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This is already law for newspapers,

Yes, at least I know it is here in Norway, and it is a Good Thing, definately. However, it is not an absolute right, the editor has still very strong influence on what is allowed in. After all, they have limited space. It can be taken to court I think and the court will decide if the editor has to publish a rebuttal.

and why would internet sites be held to a lesser standard?

Because it is not a "lesser standard". The Internet is different, and, I would say, better suited to support critical debate.

And what is the alternative?

Some naive Semantic Web stuff.

Here goes: I'm hacking on the site of Norwegian Skeptics. There's nothing more valuable to a skeptic than an open, critical debate. I mean, the whole site exists mostly to engage people in debate whatever their position may be.

So, this is my idea, and it is something that I right now implement:

I'll use RDF to make basic statements like "this critizes this", "this supports this".

The idea is that you write a rebuttal, include an RDF statement saying which URI you critisize, and that's it. (I guess we need a law to enforce that cool URIs don't change :-) ).

Some day, will have our browsers detect those links, and provide elaborate listings of the whole debate. Our search engines will index it, and tell us who is engaged in the debate with whom, what URIs contain responses and rebuttals, etc. It is very, very simple really.

What the CoE (an organization I think is the best of EU, and I don't think too highly of EU (I'm Norwegian and voted no at the latest referendum)), should do, is pay for someone to write the code for Mozilla, for IE (if it is even meaningful), and for Google, and license it under a BSD license or drop it in the public domain. It is so typical of legislation bodies. They legislate without even looking to the possibility of creating something that will solve the problem better.

Facing countless lawsuits?

Well, I think this proposal will result in endless lawsuits, yes... :-)

I would extremely surprised if not the first use of this law will be an attack from Church of $cientology against Operation Clambake.

The way this law will be abused, and I'm sure from day 1, will be to direct floods of requests against some pronounced critics, with the intention of breaking their ability to respond and then sue.

On my skepsis.no website, we have, allthough we haven't had a workable content management system, published rebuttals. However, if I had many requests to post rebuttals, I wouldn't have had the time to do it. I would have had to close down the whole site.

This will serve as a DoS-by-lawyer attack on people who haven't got the infrastructure to deal with many rebuttals.

Instead, have someone write the software, it'll work so much better.

<quote> Using HTML tags to dictate style is the only reason you or I ever even heard of this internet thing. </quote>

Not really. I remember browsing the web w. a text-based browser thru compuserve way back when (early '90s)...

<quote> HTML is not about structuring documents. </quote>

The guy who invented it back in 1991 (Tim Berners-Lee, not Al gore) would disagree with you. Here's what the W3C says:

HTML uses tags such as <h1> and </h1> to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links etc.

As to the other comments,

1. I never said HTML was "gneralized". rather that it derived/was inspired by sgml.
2. I never claimed that hypertext was a universal data format

Presentation has nothing to do with HTML, as this is completely controled by the user agent. HTML declares something is a title, a list, a document body, a paragraph, a table, etc. It doesn't specify how user agents render the content. For example, audio user agents would render a document differently than visual agents, cell phones would be another case, text-mode browsers another, etc.

HTML might not, but any modern site should be using XHTML (in my arrogant opinion - IMAO).

Using XHTML it's very simple to embed other markup in your primary markup. Here's an example right from the XHTML standard:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>A Math Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>The following is MathML markup:</p>
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
<apply> <log/>
<logbase>
<cn> 3 </cn>
</logbase>
<ci> x </ci>
</apply>
</math>
</body>
</html>

Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

There is one book I have found brilliant as a tutorial for css - Eric Meyer's Eric Meyer on CSS. It is a great way to learn css, each chapter is a project, and the projects are challenging and informative.

Also worth a mention (although why I should be giving him another free plug when his name is plastered over the sites and blogs of anyone who knows what CSS stands for - hint: it isn't cross-site scripting) is Zeldman and his new book designing with web standards. I'm a third of the way through it and it is an engaging read but I'm still looking for the meat.

Otherwise there are a bunch of on-line resources at W3C.

BTW, it's worth persevering, I recently replaced a gif menu and javascript rollovers with the equivalent xhtml/css and knocked over 20K off the homepage. Performance improved enough for customers to contact my employer to comment and that's feedback worth getting.

Dave

The above was moderated Flamebait, and it was retarded, but I do agree with the poster about the lack of valuable information in O'Reilly books. Their books tend to be poorly organized, short on good examples (with good explanations), and long on the author's "expert" comments on the specific subject. At times I've had to set an O'Reily book down simply because I felt the author was trying to impress me with his knowledge instead of teach me the subject.

I've read several O'Reilly books about Java, HTML, DHTML, JS, CSS, etc. I have been impressed with none of them. Each one of them was a "definitive guide" (except the Java book; I believe it was a "nutshell" book), but ended up looking elsewhere for good learning resources. I ended up simply going to the internet to find good tutorials on web dev. I like echoecho.com for simple/beginner HTML. I liked the CSS spec for CSS, Ivor Horton's Beginning Java for Java. There are several good DHTML tutorials at the W3C website.

1. Every browser has a default set of style rules.
2. If you don't like the way a style is rendered, you can either associate a style sheet with your page, or do in-line style stuff
3. html is about structuring documents (head, body, title, h1 thru h6, p, meta, etc). Remember that html is a subset of sgml (standard generalized markup language), which is also concerned with the structure of a document, not its' appearance.
4. using html tags to dictate style is bad practice
5. css isn't that hard to learn: a tutorial from the w3c standards organization
6. The document structure can be thought of as the layout only in the same sense that a book has covers, a table of contents, chapters, and maybe an index.
7. The document layout can be thought of as the fonts, paragraph indentation type, line spacing, colors, etc.
8. What you are complaining about when you are complaining about the rendering of tables with a default border style is controlled by css, not html

You must understand that the reference you posted about mozilla/microsoft not supporting the same XHTML+MathML is from 2001, and much has changed since then. I'd recommend you read the documents at W3.org and MathMLConference.org regarding the current state of affairs wrt MathML technology and deployment.

Yes, look at Slashdot. The geek site that is so ashamed of it's HTML, it blocks the validator.

If you try a different validator site, you find there are over a hundred errors on the front page.

Lead by example?

...extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.

Contrary to the reference browser, Mozilla does not allow this.

The neat thing about SVG is that it empowers all XML dialects... any XML data that needs to have a graphical or motion depiction can be semi-easily expressed with SVG. ChessGML is one example that's been implemented already.

I don't think that Flash is necessarily evil... Actually, I wouldn't be suprised if SVG/Flash come to coexist like HTML/PDF do currently. Inevitably, if SVG gains much more traction, there will be a ton of grass-roots content written for it just because it's free and easy to learn, and it will have a lot more creative thought put into it than Flash does, even if Flash stuff will usually be of higher quality.

Or so this evangelist hopes... In favor of SVG, an open XML W3C spec that doesn't require expensive tools to create. Mozilla sorta supports it now and should have much better support in the future. Even though SVG isn't terribly popular yet, I already see far far more database-driven content than I do with flash since XML is pretty easy to manipulate and generate.

As others have said before, the URL should have been interpreted as a relative URL, and yes, your browser should have choked on it.

Some browsers simply do a better job than others when it comes to sticking to W3C HTTP standards. ;)

One thing Ive often wondered about regarding the development of HTML was : Why did nobody, not MS, not netscape... nobody ever implement a time tag extension.

It's been proposed at least several times at the w3c mailinglists, last that I know of just one month ago, here.

The problem, however, is that no one has turned the general ideas into a formal proposal for the working group, and the general attitude seems to be similar to the following quote:

- Those who need to use it won't;
- Those who don't need to use it (because they already use unambiguous date formats) will.

One thing Ive often wondered about regarding the development of HTML was : Why did nobody, not MS, not netscape... nobody ever implement a time tag extension.

It's been proposed at least several times at the w3c mailinglists, last that I know of just one month ago, here.

The problem, however, is that no one has turned the general ideas into a formal proposal for the working group, and the general attitude seems to be similar to the following quote:

- Those who need to use it won't;
- Those who don't need to use it (because they already use unambiguous date formats) will.

No it wasn't arpanet was which as small part of the net, but the internet was an effort acros alot of countries you can keep arpanet but stay off the world wide web (in this case world is world not America like the "world" series)

"I am a US comapny. my server is in the US. my internet conection is in the US. My web site is in ENGLISH!"

Where do you think English comes from thats right England and where is england why it is part of the EU so please stop using our language, or to put it another way FOR CHRIST SAKE ENGLISH WAS STARTED IN ENGLAND. Actual its a suprise you didn't claim it was Americish.

Take a look at SVG. It supports vector graphics, PNG motion/animation and sound (at least in 1.2). Looks like Flash has also been opened up so you've got quite a selection. Here are some comparisons (look a little out of date) and a resource website.

Take a look at SVG. It supports vector graphics, PNG motion/animation and sound (at least in 1.2). Looks like Flash has also been opened up so you've got quite a selection. Here are some comparisons (look a little out of date) and a resource website.

large file size- much larger than gif or jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 27382 Jun 9 10:12 states_imgmap.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 23176 Jun 9 13:28 states_imgmap.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 22619 Jun 9 13:29 states_imgmap_pngcrush.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 21404 Jun 9 13:31 states_imgmap_pngout.png

-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 342508 May 31 02:22 grab_orig.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 136461 Jun 9 13:41 grab.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 97538 Jun 9 13:40 grab.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 95336 Jun 9 13:42 grab_pngcrush.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 87168 Jun 9 13:44 grab_pngout.png

poor standardization

little exposure

large file size- much larger than gif or jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 27382 Jun 9 10:12 states_imgmap.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 23176 Jun 9 13:28 states_imgmap.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 22619 Jun 9 13:29 states_imgmap_pngcrush.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 21404 Jun 9 13:31 states_imgmap_pngout.png

-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 342508 May 31 02:22 grab_orig.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 136461 Jun 9 13:41 grab.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 97538 Jun 9 13:40 grab.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 95336 Jun 9 13:42 grab_pngcrush.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 87168 Jun 9 13:44 grab_pngout.png

poor standardization

little exposure

It's not poor standardization. It's Microsoft not supporting 100% of the standard. PNG is standardized just fine, thanks.

Some people don't think so.

/Italics/ *Bold* _Underline_

How does one represent pathnames such as /opt/kde/ if /foo/ emphasizes? (Use and you might as well use XHTML.)

How does one represent mathematical formulas such as a*b*c? (Use MathML and you might as well use XHTML.)

I feel sorry for those who 100-years from now will be trying to figure out how to convert FrontPage or MSWord "HTML" documents into a human-readable format

HTML Tidy works for me.

As long as English is readable, the XML, XSLT, and CSS specifications are readable. As long as relevant specifications are readable, documents written to those specifications are readable.

The ultimate in bloat! Imagine; an XML document describing the vector points and bezier curves required to draw each and every character in an entire eBook! If nothing else, it would push the price of multi Tb drives down.

You don't know squat about the SVG format, do you?
If you took 2 minutes to check the SVG-specification you'd see that you are totaly wrong.
Text in SVG is described as... wait for it... ordinary text. The characters are then mapped to glyphs in your SVG-viewer. Just like in MS Doc, or Adobe PDF.
Just to show you the "ultimate bloat" I'll include an example. If you just want an ordinary plain vanilla book this is all it takes.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd" >
<svg width="25cm" height="35cm" viewBox="0 0 2500 3500" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<text x="250" y="150" font-family="Verdana" font-size="55" fill="blue">
Insert book text here...
</text>
</svg>

They are still standards. But hey, I could easily say similar things about MathML - it is a very specialized standard. The same with SVG - it is hardly in use at all on "mainstream" sites. And so on. So Mozilla implements standards for specialized use, just like Opera does.

No. You are confusing "being made for a specialised use" with "being made for a specialised platform". WAP pages aren't meant to be read on desktop PCs, so Mozilla (which is fundamentally a desktop browser) doesn't support it or the related technologies. MathML is meant to be read on normal PCs, even if not everyone uses it everyday, so Mozilla supports it. A clearer comparison: nether Opera nor Mozilla support Microsoft CHM (made for a special platform) but both support Chinese Big5 text encoding (made for a specialised use).

In any case, SVG is most definitely not special-purpose in any way. If you know anything about it, you'll know that it's a very general standard for vector graphics and animation, similar in some ways to Macromedia Flash. It has potential applications on almost any Web site with graphics; just because it isn't in widespread use doesn't mean that it isn't general in design.

The other standard I was using as an example -- XSL/XSLT -- is also very much non-specialist. It is, for instance, of immense potential use on any site larger than a hundred pages, if only because it allows for infinitely better content management (among many other things).

Actually, Opera 7 also has "experimental" support for CSS3.

I didn't know this, my apologies. This is, indeed, a sign of very good CSS support, because it shows that the makers are willing to go beyond what they need to do to just claim ordinary standards-compliance (i.e. support existing recommendations), and are taking the extra effort to position themselves ready for big new standards. In overall standards support, though (particularly with the XML-based standards), Opera is still not at the forefront.

I would argue that Opera 3 is actually better than even MSIE 6 in some situations since it has a more correct implementation. MSIE can't even get its box model right.

Then you seem intent on backing an unwinnable position, unless you intend to go to such a fine level of detail as to be irrelevant. Yes, IE's implementation of CSS is more than a little bit dodgy, but it is of decent completeness with respect to both CSS1 and CSS2 (maybe 80% - 90%, but I'm guessing). Yes, there are points where IE gets stuff wrong but old Opera or Mozilla versions get it right, but as you pointed out earlier there are plenty of examples where Opera 7 gets it wrong and IE 4 or Mozilla 0.8 get it right.

I think Opera 3 had just about complete support for CSS1.

No, this is wrong again. Maybe you missed what I wrote: if you consult the link I gave you, or try using Opera 3 for yourself, you'll see that its support for CSS1 is much less than complete, with positioning and inline element properties (like borders) being the glaring examples. Selectors like :hover are also noticeably absent.

True, but there was no release considered to be of even alpha quality until some time in 2000. That was M13.

You are redefining your terms after a claim; this is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You had claimed that Opera was supporting CSS years before Mozilla was, which is patently false. It doesn't matter that nobody knew about Mozilla or that the browser had bugs aplenty -- the point is, the support was there.

Also note that Mozilla was rewritten over four years, while Opera 7 was a complete rewrite of the browser core and GUI, and was done in about a year and a half.

Yes, I know, but

They are still standards. But hey, I could easily say similar things about MathML - it is a very specialized standard. The same with SVG - it is hardly in use at all on "mainstream" sites. And so on. So Mozilla implements standards for specialized use, just like Opera does.

No. You are confusing "being made for a specialised use" with "being made for a specialised platform". WAP pages aren't meant to be read on desktop PCs, so Mozilla (which is fundamentally a desktop browser) doesn't support it or the related technologies. MathML is meant to be read on normal PCs, even if not everyone uses it everyday, so Mozilla supports it. A clearer comparison: nether Opera nor Mozilla support Microsoft CHM (made for a special platform) but both support Chinese Big5 text encoding (made for a specialised use).

In any case, SVG is most definitely not special-purpose in any way. If you know anything about it, you'll know that it's a very general standard for vector graphics and animation, similar in some ways to Macromedia Flash. It has potential applications on almost any Web site with graphics; just because it isn't in widespread use doesn't mean that it isn't general in design.

The other standard I was using as an example -- XSL/XSLT -- is also very much non-specialist. It is, for instance, of immense potential use on any site larger than a hundred pages, if only because it allows for infinitely better content management (among many other things).

Actually, Opera 7 also has "experimental" support for CSS3.

I didn't know this, my apologies. This is, indeed, a sign of very good CSS support, because it shows that the makers are willing to go beyond what they need to do to just claim ordinary standards-compliance (i.e. support existing recommendations), and are taking the extra effort to position themselves ready for big new standards. In overall standards support, though (particularly with the XML-based standards), Opera is still not at the forefront.

I would argue that Opera 3 is actually better than even MSIE 6 in some situations since it has a more correct implementation. MSIE can't even get its box model right.

Then you seem intent on backing an unwinnable position, unless you intend to go to such a fine level of detail as to be irrelevant. Yes, IE's implementation of CSS is more than a little bit dodgy, but it is of decent completeness with respect to both CSS1 and CSS2 (maybe 80% - 90%, but I'm guessing). Yes, there are points where IE gets stuff wrong but old Opera or Mozilla versions get it right, but as you pointed out earlier there are plenty of examples where Opera 7 gets it wrong and IE 4 or Mozilla 0.8 get it right.

I think Opera 3 had just about complete support for CSS1.

No, this is wrong again. Maybe you missed what I wrote: if you consult the link I gave you, or try using Opera 3 for yourself, you'll see that its support for CSS1 is much less than complete, with positioning and inline element properties (like borders) being the glaring examples. Selectors like :hover are also noticeably absent.

True, but there was no release considered to be of even alpha quality until some time in 2000. That was M13.

You are redefining your terms after a claim; this is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You had claimed that Opera was supporting CSS years before Mozilla was, which is patently false. It doesn't matter that nobody knew about Mozilla or that the browser had bugs aplenty -- the point is, the support was there.

Also note that Mozilla was rewritten over four years, while Opera 7 was a complete rewrite of the browser core and GUI, and was done in about a year and a half.

Yes, I know, but

Is Jpeg2000 a W3C Recommendation? No. Is Jpeg2000 a free and open standard? No. And if you want Mozilla to support Jpeg2000, you can always code it yourself. I don't see to have that option with IE and PNG.

Anyway, I hope you're happy with the "latest iso" from Microsoft. Lacking CSS compliance, no PNG transparency, no tabs, no pop-up blocking all await you in IE6.

Just a question: Is transparent PNGs part of any version of the W3C HTML specs? If it's not then I think it's not "shame on microsoft"... rather it's more "please can you add this feature"

No, PNG is not part of the W3C HTML specs, it is part of the W3C PNG specs. This spec does include alpha transparency, and all of the other features of PNG that we have come to love.

What's so hard about defending the claim for standards-compliance? Mozila is, by a very long shot, the most standards-compliant browser in existence. Internet Explorer has not-too-bad CSS and DOM support, but can't claim to support either as well as Mozilla does. There's also all the standards that IE doesn't even try to do right -- MathML, which is hugely important for those of us who use it, PNG, which IE only sort-of supports, XHTML, and SVG, even though it's off by default. These and many other open standards are supported natively by Mozilla, something that no other browser can claim to do (not even Opera or Konqueror/Safari).

As for performance ... Mozilla is actually very fast, in some ways. The Gecko HTML engine is one of the fastest around, and handles super-complex CSS positioning with ease. (Yes, KHTML and Opera can be faster, but this is partly because they don't support many of the more complex aspects of CSS).

Also, although the Mozilla integrated suite takes forever to start up, Firebird/Phoenix is a good deal faster, and Gecko front-ends like Epiphany for GNOME and K-Meleon for Windows start up fast enough that if you blink, you'll miss it.

And finally: "fairly" portable? C'mon, there is no other browser that's available for as many systems as Mozilla is. Ever tried to use IE or Opera on BeOS, Irix, OS/2, or OpenVMS?

What's so hard about defending the claim for standards-compliance? Mozila is, by a very long shot, the most standards-compliant browser in existence. Internet Explorer has not-too-bad CSS and DOM support, but can't claim to support either as well as Mozilla does. There's also all the standards that IE doesn't even try to do right -- MathML, which is hugely important for those of us who use it, PNG, which IE only sort-of supports, XHTML, and SVG, even though it's off by default. These and many other open standards are supported natively by Mozilla, something that no other browser can claim to do (not even Opera or Konqueror/Safari).

As for performance ... Mozilla is actually very fast, in some ways. The Gecko HTML engine is one of the fastest around, and handles super-complex CSS positioning with ease. (Yes, KHTML and Opera can be faster, but this is partly because they don't support many of the more complex aspects of CSS).

Also, although the Mozilla integrated suite takes forever to start up, Firebird/Phoenix is a good deal faster, and Gecko front-ends like Epiphany for GNOME and K-Meleon for Windows start up fast enough that if you blink, you'll miss it.

And finally: "fairly" portable? C'mon, there is no other browser that's available for as many systems as Mozilla is. Ever tried to use IE or Opera on BeOS, Irix, OS/2, or OpenVMS?

It does, but IE is lazy, and just says */* without assigning a quality value.

Here are some examples of the HTTP Accept header...

IE:
image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, */*

Mozilla:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/pn g,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1

Opera:
text/html, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1

You can use content negotiation. You leave the file extension off and let the browser choose which file format it wants. (W3C does this with some graphics) To get it work right with IE (And choose GIF over PNG), I had to assign a slightly lower quality level to PNG on the server. It ended up being more hassle than it was worth. It's been a while since I did it, but if I remember correctly, IE wouldn't cache anything using this either. So now I just use 8-bit PNG and pray for the day IE catches up.

The link was to complex to be included here? They look pretty regular to me. You've maybe heard of the A tag? Was it Great Archaeological Sites, Exploring Mars, Earth As Art, or Archimedes' Lab; _OR_ did you just want some traffic to your site? ;)

I'm just happy that I got my computer illiterate parents to use Mozilla. When the telco guy was installing DSL, he told them that they'd have to use IE and Outlook. I nearly kicked him out on his ass.

waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States

Oh baaaaby. This calls for the loooong board. Wait a minute. March 16, 2880? Dude. Isn't that like, way off in the future or something? 406 Dude.

A good real-world case study of premature standardization is W3C XForms. I had a discussion back in April with the XFroms community and spec leads on the www-forms@w3.org mailing list that you might wonna check out.

See the threads entitled "Welcome to the Real-World; The Future of XForms" and "The Devil of Good is Perfect", for example.

Another good real-world case study using the "build it first and standarize later" approach is XUL (XML UI Language). Innovation using XML to build UIs is flourishing and slowy a XUL community is emerging. For getting started with XUL check out the XUL Alliance Link-opida and see a replay of the original HTML story in the upcoming XUL browser wars and standardization drive and more.

A good real-world case study of premature standardization is W3C XForms. I had a discussion back in April with the XFroms community and spec leads on the www-forms@w3.org mailing list that you might wonna check out.

See the threads entitled "Welcome to the Real-World; The Future of XForms" and "The Devil of Good is Perfect", for example.

Another good real-world case study using the "build it first and standarize later" approach is XUL (XML UI Language). Innovation using XML to build UIs is flourishing and slowy a XUL community is emerging. For getting started with XUL check out the XUL Alliance Link-opida and see a replay of the original HTML story in the upcoming XUL browser wars and standardization drive and more.

A good real-world case study of premature standardization is W3C XForms. I had a discussion back in April with the XFroms community and spec leads on the www-forms@w3.org mailing list that you might wonna check out.

See the threads entitled "Welcome to the Real-World; The Future of XForms" and "The Devil of Good is Perfect", for example.

Another good real-world case study using the "build it first and standarize later" approach is XUL (XML UI Language). Innovation using XML to build UIs is flourishing and slowy a XUL community is emerging. For getting started with XUL check out the XUL Alliance Link-opida and see a replay of the original HTML story in the upcoming XUL browser wars and standardization drive and more.

Not just for music. Why should I have to pay a monthly fee to HBO or Showtime just to watch the one or two programs they have that I like? Why should I have to pay a subscription fee just to WSJ.com to read the odd article? And I'm certainly not going to swith to AOL just to read the content on ew.com!

Not that I object to paying for content. Content creators have to pay the rent. (Perhaps RMS would understand that if he lost his McArthur pension!) Voluntary payments, help, but not enough. Same goes for advertising, and besides, advertisers like to control the content they pay for.

Thing is, there's this huge establisment that controls the creation and distribution of that content, and they don't want to give up that control. So they hassle anybody with an alternative distribution model, and lobby for ever-restrictive IP laws, even as technology makes those laws irrelevent. And of course they attempt to offer feeble substitutes, such as online "subscriptions".

I also suspect them (and/or the financial industry) of stifling the development of technologies that would support a pay-as-you-read model, but I don't really have any evidence.

I used to assume that the internet would simply make this issue irrelevent. But the content establishment has done a good job of maintaining its control. It's lost a little ground, but not nearly enough to satisfy me. Maybe things will change when everybody has cheap, portable bandwidth. Remains to be seen.

I think the former is their position -- that all browsers conform to all w3 standards. Mostly it's about designers wanting pages to look the same for every client.

But above web standards is the belief that content should be accessible to everyone. So a lite browser that displays content seems to be in keeping with the ethos of accessibility.

Amaya is written in C. Perhaps you were thinking of Sun's HotJava?

Their homepage claims xhtml 1.0 strict complicance.. yet consulting validator.w3.org ...
This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!
see for yourself

Any pedant points going around?

I saw a job listing recently that had as a requirement "5+ years in administering Windows 2000." This was an entry-level position.

Maybe the reason there are such insane job requirements is because so many people lie on their resume. For example, we placed an ad for a web-content manager and received a resume claiming 15 years of HTML experience. I looked at the name and to my surprise it was not Tim Berners-Lee (must have just been a close friend). My point is that maybe the HR drones are putting "5 years experience in Windows 2000" because that is what they are seeing on the resumes they have.

Most likely it would mean that a given format would not be recommended in the next standard. A couple of things on that point though...

1) Specific image types aren't really recommended one way or another: Graphics on the Web

2) The <img> tag is possibly going away in XHTML 2.0 and would be replaced by <object>. This makes the point even more moot, as <object> is pretty damn broad.

3) The real question is of browser support. I think we can all agree that Mozilla won't drop GIF support for quite awhile and IE probably never will. Hell, IE doesn't even support PNG properly.

What about text-decoration: blink?

User agents should continue to support deprecated
elements for reasons of backward compatibility.

Definitions of elements and attributes clearly indicate which are
deprecated.

This specification includes examples that illustrate how to avoid using
deprecated elements. In most cases these depend on user agent support for style
sheets. In general, authors should use style sheets to achieve stylistic and
formatting effects rather than HTML presentational attributes. HTML
presentational attributes have been deprecated when style sheet alternatives
exist.

Where do you think you can find HTTP on the W3C site?

And yet, as has been pointed out, you can indeed find it on the w3 site.

The RFCs on HTTP are useful if you are writing a server or client, however they are less useful as a guide to how what is out there works.

But, as anyone who's tried CSS or just about anything else knows, this is absolutely true. Differences between vendor implementations are one reason why many geeks are bald, sickly, and pale.

here

Honestly, save yourself ~ $50 for an O'Reilly book and go directly to the source of the information:

HTTP 1.0
HTTP 1.1

It's remarkably easy to read for a technical document.

Honestly, save yourself ~ $50 for an O'Reilly book and go directly to the source of the information:

HTTP 1.0
HTTP 1.1

It's remarkably easy to read for a technical document.

1. Talk to the bittorrent people to coordinate a standard "base url" extension to the bittorrent .torrent file. Actually, while we're at it, coordinating a standard "mime type" extension wouldn't be such a bad idea, either. For single file archives it doesn't matter much, but for multi-file archives, it's essential.
   
2. Float a proposal for a bittorrent Transfer-Encoding, and what that means. I would strongly suggest that what it means is that the server may return a bittorrent .torrent file which either describes how to download the single file asked for or describes an archive containing this file.
   
3. Write a first draft minimal apache mod_torrent which would only serve up manually created .torrent files that had been specifically configured in (in an .htaccess file, for example)
   
4. Write something in Mozilla that could start accepting these files. This is the hard part; I can't even tell if Mozilla allows this kind of thing to be done with plugins (the documentation is not clear; I think that plugins are only ever invoked for specific mime types). Unfortunately, if Mozilla does not allow for plugins that provide a new Transfer-Encoding, but only for those that handle a new Content-Type, then this effort is at least partially screwed. We'll have to jump to the ugly method of considering .torrent as an alternate Content-Type. (I suppose that one advantage of this is that in the early stages, we won't need an apache module and can instead rely on apache's content negotiation, along with manually created .torrent files)
   

Well that was certainly helpful. I suppose I should have read it before-hand.

Weitzner stressed that it's tough to use because the PPWG doesnt want people to use it easily. And remember, Berners-Lee has to sign off on everything, and it would really take a lot for him to sign off on a RAND Recommendation.

I don't see where Berners-Lee has to sign off on anything. According to the latest draft, it is up to the Patent Advisory Group (PAG) to reach a consensus on whether or not to use a non-RF patent. The PAG is composed of:

• Advisory Committee Representatives of each W3C Member organization participating in the Working Group (or alternate designated by the AC Rep)
• Working Group Team Contact
• W3C counsel
• Working Group Chair, ex officio
• Domain Leader responsible for the Working Group
• Others suggested by the Working Group Chair and/or the Team with the approval of the Director

I'm not convinced that it's all that difficult to reach consensus. To reach consensus, Everyone in the PAG has to either agree to the license or abstain. Also, noone in the PAG can object to the license. The most likely person to object is the W3C counsel, and I can easily see him/her mindlessly abstaining. Everyone else has an agenda. That agenda may well involve eliminating competition from the open source community.