Slashdot Mirror
Domain: w3.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to w3.org.
Comments · 6,785
-
Re:MathML ?
Mozilla supports MathML, altho sometimes you need to install an extra font package. Start Mozilla and see this page.
-
Uhm
it doesnt even validate
you do know about doctypes, character encodings and how xhtml and html parsers work right ?
without a doctype using or even calling it xhtml is worthless and the parser will use plain old html quirks mode (aka html 3), good effort but no cigar, you could of also scripted this in WMLS then the client would not need to post forms and would be able to update the display in realtime, the user could even use it offline then and store the WML locally.
and you call yourself a nerd ?
-
Re:That silly web thing.Lame Graphics? That's not the point. Tim Berners-Lee valued his Next because the libraries were so easy to use.
I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already.
WorldWideWeb.app commentary -
MathML ?
Whatever happened to MathML ? I remember when it was announced, half a decade ago, I did think it would solve all those printing and compatibility problems. I have yet to find one app that supports it, particularly the browsers.
-
That silly web thing.
Somehow I can't imagine doom on anything except a PC! But Tim Berners-Lee did write a particularly useless piece of software in order to justify the money he'd spent on a NeXT Cube.
-
FO
What would be really great would be if it would support graphical layout of Formatting Objects. I've checked out the available tools and they're unbelievably expensive, and not even very capable: little better than writing the formatting yourself. Something geared towards professional layout rather than simple web layout, or one page layout, would really help to advance this standard as well as the use of XML in general.
-
AbsolutelyI am a mathematics major, with research experience. All my papers, reports, and even a few physics labs I had to do have been written in LaTeX, which makes automatic section labeling, theorem/proposition/proof labeling, table of contents generation, and bibliography generation a snap. Not only have I found that LaTeX has allowed me to create truly beautiful documents, but *every* handout I have received from any professor in Math, Physics, or CS has been in LaTeX (okay, there have been a few execptions--but not many!). This includes tests, homeworks, syllabi, etc. There have even been a couple times when a professor has stopped mid-lecture to wax romantic about how great LaTeX is and how easy it makes his/her life. Every journal expects papers to be submitted in TeX or LaTeX, and every researcher in the field knows it.
As for previous comments saying that LaTeX is not extensible and that the formatting and content are not separate, that is bunk. You can write your own macros, people have written image drawing programs (for diagram generation) in LaTeX, and anything else imaginable. The formatting is done for you 99%. You just specify where paragraphs, sections, whatever start, and LaTeX takes care of the rest.
The only capacity in which SGML or XML (including MathML) is used to publish scientific content (i.e., containing lots of equations and document structions such as sections, theorems, proofs, etc.) is to first write the LaTeX, then to use latex2html (or a similar program). Seriously, it is totally impractical to write MathML yourself. take a look at some sample code if you want. It is designed to be output by a computer program such as LaTeX.
The learning curve on LaTeX is pretty low. Just google around for stuff, and it will be easy to find what you are looking for (usually). Start with the following references (there is *no* need to ever buy a book on LaTeX): but google is your best bet. I usually just type "latex -
AbsolutelyI am a mathematics major, with research experience. All my papers, reports, and even a few physics labs I had to do have been written in LaTeX, which makes automatic section labeling, theorem/proposition/proof labeling, table of contents generation, and bibliography generation a snap. Not only have I found that LaTeX has allowed me to create truly beautiful documents, but *every* handout I have received from any professor in Math, Physics, or CS has been in LaTeX (okay, there have been a few execptions--but not many!). This includes tests, homeworks, syllabi, etc. There have even been a couple times when a professor has stopped mid-lecture to wax romantic about how great LaTeX is and how easy it makes his/her life. Every journal expects papers to be submitted in TeX or LaTeX, and every researcher in the field knows it.
As for previous comments saying that LaTeX is not extensible and that the formatting and content are not separate, that is bunk. You can write your own macros, people have written image drawing programs (for diagram generation) in LaTeX, and anything else imaginable. The formatting is done for you 99%. You just specify where paragraphs, sections, whatever start, and LaTeX takes care of the rest.
The only capacity in which SGML or XML (including MathML) is used to publish scientific content (i.e., containing lots of equations and document structions such as sections, theorems, proofs, etc.) is to first write the LaTeX, then to use latex2html (or a similar program). Seriously, it is totally impractical to write MathML yourself. take a look at some sample code if you want. It is designed to be output by a computer program such as LaTeX.
The learning curve on LaTeX is pretty low. Just google around for stuff, and it will be easy to find what you are looking for (usually). Start with the following references (there is *no* need to ever buy a book on LaTeX): but google is your best bet. I usually just type "latex -
AbsolutelyI am a mathematics major, with research experience. All my papers, reports, and even a few physics labs I had to do have been written in LaTeX, which makes automatic section labeling, theorem/proposition/proof labeling, table of contents generation, and bibliography generation a snap. Not only have I found that LaTeX has allowed me to create truly beautiful documents, but *every* handout I have received from any professor in Math, Physics, or CS has been in LaTeX (okay, there have been a few execptions--but not many!). This includes tests, homeworks, syllabi, etc. There have even been a couple times when a professor has stopped mid-lecture to wax romantic about how great LaTeX is and how easy it makes his/her life. Every journal expects papers to be submitted in TeX or LaTeX, and every researcher in the field knows it.
As for previous comments saying that LaTeX is not extensible and that the formatting and content are not separate, that is bunk. You can write your own macros, people have written image drawing programs (for diagram generation) in LaTeX, and anything else imaginable. The formatting is done for you 99%. You just specify where paragraphs, sections, whatever start, and LaTeX takes care of the rest.
The only capacity in which SGML or XML (including MathML) is used to publish scientific content (i.e., containing lots of equations and document structions such as sections, theorems, proofs, etc.) is to first write the LaTeX, then to use latex2html (or a similar program). Seriously, it is totally impractical to write MathML yourself. take a look at some sample code if you want. It is designed to be output by a computer program such as LaTeX.
The learning curve on LaTeX is pretty low. Just google around for stuff, and it will be easy to find what you are looking for (usually). Start with the following references (there is *no* need to ever buy a book on LaTeX): but google is your best bet. I usually just type "latex -
Re:Wow
I think that as far as the look goes, it's a vast improvement. But they've made all the classic errors people with just half a clue make.
- Look, I'm perfectly happy with the font size in my browser. Overriding it like that (with pxs and pts, no less!) is just plain stupid.
- HTML 4.01 Transitional? In this day and age? Come on, if anybody can do better, it should be the guys behind Mozilla. They should be using Strict.
- Cludges abound. Table layouts, presentational HTML, etc
- invalid HTML.
- Screwed up character encoding
- Confusing concepts (newbie question: "If Mozilla 1.4 is so good and has won all these awards, why are you telling me that Firebird is the best browser possible?").
It's a half-assed job, and we should expect better from the Mozilla project.
-
Re:Transferring Files
Mistake: thinking that's there's only one source of metadata. Multiple metadata sources may exist for any particular object. The w3c attempts to address this issue with their rdf standard.
The first (the worst) option you mention, while not entirely apropriate, may indeed be closest to the ideal. Because we are not talking about a separate metadata file, but files . Now I wish I had a clever answer about how to maintain linkage between metadata and the things metadata describes as things move around, but I don't. But my main point is that metadata should likely be dissassociated from the thing it describes. -
Re:the future is now.
try W3C's HTML Validator and you'll see your page has errors.
I'm not saying Mozilla can't use a "best guess" like IE, KHTML, etc. do, but best guess is just a guess.
I've found a handful of pages that Mozilla doesn't render correctly, and a few times I've needed to use that pages so I had to load IE. I'm not saying Mozilla didn't have a bug causing the pages to be displayed incorrectly, but I believe it is poorly-coded HTML that tripped up Mozilla, or IE "enhanced" web-sites, which is really bad. -
Re:the future is now.
There's nothing wrong with Mozilla's table layouts, and yours aren't terribly complex to begin with. Have you tried validating your HTML?
I looked quickly through your source--many browsers have trouble rendering table cells with no content in them. Instead of empty
td
objects, fill them with an nbsp or a 1x1 transparent image. -
Re:Google's cache copy - the larger issueOn some file types, such as
Try the Pragma: no-cache and/or Cache-control HTTP headers.
-
Re:they aren't worried about security
Many of us know what a bitch it is to develop a code and feature intensive site that works correctly for all browsers.
This may be of some use to you. There really is no excuse nowadays for writing websites which don't work on all platforms...
-
XPath r0x0rs, can't wait for XQuery
XPath is awesome for getting at what you really want. SAX and DOM are too low level for implementing anything other than an XPath or XSLT engine
-
Re:No easy answerand the idea of closing your body and html tags twice is rather sloppy.
So is leaving the title of your own web page as "Untitled Document", or allowing the text box on your contact page to overlap the "design" image on the right (at least on IE6). Oh, and the site that you've created for Otter Creek Adventures fails the w3c check quite badly.
-
Re:No easy answer
The methodology sounds great until you go their web site. First glance it looks great, but when you look closer and run it through this you get this.
Want to impress me with the programming skills of your company? Don't EVER try to show me a sloppy website and tell me what great code you produce. Web Design isn't that tough, and the idea of closing your body and html tags twice is rather sloppy.
Someone should fix that IMMEDIATELY, like you say they do. -
Re:No easy answer
The methodology sounds great until you go their web site. First glance it looks great, but when you look closer and run it through this you get this.
Want to impress me with the programming skills of your company? Don't EVER try to show me a sloppy website and tell me what great code you produce. Web Design isn't that tough, and the idea of closing your body and html tags twice is rather sloppy.
Someone should fix that IMMEDIATELY, like you say they do. -
I don't think the User-Agent header cuts it
when I said that I meant "standard desktop web browsers".
I'd call those "visual web browsers for PCs". To me the term "standard" means only that a given product implements a given specification.
A simple answer is to switch on information in the User-Agent HTTP header.
OK, so you're using User-Agent to negotiate a media type. That would work for browsers dedicated to a given medium. However, some browsers such as Mozilla can be made to support multiple media, and the User-agent: header doesn't always reflect this. How would you handle, say, Mozilla running in an 800x600 window (@media screen) vs. Mozilla running in a 512x384 window (@media tv) vs. Mozilla running in a 240x160 window (@media handheld) vs. Mozilla running in an 8.5" by 11" high-resolution window with discrete pages (@media print)? How would you handle wget? How would you handle a caching proxy? I understand the basics of what you're doing with server-side XSLT switched on HTTP User-Agent, but unless the browser sends some sort of X-Accept-Media request header akin to HTTP's Accept, Accept-Encoding, and Accept-Language headers, I wouldn't know what to switch on.
The point I've wanted to make so far is: what makes a table layout better than a CSS layout? Do you use <font> as well?
-
Re:Non-visual user agents
I define a "web browser" as a program that can download pages via HTTP and render HTML into something human-perceivable. Not all web browsers are visual web browsers. Or am I degrading this discussion into a question of semantics?
You are, but I was not clear, and when I said that I meant "standard desktop web browsers".CSS supports @media selectors
The CSS approach is inherently flawed in that it adds markup to a fixed flow, when in reality I want different flow on different devices. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, sometimes repeating a header every paragraph, sometimes not, sometimes with links, sometimes not... It's a fine abstract solution that probably has some good specific applications, but it doesn't properly address the problem of vastly different device types and the fact that information/content is presented in vastly different ways on them.
You sing the praises of table layout, but most web browsers that support XSLT also support CSS. Would you really want to generate a table layout using client-side XSLT?
Sure, why not? If I'm rendering HTML for a standard desktop web browser, what's the difference? It's two alternate ways to accomplish the same thing. Neither is right or wrong.And how through HTTP would your server know which server-side XSLT script to use?
A simple answer is to switch on information in the User-Agent HTTP header. You can certainly get more clever than that, but it's usually not necessary.
By the way, don't get me wrong. I think the CSS approach to multi-platform rendering is cool, and is often easy to implement to get initial support going for multiple platforms. But for long-term production quality cross-platform presentation, it's not sufficient. -
Re:Non-visual user agents
web pages work on web browsers.
I define a "web browser" as a program that can download pages via HTTP and render HTML into something human-perceivable. Not all web browsers are visual web browsers. Or am I degrading this discussion into a question of semantics?
If you want content on other devices, you need to re-render it as something else specific for that target
CSS supports @media selectors to do just that. You can get different selectors for a text browser ('tty'), a WebTV style device ('tv' and 'projection'), IE/Mozilla ('screen' and 'print'), a speech browser ('aural'), a Braille browser ('braille' and 'embossed'), a PDA ('handheld'), etc.
A good solution is to represent data in XML and use XSLT or similar technology to render specifically for your target platform. Note that many browsers even have this functionality (XSLT) built in.
You sing the praises of table layout, but most web browsers that support XSLT also support CSS. Would you really want to generate a table layout using client-side XSLT? And how through HTTP would your server know which server-side XSLT script to use?
-
Re:Link renders bad on Mozilla?
The W3C has a ton of online resources linked from their learning CSS page Here
-
Re:get a load of this quote
No, it's not a cheap shot. It's the truth. Though I can agree with you about the world not wanting to standardize on proprietary web services, the standardization efforts behind web services have been an absolutely assinine circus.
The issue is evidenced here, and here, and here. (I think
You can debate who's to blame, but the SOAP standard has taken a long time in coming. Version 1.2 was FINALLY released like a week ago, but the W3C has been running around like idiots with it for half of forever. I can tell you from personal experience that corporations want to use web services now but are really hesitant to start using web services to build enterprise apps without real standardization. What it comes down to, in my view, is that as a developer, I need these tools now, and I've been waiting for them for far too long because Tim Berners - Lee has been stroking his Semantic Web pipe dream for more than like 3 years.
What Mr. Helms had to say wasn't a cheap shot at open standards. It was a shot at some serious problems with the drafting of these specific standards, and he has a lot of well-documented history to back him up. IMHO, calling the web services standards "immature" was pretty gracious of Mr. Helms.
You should really read up on the topics you post about so you have some better knowledge of what you're saying before you start taking "cheap shots" at someone simply because of where they're employed.
(Mods: "Interesting"?!? Come ON...) -
Hyperlinking frenzy
Hi,
I am all for html hyperlinks but I think I can find Eweek's website, as well as microsoft's website and its dot net section, especially after three years.
Of course I know, I wouldn't be bothered if I didn't try to read the article. Who reads the articles on slashdot anyways? -
SVG is the "Flash replacement"Actually, the W3C spec that most closely matches the functionality of Flash is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). It includes high quality vector graphics and effects as well as animation and scripting.
Note that this doesn't mean that it can play
-
Re:SMIL? Don't talk to me about SMIL
You are confusing the SMIL used in mobile handset multimedia messages (MMS) and SMIL in general. SMIL wasn't created for MMS purposes, it's the other way around: MMS uses SMIL to define presentation.
But MMS messages use a only a very limited subset of SMIL to define the MMS presentation. Currently an MMS is a SMIL slideshow where you link a picture, some text and a sound together for each slide (= par element), (example markup here). As you mentioned, all the Nokias ignore the timing information, etc. so the SMIL implementations by the handset makers are rather incomplete. But they very well may be so because to be MMS-conformant, they don't have to support all of SMIL.
-
Re:SMIL? Don't talk to me about SMIL
SMIL's will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly - and so far, they haven't.
This is a little bit like saying that HTML will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly. SMIL is not for phones. It can be used on phones, as can HTML or MP3 or JPEG, but it can also be used anywhere else. Consider the number of implementations out there. Only a small subset are for phones.
-
Re:Bengali scriptTypical US'ian attitude. Apparently the predominant impression is that there are two languages is the world: English and "foreign". Foreign being a language that sounds just like english, but with an accent, and is written using random strokes.
Everybody should be able to tell arabic from bengali. However, telling the latter apart from devanagari is harder, and can be excused.
-
Re:Bengali scriptTypical US'ian attitude. Apparently the predominant impression is that there are two languages is the world: English and "foreign". Foreign being a language that sounds just like english, but with an accent, and is written using random strokes.
Everybody should be able to tell arabic from bengali. However, telling the latter apart from devanagari is harder, and can be excused.
-
Tom's Hardware = worst tag soup ever
-
Tom's Hardware = worst tag soup ever
-
Tom's Hardware = worst tag soup ever
-
Re:Opera gives blacked-out page
Hmm.. Well, the HTML 4.01 spec talks about comments at http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#h
- 3.2.4, and it seems to indicate that the closing tag should be -->.What's really strange here is that I was unable to reproduce the problem on my own; I tried making a page that closed comments just like that page did, but it displayed properly in Opera. At first that made me think that the problem might be somewhere else, so I made a copy of the site's page and changed the close-comment tag to -->. Oddly, it worked. The problem may be a combination of a few different things, then.. Anyway, I've e-mailed the site maintainer about it, and I'll keep looking into it.
-
Re:Not many....
-
Re:Not many....
-
Re:Monitors. - actually...
Anti-spam webforms not only leave out the blind, but anyone who uses a non-graphical browser (like Lynx.) Similar issues abound regarding alt tags and graphics.
There are other challenge response systems that can be used in place of graphics. I think the only reason that graphics are being used is because the designers haven't given any real thought to users who don't use graphics. This is the same kind of mental blind spot that has people using javascript and flash on major sites.
I guess the blind community finally had enough - a lot of major sites apparently are not following the recommended accessibility guidelines set down by the W3. This is their version of the stick, to convince companies (and lazy designers/programmers) that ignoring them is a bad idea. -
(OT) www.rfc-ignorant.org
Heh, one would expect www.rfc-ignorant.org to be compliant with Internet standards. It's, however, not when it comes to HTML at least...
-
XHTML media type test
See this table for information on which browsers do or do not support the "application/xhtml+xml" media type. The only present browser that is a cause of problems with it is Internet Explorer.
-
Re:An insighful summary indeed!
By the way, I could not validate his page
I dunno, this validated just fine for me...
HTML 4.0 Transitional, AFAIK, does not require the specification of a character set, though it would be good form to do so.
-
Re:CSS Support?Actually, Mozilla seems to be the only browser, that has developers who actually understand the CSS box model (which shouldn't be that hard after all).
Paddings don't work right in IE or in Opera. Other than that, if you sum the support of IE and Opera, you pretty much get Mozilla.
-
SMIL
It is already on the w3.org (the people who brought you HTML and XML standards) website, and it is called SMIL.
-
Re:How about XML?
You probably want SMIL by w3c.
And it has been a w3c standard since 1998, so nothing new there... -
Re:didn't hyper card support this?Yeah, I'm having trouble seeing what's new about this.
SMIL (easily used with RealVideo as well as others) accomplishes what this screenshot seems to show, and you can always embed video in an HTML page with text hyperlinks to different timestamps in that video or different video entirely.
-
Re:Open source solution?As far as content tags go, there's are already rating standards: See ICRA (was once RSAC) and the PICS site for details. Most browsers have such filters built in, often even with central administration capabilities.
One problem is the vast number of sites which, for various reasons, don't label appropriately - usually either because they don't label at all or intentionally try to keep ahead of the censorware.
Another problem is that any set of rules will result in miscategorization, while whitelist/blacklists are neither scalable nor do they satisfy the desire for local control of categories.
I'm the concerned parent of a 5 year-old (who uses "google" as a verb), a trained teen sexuality educator, and I'm extremely anti-censorship. As you may guess, I'm occasionally conflicted on this topic. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that for my family, what I'm looking for is a tool that lets me filter out the bulk of the egregious crap (porn, hate, violence, ads) for casual use.
I'd even be satisfied with a warning rather than a hard filter in non-blacklisted cases: "Warning: the requested page will probably make your little head explode - follow this link if you really want to got there or click here if you want someone else to check it out for you".
-
An insighful summary indeed!
Jakob Nielsen - the man who wants all sites on the internet to be written in HTML 3 or 4, with virtually no images. His article is extremely insightful - stating the blatantly obvious.
News flash Jakob - nobody is using 9.6 kbps modems anymore! Graphics can be aesthetically pleasing while making a site more 'useable' than text alone.
New standards and the rich content features of web languages have a reason and a purpose. Graphical browsers have been about for 9 years - isn't it time he used these features, and stopped telling others not to?
By the way, I could not validate his page: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://useit.co
m And he seems to have several CSS warnings: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=
h ttp://useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html
These warnings stem from heuristics - rules of thumb are very common in the field of useability. These warnings attempt to avoid useability issues by ensuring the text colour is not the same as the background colour.I choose not to live in the past.
-
An insighful summary indeed!
Jakob Nielsen - the man who wants all sites on the internet to be written in HTML 3 or 4, with virtually no images. His article is extremely insightful - stating the blatantly obvious.
News flash Jakob - nobody is using 9.6 kbps modems anymore! Graphics can be aesthetically pleasing while making a site more 'useable' than text alone.
New standards and the rich content features of web languages have a reason and a purpose. Graphical browsers have been about for 9 years - isn't it time he used these features, and stopped telling others not to?
By the way, I could not validate his page: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://useit.co
m And he seems to have several CSS warnings: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=
h ttp://useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html
These warnings stem from heuristics - rules of thumb are very common in the field of useability. These warnings attempt to avoid useability issues by ensuring the text colour is not the same as the background colour.I choose not to live in the past.
-
Re:Hmmmmmm.
Next time you should check it in the W3C html validator. Oh, wait...
-
Re:Hmmmmmm.
Next time you should check it in the W3C html validator. Oh, wait...
-
We invented the WWW!
It's a bit rich for this bloke to say that Europeans don't understand the Internet when they invented computers, TV and the World Wide Web (SSEM, HREF="http://www.tvdawn.com/tvhist1.htm#Baird">Ba
i rd and Berners-Lee , all brits)!