounds doesn't sound too bad to me. I still don't want to use the browser, but not because it's expensive.

..so this is what they call html.
Maybe they can code the best search engine in the world, but they still haven't figured out how to write proper html.

That seems rather odd that it doesn't support CSS properly.

Operas techical director Håkon Wium Lie was the very same Lie that published the first proposal the to CSS standard. http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html

hah... slashdot blocks that validator from checking its homepage... try http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.calcg ames.org/sd.html (html from slashdot home page)... i wonder why slashdot blocks the validator...

Well pehaps you should try writing valid HTML?

I think we have a semantic (pun intented) mismatch here. Are you talking about model as in XML Infoset Model? If so, I never considered the model of XUL before. Got a link documenting it?

I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!

I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!

There is a Mozilla extension called Annozilla which adds the ability to browse and edit RDF annotations to web pages, using the Annotea protocol.

[is log:semantics of <documentURI> ] a :untrustworthyInformation .

[is log:semantics of <documentURI> ] a :untrustworthyInformation .

Try this.

It ain't perfect, but it's free, multi-platform, and made by the guys that invented the standard.

It takes a little getting used to, as there are some powerful text-level commands you can use, as well, but the basic layout and viewing of the DOM are nifty.

I agree with the AC, check the CSS but even if it's valid the interpretation may be contentious.

Don't forget the CSS validator. If you are having problems with the layout, it's probably the CSS at fault and not the HTML. Although, even if the CSS is syntactically correct, it doesn't mean it makes sense - e.g. because Internet Explorer has a broken box model, you could be telling it to make something 110% wide, and Internet Explorer will misinterpret it as 100%.

"The W3C is the de facto standards body for internet standards."

No, the W3C is an *actual* standards body for Internet (Web, actually) standards. IE is the "de facto" standard browser, despite not being standards-compliant. Confusing? Indeed. Kinda like the early 1990s, when "alternative" music became meainstream.

I'm not normally this pedantic (here, anyway :-) ) but when the intended meaning is exactly opposite the expressed meaning, I'll chime in.

PS: great post otherwise. I'll even flesh out point #1 for you, with Microsoft's help: "...an attacker could run programs on your computer while you view a Web page. This affects all computers with Internet Explorer installed (even if you don't run Internet Explorer as your Web browser [emphasis added])."

just wondering, what happens when you run your "new ASP.NET hosted site" through The Validator?

Your browser detecting technique is broken. If you send different content to clients depending on which HTTP request headers are sent, you need to send an appropriate Vary response header. Otherwise public caches could serve the wrong content to the wrong browsers, resulting in Firefox users getting "upgrade to Firefox" and non-Firefox users getting the content intended for Firefox users.