Slashdot Mirror

Agreed.

Instead, that course should concentrate encapsulation and presentation of data intended for human consumption. The course should open up with a primer on XML syntax and structure. They should stress that languages like XML, XHTML, and HTML are designed to tell machines things that humans would understand from presentation. CSS is should be introduced, with basic to intermediate layout and presentation techniques, especially linking, just so the class understands that their output doesn't have to look like crap, and structure comes first. ECMA Script (Javascript) should be covered in a different class, but it's structural placement and some examples should be touched upon.

A second followup course should deal with ECMA Script, introduce HTML Forms briefly as an introduction to XForms, and hit upon more server-side concepts like mod_rewrite, cool URLs, smarter addresses, etc. While the first course concentrates on form and "what", this course focuses on execution and "how".

Good layout techniques with CSS should be covered in a more artsy course dedicated to dynamic presentation. That means reflow, not gifpix. This course will cover concepts concepts leaning towards good UI design: Why shouldn't you remove underlines from links lightly? It should spend a lot of time on text layout: optimal widths (why they're optimal), whitespace, line height, kerning, serifs, distraction (animation). Color coordination should be covered. Basically, this is a layout and design course, not a course on CSS syntax. Concepts learned should be applicable to other style sheet languages. Students should be encouraged to design right before introducing wrong hacks for IE.

Heh. Must suck to have an ugly, Mac-loving wife when you're a Windows-loving webmaster whose website doesn't validate.

People pass around Word documents because its what they know how to do. I know people who put even very short memos in Word files, then attach them to email to distribute them!

We've been talking about the paperless office for a couple of decades now, but we're actually further away from it than we've ever been -- PCs seem to create new kinds of paperwork. If we're ever going to change that, we need to get away from word processor formats (Word, FrameMaker, etc.) and page description languages (PDF, PostScript TeX) that simply reproduce the physical page on a computer screen. That means training people to change their way of thinking and stop thinking purely in terms of how a document looks. It's more imporant how a document is structured. And yeah, I'm talking the XML Party Line.

Oddly enough, Microsoft seems to be moving precisely to this model -- all the Office 2003 apps emphasize using XML to share information instead of the traditional RTF. When I went to the Office 2003 launch D&S show, one of the demos had a user writing a purchase order in MS Word. But the document wasn't DOC or RTF or even HTML -- it was an XML purchase order document type, defined in an XML Schema. Violations of the schema were flagged with those little squiggles, like for grammar and spelling errors.

This is cool because it allows people to migrate to XML document types without changing their tool set. Of course, you can't just sit down and create a random XML document -- an XML expert has to have designed the workflow, programmed the business logic, and defined the document types.

I have to wonder if Microsoft sees the full implications of this approach. I rather doubt it. Because eliminating the messiness of Microsoft proprietary formats also eliminates the need to standardize on Microsoft tools. Given a well-designed schema, that PO could have been written in any XML editor.

I especially don't think that Redmond has considered that schemas can describe ordinary word processor files too, provided only that the format is well-structured and well-documented. So if you were to just tell all your Word users to use a schema that defines the XML document type used by a competing product, then there's no longer any format-gap between the two products.

If these things happen, Microsoft's could blunder away from OS dominance in much the same way they blundered into it!

It would be nice if, in parallel to the Internet, another network was developed to hold only symantically organized knowledge. That network would be free of marketing and commercial business, and would ostensibly be the largest repository of organized knowledge in the planet. Think Internet2, based entirely in XML.

Yeah, it would be nice. It would also be nice if there weren't spammers or PageRank hijackers or any of the myriad problems with the current Web. The difficulty isn't that it's undesirable to have a clean complete net, it's that there's no way to enforce clarity or completeness. People do try to build these understandable information networks, but you'll always be hampered by the limited number of people who are willing to spend the time and effort to mark up their pages.

XML simply isn't enough. Structure != Meaning. Meaning must be inserted somewhere by someone. Trying to interpret HTML/natural language to form structured documents is a daunting task. If you want real meaning then the data needs to be described or translated into a meaningful form like RDF (yes represented by xml) when it is created so that intellegent agents such as this can *understand* the data. RDF uses triples (thing graphs) to describe relationships making use of URIs: Subject--Predicate--Object ...etc. Now think about how to merge all this information - with well formed rules RDF documents merge great: with traditional structured xml the merged docs would not be well-formed. Now they can be and XML can be generated for standard xml rendering. Take a look at the Semantic Web

XML simply isn't enough. Structure != Meaning. Meaning must be inserted somewhere by someone. Trying to interpret HTML/natural language to form structured documents is a daunting task. If you want real meaning then the data needs to be described or translated into a meaningful form like RDF (yes represented by xml) when it is created so that intellegent agents such as this can *understand* the data. RDF uses triples (thing graphs) to describe relationships making use of URIs: Subject--Predicate--Object ...etc. Now think about how to merge all this information - with well formed rules RDF documents merge great: with traditional structured xml the merged docs would not be well-formed. Now they can be and XML can be generated for standard xml rendering. Take a look at the Semantic Web

Um... No, XML is based on the HTML model.

no, XML is based on the SGML model. HTML too, with exceptions to some SGML features. more info: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html

If you want to learn more about semantic webs and Friend Of A Friend systems (and Enemy Of An Enemy too, no doubt), then starting points would be FOAF Vocabulary Specification and RDF Interest Group You don't always need a central database for this, but it helps.

Instead, you were just being pedantic.

Guilty as charged, m'lud! I am indeed a pedant. That's why I take pathetic glee in pointing out that, on your resume, you claim to be an expert at HTML; yet the very same resume fails to pass the W3C HTML validator without errors. You're not exactly trying hard to sell your talent, are you?

Read this guide and use this site then come back and post. Sheesh.

w3schools.com is hardly the be-all end-all authority on HTML semantics. In fact, I'd say that a website that (as of 2004-01-09) uses tables for layout and <b> for navigation bar heading text wouldn't know what "semantic web" meant if it reared up and bit them in the you-know-where. (Go ahead, view the source.) The disclaimer on their homepage states, "W3Schools is for training only. We do not warrant the correctness of the content. The risk of using it remains entirely with the user." I'd listen to their disclaimer (and homepage joke-of-the-day) much more than their markup advice.

Come on: A random link does not an argument make. I've seen horrible HTML tutorials "explain" how <blockquote> is used to indent text and <h1>, <h2>, et al are good for making text bigger and smaller. If "somebody wrote it on the Internet" links constitute an argument, though, I'd say that Web Design Group offers a much more reliable and better-thought explanation of <abbr> and <acronym>.

Also, note that the W3's homepage itself uses <abbr> and <acronym> as I described, with the incomprehensible exception of their copyright-footer link to the name of the W3 itself. Their entire homepage navbar marks up abbreviations such as "HTML", "CSS", and "XMLP" using <abbr> while reserving <acronym> for pronounceable formulations such as "SMIL" and "SOAP". (Again: View the source.) I'd say that if any page has been extensively tested using a diverse spectrum of user-agents (including aural browsers and experimental semantic web applications), the W3's homepage is probably the benchmark to be exceeded.

As for the formal specs and other documentation (which really ought to be referenced here), I'm way too lazy to dig through them for a random /. argument. But that's ok, since another poster already took a decent crack at it. :-)

But the central issue remains: Assuming that <abbr> and <acronym> are to be used as you say, they're semantically indistinguishable and therefore redundant. I say that each has its own correct discrete usage. <acronym> is for acronyms, which are pronounceable by definition and often words in and of themselves (e.g., Web Design Group's example of "radar"). <abbr> is for other abbreviations, including unpronounceable initialisms, which cannot be pronounced or used as whole words in their own right. This is an important practical distinction for Web robots and aural browsers.

HTH.

Unfortunately the W3C's sites seem to be ambiguous about this. However, somewhere it does state that ACRONYM is for pronouncable acronyms and ABBR is for unpronouncable acronyms and abbveviations (although I can't find the link to back this up). They probably could've made this less confusing, but they didn't.

At http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#edef-A CRONYM where they actually define the standard, they give WWW as an example for ABBR.

Again, I'm just saying it's ambiguous, I'm not trying to start a flamewar.

Am I seeing this correctly? (screenshot #6 Does The GIMP 2.0 support SVG? HALLELUJAH!!! That's fantastic! I Googled around and found this article (translated from German).

This is wonderful, but a bit strange. I once inquired around about why The GIMP was so lacking in vector art tools. Why wasn't there a tool for making basic shapes, for instance? The answer I found (by Googling around) was that The GIMP is based on the old Unix philosphy, which focuses on small, reusable components. Designing in this way made components highly portable, and separated the work of creating a GUI from the core work. The GIMP did not support vector art because that was the job of a vector art authoring tool. The GIMP was a rastor image manipulation tool. This answer didn't satisfy me, because the GIMP itself is a huge conglomerate of tools, some of which are hardly related. The GIMP is the GUI wrapper which coordinates all of the little components (which are individually accessible through script-fu). So why insist that it was only for rastor image manipulations?

OpenOffice.org Draw can import/export SVG, but I don't like the interface very well. I prefer the spartan interface of a text editor for SVG. :) But I'd be willing ot try a GIMP tool.

There was a GNU project (which apparently failed) that was trying to create a vector art authoring tool. I can't remember the name of it.

website : CERN (Switzerland)
broadband : ??? ADSL - Alcatel (France)
telephone : Bell (Canada)
Big Mac : who gives a shit (USA)

Just love those crappy posts who seem to score on Slashdot... you just have to wonder what they are smoking !

I'll give you the web. I was clearly wrong. I had conflated invention of the graphical web browser (US) with invention of the web.

I was right about US companies (AT&T and Time-Warner) coming up with broadband, however. Likewise Alexander Graham Bell was a US citizen and a patriot, so you are wrong to attribute him to Canada. Someone else expounded on this better than I could in this thread.

But hey, go invent something in your country and make them proud! That is what this is all about anyway.

Argh. this link. I really oughtta hit preview more; the gods of HTML clearly didn't like my little snipe, and decided that I needed to have my post incorrectly presented because of a typo to punish me.

Don't Panic.

They still screwed up the html.

I prefer to believe in the visionary Tim Berners Lee with it's Semantic Web ideas. There are lot's of works in that direction. When we could do searches with semantics, the results would be exponentially better. Until them, my bid is in Google. How many time yet? Ten years?

I believe that, coming out of the whole NeXT tradition that invented the web browser, OmniWeb used a real SGML engine to parse the HTML applications that are called web pages, as you could tell by reading the status bar as pages loaded (SGMLObject parsing, or something; I've since updated to OW 4.5, with WebCore). True, this engine had trouble with many pages--that is, it did not accept as liberally as it could have--but I think that the twists and contortions that people put HTML through would have made even Jon Postel hang his head in shame.

Omniweb 4.5 uses the WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple - the same technology used in Safari for rendering web pages.

Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?

There's a lesson here for those of us stuck with Gecko, Opera, or the mysterious combination of undocumented engines that is Internet Explorer. You want standardization, you gotta have open-source components. W3C puts a lot of work in defining standards for HTML, CSS, and SVG. These standards have a lot of unbelievably cool features, with much more in the pipe. But nobody can use most of them, because they're not widely implemented. What's the point of working so hard to create good standards if nobody uses them?

We need a reference web engine that will drive standards-based web development, just as the reference implementation of Java, with all its flaws, drove the adoption of the Java platform. Microsoft probably wouldn't use it, but it would provide some small pressure for them to be more standards compliant. W3C could develop such a comonent from scratch, or they could use Gecko; but KHTML seems to have the code base that's closest to a real tipping point.

Omniweb 4.5 uses the WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple - the same technology used in Safari for rendering web pages.

Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?

There's a lesson here for those of us stuck with Gecko, Opera, or the mysterious combination of undocumented engines that is Internet Explorer. You want standardization, you gotta have open-source components. W3C puts a lot of work in defining standards for HTML, CSS, and SVG. These standards have a lot of unbelievably cool features, with much more in the pipe. But nobody can use most of them, because they're not widely implemented. What's the point of working so hard to create good standards if nobody uses them?

We need a reference web engine that will drive standards-based web development, just as the reference implementation of Java, with all its flaws, drove the adoption of the Java platform. Microsoft probably wouldn't use it, but it would provide some small pressure for them to be more standards compliant. W3C could develop such a comonent from scratch, or they could use Gecko; but KHTML seems to have the code base that's closest to a real tipping point.

Omniweb 4.5 uses the WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple - the same technology used in Safari for rendering web pages.

Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?

There's a lesson here for those of us stuck with Gecko, Opera, or the mysterious combination of undocumented engines that is Internet Explorer. You want standardization, you gotta have open-source components. W3C puts a lot of work in defining standards for HTML, CSS, and SVG. These standards have a lot of unbelievably cool features, with much more in the pipe. But nobody can use most of them, because they're not widely implemented. What's the point of working so hard to create good standards if nobody uses them?

We need a reference web engine that will drive standards-based web development, just as the reference implementation of Java, with all its flaws, drove the adoption of the Java platform. Microsoft probably wouldn't use it, but it would provide some small pressure for them to be more standards compliant. W3C could develop such a comonent from scratch, or they could use Gecko; but KHTML seems to have the code base that's closest to a real tipping point.

Here are some links. See esp. the REST Wiki:
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Learning to REST
Bitworking - The Well-Formed Web - REST
Debate foams over SOAP 1.2 - REST versus SOAP
How To Convert Rpc To Rest
http://www.xfront.com/ - REST Tutorial, XML et al - Roger Costello's site
ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - XML, Web Services, and the REST Architecture
Mark Baker, Tech Curmudgeon - REST - Transport, transfer and coordination in HTTP
O'Reilly Network: REST vs. SOAP at Amazon [June 24, 2003]
Paul Prescod's REST Resources
Reliable delivery in HTTP - REST
REST A Web-Centric Approach to State Transition - Paul Prescod
REST could burst SOAP's bubble - Hoobler
REST Faq - Alternative to SOAP XML
REST SlideShow: Representational State Transfer: An Architectural Style for Distributed Hypermedia Interaction
REST wiki - Representational State Transfer - alternative to SOAP XML
rest-discuss Message 2330 - ROP vs RPC vs OOP pt 1
Roots of REST - SOAP Debate - Paul Prescod Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages :Message 1314 of 1646
Roy T. Fielding - REST Architect
Sean McGrath BLOG - REST proponent
W3C mailing-list search service on REST
Why you should not use RPC for GET
xml-dev - Re: [xml-dev] SOAP-RPC and REST and security
XML.com: In a Lather About Security - SOAP security vs REST security
Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages : 2371-2428 of 2428

W3 validator

'nuff said.
(you may need to try a few times if the validator keeps reporting a 403)

The development team focused mainly on minor technical and legalistic issues like the naming of firebird, code clean up etc.
But they failed completely to incoperate the rising new mark-up technologies like XML-Signature or WebCGM.
If this development continues this year, Mozilla might lose it's technical lead to IE or Opera. And open source software might be again only the second winner.

And even if it does rule out XML per se, what's wrong with binary XML?

Interesting that you put it that way. Berners-Lee's vision for "Intuitive Hypertext Editing" is very similar to wiki technology. However where wikis work by shoehorning editing into [rapidly aging] browser technology, TBL envisions a user agent that doesn't differentiate between browsing and editing. In other words, every page you view is editable by the user and changes are sent back to the server via PUT or POST.

There's a mozilla extension that moves in this direction but I can't quite pull it out of my brain at the moment...

Mosaic was written by UIUC. Berners-Lee's original browser was WWW (source) and was written for NeXT (that's right: the 0 node of the web was a NeXTBox).

Mosaic was written by UIUC. Berners-Lee's original browser was WWW (source) and was written for NeXT (that's right: the 0 node of the web was a NeXTBox).

I'm glad to see TBL get some more recognition. The original concepts behind html and semantic markup were well designed for their time and deserve more recognition. 99% of web designers today seem to have no idea why they should be using 'em' instead of 'b' tags, nor do many seem to even care about semantics and platform neutral markup. TBL and his semantic web ideas need all the recognition they can get.

Having said the above, let me note that I just tracked down the W3C document XForms for HTML Authors. This document is another description of how to use XForms: I found it much easier to read than the text reviewed here.

A lot of old mum/dad user's are still using AOL3, with IE3/4 who cant display XHTML

You can find a tutorial on XForms here.

You can find a tutorial on XForms here.

Validate your css too. If you're not using css, hello to you from the 21st century.

And also, improve accessibility. The validator only checks whether your html complies with the standards, but doesn't guarantee usability. Implementing these relatively simple (albeit numerous) accessibility guidelines ensures your site will work correctly in just about every browsing tool on the platform, whether it be lynx, jaws (browser for the blind), or the entire safari.

He even goes so far as to mention that Index Server will search your website: but fails to mention that it does full text searching on your entire file system.

Unfortunately his site (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/) seems to be sufficiently disorganized that I have trouble finding out what his real points are, or whether he's addressed all of the issues: for example, I saw no mention of the Semantic Web if his concern is searchability on web documents.

As a side note, MS SQL is going more and more toward XML, as is the whole .NET framework. This results in richer (read: fatter) data but it does mean that you can store whatever metadata you want along with it.

Well, especially when it's been slashdotted. Here's a google cache hit to part of his writings.

I agree that it doesn't look to be easy to search around, at least when all you have is an URL to go on (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/30 /OnSearchTOC) and Google to find reachable material. I'm also not too sure about using dates as folder names but that's just a personal thing: I think Tim Berners Lee recommended it at one point in an article "Cool URI's don't Change". He does recommend using "Latest" or some such instead of the creation date in a URI, though, if "there is no reason for the persistence of the URI to outlast the magazine." It might make things easier to search for though, at least if you know when it was created: if the URIs aren't changing then you won't have tons of broken links.

Run your markup through the W3C Validator or Google for any number of other free, online resources. Share and enjoy!

too bad his pages are valid XHTML documents, it would have made an excellent +5 funny comment :(

Amaya.
Led by Irene Vatton.
(BTW: fuck you. machist asshole)

Try Amaya, from the W3C themselves.

Javascript is NOT part of HTML

I know, I've worked with it since 1996.

We could call it DHTML Application if you want. That at least implies HTML with some sort of scripting language included.

I've always wondered why MS chose the term "HTML Application", when it's a "DHTML Application".

My preferred explanation is that whoever invented it adopted the ".hta" file extension, and it was too much like hard work to change it. (Probably would have delayed the launch of Win2000.)

If you're interested, there's an introduction available. Despite the copyright notice at the bottom, that piece was actually written about 1999; notice the weird mix of what look like they should be XML Namespaces with HTML that's capitalised, thus going against the XHTML standard.

FWIW, you can use XHTML for your HTA and they still work, despite being valid documents. So then you can have MSDXHTML :-)

Still doesn't validate though.

Hypertext has been used commercially for building local applications at least since Hypercard in the 1980's. The Web really evolved out of such local applications by adding network retrieval and addressability of hypertext.

That is, the use of hypertext and scripts for building local applications preceded the web and was the historical foundation for it. It's ironic (and stupid) that Microsoft is going back in 1999 to try to patent the precursor to the web from the 1980's. Anybody who works as a developer or inventor in hypertext systems should have at least a passing familiarity with the history of the field. I think it demonstrates that the people at Microsoft who wrote this patent don't even know the basics of their profession.

Note, incidentally, that you have been able to use HTML and JavaScript for building "trusted" applications on your local machine for many years, depending on your browser, so this is nothing new even as far as HTML specifically is concerned. Hypertext with embedded widgets and scripting has also been widely used for building local applications with the Tcl/Tk toolkit.

The patent basically covers: (from the claims)

1. Read the file, check it is HTML. If so, then turn in into a bunch of rendering instructions. Otherwise, don't. (seriously - that's 1(a)-(iv))
   
2. Claim 2 is claim 1 - nothing to see here.
   
3. A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing the method recited in claim 2.
   
4. See above, only for claim 1.
   
5. Identical to claim 1, more or less. Only this time its an "apparatus", not a "method". Whoopdy-freaking-do.
   
6. Claims 7-9: Continue based on what this computer or another computer says. Sometimes write data to a storage medium.
   

The BULK of the patent is the idea that HTML can contain Javascript that does stuff. Doesn't everyone and their kitten have prior art on this?

As if it isn't obvious enough, Claims 1-6 are covered by HTML 2.0. Claims 7-9 are covered (and this is a trivial example, others will surely find better ones) by HTML 4.0 and cousins. And the only reason I don't have earlier references is that they're so bleeding obvious!

Sigh. Muppets from space.

Spoken like someone who doesn't really know what XHTML is.

...XHTML 1.0, a reformulation of HTML4 as an XML 1.0 application....

XHTML(TM) 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)

GET /droids/ HTTP/1.0

:)

I had the exact same experience learning XHTML 1.0 strict. It's a lot more picky than the old HTML you used to be able to write. However it is MUCH easier to maintain and infinitely more flexible when you start to factor in the power of CSS.

The W3C (X)HTML validation is an invaluable tool for web designers.

Who cares about SMIL? Flash has Free tools, is widely supported and just fine for animation.

I want SVG support for scalable logos and other static graphics. Flash is a bloated horror for that.

Try Amaya

That's probably because IE's CSS implementation is a wee bit lacking. I've run into that float problem myself, but I got around it.

There are ways around other IE CSS lackings as well, e.g. IE 5 had problems the w3c's _recommended_ way of centering text by specifying both left and right margins as 'auto'. It's fixed in IE 6, but I believe you could put in extra (well, redundant) rules in your style sheet to satisfy IE 5. However it's a bit ugly and unfortunate that you have to do it.

If you check out W3c's pages, even they will sometimes present different style sheets depending on your browser. The CSS page itself is a good example. Try IE and Mozilla with this one.

In any case, these lackings on IE's part will hopefully be fixed in the future, which means if you follow the standard IE will ultimately have to follow you.