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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.

Whereas SVG is only a vector graphics format, it does not handle page layout and the other things required for printed page description.

Image width: 8.5 inches. Image height: 11 inches. What uncertainty remains as to how to layout this SVG Print image onto a printed U.S. Letter size page?

SVG replaces PDF (Acrobat format). SVG plus SMIL replaces SWF..

That's a pretty fair summary, although SVG can be animated without SMIL, using the animation elements. If you add javascript and DOM into the mix you can get interactive applications, like FOAFNaut.

Only part of them. CSS3: Presentation levels. Notice that the people working on this draft are Opera employees. It's some pretty slick stuff, yet its so simple ...

People talk to other people to learn something. The genetic "feel good" of socializing is just positive reinforcement. So if a social network is content-free or too content general, what's the point? Existing internet applications (static web-pages, chatting, etc...) are just as good if not better.

Maybe the major advantage these things bring is in having data model rigorous enough to make them searchable which contains typical fields useful for social networking (friends, enemies, interests, skills, birthday, whatever). But if that's the case, all you'd need to do is define an RDF Schema for this sort of information and add some XML to existing datasets (ie html pages, slashdot profiles, etc.) You don't really need these proprietary solutions.

Just a thought...

Not too many new features? Implementation of CSS3 opacity is a pretty nifty deal. I've been looking forward to it for a long time.

You might want to check out Amaya.

There is only one place most so called "web designers' should be looking and that's W3C, end of story.

All of the XML stuff has changed as well, I found that out while going through the Core PHP, which has been *cough* updated *cough* to cover PHP5. They forgot to mention that they were talking August 2003 PHP5, AKA PHP5 before libxml2.

The nice thing is that it nearly completely models the functions listed in the w3c recomendation for the DOM Level 3 Core, which are also nearly identical to the XML::LibXML module in Perl.

So, IHMO PHP5 = Good, Core PHP 3ed = Bad!

Uh, "...fails to realize...?" MS has been making internationalized and localized software for over a decade, maybe even two decades (when did the Chinese and Japanese versions of MS-DOS come out? Mid-80s, IIRC). I think they are well aware of what it takes.

Speaking of ruby text, did you know that Mozilla still doesn't support the standard HTML <RUBY> tag (unless you download and install a 3rd party extension). IE has supported it for quite some time.

Also, Office already has spelling and grammar checkers for other languages. The English version even comes with French, German, and Spanish proofing tools, and you can get it for many more languages.

No, MS is far ahead of open source products in terms of localization... they're just looking for more ways to get other people to do their work for them.

Writen well, a site should degrade nicely (so the content is still readable, even if the scripted side does not work).

This is NOT hard, esp if you restrict the the dynamic side to mostly CSS, XHTML and W3C DOM compilent (i.e. MSIE, Moz, Opera and Kon).

It's very different than Active Desktop... that was just the idea of letting IE browser windows be part of the Windows Desktop level so that users could have a frequently-refreshed mini-page of content on their desktop.


However, the Active Desktop intiative did result in the development of CDF (W3C Proposal), aka Channel Definition Format, which is likely what the parent poster was talking about.

It's still around, belive it or not. I know that the CBC still uses it for delivering headlines, and I imagine that they're not the only ones.

...there's a good discussion of VoiceXML and various other accessibility enablers by Charles McCathieNevile in this presentation.

It talks quite a bit about RDF and the Semantic Web, too.

hink of it along the lines of IE and HTML; if you don't want to close your tags, say your table td and tr tags, it's fine, the IE browser will do it for you.

According to the HTML 4.01 spec </td> and </tr> tags are optional. So you can code a standards compliant page without them, as long as you declare your doctype properly.

I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve < http://slashdot.org>:

403 Forbidden

Please make sure you have entered the URI correctly.

Nice that you provided the links, so that we can all read the actual guides and articles, even if we can't verify that you are the original author.

oh dear... foolip is spreading 'FUD' ;-)

Slashdot isn't blocking the validator - it's just that foolip's link is broken.

The link tells the w3 validator to have www.slashdot.org validated, but any good /.er knows that the site is actually just slashdot.org.

Here's a fixed link, which shows the w3 validating the site with no "permission denied" because of a bad site name.

• Design Graphics Magazine I'm not sure if it's still in print, but it's Australian, so they might give pointers to some user groups of interest in your area
• CSS Tutorial by W3Schools Something to get you started on CSS
• A List Apart, articles on doing tricky things with CSS
• Eric Meyer's writings. Links to articles and such by the author of ORA's CSS: The Definitive Guide. [read the Web Review articles from 2000 for some of the real power of CSS]
• Learning CSS a list of books and online resources
• Westciv courses on-line courses on CSS, CSS2 and some free resources.

I'm dealing with more vision problems right now, but I've found that viewing a monitor is MUCH more comfortable if you change the colors of your main tools to use black backgrounds with light text, usually green or yellow.

Hear hear! Far easier on the eyes. I use a green-on-black KDE theme all the time, and KDE 3 is now much better and more consistent about its handling of non-standard foreground/background combinations than KDE 2 was.

All good text editors and IDE's let you change the background/text colors.

They certainly should. Unfortunately Eclipse, which I use all the time, does not - but I've logged a feature request and it's being worked on. And a lot of applications which should know better (e.g. Mozilla) don't pick up their theme colours from KDE.

My personal pet peeve is websites which set foreground colours but not background colours or vice versa. Even the specification document for CSS2 fails on this one - it doesn't specify a foreground colour for links, so on my screen the pale green links on the pale blue background are virtually unreadable.

anybrowser.com is not w3c compliant, either.

You are wrong. The HTML specification is very clear on the matter.

to use the URI "http://host/?x=1&y=2" as a linking URI, it must be written <A href="http://host/?x=1&#38;y=2"> or <A href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">.

just a little correction on my post, :target is not a selector it is a pseudo-class http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#target-pseudo

agreed, the problem isn't that it doesn't support all of the css2, it is that it doens't support the elementary stuff, like the diffrent selectors.

how often have had to adjust the markup, adding a bunch of extra classes, when i simply could have used a selector, like Child selectors and Adjacent sibling selectors.

just to show off what one can do with selectors, here is a example i made once chessboard styled table This works perfectly in mozilla, opera, and konq.
There is also some examples with :target a css3 selector if you go to the index of that page, but that is only supported by mozilla.

agreed, the problem isn't that it doesn't support all of the css2, it is that it doens't support the elementary stuff, like the diffrent selectors.

how often have had to adjust the markup, adding a bunch of extra classes, when i simply could have used a selector, like Child selectors and Adjacent sibling selectors.

just to show off what one can do with selectors, here is a example i made once chessboard styled table This works perfectly in mozilla, opera, and konq.
There is also some examples with :target a css3 selector if you go to the index of that page, but that is only supported by mozilla.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .slashdot.org%2F works fine though. You need a trailing /

msie crashes because of the p:first-letter and the em in the first paragraph, (p)(em)text

it probably doesn't know how to handle this, maybe tries to applie the style to the em-tag or something, anyway it takes the easy way out and crashes ;)

One a side note, had that document been a proper xhtml1.1 document, which should have been sent as application/xhtml+xml not as text/html as it is. msie wouldn't have displayed it at all, giving you a download dialog when trying to load it. xhtml media types

The SGML definition of HTML 3.2 declares attributes as CDATA.

Actually, it varies; not all attributes are defined in that way. If you limit your remark to the href attributes of <a> elements, the HTML 4.01 specification defines them to contain CDATA as well. However you are misinterpreting the meaning of CDATA - CDATA includes character entities.

Maybe if you use the correct URL for W3C validation (which is the same you use to access this site) and not http://wwww.slashdot.org it would work (works over here anyway). The W3C validator isn't smart enough to automatically try alternatives if a user can't even enter the correct URL (and I'm thankful for that). Here's the Correct URL.

I have to agree... still a whole lot of errors though, which I certainly didn't expect for this site!

Or try it without the www. as here

Perhaps it's slashdot that needs to be made standards compliant! It would seem that someone doesn't want us to know how compliant it is.

It seems WDG had better luck getting through, but look at all those errors!

It probably wasn't valid html.

Conforming to web standards is very important to an Open Source organisation like /.

telnet slashdot.org http and then send a HTTP POST. Consult RFC 2616 for the details.

The limit of their profit margin tends to infinite, that's the easiest money in the world. There's no other market like this.

The other good news is that the W3C's submission demonstrating that this should have been nullified due to prior art seem to have been listened to.

Why not?
But, it could be just nice to add the RDF descriptor of the choosen licence in order to display it on my FireFox browser using mozCC extension.

"twice as good as View Source"

SVG will never be a replacement for Flash

--
Inkscape is great for SVG!

"By contrast, SVG uses 128 bit variable-length pages, with a modern cubic spline rendering core (see last years SIGGRAPH proceedings for a great paper describing the rendering model). Best of all, it's free software with all the efficiency and security that it brings. If people would just get behind SVG instead of beating the dead horse that is Flash, we wouldn't have to deal with Macromedia's half-hearted "outreach" efforts."

Sigh! I have to go through this every single time.

"Brent Getlin, Macromedia"
"Peter Santangeli, Macromedia"

And of course everyone's whipping boy.

"John Bowler, Microsoft Corporation"
"Tuan Nguyen, Microsoft Corporation"

This is more efficient because the attachment doesn't need to be encoded for mailing...

Actually, if you use a web form to upload the file, it still encodes the file using MIME. But if your browser and server both support gzip it can be compressed - so you're half right.

I hate it when I get pedantic!

I think this may mean that the "Semantic Web" is dead. It never was allowed the time to take off, but an important part of it was to allow computers to make sense out of data, for example having agents roam around and gather facts, and present it to the user any way the user likes. You'd bet if anybody tries this, it will get beaten to the ground by this law at the first attempt, and any subsequent attempts to research or commercialize applications doing this would get into so deep legal problems it will simply not be feasible.

So much for Intellectual Property encouraging innovation.

nobody using WYSIWYG web-design tools really cares what the output looks like, as long as it's valid HTML that looks OK in most browsers.

But that's exactly the problem with Composer. It STILL doesn't generate valid HTML. It's a lot better than it was when Netscape Communicator 4.x was the current "do-everything" suite, but it still isn't good enough, IMO.

If the Mozilla folks can turn the combination of FireFox and Composer into an Amaya that Doesn't Suck(tm) (Amaya currently epitomises the "jack of all trades, master of none" cliche, as it's a mediocre browser and decent WYSIWYG editor), I would be the first to jump all over it.

But I don't think their energies are best spent on the HTML generation side of things. Make the browser absolutely the best in the world, THEN worry about adding stuff to it.

p

There are numerous tools for creating SVG if you're not prepared to roll up your sleeves and bang out the code in a text editor (it's markup, and only slightly more complex than HTML, after all).

Jasc had a pretty good one that I beta-tested a couple of years ago. Used to be called Trajectory, they changed the name to something else, but I don't remember what it is now.

Several mainstream graphics and presentation apps can export to SVG, including OpenOffice.org 1.1 and (believe it or not) MS Visio 2003.

IIRC (not 100% sure, I lost my copy), Adobe Illustrator also has SVG export capability.

Check out the SVG Homepage at W3 for more SVG authoring apps.

DOM-compliant XML-based scaleable images mean that images become part of the data fabric that SOAP is enabling.

Sunday, there was discussion of DIY HVAC wherein hacking the building controls of your own house was discussed. I mentioned numerous cross-industry efforts wherein SOAP (which means XML) was being built into all sorts of embedded systems.

Now self-describing data from the embedded system is nice, but how about an embedded schematic as well? The schematic should have all the characteristics of Openned / Standards based / XML based, . . and be rescaleable for use on PDAs and home PC's. Ideally, it should have an embedded means to link back to the SOAP data on current operating state of the embedded systems.

Hmmm. . . Where can we find a format that meets those characteristics. . .

[Hint: it's not Flash]

Instead of going through the bother of putting up sites and then having to take them down again, you might want to use a robots.txt file to tell search engines not to index your content yet. I know -- off-topic -- but a helpful hint none-the-less.

SVG is lousy at [making animated menus and animated vector-based graphic animations, for which Flash is usually used]. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).

Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation mechanisms. Or you can use DOM:

Using the SVG DOM. [...] Every attribute and style sheet setting is accessible to scripting, and SVG offers a set of additional DOM interfaces to support efficient animation via scripting. As a result, virtually any kind of animation can be achieved. The timer facilities in scripting languages such as ECMAScript can be used to start up and control the animations. [...]

SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.

Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.

As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.

SVG is lousy at [making animated menus and animated vector-based graphic animations, for which Flash is usually used]. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).

Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation mechanisms. Or you can use DOM:

Using the SVG DOM. [...] Every attribute and style sheet setting is accessible to scripting, and SVG offers a set of additional DOM interfaces to support efficient animation via scripting. As a result, virtually any kind of animation can be achieved. The timer facilities in scripting languages such as ECMAScript can be used to start up and control the animations. [...]

SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.

Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.

As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.

SVG is lousy at [making animated menus and animated vector-based graphic animations, for which Flash is usually used]. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).

Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation mechanisms. Or you can use DOM:

Using the SVG DOM. [...] Every attribute and style sheet setting is accessible to scripting, and SVG offers a set of additional DOM interfaces to support efficient animation via scripting. As a result, virtually any kind of animation can be achieved. The timer facilities in scripting languages such as ECMAScript can be used to start up and control the animations. [...]

SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.

Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.

As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.

You're complaining about 6 errors, all of them trivial (except forgetting to close <head>, which is a bit odd).
That's nothing in comparison to the code soup IE has encouraged on the web.
Just for fun, let's try to validate http://microsoft.com

(http://mozilla.org validates just fine, incidentally)

They're shit isn't even valid HTML 4.01 strict. Wankers.

"Web standards stagnating due to MS monopoly"

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .mozilla.org%2Fevents%2Fdev-day-feb-2004%2Fmozilla -futures%2Ftitle.html&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transition al&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29

... umm.. yeah alright..

If you choose to make your own XML document schema, you lose out on the preprepared stylesheets and converters. On the other hand, a schema made for the task at hand is usually easier to use and understand.

As a compromise, you might to check out the progress on XHTML 2.0. It has a syntax not too far removed from the HTML we've all seen before, but 2.0 is closer to the DocBook model of semantics rather than presentation. It is also more likely to be supported by 3rd party clients in the future. (There is already an XHTML 2.0 renderer available for Mozilla.)

Whatever you do, make sure the markup relates to meaning and NOT how it looks. Looks change, but if you don't take care to the meaning/semantics from the beginning, it is prohibitively difficult to put in in later. For example, it's easy to make all annotations and citations red. It's not so cut and dried to change all red text to annotations (when citations or emphasized text may be formatted in red).