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I'm one of many developers who are creating an enterprise level application for our company. We are using IE5.01, and every team member consults the W3C pages to reference their specifications on: XML, HTML, CSS, XLINK, SVG, etc...

If W3C was really that in-effective we wouldn't be using them. From talking to friends (at other jobs) we're not the only ones.
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The difference between the present and the days of the 3.0 browsers is that today the "standards" are innovative. CSS-2, DHTML, DOM and XML/XSL are technologies that empower developers to do far more than can be done today. No browser even supports a signifigant portion of CSS-2. CSS-2 and XML allow us to finally escape the shackles of presentation and content being intertwined. If you don't develope internet sites, this might seem trivial, but when you are down in the trenches trying to provide a site that looks good on a new and "innovative" browser, but at the same time works on a cell phone, you learn to appreciate the innovation that the standards have. Check out the amazing things that can be done with standards over at the W3C and then try and find a better innovation that is needed in some browser.
--neutrino

However, if the US government gets into the act, they may try to fashion legislation forcing web pages to include some meta tag indicating their content

As has been pointed out, US Government involvement is futile given the international nature of the Internet. However, if someone were to make a serious recommendation to the W3C, we could see some tag like "<rating>" appearing in a new HTML format.

Then it would be trivial to program web browsers which support the new [X]HTML standard to alter their behaviour depending on the rating of the page, or lack of any rating.

I think that self-regulation is the best way to control this, combined with individual countries passing legislation against faking the information - I'm sure that it's illegal in meatspace to put a teen magazine-style cover on your porn mag, for example.

Alex

• make web application code open and available for audit in order to prevent invalid/illegal logging.
• cryptographically sign the logs at periodic intervals and/or when the applications are stopped and started. This will help prevent tampering. Even encrypting the logs so that only particular individuals can access them might be suitable.
• use W3C standard log file formats.
• hire a reputable, independent auditor to validate your metrics at regular intervals.

Rob.

If you really want to put together a standard schema for describing code, you need to get in touch with the World Wide Web Consortium. They are currently working on standard schemas for generic databases, generic word processor formats, and just about everything else you could imagine.

XML definitely fits the bill for this idea. If you design your schema correctly, it could easily be converted into a web page and it could easily be parsed by search engines and web crawlers. I'm done now.

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With this little disclaimer out of the way I can tell you that no website, however complex, will come anywhere near this long to bring up to compliancy with the basic accessibility standards as proposed by the W3C (Check it out: Web Accessibility Initiative) I don't care how huge, loafy, and beaureacratic you get, getting the basics of this shit down is easy! The company that I work for builds software that does just this and it takes us only 15 days to get huge sites fixed up, and we have ten people doing this. IBM, with it's hoards of programers, trained monkeys writing Shakespeare and all manner of web developers could not, possibly need a year and two million bucks to do this.

How long did it take them to build the site in the first place? Four years, liberally. So just to review the worlds largest computer services firm, with thousands of employees claims that it will take them 1/4 as long as the entire project to add some alt tags to images. Why don't they just admit they were stupid enough not think about this in the first place?

Calling that "cool shit" is just plain clueless. The current recommendation for HTML is the XHTML one. 'Classic' HTML is dying.

It's the joy of XML, that it can be easily and unambiguously parsed. It is not an option. It's out there now. If you believe me look at the W3C home page source.

CoughDropAddict wrote:

Though it looks different than any other app on your desktop, a screenshot from the Windows version and the X version will look basically identical, with the obvious exception of the window decorations. That way people can easily write cross-platform web apps, with the assurance that they will look identical on any platform.

Surely that should read "app's using Web technology", not "web apps".

Any developer of user agent software who tries to make the Web look the same to everyone has forgotten what the Web's about, and should go visit the W3C Web Accessibility initiative for a reminder.

They have a message passing system called SOAP ...

It's actually an open standard put out by W3C. Check it out here

http://www.w3c.org

I'm too lazy to go out and find the urls at the moment, but there are two tools that can fix your MS-Word HTML problems. The W3C now offers "HTML tidy", which includes a handy option to undo word 2000's damage. There is also the "demoroniser", written by a gentleman whose name escapes me and updated by Tom Christiansen et al ... check Perl.com for "demoroniser" (yes, the Brit / Aussie spelling.

I'm usually very sceptical of new buzzword technologies. When I first heard about XML and did a little reasearch I was floored by the elegant simplicity of the model. XML at its most basic is a set of parser(HTML or whatever) tags that allow the representation of structured data. Much like simple HTML tables are constructed of tags like "" tags, XML extend this to define more complex structures.

For instance, a simple dataset containg haircolor,eyecolor and name for a group of people could be represented with tags like .... This idea is not only a boon for people trying to translate complex information across the web but it also allows for greated complexity in documents viewed on the web.

Here's the part where things went Awry. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium is the offical standards organization for the web. Their biggest problem is that as a standards body they are trying to maintain stabilty and conformity of standards. This makes them rather slow at approving and implementing new standards. In the past this resulted in companies like Netscape and Microsoft integrating new technologies into their browsers long before they become new standards. Javascript and ActiveX are just two examples. Can't really blam them, they have to compete in the marketplace and he who gives the consumer what they want soonest usually wins and gets to set the defacto standards. In a nutshell, the W3C has become little more than a R&D organization.

So, then we get to XML. Initially proposed over six years ago it was initially rejected by the W3C. Many outside the W3C like the proposal though so many groups started developing and testig different variations of XML. XML and similar technologies like XSL-Extensible Style Language, SVG Scalable Vector Graphics and and a plethora of others began to appear. See the Oasis to get an idea for how far this has gone.

Today there are so many standards for XML variants that there are actually groups with competing standards for XML formats as specific as data exchange between banks. Kind of like a modern day tower of Babel.

So, to answer your question, yes XML holds a lot of promise for document and data interchangability among different software products, but between here and that goal is one huge civil war among competing groups and technologies. Giants of the software industry like IMB and Microsoft have already staked their grounds. Recent Patent Rules changes and passage of UCITA in several states have complecated matters by allowing companies to patent abstract things like database structure and parsing rules. Hopefully like the war between VHS and Beta a clear winner emerges quickly more importantly the winner must be an open standard.

I agree with most of what you say, that most new technologies make pages more and more limited as far as who can view them, but this is not the case with CSS. A properly coded page that relies on CSS is actually better in Lynx, for instance, than an equivalence HTML page. Why? Well because you can avoid unnecessary usage of tags like in your document that you would use in straight HTML. Instead, you can create a new subclass of other tags which will give you the desired appearance but which will be treated appropriately by browsers that cannot produce the desired style. This is only with CSS 1. When CSS 2 support comes along, look out. It allows you to get rid of the biggest joke in HTML layout techniques, tables. Instead of dealing with putting every piece of content into a table cell, you define the layout in an intelligent way with a style sheet, just like professional publishing programs do. Similarly, when a browser comes along that cannot present it in the desired manner, the content is still readable, even if the browser doesn't understand CSS. Check it out, it is the way we'll be publishing on the web here real soon.

Yes.

NS6 passes with flying colors at the W3C CSS Level 1 test battery. A few misrenders but a lot better than IE.
The Night Angel

You guessed right. See the w3c for all your HTML specification needs. Personally, it's the only place I go for answers on HTML questions. If it's not in the spec, it's not worth my time.

The current version is HTML 4.01
Or you can glance at the previous version, HTML 4.0

First thoughts: Excellent stuff! I'm glad to have "the GPL of document processing" nicely laid out.
I also approve muchly of "Opaque formats include PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output purposes only." I'm not convinced about some of the layout specs ("first page", "title page", "adjacent pages" - can't we have a one-paragraph "this is GDL'd" with pointer to appendix Z?) It also needs to define "compilation copyright" - what is it? Is it Yet Another American thing? (I thought that around these parts, anything you "write" was automatically copyrighted... confusing.) If the GPL is but one open-source license for software, is there an "open-source" definition for documents? (How much is www.transparent-source.org going for? ;) Roll on w3c and the DOM and any other transparent document models!

There are some excelent resources available for those who wish to incorporate accessibility into their web design.

The Trace Research And Development Center has a set of guidelines for designers of all types, including web-designers and software developers.

The WWW Consortium (www.w3c.org) has a set of guidelines as well.

Sorry, I must have misheard you. Did you just call it limited? I honestly can't believe that- go check out the W3C's Style Sheet Reference and come back and tell me that again. Style sheets offer so much more customizability and layout freedom than standard HTML, but they rejuvenate an admittedly limited standard... and Mozilla is the way to go for the correct rendering of them!

</plug>

Key issues to do this is separating presentation from content (thanks to the use of style sheets), providing alternate content when appropriate (using ALT tags as well as the much-welcomed OBJECT tag), and in general, making sure to validate the HTML code you write (just as you would use "use Strict" in perl, or compile your programs for errors in C or other languages).

Unfortunately, I'd estimate 90% of commercial websites (and a larger percentage of personal pages) do not follow the above. The crap of HTML tag soup that FrontPage and other HTML authoring software puts out is poor quality, and while it's ok to set up the basic HTML, most good authors know they have to clean up the tag soup before putting it out. Even then, too many people try to force HTML into acting like a desktop publishing language.

What will help is the blind accessibly lawsuit against AOL. Before that was announced, I know I heard rumblings of a major suit of this nature by sight-impared people because they could not use a service provided by the gov't. Sure, it's still a long way before Joe Q's "WAY PAST K00L HOMEPAGE" is going to need to be site-impared accessible, but there's plenty of reason to make more commercial sites more accessible.

The best way for everyone on the Linux side to help is that the next time a site like Fox.com comes up where Linux users are shunned, email said site maintainers and point out it's not just Linux that is shunned, but anyone not using a "status quo" box. Sure, that might only be 5% of the potental viewing audience, but that's also 5% of potental customers. Point them to sites like www.websitesthatsuck.com which run down the bad tricks that should be avoided, and to www.w3c.org which have validators and other helpful information for writing clean HTML. And the key thing to remember is that it takes more work to make a web site less accessible than it does to make them fully accessible.

The article contains a bunch of funky character entities like
#8212, #8220, #8221, and #8217, which fail to render in NetPositive, BeOpera, and BeLynx (a rather eccentric collection of browsers, I admit). As I was preparing to flame him, I violated my principles, and did a little research first, and found this at w3c.org, which appears to list them as valid HTML. What gives?

jon_c wrote:

I would like to know exactly what IE has that is not part of the [W3C] standard.
Well, the one that jumps out first, since you use them, is IE's use of SmartQuotes. ActiveX is not only completely non-standard, it is a security hole. IE 5.0 does not have complete CSS or DOM implementations even though those standards have been complete for ages. Its XML implementation violates standard namespace conventions. Granted, Netscape 4.0 is no better when it comes to standards compliance, but Mozilla is.

so from my casual observations, netscape doesn't support as many standards as IE.
Your casual observations do not support your conclusion. Neither Netscape 4 nor IE 5 fully support standards, your "experts" are merely more used to IE's quirks than Netscape's.

And if Microsoft's is "bending" standards into the browser, that would seem like a good thing.
How? Microsoft implementing an IE-only feature only serves to fragment the web into IE and non-IE camps, and helps Microsoft to tie their customers to them more securely. If Microsoft (and Netscape) were to follow the standards better, consumers would have richer web content available to them, with fewer complications. Netscape has repented and is actively working on standards compliance, what is Microsoft doing to better support the standards?

The W3C page

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There's the tag. Look here for the w3c description of the tag.

Basically it preserves whitespace and tab indenting. /. doesn't seem to allow it in comments - it doesn't work in preview and it's not listed below the comment submit box with the allowed tags.

Definitely use XML over HTML. With XML, you can make up your own tag-set that accurately represents the structure of your documents. It would then be trivial for you to write an XSLT (see http://www.w3c.org/TR/xslt) stylesheet to transform your document into HTML (which has very little structure beyond lists and nested 'div' containers) for delivery, complete with auto-generated TOCs, indices, etc.

Then, if you decide to change your HTML style, you can just re-generate it by changing your stylesheet - without touching your content. It's sort of like generating HTML forms out of content in a database.

In terms of internationalization support, XML documents can contain just about any Unicode character. So basically you can write an XML document in practically any language.

Your XML source can capture things like:

12345-67

Whereas in HTML it would be more like:

12345-67, or at best 12345-67

In HTML, the only way to reproduce the 'build-your-own-vocabulary' capability of XML would be to have your whole document be a sea of div> and elements, with their 'class' attribute set to different values. But processing (and reading) such documents would be a real bitch.

A plethora of XML tools are available and tons more are on the way...

I recommend using James Clark's "Xt" (http://www.jclark.com/xml/xt.html) XSLT engine in conjunction with Sun's "Project X" (http://java.sun.com/xml) XML parser.

James was editor of the XSLT spec, and an outstanding programmer. The Sun XML parser has been shown to be the most conformant, and is quite fast.

Both applications are written in Java.

More XML info:

• http://www.oasis-open.org
• http://www.xml.org
• http://www.xml.com

Why are all these companies seemingly looking for exuses to make their web sites incompatible with X browser--the old NS-only sites, the IE-only sites, etc.? Whatever happened to HTML being browser independant? The WWW is starting to stand for Won't Work Well.

No, we're talking about STANDARDS here. All of the technologies mentioned in the article - XML, CSS, XSL - are either current or proposed W3C recommendations. Check for yourself.

If a page written according to these guidlelines won't work well, then something's the matter with your browser. Which is exacltly why I loathe Netscape 4.x. I can write a page with perfect code (according the the w3c validator), and it will look like crap in Netscape due to it's poor CSS support. So I prefer IE. Web designers and businesses are understandably pissed that they can't use standard technology becasue Netscape breaks their pages. The solutions are design for the lowest common denominator or have browser-specific pages, which undermines the whole point of the web.

Mozilla, on the other hand, is even superior to IE in its support of web standards. So I'll admit I'm a fair-weather friend with no loyalites whatsoever - when mozilla/netscape5/whatever comes out, it will be my new favorite browser.

"We've done a lot of XML here. I want to bring it to the browser, and I can't have the boat anchor of Netscape saying I can't do it."

There is a lot of bitching and moaning about IE specific features. But that isn't always, or even often, the issue.

As a web developer, I have never used a feature that was proprietary to IE. All the HTML I write is compliant with the specs as posted on the W3C. The problem is that currently IE is the browser that most faithfully implements the open standards we depend on.

It is NOT Microsofts fault that no one else has written a good browser that supports the standards that are freely published.

In other words, Netscape/Mozilla's bugs do NOT mean a site is IE specific.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has specifications for HTML, CSS, DOM, and so on and so forth on their web site.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has specifications for HTML, CSS, DOM, and so on and so forth on their web site.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has specifications for HTML, CSS, DOM, and so on and so forth on their web site.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has specifications for HTML, CSS, DOM, and so on and so forth on their web site.

Why? Because HTML 4.0, CSS and even XML, provide all the tools necessary to provide accessibility while letting designers imaginations roam free. Take a look at the specs on the these standards ( w3c.org). There is some really cool stuff one can do with the new standards.
Is it a tax on companies? Not really. The Federal government has always had standards for companies that want to work with it (frome safety and health issues to civil rights). The companies have always had a choice, though. If they didn't like the government's rules, they could do business with someone else.
Even private companies have standards they hold one another to when conducting bussiness.
Finally, even if you don't care about people with disabilities, there is a very good reason for the Federal government to be pushing standards compliance: effeciency. If every company keeps using non-standard (and incidentally non-accessable) HTML, every document will have to be examined or at the very least, undergo further processing befor it can be integrated with standards compliant data. We the tax payers will save money and time by mandating that standard HTML, XML, CSS, and even DOM and RDF are used.
To me, it appears that the ultimate benefits of requiring accessibility will reach far beyond simply allowing more access to government docs. This effort will help all of us be more standards compliant, reducing the need for re-processing data and wasting time that could be better spent understanding its meaning.

1. The page dos not error-free run through:validator.w3.org Hu!? Even /. fails!?
2. It is not LYNX-clean (no ALT-Attribs etc.)
3. It is too slow (more than 30 seconds from Europe)
4. It's not user-friendly, not "clear" enough

1. Read the alertboxes
2. use a 14.400 Modem to simulate over-sea connections (this is no joke!)
3. use tidy to clean up Your pages
4. try with LYNX before publishing!