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Which will be easier too (syntax-wise), if you serve your XHTML documents as application/xhtml+xml. Mozilla understands this and runs the source through it's XML parser, and if syntax errors are encountered you'll only get an error message on screen along with the line containing the syntax error. A little added bonus when sending as application/xhtml+xml. :-)

As for IE, I believe in most instances it'll ask if you want to download the page as it doesn't support application/xhtml+xml.

(don't know about Opera)

Here is Opera's rendering mode "strategy."

Having recently made an excursion into the world of XHTML 1.1 web design, I have to say, it demands so much of your code, you'll never look at tag soup the same way again. But it's worth it. It took a while, I adjusted, and will never give an (X)HTML document that doesn't validate* to the browsing public again. I strongly urge all of you to put forth the effort to check your pages and read up about web standards (here) as well.

If only there were some way to get the same from the 8,419,528,073 animated GIF-loaded, Frontpage Express, Geocities-hosted messes elsewhere on the web.

*: Don't forget to check your CSS for validity as well. :)

(don't know about Opera)

Here is Opera's rendering mode "strategy."

Having recently made an excursion into the world of XHTML 1.1 web design, I have to say, it demands so much of your code, you'll never look at tag soup the same way again. But it's worth it. It took a while, I adjusted, and will never give an (X)HTML document that doesn't validate* to the browsing public again. I strongly urge all of you to put forth the effort to check your pages and read up about web standards (here) as well.

If only there were some way to get the same from the 8,419,528,073 animated GIF-loaded, Frontpage Express, Geocities-hosted messes elsewhere on the web.

*: Don't forget to check your CSS for validity as well. :)

(don't know about Opera)

Here is Opera's rendering mode "strategy."

Having recently made an excursion into the world of XHTML 1.1 web design, I have to say, it demands so much of your code, you'll never look at tag soup the same way again. But it's worth it. It took a while, I adjusted, and will never give an (X)HTML document that doesn't validate* to the browsing public again. I strongly urge all of you to put forth the effort to check your pages and read up about web standards (here) as well.

If only there were some way to get the same from the 8,419,528,073 animated GIF-loaded, Frontpage Express, Geocities-hosted messes elsewhere on the web.

*: Don't forget to check your CSS for validity as well. :)

Actually both IE and Mozilla/Gecko (don't know about Opera) have this quirks rendering mode.

They use DOCTYPE - the first line of the source - sniffing to determine which (X)HTML version the web page is written for. If the page indicates the use of a strict version of (X)HTML, these browsers will render the page in a strict standards compliant mode. Everything will be rendered according to the strict standards as proposed by The WWW Consortium. Your pages will look the same both in IE and Mozilla, however don't be fooled by IE's relaxed attitude towards block/inline content - do read up on this in the specs. If you preview your pages in Mozilla first you will save a lot of time, because it's not as forgiving when you make mistakes.

In quirks mode you can use all the dirty tricks from the old days. Everything will look horrible accros different browsers, and the source will be next to unmaintainable!

The quirks/strict standards modes are triggered by these doctypes respectively:

Quiks mode:

HTML 3.2
HTML 4.01 Transitional
HTML 4.01 Frameset
XHTML 1.0 Transitional
XHTML 1.0 Frameset

Strict standards mode:

HTML 4.01 Strict
XHTML 1.0 Strict
XHTML 1.1

I'd advise everyone to write (X)HTML to the strict versions and make the www a better place to be for all of us.

"Why not save everyone a lot of time and money and support Microsoft's version of DHTML?"

Which is harder? Designing web pages by a common standard or conforming to one application's twisted implementation of said standard? You don't necessarily save money by developing only for IE. You waste time trying to create interesting ways to mimick features that can be trivial to implement in any compliant browser or simply attempting to figure out what IE will let you do. Remember browser compatibility charts that used to tell you what browser's supported what features? These were nightmarish for a simple markup language and a few CSS features. And so the solution is to just give up on compatibility charts and let MS have its way?

"It is very expensive for companies to implement Mozzila compatible versions"

No, no, I think you have it backwards. You are familiar with web standards? IE does a half-baked job of implementing them, makes some mistakes, omits things, and then leaves most of these problems for long periods of time. Oh yes, and some features actually might crash the browser.

Mozilla doesn't try to make web pages conform to some twisted view of a standard. Rather, Mozilla takes said web standards and attempts to comply with them.

There is also a principle here which is very important and every one seems to give up on. Open standards are important because they accomplish several things at once:

1) They promote use of the medium - making a given medium more accessible and beneficial to all involve.

2) They limit unnecessary complexity/redundancy - this saves everyone time and money.

3) They keep control away from single-minded interest groups who wish to control users of the medium. In essence, they protect the medium and its users. In the best cases they represent the interests of users and those care most about the medium's community.

Some people refuse to allow IE to dominate the browsable Internet unchallenged because it will only hurt the community and all involved. IE's dominance has brought apathy to its lackings - everyone knows in many ways it sucks, but the majority of its users are either ignorant, don't care, or are (seemingly) powerless. This in turn has actually warped the perception of the Internet into many things it should not be (a circus for advertising, for one). But even worse, IE has forced many developers to forget web standards and focus on IE and its version of things. In effect, IE says what is standard and what is not and we all obey.

Shouldn't that be:

I'm tired of hearing this argument! If you just adhere to the standards when creating web pages you'll be just fine. In fact, you'd be better off as your pages will be much more easy to maintain, and you'll benefit greatly from all the available features that come with CSS. Try weighing the cost of maintaining a tag soup IE optimized (ugh!) page against a page using strict standards and the latter will win anytime!

IE is way behind Mozilla and Opera, it doesn't even support application/xhtml+xml, which is (or should be) used for XHTML. And don't get me started on the XML-declaration, IE chokes on this and throws itself into quirks mode when rendering your content.

1. Immunity from biased administrative moderation.
   
2. A Meta section for users to discuss Slashdot itself, on-topic, without being administratively mod-bombed.
   
3. A public pledge to halt administrative astroturfing.
   
4. Admin moderation visible in moderation messages.
   
5. Accurate timestamps for moderation messages.
   
6. Public acknowledgment that admins and users are different.
   
7. A public apology from Michael Sims to Seth Finkelstein for defaming the only member of the original censorware project to actually accomplish something.
   
8. HTML that comes close to W3C compliance.
   
9. An open submissions queue for those paid users who opt-in to read it.
   
10. A 20-th century comment viewing mode.
    

That's 2003-04-12T19:03:12-05:00 in ISO 8601

Actually, there are some rules to which many U.S. sites must comply, specified in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 (summary).

By law, all government sites must comply with the guidelines described by Section 508, which are actually a subset of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is yet to be determined if organizations that receive federal monies must comply with Section 508; if so, that would affect a lot of pages.

'IMAGE' is not an element in HTML 4 (check for yourself). Maybe it should be. Maybe it should stand for inline, base64 encoded images. But it doesn't.

Makes you wonder when the submitter of the article last wrote a page of HTML...

Let's hope for more sites like A List Apart (www.alistapart.com) that look great AND satisfy these requirements.

The thing about rules like "three clicks", is that they are based on the pre-bubble notion of buzzwords. That doesn't work anymore in the web design field. Now we have to provide tools that the customers want to have, and design stuff so that they can easily access it. Document trees, under the nice standards at w3 are what has really changed with the internet, and not to mention PHP, Perl and free db solutions like MySQL and the other guys.

If users are leaving after 12 clicks now, like it says in the article, that says something about the level of web-smarts of the average user. But what I see in these charts, is a kind of "split the difference" research insight.

For clicking, it's 50/50 that people will go on to get what they want. For the percentage of unsatisfied users, it's 50% who are unsatisfied, according to their research.

What they've said is: "Users weren't any more satisfied with shorter clickstreams than they were with longer clickstreams. The satisfaction of users doesn't depend on the number of clicks."

So that means that in the old days, people were getting used to the infrastructure of web surfing, and things that were far away were annoying people. Today, people are used to the web... some teens have grown up on it, and therefore people as a whole are used to it. Therefore, things like design style and presentation mean more than how far clicks are, and if they know they can get what they want by going there.

Return your stolen MP3s! Here's how:

#1: Email Them

1. Look up the email address of your regional RIAA authority. (Listed in your white pages under "Recording Industry: Regional Authorities)
2. Open up your email program, such as Microsoft Outlook(TM) or Microsoft Outlook Express(TM)
3. Create an email to the email address you found.
4. Attach all the MP3s you're returning. (If you don't know how to attach a file, look in the help file for your email program)
5. Press send.

#2: Burn Them

1. Burn a copy of your stolen MP3's. (Here's a guide: You can fit about 200 MP3s on a CD)
2. Package the CD's in a plastic case.
3. Place the CD case in an envelope. Carefully cut a piece of cardboard the size of the CD case.
4. Seal the envelope. (Hint: You might consider putting in a note saying you're sorry)
5. Put on the right number of stamps.
6. Address it to:
   The RIAA
   c/o America

#3: Snail Mail Them

1. Locate on your computer the first MP3 you want to send. (Hint: MP3s usually end with the letters ".MP3" or ".mp3")
2. Open up your hex editor. (Did you know that "hex" is short for "hexadecimal?" Well now you do, if you do not you are undoubtly retarded)
3. Resize the hex dump (usually on the left side of the page) as small as it goes. You won't be needing it.
4. Drag-select the ASCII dump. Use the "copy" command.
5. Open your favorite word processor such as Microsoft Word(TM) or Microsoft WordPad(TM). Press "paste."
6. Set the page margins to 1" all around (2.54 centimeters). Consider single-spacing.
7. Load your printer with a fresh ream of paper. (Did you know that there are 500 pages in a ream?)
8. Press print.
9. Pack the paper carefully in a carton and take to the post office.
10. Send to the RIAA address in Method #2.

#4: Fax Them

1. Follow the instructions for snail mailing, but do not go to the post office.
2. Look up the fax number of the nearest RIAA Regional Authority.
3. Load your fax machine with the paper. (Hint: Most fax machines can only load 10-20 pages at a time. Can you figure out how many batches your MP3s will take. Without using a calculator of course!
4. Press send.

Now don't you feel better? I do.

(Stolen from sendthemback.org, edited for the Slashdot audience by Captain Goatse. Hopefully XHTML 1.0 compliant, otherwise, please give goatse.cx a visit.)

kind of a neat idea, actually.

Throw out the internet and start over.

PS. Does this mean we have to curse Tim B-L in the same breath as Microsoft?

I didn't actually try one of the alternatives mentioned in this discussion. But when I look at the web sites of the different solutions, it's remarkable that only the home page of Plone validates as XHTHML 1.0 transitional, and uses div structures instead of tabulars. If I need a content management system one day, I'll try this one first.

The Internet (domain names, top-tier nameservers, nameserver software, web and e-mail server software, all markup documents) runs on english, there's no way to i18n it without opening up a world of hurt. (emphasis mine)

Huh? You better not tell the W3C, who have put a great deal of work into i18n support for web protocols and markup languages. You better not tell your browser maker, the majority of whom includes support for multiple character encodings and the HTTP Accept-Language header. You better not tell Google, who have localized their search interface to support an impressive number of languages, using the HTTP Accept-Language header that your browser sends to determine which language to present. In fact, you better ignore the thousands, if not millions, of documents on the web right now that include non-English content, and the existing infrastructure that serves and presents those documents.

I can't speak for DNS or the email infrastructure, but the WWW is already internationalized.

CSS is taken and is already confused by many a begining developer with eXtensible Stylesheet Language. Name it BIOS.NET instead.

CSS is taken and is already confused by many a begining developer with eXtensible Stylesheet Language. Name it BIOS.NET instead.

That's at least a month more recent than the last progress on XHTML.

One interesting use for SVG is the ability to define cursors in CSS level 2 revision 1 documents. You simply set your CSS cursor parameter so that it points to the URI of the SVG file which contains an SVG cursor definition. Although certainly not the most important use for SVG, it is still useful and worth noting. I can imagine that in the future there will be loads of web sites with all kinds of obnoxious cursors.

One interesting use for SVG is the ability to define cursors in CSS level 2 revision 1 documents. You simply set your CSS cursor parameter so that it points to the URI of the SVG file which contains an SVG cursor definition. Although certainly not the most important use for SVG, it is still useful and worth noting. I can imagine that in the future there will be loads of web sites with all kinds of obnoxious cursors.

> XSLT providing tremendous advantages in
> transforming data for a variety of other purposes (you
> probably hated lisp/scheme based language, too).

Gah. I'm tired of people comparing XSLT to Lisp or Scheme. Okay XSLT can transform and generate itself just like Lisp, but that's where the similarities end. In almost every other design aspect it is the opposite of Lisp.

XSLT is an incredibly baroque, verbose language, only useful for a very limited set of trivial XML transformations, (ie. surprise style sheets!) that involve no I/O or complex computations. If you do a lot of this - then maybe it is worth learning, but my experience is that you can hit it's limits very quickly.

Lisp on the other hand is a incredibly elegant, compact and powerful general purpose language that has been used in almost every application domain imaginable. Maybe the most elegant, clear and powerful single programming language ever invented, where very complex functionality can often be written in an amazingly small amount of understandable code.

People who compare SVG to Flash directly are missing the point. The real strength of SVG is not vector graphics (which its pretty good at). The real strength of SVG is that since its an XML-derived schema, all the available tools for dealing with and transcoding XML documents (XSLT, et al) can be used to generate SVG documents. The implications of this are slowly beginning to be understood. Imagine how many XML derivations could use this. Anything from business documents (graphs, etc), to medical records (graphically showing the timeline of a patient's medical operations, for example) can utilize these techniques.

The coolest example I can point you to is this. An XSLT stylesheet is used to transform a chess markup language into a animated SVG image. Beyond cool.

Anybody else wonder why the poster choose to link "SVG" (and his screen name... hmmm...) to an obviously commercial site hawking a book (learnsvg.com) rather than to the W3C SVG pages? The W3C site is certainly a better authority on the topic.

Please check these sites out immediately for more information. This field is GROWING CONSIDERABLY. If you WANT A JOB, study this stuff very closely!

- http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
- http://www.adobe.com/svg/main.html
- http://xml.apache.org/batik/
- http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/
- http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

Please check these sites out immediately for more information. This field is GROWING CONSIDERABLY. If you WANT A JOB, study this stuff very closely!

- http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
- http://www.adobe.com/svg/main.html
- http://xml.apache.org/batik/
- http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/
- http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

From XML 1.0:

The design goals for XML are:

1. XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
3. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
4. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
7. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
8. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

I believe you're questioning point 5 while bitching about point 10.

If you want a binary tree representation, check out ASN.1. It has commonly been used as a binary interchange format for the same sort of data, and XML can be mapped to ASN.1 using a schema and a bit of patience.

Wow, you can get +4 Informative by simply paraphrasing Tim Berners-Lee without even providing a link.

Browse the Technical Reports, Recommendations and Proposed Recommendations at W3C as there are a lot of DTDs and Schemas there. I found a DTD for generic simulation representation there. There's quite a bit if you take the time to look.

Browse the Technical Reports, Recommendations and Proposed Recommendations at W3C as there are a lot of DTDs and Schemas there. I found a DTD for generic simulation representation there. There's quite a bit if you take the time to look.

Browse the Technical Reports, Recommendations and Proposed Recommendations at W3C as there are a lot of DTDs and Schemas there. I found a DTD for generic simulation representation there. There's quite a bit if you take the time to look.

Cool URIs don't change

A bit over-idealistic, but worth aiming towards even if you don't achieve 100% non-URI-breakage in practice.

I feel that search engines should slightly penalize sites that have a history of breaking links or making them redirect to a completely irrelevant page: partly because there is just less chance that the link you follow from the search engine will have the content you want, and partly because even if you do get to a correct page, its usefulness as a bookmark or a link from your own dcuments is reduced.

From a practical perspective, I have noticed the same phenomenon over the years, and have created the following axioms for my own sanity:

1. You can not depend on any outside entity to archive information that is important to you.

If there is come critical piece of information that you need to do your job, or as a reference to related work - by all means download and keep an archival copy for your own use. While the Internet Archive is an excellent resource - there is no way they will be able to keep track of everything on the net for all time. The drawback of this is that if you do not periodically look at the original web page you will be using the latest information (I will address this issue in a moment).

2. Look for means of extending the ability to locate information beyond the URL.

While the URL is a great boon to keeping unique locations on the web, they do not encapsulate enough information (meta information) to make searching and locating information easy. The problem is not just related to the internet - it also encompases other storage mediums (i.e. files outside of the exposed WWW partition). There are some recent tools that are at a test bed level now that can be used to solve this problem if brought into mainstream use, as we will see below.

I see several technologies need to be developed/perfected to help ameliorate these issues:

a) Software needs to be developed for end users to manage their own information resources - similar to how the Internet Archive keeps track of changes to web pages. The software should allow the user to archive pages to the local drive as desired, and provide a version control system for easily retrieving previous versions as needed; the system should also provide:

b) An easy means of keeping meta information and annotations regarding a particular web document needs to be made a standard part of all web browsers. A good starting point is the W3C Annotea standard for keeping meta data - as implemented in the Amaya editor/browser.

I think a good set of the pieces are already in place to accomplish what I suggest - the real issue now is integrating them into current end user tools.

The next, and perhaps biggest, question that needs to be resolved is how does DRM fit into this picture (if at all), and how much will DRM serve to further erode the cultural continuity archivists desire?

Agreed that improvement is a good thing, but not if it pulls the rug out from under you. I incline more to the idea that revised versions of information should be available alongside older versions. This has several benefits:

• Others can see the steps on the journey to the "definitive" statement, which allows them to avoid any blind alleys in their own approach;
• Conversely, somebody looking at what was passed over in the early stages of development of an idea might find fruitful alternative lines of enquiry;
• It can be fun seeing the complete rubbish a supposed genius came up with in their younger days.

Somebody else on this thread has posted a link to Tim Berners-Lee's article Cool URIs Don't Change , which I think makes a good case for using date stamping as the best way of maintaining content even when new and better versions are available.

This is a real problem. When Vannevar Bush conceived the Memex system, his goal was to facilitate the exchange of scientific research. Later, Doug Englebart built on Bush's ideas as did Ted Nelson (the guy who coined the term "hypertext") and Tim Berners-Lee. While the web today has become a vast sinkhole of pop-up ads, crappy web stores and inane blogs it is important to not forget that its inception was in aiding scientific research.

Yet, that is not possible without some kind of permanence. Probably what is needed is some way to integrate the web into university library collections. If there was some way of indexing web pages the way libraries currently use the Library of Congress scheme to index their physical collections, then web pages could be uniquely numbered with this number incorporated into the URL. If then universities and the Library of Congress itself were to mirror (permanently) these pages, if the original URL were to become unavailable, one could try just about any manjor university or the LOC and retrieve the page. Of course, with the current political climate here in the US I don't forsee this ever happening.

May I remind everyone to read and understand TimBL's Cool URI's don't change. It's not that hard to design systems where you do not have to change the URI every 100 days, folks.

There already is such an identifier. It's called a Universal Resource Identifier, or URI. See Berners-Lee essay Cool URIs Don't Change.

anything not specifically allowed should be considered as forbidden.

anything recommended should be considered required.

I disagree. I believe there's a reason for the inclusion of the usual definitions of terms like "must/shall" and "may/should" in the final recommendation (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#defs).

In this way, the XML declaration issue is not like the quote issue, because the XHTML spec says quite clearly: "Attribute values must always be quoted" (section 4.4). There is a difference between a recommendation and a requirement. I would recommend that developers use XHTML 1.0 Strict at the very least, but in practice that's still relatively rare, because it's not required for the web to work.

As to professionalism, I believe that a "professional" who creates a document which will not render for 90% of the target audience will not remain a professional for long.

The P element can be omitted in 4.01 Transitional but not in Strict. That is, you have to have a block-level element inside the BLOCKQUOTE, not necessarily P, but that's usually what you want. Specification.

I typically send pages with the DTD claiming XHTML strict.

Do you send them with Content-type: application/xhtml+xml as the specs seem to recommend? IE seems to use an HTML 4 (not XHTML) parser for anything sent with Content-type: text/html. For XHTML documents sent as application/xml or text/xml, IE just displays a parse tree because it can't seem to pick up on <link rel="stylesheet"> in HTML space. For XHTML documents sent as application/xhtml+xml, IE FAILS IT!

No, I'm not yet far enough along in web development to know how to get my virtual host to sniff for whether a user agent can parse conforming XHTML.

The idea is absurd. How on earth would you patent an XML Schema?

I think MSFT would find it a little difficult to fight that court battle.

Besides, it would be super easy to get around the problem even if their patent turned out to be enforcable. A program like Open Office would simply need to have it's own XML schema and an XSLT save filter. Allow thrid-party XSLT to be loaded in and selected at save time.

Open Office could be distributed without violating the suggested patent. The XSLT could be bolted on dynamically (e.g. suck it down over the network straight from the save dialog). For those that don't know, XSLT is a transformation language used to trasform XML of one schema to XML of another schema. See the spec for more details.

Oh dear! They aren't even sending the correct mime-type for XHTML 1.0 (Nor is it even valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!)

Quite a poor example of how a site should "look," if you ask me (which you didn't...).

Oh dear! They aren't even sending the correct mime-type for XHTML 1.0 (Nor is it even valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!)

Quite a poor example of how a site should "look," if you ask me (which you didn't...).

Daniel M. Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets.

HTML is not a semantic web technology! here's the W3C Semantic Web page. Notice how (X)HTML isn't mentioned?

i don't know who to blame for the propagation of this usage of the word 'semantic,' but i think it might be Jeffrey Zeldman. i like the dude, but this has to stop...

That's because of the missing table tags and nonstandard margin tags. Slashdot has a lot of no-nos like class elements, failure to begin and end javascript properly...
Check it out.

Standards-compliant browsers display text too far to the left because that's exactly what the HTML is telling them to do.

/. was never even HTML 3.2 compliant. It's a godawful mess, which should come as no surprise if you're a perl coder and have seen slashcode.

Font overlapping. Try a text zoom to as little as 200% (yes, doubling the text size is not that extreme) and most CSS table based designs instantly break.

Then the developers screwed up. This is not something inherent to CSS, it just sounds like they've set a pixel-based width on something.

I don't know if this si a browser issue, or a problem with the CSS spec,

Then your subject of "ALA is ok but CSS is broken" is pretty retarded, isn't it?

There needs to be a way to style tables in CSS without having to use a table tag.

So in the "days researching correct CSS tables", you never came across the actual CSS 2 specification that includes a whole section on how to do just that?

...the best (longest, most links...

Please...no, stop!! More links a in a story submission means the submission is likely to be inferior.

For example, here is part of a made-up submission:
Joe Clark writes "Nearly a year after an interview with this correspondent highlighted a few problems with Slashdot's HTML, Daniel M. Frommelt...

...the best (longest, most links...

Please...no, stop!! More links a in a story submission means the submission is likely to be inferior.

For example, here is part of a made-up submission:
Joe Clark writes "Nearly a year after an interview with this correspondent highlighted a few problems with Slashdot's HTML, Daniel M. Frommelt...