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The w3c also has a list of projects that use RDF. Some of them seem a bit academic, but one that looks particularly cool is eventSherpa - a semantic calendaring application that lets you publish and subscribe to RDF calendars. The FOAF project has also been gaining steam as Typepad and others join the movement.

For some time RealPlayer was the only "free" plug-in to support SMIL. Fortunately, we now have Ambulant.

There are still, like you mentioned, several places which offer .rm formats to view their contents. Annoying, but then again, it appears only Quicktime and WMV are the alternatives.

IE has support for a large deal of things I wish were standard.

But IE has a lot of things in it that I wish it didn't have (screwed up box model, improper handling of padding, stupid colored scrollbars, et. al.). And, quite frankly, I'm glad they aren't standard.

However, too many internet bodies can't make decisions and standards are simply corrupted leaving Microsoft to run around generating their own sudo standards.

You know, if only there was some kind of standards body to make standards and such for the web. *cough*W3C*cough*

But you can't be serious about that last statement. There ARE standards. MS just refuses to abide by them. It is to the Internet's detriment and only they stand to gain from it.

As far as web development goes and building high quality, web-based applications (trust me, the backend to all sites I work on are served by one the last servers VA's sold) IE simply offers more flexability, creative applications, and...well, a larger userbase.

Really? IE offers what flexibility? What can you do with IE that you can't do with Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, or Firebird? I can't think of a thing. Sure, you might not be able to use some kind of propietary IE plugin. But there are other, better, and more universal ways of accomplishing anything that a propietary plugin can do.

I suffer wasting time making sure the stripped down version of these sites work in Mozilla.

No my friend. You suffer because you write poorly coded, non-standards compliant web pages. Once again, W3C. Check out the XHTML 1.0, CSS 2, DOM, and other standards.

As Jeffrey Zeldman and others have pointed out, coding to standards and then tweaking for IE is *much* easier than the other way around. If you code to IE first and then try to back port compatability, you end up with a hacked together mess that conforms to no real standards at all. In fact, many Web Design/CSS gurus prefer to preview their pages in Mozilla/Firebird/Netscape/Opera first to ensure that their pages will look right in a standards compliant browser. Only after they do this do they tweak their CSS to make it look right in IE (which has many woeful CSS issues).

Aaron Giuoco

IE has support for a large deal of things I wish were standard.

But IE has a lot of things in it that I wish it didn't have (screwed up box model, improper handling of padding, stupid colored scrollbars, et. al.). And, quite frankly, I'm glad they aren't standard.

However, too many internet bodies can't make decisions and standards are simply corrupted leaving Microsoft to run around generating their own sudo standards.

You know, if only there was some kind of standards body to make standards and such for the web. *cough*W3C*cough*

But you can't be serious about that last statement. There ARE standards. MS just refuses to abide by them. It is to the Internet's detriment and only they stand to gain from it.

As far as web development goes and building high quality, web-based applications (trust me, the backend to all sites I work on are served by one the last servers VA's sold) IE simply offers more flexability, creative applications, and...well, a larger userbase.

Really? IE offers what flexibility? What can you do with IE that you can't do with Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, or Firebird? I can't think of a thing. Sure, you might not be able to use some kind of propietary IE plugin. But there are other, better, and more universal ways of accomplishing anything that a propietary plugin can do.

I suffer wasting time making sure the stripped down version of these sites work in Mozilla.

No my friend. You suffer because you write poorly coded, non-standards compliant web pages. Once again, W3C. Check out the XHTML 1.0, CSS 2, DOM, and other standards.

As Jeffrey Zeldman and others have pointed out, coding to standards and then tweaking for IE is *much* easier than the other way around. If you code to IE first and then try to back port compatability, you end up with a hacked together mess that conforms to no real standards at all. In fact, many Web Design/CSS gurus prefer to preview their pages in Mozilla/Firebird/Netscape/Opera first to ensure that their pages will look right in a standards compliant browser. Only after they do this do they tweak their CSS to make it look right in IE (which has many woeful CSS issues).

Aaron Giuoco

If this were a site in Europe I would expect it to be written in a European language, use a European date format, and use "," as the decimal separator, not "." like in the US.

I would expect a web page to display a date that conforms to the ISO standard, as do the W3C. It's not the format commonly used in my country either, but I realise I'm publishing on a global medium to a global audience and that's why I use it.

Are you going to attack Asia now for not using a Western alphabet?

Most of Asia (including China, Japan, Korea and others) already use YYYY-MM-DD as their date format, so no I won't be critisising them as they have prefectly sensible date formats and, along with much of Scandinavia, are ahead of most the rest of the world when it comes to using logical date notation formats.

Attacking and riddiculing someone for not being "like you" (using your favorite date format, running your favorite operating system) is really quite a bit more arrogant than someone using their own culture

I'm not attacking a group for not being 'like me' I'm attacking them for doing what is clearly (as far as the rest of the world thinks) the wrong thing, and pointing out that MM/DD/YYYY is the wrong thing is something I am quite comfortable with.

Your simply ignoring the arguments of logic and common sense and attempting to introduce political correctness into the argument. You don't have to be a maths wizard or software developer to see why it's a bad format, but I really hope your not a programmer if you can't see what makes it a bad format.

From the google cache...

That is why he is going in an XML direction. The relational approach is rectilinear and requires that the information be framed in a highly normalized fashion. Generalized semantic searching is highly non-normalized because, well, humans are highly non-normalized.

I think that he should look at some work by a different Tim, the Semantic Web.

open4free

W3C

From a practical perspective, I have noticed the same phenomenon over the years, and have created the following axioms for my own sanity:

1. You can not depend on any outside entity to archive information that is important to you.

If there is come critical piece of information that you need to do your job, or as a reference to related work - by all means download and keep an archival copy for your own use. While the Internet Archive is an excellent resource - there is no way they will be able to keep track of everything on the net for all time. The drawback of this is that if you do not periodically look at the original web page you will be using the latest information (I will address this issue in a moment).

2. Look for means of extending the ability to locate information beyond the URL.

While the URL is a great boon to keeping unique locations on the web, they do not encapsulate enough information (meta information) to make searching and locating information easy. The problem is not just related to the internet - it also encompases other storage mediums (i.e. files outside of the exposed WWW partition). There are some recent tools that are at a test bed level now that can be used to solve this problem if brought into mainstream use, as we will see below.

I see several technologies need to be developed/perfected to help ameliorate these issues:

a) Software needs to be developed for end users to manage their own information resources - similar to how the Internet Archive keeps track of changes to web pages. The software should allow the user to archive pages to the local drive as desired, and provide a version control system for easily retrieving previous versions as needed; the system should also provide:

b) An easy means of keeping meta information and annotations regarding a particular web document needs to be made a standard part of all web browsers. A good starting point is the W3C Annotea standard for keeping meta data - as implemented in the Amaya editor/browser.

I think a good set of the pieces are already in place to accomplish what I suggest - the real issue now is integrating them into current end user tools.

The next, and perhaps biggest, question that needs to be resolved is how does DRM fit into this picture (if at all), and how much will DRM serve to further erode the cultural continuity archivists desire?

From a practical perspective, I have noticed the same phenomenon over the years, and have created the following axioms for my own sanity:

1. You can not depend on any outside entity to archive information that is important to you.

If there is come critical piece of information that you need to do your job, or as a reference to related work - by all means download and keep an archival copy for your own use. While the Internet Archive is an excellent resource - there is no way they will be able to keep track of everything on the net for all time. The drawback of this is that if you do not periodically look at the original web page you will be using the latest information (I will address this issue in a moment).

2. Look for means of extending the ability to locate information beyond the URL.

While the URL is a great boon to keeping unique locations on the web, they do not encapsulate enough information (meta information) to make searching and locating information easy. The problem is not just related to the internet - it also encompases other storage mediums (i.e. files outside of the exposed WWW partition). There are some recent tools that are at a test bed level now that can be used to solve this problem if brought into mainstream use, as we will see below.

I see several technologies need to be developed/perfected to help ameliorate these issues:

a) Software needs to be developed for end users to manage their own information resources - similar to how the Internet Archive keeps track of changes to web pages. The software should allow the user to archive pages to the local drive as desired, and provide a version control system for easily retrieving previous versions as needed; the system should also provide:

b) An easy means of keeping meta information and annotations regarding a particular web document needs to be made a standard part of all web browsers. A good starting point is the W3C Annotea standard for keeping meta data - as implemented in the Amaya editor/browser.

I think a good set of the pieces are already in place to accomplish what I suggest - the real issue now is integrating them into current end user tools.

The next, and perhaps biggest, question that needs to be resolved is how does DRM fit into this picture (if at all), and how much will DRM serve to further erode the cultural continuity archivists desire?

Helevius

Seems like for a tech site that is rather obsessed with open standards this place would come at least a little close to validating via the W3C The new XHTML & CSS they have whipped up looks good and renders A LOT faster in both IE and Opera on my PC.

The only standards you need to follow are the W3C Web Standards They even have a validator for your convience if you need to make sure that your code is valid. I did that at my summer internship and over the course of a summer was able to make our 1000+ page website 99% w3c complient. It might take you a few days to get in the rythym of doing things, but once we had our site up to html 4.01 standards, we never had a problem with any browser compatability issues, and we tested all the way back to Netscape 4.7.

why would i wanna "buy" a book, that has info that is already available on http://www.w3c.org?
You can also join the W3c mailing lists to get in-depth info on any of the technology stacks.

Perhaps someone should inform them if this new invention called HTML. It's like a standard, the same standard that let us read /. without Proprietary addons from e.g. Adobe (which holds the PDF "standard" hostage, and is knows to make US "police" forces kidnap foreign visitors and throw them in jail) is IMHO not anything to condone.

SGML/XML was designed to be the mother-of-all information distribution and typesetting formats, so it gives you considerable power and flexibility--particularly with your vector graphics query: SVG . Output to LaTeX, Docbook, PDF, HTML, PS, etc.

What do you mean, just use the standards, no reason to spend the extra time and money to make sure the site works with Internet Explorer

In other news, W3C standards support has been greatly improving for the past five years, ever since the horrid crapfest that was Netscape 4.5.

And the browser is free to render that border any way it chooses to according to the 4.x specification. For example, if you put <table border="1">, the browser may make just a 1-pixel line. But then it may also have a built-in rule that the default for tables is a 3-d look, in which case, it will attempt to render your 1-pixel border with a 3-d look, which ends up looking strange if you have a white background (the left and top disappear).

The spec can be found here along with other cool stuff.

http://www.w3c.org/

There are standards for HTML, granted there are no trademarks on the name, however they would be much better off if there were. Before Netscape 6.0 it was a pain for web developers to try to get something to look the same in Netscape and IE because Netscape did not comply to the standard and rendered things in a very funny manner (tables and the like would be rendered too large, a 130 pixel table might be 200 pixels)

Right now the only "big" browser that complies to the HTML standards is Mozilla, and then consequentially, Netscape which is based off of Mozilla.

I'm sure if I looked hard enough I could find standards boards for most of the other things too. Having teeth to a standard isn't necessarily a bad thing. Phillips isn't allowing the RIAA to use the "Compact Disc" logo on their copy-protected CDs because it doesn't comply to the standard for a Compact Disc. This is legitamate to Apple not being able to call OSX "Unix" in their marketing, because it is not Unix.

These standards boards exist to protect the consumer so they know what the product they are buying is what it says it is.

Call me wacky, but maybe that's because CSS3 is still under development.

Or, you could just check out the W3C and read up on it without the need of someone making edits to the explanations of the actual specs.

...that open source authors prefer solutions they like over "standard" solutions.

To add to the reply on this, I think that this particular "problem" is in fact quite and advantage to OS development. Fabricated standards are often not as good as they can be, and are only revised after a long, long time. As far as I know, W3C isn't that quick on updating their standards, for example. An OS developer that implements a solution "he likes" does this for a reason, and can show that there's a problem with an old standard, and a solution. Evolution of standards is pushed that, far quicker than the committees could, simply because those committess don't know what problems there are with a standard when developing an application x, simply because they don't write it - they don't write a whole lot, I believe.

http://www.w3c.org

nuff said.

Why this talk of developing for a specific browser? There are standards for a reason.

So what is Gecko doing that's innovative? Or, at least, more innovative than Opera? Seems to me they're both neck-for-neck for implementing the standards correctly and completely.

The challenge is just to render web pages as the W3C standards mandate. And trying to render as good as possible b0rken pages (e.g. pages designed for Internet Exploder only). Especially the latter, IMO, is an interesting challenge. :-)

Here on this intarweb thing we have this revolutionary technology called hypertext. The idea is to use links that you can click on to instantly view pages you didn't know existed!

Check it out!

I have been working on Kawa since 1996. Originally it just compiled Scheme to bytecodes, but it is now a multi-language framework supporting XQuery, Emacs Lisp, some Common Lisp and other languages. It is easy to compile any of those into modules, applications or servlets. These days I'm mostly working on XQuery, a very interesting and useful new language from the W3C.

• 2002-10-11 14:09:06 Wired redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)
• 2002-12-06 16:39:05 W3C redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)

HTML Tidy has a 'clean up Word HTML' mode which works wonders. Dave Raggett developed it for W3C.

this isn't about patents, this is about the W3C.org which is an internet standards group. there was this possibilty that they would charge folks to impliment what was considered the standard...oh hell read the story.

agreed.

the "savvy user" is not hunting around the internet for scrolling marques or 150kb animated gifs - they want content and usability. a good web site should be able to stand alone, without needing endless "pretty" crap to keep the surfer interested.

google is one of the most visited sites on the internet, and what's on its home page? very little. it loads fast, is highly usable, and serves it's purpose excellently. there are very few sites on the internet that do this well.

i think most web designers realise this. most pages for the "savvy user" (slashdot being an example) are functional, and really cut through the crap. check out a web site for a less particular demographic (how about disney - oooh! pictures! sounds!), and the site design is certainly different.

and web design brings about another sore point - browser compatability. seeing as most of the world uses ie now, nobody seems to care about what the pages look like in different browsers. i'd never use netscape (personally, i use opera, but i wish they'd get their game together just so there'd be more variation in browsers. those responsible for making the browsers would have to stick to the standards more closely, which would lead to greater browser compatability for all sites (hopefully!).


chris.

Frob.

HTML and CSS are both standards and can be validated at the W3C. As for Javascript I have the same question. It Javascript at all standardized? Does a Javascript validator exist anywhere?

I want them to support standards like HTML, XHTML, CSS and so on.

Then the sites will work with any current or future client technology that also supports those standards.

Nowadays, there is no reason why your site should not be valid

They have to pick the biggest browsers and target their software for them.

You don't write web pages for browsers, you write web pages to standards.

It's not too hard, for inspiration, Wired News recently switched to full xhtml compliance with css. Their stuff works fine in any compliant browser.

People who complain about "I try to write to standards but all the browsers are broken", or "you can only do $feature on a certain browser" are lazy. That was a valid excuse 5 years ago, but not today. It is easier to write the stuff compliant to begin with than play around with stupid browser detection and NS4.x workarounds.

Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media.

Well, there's always Amaya, W3C's HTML editor/browser. I think they have a Win32 build.

Amaya's been around for a long time, but not many people know about it, which is a real shame. It's a nice HTML editor, and produces very clean, HTML 4.0 compliant code. It supports CSS, and many other related web technologies. Check it out.

Shouldn't the WWW Consortium (W3C), instead of the big corporations, be proposing Web standards?. I haven't seen any mention to them in the PDF document from Intel.

W3C sets HTML standards. What you're suggesting is to let Microsoft determine HTML standards? HTML standards are there so that many people using many platforms from PCs to cell phones can access web pages. Microsoft's goal, on the other hand, is to have every PC, PDA, cellphone, TV, and video game user a Microsoft customer. Does that not seem like a conflict of interest?

If that's not what you are suggesting then it sounds like you are just to lazy to create proper HTML pages, prefering instead to settle with tool that requires the least amount of knowledge. However, there are better WYSIWYG HTML editors out there. Try Dreamweaver.

Speaking as a experienced webdeveloper they could cut the bandwidth usage here at least in half by using stylesheets,removing whitespace in the source,and adhering to w3c standards in the html code , it would be quite trivial to convert and the time spent would == cash saved for the effort (and it would still work in lynx:)

we are always bashing people about standards , so why dont we take a leaf out of our own book and make this site/code/browsers use the technology available to us ?, it is 2002 after all not 1992.

heh or is it another case of "do as i say not as i do" ?

Why the in the world are you asking Slashdot? You realize that this is just going to get you confused. 500 posts say "Java SUX, use Linux!", 200 posts will send you to www.willywonkaland.com as the BEST developer resource, and at least 10 will tell you to "Use the force young padiwon!" At the end of the day, the real answers will be so buried, that you will have NO chance of ever finding them.

That being said, if you want to learn to be a good developer, first you are going to have to be as self-reliant as possible. If you need documentation for something, go to the source. For example:

Java: java.sun.com
Here you'll find a tutorial and JavaDocs. Millions of developers (myself included) learn everything they need to know about Java, right here.

PHP: php.org
Like Sun's Java site, this is a no brainer. Everything you need to know about PHP is right here.

HTML, XML, CSS: W3C
Hold this one close. A good portion of Internet standards are passing through this commitee. The best part is that the specs are right there for everyone to see.

.Net, C#, VB, etc.: msdn.microsoft.com
Ugh. Shell out money, get a bone. There is no other way to develop for M$.

If the documentation and/or support you need doesn't exist at the source, you may want to re-evaluate your usage of a language/product. Why should you waste your time on a meaningless hunt for info when you should be getting work done? The company you buy from should be providing you with what you need to use their product, otherwise you're just giving them money to do their job for them.

The PNG specs include instructions for lossy compression.

Hate to say it, but W3C disagree with you.

Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?

Stateless, connectionless servers are a good idea (HTTP, NFS, SMTP); for this reason, most people are going with web services calls (XML-RPC or SOAP) and using HTTP pipelining to erase the TCP connection negotiation overhead. This solves 95% of the problems that BEEP is designed for.

If you're still convinced that you really, really, really need a stateful connection, XATP is much simpler and gets the job done just as well as BEEP.

Well I am comparing my "IE in windows" to "mozilla in linux". IE supports the HTTP standard better, it doesn't die as often [assuming you have a clean install of windows... something not so easy] and generally just is easier to use.

What HTTP-standard is that? The "Real" HTTP-standard set up by W3C or Microsofts HTTP-standard?

Obviously mileage vary when it comes to Mozilla, because I haven't had it crash on me once in Windows. Never. It happened once in IRIX, something I reported to bugzilla and that bug was gone 1 month later.

I find even Mozilla 1.0 will die on a page or two [mostly at yahoo] and just hang without anything. In windows with IE I never really had any problems.

Can you give some examples of pages where mozilla dies? Does it happen everytime you visit those pages? Have you reported this to the mozilla-team via bugzilla?

And trust me when I say IE supports HTTP cleaner. I'm in the midsts of writing a web server and in due course I have tested it against wget, opera, mozilla, voyager, konquerer and IE. IE handles pretty much all of the HTTP specs [that my limited server uses just fine]. IE will also properly handle invalid replies [e.g. with no Content-length].

I believe you. In mozilla you have to write proper http/html for it to work, not Microsofts bastardization of it. Yes, the redmond based company has embraced and extended this protocol too. I would very much like to know how Mozilla handles the invalid replies that you spoke of.
Yes, IE is much more forgiving than Mozilla. This is not a good thing. That encourages webmasters to write bad code. If you should complain about something it should be about the persons who write bad html that don't comply to the w3c standard.

Mozilla works somewhat decently but I find it won't handle all cases of GZIP messages [I actually submitted a bug w.r.t this].

I agree. Mozilla is a good product, it isn't perfect. It isn't "done". It's a good product in the making.
It's good that you filed a bug-report. That is actually very constructive, and a lot of people could find this useful. Thank you.

I use Mozilla because it's a standard compliant cross platform browser with lots of features that IE misses still. I'm sure they'll catch up, but until they do Mozilla is my browser of choice.

Best regards

.haeger

Is not actually a bad idea at all. w3c in it's all brightness does not provide a comprehensive statement on "what to do" and "why" for those new to these things. An organisation responsible for standardizing such a large matter always hides everything behind a jungle of technical details.

An organisation that sums this up, cannot harm anyone - atleast as it does not start pushing only the will of a selected vendor.

Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it)

Very few - at least I have few problems with Koqueror and very few with Mozilla. I ahve had problems with IE 5 (which i sue at work) not rendering some sites properly (e.g www.w3c.org. The other browsers have advatages that more than outweigh the better testing sites get on IE - e.g. cookie management, seurity, supressing pop-ups etc.

StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.

Only really an issue for those doing Large spreadsheets. For wordprocessing Open Office is just as good for short documets. For long documets I find Lyx a lot better. Even for spreadsheets it is close, if not quite there.

GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop

How many people need photoshop? GIMP is more than adeqaute for most people (may be not professionals).

I use only Linux at home. I have done everying I would do in an office environemnt (excpet alrge spreadsheets. Neither I nor my wife (very much a naive user) ahve had any problems.

Having used Openoffice, Lyx, Mozilla, Konqueror fairly heavilly and a number of other programs lightly we have generally found no disadvantages over Windows. Lyx is wonderful and has definitely won me praise for good presentation on an Open University Course I am doing at the moment. There is a lot of very productive software that Linux encourages one to try even if (as in the case of Lyx) it is also avaiable for Windows.

Friends who use Windows and MacOS have had little diffculty in using Linux when visiting us

the default window manager on Linux and Solaris is mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is absolutely horrible

So your example shows that Linux and Solaris do not work when set up with an unfirendly user manger as default! How informative!

The biggest advantage is that I do not ahve to worry about all those email visuses friends who use windows keep sending me.

You CANNOT tell me it does not cost more to develop multiple versions of scripts to do interactive content.

multiple versions? what for? this is the reason why the World Wide Web Consortium exists at all! develop your scripts to written standards, and you'll only have to do one version that will work for every platform.

haven't you noticed that web sites are becoming more and more standards compliant? if you keep scripting for an IE only audience, then soon your web sites will be considered 'broken' and your employer (or customers) will be asking you why their website looks/acts screwy.

trust me, save yourself time and effort now and base your code on existing, internationally recognized standards. the money is the same, and you'll be doing both customers and future developers a favor.

no, we do NOT need 1 browser. We need a clear standard for writing web-pages. Strangely enough, there is just such a standard..

//rdj

A major step forward in online privacy, P3P, was recently made a recommendation by the W3C.

• W3C
• P3P at W3C