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I have just looked at gnu.org, as suggested; it's cleanly arranged, valid XHTML. I wouldn't say it was ugly, and I certainly wouldn't say it was 'shit'. What I'd describe as 'shit' pages generally tend to have emerged from some GUI editor like DW, FP or even Word, and are stuffed with unnecessary features and masses of behind-the-scenes text. As an example, a page produced where I work uses Flash buttons for animations, simply to achieve a rollover effect, and the buttons just contain text. It's like that because that's the way Dreamweaver guided its author to create it. Now, I'm not saying that's purely DW's fault - I know that DW can be a very useful tool, and like any tool it can be used well or used poorly. But I do think that in order to use DW well - and by well I mean creating conformant and accessible pages, not simply 'great looking' ones - you need to be well versed in the program itself AND (X)HTML, just as you do if you're creating hand-coded pages in vi or Notepad. The difference is that vi and Notepad don't lob in chunks of code on your behalf; while such a feature can be a Godsend, it can just as easily be a curse.

If you don't know what you're talking about, shut up.

Idiot.

One of the links showing (perporting to show?) prior art from as much as 18 months before the filing of the patent application shows the being used.

[embed type="application/eqn"]2 pi int sin (omega t)dt [/embed] (original used the angle brackets instead of [] correctly, /. won't allow the original example to print - the browser interprets it.)

Looks to me like BOTH Nescape AND Eolas copied from that earlier source - gee where have we heard that *cough*SCO,Linux*cough* before?

Parent says:

--
As for Dreamweaver, regardless of the naysayers, it's bloated, not stable, and it still is not fully w3c compliant, even if you do know what you are doing. There is still non-compliant code that is inserted into source code, regardless of the settings.
--

I work for a shop that specializes in web accessibility and usability. How, exactly, does Dreamweaver 'insert' things into the source code, regardless of the settings? I code in Dreamweaver. I don't use design mode and I only tinker with a couple settings. I don't remember the last time Dreamweaver inserted code into anything I did without my asking it to.

Coldfusion, however, is guilty of doing this; notably tags like that will create tags and then not close them, so your page won't validate, but there are plenty of ways around that.

When you say Dreamweaver isn't w3c compliant, do you mean the WCAG Authoring Tool Guidelines? If so, it's worth mentioning that No web authoring tool satisfies all ATAG standards -- not Dreamweaver and not Quanta.

So in response, we do know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility standards, and Dreamweaver works wonderfully for what we do. The 'rest of the world' has not realized anything about the companies you made, and your comparison between Sun, Adobe, Macromedia and SCO is unsupported.

-Aquitaine

Parent says:

--
As for Dreamweaver, regardless of the naysayers, it's bloated, not stable, and it still is not fully w3c compliant, even if you do know what you are doing. There is still non-compliant code that is inserted into source code, regardless of the settings.
--

I work for a shop that specializes in web accessibility and usability. How, exactly, does Dreamweaver 'insert' things into the source code, regardless of the settings? I code in Dreamweaver. I don't use design mode and I only tinker with a couple settings. I don't remember the last time Dreamweaver inserted code into anything I did without my asking it to.

Coldfusion, however, is guilty of doing this; notably tags like that will create tags and then not close them, so your page won't validate, but there are plenty of ways around that.

When you say Dreamweaver isn't w3c compliant, do you mean the WCAG Authoring Tool Guidelines? If so, it's worth mentioning that No web authoring tool satisfies all ATAG standards -- not Dreamweaver and not Quanta.

So in response, we do know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility standards, and Dreamweaver works wonderfully for what we do. The 'rest of the world' has not realized anything about the companies you made, and your comparison between Sun, Adobe, Macromedia and SCO is unsupported.

-Aquitaine

browsers actually support css now - a thing _nobody_ _ever_ thought would happen 3 years ago

He's a nobody, she's a nobody, wouldn't you like to be a nobody too?

In the days when css was synonym for the crappiest implementation of cross-plattform standards ever,

History lesson: the CSS recommendation we all know and love started life as a proposal to the W3C by Microsoft Corporation. In about the same time frame, Netscape Communications made their own proposal: JavaScript StyleSheets (JSSS). MS naturally implemented their own proposal, NS implemented theirs. Shortly before Navigator 4 was to be released, the W3C settled on CSS and JSSS became roadkill. NS hastily retrofitted Navigator to translate CSS rules into JSSS rules that their style engine could understand, but of course the capabilities of the two technologies were different and so the result was less than whelming. Point: CSS suffered not because of a lousy cross-platform implementation, but because Navigator never did grok CSS; it just translated it (badly) into JSSS.

Flash was the *only* way to make a good visual appearance and be truly cross plattform. In fact, you'd be more compatible and accessible with Flash than with anything beyond "table" and "href".

Oh dear.

Setting aside questions of taste (and grammar) inherent in the 'good visual appearance' portion, 'truly' cross-plaftorm compatible' is a load of horse manure. A great many browsers/platforms didn't support Flash until well after the advent of Netscape 6.2. Many still don't. And as far as accessibility goes, ever try to access even most recent Flash movies with a screen reader? Rotsa ruck.

That has changed since then, with the appearance of NS 6.1 came a whole bunch of browsers that manage css in a way that is fairly acceptable.

Any 6.x version of NS you care to name was released weeks or months after the corresponding Mozilla version. IE 5/Macintosh offered far and away the best CSS support of any browser when it was released in '00--well ahead of NS 6.0. While it may be a bit dodgy by today's standards, even the original release of IE 5 for Mac is better than even the latest IE 6/Win.

Likewise, Opera 4.x sported a very solid CSS implementation--better than IE 5.x/Win, at least, and arguably on a par with IE 6/Win. That browser was out well before even IE 5/Mac.

Netscape 6.2 was a pretty good browser, particularly from a standards perspective, but it hardly broke new ground in that area.

Back in the we-don't-give-a-f*ck-about-webstandards time Dreamweaver was the _only_ tool that would make webdevelopement possible.

Bullshit. I've been doing web sites since 1996 for large and smal companies (Kaplan, Inc., APBnews.com [if anyone remembers them], GovWorks.com, Eureka-GGN CTW and Insignia Financial Group, to name a few). I've not used Dreamweaver for any of those clients. Not one.

Nobody would handcode anything for NS 4.7, trust me on that one.

Hi, I'm nobody.

Matter of fact, I did several sites for Aktion Mensch (3rd most recognized brand in Germany) that used CSS for layout and had to look 'right' in NN4.x. I did 'em by hand.

no matter what VI zealot keeps bullshitting about on /.

Vi? Never touch the damned thing. Used BBEdit and HomeSite or HTMLKit mostly.

browsers actually support css now - a thing _nobody_ _ever_ thought would happen 3 years ago

He's a nobody, she's a nobody, wouldn't you like to be a nobody too?

In the days when css was synonym for the crappiest implementation of cross-plattform standards ever,

History lesson: the CSS recommendation we all know and love started life as a proposal to the W3C by Microsoft Corporation. In about the same time frame, Netscape Communications made their own proposal: JavaScript StyleSheets (JSSS). MS naturally implemented their own proposal, NS implemented theirs. Shortly before Navigator 4 was to be released, the W3C settled on CSS and JSSS became roadkill. NS hastily retrofitted Navigator to translate CSS rules into JSSS rules that their style engine could understand, but of course the capabilities of the two technologies were different and so the result was less than whelming. Point: CSS suffered not because of a lousy cross-platform implementation, but because Navigator never did grok CSS; it just translated it (badly) into JSSS.

Flash was the *only* way to make a good visual appearance and be truly cross plattform. In fact, you'd be more compatible and accessible with Flash than with anything beyond "table" and "href".

Oh dear.

Setting aside questions of taste (and grammar) inherent in the 'good visual appearance' portion, 'truly' cross-plaftorm compatible' is a load of horse manure. A great many browsers/platforms didn't support Flash until well after the advent of Netscape 6.2. Many still don't. And as far as accessibility goes, ever try to access even most recent Flash movies with a screen reader? Rotsa ruck.

That has changed since then, with the appearance of NS 6.1 came a whole bunch of browsers that manage css in a way that is fairly acceptable.

Any 6.x version of NS you care to name was released weeks or months after the corresponding Mozilla version. IE 5/Macintosh offered far and away the best CSS support of any browser when it was released in '00--well ahead of NS 6.0. While it may be a bit dodgy by today's standards, even the original release of IE 5 for Mac is better than even the latest IE 6/Win.

Likewise, Opera 4.x sported a very solid CSS implementation--better than IE 5.x/Win, at least, and arguably on a par with IE 6/Win. That browser was out well before even IE 5/Mac.

Netscape 6.2 was a pretty good browser, particularly from a standards perspective, but it hardly broke new ground in that area.

Back in the we-don't-give-a-f*ck-about-webstandards time Dreamweaver was the _only_ tool that would make webdevelopement possible.

Bullshit. I've been doing web sites since 1996 for large and smal companies (Kaplan, Inc., APBnews.com [if anyone remembers them], GovWorks.com, Eureka-GGN CTW and Insignia Financial Group, to name a few). I've not used Dreamweaver for any of those clients. Not one.

Nobody would handcode anything for NS 4.7, trust me on that one.

Hi, I'm nobody.

Matter of fact, I did several sites for Aktion Mensch (3rd most recognized brand in Germany) that used CSS for layout and had to look 'right' in NN4.x. I did 'em by hand.

no matter what VI zealot keeps bullshitting about on /.

Vi? Never touch the damned thing. Used BBEdit and HomeSite or HTMLKit mostly.

You forgot cocoon and XSP, and what that means for building a cross-device website. There's also SMIL and SVG along with the other XML technologies, and what that means for getting rid of Flash.

You forgot cocoon and XSP, and what that means for building a cross-device website. There's also SMIL and SVG along with the other XML technologies, and what that means for getting rid of Flash.

You forgot cocoon and XSP, and what that means for building a cross-device website. There's also SMIL and SVG along with the other XML technologies, and what that means for getting rid of Flash.

4.2. Element and attribute names must be in lower case

XHTML documents must use lower case for all HTML element and attribute names. This difference is necessary because XML is case-sensitive e.g. <li> and <LI> are different tags.

J2EE really wanted to be implemented in ruby, or Python if that's your thing. it is so obvious.

J2EE is as ridiculous as the complete over-abuse of XML (Jelly and XSL comes to mind).

For another, it recommends a public sector-led effort to adopt an XML-based standard document format, either that of OpenOffice or a new one developed by the EU. Will they push ahead with these plans or is it just more talk?

What's wrong with good old reliable existing formats?

• Composite files built at request time,
• The results of running a script,
• Interaction with a web application 1 2 3 4,
• Remote procedure calls and object access 1 2,
• Instant messenger communications, and sometimes
• Static files.

My current favorite for PDF generation is to build an XML document programatically. This document has no layout information, so I use Saxon and an XSLT stylesheet to translate it to XSL Formatting Objects. From there, I use FOP to translate to PDF.

The best part is that the XML document contains the content, while the XSLT stylesheet describes how to make a document out of it. If I need a screen version all I have to do is write another stylesheet to translate to HTML.

My current favorite for PDF generation is to build an XML document programatically. This document has no layout information, so I use Saxon and an XSLT stylesheet to translate it to XSL Formatting Objects. From there, I use FOP to translate to PDF.

The best part is that the XML document contains the content, while the XSLT stylesheet describes how to make a document out of it. If I need a screen version all I have to do is write another stylesheet to translate to HTML.

My current favorite for PDF generation is to build an XML document programatically. This document has no layout information, so I use Saxon and an XSLT stylesheet to translate it to XSL Formatting Objects. From there, I use FOP to translate to PDF.

The best part is that the XML document contains the content, while the XSLT stylesheet describes how to make a document out of it. If I need a screen version all I have to do is write another stylesheet to translate to HTML.

"compiled into micro-HTML" - I'm pretty familiar with the HTML standards from the W3C (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/), and I haven't found the spec yet for "micro-HTML". Perhaps this is the marketing buzzword description for zip compression of the HTML file? Am I missing an explanation, or is this just a freely flung buzzword in an otherwise interesting article?

Hear hear.

Some of the things you mentioned are in there, namely data, time, and sliders (range). The last link details it.

When you do this, I assume its when they use a web browser. In this case does the page show up as a '500' status error page or a normal '200' status page?

RFC rfc2616 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

you can make chinese / japanese vertical text in html using tables, but it is a major PITA. i've seen some sites do it though. still other sites use gif/jpeg images for vertical text (some arabic sites do this as well as arabic support in browsers tend to suck ass).

explicit vertical text support is in css though.

microsoft has (i guess nonstandard) support for vertical text.

Standards compliance is part of the big picture. I think Amaya is more of an official reference implementation, but my point is why should Mozilla deviate from its goals when that's not part of its purpose? They didn't set out to make an IE-compatible browser, they set out to make a browser that follows the standards.

You can argue whether or not following the standards strictly is good or not, but the fact is if someone wanted to break standards, they can fork Mozilla and add all the IE-specific features. But don't expect the Mozilla project to do that. In any case, I personally would not want them to waste their limited resources on this.

Yup, not valid.

Really great SVG support, IMHO, is one of the necessary ingredients for making the web more exciting. This is the kind of innovation that is not just useful, but something the whole community can participate in.

• Vector graphics,
• independent of screen resolution,
• able to convey layout information, and in
• a standard format accessible to anyone who can download and read a specification,

Mozilla's market share is so low that it is not regarded as a serious competitor to IE.

The only way Mozilla can gain broader acceptance is if it not only does the standard HTML rendering acceptably good, but if it offers exciting new technology that is not available in IE.

IIRC, an SVG implementation is already in IE, but there's little incentive for it to be further developed. Arguably there's incentive for SVG in IE not to be further developed by Microsoft because a robust successful implementation may displace competing product lines of their own and other partners (Shockwave, Adobe). There's a potential wonderful application area to be served, but it will require someone besides established big-names to develop.

Would you be so kind to explain to me exactly how many technologies that .net has that makes it a superset of Java? Maybe you haven't investigated J2EE, J2ME and all the other technologies that are part of the Java platform. Besides, Java has a much larger free software community. Freshmeat, for example, lists 2382 Java projects (that's less than 100 frewer than C++). To be compared to the 46 C# projects.

Want to implement a SOAP web service? Check out GLUE. It allows you to distribute any java object as a SOAP service using only 2 lines of code (one to start the server and one to register the object).

And if you don't want to listen to me, why not read this list. It contains some good stuff.

Why people spend their precious time on a project like Mono with such an unstable (legally) base is beyond me. Why the Linux community seem to embrace .net more than java is even more boggling.

It was a surprise to me, and a pretty powerful incentive for me to go with the sexy little thing I'd never previously considered worth the price-markup. Now all I have to do is starve for a few more months...

PS: For those of you who are wondering what the rest of the audience was carrying, there were two ThinkPads, and one or two grad-student-like fellows had desktop-replacement Inspirons.

Does ANY of the other browers somehow render web pages better or worse?

Umm... how about all the other browsers out there? Seriously, have you never tried to look at a proper CSS2 page in IE? (e.g. the W3 CSS page, which isn't complex CSS at all) IE's pathetic rendering is the bane of good web designers everywhere who are forced to use ridiculous hacks so IE will display their valid content at all.

Oh XYZ is unsafe. Well you feel that way turn it off.

Even if you *could* make IE 100% safe by disabling XYZ, quite probably reducing your browser's capabilities in the process, that's not enough. IE is a horrible product by virtue of the fact that the default settings leave you at the mercy of script kiddies everywhere. If there's no way to make ActiveX et. al. more secure, they should be OFF by default.

IE is very customizable.

Hooray, I can... move the toolbar! And I can change the buttons! And I can... move it again! I'm going to switch to IE forever now!

PS is anyone else getting a lot of "500 internal server error" messages. (Slashdot is being slashdotted)

I saw lot of 500's yesterday, but that is NOT a slashdotting. 500 is an error code, usually due to a CGI program (such as the entire slashdot code) craping out. I get this alot when developing perl scripts (like slashcode only much smaller).

I assumed they were upgrading the code live, thus requests NOW might have data that is not valid in 5 seconds. If the server that is running slashcode was overloaded, you wouldn't get 500, you would get a blank page and an hour glass. You can find the list of status codes here at w3.org.

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/script.html

SVG is a new way to render without pixels . . .

SVG is a new way to render without pixels . . .

For those of you who don't know, SVG = Scalable Vector Graphics

that's harsh, dude, but i can't say i disagree. i would never in conscience design a site that was solely designed for Win/IE, regardless of its market share. but the fact is that Win/IE, for all its crappy implementation, isn't that horribly uncompliant, meaning that there's little reason not to develop for both Win/IE and current standards at the same time (which can't be said about Netscape 4, the bane of my existence for years... it's only been in the past year or so that N4 use has dropped to the point where you can make a business case for not supporting its crap-ass CSS implementation.)

that said, it's a frustrating world for us web developers who want to do our part to encourage standards compliance. fact is the IE implements very fundamental CSS (such as the visual box model) differently than the standards dictate, meaning that you're practically forced to use some kind of browser rerouting or stick with the vanilla HTML of a previous generation of web design.

IE, thankfully, has one useful (albeit non-compliant) CSS feature... the ability resolve javascript expressions right in the stylesheet. i hate having to compromise in that way, but almost every time i end up using js expressions to change the fscking width property for IE5&6.

and while i'm complaining... what's up with not supporting the minimum widths property? it's the one thing that will finally make table-based web-design a thing of the past, and they don't bother with it. even if they end up supporting it, it'll still be YEARS before IE5and6 pass from common use.

ah microsoft, how i hate you.

Those who live in glass houses... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .rmpmusic.com%2F

I think it is well known that slashcode spews out horrible HTML - Pity no one has tried to clean it up with CSS and modern markup

Oh IE, why can you not support an open standard correctly?

Oh IE, why can you not support an open standard correctly?

I applaud you for your firm grasp of the use of HTML links.

Being able to parse a format does not mean that your application 'supports' the format. SVG is XML, and XML is easy to parse - reader.parse(doc);

But I hardly think that is what this article is about.

There is a lot of work involved in interpreting the nuances of SVG see the W3C Standard for SVG. I think you will find that there is quite a bit of work in order to support SVG bi-directionally in an application.

-dave

1. The complexity of the implementation
   
2. The lack of a compleated specification
   

Good for them, it Validates, and looks a lot nicer. I'm glad to see they took the navigational links out of images, I hate that practice.

It is written in the original article and there's even a link that you could click on. Try this one instead: Scalable Vector Graphics.

I just googled for some OpenGL-based options, and Amaya looks interesting.

Anyone used Amaya or have other recommendations for an open source, OpenGL based SVG rendering API?

Before everybody and their mothers starts flaming them because they use XML as their protocol, I would like to point out that they are using WBXML to send their messages.
WBXML is a packed encoding for XML, thus saving space and all those that can be highly compressed. Just have a look at the specs, it's not because it has WAP tagged to it that it's a load of crap.
And then, to those saying that the parser will kill the perfs, I'd like to point out that this protocol doesn't rely on string parsing but _byte_ parsing..

Verisign clearly want to innovate so much that their homepage contains 87 HTML errors, check the w3c validator, in less than 300 lines of code.

That has to be some sort of innovation record!

cLive ;-)

Scully is echoing comments from Tim Berners-Lee during the development of the web. The original proposal for the world wide web specifically mentions Hypercard when describing what the system does.

That shouldn't make a difference if you're able to read /. The main page has 394 as I type this.

No the page is not valid HTML there are 93 errors.