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Stories and comments across the archive that link to w3.org.

Comments · 6,785

  1. O'Reilly XForms book to be under GFDL by mdubinko · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Prentice Hall To Publish Open Content Licensed Books

    Also of note, the XForms book I'm writing for O'Reilly will be published under the GFDL.

    Before publication, the text-in-progress is also available, but under a somewhat more restrictive license, at http://dubinko.info/writing/xforms/.

    This policy at O'Reilly dates back to at least May 2002, when I signed the contract.

    .micah

  2. Re:No, it's not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative · on Why IE Is So Fast ... Sometimes

    Back/forward is allowed (expected in fact) to show the page without reloading it. See RFC 2616.

  3. Annotea is the start of a solution by mike_sucks · · Score: 4, Interesting · on Are Digital "Margin Notes" Possible Yet?

    Annotea is a W3C project. To quote from the site:

    Annotea is a LEAD (Live Early Adoption and Demonstration) project enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations.

    It provides annotation capabilities for HTML documents, and maybe XML documents, delivered in a web browser or similar UA.

    Anonzilla is a project for providing Annotea capabilities for Mozilla. Check it out!

    HTH
    /mike

  4. Conformity DNE, not even in IE by Cokelee · · Score: 1 · on Seeking a Browser Compatibility Reference?

    Good luck trying to get ANY consistency if you really want to separate info and content!
    I have written sites with CSS for layout instead of Tables as the W3C recommends. It does not render consistently in ANYTHING. IE6SP1 displays it differently from IE6, IE5 (SP1,2), IE4 and Opera's CSS support is lacking. I've checked the page in Phoenix and it renders fairly well.

    For more information, I've saw a good tutorial on CSS stuff at Glish.com

  5. Conformity DNE, not even in IE by Cokelee · · Score: 1 · on Seeking a Browser Compatibility Reference?

    Good luck trying to get ANY consistency if you really want to separate info and content!
    I have written sites with CSS for layout instead of Tables as the W3C recommends. It does not render consistently in ANYTHING. IE6SP1 displays it differently from IE6, IE5 (SP1,2), IE4 and Opera's CSS support is lacking. I've checked the page in Phoenix and it renders fairly well.

    For more information, I've saw a good tutorial on CSS stuff at Glish.com

  6. Conformity DNE, not even in IE by Cokelee · · Score: 1 · on Seeking a Browser Compatibility Reference?

    Good luck trying to get ANY consistency if you really want to separate info and content!
    I have written sites with CSS for layout instead of Tables as the W3C recommends. It does not render consistently in ANYTHING. IE6SP1 displays it differently from IE6, IE5 (SP1,2), IE4 and Opera's CSS support is lacking. I've checked the page in Phoenix and it renders fairly well.

    For more information, I've saw a good tutorial on CSS stuff at Glish.com

  7. Re:looks like very high quality work, but... by aallan · · Score: 3, Interesting · on newdocms: Beyond the Hierarchical File System

    While I do think the work presented is a great idea, it seems to me that it's a lot of effort just to setup the system.

    Thats pretty much the problem with meta-data based file systems. They're great for new projects, where you have a clean start and can actually add metadata to the files. The real problem is legacy data.

    My home directory weighs in at just under five gigabytes, and has files dating back over ten years, and thats just the "personal stuff". My work partition has about eight gigabytes, which is mainly source code.

    I'm really not going to be able to associate metadata with every individual file by hand. Until automatic tools come along that will data mine the file content and automaticlly do some minimal level of association.

    On top of this a whole new generation of development tools needs to be written. At a very basic level you need a version of make that will build all C source files on the disk with associated meta data "Belonging to Project X, dated no later than last week".

    When you think about it you'll realise that while as a concept its fairly powerful, we won't be switching to using this sort of thing soon. For the same reasons the semantic web and RDF are having problems getting adopted, metadata based file systems face real problems before people will start widly adpoting them...

    Al.
  8. W3C != ISO by yerricde · · Score: 1 · on Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

    Nothing is a standard until it has at least two independent, interoperable implementations.

    Agreed, even if I can't convince Twirlip of the Mists of this.

    And it need to be agreed upon by a standards body.

    Define "standards body". Many Slashdot trolls define "standards body" to exclude, say, the World Wide Web Consortium because unlike ISO, the W3C doesn't have statutory or regulatory support from any sovereign government.

  9. Removing the copyright notice? by yerricde · · Score: 2 · on Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

    too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.

    How would you fix this in a way acceptable to corporate attorneys? The copyright and trademark notices are in there for a reason.

    character separation should use optional hyphens.

    What's the HTML code for "optional hyphen"? And how can you make it handle words that are spelled differently when hyphenated or not, such as German <Zucker>, <Zuk-ker> = "sugar"?

    Content Proprietarily Encoded

    What free, patent-free video codec would you suggest?

  10. Nothing New and Wrong Approach by AShocka · · Score: 1 · on Listen to Webpages While Driving

    Like most of the other intelligent comments here, slashdotters know this product, and it's approach, is neither new or well targeted.

    Not only will such a product be almost impossible to use because of the task of trying to render intelligence from all the HTML soup out there, it does not address the software architecture underlying OS and browsers. It's a waste of time.

    All the major operating systems; Microsoft Windows , Apple Macintosh, and the major distributions of Unix, are built on architectures that support accessibility. These are inherent within the component architecture of the software development kits (SDK), and correctly built software utilises the component architectures for interfacing with various devices, including human interactive devices of screen, keyboard, mouse and sound.

    When one builds software in accordance with the resources of the SDK, the fundamentals of user accessibility to software interfaces are addressed. If the developer is not aware of the component architecture of the SDK, and why it is structured that way, they can unwittingly penalised their software usability and their users accessibility, through failing to address standard user interface issues. Each resource needs to be correctly implemented; Icons, Cursor, Menus, Dialog Boxes, Bitmaps, Fonts, String-Tables, Accelerators, Name-Table Version-Information.

    The web also has a similar architecture, and the foundations are there, and improving with better user agent support. Such media can be targeted independently through correct use of CSS Media types in the latest browsers. Negligence in not being aware of the web's architecture also penalises the web developer when designing and building web services (such as this case).

    If the web developer wraps their valid code in logical sections divided with DIV tags and assigned appropriate CSS classes, it is possible, using one design, to either display or hide various sections of the page. This also addresses the need for printer friendly pages.

    When the support finally arrives (here's hoping for a perfect world... it is definitely improving), one will be able to enhance web pages, such as interviews and navigation with different voices so that the listener can better differentiate the content through intelligent and creative assignment of Aural CSS.

    Given that Aural CSS is designed to be interactive, it would be of immense value to the whole mobile device development community to correctly implement such services.

    This would not only assist those with disabilities, but it would be great to be able to listen to some web pages while cleaning the office desk, taking a break, or whatever... but maybe not driving a car.

  11. Nothing New and Wrong Approach by AShocka · · Score: 1 · on Listen to Webpages While Driving

    Like most of the other intelligent comments here, slashdotters know this product, and it's approach, is neither new or well targeted.

    Not only will such a product be almost impossible to use because of the task of trying to render intelligence from all the HTML soup out there, it does not address the software architecture underlying OS and browsers. It's a waste of time.

    All the major operating systems; Microsoft Windows , Apple Macintosh, and the major distributions of Unix, are built on architectures that support accessibility. These are inherent within the component architecture of the software development kits (SDK), and correctly built software utilises the component architectures for interfacing with various devices, including human interactive devices of screen, keyboard, mouse and sound.

    When one builds software in accordance with the resources of the SDK, the fundamentals of user accessibility to software interfaces are addressed. If the developer is not aware of the component architecture of the SDK, and why it is structured that way, they can unwittingly penalised their software usability and their users accessibility, through failing to address standard user interface issues. Each resource needs to be correctly implemented; Icons, Cursor, Menus, Dialog Boxes, Bitmaps, Fonts, String-Tables, Accelerators, Name-Table Version-Information.

    The web also has a similar architecture, and the foundations are there, and improving with better user agent support. Such media can be targeted independently through correct use of CSS Media types in the latest browsers. Negligence in not being aware of the web's architecture also penalises the web developer when designing and building web services (such as this case).

    If the web developer wraps their valid code in logical sections divided with DIV tags and assigned appropriate CSS classes, it is possible, using one design, to either display or hide various sections of the page. This also addresses the need for printer friendly pages.

    When the support finally arrives (here's hoping for a perfect world... it is definitely improving), one will be able to enhance web pages, such as interviews and navigation with different voices so that the listener can better differentiate the content through intelligent and creative assignment of Aural CSS.

    Given that Aural CSS is designed to be interactive, it would be of immense value to the whole mobile device development community to correctly implement such services.

    This would not only assist those with disabilities, but it would be great to be able to listen to some web pages while cleaning the office desk, taking a break, or whatever... but maybe not driving a car.

  12. Re: Validation by dbaron · · Score: 5, Informative · on Review of Mozilla's 2002

    It seems like you're suggesting that validation assures standards-compliance. Validation does not ensure standards-compliance.

    HTML Validation only ensures that you've met certain constraints of syntax and containment, but it doesn't ensure that you're following the standard. If you're using one of the Transitional doctype declarations, it doesn't ensure that you're avoiding deprecated features. More importantly, it doesn't show if you're depending on a bug in the browsers you're testing in. For example, a browser that doesn't implement section 14.3 of the HTML 4.0 spec correctly (pretty much any browser other than Mozilla, right now) might load stylesheets that the HTML spec says shouldn't be loaded. Thus you'll have valid markup, and your browser will load your stylesheets, but any standards-compliant browser will treat some of your stylesheets as alternate stylesheets and not load them. (This happens if you specify different title attributes on the LINK element linking to the stylesheets, since it makes some of the stylesheets alternate stylesheets.) Similar traps can happen in other ways and allow you to write perfectly valid markup that means something other than what you think it does and what you intended it to do.

    CSS validation has similar problems. (It also has the problem that the validators themselves have rather significant bugs, since there aren't any mature implementations of CSS parsers using which one can build validators like the SGML parsers on which HTML validators are based.) For example, MSIE for Windows treats the height property on block-level elements incorrectly: it treats it as min-height and allows the height of the block to be larger if the contents overflow. This is incorrect, so there are pages that are displayed nicely on MSIE for Windows but have lots of overlapping text on any CSS-compliant browser. Likewise, you could be writing pages that work fine at your default font size or window width but display very badly at others.

    In other words, validation tools for HTML and CSS are nowhere near smart enough to be a substitute for really knowing what you're doing. (Does anyone rely on lint to verify that their C programs are bug-free?)

    (I actually wrote this post before on slashdot, but way too late in the thread for anyone to notice it. I'm afraid I'm doing the same thing again, though...)

  13. Re: Validation by dbaron · · Score: 5, Informative · on Review of Mozilla's 2002

    It seems like you're suggesting that validation assures standards-compliance. Validation does not ensure standards-compliance.

    HTML Validation only ensures that you've met certain constraints of syntax and containment, but it doesn't ensure that you're following the standard. If you're using one of the Transitional doctype declarations, it doesn't ensure that you're avoiding deprecated features. More importantly, it doesn't show if you're depending on a bug in the browsers you're testing in. For example, a browser that doesn't implement section 14.3 of the HTML 4.0 spec correctly (pretty much any browser other than Mozilla, right now) might load stylesheets that the HTML spec says shouldn't be loaded. Thus you'll have valid markup, and your browser will load your stylesheets, but any standards-compliant browser will treat some of your stylesheets as alternate stylesheets and not load them. (This happens if you specify different title attributes on the LINK element linking to the stylesheets, since it makes some of the stylesheets alternate stylesheets.) Similar traps can happen in other ways and allow you to write perfectly valid markup that means something other than what you think it does and what you intended it to do.

    CSS validation has similar problems. (It also has the problem that the validators themselves have rather significant bugs, since there aren't any mature implementations of CSS parsers using which one can build validators like the SGML parsers on which HTML validators are based.) For example, MSIE for Windows treats the height property on block-level elements incorrectly: it treats it as min-height and allows the height of the block to be larger if the contents overflow. This is incorrect, so there are pages that are displayed nicely on MSIE for Windows but have lots of overlapping text on any CSS-compliant browser. Likewise, you could be writing pages that work fine at your default font size or window width but display very badly at others.

    In other words, validation tools for HTML and CSS are nowhere near smart enough to be a substitute for really knowing what you're doing. (Does anyone rely on lint to verify that their C programs are bug-free?)

    (I actually wrote this post before on slashdot, but way too late in the thread for anyone to notice it. I'm afraid I'm doing the same thing again, though...)

  14. Re: Validation by dbaron · · Score: 5, Informative · on Review of Mozilla's 2002

    It seems like you're suggesting that validation assures standards-compliance. Validation does not ensure standards-compliance.

    HTML Validation only ensures that you've met certain constraints of syntax and containment, but it doesn't ensure that you're following the standard. If you're using one of the Transitional doctype declarations, it doesn't ensure that you're avoiding deprecated features. More importantly, it doesn't show if you're depending on a bug in the browsers you're testing in. For example, a browser that doesn't implement section 14.3 of the HTML 4.0 spec correctly (pretty much any browser other than Mozilla, right now) might load stylesheets that the HTML spec says shouldn't be loaded. Thus you'll have valid markup, and your browser will load your stylesheets, but any standards-compliant browser will treat some of your stylesheets as alternate stylesheets and not load them. (This happens if you specify different title attributes on the LINK element linking to the stylesheets, since it makes some of the stylesheets alternate stylesheets.) Similar traps can happen in other ways and allow you to write perfectly valid markup that means something other than what you think it does and what you intended it to do.

    CSS validation has similar problems. (It also has the problem that the validators themselves have rather significant bugs, since there aren't any mature implementations of CSS parsers using which one can build validators like the SGML parsers on which HTML validators are based.) For example, MSIE for Windows treats the height property on block-level elements incorrectly: it treats it as min-height and allows the height of the block to be larger if the contents overflow. This is incorrect, so there are pages that are displayed nicely on MSIE for Windows but have lots of overlapping text on any CSS-compliant browser. Likewise, you could be writing pages that work fine at your default font size or window width but display very badly at others.

    In other words, validation tools for HTML and CSS are nowhere near smart enough to be a substitute for really knowing what you're doing. (Does anyone rely on lint to verify that their C programs are bug-free?)

    (I actually wrote this post before on slashdot, but way too late in the thread for anyone to notice it. I'm afraid I'm doing the same thing again, though...)

  15. Re:this reads left to right by jesser · · Score: 3, Informative · on Listen to Webpages While Driving

    So it will take a while to get through the menus. Who wants to hear [all the stuff at the top of each Slashdot page] while trying to get the news?

    This is a reminder that web accessibility isn't just for letting disabled people use your site. Many of the same techniques are useful for letting non-disabled people use your site through a device other than a computer with a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and graphical web browser.

    The problem of identifying the beginning of the main content of a page is not new to this listen-while-driving application. In 1999, Jim Thatcher of IBM Special Needs Systems called it "the most serious impedement to access to commercial web content". At least one version of JAWS, a screen reader popular among blind users, provides the shortcut INS+ENTER for "move to the next block of text which has no links". That JAWS includes such an unreliable heuristic points to the importance of being able to skip blocks of navigation links.

    The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines suggest grouping navigation links in a <map> element, and until assistive technologies widely understand <map> as a navigation-link-grouping mechanism, also putting a "skip to main content" link at the top of the page and hiding it from graphical browsers.

    Mark Pilgrim recommends trying to put the main content of the page first in the HTML, and describes a "table trick" that allows a navigation sidebar on the left side of a page to come after the main content in the HTML. (If a page uses CSS for layout rather than tables, it should be even easier to put a left sidebar later in the HTML.) For the listen-while-driving application, I imagine that putting the main content first is a more effective technique than the "let users of text browsers skip navigation links" techniques.

    By the way, switching to Slashdot's light mode (preview) eliminates some of the junk at the top of Slashdot pages. The faq...hof navigation links are still there, but the OSDN bar, section links, and recent topic links are gone.

  16. Re:this reads left to right by jesser · · Score: 3, Informative · on Listen to Webpages While Driving

    So it will take a while to get through the menus. Who wants to hear [all the stuff at the top of each Slashdot page] while trying to get the news?

    This is a reminder that web accessibility isn't just for letting disabled people use your site. Many of the same techniques are useful for letting non-disabled people use your site through a device other than a computer with a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and graphical web browser.

    The problem of identifying the beginning of the main content of a page is not new to this listen-while-driving application. In 1999, Jim Thatcher of IBM Special Needs Systems called it "the most serious impedement to access to commercial web content". At least one version of JAWS, a screen reader popular among blind users, provides the shortcut INS+ENTER for "move to the next block of text which has no links". That JAWS includes such an unreliable heuristic points to the importance of being able to skip blocks of navigation links.

    The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines suggest grouping navigation links in a <map> element, and until assistive technologies widely understand <map> as a navigation-link-grouping mechanism, also putting a "skip to main content" link at the top of the page and hiding it from graphical browsers.

    Mark Pilgrim recommends trying to put the main content of the page first in the HTML, and describes a "table trick" that allows a navigation sidebar on the left side of a page to come after the main content in the HTML. (If a page uses CSS for layout rather than tables, it should be even easier to put a left sidebar later in the HTML.) For the listen-while-driving application, I imagine that putting the main content first is a more effective technique than the "let users of text browsers skip navigation links" techniques.

    By the way, switching to Slashdot's light mode (preview) eliminates some of the junk at the top of Slashdot pages. The faq...hof navigation links are still there, but the OSDN bar, section links, and recent topic links are gone.

  17. XML (RSS/RDF) to the rescue? + Interface ideas by sonamchauhan · · Score: 1 · on Listen to Webpages While Driving
    Good point. RSS ("RDF Site Summary") - an XML standard for summarizing and pointing to website content - may be part of the solution here. The RSS 1.0 spec defines XML files that contain summary information and pointers to content on websites. Some links:
    • O'Reilly has an excellent RSS tutorial.
    • This article is a good source of RSS Links.
    • Meerkat shows RSS in action.
    • This is pretty nifty - an NNTP-RSS gateway. It lets your favorite NNTP newsreader works as RSS newsreader. (See screenshot)


    [ Note: I'm no expert on RSS/RDF - just an interested reader. Maybe an expert can chip in here:... ] RSS does not provide one crucial thing - information on the internal structure of the content itself. Maybe RDF (Resource Description Framework) does that -- I'm not sure. Anyway, RSS only supplies meta-information pointing to the content. An in-car application could read out "article headers" from RSS information. If the user "selected" a particular "article header", the system would need "content-structure information" (RDF?) to skip unwanted elements like menus and ads, and just read out content like a radio news story. Of course, only some types of content lend themselves to being read out. For instance, Slashdot has a RDF feed (BTW, shouldn't this be an .RSS file?). These point to the Slashdot articles. If I "selected" a story, I'd want a script that extracted the submitted story (and NOT the user comments) and read it out.

    The car's existing audio controls could be used to "browse" such "articles". Some cars have buttons mounted on the steering column to let the driver flip through radio stations without taking his hands off the wheel. For this system, two switches - an "up/down" rocker switch for navigating up and down the "Newsfeed > Headline > Article" hierarchy, and a "forward/backward" switch for navigating elements under the same hierarchy could provide the driver all the control he needed without taking his eyes off the road.

    It would be good to integrate this system with another system that measured cognitive load on the driver. The recitation would pause, say, when speed exceeded some limit, or (using sonar) neighbouring cars came closer than a minimum distance, or some such combination. Done properly, this system _could_ enhance safety by providing the driver feedback.
  18. Re:NOT WORKING by Ankh · · Score: 2, Insightful · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall

    There was a power outage at MIT (note: it's in Cambridge, MA, not Redmond) where lists.w3.org is hosted. This was because of sheduled building work, and the date was published several weeks in advance.

    I encourage you to try again -- most or all of the W3C systems seem to be running OK now.

    You're also welcome to email me directly (liam at w3.org) if you want to understand more about what W3C does, or how it is organised to minimise the chance that one company can control specifications - or you can read our web site.

    [Lam Quin, XML Activity Lead, W3C]

  19. can't approve my comment! BROKEN MAILING LIST? by js7a · · Score: 2 · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    It's sections 3, items three AND SEVEN which have the problem. Not just section 3 item 3.

    Currently, the last comment I see is three days old: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpoli cy-comment/2002Dec/

    I hope Slashdot's last-minute comments aren't headed into the bitbucket.

  20. Can't comment due to bug in w3c message submit by SuperKendall · · Score: 2 · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall

    Well, I did my part - I wrote up a message explaining why I felt the section should go, and mailed it off.

    I got back an automated response saying the message had been accepted, then a seperate message saying that I would have to visit here to give permission to post the message to the mailing list and store it. However, trying out that link gives me the message:

    Error: There is no message with id: 3a9041e823e02419d0f7ddd1223cf918b8a3e226. Please make sure you have cut and pasted the URI correctly.

    So, good luck to those trying to remove the offending wording if those opposed can't even submit persistent comments!

  21. Oy Slashdot! by The+Bungi · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    This sudden interest in the W3C and open standards and unencumbered software and patent free and, etc. etc. is quite interesting.

    Considering you intentionally block the W3C validator

    I can't help but think that's about the stupidest thing /. has ever done (though I may be wrong). I mean, what's the point? Lame jokes about the crappy output of your Perl scripts got you down? How about fixing it instead??

  22. WWW and the GNU GPL by Milo+Fungus · · Score: 1, Troll · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall

    It's interesting to think that Tim Berners-Lee at one time was pushing CERN to release all of the code for the World Wide Web (like http and html) under the GPL. He explains in Weaving the Web that some of the vendors seeking to capitalize on the Web (like Netscape) were concerned about the viral nature of the GPL. How much different would the web (and the world) be if the Web were part of the GNU project instead of in public domain? (I realize that releasing under GPL does not make a project part of GNU, but if the Web were GPL'd, would anyone use it outside of GNU?)

    I think GNU is great, but I'm really glad the Web is what it is.

  23. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  24. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  25. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  26. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  27. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  28. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  29. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  30. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  31. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  32. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  33. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  34. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  35. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  36. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  37. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  38. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  39. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  40. 2001 Oct thread link by miltimj · · Score: 5, Funny · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    Ah yes, that thread has a lot of great points threaded throughout... such as:

    And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
  41. Badly needed background... by persist1 · · Score: 3, Informative · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall

    Also of note:

    Working Draft, W3C Patent Policy...

    Abstract:

    The W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy governs the handling of patents in the process of producing Web standards. The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.
  42. I'll pay attention to this... by Blacklist+Blacklist · · Score: -1 · on Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
    when slashdot stops BANNING the HTML Validator and begins to use real HTML!

    Until then: Bah.

  43. Re:Bah! by Milo+Fungus · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Redesigning The "Back" Button

    Exactly. Read Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee for a good explanation of the origins of the WWW. A lot of the Web as we know it is a hacked version of Berners-Lee's original vision and intent. People weren't willing to make client programs text editors, so the Web became a publishing medium viewed with a browser instead of the interactive medium it was intended to be. It would be easy to display your browsing history as a hierarchy or as a link web, but it would probably take up more space on your screen. Display space is at a premium. (I wish Mozilla would let me interactively resize the tab buttons, for instance. They take up too much space.)

  44. Re:built for the web? by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2 · on PHP 4.3.0 Released
    More like
    echo "PHP is <q>built for the Web</q>";
    Q element. :^)
  45. Re:Radio buttons and their dumbness by boneshintai · · Score: 1 · on Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

    May I suggest the <label> tag? If that doesn't perform how you want it to, suggest it to your browser makers of choice, or write your own.

    Relevant excerpt, for the link-phobic:

    The LABEL element may be used to attach information to controls. Each LABEL element is associated with exactly one form control.

    The for attribute associates a label with another control explicitly: the value of the for attribute must be the same as the value of the id attribute of the associated control element. More than one LABEL may be associated with the same control by creating multiple references via the for attribute.

    ...

    To associate a label with another control implicitly, the control element must be within the contents of the LABEL element. In this case, the LABEL may only contain one control element. The label itself may be positioned before or after the associated control.

  46. Re:As if by ergo98 · · Score: 1 · on Microsoft To Acquire Macromedia?

    That and the fact that Flash has 99% market penetration and SVG has 0.01% and no active development.

    Complete and absolute BS. Flash has probably 1% penetration in places where dynamic vector graphics could be used. There are countless places where neither Flash or SVG are in use because people either don't want to exclude users for marginal gain. Saying that SVG has "no active development" is absolute Flash-enabled fantasy as well: I don't know if you noticed, but SVG 1.1 was big news. SVG 1.2 will be even bigger news, and there is native support in virtually all graphics packages and a growing developer base. Flash just keeps on in the margins, shunned by the overwhelming majority of those in the know.

    DHTML makes for not fully-functional GUIs and excludes NS4, Java crapplets collapsed under browser incompability, and VBish client-server stuff is too hard to deploy.

    If one is willing to say "Well Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install the Flash plug-in", then I'll turn that around and say "Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install IE 6/Mozilla. If one has the option to install Flash, then a newer browser is certainly in the works. One will have probably an equal number of users who don't have Flash installed as those who have a browser ill suited for modern DHTML.

    As far as SVG having an "unmaintained plugin" that's just a riot. Have you used the Adobe SVG Viewer? It is tremendous. Corel is actively developing a plugin. There is a version of Mozilla with SVG native support. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention (of have been hiding hoping that the web switches to Flash), but virtually every graphics company but Macromedia is involved and participating in the SVG standard. Take a look at the signators at the bottom of the spec...the only big company missing is Macromedia. Tell me again how Flash is the new world order...

  47. Time to push SVG! by zero0w · · Score: 1 · on Microsoft To Acquire Macromedia?

    I was wondering how we can be prepared for this, interestingly I stumbled over an SVG Vector drawing program named sodipodi a while ago:

    Sodipodi
    Sodipodi screenshots on Linux with GTK Geramik theme

    It is a nice open source vector drawing program. And it got me interested in looking into the SVG format, which also supports (web) animation :-) . This article explains it a bit more:

    SWF Is Not Flash (and Other Vectored Thoughts)

    Anyway I think SVG will have a bright future and even can replace Flash (SWF) in certain extent, more info on SVG can be found at W3C.org here:

    Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification
    Mozilla SVG Project

  48. Re:If Microsoft makes Flash proprietary... by ManxStef · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Microsoft To Acquire Macromedia?

    Then perhaps people would switch away from Flash, to a fully open, free, W3C-supported standard like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)? (See a comparison of SWF and SVG functionality and a description of how Flash animation maps to SVG - both fairly old articles BTW.)

    I wish, but MS will use their browser market dominance to make sure that IE doesn't support it. Or if they do decide to incorporate it they'll use their tried-and-trusted tactic of "embrace(alter) and extend", so any W3C standards that are supported suddenly only seems to work properly in IE, thanks to a few subtly different things (not that they've done that before, cough - document.all, element.innerHTML - cough!). And as they'll have also aquired Dreamweaver (the most popular web development tool) they will therefore control the output format of 90% of the code produced; I dread to think how this'll affect the web as a whole.

    Wouldn't surprise me if they just stuck their middle finger up at the W3C and took control for themselves... or am I being overly paranoid?

    Damn I sure do hope this is just a rumour...

  49. Re:One more reason by bheerssen · · Score: 1 · on Next-Gen Pop-up Ads

    Perhaps you need to think more deeply on this. Browsers absolutely should respect command X simply because it's in the standard. Not doing so results in divergent browser behavior, which results in divergent website behavior, which in turn results in a fracturing of the web as a whole. WWW standards are good for us all, and should be vigorously defended.

    If you disagree with any particular portion of a standard, you are free to contribute to the process, and I heartily encourage you to do so.

  50. UAAG Compliance and Test Suites by AShocka · · Score: 2, Informative · on W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines