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How do they want to license those protocols when they can't even use clean HTML?
You can check it here!

Also how much do these guys know about character sets? The Attavik website uses "latin1" (a non existent charset--should be "ISO-8859-1"--and why not UTF-8 so they don't need images) and is content-free giving no one any real idea what they do. From what it says I think they sell proprietary software to Inuktitut organisations (that they probs don't need) though.

Also, the companies homepage (which sucks) doesn't have a charset (and is not UTF-8/ASCII) and is very invalid even when you do work the charset out.

Also how much do these guys know about character sets? The Attavik website uses "latin1" (a non existent charset--should be "ISO-8859-1"--and why not UTF-8 so they don't need images) and is content-free giving no one any real idea what they do. From what it says I think they sell proprietary software to Inuktitut organisations (that they probs don't need) though.

Also, the companies homepage (which sucks) doesn't have a charset (and is not UTF-8/ASCII) and is very invalid even when you do work the charset out.

Not that obscure. Why would you rather have a 256 color bimtmat format (GIF) rather than a complete vector format?

God, what horribly broken html you write! Yuck. It's completely unreadable in Mozilla. Hint: validator.w3.org.

Also makes me wish Microsoft supported more of the CSS standard on IE. I've been using CSS since '99 and almost every interesting effect breaks in IE Win. Thankfully more Windows users are using alternative browsers for security reasons.

Now if only Slashdot would validate!

Neither main page passes w3c's html validator, but Kerry's has much fewer "errors".

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#ede f-A

According to the HTML4 ref @ w3, putting a table inside of an anchor-tag is illegal. Only inline tags may reside there, and a table is a block-level tag.

Since ths means the browser's behavior is undefined, I hope they come up w/ a better fix ...

They're even trying to hide from the validators:
W3 validator is 403'd
Actual results on the current front page not good

They're even trying to hide from the validators:
W3 validator is 403'd
Actual results on the current front page not good

Tsk tsk, I'm disappointed... these guys are supposed to be all that, you'd think they would be able to hire a someone to design a valid webpage:

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

Note that I'm primarily urging XHTML as the file format used on the server. Secondarily, I'm urging that people use XHTML/HTML for editing. Note I tried to carefully distinguish HTML and XHTML in my post: The server should send HTML-compatible XHTML to the client's editor, and if it gets HTML it should "clean it up" to make XHTML.

In practice a server could use client detection to use Mozile when suitable, and something like rte otherwise.

But this is ... slashdot.org

The ability to make the browser popup ALT attributes for images?

Mozilla/Firefox is standards compliant and you won't ever see this happening without using an extension. IE's behavior which you have gotten used to is simply incorrect. Web designers should be instead using the TITLE attribute.

The ability to make the browser popup ALT attributes for images?

Mozilla/Firefox is standards compliant and you won't ever see this happening without using an extension. IE's behavior which you have gotten used to is simply incorrect. Web designers should be instead using the TITLE attribute.

The ability to make the browser popup ALT attributes for images?

The alternate text attribute is only to be shown if the image is broken or to aid those who are vision impaired and such. Hence alternate text. If a person wants text to show when a mouse hovers over it, they should use the title tag instead.

Alt vs Title

Either way, the point is that Firefox is simply enforcing / supporting W3C webstandards! It doesn't display alt text when you hover the mouse over it because it's not supposed to be displayed for the normal, fully functional user if the image is rendered properly. And people wonder why the web is so messed up.

The ability to make the browser popup ALT attributes for images?

The alternate text attribute is only to be shown if the image is broken or to aid those who are vision impaired and such. Hence alternate text. If a person wants text to show when a mouse hovers over it, they should use the title tag instead.

Alt vs Title

Either way, the point is that Firefox is simply enforcing / supporting W3C webstandards! It doesn't display alt text when you hover the mouse over it because it's not supposed to be displayed for the normal, fully functional user if the image is rendered properly. And people wonder why the web is so messed up.

Then why does this work ... validate this page

This is not how the ALT is to be used which is why FF does not do it. According to the specifications one should use the TITLE tag if you want to see the popup for something. The ALT tag is to be used for text-only browswer or for screen readers.

Therefore, FF adheres to the standards while IE does not.

For reference: ALT tag from W3C

Also, when you first go to the W3C website hover over any of the links on the left side under the 'W3C A to Z' section and you will see the popups you are looking for. Now view the source for the page. Notice the use of the TITLE tag? That's how things should be done to get the popups.

I noticed that too.. the article text was crammed into a 100-pixel column, rendering it unreadable. Validating at W3C revealed 461 errors, so display problems are no surprise.

Not true:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org.nyud.net%3A8090%2F&charset=(detect+autom atically)&doctype=HTML+3.2&verbose=1/
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org.nyud.net%3A8090%2F&charset=(detect+autom atically)&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&verbose=1 /

(Using http://slashdot.nyud:8090 as address in W3 Validator because Slashdot has blocked it...)

Not true:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org.nyud.net%3A8090%2F&charset=(detect+autom atically)&doctype=HTML+3.2&verbose=1/
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org.nyud.net%3A8090%2F&charset=(detect+autom atically)&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&verbose=1 /

(Using http://slashdot.nyud:8090 as address in W3 Validator because Slashdot has blocked it...)

stupidest idea ever.

Considering the site you saw this on doesn't even validate, itself...

Badnarik: 13 Errors
Bush: 303 Errors
Kerry: 33 Errors
Nader: Unable to validate

It should be noted that Kerry's page is just a splash screen. If geeks voted based on errors, it would be Badnarik in a landslide!

Badnarik: 13 Errors
Bush: 303 Errors
Kerry: 33 Errors
Nader: Unable to validate

It should be noted that Kerry's page is just a splash screen. If geeks voted based on errors, it would be Badnarik in a landslide!

Badnarik: 13 Errors
Bush: 303 Errors
Kerry: 33 Errors
Nader: Unable to validate

It should be noted that Kerry's page is just a splash screen. If geeks voted based on errors, it would be Badnarik in a landslide!

Badnarik: 13 Errors
Bush: 303 Errors
Kerry: 33 Errors
Nader: Unable to validate

It should be noted that Kerry's page is just a splash screen. If geeks voted based on errors, it would be Badnarik in a landslide!

2. The halloween webcam - vote for Hulk page W3C validates (except for the (intentional) marque tag, which most browsers handle, although Internet Exploder handles the behavior='slide' better than Firefox)

3. Hulk's web site has "survived" being FARK'ed, Slashdotted, Ernie's House of WhoopAss, etc. ... and also provides hourly updated web stats

4. Hulk's web site was "attacked" by a "Kerry-Bot" that tried to stuff the ballot but those votes were chucked and IP was banned.

5. Hulk's site is running Linux/Apache/Perl per the FAQ (obligatory suckup to the /. crowd ;-)

6. Hulk's site allow you to vote before the election (and vote often!) ... and shows you the results real-time - they currently are:
HULK: 9,386 BUSH: 9,151 KERRY: 8,623

7. Hulk's site done by ONE Puny Human in his spare time ... and is just a lot more fun!

2. The halloween webcam - vote for Hulk page W3C validates (except for the (intentional) marque tag, which most browsers handle, although Internet Exploder handles the behavior='slide' better than Firefox)

3. Hulk's web site has "survived" being FARK'ed, Slashdotted, Ernie's House of WhoopAss, etc. ... and also provides hourly updated web stats

4. Hulk's web site was "attacked" by a "Kerry-Bot" that tried to stuff the ballot but those votes were chucked and IP was banned.

5. Hulk's site is running Linux/Apache/Perl per the FAQ (obligatory suckup to the /. crowd ;-)

6. Hulk's site allow you to vote before the election (and vote often!) ... and shows you the results real-time - they currently are:
HULK: 9,386 BUSH: 9,151 KERRY: 8,623

7. Hulk's site done by ONE Puny Human in his spare time ... and is just a lot more fun!

I tried to validate slashdot from that url, and got an error. So I'm not sure.

Does the site generate valid HTML? This is a completely objective test which can easily be conducted using the W3C Validator. If a page is not valid HTML, then all questions of browser behavior become moot.

When presented with valid HTML, does the browser render it acceptably? This is necessarily a subjective question. For example, if you were visually impaired, the browsers which you consider acceptable will probably be different than if you were a graphic designer.

My experience is of course only one among millions, but I can report that I rarely find a problem using Mozilla on any website. Where there are problems, they are invariably due to the site being designed to work only when the browser has JavaScript or cookies enabled.

How much nicer would all these posts be if we had real MathML suport!!!

Here is what Mozilla is doing about it, but is any other browser supporting this [much needed!] standard?

javascript is a horrible hack thought up by some drunk, off-duty engineer on toilet paper one day while reading the graphiti over the urinal at work

Nice troll! Seriously, what exactly is your problem with JavaScript? It is a standardised language that is quite powerful enough to handle anything reasonably expected of it. It's easy to learn and quite pleasant to work with.

Perhaps your beef with JavaScript lies with the variety of interpretations of the API, and bastardisation thereof. Don't confuse a language with an impementation of an API. Obviously the developers of XUL think that JavaScript is worthy, and so they should. I'll be sideing with them, rather than your righteous self.

It's lousy, and not advancing

Taken from http://www.mozilla.org/js/js15.html: The next version of JavaScript will be the 2.0 release. 2.0 represents a rewrite of both the language specification and engine implementation... Your opinion that it's lousy is just that - your opinion. Please engage with some more considered argument before spouting your opinions.

Why can't a java VM be modularized so that language modules (javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) can be ported to the VM and let us use our language(s) of choice?

Yeap, because with a helthy dose of sarcasm, waiting half an hour for a VM load up which then consumes a tonne of system resources is really in the best interests of the user, not to mention that it's not complete overkill for simple maniplation of data and UI widgets.

Just make sure you write valid html.

Windows users want things to be installed as easy as they installed windows (but without the inherent security complications, heh).

As a dummy average Joe-user Windows hobbit, I just want to insert a CD and let it do what it has to do. I'm NOT supposed to know about filesystems, nor the directory structure and how to configure the xf86watchamacallit in case the GUI blows, nor what cryptic combinations of keypresses to do to make the frigging ctrl+shift+numeric keypad arrow work as it SHOULD.

I just want a friendly box which lets me open my apps and play my music without having to mess around and compiling an ALSA XMMS plugin because XMMS takes about a minute to play because some by-default misconfiguration in the KDE.

I want to be able to download a program from the internet, press a few clicks, and get it installed in the appropriate directory without having to enter the command line.

In other words, I want to be able to run my favorite apps, word processor, stylesheet, multimedia apps, without having to know ONE SINGLE DETAIL of how Linux works.

Ok, let's summarize this in two words.

IDIOT-PROOF.

Sure, Linux is much more stable than winblows, it doesn't get viruses, etc. But what use is this rock-solid stability if the user has to go to the command line 10 times per day, become a super-user, and navigate in the creepy branches of the directory tree just to adjust something? (Linux Parody here)

Look at windows. You just open the Control Panel, click on an icon... and adjust a few sliders. Is that too hard?

Yes I know, being a windows lamb is dangerous. But not all people were born to be hax0r leaders. You may know how to download a plugin and install it in your OS, but I betcha the 99.99% of Windows users don't know even how to configure their Windows.

And you want them to open a command line, type ./configure, make, make install and a bunch of NEEDLESSLY COMPLICATED things that an automatic program SHOULD provide? And what if the compilation breaks something? Do you really expect a common housewife to burst in tears, frustrated just because some stupid misconfigured .h header file got a line (i.e. an application path) wrong?

It's the lack of standarization that makes Linux (i'm not talking of a particular distribution, but Linux as a whole) scary for your average windows hobbit. I mean, can't the Linux guys get together, form some kind of "ecumenic council" as seen in Lord of the Ring movies, and decide a "user-friendliness Linux standard" that all Linux distros should follow? The web guys did it with the W3C Web Content Accesibility Guidelines, what makes people think the Linux guys can't? I don't want to think that they're just lazy about it.

Maybe I'm asking the impossible. But think about this. If Linus Torvalds could make Linux, what makes it so difficult for his successors to agree on some points?

As I said, I (and I bet the 99.9% windows hobbits) just want a nifty idiot-proof Operating System that lets me do what I want.

And if Xandros is offering that to me, what's so wrong with it? (Too bad they want to charge for it, but that's a separate matter).

(Update: I'm looking at the 142 Ubuntu Linux Screenshots and it looks JUST LIKE what I wanted to express.

Hmmm. 146 images are worth a thousand words ;-)

I just tried all 5 of the sample pages listed in the report with the W3C Markup Validation Service. None of them crashed the validator; they all showed "This page is not Valid !" and listed the specific lines which were in error.

In HTML 4 Strict, how does one number an ordered list starting at 10? The value attribute of the li element (<li value="10">) is missing.

Hadn't known about that - apparently the correct route is via CSS, of course, but browser support is meant to be somewhat lacking. As always. ;-)

My favourite bit of HTML 4 brokenness is the retention of 'cellpadding', 'cellspacing' and friends in HTML 4 Strict's tables. Having attributes specifying pixel-sizes in the supposedly formatting-by-CSS-only system kind of undermines their arguments for removing the more esoteric, not-quite-display features like those list item attributes...

> But what other area could the patent
> possibly apply to?

Well, anything analogous to how email works... for eg: signing IRC messages, some wierd video conferencing authentication process, opportunistic network encryption where the server holds a self-signed certificate... And a thousand thing we _don't_ know -- and that really is the key problem with DK.

I think the DK patent (if in fact they did get a patent on something so obvious) is not a good thing.

By itself, DK does very little to stop spamming. Stopping spam by choking the money flow of the spammer. Till now spammers bought cable modem connectivity, and jumped between accounts as they were squelched. Now all that will happen is spammers will have to buy domains (at what, $18 a year, maybe cheaper wholesale?) and jump between domains as they already jump between cable modem connections.

So instead of paying $20 a month per account, they pay $21.5. Not much of a monetary squeeze there.

The main _main_ benefit of DK is non-repudiation of spam mail. Since the mail is signed, and because DNS entries are recorded by third parties, the spammer can't plausibly stand up and say in court: "All these emails with full headers are all forged your honor... the prosecution witness simply made them up to implicate me"

But that's not an approach spammers generally used to take anyway.

But it will make a difference to business and personal email.

See also here:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-paten tpolicy-comment/2003Jan/0075.html

It's kind of in the name. Transitional should best-guess. Strict should not.

Not really - HTML 4 Transitional was designed so that it wouldn't be so much work for sites to change their markup from the previous, somewhat ad-hoc standards. As a result, it includes various tags and attributes from HTML 3.2, usually to do with more visual aspects of page layout. Such features aren't present in HTML 4 Strict, where CSS is used for visual formatting (almost) throughout.

References to the Transitional DTD appear at the top of many HTML documents which aren't anywhere near valid HTML 4 Transitional - I suspect this is why many browsers go into some kind of 'Quirks' mode when they see it. The Transitional specification is just as definitive as the Strict one, it just includes a lot of older features for the sake of compatibility and conversion.

Still, it says something about how much the W3C's standards are respected when even now, hardly anyone bothers following the Transitional spec from 1997, considering it too difficult...

1. It means you'll need to build in a strict parser and a normal parser into an agent. For example,

<img src=foo/bar-1.jpg alt="barbar">

is formally illegal since the '-' is not allowed outside quotes. I doubt that there is any browser that uses such strict rules for parsing. And if the browser has to parse everything twice, it will generate extra bloat.

2. It might be easy to set a flag in the parsing code whenever a "workaround procedure" is called, in order to get the warning message. However, the next thing your users will demand is an explanation about what is wrong. It isn't easy to generate human-readible error messages from a parser. The W3C validator often generates very cryptic messages. The above example will generate the message "required attribute "ALT" not specified". Go tell.

By the way, Opera has a hotkey, ctrl-alt-v, to submit a page to the W3C validator.

Test if your code is good or not at http://validator.w3.org/

Never mind - my goof...

While W3C has not made HTML a standard, the ISO and IEC apparently have standardised "a refinement of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Recommendation for HTML 4.0 ... Documents which conform to this International Standard also conform to the strict DTD provided by the W3C Recommendation for HTML 4.01."

Browsers are under _no_ obligation to implement it and can render it however they see fit but obviously its in their interest to be compatible. This was my point. There is no official standard that says a browser must do anything.

• User agents must not evaluate script data as HTML markup but instead must pass it on as data to a script engine.
• User agents must follow the steps set out in the section on specifying character encodings in order to determine the character encoding of an external resource.
• To facilitate the introduction of these extensions, conforming user agents must be able to parse the media attribute value as follows

These maybe?

on achieving standards compliance when his own site doesn't validate at all.

The W3C seems to disagree with you.

No they don't, as other people have pointed out, you have thoroughly confused the terms "specification" and "standard". If you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth:

The W3C has been an active voice in industry technology debates for a little over two years now. Today, we represent over one hundred and seventy developers, research organizations, government agencies, and users. We have a technical staff of three dozen folks around the world working in three Domains on thirty Activity Areas. We are not a:

1. Standards body, because we do not make legally binding decisions
2. Research Think-tank, because we work on the here-and-now
3. Trade Organization, because we represent the public trust

There you have it. The W3C are not a standards body. They don't make standards. If you want to use a standardised document format, ISO, a real standards body, has produced ISO-HTML.

HTML 4.01 Specification

W3C Recommendation 24 December 1999

This specification defines ... the publishing language of ....

HTML 4 is an SGML application conforming to International Standard ISO 8879 -- Standard Generalized Markup Language

... endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation.

W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment.

HTML has been extended in a number of ways. The Web depends on Web page authors and vendors sharing the same conventions for HTML.

HTML 4.01 Specification

W3C Recommendation 24 December 1999

This specification defines ... the publishing language of ....

HTML 4 is an SGML application conforming to International Standard ISO 8879 -- Standard Generalized Markup Language

... endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation.

W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment.

HTML has been extended in a number of ways. The Web depends on Web page authors and vendors sharing the same conventions for HTML.

HTML 4 isn't a standard

Really? The W3C seems to disagree with you. (Note the title of the document: "HTML 4.01 Specification".)

and hasn't been deprecated.

This much is true, however the previous poster is correct in that it will not be updated.

as far as publishing for the web goes, most authors are better off using HTML 4 rather than XHTML

I agree with you 100% here, but it doesn't make the original poster's information incorrect.

This was the notion behind P3P. Also see Agent: I dont think it means, what you think it means.

Abstract

As the deployment of computer agents that act on behalf of users grow, so do questions regarding the legitimacy and legal standing of computer based agreements. I note the use of the terms "agents" and "proxy" in the technical discipline and argue that a more explicit understanding of these terms is necessary to properly address the convergence of technical and legal issues related to electronic commerce. Unfortunately, much of the legal literature on the question of computer agency is preoccupied with concepts of intelligence, consideration, and intention within a computer program; this is because these concepts are found in law. However, these concepts are premature in a technical context -- regardless of hand-waiving about artificial intelligence. I provide a simple technical explanation of computer agents and proxies, as well as a brief etymology of those terms in the technical context. I conclude by pointing out some problems of making automated agreements on the Web in hopes that this small contribution will permit legal analysis to focus on pressing issues of the day.