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As for the pixel sizes : The MS line is that the spec doesn't say it's allowed

I find that fucking impossible to believe, because the specification goes into great detail on how to adjust pixel lengths.

The CSS specs don't say that fonts specified with fixed pixel sizes should be scalable, that's just an assumption made by some browsers.

Actually, that's completely wrong. Take a look at the recommendation yourself.

Err, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but they do have an RSS feed.

Whats important now is to keep moving forward! Don't let your self, friends, family, clients, company, etc put up any new sites that don't at least try to validate. They don't have to be perfect, just at least try and put some effort into it.

For those of us who learned HTML in the 2.0 & 3.x days, it takes a little bit of relearning in terms of how you approach markup, but it really is worth it.

Go run your homepage through validator.w3.org. Fix 5 things. Make it a goal one weekend to make your site validate with less than 5 errors. It really is remarkably easy, we're talking about markup and stylesheets here people.

Well, but their absolutely uncool URI design still sucks.

This value is useful for the font-size-adjust CSS parameter, to make sure that if font substitution takes place, the resulting font still has the same apparent size as the designer intended. font-size-adjust basically defines the ratio between the height of the font, and its x-height (the height of a lower-case letter).

W3C cames up with XForms - The Next Generation of Web Forms in 2002, but
XForms - a GUI toolkit for X has existed for a long time (initially here).

Here's a nice reference.

So far it seems to handle tabs better. I had v.67 and it would usually mess up tabs a bit--draw the borders wrong (overlapping in wierd ways) and leave more than one drawn in the lighter color to suggest the active tab. Seems fixed so far. Still no support for the 4-year-old fieldset tag, though. Too bad, it's handy in forms.

And it still screws up sending text messages from this AT&T page. Type text into the sender and subject box and it only shows 1 character at a time. Type into the message box and it streams backwards! Hit 'send' and the recipient gets the last letter of the sender's name, the last letter of the subject, and the message is indeed backwards. I'm sure it has something to do with the wacky JS they use to count characters.

since CSS does not allow you to say "width=[400..800]" or something like that

You mean like the CSS min-width and max-width attributes?

--Dan

Those aren't necessarily supposed to be URLs where you can find the schemas. They are namespace URIs. They are just a unique namespace identifier for the elements and attributes used in the document. Those xmlns attributes of the wordDocument element associate the namespace URIs with namespace prefixes which are used throughout the document to refer to them.

The convention is to use http-scheme URIs to identify namespaces, but in reality they can be any unique URI. Some folks, like the W3C, also publish the schema that define the elements and attributes that belong to a namespace at the namespace's URI. But there's no reason to expect that Microsoft would do the same.

For more information, check out the W3C recommendation for Namespaces in XML.

The same company also makes keyboards with braille displays for regular computers. Good sites to visit on the topic of computer access for the blind are:

Trace Center
Smith-Kettlewell RERC
Section 508
W3C's WAI
National Center for Accessible Media

If you are in the States, see if there is a local Independent Living Center (sometimes also called Center for Independent Living). These offer support and information for people with disabilities in the local community.

On a separate note, if she is not sensitive to red light, you might be able to whip up a red "grayscale" display. Check the CRT and LCD manufacturing companies to see if they make such screens already for low light work settings (military).

A crazy thought: If the safe light frequency is too narrow for off the shelf screens, you could go the full geek route and construct a matrix using narrow frequency red LED's (like the banner message board signs) and feed the display with the text stream. One of the low vision/blind access software programs might be able to extract the text for the display.

A validator [w3.org] would be a better choice. It's a proper syntax checker, not just a linter.

Speaking of w3.org, Amaya has some nice features for working with, and validating complicated document structures.

I still use HTMLtidy [w3.org] to check my pages...

A validator would be a better choice. It's a proper syntax checker, not just a linter.

I still use HTMLtidy to check my pages... I would love to have something like a "stringent" mode while developing web pages (ala browser producer error instead of trying to render the html). A while ago I found out that mozilla can even be more forgiving than IE. There was some weird bug in a parser I was testing, which sometimes resulted in </tr> to be rewritten as </tr or something. Mozilla didn't care. IE was totally confused. (First time I ever found something in html that confused explorer, but rendered ok in moz). Anyways... is such a mode/plugin available?

Unfortunately, Google's home page is still not W3C compliant. They don't put in a doctype, which is the first problem, and few of the HTML tag attributes are quoted, resulting in 53 HTML errors.

I'd be much happier if they added 100 bytes or so to the page to make it completely W3C-compliant -- it's not that hard to do, and it would make them have one more bragging right over Yahoo and the others.

We'll be back.

...and yes, we will work in your browser and be navigable by blind users and probably even make validator.w3.org happy. These are all definite design goals for the new website. Small technical details are important to these people.

I am not in the US but I must say that I think the US Constitution is very well written and a great model for any nation (even if I may not totally disagree with small parts). I just read the Constitution and Bill of Rights and it it is well-written, timeless (i.e.: still applicable) and looks like the authors really cared about democracy and wanted to start a true democratic republic where the people had the power (and were not controlled by a government but had ccontrol over a truly democratic congress).

However, the more I read of the Constitution, the more it seems that the modern governments of the USA try to break every rule (just go through them) it sets (to the extent that I believe many countries are far more democratic). Something I did not know that is interesting is that it seems to implie that the USA government is not allowed to have a permenent army but when attacked the citizens may form one for a short period (hence the right to bear arms, I guess). Throughout it really does put the citizens control, but, I guess, it did not work...

I am not in the US but I must say that I think the US Constitution is very well written and a great model for any nation (even if I may not totally disagree with small parts). I just read the Constitution and Bill of Rights and it it is well-written, timeless (i.e.: still applicable) and looks like the authors really cared about democracy and wanted to start a true democratic republic where the people had the power (and were not controlled by a government but had ccontrol over a truly democratic congress).

However, the more I read of the Constitution, the more it seems that the modern governments of the USA try to break every rule (just go through them) it sets (to the extent that I believe many countries are far more democratic). Something I did not know that is interesting is that it seems to implie that the USA government is not allowed to have a permenent army but when attacked the citizens may form one for a short period (hence the right to bear arms, I guess). Throughout it really does put the citizens control, but, I guess, it did not work...

jeesh, I mean, that's what hyperlinks were invented for

SOAP

XML-RPC

I'm getting "connection refused" so :

cached XMLRPC

Just how do you submit a complex transactional XML document using REST? Parsing a URL query string with 200 name-value pairs, then assembling that back into the XML document that the recipient expects does not seem like a good solution.

The above shows just how little jnana understands REST. Note that SOAP over HTTP uses POST and does not do any URL encoding of the requests. Just why can't a simple HTTP application do the same?

HTTP GET is to be used for retrieval only, and all URL encoding that may happen is only to identify the particular resource. In a well designed REST application no complex data structures need to go into the GET URL. For submissions to processing, there is the POST method.

The real difference between SOAP and REST is that currently the only protocol designed around REST is an application protocol for hypermedia transfer whereas SOAP is a general protocol upon which application protocols may be built, including RESTful ones. One of the protocols already built over SOAP is the RESTless RPC.

Disclosure: I'm a member of the W3C working group that's just now finishing SOAP 1.2.

Try XSLT.

It's powerful, has it's own php extension (instead of php classes like smarty and patTemplate -- although, come to think of it, the extension is just a Sablotron API so meh), and it's a W3C standard. On the downside, you need to configure your environment, which can be a problem depending on your hosting solution. You'll also have to learn XSL and work with XML but the semantic web is the future so get used to it.

Who wouldn't build their own database website. Imagine slogging through hundreds of pages of fixed html. Does anyone know of sites like these other than personal pages put up by newbies? All of my sites are at least dynamic using php.

It depends on what type of content you're putting up. I wanted consistent navigation from page to page and easier maintainability; server-parsed HTML is sufficient for that task. It also allows me to serve up either proper HTML and CSS for browsers that can handle it or broken, non-standard HTML for crappy non-standards-compliant browsers. While I use MySQL for logging server activity (when I dumped access_log into the database, the database was smaller than the text file that created it), the only "content" I've ever served up from it was statistics of how many tens of thousands of times infected IIS machines had tried to pass their bugs on to my server (done with server-parsed HTML and a shell script with the query). For mostly-static content on a small to medium website, is there any reason (other than "because I can") for shoving every website into a database?

All of my sites are at least dynamic using php.

Such as this one, which took forever to load because the images appear to have not been optimized? Looks like invalid HTML with a big table in it.

(Why do I get the sneaking suspicion I've just been trolled?)

I'm sorry to "me too", but I've come to the same conclusion. In fact, I'll take it another step: they don't know what they're talking about. The very first page of the XML recommendation spells out why they created XML:

The design goals for XML are:

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

In other words, it's portable, widely useful (pretty much any data storage app can use it), easy for both humans and machines to read and write, and in order to achive all this they're sacrifing size. It says it in the first page!

I guess it's the "when the only tool you have..." problem, but this tool comes with a list of its goals. If a hammer said "The hammer was designed with concentrating lateral kinetic energy into a small area in mind. Exerting or harnessing rotional energy is of no importance.", would people say "hammers suck! they don't work with screws!"?

sigh...

It doesn't validate... they break the standards they try to protect...

This is the reason that my website does NOT validate.

I wanted to validate. I tried to validate. But the ampersands screwed me.

..with Jack.

What you are looking for is XML Schema

Flash should be replaced by a proper W3C standard, that way everybody can play without running closed code from Macromedia.

Lo and behold, just such a thing exists!!!
It's called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/

Don't worry, you can still do all your stupid, annoying animated 'punch the monkey' type of nonsense, but at least your monkey is standard XML. And your audience can 'view-source' your monkey if they like, thus enabling a whole community of open-sourced monkey punching animations.

You can generate it server-side (or even rasterize it for those with crappy browsers) with a spiffy batch of tools by those same people who brought you the Apache HTTP server.

There's even a very nice gtk SVG editor app available for X11, and Win32 available here.

Of course, there is a small downside, as of yet, mozilla (and IE) only support it with the use of a plugin, but if you're used to flash, you shoudln't mind that. As soon the the mozilla folks get around a liscencing issue, moz should support it natively (some builds already do).

In summary:
Proprietary 'punch the monkey' things suck ass.
Open standards-based 'punch the monkey' things suck considerably less.

(Sorry, haven't quite grokked the insert-link process)

Go read the World Wide Web Consortium's 10-minute introduction to HTML

Or just go to your browser's View menu, and look for Source. A link looks like this as source code:
<a href=http://www.worldpress.org> World Press Review </a>

and looks like this in the browser window:
World Press Review

See? The part between the 'opening tag' (the thing that starts with 'a') and the 'closing tag' (the thing that starts with '/a') is what you see on the screen. The browser typically underlines it for you and/or changes the color, and if you click on it it takes you to the address to the right of the href=, which is inside the tag, and therefore is not text to be displayed, but an instruction to your browser.

I couldn't even see the article without first yanking out all the 116 html errors in Scienceblog's webpage. With html like that, who needs popup ads?

Also run the site through the w3c validator to discover 298 HTML errors. Quite a lot for a ``standards compliant'' site I would say.

validator

Some of the more interesting errors include:

Line 1105, column 8: end tag for element
"SCRIPT" which is not open.

Line 1107, column 6: end tag for element "BODY" which is not open.

Line 1107, column 13: end tag for element "HTML" which is not open.

You could alse specify your style sheet link in a way that ns4 doesn't understand (I think there are a couple, but you lose the ability to provide a different style sheet for print media).

There are quite a few ways of hiding css from browsers, but there's nothing specifically preventing media-specific stylesheets. For exmaple, Netscape 4.x wouldn't see the contents of a print stylesheet referenced in this way:

You could also make your style sheet served dynamically and have an alternate or blank style sheet returned to NS4.

Bad idea for caching, http pipelining, and cpu time, unless you are willing to put a fair amount of effort into working around the various problems this causes.

If NS 4 doesn't get a style sheet, the page is rendered as if it came out of the 1994 internet. But for folks who use an old browser, I say too bad.

Ditto.

The things I like to use most that NS4 doesn't like are floating elements (div {float:left;width200})

What do you expect? You could at least have the decency to give it correct code. Go validate.

I love hearing about standardized web code on Slashdot, which is so embarrassed about its HTML that it blocks the validator.

Coverage at CNET indicates that the W3C may be softening it's Royalty-Free Standard Licensing stance. Please read Adam Warner's W3C Patent policy page on why RAND is not an option for Open Standard Licensing and email your comments to the W3C Patent Policy mailing list!

Just yesterday I was learning XHTML+SMIL and found this MS technology called HTML+TIME (check the page, they even link to draft of XHTML+SMIL). Now, the funny bit is that XHTML+SMIL Profile W3C Note is authored by Microsoft but regardless of that, their implemention in form of HTML+TIME does differ from the W3C version quite a bit. What should we think when Microsoft helps W3C to author new specs and in the same time they implement totally incompatible implementation of the very same idea?

If you happen to have MSIE 5.5 or newer installed, check out some HTML+TIME demos (hopefully you don't slash down the poor guy). It seems that you need javascript turned on even thought the demos do not contain any javascript. Now, I must admit that those demos aren't that great looking, but look at the source. Pretty small and readable files compared to similar flash stuff.

Their main page www.w3.org does validate. The validator looks to have a minor error that causes it to not-validate (a table without elements, which looks like it shouldn't be there.) Compared to the 100 or so errors on Slashdot's main page, it's nothing.

*shrug* w3 dosent validate either

• The license may be suspended if the licensee sues the licensor.

Does that mean that the following can happen:

1. Entity A implements a W3C standard, in the process receiving a royalty-free license for some implicated technology from Entity B.
2. A distributes its implementation.
3. time passes . . .
4. A sues B on an unrelated matter, say for example, getting B to abide by the terms of an open-source license.
5. B suspends A's royalty-free license on the technology in the standard implementation.
6. All distributions of A's implementation now in license limbo courtesy of a suit on an unrelated matter?

Every try to validate one of these pages? Ha! Good luck on that. They've actually FORBIDDEN the w3c validator from looking at the pages!

One thing that you seem to forget is that XML is useful for putting down the structure of the object in question, while leaving the presentation up to some third-party app.

The XML snippet is indeed more verbose, however it carries much more semantic meaning than lour latex snippet which is just pure text.

How is this useful? Well assume that I'm blind and I use applications that speak text to me. I'll end up with:

"dollar-sign x carat 4 ..."

Whereas with MathML my text-to-speach agent can actuall say:

"x to the fifth plus 3 x minus nine equals zero".

I write latex a lot, and it's a joy to write expressions that will end up looking great. However, I know that when I do so, I'm leaving the mathematical world for the one of fascinating typesetting.

You say that XML can become to bloated to be edited by humans. On that point you are 100% correct. However, remember that one of the tenets of XML is that it should be possible, but not necessarily fun or easier, to hand code up input, as stated by the w3c . All that's required is that the format be human-legible and reasonably clear. If you find writing MathML too difficult (something which would not surprise me at all), then I suggest you work on a tool that converts Latex to MathML. Hell, I'll even help you with it. But given my experience with Latex I am extremely wary as I have no idea how that complicated beast works and I would imagine it would be quite difficult to infer a lot of the mathematical semantics from most Latex snippets.

XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.

XML shall support a wide variety of applications.

XML shall be compatible with SGML.

It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.

The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.

XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.

The XML design should be prepared quickly.

The design of XML shall be formal and concise.

XML documents shall be easy to create.

Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

I'd say two of them were met, but were bad ideas (SGML compatibility, terseness unimportant), and five of them were completely missed (ease of use, human legibility, quickly designed, formal and concise, ease of creation).

Thirty per cent is a failing grade, folks...

Unfortunately XML alone doesn't guarantee data interchangeability between programs. And XML Schema doesn't do it either. Knowing whether or not Tag1 can be in Tag2 doesn't tell you what Tag1 or Tag2 mean or if they correspond to a data structure that you need or can use. For that you need data modeling.

For data modeling in XML I've looked at a huge number of languages: RDF, Iso step 28, and XMI were my favorites (though in my opinion XMI first starts getting interesting with ver. 2.0 which isn't even finished yet). Each has a few advantages and disadvantages. And of course there are lot more than just these. But the problem is that these are all very young standards and APIs which would make them useful are not abundant.

So maybe the author's right that XML is not yet good enough, but I think a lot of progress is being made.

Well, SOAP is designed to allow applications to have access to the kind of context-full information humans would have access to through the web anyway.

Err, no.

SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment.

-- Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1

It is a RPC mechanism which is primarilly layered on top of HTTP. Don't make the mistake that just becuase it typically uses HTTP for transport, or is used in "Web Services" that it will only be used in a benign way, or that it is benign by design.

People are alreay starting to use it for mission critical RPC. It is a disaster waiting to happen.

/mike

Well actually you can make SQL queries to XML with the W3C drafted XQuery language, or if you want to use an older method, then try XQL, or XML-QL.
As for the flat text file, no you cant SQL query those, perhaps reading up on regex could help you get data out of those pesky text files.

Well actually you can make SQL queries to XML with the W3C drafted XQuery language, or if you want to use an older method, then try XQL, or XML-QL.
As for the flat text file, no you cant SQL query those, perhaps reading up on regex could help you get data out of those pesky text files.

are anchor tags so hard?
London Underground are also testing this.

Ahh, I ways wondered what the yellow circles were, thanks for the link :)

In case you have a problem with using something (at least partially) from HiSoftware (I know some Assistive Tech. Specialists who do), you might be interested in using the WAVE.

Here's a Google of some resources and info, as well.

Ultimately, the biggest problem I have, is that too many web designers utterly rely on these validators. The problem is, they can only check for a few different parts of the standard. For instance, an automated validator may only be able to verify compliance with maybe half of the W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Intiative)'s 65 checkpoints (that's in all 3 priorities). The other things have to be done manually, which is not really that bad if you understand what needs to be done and how to do it.

It's simply a matter of rearanging your design style slightly to accomodate some minor design principles. Unfortunately, most web designers think that a validation or repair tool will solve all of their problems. It won't.

The earliest entries in the changelog are from '91.