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The earliest entries in the changelog are from '91.

I don't want to see something prepared in a format someone else likes. I want to see it how I like it.

Unfortunately, hordes of web designers seem to disagree with you on this one, if the contents of ciwah and related groups is anything to go by. A lot (probably the vast majority) of people who publish on the web want pixel-by-pixel control of what you see on the screen.

Thankfully the W3C is moving the HTML standards away from this, but without popular support (read: internet explorer) the good things they're doing will fall by the wayside.

As an aside, this post highlights some of the existing holes in popular support for HTML. See if you can spot them! :)

Oh ho ho...you think you're so cute. Well, let's just see when I get a screenshot of your comment using WorldWideWeb!

Now, I didn't say it would be pretty.

...called WorldWideWeb written by Tim Berners-Lee.

The first version was completed on Xmas day 1990.

That makes the WWW twelve now and thirteen on Xmas day this year.

The first browser was called WorldWideWeb, more info where. His first release was in Christmas 1990. So, the World Wide Web is 12 years old.

...for all web developers: Cool URIs don't change.

Uh, no, it' s not. Hence the creation of XHTML.

The w3c validator says otherwise - oh and it works for me using Mozilla. Maybe you're just using a browser that doesn't cope well with xhtml?

I'm not fond of Microsoft (indeed, some people consider me a 'basher'), but I don't think the majority of Slashdot's reaction has been rational in this case. For instance, some quick googling brought up the following comment by Tim Bray; he is one of the authors of XML, by the way. ;-)

From: MS Office 'Office 11' XML as Seen by Tim Bray

Justin Lipton wrote:

> Does anyone know or have ideas about what XML enabled Office 11 actually
> means?

I got an extended (hours-long) demo of Word & Excel & XDocs from JeanPa and a product manager whose name I don't have handy, two or three months ago, so things may have changed but here's what I saw:

Both Word & this new XDocs thing can edit arbitrary XML docs per the constraints of any old XSD schema. No DTD supprt. There are some of the usual XML editor goodies such as suggesting what elements can go here and picking attributes. They have pretty cool facilities for GUIfied schema customization. Neither of them can help much with mixed content, which has always separated the men from the boys in the *ML editing sweepstakes.

I'm not sure that either of them are really being positioned as general-purpose XML content creation facilities up against Arbortext & Altova & Corel. I'm not sure that market is big enough to interest MS anyhow. XDocs is (strictly my opinion) an attempt to build a desktop application constructor at a level that is a bit more declarative and open than VB, but richer & more interactive than a Web browser. I'm not really convinced yet - I think MS would agree there's still quite a bit of product management to do - but it does seem to be a pretty clever piece of software. I'm pretty sure it's safe to interpret the advent of XDocs as MSFT's declaration that they're not going to do anything with XForms.

What actually turns my crank is that you can save word docs as XML and they have their own "WordML" tag set that gets generated. I took a close look at this and it's pretty interesting. Very verbose - every word on the page gets its own markup. Suppose you have the word "foo" in bold with single-underline, the WordML looks something like:

<r>
<rps>
<rp class="bold" />
<rp class="underline" lines="1" />
</rps>foo</r>

When you get something like a Word table or floating text box the markup gets really severely dense and ugly, but I didn't see anything that seemed egregiously wrong, it's not pretending to do anything more than capture all the semantics that Word carries around inside, which are correspondingly severely dense and ugly. And HTML tables get pretty hideous too.

Why did I like this? I didn't see anything that I couldn't pick apart straightforwardly with Perl, and if someone asked me to write a script to pull all the paragraphs out of a Word doc that contain the word "foo" in bold, well you could do that. Which seems pretty important to me.

The idea is that you can have a Word document with all that formatting and then you can mix that up pretty freely with your own schema stuff, and have validation, then you can save it as Word (your markup plus Word's) or as pure XML (discards Word's markup, leaving just yours). The old Corel WPerfect SGML editor used to be able to do this too. [snip]

I think it would be interesting to take a look at an example WordML document. Unfortunately, I don't have - nor to I plan to get - the beta for Office 2003. Would anybody like to post an example document of what Word 2003 presents?

I wish it was that simple. Take, for example, XSL. Are you telling that XSL files aren't XML files? OK, so we agree that XSL is built on XML technology and XSL files are parsed with the same parser as any other XML file, right? Guess what? XSL means "The Extensible Stylesheet Language", which, like the name suggests, has something to do with the presentation.

XML is simply a format to store structured documents. If your document has no real structure a valid XML document (without XML declaration) could look like <data>...encoded binary data here...</data>.

You're right that it's a good idea to separate content and presentation but XML doesn't require (or even suggest) that.

It would also be nice to be able transform the XML via a provided XSLT into fo (FO at W3C and FOP). Then you could present the document as a PDF, RTF, Doc, Java applet, or whatever.

Or isn't this good enough?

Personally, I only use a word processor to re-markup things I've written in HTML. That includes my dissertation. HTML isn't super printer friendly, but come on, we're all trying to go paperless anyway, right?

For example, a tremendous portion of all web-related traffic is simply sending text in bitmap form so a site can look "pretty". Then count in all of the very similar redundant images (in javascript rollovers), and then add in "graphically simple" images... that's a lot of traffic. All of this can, and should be replaced by much smaller and more efficient vector art.

While I'd say that vector images are certainly a big missing piece for the web (I'm waiting for proper svg support in browsers), I would completely disagree that you should send text as images, vector or otherwise.

I may have a high-resolution display that is capable of rendering serifs well, so I'd want to subtitute another font for sans-serifs most of the time. CSS allows me to do this, flash does not.

Normal text is indexable by search engines and other tools, and can be searched easily within the browser. Copy & paste works fine too. Does all of this work with flash?

It's very attractive if you want to deliver a self-contained web application (like a game)

True. I'm specifically addressing navigation implemented with flash though. I have no trouble accepting that there are good uses for flash.

I still think its scripting system and API are abyssmal, but if you're up for abuse you can make it do amazing things.

The authoring system ~v4 (I can't comment on other versions) is absolutely terrible, yes. I reminds me of the "click to program" things that were popular around 1990 - what was the one called, click 'n' play? I've played around with flash generated by php scripts, it looks promising, if a little buggy.

Something like Flash could replace HTML eventually.

I really hope not. The html wg has only just managed to properly separate content from presentation, it would be madness to glom it all back together again. There was a recent discussion about this on the www-html mailing list, actually, although that was centred around a markup language, the principle was the same.

Personally, I think that flash could be completely replaced by w3c technologies today, with a massive increase in usability/accessibility/ease-of-development if only the browser support was there. Check out scripted svg, the dom, ecmascript, smil, css, and so on.

HTML Tidy to the rescue.

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

Tidy can now perform wonders on HTML saved from Microsoft Word 2000! Word bulks out HTML files with stuff for round-tripping presentation between HTML and Word. If you are more concerned about using HTML on the Web, check out Tidy's "Word-2000" config option! Of course Tidy does a good job on Word'97 files as well!

What, like Amaya?

I know that IE renders things "wrong", but because of those percentages, that makes it right, and everyone else wrong. So why can't Netscape/Gecko/Mozilla/etc render things the way I want them to? And until they do, I'm using IE.

This is exactly the attitude that keeps the browser wars going. The browser wars will end when every browser is fully compliant with all the W3C standards that browser claims to support. I doubt anybody who complains "[insert browser] doesn't render pages as incorrectly as IE" is a member of the W3C or any of their working groups.

Support the W3C and its standards by writing pages that validate, or don't.

And about unimplementable standards, I thinked that Amaya goal was this, an example browser that shows that standards can be implemented.

Each different browser can have a different document object model (lowercase). Document Object Model (uppercase), on the other hand, is a W3C standard API that allows you to access different document object models in the same way.

P.S. BTW:

joeblakesley@netsc[ ].net ['ape' in gap]

Why is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) quiet about all this. A quick search on their website (through google) shows no mention of tabs, not the ones we are thinking of anyway.

If the W3C really wants people to stick to their specifications, they need to be ahead of the curve. I can just see IE 7 with javascript commands like window.tab.new() and Netscape with window.tab.open() etc.

The good point of XML is its unified syntax - you don't need a new parser each time, you already have one and you concentrate on semantics rather than syntax.

That's why there are such projects as XML representation of FlatCurry. Similar implementations I've met also in mail-lists about Mercury (BTW, they have also discussed S-exps as a basis of new syntax). Even ASN.1 goes to XML.

Again, I think XML tags are worse readable (and less compact) than Lisp S-expressions. Thast's why I believe that eventualy the market attraction of Lisp-like languages will tise again.

One problem with the way serialization is implemented in Java is that minor modifications are enough to change the "Serialization UID" of a class, which makes it impossible to deserialize objects that have been written using an earlier version of the class.

Of course, in part this is a conceptual problem not confined to Java, but in Java it's particularly nasty. Adding a column to an SQL table is a no-brainer. But add a field to a Java class and all previously serialized objects of that class will become useless.

Another problem with serialization in Java is that in practice it works only if you always use the same VM for both serializing and deserializing, which essentially means that you won't be able to upgrade easily as long as you have serialized data sitting on your hard drive. This is true for both the Sun and the IBM implementations.

I personally go a long way round Java serialization for these reasons. Java is fine, but you're better off using one of the other available persistence layers. EJB (whose initial version sucked, but 2.0 is cool) and JDO already have been mentioned, Xindice may also be worth a look at - it allows you to query data using XPath expressions. Like Prevailer this is only suited for small-scale applications that can do without ACID, though. May be interesting for reading/writing XML configuration files, storing and retrieving XSL templates for CM systems, stuff on that level.

He really shouldn't bitch too much, his page is invalid, and you can't 100% blame the browsers if you're feeding it bad XHTML/HTML

There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.

Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.

Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.

You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents

• Design Issues - Architectural and philosophical points
• Technology & Society
• Semantic Web
• Accessibility
• The Architecture Domain
• etc

Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.

There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.

Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.

Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.

You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents

• Design Issues - Architectural and philosophical points
• Technology & Society
• Semantic Web
• Accessibility
• The Architecture Domain
• etc

Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.

There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.

Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.

Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.

You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents

• Design Issues - Architectural and philosophical points
• Technology & Society
• Semantic Web
• Accessibility
• The Architecture Domain
• etc

Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.

There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.

Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.

Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.

You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents

• Design Issues - Architectural and philosophical points
• Technology & Society
• Semantic Web
• Accessibility
• The Architecture Domain
• etc

Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.

There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.

Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.

Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.

You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents

• Design Issues - Architectural and philosophical points
• Technology & Society
• Semantic Web
• Accessibility
• The Architecture Domain
• etc

Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.

There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.

Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.

Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.

You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents

• Design Issues - Architectural and philosophical points
• Technology & Society
• Semantic Web
• Accessibility
• The Architecture Domain
• etc

Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.

The new XHTML 2.0 introduces XForms integration, navigation lists, linking on every element, unordered section headings, and an expanded role for the object element.

Visit the W3 PNG test page using IE and Mozilla. IE doesn't fully support PNG, why would you expect Paint (IMHO the worst image editor EVER) to fully support the PNG format?

Dont forget XML!

Most of those "modern web techniques" cause more trouble than they're worth. They tend to work consistently only with Internet Explorer, which is their real reason for their existence and the reason Microsoft promotes them.

You, sir, are mistaken. The original poster was talking about using modern web standards in place of kludgy code, and Microsoft is notorious for not supporting OR promoting those "real" standards. Their home page doesn't validate. I've yet to see any of their applications produce clean HTML or CSS. In fact, the only things that DO work consistently in Internet Explorer are things that break the W3C standards -- the flashy, IE-only effects that few people use but many people deride. Besides which, Mozilla supports those "modern web standards" much better than IE ever has. It boasts full CSS compatibility for Level 1 and most of Level 2; IE doesn't even support a subset of Level 1 correctly. I won't get into DOM support here, but Mozilla and other browsers beat the hell out of IE there, too.

CSS is in a wierd niche - unneeded for simple pages, and too weak to do what Flash can do. Most of what CSS is usually used for can be done on the authoring side, with Dreamweaver templates or something similar. CSS also interacts badly with firewalls and proxy servers that edit out hostile content. If you really need exciting animated graphical effects (and you usually don't), Flash has far better capabilities.

Again, you don't know what you're talking about. CSS dramatically reduces coding time, bandwidth usage, and maintenance problems to the point that stylistic changes are no longer a headache. Most browsers now support the majority of CSS L1 -- including IE 5.0+ -- and the sheer savings of selectors versus font tags is incredible. Even on "simple" pages, CSS is more efficient. I've never seen it interact badly with firewalls and/or a proxy server, since when it's done right it's linked as an external file just like an external script.

You're also wrong to compare it to Flash. CSS is about styling content, not "exciting animated graphical effects." That's what SVG is for, and I suggest you read up on that. CSS has nothing to do with vector animation.

Almost nobody uses XML as originally envisioned - as a way to send structured data from a web site to the user's client. I built Downside [downside.com] to do just that for SEC filings, but apart from one obscure client program nobody uses, nobody downloads data that way. We're not seeing XML-tagged price and part number info on sites to allow price-oriented search engines to find the best deal for consumers, now are we? When you buy something online, you don't get back an XML-tagged receipt that goes into your own database. XML is mostly used for in-house and business-to-business applications, typically in situations where no human looks at the content.

False. XML is not intended to be the de facto standard for web communication. It's intended to be a standard data format that multiple, different applications can understand (including human readers.) If XML were the be-all, end-all of a user's browsing experience, the W3C wouldn't be working on another version of XHTML. Moreover, just because you're not seeing XML data doesn't mean it's not useful. Sometimes, companies don't want consumers (or their competitors!) to have access to their inventories and prices. As for XML receipts, I've yet to see a program that does what you're talking about, to say nothing of one that a consumer could use without requesting help from a geek friend.

Please, get your facts straight.

testing for loading XML is a bit silly anyway since DOM3 load and save aren't recommendations yet, but working drafts.

so failing the load xml test doesn't really tell us anything, other than the reviewer needs to take more care.

Sorry, http://www.speex.org is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict The Open Source community suggest that you get a better browser.

IE has to fix its bugs with understanding mimetypes.

IE seems to take no notice what so ever of the MIME type specified in HTTP headers. It also takes no notice of the charset specified in HTTP headers :-(

This is why the IE problems with this page are nothing to do with the fact that it's served as text/xml -- it SHOULD be served as'application/xhtml+xml' since it's a XHTML 1.1 document.

However there are not many browsers that support application/xhtml+xml...

I think the only way around this is to serve different MIME types to different clients for XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1.

IE has to fix its bugs with understanding mimetypes.

IE seems to take no notice what so ever of the MIME type specified in HTTP headers. It also takes no notice of the charset specified in HTTP headers :-(

This is why the IE problems with this page are nothing to do with the fact that it's served as text/xml -- it SHOULD be served as'application/xhtml+xml' since it's a XHTML 1.1 document.

However there are not many browsers that support application/xhtml+xml...

I think the only way around this is to serve different MIME types to different clients for XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1.

It doesn't appear to be an IE parsing error, it looks like it was blocked from IE at mozilla.org. As in if I use proxomitron to fake my user-agent it displays.

It appears to be valid XHTML and valid use of CSS, so your comments seem strange, unless they serve different documents for different user agents. Have anybody tested this?

It doesn't appear to be an IE parsing error, it looks like it was blocked from IE at mozilla.org. As in if I use proxomitron to fake my user-agent it displays.

It appears to be valid XHTML and valid use of CSS, so your comments seem strange, unless they serve different documents for different user agents. Have anybody tested this?

ok, try just http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd

The file is there.

in order to prevent the caching of your copyrighted material, you should have indicated this on the page. remember - google does not try to interpret copyright info from the content of the page. you have to indicate this using html tags. you have the copyright tag at your disposal. if you don't want it cached, you can always use "meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"". note that you can also indicate when a cache should expire. how is the google spider supposed to know things are copyrighted if you never tell it that? it's only "illegal" if you specifically tell them it's copyrighted and should not be cached.

in order to prevent the caching of your copyrighted material, you should have indicated this on the page. remember - google does not try to interpret copyright info from the content of the page. you have to indicate this using html tags. you have the copyright tag at your disposal. if you don't want it cached, you can always use "meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"". note that you can also indicate when a cache should expire. how is the google spider supposed to know things are copyrighted if you never tell it that? it's only "illegal" if you specifically tell them it's copyrighted and should not be cached.

Well, I was interested in watching the matches but not really interested in installing a proprietry viewer or installing media player 9.
Where's the ChessGML version so I can view it using SVG?

Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.

But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).

True enough, but I think Google could do a much more planned, coherent version with some actual cooperation from the bloggers.

For example, Google could tell their "preferred" bloggers they want to do an editorial section on, say, Afghanistan--$50 to anyone who writes a piece we use. Or perhaps change blogger.com to use RDF so that Google can more knowledgeably (sp?) format a "Blogzine" page.

It's easier for Google to do this when 500 newspapers go online with a story, but blogger interests are more diverse. I think Google would need something more than their current news system to place, for example, the talking points memo series on the GOP Marketplace trying to swamp Democrat phone banks with calls. Interesting story (to me at least), but apparently only 1 newspaper was reporting it. How would a Google blog news service know what to do with that series today?

In any case, you're probably right in the sense that I think the odds of Google doing something like what I imagine are slim. I still think it could work, but they'll probably come up with something more clever than this. Must be a joy to work in their research lab...

adéu
Mateu

A XML Schema is a way to define a set of XML data as set forth in the applicable W3C standards. A Scheme is a scam perpetrated by scam artists, e.g. the television industry. I stand by my English as used in my original post.

Cool! Opera.com validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict!

Try putting Slashdot into the validator:
Validate Slashdot.

The css MSN served Opera in their tests checks out with only a warning about a missing background color.

Here

but the page is valid html4.0 strict