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Apparently I looked up the wrong 2advanced the first time. The other guy said flash and I remembered hearing about 2advanced.com and having the page after the entrance show up blank because it expected flash.

I'm not sure what to say when "one of the top webdesign firms in the world" can't even make the front page on their website standards compliant.

Thanks, and thanks too for enlightening me to the outcome of the W3 patent policy debates. I expressed my feelings at the time but lost touch with the issue due to heavy work commitments. It's nice to see the right outcome.

I will also look into donating to the EFF when my credit card arrives.

Cheers!

If you ask me, the more people creating content the better. The web is a collaborate medium after all.

Granted, there's a lot of worthess content out there, but I'd take a truly democratic system over an overly controlled one any day.

So is this an XML based audio format? Wouldn't that waste a lot of bandwidth?

Just in case you're not trolling: no. VoiceXML is a language for writing interactive voice applications.

The only one I've used for a few years now: the WWW Consortium.
Although I did use Webmonkey a few times back in the mid-90's, they haven't really kept up with the latest standards and practices.

WTF?!?!?!!!! MICROSOFT has a patent on STYLE SHEETS?! I guess the PTO never got around to reading this.

A monopoly (be it Microsoft or anybody else) could, through marketing a better product for a period of time (which, like it or not, is what they did with IE), gain effective control over what people refer to as Java, in the same way as they have done with what every webmaster worth his salary refers to as correct HTML; does it look right in IE?

There might be some standards group who think they're defining what Java really is, but whoever has the dominant VM is going to be the one in charge. At the moment that's Sun; they win by default. I imagine they want to keep it that way.

And BTW, why are you complaining about MSXML not generating CRLF? You DO realize CRLF is a Microsoft-ism and not "standard", right?

It may not be standard, but it is permitted by the XML standard, section 2.1.1.

The problem with the internet is that it happened too fast.

Had it have been controlled by the telcos it would have been rolled out slowly and in a considered fashion - of course, we would still be on 9600 baud modems paying $60 per month, but we would also have a micropayment solution built into the infrastructure.

It would be something like the telephone billing system, where I can call a pay-per-minute telephone service and the charges get billed via my phone account.

Now, back to reality, I like the internet the way it is, but a good micropayment system may work if it was charged to the ISP in a similar fashion to my telco nightmare above.

In fact, pay-per-view was considered in HTTP/1.1, which has the response status code 402 Payment Required reserved for future use. Presumably it would work like HTTP authentication, popping up a dialog asking for approval. At that time, (somehow) the cost needs to find its way back to the ISP.

I'm guessing that billing-the-ISP is the hard part, but here's how I'd approach it:

0. The browser requests a pay-per-view page.
1. the server returns 402 Payment Required, plus sends back some response headers for things like Payment-Amount and Payment-Currency.
2. the browser pops up a "payment required" dialog box, similar to the "authentication required" dialog box.
3. the client has a SSL certs signed by the ISP, which provides both the proof that the purchase is OK, and a path to the ISP to charge them.
4. the server connects to the ISP (derives the 'billing server' from a DNS info record, then connects via HTTP using a new HTTP/2.0 method) with the proof of payment.
5. ...
6. money money money!

On the matter of choosing a UI design for Google, it is of course just downright stupid to build any appearance into a website. The markup should be standards compliant and structural. Websites should obviously provide a default set of stylesheets and images, but the user should be able to apply any stylesheet they want. In the world envisioned by the W3C, there's nothing stopping you from applying any appearance you want to the web, rather than the other way around.

Because It isn't.

See?

Because It isn't.

See?

Appendix A of this document has some Usenet postings from over a decade ago discussing who came up with the concept of Virtual Desktops.

It looks like the first virtual window manager for X was developed sometime between 1988 and 1990

This is interesting considering Google is not even W3C compliant. I guess when your on top you don't follow rules, you make them.

This is no big deal. Unless you have configured your browser in a special way, it will gladly give out the URL of the page you were coming from to the page you are going to.

The HTTP 1.1 standard includes this "referrer" statement in the headers of http. Following the direct link you posted, and watching mozilla discuss with the server through the mozilla module Live HTTP Headers, you can see your browser gives out this information:

Referer: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 2/25/0857235&mode=nested

I put more emphasis on function, he was geared more towards form

That's the fine balance you must find when designing for the web, and it's easy to go either way these days, especially with the numerous approaches to designing a web site. In the end, you just have to find something you're comfortable with and you should know what is possible and what is not. This may be beyond the scope of the discussion but I think that it's also important to note that CSS, though excellent in its presentational capabilities, is not standard across all browsers. Not all browsers follow the W3 CSS recommendation very closely and so pages don't always render as expected (preview out your CSS styles in several browsers before integrating the code into your main design, you'll save yourself a lot of pain!). That being said, even if you prototype from a WYSIWYG, you may not always GWYS :)

Come one. This is Slashdot after all. Since when have missing tags been a problem around here?

It seems the author of the article wished to place emphasis on certain words in the article. I contend that he went about achieving his end with the incorrect means.

HTML has provided authors with a means of deliniating emphasized content since version 2.0 and this means has not been depricated since.

The following is taken from RFC 1866:

5.7.1.3. Emphasis: EM

The <EM> element indicates an emphasized phrase, typically
rendered as italics. For example:

A singular subject <em>always</em> takes a singular verb.

This is the best way for authors to indicate emphasized content because user agents may then style the content according to a stylesheet. For example, a user agent may perform a text transform to all capitals (which would achieve the effect he created), boldface the content, or raise the volume of the content (for an aural browser).

It should be noted that Slashdot is written in accordance with the HTML 3.2 Reccomendation from the W3. Comments, since they are displayed under this doctype, should follow spec.

I don't see it. What's to keep them from implementing a broken form of this (or sabotaging it in some way) even though they're a part of it?

It's not like they haven't done it before:
MS stalls IPv6 progress
Microsoft missing browser standards (and they are a member of the W3C)

We all know how they are with standards.

And I'd only just figured out how to do text shadows today!

don't be to attached to that property ;)
its has been droped from the css2.1 specs. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html#q24

for a second there i thought they had a patent on CSS

People say OS X is the first unix desktop-friendly unix(ie, no command-line necessary), and they're dead wrong- SGI had them beat by almost ten years with Irix.

You're both wrong. Ask Tim B-L.

IANAL but mabe the W3c and the SGML Editorial Review Board can sue for infringeing intellectual property?

Personaly I'm sick of the copyright and digital media legalities, can't everyone else see that art in any form is naturaly free? You cannot stop hearing, seeing, feeling, tasteing, or smelling without killing or mangleing people. So should we be persecuted for recreating what we see or hear?
How about what we taste? Can I not alter your recipies? Can I not use your discovery of buttered bread to create butter toasted sandwitches with a toothpick in it? This is what copyright does. Its stoopid to restrict our own evolution of thoughts, ideas, and progress because we copy each other.
I want to patent speach, a method of chewing food, wipeing of ass' with tp, grooming lawns, and of course thinking in monotone.
Fuck copyrights, I love art but please if I create something copy it if you like, If I don't want you copying it tuff shit I shouldn't have exposed it to the public.

The HTML 4.0 specification, Section 18, includes examples of including scripts in JavaScript, VBScript, and TCL in a an HTML document.

The definition of prior art must not include HTML. Sad. I'm not sure what is original or non intuitive about this. Jeesh.

I usually recommend strict,yes. But if one have an an exception like this of course you can use Transitional. Usually there shouldn't be any need for a Transitional doctype. (probably cause i'm a bit fed up by messy code ;) )

And instead of value, I think one wants you to use Counters in css. Of course currently one browser is supporting counters in css.

Some example of counters.
www.html-world.de(translated by google)
www.w3schools.com counter-reset
www.w3schools.com counter-increment

I'm also aware of the problems with xhtml, the reason i only said strict, not 4.01 strict or xhtml 1.0 strict. I believe it should be up to yourself to deside which is the best suited for you. But of course there is always a bunch of people jumping the bandwagon. As it is now xhtml1.0 may be sent as text/html http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ Though i have seen very often pages that is supposedly in xhtml1.1, but sent as text/html. When confronted most of the people that made these pages have no clue what the document should be delivered as. they just think its cool to use the latest doctype. Espesially fun when you know these people use MSIE ;) (MSIE which open a download dialog, when it tries to open a document sent as application/xhtml+xml)

One could use this apache mod_rewrite described at greytower.net but it really doesn't solve the problem, but it allows the document to be opened in MSIE.

I usually recommend strict,yes. But if one have an an exception like this of course you can use Transitional. Usually there shouldn't be any need for a Transitional doctype. (probably cause i'm a bit fed up by messy code ;) )

And instead of value, I think one wants you to use Counters in css. Of course currently one browser is supporting counters in css.

Some example of counters.
www.html-world.de(translated by google)
www.w3schools.com counter-reset
www.w3schools.com counter-increment

I'm also aware of the problems with xhtml, the reason i only said strict, not 4.01 strict or xhtml 1.0 strict. I believe it should be up to yourself to deside which is the best suited for you. But of course there is always a bunch of people jumping the bandwagon. As it is now xhtml1.0 may be sent as text/html http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ Though i have seen very often pages that is supposedly in xhtml1.1, but sent as text/html. When confronted most of the people that made these pages have no clue what the document should be delivered as. they just think its cool to use the latest doctype. Espesially fun when you know these people use MSIE ;) (MSIE which open a download dialog, when it tries to open a document sent as application/xhtml+xml)

One could use this apache mod_rewrite described at greytower.net but it really doesn't solve the problem, but it allows the document to be opened in MSIE.

So just use the validator.

"Best viewed with..." ads are evil, even if the browser you're supporting is great. People should be coding according to the standard because the web exists to present information, not tell you what you should be running. I prefer the any browser and W3 logos.

What you might want to do instead, is to have a 'tested with' list somewhere on your page, which lists the browsers you tested your page with. It shows that you take your work seriously, and mentions a lot of browsers people might want to try.

Code to the standards, and make sure your clients realize that even though "everybody" uses IE, it is a relic, essentially unchanged since version 5.0, released in March 1999. More importantly, IE still has poor support for W3C recommendations that existed for years prior to version 5.0. These things make sites harder to implement, take longer, and therefore will cost more. Your clients will understand that.

Evangelize standards compliant browsers, both for your clients and for the users on their sites. Web developers are the only people who can drive these changes in the general public.

By the way, I do xhtml 1.1 strict, no tables.

Then either you're serving your pages with the wrong MIME type, or they can't be seen in IE at all.

You're not supposed to serve XHTML 1.1 as text/html: you should use application/xhtml+xml. See the W3C's XHTML Media Types. If you're labelling your XHTML 1.1 as text/html, then your browser isn't treating it as XML (note that Mozilla is using Quirks mode, for instance).

Snag is, Internet Exploder (to IE6SP1) doesn't know what to do with application/xhtml+xml, even though there's been a built-in XML parser since IE5, and application/xhtml+xml was defined in RFC 3236 over 2 years ago (and was presumably floating around the standards track for some months before that). But don't worry: just remember that Internet Explorer 6 SP1 gives you the freedom to experience the best of the Internet. At least, that's what it says on the box.

Assuming you're not prepared to be held hostage to the Great Beast, the best workaround at the moment seems to be to use Apache's content negotiation (MultiViews) to lie to IE (and anything else that doesn't know about application/xhtml+xml) that you're giving it text/html.

There's more on this here and here.

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?

I sure hope not.

XHTML sent as text/xml is unsupported by 95% of the browser market. Sending XHTML as text/html works in many cases, but is an even worse idea because agents that XHTML as HTML wind up interpreting something that is neither correct XHTML or HTML.

On the other hand, there's little wrong with HTML 4.01.

eventSherpa is cool. I happened upon this one day while searching for calendar applications.

We need more user-facing semWeb apps like this. The data is now getting out there in a machine-readable format. This opens up lots of cool possibilities for "personal agents" and other things which thrive in a structured environment.

Personally I find it hard to work with RDF/XML since it can get kind of unreadable. I've found this primer on n3 helpful. n3 is a simpler way to write RDF, which makes the triple structure a little more obvious.

A fun place to start in RDF is making a foaf page. Foaf is the friend of a friend vocabulary. If you search for foaf in google you should find stuff to help you start with it. This lets you track things like degrees of seperation between people.

You can write OWL markup that describes the content of your webpage, but this is somewhat harder to do (there are some graphical tools that would help), and less useful right now. There aren't many tools that make use of/display random OWL markup associated with a web page.

More useful for a small webpage might be including dublin core metadata (should have no problem searching for their homepage either) about the author, title, etc. of each page. The dublin core initiative provides info about how to do this.

See the OWL Faq
It says: Q. What does the acronym "OWL" stand for?
A. Actually, OWL is not a real acronym. The language started out as the "Web Ontology Language" but the Working Group disliked the acronym "WOL." We decided to call it OWL. The Working Group became more comfortable with this decision when one of the members pointed out the following justification for this decision from the noted ontologist A.A. Milne who, in his influential book "Winnie the Pooh" stated of the wise character OWL:
"He could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn't Wednesday..."
nice to see a working group with a sense of humor...

The w3c also has a list of projects that use RDF. Some of them seem a bit academic, but one that looks particularly cool is eventSherpa - a semantic calendaring application that lets you publish and subscribe to RDF calendars. The FOAF project has also been gaining steam as Typepad and others join the movement.

The OWL sense of "ontology" is the second sense, if you read "theory" in the formal (computer science/mathematical logic) sense.

That is, an OWL ontology tells readers (especially computers) what kinds of things exist and what kinds of relationships they can have to each other.

Some of the OWL specs are actually pretty readable. Try starting with the OWL Overview. (Others, like OWL Semantics, are... more challenging.)

Okay, I thought those were relatively pleasant reads, which can be a plus. (And I wanted to say something fast, before slashdot buried any response I might make...)

My actual response at the time is brief and chatty. The response from Dan Brickley is also short and sweet. Neither of us felt it was worth the time to reply point-by-point.

The "misquoting" is to suggest that my "how you buy a book on the Semantic Web" sketch should possibly cause Jeff Bezos to lose sleep. I was trying to explain an experimental protocol in a way I hoped my grandmother could understand (seriously!) and Shirky thinks I'm sketching out Amazon's doom? I don't expect the Semantic Web to doom anyone but folks who want to keep data exchange laborious.

Slashdot is unlikely to follow w3c standards as it does not believe in them.

A lot of RDF out there is in FOAF and RSS 1.0 vocabularies. Increasingly, people use to link RDF files, which makes it possible to have RDF crawlers ("scutters") harvest RDF from the web. I have an RDF aggregator service running that crawls the semantic web. There's a lot of useless broken RDF out there, so if you put RDF on your web site please use W3C's RDF Validator to check for valid RDF.

RDF is actually quite usefull and is used when making extensions for FireFox/Mozilla among other things. Be sure to check out the RDF validator here as it can save you time.

It will be very interesting to see how RDF/XUL stands up against XAML.

....that is, the Ontological Web Language, you might be interested in SemWebCentral, a new project hosting site for Semantic Web projects that just opened up.

Many of the tools from the DAML project have already moved over to SemWebCentral; it's definitely worth a look.

There are standards.

One problem is that CRTs lose brightness as they age. Eventually you squeeze the dynamic range when you compensate by turning the brightness knob up.

A good place to look at some code for this is cpercep.c in the gimp source code. I'm not sure if the gimp even uses this code (yet), but it's got a lot of the functions and algorithms to do perceptual colorspace transformations taking into account gamma and color temperature of the display device.

• Although this revision was partially driven by IBM (they needed some changes to do XML in EBCDIC, there are other problems that people wanted to address. ERH seems to think this is all a case of IBM throwing its weight around -- which is just not true.

• ERH blames this hassle over an "obsolete" coding on IBM's corporate arrogance. In this, he follows the common wisdom that IBM just ignored the whole EBCDIC/ASCII issue until the PC revolution made a switch to standard character sets unavoidable. I actually believed this stuff myself, until I stumbled onto the real story. Which is that ASCII (which was invented at IBM!) was supposed to be the standard for IBM mainframes, but a series of bureaucratic screwups and bad decisions prevented this from happening.

  Yeah, IBM, should have made the change anyway. But we all how hard it is to change a technical direction once a lot of effort has been put into it. Look at the groddy UI at Slashdot. Look at all the web presence providers (including mine!) who won't upgrade to a taint-safe version of Perl because it would break too much of their code. The examples are endless. You may not sympathize, but you damn well should understand.

• If you read the 1.1 spec carefully (I recommend the version with highlighted revisions) you'll realize that 1.1 is in no way a replacement for 1.0. People with a lot of 1.0-compliant XML and who don't need to read any 1.1-compliant XML can simply ignore the new spec, if they choose. The 1.1 spec very clearly states that nothing has changed in terms of what parsers should and should not do with XML 1.0. Provided, of course, people remembered to head all their XML files with the mandatory processing instruction:

  <?xml version="1.0"?>

  And if you've read ERH's books, you know to do that!

Most people haven't even figured out how to make a page look good in more than one browser.

See the Any Browser Campaign.

[And I don't mean 'detect what browser they're using, and serve them a page that's specially tailored to their browser', I mean making a single page that is written to the standards, and doesn't look like crap when some new unknown browser renders it]

We know JavaScript isn't good for 'Any Browser', as there are browsers that don't support it -- and it's even frowned upon by the WAI

Most people haven't even figured out how to make a page look good in more than one browser.

See the Any Browser Campaign.

[And I don't mean 'detect what browser they're using, and serve them a page that's specially tailored to their browser', I mean making a single page that is written to the standards, and doesn't look like crap when some new unknown browser renders it]

We know JavaScript isn't good for 'Any Browser', as there are browsers that don't support it -- and it's even frowned upon by the WAI

You're right, that valuable brand recognition is damaged by name changes.

But there were enough problems with the Firebird moniker to justify the name change. And, arguably, with bare single digit percentage market penetration, it's still early in the game; name changes aren't as such a big deal to the party faithful.

A really important step to promote the growth of firefox might be overlooked: their little button logos available for you to put on your web site.

As a responsible web site maintainer, these buttons can go alongside some previously collected good button merit badges such as

1. W3C complaince with standards HTML 4, CSS, XHTML 1, MathML, SVG, etc.
2. works best with any browser

You're right, that valuable brand recognition is damaged by name changes.

But there were enough problems with the Firebird moniker to justify the name change. And, arguably, with bare single digit percentage market penetration, it's still early in the game; name changes aren't as such a big deal to the party faithful.

A really important step to promote the growth of firefox might be overlooked: their little button logos available for you to put on your web site.

As a responsible web site maintainer, these buttons can go alongside some previously collected good button merit badges such as

1. W3C complaince with standards HTML 4, CSS, XHTML 1, MathML, SVG, etc.
2. works best with any browser

If it validates, there is absolutely no reason it shouldn't work in browser A, B and C, as long as the browsers are properly standards-compliant as well.