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There have been small steps in this direction, most notably the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. Unfortunately P3P, as it's known, is limited to relatively simple matters of online privacy, ignoring other kinds of online contracts like software license agreements, ISP policies, and terms of service contracts.

That's true, and it's because it took P3P about five years to figure out the appropriate terminology and concepts relating to online privacy. The technology is pretty simple; its the range of possibilities (the ontology, if you will) that's so hard.

This is just like coming up with a universal scheme for addresses and other common business structures; it's possible, but getting enough people to agree on the details to get momentum takes a lot of time and effort (see UBL).

P3P does NOT require parsing of natural language. Go here to get more information

Don't Tell the W3C that P3P doesn't matter. Or the "30% of the top-100 sites and 20% of the top-500 sites" which are P3P enabled they talk about here.

Don't Tell the W3C that P3P doesn't matter. Or the "30% of the top-100 sites and 20% of the top-500 sites" which are P3P enabled they talk about here.

The purpose behind P3P is that it really distills the privacy down to a few multiple choice questions. Thus, there isn't a need for an army of readers - the robolawyer could automatically check the answers to the multiple choice questions... after all, those answers are machine readable.

Let us not forget CERN's early work with the www client and wwwd server. In particular, the work of Tim Berners-Lee. That link includes some web history.

Let us not also forget NCSA Mosaic, which became a "killer app" in the early/mid 1990s, before being spun off as SpyGlass.

My memory is faulty, but I believe more than half of the NCSA team left the project and formed NetScape. Can anyone correct this?

The web as we know it also owes a debt to previous research in hypertext systems dating back decades, as well as existing document-markup systems.

To those who keep Mozilla alive today:
I salute you, but do take too much pride in yourselves:
Never forget that you stand on the shoulders of giants.

XQuery is a standard, not one of Microsoft's creations.

However, HTML is not so relevant in the Semantic Web. There are many reasons for this, but I guess one is that it is expected to never get beyond tagsoup... Well, I dunno...

It is RDF that is at the core of the Semantic Web. Funny, I have been interested in RDF for six years, still I haven't had time to really sit down and read the specs, and so, I often bump into rather fundamental things I haven't grokked.

BTW, a quick, funny and interesting way to get started with the Semantic Web is FOAF: Go and generate your FOAF profile here.

A message has "meaning" if you can make special use of it.

Normal web pages have meaning for browsers, it's just that that meaning is limited to "how to draw words for the user."

What we're doing, is making it so that your computer can make special use of messages on the web, to do smarter things.

It would be scary if the Semantic Web were about "my meaning is THE meaning." But it is explicitely not like that. In fact, one of the main things about it is that anyone can make up their own languages, their own way of modelling the world.

There are tools that make it so you can say, "My word X is sort of like their word Y," but it's acknowledged that such translations will be imperfect. Likely, fuzzy logic, and systems that are able to ask for clarification (and remember responses), will be used to mediate that sort of things.

You may also be interested in my favorite page on AI by Open Mind. The Semantic Web isn't explicitely about AI, but it opens the door for a lot of AI work.

A message has "meaning" if you can make special use of it.

Normal web pages have meaning for browsers, it's just that that meaning is limited to "how to draw words for the user."

What we're doing, is making it so that your computer can make special use of messages on the web, to do smarter things.

It would be scary if the Semantic Web were about "my meaning is THE meaning." But it is explicitely not like that. In fact, one of the main things about it is that anyone can make up their own languages, their own way of modelling the world.

There are tools that make it so you can say, "My word X is sort of like their word Y," but it's acknowledged that such translations will be imperfect. Likely, fuzzy logic, and systems that are able to ask for clarification (and remember responses), will be used to mediate that sort of things.

You may also be interested in my favorite page on AI by Open Mind. The Semantic Web isn't explicitely about AI, but it opens the door for a lot of AI work.

Hasn't everyone heard of this already?
W3C semantic web activity from 2001.
Heflin's Thesis from 2001.

I'm rather skeptical of the whole thing, it seems to me to be like "Wouldn't it be nice if people documented their web page content better? Then we could do all these neat things." The second statement is right, but I fear the first statment is intractable.

• We need an ontology that will cover many if not all aspect of human experience. And this experience has been evolving dramatically and will continue to evolve. This ontology is probably a moving target. This task alone of creating the ontology has been, and is still the holy grail of AI and Knowledge Management.
• The amount of time we will have to invest in adding metadata to the data will dramatically increase over time. We will need a way to automate the filling of the metadata layer. This is where kicks in automatic image recognition and classification, speech to text, text summarizer and meaning extractor (Here, Copernic is is the right direction). Maybe the librarian profession will be the next hot job...
• Almost every application will have to adapt and inter-communicate. No big deal, RDF will probably become the new data bus anyway.

The W3C doesn't own the web. The W3C doesn't even make a web browser!

Referer:
This optional header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address ( URI ) of the document (or element within the document) from which the URI in the request was obtained.

All header fields are optional and conform to the generic HTTP-header syntax.

Note: Because the source of a link may be private information or may reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From information.

Referer:
This optional header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address ( URI ) of the document (or element within the document) from which the URI in the request was obtained.

All header fields are optional and conform to the generic HTTP-header syntax.

Note: Because the source of a link may be private information or may reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From information.

No one should advocate HTML mail - this is just crap, and the best way to inject all sorts of junk into e-mail. If a message isn't getting to you clearly in plain text e-mail, then the sender really needs to take a writing class. I think this .sig sums it up: (credit: Matthew Keller) "No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"

Full HTML may be a bit much, but what about allowing parsing of the few XHTML core modules, like the text, hypertext, and list modules? This is basically just HTML without images, styles (except for the email reader's style sheet), or other multimedia. This would make it infinitely easier to quote other emails and to link to sites on the internet.

At the same time, robot searchability would be improved while the "crap" you dislike can't be transmitted easily. I gather that you don't object to the semantic data exchanged via HTML email, just the (usually poorly done) multimedia.

Finally, as XML uses UTF by default, languages that contain letters not found in the English alphabet can be exchanged. ASCII is arguably an anachronism in an age of global text transmission.

OK like many other people here I have a spare gmail invite. But here in New Zealand when you enter a game of chance you must by law answer a question of skill. Now normally these are pathetically simple, but here is one that has bugged me today:

What is it called when you truncate URLs like this: " ../fakepage.html "? and Why does this work fine in every browser I have tested, but link checking programs bork at it?

Best reply gets the invite

if so, then having a P3P file, and let the user choose to block?

Is this patent really a threat to internet development? Then let's take a lesson from what happened when M$ got hit by the Eolas patent. The W3C mobilized to evaporate that patent.

It makes sense to me.

We're making an Internet Hive Mind.

It's started with commited group efforts like Free Software. As communications technology develops, we start seeing things like Wikipedia.

As it develops further, we will see things like the project-space network, and local economies and sharing networks. As it develops still further, local governments will be mediated over by well organized electronic communities online.

Really, if this all seems strange to you, you have no idea the power of communications technologies.

Before "wiki," a piece of software, there could be no wikipedia. After that piece of software, it's almost impossible for there not to be a wikipedia. Details could be different, but the basic idea is almost an inevitabilitiy.

We are not done. There's still a hoard of communications software in the pipes. We're just now getting our event systems online. We'll start seeing things like "OverHear," allowing you to hear your friends' public conversations, with voice even. As we get the ability to index the world's voice conversations (with voice-to-text software), we'll be able to ask, "Who in the last 5 minutes said this world," we'll see that the online world will become one gigantic OpenSpace conference. We'll see the conferences, we'll see the group affiliations, we'll see the projects, we'll see it all.

I predict that between 2015 and 2020, the Hive Mind (by some other name) will be a recognized and powerful force. It will also recognize itself and it's own power. We could call this the day that the Hive Mind achieves "self-awareness."

It may even have a military force- I don't know what else to call a gigantic networked mess of sympathetic hackers, chemists, biologists, and lawyers. It is not unthinkable that "the Internet" may become it's own "sovereign nation," of sorts, lack of an independent land be damned.

So, connecting the idea of the UN and the Internet is not all that strange. I mean, what else? What else could it possibly be?

Our next generation "communications software" isn't so much about making it so that messages can be sent from person to person in different ways, but about organizing the existing communications, and about organizing ourselves. We're putting in individual-to-group affiliations, and affiliations amongst groups with each other.

There's no reason to believe that our communications will stop networking and developing.

People do not have their attention on our trajectory. They see half the people downtown walking around with cell phones stuck to their ears, but they don't think that anything can "come next." But it will. There's much much more on the way.

The "Hive Mind" will look less rediculous, I think.

In 5 years, VoIP will be mature, and have basically taken over. Online group VoIP conferences may be primitive, but some ordinary people will be using them. Semantic web technologies like RDF will be in mainstream understanding and use (like XML right now), and our computers will be noticably "smarter" than the information desplay we have today. Tablet's will be cheap and accessible, and we'll tighten up the "I drew something"-to-"There it is on the web" loop. In short, our conversations will be full of napkin diagrams, Visual Language will take off beyond web comics. Our user interfaces will have transcended (finally) the box-ish interfaces, because graph data-structures have taken on new-found importance, and with the new interfaces, we'll see component lan

/* XHTML proper header for browsers that accept it. If using Mozilla, this is one way to make sure your XHTML validates */
if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']) AND stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml'))
{
header('Content-type : application/xhtml+xml');
}
else
{
header('Cont ent-type: text/html');
}

This is short-sighted. Looking for an occurance of "application/xhtml+xml" in an HTTP Accept string isn't reliably going to determine a client that prefers XHTML. A user-agent that doesn't want XHTML will have "application/xhtml+xml;q=0". The q=0 means "Don't give me that mime-type" - and your logic will send them exactly that every time.

You need to replace the stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml') with a function that will rank a user-agent's preferences specified in the HTTP accept header, and send back the highest preferred mime-type that your application supports.

Here's my vote for visualization and editing tools.

• Isaviz is the best for visualization and navigation
• Protege is cool for editing ontologies

Handle is not the same as render correctly see

http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/media-t ypes/results

sadly no Konqueror on that list

I agreee about I.E. it is the backwater browser :) poor saps

Should I be suprised that I see no the mention of CSS3, let alone CSS2(everything is just stated as "CSS"), anywhere on Slashdot, the book's synopsis, reviews, or even the author's own website?

For all I know, it just teaches you Microsoft's faulty CSS1 specification they used back during the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 back in 1996, exciting! What could be better worse than this? Lots of things, I'm sure, but even Cascading Style Sheets For Dummies mentions CSS3 which Opera and Firefox/Mozilla support.

Reference:

• CSS Property Index by Brian Wilson

Tutorial:

• Adding a touch of style by Dave Raggett

5. More browser-compatibility problems than the supposedly evil solution of HTML4 and its tables. At work I'm on a pre-OSX iMac, I have some hilarious screenshots on my hard drive showing how horribly a great number of CSS sites "degrade."

4. Too many files need to be downloaded before I can view the dang page. Remember how cool Netscape 0.9 was, because you could view the page instantly, as the images downloaded? I mean, at least as long as the author new about HEIGHT= and WIDTH= tags. Now, your browser often has to fetch three or four CSS files (and one or two javascript files) before it can even guess how to render the page. I'm sorry, when did managing the publisher's presentation layer become my problem?

3. It's not enough to evangelize a new religion, the W3C and other evangelists want to deprecate the older, working, time-proven system Web authors already know -- HTML. Why? KISS. And CSS ain't simple.

2. People are using CSS to make their sites even more tarted up than they were before, not less. The geeks tout CSS because they think they'll get their 1993 Web of H and P and A tags back. But that's not happening. Instead, the designers are using it to specificy esoteric fonts, leading, families, stem width, glyph height, stretching, etc. CSS was supposed to empower the rest of us to make websites render how *we* want in *our* web clients, but this hasn't materialized. Hardly anyone uses personal stylesheets.

1. People spend wayyy too much time making sure their pages validate or show up at all and wayyy too little time actually writing interesting stuff online. It's just a Web page. I'd rather read some interesting articles than stare at your "validated" button and read about Web standards for three hours.

BTW, this has been active at least for three years, but very few people know about it.

A /.er attempting to define irony, especially when incorrectly identifying a CSS standards book as an HTML standards book.

CSS is for styling/layout, HTML is for structuring of the document. Two completely different beasts.

And why buy a book when you can read the W3C recommendations/specifications for HTML/XHTML and CSS that are (imo) very understandable and easy to read?

A /.er attempting to define irony, especially when incorrectly identifying a CSS standards book as an HTML standards book.

CSS is for styling/layout, HTML is for structuring of the document. Two completely different beasts.

And why buy a book when you can read the W3C recommendations/specifications for HTML/XHTML and CSS that are (imo) very understandable and easy to read?

I'll have to check that out, along with the sites you mentioned. I do a lot of web design myself, and I've found the W3C's site to be a pretty helpful reference for what I do, but I'm always interested in learning more from additional sources. Incidentally, another helpful tool when doing CSS is the EditCSS extension for Mozilla Firefox. It can save some time in trying to get everything looking just right.

AFAIK, the latest builds of Firefox have this bug fixed (so Slashdot should render ok with 1.0 once it's out), but currently (if you want to be nicer to slash's servers) you can change the size instead of refreshing the page to get the correct layout - and if you didn't know, you can do this handily by holding down Ctrl and either pressing '+' followed by a '-', or turning the mouse wheel up and down. Voilá.

Now as to why IE renders Slashdot better, it probably has something to do with this; IE seems to be more tolerant to bad html (whether this is a good thing is a matter of another debate).

Marking up Hilton as <motel> or <celebrity> is all very well. This is what XML is for.

One of the key points behind the semantic web is to define meanings to your meta tags. My system has a <partnumber> tag and so does yours, but that doesn't mean they're the same. I can publish my definition of <partnumber> so that other apps can know how to interpret my partnumbers. Complex definitions can be provided in computer-readable format, which can then be looked up, referenced, shared etc. with other systems.

Take Dublin Core, for example. A standard set of tags to describe document attributes, such as title and author. Why should I write my own <author> tag when I can simply pull-in part of Dublin Core's vocabulary. Not only does that save me (the developer) time, but it means any app that knows about Dublin Core will know what I mean when I say "author". Or, if an app doesn't know about a particular term it can simply go look it up.

Sharing vocabularies is time-saving, but also helps computers process information automatically. Mr Berners-Lee and some colleagues had a good article published in Scientific American a while ago which explains their vision of intelligent software agents doing the sorts of things computers should be doing with the information the web has to offer. Such as automatically adjusting your schedule if your gym's online timetable has changed and your squash game needs to be moved. OK, that's a very basic example, but the point is that although the information needed to do this sort of stuff is already on the web, it is currently only readable by humans.

If anyone is interested in learning more about this stuff then have a look at the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is a foundation technology of the Semantic Web (There's more to it than HTML META tags!). There's a lot of activity involving RDF-based technologies such as OWL, FOAF and the popular RSS.

Marking up Hilton as <motel> or <celebrity> is all very well. This is what XML is for.

One of the key points behind the semantic web is to define meanings to your meta tags. My system has a <partnumber> tag and so does yours, but that doesn't mean they're the same. I can publish my definition of <partnumber> so that other apps can know how to interpret my partnumbers. Complex definitions can be provided in computer-readable format, which can then be looked up, referenced, shared etc. with other systems.

Take Dublin Core, for example. A standard set of tags to describe document attributes, such as title and author. Why should I write my own <author> tag when I can simply pull-in part of Dublin Core's vocabulary. Not only does that save me (the developer) time, but it means any app that knows about Dublin Core will know what I mean when I say "author". Or, if an app doesn't know about a particular term it can simply go look it up.

Sharing vocabularies is time-saving, but also helps computers process information automatically. Mr Berners-Lee and some colleagues had a good article published in Scientific American a while ago which explains their vision of intelligent software agents doing the sorts of things computers should be doing with the information the web has to offer. Such as automatically adjusting your schedule if your gym's online timetable has changed and your squash game needs to be moved. OK, that's a very basic example, but the point is that although the information needed to do this sort of stuff is already on the web, it is currently only readable by humans.

If anyone is interested in learning more about this stuff then have a look at the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is a foundation technology of the Semantic Web (There's more to it than HTML META tags!). There's a lot of activity involving RDF-based technologies such as OWL, FOAF and the popular RSS.

The WWW also has Annotea, to allow for people to submit annotations. Now, you can imagine lots of people having a simple way to rate pages, a rating option could for example be "Supplied metadata are bad/fraudulent", or something like that.

You would first and foremost make decisions based on ratings from people you trust. That is, people who are close to you in your FOAF-based social network.

When every Internet user becomes a reviewer, and people are well connected in a social network, so that there is a review available of most pages, there is going to be a very strong incentive for authors to supply accurate metadata. Think of it as moderation.

Face it, allthough it happens that you stumble upon pr0n involuntarily, the vast majority of pr0n surfers do it on purpose. Pr0n0graphers (this is getting a bit too leet for me...) then will have strong incentive to refrain from such tactics, they will be modded into oblivion anyway, and accurate metadata is going to bring them traffic, since they are modded up by those who actually surf pr0n.

So, unless the goatse guy is a friend of yours, I don't think it is a big worry.

Provided SW becomes a reality that is.

FOAF is a really good start, though, go create it now!

The rest of us call this... GOOGLE.

Google identifies relationships between data using only on the links between pages containing the data.

The Semantic web represents relationships between data based on metadata (i.e. data about data). This is a far more powerful way to describe the meaning of data.

works for me.

Maybe, but that doesn't mean its the best way to accomplish what you are trying to do.

Well, beyond the "knowledge management"-type mumbo jumbo, anyway. Some basic definitions are here, here, and .

PNG can handle a maximum of 16-bit RGBA or 16-bit greyscale (see the IHDR chrunk spec).

PNG already supports arbitrary additional data blocks... no need to break it by adding a new "standard" for them.

See the PNG spec for details.

In my opinion, working with the bare bones of their technology, ALL of it is well thought out, comprehensive and well explained.

They consider all of the difficulties of the problem domain. For instance, see how easy it is in PDF to create changes to an existing document, great for low powered CPUs. Just append the changed object and add on a new footer to the file. 95% of the file retained, which is a lot less expensive than re-generation of the whole file.

I think Adobe will do a good job here and post the specifications ala PDF and Postscript.

Not mentioned in the other comments is the run time hardware cost of saving this Digital Negative. I think Adobe will put effort into making this as friendly to integrated hardware capture as possible. A large portion of this has to be very little re-ordering of data as it comes from the CCD, as these usually require an in memory buffer. This fundamentally changes the nature of the format.

but can [PNG] also save meta-information about that channel, which colour it represents?

Sure, that's the whole point of a chunked format, you can store any metadata you want!

Surely not in any standardised, widely compatible way.

Surely a large group of industry players could quite simply agree on a format, and even get it accepted as a standard chunk?

Parent poster is exactly right. The semantic web is designed exactly for just this kind of thing, and would drastically reduce the amount of computing power needed to do it.

For a good discussion of the semantic web, and why we need to get going and build it, read the relevant chapter in The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I didn't quite understand what Tim Berners-Lee was getting at when he described the semantic web in Weaving the Web. Dertouzos explains it better, I think.

I had an idea earlier this week about broken links. I use Amaya as my primary word processor, and I use hyperlinks to connect related documents. But directory structures change over time as different areas change in importance. For instance, it may have made sence to keep your financial aid status documents in the 'School' folder during the summer, but after the semester begins that folder fills up with lecture notes. Then those lecture notes are partitioned into child folders for separate subjects. Maybe now you want to move your financial aid documents to a child folder called 'Financial Aid'. It would be really nice if the application (or the operating system) kept track of changes to the directory structure and updated the link urls in the documents. Perhaps it could leave a pointer in the old place for a certain amount of time, just in case the change is only temporary.

It shouldn't matter where the document is - on my local machine in a certain folder, on a removable disk, on a network share, or on the Web. Things get trickier when the document is on the web, which is where this technology could help.

Parent poster is exactly right. The semantic web is designed exactly for just this kind of thing, and would drastically reduce the amount of computing power needed to do it.

For a good discussion of the semantic web, and why we need to get going and build it, read the relevant chapter in The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I didn't quite understand what Tim Berners-Lee was getting at when he described the semantic web in Weaving the Web. Dertouzos explains it better, I think.

I had an idea earlier this week about broken links. I use Amaya as my primary word processor, and I use hyperlinks to connect related documents. But directory structures change over time as different areas change in importance. For instance, it may have made sence to keep your financial aid status documents in the 'School' folder during the summer, but after the semester begins that folder fills up with lecture notes. Then those lecture notes are partitioned into child folders for separate subjects. Maybe now you want to move your financial aid documents to a child folder called 'Financial Aid'. It would be really nice if the application (or the operating system) kept track of changes to the directory structure and updated the link urls in the documents. Perhaps it could leave a pointer in the old place for a certain amount of time, just in case the change is only temporary.

It shouldn't matter where the document is - on my local machine in a certain folder, on a removable disk, on a network share, or on the Web. Things get trickier when the document is on the web, which is where this technology could help.

Ideally, cool URIs don't change, but in the real world they do.

If document X moves and the link is invalid, you should be serving an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect and well behaved user agents will update their bookmarks, and well behaved content management systems will update their code. If document X is gone, you should be serving an HTTP 410 Gone.

Ideally, 404 is supposed to mean that the web server has never heard of the file in question before, but in the real world...

That's what the 410 Gone HTTP response header is for. If only admins would use it more...

Just use the W3C's link-checker.

they also need to present their browser as having something that neither firefox nor IE have.

By virtue of its huge central storage capacity and search engine, Google can add features that no other browser easily can.

1. Online storage of favourites and groups
2. Notification when selected favourites pages or sites change
3. Central storage of combined favourites of communities (with notification when favourites are added)
4. Google alerts for communities and online storage of results

It could also, perhaps for a fee, extend blogger.com with additional security features to allow mutli-user creation and editing of documents on line. For this purpose Amaya, an open source browser to create and update documents directly on the Web, might be the browser to emulate or extend.

Google is now spidering and indexing the whole Web. With content management features added to the browser, some of the Web could simply move to Google and cut out all the spidering.

These sys-con web pages are not standards compliant:
W3 validator

You should take a look at slashdot through the W3C markup validator.

Of course, the Slashdot Moderators(tm) don't want you to look at the site through the w3c. That's why you get the 403 forbidden error. However, if you save a page from this site and upload just that html file to w3c, you'll get over a hundred html errors. Try it with this story and you'll see what I'm talking about.

And people wonder why this site doesn't render right on different browsers, sheesh.

Shaggy

p.s. Yes, I know it's easier to bitch and moan than to actually do something about it. But damnit Jim, I'm a bicycle mechanic, not a programmer!

because slashdot redirects the page to a page saying you are banned and then gives reasons. take a look at this http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=( detect+automatically)&ss=1&outline=1&sp=1&noatt=1& No200=1&verbose=1

That's weird. Just for kicks, I entered slashdot and only got an error message. I wonder what's up with that?