Slashdot Mirror

Actually, he reads Slashdot, and he takes for granted that everybody knows what it is, just see the "Hall of Flame" at the end of this article.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the relationship between RDF and Model Theory. Does it really matter to what extent RDF is "driven by model theory"?

I think the RDF Semantics specification was written in a manner illuminated by MT, but the basic design and utility of RDF are not particularly related. They come more from frame systems, semantic nets, and the like; it's a small fragment of first-order logic.

If you'd actually like to engage in productive discussion about RDF or the relevance of the W3C, you might try some of the W3C mailing lists.

(Disclosure: I'm part of the "RDF staff", although we didn't write the specs; mostly the staff just offers support for the members of the Working Groups who do the real work. Of course we do accept some responsibility for problems in the spec, so if you'd care to explain better, I'll listen.)

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the relationship between RDF and Model Theory. Does it really matter to what extent RDF is "driven by model theory"?

I think the RDF Semantics specification was written in a manner illuminated by MT, but the basic design and utility of RDF are not particularly related. They come more from frame systems, semantic nets, and the like; it's a small fragment of first-order logic.

If you'd actually like to engage in productive discussion about RDF or the relevance of the W3C, you might try some of the W3C mailing lists.

(Disclosure: I'm part of the "RDF staff", although we didn't write the specs; mostly the staff just offers support for the members of the Working Groups who do the real work. Of course we do accept some responsibility for problems in the spec, so if you'd care to explain better, I'll listen.)

...but rather the WWW, right here. It's in his 'Kid's Questions' section - you might want to check it out.

Actually, the most interesting thing is that the original proposal by Berners-Lee offers no hint of commercial applications.

E-commerce, or even advertising-based commercial sites like Slashdot, don't get any mention at all.

Yes he does

www.w3.org isn't good enough for you?

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Hey, wide readership is more important than following the W3C Nazis. Who the fuck put them in charge of the net? Screw 'em. I'd prefer to have many readers rather than a few web standards zealots.

DDT on the other hand is definitely dangerous when overused, and it was overused, but it arguably should still have its place today.

DocBook XML and SGML require too much markup...

Another approach is simply to define your own markup language. Since your needs are simple, you probably don't need to validate your documents, so an informal description of a well-formed XML document is all the design you need to do. You'll also need to write transform software that creates HTML or whatever other deviverables you're trying to create. That's easy enough to do in XSLT.

One last suggestion: if you're serious about using markup that separates content and presentation (an attitude I heartily applaud) Slashdot is probably not the best place to get advice. You're inviting criticism and trolls from people who think that TeX, or even "Plain ASCII" is all anybody really needs. Try some of the XML forums, like XML doc

Then there is the OPML and OML duo which provides nice and flexible documents and their outlines.

You could even consider GNML which is a wacky markup language which uses non-letter chars as tags. It tries stay out of your way as much as possible.

I personaly would make a markup language which suited my style using XML and DTD

MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs

Out of curosity, how old are you, and how long have you been using small / personal computers?

Oh, I'd say he's about 49 years old and has been using personal computers since 1981.

The only people who deny that Microsoft is a monopoly are Microsoft itself or its apologists. You can make the argument that the web browser SHOULD be part of the OS - after all, that's what Netscape was thinking at one point, to build a platform on the browser, and Mozilla has a good start in that direction - and you can make arguments against a number of the other cases that lead to the monopoly judgment; but you can't dismiss them all. Microsoft is a monopoly which has illegally leveraged that monopoly to drive competition out of most of the markets they've targeted. Those are the findings of fact produced by Penfield Jackson, a judge who was cherry-picked by MS after they claimed the previous judge, Daniel Sporkin, was biased against them; and then, of course, when Jackson judge ordered a break-up, Microsoft successfully got him dismissed for defending his ruling before the pro-Microsoft business press, helping Microsoft to stall the case long enough for a pro-MS administration to come in and pull the prosecution's fangs - as Jackson actually predicted (see the com.com link above)!

If the monopoly ruling had been used to enforce the imposition of standard formats for a handful of document types, to force MS to release their flagship applications for competing platforms, or best of all to divorce the applications product line from the platform product line via a break-up, we might see for all aspects of computing a degree of integration similar to what the web provides (common protocols that promote and ensure interoperability). Instead, we have hydraulic despotism - the entire world economy is beholden to Bill Gates' whims, because the only way a company can interoperate effectively with its corporate partners is through Microsoft on the desktop, and Microsoft on the desktop doesn't interoperate well with anything other than Microsoft on the network, except where Microsoft's competitors have made heroic efforts toward interoperability.

Don't forget that most of the calendar using world formats its dates as dd/mm/yyyy, not our American system of mm/dd/yyyy. So if you plan on writing software for use outside of the U.S., this would be a really useful piece of code to keep laying around.

Actually, most of the world is following ISO 8601 standard, which says that you should use YYYY-MM-DD instead. The ISO 8601 time format is also recommended by W3C.

That's big talk coming from a man whose home page has twice as many errors as it has lines of HTML. Fifteen errors in seven lines of HTML? You, sir, have a gift.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
XHTML Zealot

378 by my count, although Slashdot (520) doesn't seem to have much to brag about either.

Since it is running on IIS they have to use .asp and probably some custom software.

The back-end language & web server shouldn't matter. You should still be able to generate a standards-compliant page that looks great in modern browsers. Instead, their front page has 366 errors on it.

Now, I'm not one of those people who insists every page has to validate, but this is just sloppy. MSDN, not just Channel 9, reeks of it, too. I suppose one could argue that you can't blame them, as they are Microsoft, so of course they're going to code to their browser, but I don't buy that argument.

talk about throwing stones in glass houses.

What a crappy site. It doesn't render properly with Mozilla/Firefox and as soon I went to the page, I was hit with a bunch of ActiveX controls trying to run. No thanks. Maybe if they want to try to interest other developers in MS, they should NOT REQUIRE MS stuff. The main page has more then 300 HTML errors according to W3C. Come on now. It is not hard to make a little HTML, honest! There is no coding involved. Oh, and this site is .Net. You can see what great standards compliant HTML MS's Web Forms spit out.

I'd suggest that for a lot of UI elements it would actually be better to use a vector-based format like SVG. Although I'm sure MS will use something like XAML (another link).

From the site: "Works seamlessly with Internet Explorer--keep browsing just as you do now"

Uh, I use Mozilla Firefox because it embraces the current standards, especially CSS.

"custom CSS tags within the HTML"

And, most importantly, at least try to go through the system (W3C) before resorting to custom markup such as this. How does this relate to the Semantic Web? Have they gone through the process of presenting this as a new standard or improving upon a standard? I doubt it.

No, they have always been required.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<title&g t; I should be valid</title>
<p>Unless my author screwed up that is</p>

No, they have always been required.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<title&g t; I should be valid</title>
<p>Unless my author screwed up that is</p>

No, they have always been required.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<title&g t; I should be valid</title>
<p>Unless my author screwed up that is</p>

No, they have always been required.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<title&g t; I should be valid</title>
<p>Unless my author screwed up that is</p>

well, your site link validates, and so does mine, so that should be enough to keep everyone entertained for a while doncha think? ;)

Also, one my favorite sites validates, too!

I personally think that web browsers should barf on pages that don't validate.

* No wonder it is blocked; they get failing remarks for their "master development" skillz:

File: Slashdot.htm
Doctype:
Encoding:

I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:

• The HTTP Content-Type field.
• The XML Declaration.
• The HTML "META" element.

And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.

Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.

IANA maintains the list of official names for character sets.

I personally think that web browsers should barf on pages that don't validate.

* No wonder it is blocked; they get failing remarks for their "master development" skillz:

File: Slashdot.htm
Doctype:
Encoding:

I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:

• The HTTP Content-Type field.
• The XML Declaration.
• The HTML "META" element.

And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.

Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.

IANA maintains the list of official names for character sets.

I personally think that web browsers should barf on pages that don't validate.

* No wonder it is blocked; they get failing remarks for their "master development" skillz:

File: Slashdot.htm
Doctype:
Encoding:

I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:

• The HTTP Content-Type field.
• The XML Declaration.
• The HTML "META" element.

And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.

Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.

IANA maintains the list of official names for character sets.

A little help for you

Additionally, font tags, etc always take precidence over style sheets.

No, non-CSS presentation hints have a specificity of zero, and so should never take precedence over stylesheets.

Unless I am reading the date format wrong, and the submitter's car was stolen in the future

Let me introduce you to both European (and most of the non-USA world) date formatting, and more importantly, ISO 8601 standard format for representing dates and times. F.Y.I.

HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because it's so non standardized, and very very sloppy.

HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because it's so non standardized, and very very sloppy.

HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because it's so non standardized, and very very sloppy.

HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because it's so non standardized, and very very sloppy.

Here is an example of a site, and how it looks in an older browser, where the developers claim they are using "web standards" to make a site, and it degrades horribly.

That site uses tables to layout non-tabular content, which is a big css no-no. It also does not validate. Validating is part one of being standards compliant. Following the basic rules of how to appropriately use css is part two. Complying with all the tips from dive into accessibility is part three.

Correctly designed, by someone who knows what they're doing, a css-based site will always degrade gracefully. Always.

FAQ: Styling using the lang attribute

Very interesting! Thanks for the link.

JP

For example: a typographical convention that is used sometimes is to use italic for pieces of text in a foreign language. Which HTML tag should that be?

Sure, use CSS! But if you're short of time/expertise, don't reinvent the wheel! Use the W3C Core Styles.

And if none of those style sheets quite tickles your fancy, you can use one as a base to modify.

Unfortunately, it still doesn't validate!

Google isn't valid HTML either. And they still use an embedded style element rather than a highly-cachable external stylesheet, and still use crap like <body bgcolor=#ffffff...

And very sensitive about it!

I would've thought it obvious that the non-standard feature should never have been implemented to start with.

Besides, MS have shown in the past that they're happy to completely remove completely standard features that have completely legitimate uses rather than just fixing the bug that makes them dangerous, so why should they find removing a nonstandard feature any more of a problem?

Microsoft have cornered the market with a bugridden browser that they have no motivation to improve by bundling it with standard windows - no web developer wants to alienate 95% of their visitors by refusing to support such a broken piece of software, so web developers are stuck in the continual situation of having to work around the bugs in IE rather than using all those cool features that every other browser supports (and have supported for a long time).

SVG native authoring
- Sodipodi (linux)
- Inkscape (linux)
- Sketsa (cross platform/java)
- Evolgraphix XStudio (Windows ???)
- Jasc WebDraw (Windows)

other non native, but export to svg
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe GoLive
- Corel suites
- Scribus (linux)
- etc

viewer
-Adobe SVG Viewer
-Corel SVG Viewer
-Apache Batik (Java)
-Mobiform

SVG library
-librsvg (linux)
-Apache Batik (Java)
-SharpVector (dotNet)

other info on SVG
-http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/

someone care to add?

Holy cow.

I have never heard of HTML-TIME and just looked at the specification. I have now read the entire thing. There is nothing in that entire specification that can't be accomplished (and in all likelihood, better and more flexibly accomplished) by giving Javascript access to a more accurate timer (the same one that HTML+TIME will need to work correctly), a couple of additional properties on reflected movie object, and a Javascript library (where each library could offer different things to different users, instead of enforcing a standard that may or may not meet the user's needs and they'll need a library anyhow).

All of that uselessness and security holes too! If they'd stuck with my solution, they'd only have one method and a couple of attributes to secure instead of an entire massive specification.

SVG Print is a page description language.

SVG Print is a page description language.

I think a better link for SVG would be to http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/, which has news and links to the various specs, instead of linking to the SVG recommendation.

Slightly OT, I suppose, but you can already achieve the getURL() functionality with both Mozilla and IE in plain HTML + JavaScript pages (I don't know about Opera or Konqueror, or any other non-Gecko based browsers). IE exposed an ActiveX object to its script engine called XmlHttpRequest in about version 5.0 or so, and the Mozilla crew have cloned its functionality.

Some marketroids have called this 'inner browsing'.

Check out Microsoft's documentation on the XmlHttpRequest object, or Mozilla's version of the same thing.

Also see this document entitled Using the XML HTTP Request object.

You can also use the DOM-standard createDocument method that takes a URI as an argument if you don't want to or can't use the Microsoft-inspired XmlHttpRequest but this approach only allows GETs and not POSTs, and it forces the return to be XML, whereas the poorly named XmlHttpRequest gives you access to the entire HTTP response so you can read the plain text if you want to.

Ian

SVG is very useful on its own, but having an open alternative to Flash would be even better. SMIL, a W3C Recommended standard for adding timing and animation to things like SVG and XHTML, is that alternative.

The Mozilla team has (wrongly, IMO) decided to leave full SMIL implementation to plugins. However, the W3C has designated a subset of the SMIL 2.0 modules as being suitable for integration with XHTML, which is obviously functionality that belongs in the browser and is already available in IE6.

To keep Mozilla competitive, allow SVG to reach its full potential, and help kill Flash, I'd like to encourage everyone to vote for two Bugzilla bugs:

• XHTML+SMIL support in mozilla
• Implement SVG (SMIL) Animation

If you don't already have a Bugzilla account, you can get one painlessly -- if you use Mozilla you owe it to the community to help direct the project.