Slashdot Mirror

Holger Blasum writes: "The W3C is closing its last call for comments on its future patent policy (with disputed RAND: "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing") on 30 Sept 2001. One of the authors of the framework argues this to be not uncommon (and, in fact, RFC 2036's section 10.3.3 has it too). As it is common practice, the W3C has set up an archived mailing list (www-patentpolicy-comment-request@w3.org) for comments. Adam Warner has outlined (mirror) some possible consequences for th e SVG standard."

wdebruij asks: "After reading the 'The Mac, Metadata, and the World' article posted a few days earlier I was wondering what metadata progress is made outside of the Mac platform. I'm currently programming a set-based metadata system working on top of the standard file-system (called AtomsNet) and would like to know how the Slashdot community sees the future of metadata support in operating systems. The Resource Description Format and MPEG7 look like promising initiatives, but I do not know of any real life implementations so far."

Bob_Juanita writes: "The W3C has finally made the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format an official recommendation." I'm looking forward to this - SVG looks to have a lot of potential for web development. Easy, dynamic, scalable graphics from database data - nice.

Bob_Juanita writes: "The W3C has finally made the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format an official recommendation." I'm looking forward to this - SVG looks to have a lot of potential for web development. Easy, dynamic, scalable graphics from database data - nice.

j7953 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.0 as a W3C recommendation; and the Web3D Consortium has announced they will present first browsers supporting their X3D standard (here's a draft), which is supposed to replace VRML, at Siggraph 2001."

j7953 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.0 as a W3C recommendation; and the Web3D Consortium has announced they will present first browsers supporting their X3D standard (here's a draft), which is supposed to replace VRML, at Siggraph 2001."

Slashback tonight with another assortment of corrections, amplifications, looks backward (and even looks forward to looks backward). In this last case, it looks like you may even get fed.

You mean we have to reprint all the invitations? Reader Ian Cowley wrote with a slight correction about the end of an era:

"Your article on slashdot.org about the billionth second of the epoch is sort of (but not entirely) flawed.

Yes, UNIX systems will report 1000000000 seconds at 01:46:40 on 9th September. Which of course means the 1 billionth number will be 01:46:39.

But, these systems do not account for leap seconds. According to TAI (international atomic time), the 1 billionth second since the beginning of January 1st 1970 will occur at 01:46:17 on 9th September 2001, as 22 leap seconds have been inserted since 1970 (the first was 1972, the last 1999).

So celebrations of the 1000000000th second should be at 01:46:17, whilst 01:46:40 can be reserved for celebrating 1000000000 displayed on UNIX system clocks."

Errr ... thanks. We'll just have to start at "Unix Day, Observed."

What price the capture and humiliation of virus spreaders? JayHerrick writes: "We have posted a small bit of JSP that reports the number of times our server has been queried for a 'default.ida' page. It's stylish, it's cool, and it'll probably get Pepsi all mad at us because we ripped the Code Red logo off one of the bottles." Equally stylish, despite the name, is a small tool named codeRedNeck, described by reader mindriot thus: "As CodeRed probes port 80 of a machine, CodeRedNeck first answers on that port and then goes silent, thus forcing the worm to wait until the connection times out." He advises: "Read the original idea by Tom Liston. Heise also has more on this."

Even More Auspicious dates. No matter which date you choose to mark it, Linus' little kernel-that-could is about to mark its tenth birthday. ikluft writes:

"The "Linux10" Linux 10th anniversary picnic and BBQ will be held on Saturday, August 25 from 11AM to 6PM at Sunnyvale Baylands Park in Sunnyvale, California. Details and directions can be found at Linux10.org. If you can attend, please use the RSVP form so the organizers know how much food and soft drinks to provide (only provided if you RSVP.)

Linux10 is being organized as a family event -- bring the kids. In support of that goal, it is also a no-media event. Linux and Open Source enthusiasts who work for the media may attend and participate while off-duty.

Linux10 will gladly link to other Linux 10th anniversary events. Let us know the URLs for those events."

Reader big_drew adds: "The event is free (food, softdrinks, cds -- sorry, no free beer, but byo is ok)" and says "If you can't make it out to CA, you can still get the t-shirt (profits will be used to fund the picnic)."

Anyone want to organize a picnic in the vicinity of Knoxville, TN? :) I can bring some pasta salad and watermelon.

Ten candles all around here, too. Simon Spero writes: "As noted in http://www.w3.org/History.html, today, August 6th, is the 10th anniversary of the first public release of the CERN Web Software."

quakeaddict writes: "The SOAP 1.2 spec is out in draft. Get it while it's hot!"

Arthur Phillip Dent writes: "News.com is running a story about IE6 being the first browser to implement the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) standard. Bad news for Doubleclick et. al., that is unless it's just /.ers using the features! This will get real interesting if lusers' using it with sites that do not post P3P policies (and thereby blocking sites from setting cookies, for example) creates any kind of unrest/discussion about the exchange of marketing data for content and functionality." One thing no one writing about IE6 seems to note: Microsoft has carefully arranged their MSN cookie setting technique to avoid being blocked by their own browser - they bounce people through msn.com to log in to any Microsoft property, so it's always a "first-party" cookie being sent/placed.

J1 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has officially given its Stamp of Approval to the XML Schema specification. This makes it an official W3C Recommendation. The press release has the details."

J1 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has officially given its Stamp of Approval to the XML Schema specification. This makes it an official W3C Recommendation. The press release has the details."

J1 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has officially given its Stamp of Approval to the XML Schema specification. This makes it an official W3C Recommendation. The press release has the details."

wdebruij asks: "I'm currently writing a small program for sharing information over the internet. For categorizing and indexing this information I want to use RDF and the semantic web as described by the WWW consortium, but since the documentation says nothing about a standard dictionary I seriously doubt we will ever have such a general information index. The Open Directory Project has written it's directory in RDF, but does anyone know of another 'standard' dictionary?" The whole point behind the "semantic web" concept is that data is organized online in such a manner, that a variety of different, independently designed machines can use it without compatibility issues.

wdebruij asks: "I'm currently writing a small program for sharing information over the internet. For categorizing and indexing this information I want to use RDF and the semantic web as described by the WWW consortium, but since the documentation says nothing about a standard dictionary I seriously doubt we will ever have such a general information index. The Open Directory Project has written it's directory in RDF, but does anyone know of another 'standard' dictionary?" The whole point behind the "semantic web" concept is that data is organized online in such a manner, that a variety of different, independently designed machines can use it without compatibility issues.

Years after the virtues of XML were first extolled (and plenty of uses both front-and-center and behind-the-scenes later), XML still isn't the do-all, be-all wonder we were led to believe. Book reviewing genius chromatic here dissects a book that sounds aimed at intermediate or advanced programmers (of other languages) who want extend their grasp with a greater understanding of the flexibility inherent to XML. How well it succeeds? Well, see what he's got to say about that.

Inside XML author Steven Holzner pages 1102 publisher New Riders rating 7 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-7357-1020-1 summary A detailed but uneven treatment of XML and related topics.

The Scoop People love it, but XML won't save the world. If properly applied, it will improve the transfer of information between different individuals, platforms, and programs. A language that describes languages, XML in the real world has spawned hundreds of applications. In Inside XML, Steven Holzner attempts to make sense of the basic principles and more popular implementations as things stand right now. What's to Like? Holzner's caught platform independence fever, and he imparts a healthy sense of respect for W3C standards to his readers. While the current state of XML handling, especially in web browsers, is mediocre at best, he varies platforms when possible. Though most examples use IE on Windows, the author occasionally examines offerings from Mozilla and IBM.

The book's strength is describing a technology. The first five chapters explore XML's essential concepts, including DTDs and schemas, in as good an explanation as you'll find anywhere. Later chapters cover XSL (used to format and to transform documents), XHTML (the successor to HTML), CSS (governing the presentation of XML and XHTML documents) and RDF and CDF (to describe available resources) in sufficient detail. The explanations here are good, with accurate information and plenty of examples.

Java programmers will appreciate the extended descriptions of the DOM and SAX parsing styles. Though the examples themselves are in Java, most concepts translate fairly well to other languages. JavaScript also gets some attention, mostly in the confines of IE5.

What's to Consider? Though the cover blurb claims otherwise, most programming examples use Java. Perl earns a brief 13-page treatment, while ASP and Java Servlets share just eight pages in the same chapter. Exotic languages like C and C++ are conspicuously absent. A detailed description of the DOM and SAX approaches would benefit everyone, not just Java hackers.

This massive tome could have stood another round of editing. Many examples run up to a page and a half in length when only two to four lines have changed from the previous listing. Other material is arguably filler, such as four and a half pages of JavaScript events supported in IE, or fifteen pages detailing XML DOM objects and associated methods before giving a single example of DOM usage. The publisher could have cut between 100 and 200 pages, instead adding footnotes to authoritative sites.

Worse yet, the book's organization is questionable. After describing the basics of XML, it veers off into a 50-page JavaScript tutorial. Java soon suffers the same fate. These chapters break the flow of subjects, use no XML in their examples, and should be appendices. (They're decent, as far as tutorials go. They just don't belong in the middle of the book.) Readers will have difficulty finding useful reference material mixed in with tutorials.

English majors will also find Holzner's transitions awkward. Logical sections often conclude with a phrase such as "Now I will talk about the topic named in the heading immediately following this sentence." XML is not a serial radio cliffhanger, and most readers can find their way down the page by themselves. It occurs often enough to be distracting.

The Summary Besides the reservations above, most of the information is solid and usable. Inside XML is at its best when describing technologies instead of how to work with them. Uneven presentation hinders (not hobbles) the book, making it a better introduction than a definitive guide. Though falling short of its claims, cautious readers will learn plenty. Table of Contents

1. Essential XML
2. Creating Well-Formed XML Documents
3. Valid XML Documents: Creating Document Type Definitions
4. DTDs: Entities and Attributes
5. Creating XML Schemas
6. Understanding JavaScript
7. Handling XML Documents with JavaScript
8. XML and Data Binding
9. Cascading Style Sheets
10. Understanding Java
11. Java and the XML DOM
12. Java and SAX
13. XSL Transformations
14. XSL Formatting Objects
15. XLinks and XPointers
16. Essential XHTML
17. XHTML at Work
18. Resource Description Framework and Channel Definition Format
19. Vector Markup Language
20. WML, ASP, JSP, Servlets, and Perl

1. The XML 1.0 Specification

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.

kellan1 writes: "The W3C has published a note Common User Agent Problems, aka why do web browsers suck, and what can you do about it?"

Nearly three years after the officialization of MathML's first generation, MSjogren writes: "W3C has announced the advancement of MathML 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Check out the W3C Math home page. Now I just wish I could get it to work decently in Mozilla too :(" Part of the proposed recommendation is this explanation of some of the difficulties and aims of mathematical expression, especially when it comes to transmitting over the Web, which emphasizes the importance of a format which can be written to by various tools as appropriate, for reading by anyone.

Nearly three years after the officialization of MathML's first generation, MSjogren writes: "W3C has announced the advancement of MathML 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Check out the W3C Math home page. Now I just wish I could get it to work decently in Mozilla too :(" Part of the proposed recommendation is this explanation of some of the difficulties and aims of mathematical expression, especially when it comes to transmitting over the Web, which emphasizes the importance of a format which can be written to by various tools as appropriate, for reading by anyone.

Nearly three years after the officialization of MathML's first generation, MSjogren writes: "W3C has announced the advancement of MathML 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Check out the W3C Math home page. Now I just wish I could get it to work decently in Mozilla too :(" Part of the proposed recommendation is this explanation of some of the difficulties and aims of mathematical expression, especially when it comes to transmitting over the Web, which emphasizes the importance of a format which can be written to by various tools as appropriate, for reading by anyone.

Nearly three years after the officialization of MathML's first generation, MSjogren writes: "W3C has announced the advancement of MathML 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Check out the W3C Math home page. Now I just wish I could get it to work decently in Mozilla too :(" Part of the proposed recommendation is this explanation of some of the difficulties and aims of mathematical expression, especially when it comes to transmitting over the Web, which emphasizes the importance of a format which can be written to by various tools as appropriate, for reading by anyone.

miester writes "Since I haven't seen anything about this on Slashdot I thought I might submit it. W3C has officially recommended that XHTML Basic be the next step for the World Wide Web. Just when I learned how to do tables ...."

miester writes "Since I haven't seen anything about this on Slashdot I thought I might submit it. W3C has officially recommended that XHTML Basic be the next step for the World Wide Web. Just when I learned how to do tables ...."

A reader writes: "This editorial has been just published on freshmeat: 'After full integration of the RPM ^[?] patches into APT ^[?] , it will have the potential to become the standard package management frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions and reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least one important system administration tool. (...) The temporarily-forked version of APT is already fully functional and actually works. Conectiva Linux 6.0 -- the first RPM-based distribution to support APT -- currently ships with it, and has some repositories that are available for use with APT.' It can be downloaded here."

beebware writes: "According to this article on C|Net, Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML) has launched Antarcti.ca which renders computer networks in 2 and 3D maps. It's currently running a demo off the ODP data. But will it take off? Will users really like 'country-maps' opposed to listings? (Incidentally Tim used to be vice-president of production at Yahoo! so I think we can tell what his money's on.)"

Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has just released Amaya 4.0. Its a browser/development tool that is designed to test the functionality of new specs in a practical environment. Essentially, it is the client-side counterpart to Jigsaw. The new version should be pretty good, and there are binaries for Unix and Win32." I've been trying Amaya once in a while for a long time. For all the hype about Mozilla, konqueror and many others, it's interesting that the W3C's effort should get so little attention. One notable feature is that it completely integrates the page creation and page viewing aspects, though you might not see a lot of the Flashy features you'd like in a browser -- Amaya is stubbornly (or appropriately) "correct" in its adherence to W3C standards.

Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has just released Amaya 4.0. Its a browser/development tool that is designed to test the functionality of new specs in a practical environment. Essentially, it is the client-side counterpart to Jigsaw. The new version should be pretty good, and there are binaries for Unix and Win32." I've been trying Amaya once in a while for a long time. For all the hype about Mozilla, konqueror and many others, it's interesting that the W3C's effort should get so little attention. One notable feature is that it completely integrates the page creation and page viewing aspects, though you might not see a lot of the Flashy features you'd like in a browser -- Amaya is stubbornly (or appropriately) "correct" in its adherence to W3C standards.

Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has just released Amaya 4.0. Its a browser/development tool that is designed to test the functionality of new specs in a practical environment. Essentially, it is the client-side counterpart to Jigsaw. The new version should be pretty good, and there are binaries for Unix and Win32." I've been trying Amaya once in a while for a long time. For all the hype about Mozilla, konqueror and many others, it's interesting that the W3C's effort should get so little attention. One notable feature is that it completely integrates the page creation and page viewing aspects, though you might not see a lot of the Flashy features you'd like in a browser -- Amaya is stubbornly (or appropriately) "correct" in its adherence to W3C standards.

NoInfo writes: "You've heard a lot about XML, SOAP and the idea of Web services. All of which have been intriguing me a great deal lately. Sun, Big Blue, MS, Ariba and others have teamed up to create UDDI.org. The site describes a bit about their idea of companies publishing the electronic services they provide. They will also eventually let you search a registry of those businesses and their offered services, including any exposed 'Web services' they provide. With all these forces behind it, perhaps it's not even a question, but will UDDI and/or Web services 'fly'? Are there any Slashdotters aiming to provide Web services, despite its heavy backing by Microsoft?" If this lives up to its promise of platform independence, then may turn out to be something incredibly useful. Are there any readers involved in UDDI who can comment further on how things are progressing?

NoInfo writes: "You've heard a lot about XML, SOAP and the idea of Web services. All of which have been intriguing me a great deal lately. Sun, Big Blue, MS, Ariba and others have teamed up to create UDDI.org. The site describes a bit about their idea of companies publishing the electronic services they provide. They will also eventually let you search a registry of those businesses and their offered services, including any exposed 'Web services' they provide. With all these forces behind it, perhaps it's not even a question, but will UDDI and/or Web services 'fly'? Are there any Slashdotters aiming to provide Web services, despite its heavy backing by Microsoft?" If this lives up to its promise of platform independence, then may turn out to be something incredibly useful. Are there any readers involved in UDDI who can comment further on how things are progressing?

Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has finally released its working draft for Cascading Stylesheets 2 for Mobile Devices. Definitely check this out if you intend on getting in on WAP or any other form of wireless internet."

Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has finally released its working draft for Cascading Stylesheets 2 for Mobile Devices. Definitely check this out if you intend on getting in on WAP or any other form of wireless internet."

aibrahim asks: " I recently found out about W3C Specification for Scalable Vector Graphics from the Adobe SVG site. So I was looking around for programs that would allow me to work with SVG on Linux, or any OSS system for that matter. Adobe plans on making almost their entire product line work with SVG, including Photoshop. Corel has released an SVG Filter. Yet, I couldn't find a single product with a Freshmeat search that mentions SVG. Looking on SourceForge reveals two projects: Gill and Savage. Neither of these projects have posted any files as of 9/2/2000. Are there any free software projects with a usable SVG product? Can anyone comment on when any such project may come to fruition? Lastly, since Adobe is including SVG features in Photoshop has anyone even mentioned it to the GIMP ^[?] develeopers?"

gwernol writes: "The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the specification for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format as a 'candidate release.' Because this is an XML-based format, it should be easy to implement, and could see wide adoption as a standard for animated and vector graphics on the web. Cool." And wouldn't it be neat to have a freely available, widely used free-both-ways vector animation format?

gwernol writes: "The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the specification for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format as a 'candidate release.' Because this is an XML-based format, it should be easy to implement, and could see wide adoption as a standard for animated and vector graphics on the web. Cool." And wouldn't it be neat to have a freely available, widely used free-both-ways vector animation format?

gwernol writes: "The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the specification for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format as a 'candidate release.' Because this is an XML-based format, it should be easy to implement, and could see wide adoption as a standard for animated and vector graphics on the web. Cool." And wouldn't it be neat to have a freely available, widely used free-both-ways vector animation format?

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

EPIC has just released a harsh criticism of the Pretty Poor Privacy specification from W3C. Although automatic data transfer is not in the P3P spec itself any longer (taken out after polls showed people didn't like it), implementations of P3P will still include automatic data transfer mechanisms - the idea behind P3P is that viewers will be required to reveal their addresses and other personal information to every commercial site they access or be denied entrance, and that this data transfer will be effectively hidden from users so it will be "out of sight, out of mind". (For a more in-depth article about P3P and Internet privacy generally, see this paper, written in response to Lessig's support of P3P in his recent book.)

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have stories about the FTC's decision to ask Congress for the authority to regulate online privacy. The FTC had recently completed yet another privacy survey that showed companies were doing little to protect privacy on the Internet, even after several years of dire warnings. In other news, Doubleclick named a "No-Privacy Board" -- errr, a "Privacy Board." Its members are listed below, along with my notes on their backgrounds.

It is important to keep in mind what this is being billed as: Doubleclick calls this, in their press release, a "Consumer Privacy Advocacy Board." Supposedly this board is set up to, you know, advocate consumer privacy. So, let's take a look at its composition.

Robert Abrams, former attorney general of New York: hired because of his connections in New York State, which threatened to file suit against Doubleclick. His role will be to lobby his buddies in various government agencies to prevent privacy lawsuits.

Robert Litan, vice president and director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution: supports "opt-out" marketing and notification of privacy policies, as opposed to actual privacy. (Which is exactly Doubleclick's position, of course.)

Harriet Pearson, director of public affairs at International Business Machines Corp.: Pearson is one of the people behind the Online Privacy Alliance, a corporate front group working to attack privacy on the Internet. Pearson has moderated seminars on how to profile users without seeming to be Big Brother; her job is to make you feel good about not having any privacy. Every group needs a PR flack.

Lori Fena, chairman of Web privacy organization TrustE: Fena is an advertising executive by trade. And obviously, having her on board means that TrustE won't exactly be cracking down on any of Doubleclick's practices.

Daniel Weitzner, an executive at the World Wide Web Consortium: Weitzner's main job at W3C is promoting P3P, a protocol designed to automatically give out your name, address, phone number, credit card information, Social Security number, and other personal data to Web sites as you browse -- a sort of hyper-invasive universal cookie. Need I say more?

Elizabeth Lascoutx, a director and vice president at the Council of Better Business Bureaus: Lascoutx's work at the BBB used to center around children's advertising -- she sought to have commercial messages on children's Web sites set off from the rest of the content in the same manner as television advertising ("after these messages, we'll be right back").

David Stazer, vice president and co-founder of PlanetOut.com: I don't know of any qualifications Stazer might have with regard to privacy.

Stewart Baker, a partner at the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson: Baker used to be the general counsel of the National Security Agency, probably not the first people you'd think of when you think "privacy"; he's an influential Washington lobbyist now. Baker publicly attacked the efforts to boycott Intel and Microsoft over the Pentium-III processor ID and the GUID embedded in MSOffice documents -- he stated that if all machines on the Internet were authenticated and identified, things like denial of service attacks could be prevented (which is true enough, if you don't mind a total loss of privacy).

No one from EPIC? No one from the ACLU? You can draw your own conclusions about whether this "Consumer Privacy Protection Board" (sic) is intended to actually help Doubleclick change its ways, or whether it is merely intended to help protect the company from lawsuits and adverse governmental action, like, say, the FTC wanting the authority to force companies to respect privacy concerns.

We got a lot of (shall we say) slightly impertinent questions for Web Standards Project co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman, but that's okay. He reads Slashdot and knows the nature of the beast, and he's hard-core enough to give as good as he gets. So set your humor module to high, then sit back and enjoy Mr. Zeldman's (appropriately impertinent) answers to the 12 questions we forwarded to him.

1) Here's my question:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by FascDot Killed My Pr

If you're such a hotshot web designer, why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design: Putting an "entry page" that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?

Jeffrey:

I'll answer this one piece by piece.

"If you're such a hotshot web designer."

Never claimed to be. Roblimo wrote that glowing description. It's not surprising that some of you, who have no idea what I do, were pissed off when those words of high praise took you to a very simple, low-bandwidth, personal site.

I wish Rob had said "Zeldman is a co-founder of The Web Standards Project" (WaSP), and had explained what the WaSP does, maybe even mentioning the role we played in getting Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and begin building Mozilla around the standards-compliant Gecko core. I'm guessing people would have overlooked my supposed "design sins" or their distaste for the color orange on my personal site if they had a better idea about what I actually do.

For those who don't know, the WaSP organized a petition drive to persuade Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and build its new browser around Gecko. Then-group-leader George Olsen of WaSP, along with ThunderLizard's Jim Heid, got 2,000 developers to sign the petition. Netscape is a company that listens - at least, for the last two years, it has been listening - and you all know the result: an upcoming browser that is designed to fully comply with HTML 4, CSS-1, the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript.

No disrespect to Roblimo either. I dig the guy. And what he said is true in a sense. I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.

By the way, I wasn't upset by what Mozilla did; I was flattered by it. You may think it is ugly design, though I'm sure that none of you said so to Mozilla because you believe in the project. It's weird to me that the same people who dig Mozilla would be rude in their comments to someone who, at least in a small way, helped influence the direction of that browser, and who also influenced the initial DESIGN of that project, but whatever. I also talk with Microsoft, because the goal of WaSP is to get standards in *all* browsers, and the fact that I talk to engineers at that company may make me evil incarnate in your book. I can deal with that. If we get better browsers, I'll be satisfied.

I do get copied a lot and often those copies are better than the original. In that sense "VIEW SOURCE" functions like "OPEN SOURCE." ;) I am happy when someone takes an idea of mine and makes it better (and their own).

"why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design"

I've been designing websites for five years. I don't claim to be a genius and I'm far from the best designer on the planet, but your take on cardinal sins of a profession you do not participate in is about as meaningful as my comments on your programming decisions would be.

You are parroting Jakob Nielsen or some other expert whose work you've read. You haven't read my work on the same subject (no problem) and you don't know my work as a designer (no problem). Just as in programming, design is about decisions. A designer never sins. He/she makes informed decisions. If you get to know the work, you may understand why those decisions were made. If you never bother to engage with the work - if you merely believe that all design must conform with a small set of rules written by one or two people - you don't understand the nature of the thing you are criticizing. Especially if you spend all of five seconds looking at it, and then rush to be the first to post a rant. There are rules of grammar, too, and James Joyce threw them all out. True, I ain't him. But I am me. All designers make decisions, and if the entire web looked like http://www.useit.com I don't think that would be such a great thing. Anything that departs from the look of http://www.useit.com is violating at least a few of Jakob's "rules," and that's the nature of the beast.

"Putting [up] an 'entry page' that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?"

The bandwidth sucked is exactly 4K. I think you can handle it.

The "entry page" is a temporary placeholder while I rethink the front end of my personal site. Notice the words "temporary," "placeholder," and "personal." The previous front page was navigational in nature, and it is archived at http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html . The name refers to the fact that the page revealed a bug in recent builds of Mozilla. I have left it online so the Mozilla folks can use it to track down and fix that bug, which they are doing now.

Recently, I've been focused on WaSP and A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), a web design magazine and mailing list I co-founded with Brian Platz. The content on my personal site (275+ pages) has not been my most recent focus, so I determined a while back that it was silly to stop the visitor with a primarily navigational page. I should explain that some people visit zeldman.com for entertainment like The Ad Graveyard; a completely different audience visits for web design info, such as the Ask Dr Web tutorial; and so on. To accommodate those very different visitors, I initially had a core page that was navigational. I didn't put real content on page one, because I was accommodating maybe six completely different audiences, and there was nothing in all that content that would appeal to ALL of them. On http://www.alistapart.com/ I start with content on page one, because the audience is more unified.

Even that old navigational page (http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html), with all its rollovers etc., was very low-bandwidth. I recently got to look at it while stuck at an airport in Stockholm. The airport had five Windows boxes sharing one 56K modem. I looked at some of my favorite sites, and they were all crawling onto the screen. I was pleased that my own front page loaded instantly. I design for low bandwidth, which explains why my work rarely looks like that of "such a hot shit designer." Back to the point. I haven't yet figured out how to restructure the front end of my site, so I put up a 4K placeholder with a bone-simple rollover and a 6 second refresh to the single page at my site that I have been focusing on lately.

Now you know why I have a temporary entry page; now you know why it does "nothing" (it is temporary, and what it does is redirect you); and now you know that it does not suck bandwidth.

How it "makes it difficult to 'back' out of the site" is a mystery to me, so I can't comment on that clause in your question. Personally I find database driven pages much harder to navigate and back out of than 4K html pages. And with browsers that suck, frames-based pages can also be tough to navigate. My 4K page is frameless HTML.

2) I have a question:
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Skinka

What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?

Jeffrey:

Yes, I've read them, yes I've written on the subject, yes yes yes.

Along with another WaSP member, I helped influence Microsoft to make ALL web text resizable by the user in IE5/Mac for reasons of accessibility and usability, and we are hoping to get the same from Mozilla. (At the moment, this feature is only available in IE5/Mac. It should be in every browser. It's not in the Windows version of IE and it's obviously not in the current version of Navigator.)

Why small fonts? Personal design decision on a personal site. You can enlarge the type in some browsers, not all. That day is coming.

There are methods of CSS that allow you to resize type in *all* browsers.

Why do I often avoid those methods?

Because they are not supported in most "CSS-capable" browsers.

Absolute font-size keywords are broken in Navigator 4 (all platforms) and IE5/Windows.

Percentages and ems are broken in Netscape 4.

Points are meaningless on computer screens, and the reliance on points in Style Sheets is a widespread authoring error.

Until all browsers support standards, designers will be stuck using pixels or FONT SIZE tags. Or simply making no effort at all to control the appearance and size of type on the web page. If this bothers you, join The Web Standards Project.

(Warning: it is orange. If you "can't get past the color" then I guess you'll have to let big browser companies determine the fate of the web.)

Unless you design web sites every day, you have no idea of the compatibility nightmares involved. But in your own work, I'm sure you have plenty of examples of brain-dead decisions by others that force you to use hacks and workarounds. It's the same in web design.

At the moment, the main text at http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html (the one page in all my work that most Slashdotters seem to have looked at) is laid out with ems. This is wonderful, scalable technology. You can easily enlarge or reduce the type in just about any browser.

Except, of course, that it doesn't work at all in most versions of Navigator 4. If you're using Navigator - and you know you are - you will see large ugly type, not the type treatment I intended. Until we have standards, that's just the way it will be.

3) Not to flame, but...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mr.nobody

I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.

Jeffrey:

Another cardinal sin.

Hmm. Let's see.

The status bar *does* reveal the url of the page it links to - just like an untreated status bar would do. It also provides ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND COMMENTARY. I guess that's a bad thing. I can't see why, but I guess I'll take your word for it. URL = good, URL + additional information = bad. Because you say so.

The title tag also provides additional information, but Question #12 told me that that was okay, even good. Whew! That's a relief.

4) where's the interview
(Score:4, Interesting)
by geekpress

Jeff, I programmed for a web design company in which design issues totally trumped more practical concerns like download time. (In one case, I was forced to create absurdly complex html tables just so that the designer could get his one-pixel rounded corners on his notecard design.) What do you see as the appropriate balance between aesthetics and practical usability?

P.S. That company is now out of business, thank goodness!

Jeffrey:

I almost always design for low bandwidth.

I was creative director at a web firm and had designed a layout with thin black borders (yes I do this same thing over and over again) for a database driven site that would be creating tables on the fly. The design effect would not render in Navigator, but the page still looked fine in Navigator, even without those little black outlines.

It was possible to FORCE Navigator to display the effect by surrounding every table with an additional, empty table. That is sometimes okay, obviously - I've been doing it since we could begin applying rudimentary styling to tables - but on a large page full of data, it would unnecessarily increase the bandwidth per page, force all browsers to burn cycles as they calculated the appearance of complex table-in-table displays, possibly cause display errors, and completely yoke the content to the presentation, making it that much harder to fix later, when we have better browsers.

So I told the company president it was a usability nightmare and a waste of resources and bandwidth and therefore not worth doing.

He told me to do it anyway.

So I quit my job and started my own company.

Rounded edges, high bandwidth, all that stuff can be fine in the right situations, as long as alternatives are provided and rules of accessibility are respected. Usually I persuade my clients to go in the low-bandwidth direction, and I almost always go low-bandwidth on the noncommercial sites I do (zeldman.com, http://www.webstandards.org/ and http://www.alistapart.com/ ).

But high bandwidth is fine for the right audience. Consider http://www.praystation.com, which is a brilliantly designed site by Joshua Davis. It's amazing work. The audience for that site is primarily Joshua's fellow designers, and most of them have T1 or DSL access. Since the site's goal is to push design as far as it can go on the web, and since the audience is known to have fast connections and a desire to see great design, there is absolutely nothing wrong (and lot right) with the higher-bandwidth road taken by this project.

5) Optimism?
(Score:5, Funny)
by Chalst

How hopeful are you that Microsoft can be coaxed into making IE standards compliant? What exactly do you think Microsoft's motive was in not supporting HTML 4.0 completely?

Jeffrey:

It varies by the hour. Sometimes I think they are going to do this and simply have not committed to it because they're not sure they can pull it off. Sometimes I suspect that as the current market leader (guys with the most users) they think they don't have to bother with this. ("Our way *is* the standard." That kind of thinking.) And sometimes I reckon that they're doing this to fuck up Mozilla. ("You're going to support standards? Well, we have more users. You lose.") I don't *know* what they're thinking, but I suspect that different people there are thinking combinations of all the above.

I do know there are engineers there who are committed to supporting standards. Not only because I've met some of them through my work with WaSP, but also because - in the case of IE5/Mac - they've actually pulled it off. Remember, Microsoft (along with Netscape, Sun, invited experts, etc.) helped come up with these standards in the first place. Why would you design blueprints and then not follow them when you build the house? The engineers who participate in the standards process are committed to complying with standards. Some people in management may not be. Or they may be delaying, for short-sighted competitive reasons, or from fear of committing until they are sure they can do it right.

HTML 4 - the LAST HTML - includes dozens of accessibility improvements, and it is insane for any company not to fully support that. Without full support for HTML 4, millions of web users get hurt. That's morally wrong, and it's also just plain bad for business. I think that in time, all browser companies, including Microsoft, will come to see that. I also think the W3C's recent hiring of a conformance manager (http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=517) signals that the W3C will soon take a more active role in "helping" companies get with the program, support standards, and stop screwing up developers and web users in a game where everybody - including the browser companies - eventually loses.

6) Balancing Technologies
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Proteus

As you are no doubt aware, the technology that drives web site design is advancing rapidly. However, there are still a lot of users who run older browsers, or prefer to use text-only browsers such as Lynx.

Obviously, one wants to reach as large an audience as possible, but not "lag behind" too far. How do you go about balancing the use of newer technology on a site without alienating users of older software, disabled users, and text-only browsers?

Jeffrey:

Using HTML 4, ALT tags, and the TITLE tag goes a long way toward achieving this goal.

So does using CSS for type, instead of FONT FACE and FONT SIZE tags that yoke content to presentation.

I do both these things, and all the other little things you have to do, for instance with framesets. I think there may be some really old (1996) framesets at zeldman.com where I left out full content inside the noframes tags. I'm cleaning that up as quickly as I can. At ALA http://www.alistapart.com/), wherever I used framesets, I included the full text inside the noframes tags, and I also included TEXT versions of all articles.

The next stage is full separation of content from structure, and that means using HTML 4 and CSS (and eventually, replacing HTML 4 with XHTML; and eventually, migrating to XML).

We can't safely do that yet. Gecko is still in development, Netscape 4 has appalling "support" for CSS, IE5/Windows has better but far from complete support, and the only released browser that gets it right - IE5/Mac - has a 6% market share.

SOON. Not soon enough, but SOON, we will look back on this era of stupidity and laugh. Oh, how we will laugh. This is the TRON era and we are striving to reach the MATRIX era.

7) Reverse scenario question...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jonny Royale

Have you ever seen anything come from a browser publisher "extending" a standard (Microsoft, Netscape, other), and thought "Gee, I wish that was in the standard"? Examples?

Jeffrey:

Yes.

LOW SRC was a funky old tag from Netscape (dating back to Netscape 1.1) that allowed you to slip a low-bandwidth image into place, and then have it replaced by the more bandwidth-intensive image when the latter finished downloading. For people with very slow connections, it was a useful hack. It also enabled creative web designers to add a certain amount of "SFX magic" (cough) to even the most primitive pages, viewed by the oldest browsers, under the most adverse conditions. That's gone. Too bad. I miss it.

Because of browser offsets in all released versions of Navigator and most versions of Explorer, I wish the "four horsemen of non-validation" (leftmargin, topmargin marginwidth and marginheight) had made it into HTML 4.0 transitional. We won't need them eventually, but until the browsers are smarter, we still do need them. The W3C is always ahead of what the browsers can deliver, of course; but by discouraging these dumb proprietary tags, the W3C has put us in the position where PAGES THAT WILL NOT WORK without these tags will fail at http://validator.w3.org. That kind of failure discourages developers from building standards-compliant pages. It is a small thing, and it is transitional, but DURING THE TRANSITION, I would have liked to see those four stupid tags get approval with a benevolent sigh.

On the other hand, designers who know what they are doing may include these tags and ignore those validation errors, but don't tell the W3C I said so.

Given the brain-dead way Navigator 4 and IE4/5/Windows handled absolute font size keywords in CSS, I *sometimes* wish font size tags were not discouraged YET. I hate them and hardly ever use them, but (for instance) there's no way to get small type in Linux that is actually READABLE without relying on these dumb old non-standard tags. What I really wish in this case, of course, is that Netscape and Microsoft hadn't fucked up this simple CSS technology. So I take the FONT SIZE tags thing back. Uh, never mind. I just wish Netscape and Microsoft had gotten CSS right the first time.

8) Banners
(Score:5, Interesting)
by TheTomcat

This is only vaguely related to design, but directly related to the web, and functionality.

We all know that banners don't work anymore. The only way a business can profit from banners is to show thousands per day. Most users don't even SEE banners anymore. We avoid them the same way we dig in the couch for the remote when commercials interrupt The Simpsons.

Do you have any suggestions to make future, content-based sites profitable?

Jeffrey:

There are several issues here. One is, a lot of the best work is done as a labor of love, and always will be. Those who need a revenue model before they are willing to even think about working will lose one of the golden opportunities of the web, which is free expression and the building of communities, regardless of financial issues. For instance, Slashdot was born as a community and still is one. Eventually, Slashdot got into a position where it could make money, but Slashdot is true to itself and was not corrupted or changed by any commercial considerations. So it is possible to make a good thing and not blow it when the cash register starts jingling. But a lot of other sites and communities have turned to dreck when money was involved.

We all agree that banners suck - Roblimo even wrote an article for ALA on that subject, back when ALA was just getting launched. With a big enough readership, banners *can* be profitable, as they are at Slashdot. But I agree that most of us just hate 'em.

Sponsorships are another possible means of revenue. "This issue of Webmonkey brought to you by Hewlett-Packard." With an entertaining HP minisite available at the click of a link, for those who care. Kaliber 10000 (http://www.k10k.net) has gotten Apple sponsorship, and all that means is, there's a tiny Apple link in the top right hand corner of the front page. If you click it, you get a popup window with text on why the site's designers like their Macs, and links to some current movies in Apple Quicktime format.

The Cluetrain guys have spoken about this model of corporate sponsorship as well.

I think about it sometimes. For instance, http://www.alistapart.com/ could be "brought to you by" Macromedia or Adobe. But to tell the truth, I don't really pursue this idea because I'm not motivated by money when it comes to creating web content. I simply want to create or choose the right content, and totally control it, and I'm not sanguine that I could do that if I *had* corporate sponsorship. Thinking about it some more is on my to-do list, but it's about 500 layers down in the list. I make enough money designing websites that I don't worry about "revenue models" for my content sites. It is a real issue, though. Just one I haven't bothered with personally, yet.

9) Jeff, your CSS suck
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Nicolas MONNET

I quote from your website:

H1 {font: bold 24px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 0xp;}
H4 {font: 12px verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px;}

So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?

Jeffrey:

Refer to the answer to Question 2. Also refer to this Word from the WaSP column:

http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

The best way to style text - and the way the W3C recommends - is to use relative sizes or absolute size keywords.

Both these methods are completely broken in Navigator 4. Totally frickin' useless. Don't shoot the messenger. Netscape agrees, and that's why they threw out their old rendering engine and started from scratch.

And absolute size keywords are stupidly mis-supported in IE4/5 for Windows, where "medium" means large, and "small" means medium.

Faced with this maddening stupidity on the part of browser makers, designers/developers have two choices:

Do not style text at all. Have a nice day.

*OR* rely on pixels, which work in all "CSS-capable" browsers.

I sadly choose the latter until the browsers fully comply with W3C standards.

As to POINTS versus pixels, points are absolutely meaningless on the web, and the fact that they are used by thousands of developers who should know better proves only how little CSS is understood by the development community.

Certain point sizes may work on your platform in your style sheet. That proves that certain point sizes work on your platform in your style sheet. Cross-platform it is not transportable, and points are print-based units of measurement that have no meaningful relationship to the wonderful world of monitor resolution.

For a good discussion of CSS problems, see Todd Fahrner's "Beyond the Font Size Tag: Practical HTML Text and Styling" at http://style.metrius.com/font_size /livetext.html (Unfortunately, even some of *THESE* techniques do not work in more recent versions of Navigator 4.)

In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now. Since neither has dominant marketshare, developers will still face huge obstacles when trying to do something as SIMPLE and BASIC as size text on the web. Many will stick with pixels, which are the only CSS technique that actually WORKS across browsers and platforms.

In addition to all these nightmarish problems with our browsers, there are special challenges with Linux, because unless Linux users install additional scalable fonts, you can follow all the rules for good CSS, and avoid "problem" font sizes, and still create pages that look jaggy or are unreadable on a lot of people's machines. I worry about this all the time, but I don't have a solution for it. I have actually gone back to using the stupid The way to advance the medium is to get absolute font size keywords and relative font sizes right in CSS, finish implementing HTML 4, and give us the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript. (And then wait two years for users to upgrade.)

10) Pixel based alignment and HTML
(Score:4, Insightful)
by mcelrath

One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?

Jeffrey:

Separation of style and content is the way forward.

The problem is the browsers.

When I revised my "Ask Dr Web" tutorial at http://www.zeldman.com/askdrweb/, along with other pages at http://www.zeldman.com/, to use CSS layouts instead of tables, certain versions of Navigator 4 began crashing.

Actually crashing from basic CSS-1.

I wrote about this at A List Apart, ("The Day the Browser Died") and because of this, Netscape invested some time and resources to fixing some of these bugs in Navigator 4. It didn't catch them all, and it didn't catch them in Linux. These bugs will never be fully fixed in Navigator 4, because Netscape is wisely spending its energy to finish the Mozilla browser. Unfortunately, this means that Netscape users will continue to face serious usability hazards throughout the web until Netscape 6 is released ... *OR* it means that developers will continue to use TABLES for layouts for the next two years (as Jakob Nielsen has predicted).

If you look at these pages - http://www.zeldman.com/steal.html or http://www.zeldman.com/icon.html are other examples - you will see that we are talking about extremely BASIC layouts. An expert from the CSS pointers group actually volunteered hours of her time trying alternate combinations of the very basic CSS on those pages to see if she could find ways to stop Netscape from crashing. She could not; neither could I. Netscape did what it could for its 4.0 users, but it can't do anything more until the next generation is released.

On my personal site I made the tough decision to leave these pages as-is. I don't have time to recode them all using tables.

You can agree or disagree with that decision.

Linux folks can either use the Mozilla or Opera betas to navigate those pages in safety and comfort.

It's worth noting that W3C pages also crashed Netscape 4, for the same reason.

What happens when Netscape's browser is this badly damaged? I get hate mail from people who don't understand the issues involved. I also got a letter of thanks from Netscape's Eric Krock, because good companies WANT us to help them find bugs in their software.

As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use font size=1 to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font.

See above for the explanation as to why developers are stuck using 1994 technology to support late-1990s browsers. The same questions, the same answers.

The good thing - the ONLY good thing - about the font size tag is that it is user-resizable. The rest of this has been answered above.

Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.

Right, although in some cases it is justified.

As another example, many pages use the table , and layer to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.

Yes, that is usually a bad design decision. Whenever possible, I use what Glenn Davis (WaSP and Project Cool co-founder) calls "liquid" design ... design that reflows to exactly fit the visitor's monitor. That's almost always a better way to go. Examples of my liquid designs include http://www.alistapart.com/, http://www.the-adstore.com, and most of zeldman.com. If you dig long enough in zeldman.com, you'll come upon pages older than the NYC subways, that simply use BAD design ... though at the time, it wasn't all that bad.

Liquid design is not always appropriate but it is generally best.

What are standards groups doing to fix this?

Nothing. The W3C can't make better or more intelligent designers out of people, and neither can the WaSP, whose sole purpose is to agitate for W3C standards in browsers (and eventually in web authoring tools).

We can try to lead by example. http://www.webstandards.org/ is liquid (aside from the front page, which is "semi-liquid" owing to the large low-rez graphic) and it validates.

MEMBERS of standards groups can write articles on the subject and hope that people read them. Of course, if people "can't get past" a 4k splash page, they will not learn about my articles on the subject.

Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement table width=30ch to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?

Standards bodies can recommend certain authoring practices, and they can develop standards that make such practices possible, but they cannot enforce good authoring.

11) Evaluate Slashdot
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?

Jeffrey:

It's a community and it works. It has achieved visibility, notoriety, and even commercial success without giving an inch. Pretty awesome achievement. What would I change?

Sometimes the longer threads take a long time to load, due to back-end technology, platform and server issues. The technology works better on Linux than it does on my platform of choice (Mac OS) but, hey, that's okay.

I know you want me to comment on the design. Design is subjective. Black backgrounds and teal are not my favorite color scheme (though I used black backgrounds at the 1995 Ad Graveyard (http://www.zeldman.com/ad.html) and the January 1997 Furbo Filters so who am I to talk? The main thing I was trying to do at Furbo was get CSS to work - and to let people know about Craig Hockenberry's and my Furbo Filters, which were the only Photoshop plugins at the time that dealt with the web-safe color palette - at least to our knowledge.)

I might change the color scheme and some other things if Rob Malda went on a crack run and asked me to redesign Slashdot, but that ain't likely to happen. And I think the design of Slashdot is just fine. It focuses you on the breaking stories, allows you to read more (or not), and provides access to almost everything else on the site via small navigation units. In terms of usability it is damn good, and it has plenty of attitude.

Of course, it commits the "cardinal sin" of teal, but I can get past that.

12) Do you agree with Nielsen?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox columns by Jakob Nielsen.

Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?

Jeffrey:

I agree with his comments on oral sex and wearing white after Labor Day.

And I like that he can get $25,000 to talk for an hour. I'll do the same for half that amount.

I also agree with Jakob that most websites should be usable by as many people as possible.

What I have done about that is help found The Web Standards Project, so we can actually achieve that goal instead of using duct tape and lasagna to build sites that work for "most" people. And I try to make my pages accessible in spite of the limitations of current browsers and some of the cross-platform issues discussed above.

If you are interested in my views, you can read them at http://www.alistapart.com/, Adobe.com (here, http://www.adobe.com/we b/columns/zeldman/20000320/main.html, for instance), http://www.webstandards.org/ and of course at http://www.zeldman.com/. If you can get past the 4k splash page.

At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).

Thanks! The reason Slashdot chomps title tags is probably because they are not supported in Netscape yet. They are an important usability feature, and in some browsers they also offer nifty low-grade special effects - along with the opportunity for contextual ampliciation or ironic commentary.

jeffrey

Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little.

http://www.zeldman.com
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.happycog.com
http://www.webstandards.org

Pauly asks: "My former profession of Technical Writer was made very painful by my customers' requirement to have their documents delivered in MS Office formats. PDF/FrameMaker was not acceptable, as they needed to be able to edit the documents as well. Let me tell you, it is painful watching a 3,000+ page Word97 manuscript, the fruit of weeks of hard labor, rendered into rubbish by my customer's Word95. I've missed deadlines, lost money, and will never forgive Microsoft for their abuse of me and my kind. My question: is it possible that XML-based standard file formats suitable for word processor, spreadsheets, etc. could be created that forever do away with proprietary binary formats and inadequate file conversion routines? This notion seems to be working for the graphics crowd in the form of SVG. The benefits are obvious, what are the drawbacks?"

Cactvs142 asks: "Have to make a choice for writing my science report in chemistry. I want to use XML and end up with PDF, so Word (etc.) and LaTex fail. It comes down to this choice: DocBook or TEI. DocBook is used by O'Reilly, but TEI already supports MathML. Which one is the better choice?"

thehermit writes "New info on the W3C's Web site as XHTML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on Jan. 26. The specification now features a single namespace, and takes a more cautious approach to Internet media types, following feedback from W3C members on the previous version of the specification. " W3C notes that "XHTML 1.0 is the first step toward a modular and extensible Web based on XML". The full XHTML spec is also available.

thehermit writes "New info on the W3C's Web site as XHTML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on Jan. 26. The specification now features a single namespace, and takes a more cautious approach to Internet media types, following feedback from W3C members on the previous version of the specification. " W3C notes that "XHTML 1.0 is the first step toward a modular and extensible Web based on XML". The full XHTML spec is also available.

apsmith wrote in wondering what software makers (like Microsoft) will be doing with their software versioning now that we've passed the year 2000 milestone. It's a humorous look at software versioning and it poses some interesting questions. What do you do when you cease using a sensible versioning system in favor of marketing hype (ala "Windows 2000")? Click below for the full text.

apsmith asks: "As I just heard that Microsoft is naming the next version of its database SQL Server 2000 it got me wondering - what happens to all these software products with big "version numbers" in a couple of years when 2000 seems like ancient history? Will we see more factor-of-20 leaps to Office 65535, Windows 1048575, etc? Merely modifying the fourth digit of the version number seems too insignificant to make upgrading seem worth the hassle - does Windows 2008 catch your eye any differently than Windows 2005?

It's not just Microsoft products that seem to have written themselves into a corner with high version numbers, though they are probably the worst. But even Emacs is up to version 20. Sun pushed Solaris from 2.6 to 7. RedHat at 6.1 is somehow way beyond the Linux kernel. At the other extreme is the model that Donald Knuth took for TeX, with the version numbers slowly approaching Pi (the latest teTeX distribution has TeX version 3.14159) but TeX hasn't changed much in the last 10 years either, so a lot of extra pieces have evolved around it to keep it functional.

In the real non-hyped world it seems any version number over 5 or 6 implies it's about time to switch to a new product or start over from scratch. There are countless examples - from recent history think of libc6 -> glibc2 (a bit of a mess there), HTML 5 -> XHTML, or perhaps even Netscape 5 -> Mozilla. Or is that just a geek's view of the universe? How should we be numbering our products these days? And what is Microsoft going to do after 2000? "

Bogatyr writes "Robert Cailliau, who designed the Web with Briton Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990, says all Internet users should be licensed so surfers on the information highway are as accountable as drivers on the road. " W3C has been working on such systems for years - unforgeable certificates which users must present to gain access to content, and which incidentally identify them uniquely and provide assorted marketing information. The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you.

What do Microsoft, AOL, IBM, MCI Worldcom, Bell Canada, British Telecommunications (BT), Bertelsmann, Demon Internet, Cable and Wireless, Deutsche Telecom, the Japanese Electronic Network Consortium, EuroISPA, and UUNet have in common with the United Kingdom, Germany, the European Union, and Australia? They're all working together on a plan to censor the Internet.

Hundreds of people from around the world are coming together in Munich for a three-day conference, September 9-11. They represent the largest internet corporations and first-world countries. They've been working on this for years. They have millions of dollars. They're very, very serious. And someone forgot to tell them that information wants to be free.

What's going on?

Labels are the big thing. Labels are everywhere. Television has labels, after Congress threatened to not renew station broadcast licenses if the networks didn't comply. Video games have labels, after Congress threatened the gaming industry. Music has labels, after Congress and Tipper Gore (Al's wife) threatened the recording industry. Anyone remember the 80s, when musicians and fans both seethed at the very idea of labels slapped on our music by some politician? Now even MP3.com has a parental advisory icon.

And of course, movies have labels, the motion picture industry being the most dangerous threat to America's youth next to the internet. Hollywood labors under hundreds of censorship laws.

Now Senator Lieberman wants to rate every audio-visual product produced in the U.S. with a violence labeling system. (Lieberman was primarily responsible for the video game ratings and television ratings as well.)

Proponents of these censorship systems sometimes like to call them "voluntary". They're as voluntary as death and taxes. Or as voluntary as not being able to sell your product at all - that's what Lieberman's bill would dictate, if you don't comply. Salon said it well:

"The point has always been to change what actually gets broadcast through the flexing of government muscle. In simpler times, this was known as censorship."

Labels and censorship go hand in hand. The American Library Association speaks plainly: "Labeling is an attempt to prejudice attitudes and as such, it is a censor's tool." Some groups do stand up for what's right. You'll notice you don't see parental advisories on library books. Yet.

Think of how it works in practice: items with labels are stigmatized, attacked by Congress and pressure groups, and eventually - through law or simple bullying - they aren't available anymore. Think of the NC-17 label. All it's supposed to indicate is fare fit for adults - and since adults are 80% of the population, there ought to be plenty of movies made for them. But since most theaters (over 90%) won't run NC-17 movies, and most newspapers won't carry ads for them, any NC-17 movie is doomed to be a failure. And thus the only movies that make it to the theater are those deemed fit for children. Movies bearing that label were easy to attack - just take the most horrible movie you've ever seen (Debbie Does Dallas? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Stargate?) and whip up a public frenzy, then say, "We can get rid of this filth if only you'll stop showing NC-17 movies, Mr. Theater Owner." The pressure was applied at different steps in the distribution process - at the movie theater chains and newspapers, rather than at the consumer's end - but the result is the same: you can't see it.

Or you can't see it the way it was intended. Stanley Kubrick was known first for his work, and second for the exacting craft with which he set up every single shot. If even Kubrick's famous final-cut contract couldn't keep the MPAA vultures from digitally painting over his sex scenes, how is any director safe?

But we digress. We were talking about labels, and Internet censorship. These things intersect in a technology called PICS.

PICS stands for Platform for an Internet Censorship System - well, close enough. It's a specification for attaching labels to internet content - Web pages, Usenet posts, chatroom messages, emails... anything. In theory, you could rate anything on any scale you chose - journalist Simson Garfinkel made a tongue-in-cheek PICS rating system to rate pages based on the amount of Simson they contain.

But that is theory. In the real world, you could rate music or video games on the basis of Simson too, but nobody does - because life is short. Just like all the other labeling systems, it turns out that the only Internet labeling systems that anyone cares about are pejorative labels - rating pages for sex, or foul language, or heresy, or violence. Why? Because these are what the censors want to get rid of.

The people getting together in Munich are doing so for the purpose of developing a single, uniform, international rating system to be applied to all Internet content worldwide. It's not a voluntary system - several countries have already declared their intent to make it mandatory, and Jim Miller of W3C (and co-creator of PICS) put it nicely when he said -

"It's going to happen and the publishers are going to resist it as long as they can, but they'll have to realise that they must rate their content or face prosecution."

Who's a publisher? We are. You are, if you post a reply to this thread. If the system gets set up as scheduled, you'll be forced to add a rating to every post you make, every email you send, every webpage you publish - or face prosecution. After all, you're protecting the children.

Or more precisely, the adults. Australia wants to ban the sex categories from its entire population - Germany wants to ban the hate speech categories. Just like at the movies, it's easier if you attack higher up in the distribution chain.

Rather than making it illegal to download Mein Kampf or purchase it from Amazon.com, it's much easier if you make a law that applies to the telecommunications providers. They're big companies. The bigger they are, the less likely they are to buck the laws - and since there aren't many of them, they're easy to monitor for compliance. Civil disobedience isn't in their vocabulary: give them a law, and they'll just implement it. Such as censoring out all material with a certain rating at the backbone.

Oh, it's true that it won't be 100% effective. Banned documents will still be smuggled across the electronic borders. But for most people, in most circumstances, it will be plenty effective. If you like your internet unlabeled, it's just about too late.

by Michael Sims and Jamie McCarthy

(More tomorrow on the Munich conference and recent events in the development of the Global Rating System.)

What do Microsoft, AOL, IBM, MCI Worldcom, Bell Canada, British Telecommunications (BT), Bertelsmann, Demon Internet, Cable and Wireless, Deutsche Telecom, the Japanese Electronic Network Consortium, EuroISPA, and UUNet have in common with the United Kingdom, Germany, the European Union, and Australia? They're all working together on a plan to censor the Internet.

Hundreds of people from around the world are coming together in Munich for a three-day conference, September 9-11. They represent the largest internet corporations and first-world countries. They've been working on this for years. They have millions of dollars. They're very, very serious. And someone forgot to tell them that information wants to be free.

What's going on?

Labels are the big thing. Labels are everywhere. Television has labels, after Congress threatened to not renew station broadcast licenses if the networks didn't comply. Video games have labels, after Congress threatened the gaming industry. Music has labels, after Congress and Tipper Gore (Al's wife) threatened the recording industry. Anyone remember the 80s, when musicians and fans both seethed at the very idea of labels slapped on our music by some politician? Now even MP3.com has a parental advisory icon.

And of course, movies have labels, the motion picture industry being the most dangerous threat to America's youth next to the internet. Hollywood labors under hundreds of censorship laws.

Now Senator Lieberman wants to rate every audio-visual product produced in the U.S. with a violence labeling system. (Lieberman was primarily responsible for the video game ratings and television ratings as well.)

Proponents of these censorship systems sometimes like to call them "voluntary". They're as voluntary as death and taxes. Or as voluntary as not being able to sell your product at all - that's what Lieberman's bill would dictate, if you don't comply. Salon said it well:

"The point has always been to change what actually gets broadcast through the flexing of government muscle. In simpler times, this was known as censorship."

Labels and censorship go hand in hand. The American Library Association speaks plainly: "Labeling is an attempt to prejudice attitudes and as such, it is a censor's tool." Some groups do stand up for what's right. You'll notice you don't see parental advisories on library books. Yet.

Think of how it works in practice: items with labels are stigmatized, attacked by Congress and pressure groups, and eventually - through law or simple bullying - they aren't available anymore. Think of the NC-17 label. All it's supposed to indicate is fare fit for adults - and since adults are 80% of the population, there ought to be plenty of movies made for them. But since most theaters (over 90%) won't run NC-17 movies, and most newspapers won't carry ads for them, any NC-17 movie is doomed to be a failure. And thus the only movies that make it to the theater are those deemed fit for children. Movies bearing that label were easy to attack - just take the most horrible movie you've ever seen (Debbie Does Dallas? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Stargate?) and whip up a public frenzy, then say, "We can get rid of this filth if only you'll stop showing NC-17 movies, Mr. Theater Owner." The pressure was applied at different steps in the distribution process - at the movie theater chains and newspapers, rather than at the consumer's end - but the result is the same: you can't see it.

Or you can't see it the way it was intended. Stanley Kubrick was known first for his work, and second for the exacting craft with which he set up every single shot. If even Kubrick's famous final-cut contract couldn't keep the MPAA vultures from digitally painting over his sex scenes, how is any director safe?

But we digress. We were talking about labels, and Internet censorship. These things intersect in a technology called PICS.

PICS stands for Platform for an Internet Censorship System - well, close enough. It's a specification for attaching labels to internet content - Web pages, Usenet posts, chatroom messages, emails... anything. In theory, you could rate anything on any scale you chose - journalist Simson Garfinkel made a tongue-in-cheek PICS rating system to rate pages based on the amount of Simson they contain.

But that is theory. In the real world, you could rate music or video games on the basis of Simson too, but nobody does - because life is short. Just like all the other labeling systems, it turns out that the only Internet labeling systems that anyone cares about are pejorative labels - rating pages for sex, or foul language, or heresy, or violence. Why? Because these are what the censors want to get rid of.

The people getting together in Munich are doing so for the purpose of developing a single, uniform, international rating system to be applied to all Internet content worldwide. It's not a voluntary system - several countries have already declared their intent to make it mandatory, and Jim Miller of W3C (and co-creator of PICS) put it nicely when he said -

"It's going to happen and the publishers are going to resist it as long as they can, but they'll have to realise that they must rate their content or face prosecution."

Who's a publisher? We are. You are, if you post a reply to this thread. If the system gets set up as scheduled, you'll be forced to add a rating to every post you make, every email you send, every webpage you publish - or face prosecution. After all, you're protecting the children.

Or more precisely, the adults. Australia wants to ban the sex categories from its entire population - Germany wants to ban the hate speech categories. Just like at the movies, it's easier if you attack higher up in the distribution chain.

Rather than making it illegal to download Mein Kampf or purchase it from Amazon.com, it's much easier if you make a law that applies to the telecommunications providers. They're big companies. The bigger they are, the less likely they are to buck the laws - and since there aren't many of them, they're easy to monitor for compliance. Civil disobedience isn't in their vocabulary: give them a law, and they'll just implement it. Such as censoring out all material with a certain rating at the backbone.

Oh, it's true that it won't be 100% effective. Banned documents will still be smuggled across the electronic borders. But for most people, in most circumstances, it will be plenty effective. If you like your internet unlabeled, it's just about too late.

by Michael Sims and Jamie McCarthy

(More tomorrow on the Munich conference and recent events in the development of the Global Rating System.)

Floris writes "Mozilla picks up steam - it is actually starting to look like a real OSS project now ;) New third party contributions are IRC andReal Time Messaging clients. Funny to think that Mozilla might actually fulfill the promise the browser once was and integrate all internet protocols into one interface."

Eric Krock writes "The Web Standards Project has launched a petition drive to pressure Microsoft to fully support HTML 4.0, CSS1, DOM1, and XML in IE." Like it or not, IE is currently the most widely-used WWW browser. Since Microsoft is under a lot of pressure to act (or at least pretend to act) nice nowadays, a large number of polite requests to make their browser products fully support current and future W3C standards just might do some good.

fabbe writes "The HTTP 1.1 protocol has been approved by the W3C and IETF. CNET article is here. " Both bodies apparently showed ruthless efficiency getting these standards out there... speeds that make even glaciers jealous.