Return of the WaSP

No_Weak_Heart writes "After a brief hiatus, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has returned. Here's the story at Wired about this grassroots coalition which works to promote the adoption of web standards by authors, tool makers and in browsers. In a related vein, the Boston Globe has a comfy chat with Tim Berners-Lee, the guiding force behind many of those standards."

Comments

The Return of the Dance!

[thedanceman]

Who let the dogs out? I like WASP!

No errors!

[oever]

Great! this is actually one of the few sites that passes the w3 (x)html validator!

Check it too.

Re:No errors!

[oever]

By the way, if you want Mozilla or another javascript capable browser to check any webpage for HTML easily, look here.

You can add a bookmark to your toolbar that checks the current page in your browser if clicked.

Re:No errors!

[ncc74656]

Great! this is actually one of the few sites that passes the w3 (x)html validator!

I'd swear they returned six errors (all "references to non-SGML characters") when I tried it.

(BTW, the moderator who marked the parent offtopic is a fucking retard. In what way is a comment on the validity of the HTML used by a website that purports to stick to standards offtopic?)

too bad...

[matt4077]

It's just sad, that something like this is needed in the first place

Re:too bad...

[LinuxCumShot]

what is that little 'a' stand for? Or is it a backronym?

I am not impressed

[rknop]

I laud what they're doing and approve of the content of the text.

On the other hand, they belie what they say with their front page. Oh, yeah, it may abide by all the standards. But, they don't abide by the spirit of the standards on their front page. The spirit of the standards is to keep the web accessible to everybody regardless of their choice of browser, so long as those browsers are also standards compliant.

It seems to me that a basic precept of web design should be that people choose their default font sizes because that's the size in which they bloody well want to read most of the "main" text on the web!! Resizing of fonts should be relative to that. Most of the text should be in the default size, and larger and smaller sizes should be reserved for headlines, "fine print", and other things.

These "web standards" people, however, seem to be using a font size a step down from standard for the main text on their page. Why? What possible excuse is there for doing that, while smiling and saying that they want to support browsers and web coding that is maximally accessible? It would be so bloody easy for them just to make their main text the standard font size that everybody chooses, instead of shrinking it down and requiring us to expand our fonts before reading the page!

That one fact makes it difficult for me to take this project completely seriously.

-Rob

Re:I am not impressed

[skunkeh]

Your point is fine in theory, but you have to remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their default font size (let alone how to do it). Secondly, the default font size on most browsers looks plain ugly. I would imagine that any users who want larger fonts have set their font size so that sites which use "font-size: small" are readable for them, as that will be a very common size for text on the web.

I imagine the Web Standards site design team had to make a tricky compromise, between the theoretically correct step of sticking to the default browser font size and the more design friendly choice of using "font-size: small". At the end of the day the point of the project is to convince designers that they should be using web standards, and as such it is important that the site looks good. Had they used the default font size I imagine many designers would have been put off the site by the ugly size of the text.

Re:I am not impressed

[rknop]

Your point is fine in theory, but you have to remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their default font size (let alone how to do it). Secondly, the default font size on most browsers looks plain ugly.

Uh-huh. I'm not the slightest convinced. These are people who say "follow standards and everybody will be happy". Making tradeoffs to cater to the default font size on IE undercuts their message.

-Rob

Re:I am not impressed

[liquidsin]

That's the sacrifice we as web designers have to make. IE holds the lion's share of the browser market, and we can't expect MS to change the way it behaves in regards to web standards just to please you communist Moz users - it's an integrated part of their OS!!! Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to re-insert my head into my own anus.

p.s. - I do web design, and when I need to see how everything looks, I fire up Galeon. If we could get more web developers on Moz we'd have a much better looking/behaving web.

Re:I am not impressed

[stankyho]

Here's a good explaination of the font issue and why IE is the worst for individual font sizing.

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

These "web standards" people, however, seem to be using a font size a step down from standard for the main text on their page. Why?

Probably because (according to their stylesheet) they intend the main text to be displayed using the ubiquitous Georgia font and Georgia has a high aspect value, making it look "too big" when the default font-size is used.

See the W3C CSS spec (scroll down a bit):

For example, the popular font Verdana has an aspect value of 0.58; when Verdana's font size 100 units, its x-height is 58 units. For comparison, Times New Roman has an aspect value of 0.46. Verdana will therefore tend to remain legible at smaller sizes than Times New Roman. Conversely, Verdana will often look 'too big' if substituted for Times New Roman at a chosen size.

Arien

Re:I am not impressed

[rknop]

That's the sacrifice we as web designers have to make. IE holds the lion's share of the browser market, and we can't expect MS to change the way it behaves in regards to web standards just to please you communist Moz users - it's an integrated part of their OS!!!

That's fine. I have my differences with this argument, but fine, whatever.

It is also, irrelevant. The original message is about an outfit promoting web standars. They are not promoting "code to IE". They are promoting standards. Given that, they should be coding to standards, not changing the way it behaves in regard to standards just to please you IE users.

We're not talking corporations or banks supporting customers here. We're talking a web standards advocacy group.

-Rob

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you seem so up to date on standards, perhaps you would care to bring your own website up to spec. The current standard is XHTML, not HTML 4.xx.

Furthermore, you are using paragragh elements to create a list which is structurally wrong and impedes accesibility.

I could rip through your work like no tommorrow, but I think you get the point.

Re:I am not impressed

[jscribner]

And by Lion's share, we're talking 80%+. However, that doesn't mean web developers can say "it looks good in IE and OK in mozilla," so it's 'mostly-good' and thus sufficient. Pages need to be designed for the greatest possible accessibility and that includes all of the major browsers, earlier versions, and screen reader software (getting back to the 508 comment).

All too often i've been seeing trade-ins on design/coding_ease for standards compliance (particularly with fixed font sizes in css), better standards (WaSP) with more universal browser adherence to such standards.

Last comment (then i'll shaddap), the different browser interpretations of a particular piece of HTML has always been a problem and, though better, it is still an issue. Though this probably exists already, a good website identifying the differences on a case by case would be useful to the developer community. In addition, such a site could recommend lowest-common-denominator solutions and WaSP standards at the same time.

Re:I am not impressed

[kerincosford]

Most standards-advocates (myself included) would love to use 'font-size: small', or percentages, or ems to size text relative to users font preferences.

The problem is, support for these relative values are still too broken in IE6 and Opera (Opera is better though) for us to use them. Much as we'd like to, we can't be truly accessibility and standards-driven when the most popular browser on the web gets is wrong.

Theres only really 2 options open just now - use px as the font unit, or don't size at all. Most developers/designers aren't quite Zen enough to not size the text at all, as the default text size in most browsers is fucking ugly.

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

The size of fonts is not defined in a standard. Go to w3.org and check it out. Nobody on the design team made tradeoff to cater to anything (except maybe their design sense). Get over yourself.

Re:I am not impressed

[Fweeky]

I imagine the Web Standards site design team had to make a tricky compromise, between the theoretically correct step of sticking to the default browser font size and the more design friendly choice of using "font-size: small".

Am I really the only one to find 1em verdana to be just the right size?

I hate sites that force 11/12px fonts on me - my usual response is to turn off style entirely for these sites if my font-size: 1em !important user.css rule is overridden.

Some design bod on MSDN said people need small text to read comfortably, and that 1/6th of an inch was about optimal; it was ironic that in forcing 12px fonts, the text was actually more like 1/14th of an inch tall, and very tiring to read.

Re:I am not impressed

[mysticgoat]

...Oh, yeah, it may abide by all the standards. But, they don't abide by the spirit of the standards on their front page. The spirit of the standards is to keep the web accessible to everybody regardless of their choice of browser, so long as those browsers are also standards compliant.

I've got that page open in the second tab of Moz as I write this. It is liquid from any browser width down to 410 px. Below that, it degrades acceptably (remains readable) until the columns are just a single word wide, well below the limit of reason. All text responds to user-agent changes in the font size, and the layout reflows without problems. I've looked at their stylesheet and it looks good (wsp/css).

There is no may about it; this page does "abide by all the standards."

Does it also abide by the spirit of the standards?

Yes. The standards are not intended to lock you into any design style. There is no "best" design style. The standards were developed to assure that material written to the standard will be presented to the reader no matter what his user-agent (so long as the user-agent also recognizes the standards).

The standards have nothing to do about good design. All they address is across the board functional design. IMO, I think that on this page WaSP has sacrificed some quality of design to showcase what can be done within the standards. That is a reasonable design trade-off, and it has nothing to do with standards compliance.

In this instance, you need to realize that WaSP's core audience, the group they are hoping to influence, is not the average guy using his browser in the usual way. Their audience consists of web designers and others who are pretty sophisticated in their use of the browser, and are likely to have their browser window set at around 700px width, in a corner of their 1600x1200 screen.

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

I avoid linking to the pages of these guys due to their blatant disrespect of the users' font size settings. If they don't like the defaults, they should change the setting of their own browser.

Re:I am not impressed

[Isofarro]

the different browser interpretations of a particular piece of HTML has always been a problem and, though better, it is still an issue.

That's not a problem, that's the benefit a truely accessible world wide web offers. Its only seen as a "problem" by designers that insist that it is they that control the presentation to users.

When markup is authored to leverage the content rather than its layout, then the difference between interpretations is to the benefit of the end-users.

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Rebuttals:

• "The vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their own font size (let alone how to do it)." I reckon the vast majority also don't they can override a specified font and specify their own fonts or own font sizes. So, are you suggesting that if a user's font preference are important, they should write their own style sheet? Of course not. What you mean is that page authors know better than users what looks good. That's elitism, in practice. What you fail to see in this argument is that the "most of them are stupid" claim works both ways.
• You arguing that absent font-size:small designers would have been put off by the ugly size of their defaults. If web designers aren't even bothering to change their default fonts or use their own styles, what about the vast majority of internet users who aren't web designers? Or could it be that web designers also belong to the class "vast majority of internet users"?

Something worth noting: In CSS1 author !important overrode user !important. In CSS2 that was reversed, and for good reason. Whether or not your page is valid html/css, disrespecting user preferences violates the spirit of open standards. In practice that's called being rude.

p.s. The WaSP site really does look pretty. But I guess that's because my fonts defaults are the same size as called for by textResizer.js(And anyways I only turned on js to see the wonderful effects of this. Normally I'm blind to such chicanery.)

Re:I am not impressed

[jscribner]

Not necessarily - while I agree that there are too many cases of webpage developers stressing design over content, there are other cases where the design augments the content. Take, for example, a simple table. In html, the table has long since ceased to be merely a mechanism to contain spreadsheet data and instead morphed into design control code. However, it extends beyond the "here's a page with a masthead, nav, footer, and we've built it all into a table" but rather "this content needs to appear alongside that other content with thin vertical lines of different, meaningful, colors." Netscape (/Mozilla) and IE handle tables very differently, this was more evident in early versions where Netscape would chew on big tables for several minutes while IE rendered them in several seconds (but it was integrated with the OS! I know, I know...), a more recent fluke is that NS can have trouble with 1 pixel high table cells. As a result, it can be difficult to effect more complicated design-content combos without using images (which have their own accessibility problems) because of the differences between browsers. IMHO, the key isn't to get hung up on the details of how one browser will behave versus another but simply to pick a solution that gets my content to the user in the most meaningful way. Good web design requires adjusting content to a layout that will adapt easily to browser limitations (especially when using the lowest-common-denominator approach), which is why it is important for browsers to move toward standards that require consistent display behavior.

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Coding to standards by definition means ignoring how its rendered.

Not that WaSP are standards based. Remember the display:none hack for their upgrade message? :)

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no may about it; this page does "abide by all the standards."

Sir, I take issue with you saying that WaSP obey standards. WaSP historically have always been syntactically compliant; passing through validator.w3.org without issue, but time and time again they have abused the usage of w3c xhtml/html as per the spec.

I present exhibit 1, their previous upgrade campaign, in which they suggested using the CSS display:none to hide their upgrade message. They used CSS - a style - to change the meaning of the page for people who couldn't load the CSS. As CSS is by definition optional many users get a different meaning. No syntax was broken - only standards.

I present exhibit 2, their default font size as mentioned in this very thread. Obeying standards - by definition - means coding to them - and not diverting from the standards to cope with implementation issues. Here WaSP use a smaller font-size than regular - when 'font-size:regular' is intended to be used for the body of the document. No syntax was broken - only standards.

Sir, the court now clearly sees that WaSP do not understand the w3c standards, and that they merely rile up followers and non-followers into two camps endlessly bickering with each other (in the same way as Jakob Nielsen, or Joel on Software). Those who follow standards follow the w3c, not WaSP, and they would do well to ignore WaSP's teachings.

In summary, WaSP dictate and lecture hardline opinions and they do not obey standards.

Thank you.

Re:I am not impressed

[CargoCultCoder]

> Your point is fine in theory, but you have to
> remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority
> of internet users don't even know that they can
> change their default font size (let alone how to
> do it).

I don't see how this leads to the conclusion that they want the site font to be smaller. Or larger for that matter.

> Had they used the default font size I imagine
> many designers would have been put off the site
> by the ugly size of the text.

This implies that many designers (cough) don't know how to change the default font size of their own damn browser. If that's the case - if professionals authoring for the Web don't know how to use the most basic tools of their trade - then I'm afraid the Web Standards folks have a real uphill fight on their hands.

Frankly, I think the whole font-size issue is a red herring. The only people who care are "designers" and perhaps their clients. One or the other looks at the page, thinks "Gee, that font is too big" and starts slapping in font tags left and right without considering adjusting their own browser so pages look they way they prefer. To satisfy themselves, they muck with a parameter affecting nearly every visitor to their site. Brilliant.

Factoid: I run privately a small but reasonably well-visited mostly-text site: 50K page views a week. I make a factual error, visitors _love_ to let me know. A link breaks or some stupid browser bug renders part of a page illegible, and maybe someone will contact me about it, but probably not.

Not once have I received a comment about the font size used on the site: the browser's default.

The entire issue is an overblown non-issue.

Re:I am not impressed

[mysticgoat]

Well, let's see. Where to start?

• Sir, I take issue with you saying that WaSP obey standards. WaSP historically have always been syntactically compliant; passing through validator.w3.org without issue, but time and time again they have abused the usage of w3c xhtml/html as per the spec.

You've expanded the subject of discussion from a relatively narrow focus on one web page to a much more global condemnation. I can't say I'm terribly interested in going along with this. But I suppose I can spare you my afternoon coffeebreak. So let's get on with then...

• <snippage> I present exhibit 2, their default font size as mentioned in this very thread. Obeying standards - by definition - means coding to them - and not diverting from the standards to cope with implementation issues. Here WaSP use a smaller font-size than regular - when 'font-size:regular' is intended to be used for the body of the document. No syntax was broken - only standards.

Ah, replying to you isn't going to take much time a all!

Let me point out to those who aren't familiar with CSS that "regular" is not one of the allowed values for font-size property. There is no such thing. A forgiving user-agent will ignore this declaration, but there may be some that will give an error message and refuse to display the page.

IMO, there is no point in conducting discussions about standards with persons who lack a fundamental understanding of the area the standards govern, or who are too sloppy in their work to cross-check critical details in their arguments. Come back again when you are better prepared to talk about the subject. I expect, though, that in your preparations you will discover that there is a big difference between a codified standard and any of the myriad of (often conflicting) rationales that came into play during its discussion.

Just for the record, the WaSP style sheet uses

body { font-size: small }

, which sets the font relative to the user-agent's default. This is generally considered to be good practice by those concerned with browser ergonomics.

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, replying to you isn't going to take much time a all!

It certainly won't when you respond to a quarter of what I wrote!

'Regular' isn't a css font-size after all. 'Medium' is. Because of this you feel justified in ignoring everything.

lack a fundamental understanding of the area the standards govern, or who are too sloppy in their work to cross-check critical details in their arguments

You've expanded the subject of discussion from a relatively narrow focus on one CSS item, to a much more global condemnation. I can't say I'm terribly interested in going along with this. This doesn't interest me. No, not interested. Interest. None. I suppose I can spare you my afternoon coffeebreak. So let's get on with then...

You wrote all that and you actually didn't respond to the points. My first exhibit is undisputable, and clearly shows WaSP's abuse of standards. Then you make up stories, "A forgiving user-agent will ignore this declaration, but there may be some that will give an error message and refuse to display the page"

Heaven wonders why you even bothered responding at all if you're just going to talk aroun this issue...

Re:I am not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

The body of the content is supposed to be set to medium, not small or large. That is a standard.

Re:I am not impressed

[Isofarro]

"here's a page with a masthead, nav, footer, and we've built it all into a table"

Its not the browsers fault at all that web developers are using the wrong constructs. Tables are for presenting tabular data, not layout. Stylesheets are to be used for laying out content.

Your argument falls flat purely because you insist on using tables for purposes it was not intended for.

NS can have trouble with 1 pixel high table cells

What's a one-pixel high table cell adding to the value and context of the content -- nothing.

Why would someone have a table cell one pixel high for displaying tabular data? If you need a pixel extra for your padding, use a stylesheet.

Using CSS to suggest a layout is a standard technique. The tools are there to create the layouts you need - use them.

Re:I am not impressed

[soulhakr]

> The entire issue is an overblown non-issue. Welcome to Slashdot! :-P

Re:I am not impressed

[jscribner]

You missed a line:
while I agree that there are too many cases of webpage developers stressing design over content, there are other cases where the design augments the content

thanks for the link:
Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media ... [tables often coded poorly] ... To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control layout rather than tables.

In addition, 70% of my NS users are on 4.x or below, which poorly handles CSS. IMHO, the Web is not for presenting data in the most textish format possible (though Nielsen won't agree with me ^_^), but to get a message to the users, all users, and not lose details because of variations in the browser.

Re:I am not impressed

[Isofarro]

You missed a line:
"while I agree that there are too many cases of webpage developers stressing design over content, there are other cases where the design augments the content"

Its because I am not convinced that design can add anything to good content other than eye candy. If the content sucks, dressing it up doesn't make it any better.

70% of my NS users are on 4.x or below, which poorly handles CSS.

Rather high usage for an Internet web-site. Unless its something like an OS/2-user focused web-site (guessing by your identifying URL).

Is Netscape 4 a good enough reason to prevent standardising and making content inaccessible? In your case, you'd need a rewrite of your websites when Netscape 4 finally disappears (happy 5th birthday NN4!) to achieve compliance.

Its in these sort of situations that a technique like Dancing with Crawlers come in handy. Since its a good idea to separate content from presentation, its feasible to deliver compliant HTML and CSS presentation to all user agents (including our friend Googlebot), but just for Netscape 4 adopt a tables based layout.

Templating with good scripting languages like Perl and PHP make this technique useful, and advantageous benefitting both from compliant and accessible websites and the Netscape 4 dillema.

Well yes .. but ...

[Mr_Silver]

The most popular browser in the world is pretty good at following the rules, the permutations of the Gecko engine (here are some: N M C) are all praiseworthy, and on top of that virtuous standards oatmeal is some pretty tasty rendering brown sugar; anti-aliased fonts are here to stay!

Well, yes, I don't think many people but the most hardcore of standards purists could claim that IE isn't pretty good at following the rules. Thats not the issue.

The issue is that it's not very good when the code doesn't follow the rules. The problem here is that IE "guesses" what you're trying to do.

This in itself isn't a bad thing and from an end user perspective is a damn good idea. If I go visit a site that someone has made a basic error then at least I can still view the content, their mistake doesn't prevent me from getting what i want.

The problem comes when people start getting used to writing sloppy HTML because it works on IE (yes, I made that mistake before I found the w3 validator and Opera) and when Microsoft products start producing sloppy HTML (Words and Powerpoint being two apparant examples, although I've not looked personally).

So yes, web-standards great idea. But there should be a standard on what to do with badly formed HTML too.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[Shimbo]

Well, yes, I don't think many people but the most hardcore of standards purists could claim that IE isn't pretty good at following the rules.

Call me a standards purist if you like but IE has improved form poor to merely passable in its standards support. They fixed several annoying bugs in IE5 but they still have a hell of a long way to go. It took them until version 6 to get difficult concepts like 'width' and 'height' correct.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[Zontar The Mindless]

> But there should be a standard on what to do with badly formed HTML too.

I could not agree less. This would simply reinforce, encourage, and -- even institutionalise -- bad markup.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[slamb]

there should be a standard on what to do with badly formed HTML too.

There is such a standard for XML:

Validating and non-validating processors alike must report violations of this specification's well-formedness constraints in the content of the document entity and any other parsed entities that they read.

I suspect it's there because of the reasons you mentioned.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, yes, I don't think many people but the most hardcore of standards purists could claim that IE isn't pretty good at following the rules. Thats not the issue.

Call me a standards purist, but last time I tried to make web pages work in IE6, I had a hell of a time. I ask it to draw a dotted border, it draws a dashed border. I scroll down and up again, lo, the border has become partially solid (a rendering bug).

So I say, okay, screw that, back to solid borders. Then I find it doesn't do transparent PNGs. One evil DirectX-using hack later, that's working too.

Next up is the fact that it doesn't seem to like XHTML, or I was doing something wrong. It worked just fine in Mozilla though, so I'd guess I'd got it at least mostly right, as Gecko is fairly strict. So I drop the XHTML aspect of it.

Finally I find the text is too big, IE doesn't understand the "small" text sizing keyword, so I have to specify it in point sizes, which is now too small on Linux.

No, though 6 is much better than 5, IE is still a long long way off being anything other than a half-arsed attempt to follow the rules.

Sorry, rant over :) Other than that, yep, agree 100% with your post.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then I find it doesn't do transparent PNGs"

BS. You read on slashdot that it doesn't do transparent PNGs. Not that you particularlly needed a transparent PNG. You also read that IE would choke if you fed it some brandnew XHTML contenttype.

Please drop the regular joe act. Everyone knows you are a loonie fringe moz advocate type. Say it loud and proud and quit shitting us.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Never had a problem with dashed vs. dotted. Sure you have the proper DOCTYPE in there?

It should look exactly like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

If it isn't right. IE will go into quirks mode.

But yes. IE still has some really annoying bugs. IMO it's still behind in standards when compared to any Mozilla based browser.

Re:Well yes .. but ...

[groomed]

You can't very well legislate away bad programming.

Tim Berners-Lee's favourite web sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Courtesy of SatireWire

What's their objective though?

[ranulf]

I struggle to see how their aims are any different from W3C, as there seems to be little on their page that says what their goal is apart from "The Web Standards Project (WaSP) fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web". Later, they cite as a list of standards those created by W3C. All I can figure is that maybe they oppose the RAND proposals, etc... but this doesn't seem to be stated.

Anyone with any ideas?

Re:What's their objective though?

[LordoftheFrings]

The W3C is here to design standards. They are not here to help web developers create web pages with no compatability issues. That is what WaSP is for. So, yes there is a difference.

Re:What's their objective though?

[skunkeh]

WaSP is an advocacy organisation. They do a pretty good job of it as well :)

Re:What's their objective though?

[JamesOfTheDesert]

The W3C is here to design standards.

The W3C designs recommendations. They are not a standards organization (such as ISO or ANSI).

Re:What's their objective though?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yeah - if you consider not following standards at good job. Damn hypocrites.

W3C for dummies

[jukal]

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.

Re:W3C for dummies

[meryl]

You got that right. W3C requires a PhD to understand the rules. OK, maybe it's not that technical, but it's tough to reference it quickly. WaSP does a better job of communicating the "how."

Oh yes, I remember WASP

[Salsaman]

They were the people who said that Mozilla should give up and die, right ?

Re:Oh yes, I remember WASP

[thraxil]

are you on crack?

i've been following the WaSP closely for years and i don't recall them ever having any problems with mozilla.

please post a link if you think i'm wrong.

Re:Oh yes, I remember WASP

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a link. I distinctly remember that WaSP (or was it ALA - same guys anyway) were the main ones who pushed Netscape 6 out in its' then current state of Mozilla 0.92. They were annoyed because there had been no release from Netscape and they were where they were years ago.

They forced out a premature crappy release. They fucking suck.

Re:Oh yes, I remember WASP

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

They were the people who said that Mozilla should give up and die, right?

Care to back that up with something? If not. I think you must have missinterperated something they said. 'Cause I've followed WaSP closly, and I find it hard to belive they'd say something like that.

Re:Oh yes, I remember WASP

[noweb4u]

I remember this too.

Re:Oh yes, I remember WASP

[Gooner]

No they didn't say that. Is it that hard to type Netscape and WaSP into Google?

Here's a couple 'grafs of what they did say:

"Some will say we are to blame for your woes, since we were the ones demanding full compliance with standards. Frankly, if we had known you could not deliver a stable, usable, standards-compliant browser in under two years, we would not have asked you to try. More frankly still, we suspect you would have taken a more "realistic" approach if you'd realized it would take you this long to deliver the goods. But wasn't it your job to know whether or not you could pull this off before you pledged to do it? Estimating software delivery dates is notoriously tricky, we admit - but two whole years?

We wish everyone shared your passion to do the right thing and deliver XML and the DOM inside the browser. But if it takes you another six months to pull this off, the world's first fully standards-compliant browser could be playing to an empty house. And the message such a failure would send is: "Don't support standards if you want to stay in business." If you send the world that message, you will have harmed the cause you meant to help."

So they actually said pull NS4 and put out the product Netscape had promised.

Re:Oh yes, I remember WASP

[Salsaman]

No, they were complaining about Mozilla taking more than two years to go from nothing to a release quality product.

Well, I guess it would have been possible IF the Mozilla team had written just a browser, just for Win32.

But that was never mozilla's plan - look what we have now, a fully featured, cross platform browser suite, we have bugzilla, tinderbox and bonsai as well.

The point that was made at the time was that the WaSP should have been supporting mozilla, not piling critisism on it. It was very, very short sighted off them, and I won't let them forget it.

Wait till Microsoft deviates from the standard...

[purpledinoz]

WASP is gonna have a helluva time when Microsoft decides, yet again, that standards are for wusses. MS has balls.

Ridiculing

[LordoftheFrings]

From article:

...if that fails, we plan to guilt-trip them. And if that fails, we will ridicule them mercilessly, as we once ridiculed Netscape and Microsoft.

Wow, they seem to really have a great strategy worked out.

Standards will never be imposed in this industry

[gartogg]

Basically, since microsoft controls a HUGE majority of the market, whatever they do becomes a de-facto standard. For once, I would like to thnak them for their good work. They have voluntarily followed standards, and written a reasonably good browser. (not that the code isn't, memory hogging trash)

bad news for Linux?

[tps12]

I am as much in favor of standards as the next Free Software fan, and I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but I'm going to anyway. I use Linux for all my mission-critical servers, and even my home boxen. Fuck, I even run Linux on my car's mp3 jukebox.

But I have to say, the WaSP project could mean trouble for Linux zealots like me. Mozilla has only just (as in hours ago) become release-caliber, and besides that, what does Linux have in the way of standards-compliant browsers? Konqueror crashes every 12 seconds and Opera is closed-source, commercial, and evil.

At the moment, IE is the only production-caliber standards-compliant browser on the market. And it don't run on Linux. Until we get Mozilla and Konqueror up to speed, we should try to gloss over this fact rather than bring the embarrassing standards-compliance issue to the fore.

Re:bad news for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You lie. I can't get Mozilla to crash, and it's really bumming me out. What's the web coming to when you can't get a browser to crash? I can't even get Dillo to crash for crying out loud. I'm going to have to take another look at Cheetah. This not crashing business is getting on my nerves.

Standard HTML

[Torulf]

Maybe Slashdot could get the hint!

Re:Standard HTML

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

The nice thing about standards is that there is such a rich tapestry from which to choose.

'Standards' is a one-word oxymoron. If there's more than one covering the same domain, then each is:

• sub-standard or
• non-compliant with one of the others

It's not that hard, really.

While you're at it ....

[reaper20]

Government workers and contractors, you have to (or already have) comply with Section 508 Accessability Guidelines (as stated in the article), which means that most of these pages need to be rewritten anyway, now's a good chance to knock out XHTML1.0 compliance while you're at it, and shoot for the Web Content Accessability Guidelines (WCAG) too ... so all those neat Powerpoint presentations that are autogenerated into HTML need to go!

Getting to level A is not hard at all, anyone hit AAA yet?, I'm finding XHTML1.1 and WCAG-AAA a little bit to unwieldy for everyday web use ...

Re:While you're at it ....

[Anonymous Coward]

yikes- i haven't even heard of xhtml1.1 yet.

but regarding triple-a, i've found xhtml1.0-strict, css2, and wcag-aaa conformance to be a breeze. the only problem comes when the designed wants something changed, but i just say "sorry, can't be done in a standards-compliant and accessible fashion". it helps that i get paid by the gov't, i guess.

Re:While you're at it ....

[dsoltesz]

Actually, writing valid HTML 4+ is prettty much a requirement of Section 508 along with following standard accessibility practices.

Re:While you're at it ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting to level A is not hard at all, anyone hit AAA yet?

Yeah, but to get to the real ending you have to get 8 straight Rank S victories and then finish off the fourth hidden boss with a Super-Hyper Upward Secret Special Combo.

Re:While you're at it ....

[gregbaker]

Sure, plenty of people have.

I'm working on it for my site. I've got all of the ugliness done (I had no idea how many acronyms I used), there's just a few small AAA level things I have to fix up now.

They can't get an acronym correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Standards Project != WaSP

Where's that "a" come from?

If they can't get this right, how the hell are they going to standardize the web?

Slashdot

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, does slashdot.org comply with the standards stated in the article? If not, why?

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, not :)

Try it yourself

Actually, it's amazing how few websites anywhere validate as correct HTML. We're not talking style here, but basic syntax. Since browsers don't enforce strict coding, web designers can output faulty code and get away with it.

Re:Slashdot

[Lysander Luddite]

well...

Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML (and XML derivatives) it causes problems in browsers designed for the sight impaired (and therefore violates Section 508).

Slashdot also uses deprecated tags such as (font) and (b) rather than use CSS to change text presentation. I also don't see any structural flow such as using (H)eader tags to enable things like search bots to more accurately determine page content and weighted analysis.

So no, I would suspect Slashdot wouldn't stand up to WaSP scrutiny.

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Tables have nothing to do with sight impaired people. Are you referring to the fact that 'lynx' is a crappy browser that doesn't support anything out of the W3C in the past 7 or 8 years?

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Tables are fine. Screen readers used by blind people dealt with that issue a long time ago.

Re:Slashdot

[krs-one]

I'm sorry but you had several mistakes in your post.

First, tables, provided they are coded correctly, are HTML, and XHTML compliant. They would have to be, as tabular data (what tables were made for) still has to be displayed on some sites.

WASP is saying that to make a layout like their site does not require tables, and it doesn't. You can use some fancy positioned div's, and spans and you'll have a very nice site.

Also, the (b) tag is not depricated. However, (strong) should be used in place of it in most places.

No, the HTML behind /. would fail WASP tests and the regular W3C validator tests.

-Vic

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML

I don't know about slashdot, but when I make web pages I still frequenly use tables for page layout simply because nothing in CSS can do some things that tables can.

For instance, in CSS, there's no way to say "position this block 30 pixels off the bottom of block X". As an example, check out the web standards project's own site. See that sentence at the very top ("The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting...")? The main part of the page looks to be absolutely positioned below it. Try increasing the font size of your browser a bunch (ctrl + in mozilla). Eventually, the sentence at the top will overflow into the main text below it. If they had used a table with two rows, one for the quote up top and another for the body text, then the top row would grow and move the body text down to accommodate the larger font size. With absolute positioning, its stuck there and won't move even if the text is bleeding out of it.

Now, this isn't so much of a problem with the text blocks so far apart like that, but many times I have had to arrange blocks of text like this close together and if you increased the font size at all, the text would bleed out of its absolutely positioned container.

And none of the other positioning modes make it work... I've tried for hours to make certain layouts work with CSS *and* be flexible to varying font sizes and browser window sizes to no avail. Only tables worked. There's relative positioning, but that requires a parent-child relationship between the two blocks (which often makes no sense) in question and doesn't remove the child block from the normal flow layout.

Re:Slashdot

[Lysander Luddite]

You are right about the tables. It si compliant, however using them for layout is not how they were intended to be used. That is the point I tried to make. It also explains why text-to-speech browsers have difficulties with them. I apologize if I wasn't clear.

As for (b) correct again, but WaSP would suggest you use a SPAN or DIV rather than a (b), which is a presentation tag rather than a structural one.

However, I do applaud Slashdot for at least use a DOCTYPE header, which reads as 3.2. WaSP would most likely encourage them to move to HTML 4.01 or and XML/XHTML DOCTYPE. That would allow the separation of content and layout.

Re:Slashdot

[bertilow]

Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML (and XML derivatives) it causes problems in browsers designed for the sight impaired (and therefore violates Section 508).

It's true that layout tables are to be avoided (it's actually a form of lying: you're indicating tabular relations between the cells and rows of the table, while in reality there are no such relations - that's the main problem).

But, Slashdot is in good company: the W3C themselves use tables for layout! That's really the pits... Just check out "www.w3.org".

Slashdot also uses deprecated tags such as (font) and (b)

Unfortunately "b" is not deprecated.

Re:Slashdot

[King of the World]

Tables were intended for layout in the past (see html 3.2). Current x/html standards don't though.

Good to know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whew....and I thought the white anglo-saxon protestant had disappeared! This is truly a scientific breakthrough to discover this species still alive.

From the Amaya (w3 broswer) FAQ...

[gTsiros]

"Amaya cannot be used to check validity of HTML pages. It accepts valid and invalid HTML documents and tries to dynamically correct errors. For example it's able to add missing end-tags and to move misplaced elements.
"

So let's all stop whining and poking at IE for trying to correct errors, hmmmmmm?

Re:From the Amaya (w3 broswer) FAQ...

[Tim C]

On the contrary, this knowledge will merely make me whine and poke at Amaya too.

I work in a web agency, and have had real problems in the past with certain designers writing/editing pages that look fine in IE, but don't actually work in either browser (or, on occasion, display at all in Netscape). They then proclaim the page to be finished, never having checked it in Netscape (despite a contractual obligation to support it), leaving it for the rest of us to fix.

I would like to see a "debug mode" in all browsers, whereby any badly-formed HTML is clearly flagged as such. Then you could tell at a glance if there was a problem, and what it was.

Cheers,

Tim

Re:From the Amaya (w3 broswer) FAQ...

[gTsiros]

You are right in your thoughts...

> I would like to see a "debug mode" in all browsers, whereby

You can use the w3.org validator for that.

What i thought of now is whether the validator's results page is HTML valid...hm...practice what you preach, hehehehe

comments on Semantic Web

[MarkWatson]

I thought that the second half of the post (on Semantic Web) was interesting.

As someone who has spent lots of time in the last 5 years trying to automate extraction of information from the web, I welcome wider use of RDF (I have used it for years on my site) and separation of content and layout.

While the web as we know it is all about supporting human readers, the Semantic Web is all about supporting software agents.

-Mark

Re:comments on Semantic Web

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that so? I thought the Semantic Web was a succesfull scheme to milk as much money out of research funding agencies by reselling them obsolete AI research from the 1960's.

Ahh Yes, WaSP

[Hexxon]

I Believe That Is "We are Satans People".

Just error out.

[eddy]

But there should be a standard on what to do with badly formed HTML too.

I'd like the browser to halt with a 'Error: Page invalid' myself. If IE (and all browsers) would do this for nonvalidating HTML and CSS I'd say we'd see things improving pretty fast.

This is on my Opera wishlist, actually. Can we please have finer granularity on disabling popups and plugins too, and add right-click image/plugin-output to blacklist source server? Thanks.

Re:Just error out.

[Mr_Silver]

I'd like the browser to halt with a 'Error: Page invalid' myself. If IE (and all browsers) would do this for nonvalidating HTML and CSS I'd say we'd see things improving pretty fast.

Unfortunately the end user might see this as broken and therefore decide not to update. Personally, I'd avoid updating if it meant that i was going to be denied access to some content because of someone elses cockup.

Maybe what would be better is a javascript error style pop up window informing the user that the page contains invalid HTML, telling them it can guess what the content is, but it might be illegiable and would they like to do this?

At least then, the annoyance of a pop up on your site would force you to do something about it but at the same time not prevent people from not viewing what you've put.

Of course there should be an option to disable this but it definately shouldn't be the default and there shouldn't be a "don't show this again" option on the menu.

If people want it off, they have to hunt for it.

Re:Just error out.

[ncc74656]

I'd like the browser to halt with a 'Error: Page invalid' myself. If IE (and all browsers) would do this for nonvalidating HTML and CSS I'd say we'd see things improving pretty fast.

It doesn't halt on invalid HTML, but iCab has an indicator on the address bar that tells you if a page uses valid or invalid HTML and/or CSS. Something similar in Mozilla would be nice.

(BTW, iCab doesn't think much of /.'s HTML, but that comes as no surprise.)

Important not for what they standardize...

[Throatwarbler Mangro]

...but for what they don't.

Anyone or anything that stands up to prevent the next BLINK tag from running rampant on the net deserves some respect...

Re:Important not for what they standardize...

[Isofarro]

the next BLINK tag

Flash -- if Macromedia's Usability drive doesn't take off.

Corrections in Google cache?

[totierne]

Why not get google to 'correct' all the html in its Google cache?

Why would they?
It might annoy microsoft

Why would they not?
It might annoy microsoft

No seriously:
They may have 'better' things to do with their development and marketing time. Also it would not work for dynamic pages. Foiled again.

Re:Corrections in Google cache?

[King of the World]

Why would they not?

Because then it wouldn't be a cache. Also, HTML Tidy can't even cope with some broken pages.

iCab browser

[Anonymous Coward]

--I use iCab on the mac classic when I'm on the mac. Not only the FASTEST GUI browser out there (sorry moz and opera fans, it just IS, get over it), but also is written so that you can easily check standards. The developers are strictlers for it. And just anecdotally, very few web pages are actually coded correctly.

Re:iCab browser

[pteaxwa]

ironically icab's standards compliance is on par with netscape's 4.x. it doesn't even fully implement CSS1.

Re:iCab browser

[Isofarro]

No irony in that statement at all. Standards compliance does not indicate CSS _has_ to be implemented or used.

The idea is that HTML is given to the relevant user agent, and if they want to use a style sheet to "enhance" the layout, they can. User can also decide to ignore all web-author specified styling.

Browser predictability.

[hkmwbz]

Just about all browsers have some "error correction", and will try to guess what the author really meant. However, IE takes this to the extreme, and actually seems to pretend to know better than the author at times (which is entirely possible, as there are many clueless "web designers" out there, but that's besides the point).

For example, IE tries to guess what to do with a remote resource based on the contents of the file, rather than following the Content-Type header. Not only is this insane, as the server should be telling the browser what kind of file it is serving, not vice versa, but it has caused serious problems when trying to actually make IE treat a file with a particular content type differently. Want IE to download the file rather than display it? Well, unless you want to create stupid workarounds which break other browsers, you may have a hard time with this.

What WaSP should be pushing, and what I feel is one of the important parts of a web standard, is that a browser's behavior is as predictable as possible. When the browser tries to guess everything itself, rather than doing what the code actually says, it causes situations such as the one above. Sure, let the browser correct simple errors, but today's browsers are too "sloppy" when it comes to sloppy code. They should be more strict and unforgiving. This would make things a lot easier for web designers, as the browser would show clearly when there are errors in the code.

I generally find that it is a lot easier to "design for" (bad way to do it, but still) browsers that allow less sloppy code. Opera is excellent to check your code with, as it is even more unforgiving than Mozilla. Although this can lead to more "broken sites" when browsing the web, I find it to be of tremendous help to keep my own pages written properly. Mozilla has strong standards support, and seems to sometimes handle pages better than both Opera and IE (since IE's implementation of various standards has serious flaws), but it allows too much garbage code.

Then again, we have to live in the real world, and with clueless Frontpage users out there, we should back WaSP and try to make both browsers and authoring tools behave better - for a more open and accessible web. Sadly, because of IE's sloppiness, we are currently trapped in web designer hell. And viewer hell if the browser isn't "MSIE compliant".

Re:Browser predictability.

[Anonymous Coward]

'Sadly, because of IE's sloppiness, we are currently trapped in web designer hell. And viewer hell if the browser isn't "MSIE compliant"'

Don't you think the four year wait for Mozilla 1.0 had something to do with this? Microsoft became the standard because there was nothing else (of quality, sorry Opera) available on the Windows platform, 90% of the PC market. What did you expect to happen?

At the moment, the web standard is Internet Explorer HTML, and the W3C has no say-so. This will change, now that there is another high quality browser.

Re:Browser predictability.

[hkmwbz]

No, Microsoft's browser became the most widely used browser because it was distributed with the Windows operating system.

Mozilla has been of excellent quality for a long time now, and Opera remains one of the leading browsers today.

IE is not "the web standard", and it should not be. Why? This is outlined in my previous message.

Re:Browser predictability.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever -- I've got some fairly simple and 100% correct DOM stuff that fails to work in any version of Netscape 6.x or Mozilla until .99 or so. Early versions crash harder than Netscape 4. It's not standards compliant if it Does Not Work.

Microsoft's distribution strategy (particularlly with ISPs) helped them immensely. But the main reason that Netscape has 5% marketshare (less than 1% for Mozilla/NS6!!) is in fact Netscape and the 4 year break they took while developing Mozilla.

Reinventing half the OS libs with things like XUL might have seemed like a great idea until they looked around and found that nobody cares anymore except a few loudmouths in the web's armpits such as slashdot (speaking of which, check out the HTML on this site!)

Re:Browser predictability.

[hkmwbz]

There's a slight problem with your comment about a particular DOM bug in a minority browser: It does not affect 80% of users, and will be noticed by very few. At least it's been fixed, unlike things like IE's terrible handling of basic issues like absolute positioning with CSS.

The ISP distribution strategy might have worked in the beginning, but IE would have never been as widespread if it hadn't been included with Windows. No, Netscape does not have a lower market share because Mozilla took a long time to develop, but because when the people who used Netscape previously, and got it on a CD with their ISP, upgraded to a newer Windows version, a browser was already included with the operating system. So why download another browser. Casual users just used IE, and it seemed to work for them, so they didn't bother with downloading another browser.

A platform independent browser needs to be largely independent of the operating system (duh!). And since they want Mozilla to be usable on a wide range of systems, and highly customizable, they did what you are describing.

Nobody cares, you say. Well, tell that to AOL, who have, what, 30% of the US Internet users? What about their move to Gecko?

And what about the fact that Pocket IE is a dreadful piece of unusable crap, while both Mozilla and Opera have excellent embedded solutions. Opera for embedded devices is exactly the same as the desktop versions! Pocket IE is stripped of all functionality.

And the embedded market is growing.

Your comment about "a few loudmouths" is a bit silly, considering the fact that those who do know about alternative browsers are the ones with knowledge, and the power to change the web. Ignorant people who think IE is the world will lose in the end.

More dot.com deaths will come because some "web designers" ignore open standards and paint themselves into a corner by writing specifically for a dying "standard" - IE's proprietary extensions. The browser market is fragmenting, and IE is not able to catch up. The only way forward is to support WaSP's efforts. Those who don't will hopefully go out of business. Darwinism, if you will.

Re:Browser predictability.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that AOL now has what they want (Gecko). Mozilla and Netscape are disposable money pits -- unless they gain some userbase and start making money somehow. My prediction? By 2004 there won't be either a Netscape or a Mozilla, but other developers will salvage Gecko for otherwise platform-specific browsers in the vein of Galeon.

As for dot.coms, pass the crack. Most of that shitty html was needed for Netscape compatibility and has nothing to do with the failure of the site. After all, you are still posting here from /.'s shitty html.

Re:Browser predictability.

[hkmwbz]

Mozilla is an open-source project with volunteers working on the project. AOL actually get a lot for free by contributing with resources for further development. Mozilla has proven itself to be a solid browser with excellent standards support, and features which makes it easy to port and customize into just about anything.

I'm not talking about Netscape 4-specific sites (although some still code specifically for this browser), but about MSIE. I naturally hate Netscape 4, but it is dying, and MSIE is currently in control of the desktop market. It isn't entirely Microsoft's fault that things are the way they are, but having a near-monopoly would have allowed them to push through proper standards compliance. It could actually be in their best interest.

I can't speak for Slashdot's HTML, as I am not responsible for the site. It would be nice if it had fewer errors and didn't use any IE-specific attributes (leftmargin, topmargin...), but I doubt there's anything I can do about that. At least Slashdot works in, well, every single browser out there? But why don't you mail them and ask them to consider a small cleanup of their HTML code?

They already did

[Lysander Luddite]

The have shamed MS in the past for browser compatiblity. When MS decided to make MSNBC work only in their browsers while hiding behind the refrain of standards compatibilty WaSP members called "bullshit" and MS backed down.

Re:They already did

[Anonymous Coward]

From a business standpoint it doesn't make sense to support browsers comprising 3% of the total.

But WaSP is part of the vocal minority right?

Re:They already did

[Lysander Luddite]

What you don't seem to understand isn't that WaSP supporting any particular browser. What WaSP wants is browser makers to support the standards and to have developers write in those standards.

How difficult is it to get that through people's heads? WaSP doesn't support Mozilla just becuase it is not IE. They support it because it is standards compliant. WaSP congratulated IE 5 on Mac when it was released becuase of satnards adherence.

Sheesh. Are you a troll or what?

Standards and Reccomendations

[JamesOfTheDesert]

The W3C issues recommendations. They are not a standards organization, such as ISO, ECMA, or ANSI. Many companies, particularly those doing government business, are required to follow specs issued from standards bodies. HTML is OK, becasue of ISO/IEC 15445:1998(E). XHTML is not a standard; neither is XML, except as particular applications of SGML.

I tried creating a web page that used the ISO HTML DOCTYPE declaration:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:1998//DTD HyperText Markup Language//EN">

The W3C validator page complained about it: Fatal Error: unrecognized {{DOCTYPE}}; unable to check document

It seems standards are not so standard.

Re:Standards and Reccomendations

[dsoltesz]

Yes, but most of us recognize that W3C issued recommendations are specifications and that W3C is the official word on the HTML specifications.

Re:Standards and Reccomendations

[Anonymous Coward]

works.

Re:Standards and Reccomendations

[Anonymous Coward]

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:2000//DTD HTML//EN"> works.

Re:Standards and Reccomendations

[jonasj]

What's the difference? What, apart from the name, makes ISO, ECMA and ANSI "standards bodies" while the W3C is merely a "consortium"?

who is this poof ?

[nick slashdot]

this guy pretends to be the inventor of the web, and now he wants to dominate it. fuck him.

Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm a very strong supporter of technical standards, I think efforts like this are naive wastes of time. The standards on the web are whatever MS decides they are, which is probably the best proof yet (if any more were needed) of why monopolies are bad.

What about Slashdot being standards compliant ?

[zBoD]

I mean, look at the poor "HTML" code generated here... Disgusting.

There is no 'a' in "WEB"

[BenJeremy]

Big stretch to use the acronym 'WaSP' for this one. Perhaps 'WSaP' might be better, then Bud can sponsor the project...

i know acronyms can be a stretch

[Gavitron_zero]

but where does the "a" come from in WaSP.... or maybe that's part of the proposed standard...being able to add any required letter to your project acronym to make it sound cooler.

Re: font-size workaround

[iangoldby]

A List Apart have published a workaround for setting a font-size one-smaller than the default size that works in all browsers, using the 'box model fix' technique. Just a pity they don't use it in their own pages. But yes, it does work.

Re: Modern Browsers

[SloppyElvis]

According to WaSP, modern browsers are a necessity. The problem is, WaSP doesn't have the power the impose such a mandate, and my grandma uses whatever browser came bundled with her machine (how did IE win the browser war?)

IMHO, standards are great, but only if they are, in fact, standards. Thus, everything I write for the web follows the LCD (lowest common denominator) philosophy. Heck, I don't need tricks to put something that looks good on the screen (I'll do the alpha blending during graphics production, not at runtime). I don't like rewriting everything for a new browser (neither do the WaSP gurus), and that is why I'll stick to plain ole' minimal tag set HTML.

HTML is not the problem for me; the problem in getting a site to work properly on any browser comes in when you try to use JavaScript. An standard object model for *JavaScript* is what I really need, and that is just not a reality yet.

Some have pointed out IE's tolerance for mistakes is a problem, and I couldn't agree more. As a development browser, IE is a big mistake, unless you don't care about users of other browsers at all. Thank goodness for Mozilla.

Re:stoopid validator

[Doobian Coedifier]

Went to this w3 validator, and ran it on www.washington.edu. Gives a LOT of stupid errors, such as saying the tag was never opened (yes, is there). Oh well.

duh?

[bcrowell]

I guess I'm just stupid, but a lot of what they're saying doesn't make any sense to me.

Most major websites can also be improved by removing intricate table layouts and superfluous markup
Uh, how the heck would you set up your layout without tables? For instance, how would you generate a page that looks like Slashdot without using nested tables?

I also don't understand how they can claim that web designers should design a single page that can be used both on desktops and handhelds. OK, maybe if it's just plain text that would work. But any more complicated layout is going to have to be redesigned completely for a handheld.

Re:duh?

[manual_overide]

Uh, how the heck would you set up your layout without tables? For instance, how would you generate a page that looks like Slashdot without using nested tables?

Uh, it's called CSS. You'd be amazed at the stuff you can do with DIV tags and a decently advanced stylesheet. check out this for an example. Use mozilla or netscape 6 to view it, because IE doesn't fully support CSS1 (even though MS says it does)

Re:duh?

[Isofarro]

how the heck would you set up your layout without tables?

Cascading Style Sheets. HTML was meant to represent the structure of the content, not its presentation. Style Sheets are the suggestions of layout and style.

I also don't understand how they can claim that web designers should design a single page that can be used both on desktops and handhelds. OK, maybe if it's just plain text that would work. But any more complicated layout is going to have to be redesigned completely for a handheld.

That's because you are stuck in the mindset that layout is done in the HTML. By moving layout suggestions to the stylesheet, there's a clear seperation between the content and the layout/presentation. That means the same content can be displayed on both devices, the browser making full use of the style-sheet, while the PDA uses a minimal or no stylesheet at all. The HTML just encapsulates the structure of the content (in that _this_ is a heading, _that_ is a paragraph), while the style sheet describes how to display it (headings should be bold, red and s_so_ big).

By a clear separation, accessibility to an HTML page is increased.

Re:duh?

[apg]

Uh, how the heck would you set up your layout without tables? For instance, how would you generate a page that looks like Slashdot without using nested tables?

It really wouldn't be all that hard to redesign this layout without using tables for the major page structure. At it's simplest you've basically got a single, fixed-width column running down the left side and a content area that takes up the remaining page width, with a header and footer and little bit of margin around the edges. Even the nested threading of the comments and replies wouldn't be all that hard to replicate.

I also don't understand how they can claim that web designers should design a single page that can be used both on desktops and handhelds. OK, maybe if it's just plain text that would work. But any more complicated layout is going to have to be redesigned completely for a handheld.

The idea is that if you mark up the content of your page structurally and use CSS to create the layout, a device can display the content as best as it's able. Not that a handheld will reproduce the exact same layout as the desktop, but that it is able to present the information in a way that is appropriate for a handheld.

Re:duh?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Uh, how the heck would you set up your layout without tables? For instance, how would you generate a page that looks like Slashdot without using nested tables?

Like this.

It's not a perfect example, it won't fit in a small screen. But that's totaly fixable. It's just something that I've thrown together and played with. Adding indents for a comments layout (which I plan to do) is easy.

If you look at the source code. You will notice that it's very lean. Even the CSS file is lean. Much smaller than the /. HTML anyway. Also, if some of the code in there looks different (like the first artical), like I said before, this is only something I've been experimenting with, and there will be lots of bugs. Just want to make sure no one goes away thinking that CSS is crap or anything.
You'll also notice that I haven't got CLASS="foo" in all the tags, only some because of the way CSS can be used.

The other great thing is, if you wanted to put the side bar on the other side. It would take you less than 2 mins to do it. And you wouldn't even have to dick around with messy HTML, or in this case, even messier HTML within Pearl scripts.

Also, save only the HTML page to you disk. And open that file. Now you can see what it looks like without the CSS. Perfect for any browser including a PDA. And you can always have another CSS sheet for them if you want to change it.

BTW. You will need something like IE 6, Mozilla, or Opera 6 to view it properly. It will just look like plain vanilla HTML to NN 4.7 etc.

Re:duh?

[King of the World]

It's a foggy seperation at best. HTML still has many many elements that are presentation based (ie, i, b, br)

Re:duh?

[Isofarro]

Three elements is not "many many". Quite a lot of the presentational elements have already been deprecated in favour of stylesheets. Elements i and b can be replaced by "non-presentational" emphasis and strong.

Re:duh?

[King of the World]

Then try bgcolor/background/text/link/alink/vlink for many many - you rude boy. It's ridiculous that emphasis and strong are taken as the non-presentational equivilents of italics and bold. Em/strong aren't even particularly semantic. Take it this way, what information is clearly strong, and not emphasis? What information is clearly emphasis, and not strong? There's no reasonable distinction aside from how they happen to be rendered.

Re:duh?

[Isofarro]

Then try bgcolor/background/text/link/alink/vlink for many many

These are not elements, they are attributes which have been deprecated because there are CSS equivalents that should be used.

What information is clearly emphasis, and not strong?

The sort of information that clueless website authors who can't tell the difference between elements and attributes need constant reminding of.

Re:duh?

[King of the World]

The sort of information that clueless website authors who can't tell the difference between elements and attributes need constant reminding of.

Ha ha! Got you on that. You have no answer. Excellent!

Re:duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use mozilla or netscape 6 to view it, because IE doesn't fully support CSS1

...I'm sorry..your point about not using tables...what was it again?

Re:stoopid validator

[Isofarro]

Went to this w3 validator, and ran it on www.washington.edu. Gives a LOT of stupid errors, such as saying the tag was never opened (yes, is there).

A lot of errors are a result of earlier problems, in your case for starters, the link element is incorrectly terminated with a / (you have specified HTML4.01 Transitional, not any XHTML flavour).

W3 Link element spec

Not much point specifying one HTML recommendation and following another!

Use CSS to create 3-columned tableless layouts

[starvingartist12]

It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.

These sites have different tutorials for various column combinations and even backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.

http://www.glish.com/css
http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts
http://homepage.mac.com/realworldstyle
http://www.projectseven.com/whims/cssp_3box/3boxno script.htm

The beauty of not using tables is that you're seperating structure from presentation. Basically, around some content, you specify what it is (structure). In the case of Slashdot's side navigation, in the XHTML/HTML you'd might surround the content with a DIV tag and give it an id/class of "sidenavigation".

With tables, you're already forced to predetermine that you want to use it on the left column when you mark up the whole table in TD and TR tags.

So how's CSS better than tables? Well, once you've defined the structure in XHTML/HTML, you can use CSS to define the presentation to say, I want anything tagged as a "sidenavigation" to be a vertical box on the left side that's X pixels wide.

This presentation can be easily be altered by changing the CSS. You can tell CSS to move things to the right, maybe center it or whatever. And you can define a CSS specifically for handhelds. You can tell it to hide data, change font sizes, redefine colors, or anything you want. For the sight-impared, you could define the CSS to display it all in a simple, column-less layout. And since you have not predetermined the presentation in the HTML, the user could have defined their own stylesheets to override your CSS to present the content in the way they want it.

With HTML and CSS (and also the XML and XSLT recommendations), websites can be so much more flexible.

No ad money in the Semantic Web

[yerricde]

the Semantic Web is all about supporting software agents.

Software agents do not have purchasing patterns that can be influenced by advertising. Therefore, in order to recoup the costs of hosting a Semantic Web site, almost all commercial Semantic Web sites will have to be subscription sites.

Re:No ad money in the Semantic Web

[King of the World]

Yeah - just like search engine robots *sigh*

Good CSS tutorial

[mlas]

Here's an excellent tutorial on how to get some common layouts without using tables for layouts. It's a little tricky at first but entirely possible. I've built my last three sites using no tables.

Replace nested tables with nested divs

[yerricde]

how would you generate a page that looks like Slashdot without using nested tables?

Put the left side bar into a div and float:left it. Then put a wide left margin on the left side of the main content div, wide enough to skip the left side bar.

Then use nested divs to indent the various comments with a wide left margin.

Re:Replace nested tables with nested divs

[King of the World]

Also a body border of black on the left and right. But the border on the right goes outside the scrollbar on IE5 - spook!

It's a lobby for style sheets

[Animats]

This group seems to be a lobby for style sheets. They don't like nested tables. They want style sheets and "abstraction".

Why should there be "abstraction" at the presentation level? It might help the content creator, but it doesn't do much for the reading end.

Speaking as someone who decodes elaborate HTML material with programs (I wrote an engine which, among other things, reads financial statements expressed in HTML), adding a layer of abstraction doesn't help when extracting the meaning of the content. It might if you were guaranteed that all content of a given type used the same style sheet. But you're not, so it hurts, rather than helping. Decoding programs have to expand out all the style sheet stuff, like macros, then work on the expanded form.

At least we know what tables mean in a 2D sense. I can machine-parse HTML with tables and determine that one item is above another item. Rows and columns can be extracted. You can tell what's adjacent to what when seen by the end user. Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure, and the geometric structure is what the user sees.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[Isofarro]

Why should there be "abstraction" at the presentation level? It might help the content creator, but it doesn't do much for the reading end.

Tables are meant for tabular data - no-one is saying not to use tables for tabular data. What they are saying is not to use tables for _layout_.

Given a table - how do you tell whether its for layout or tabular data? I doubt you could always get it right.

adding a layer of abstraction doesn't help when extracting the meaning of the content

The meaning of the content is in its document strucutre, not in whether its left or right aligned. Presentation just makes content look presentable, not add meaning to it.

a h1 element will tell you more about some text than a font-size.

Decoding programs have to expand out all the style sheet stuff

No they don't. Presentation doesn't add anything to the content. How a heading is displayed gives no more significant information than knowing a piece of text is a heading.

The only time your statement could ever be slightly accurate is if people insist on using tag-soup instead of logical HTML markup.

Yes, you can make something _look_ like a heading by sticking it in a paragraph and alter the attributes of that paragraph to _look_ like a heading. There's no point in doing so, since the structure of the elements doesn't describe the structure of the content adequately -- that's tag soup.

Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure

Disagree. Abstracting the presentation (those bits that don't add value to the content structure but only describe style attributes) will clarify the geometry of a document right down to a clean hierachial list of nodes that are easily traversed.

Parsing an XML file is much easier than a random tag soup. And it can be done with standard freely available tools.

Speaking as someone who decodes elaborate HTML material with programs

These programs will be common accessories to the normal web user (transparent to them of course), precisely because of the direction WaSP and others want to go.

The Semantic Web is just an extension of the WWW.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Semantic Web is just an extension of the WWW."

I once heard something about how the Semantic Web would have to violate Godel's theorm in order to work.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[No_Weak_Heart]

"I was driving home from the hardware store yesterday when I heard a report on NPR about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It concluded with a discussion of the Semantic Web, with the interviewee making claims that the Semantic Web would run into sizable issues with Incompleteness."

Yes, yes. Tell me more.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[King of the World]

Tables are meant for tabular data - no-one is saying not to use tables for tabular data. What they are saying is not to use tables for _layout_.

Unless you're coding HTML 3.2 - in which case it's OK ;)

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[King of the World]

No they don't. Presentation doesn't add anything to the content.

Unless you're WaSP, in which case you use CSS to hide upgrade messages ;)

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the link. I heard the same report on NPR and couldn't find any more info on it.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[King of the World]

o \
\ /

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[Isofarro]

I never understood how WaSP's suggestion of preventing users from seeing a requested page and redirecting them to a holding "upgrade your browser" page was making the content more accessible.

At least they are on the right track now by focusing on getting web authors and developers to create standards-compliant and valid markup.

The web is about content, not browsers. It is the content that people want. If a browser finds itself unable to display valid and compliant content, they'll quickly fix their browsers.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[King of the World]

If a browser finds itself unable to display valid and compliant content, they'll quickly fix their browsers.

Doubtful.

Any fresh download will get a good enough browser. It's the legacy of browsers that's the problem, and the issue.

WaSP do not deal with legacy. They have average teachings and average implementations of standards that are yet to be implemented. As they do not deal with legacy they are not about 'what works' they are about doing what they believe is best for the future.

What they preach does not work best in browsers.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[Isofarro]

Doubtful ... Any fresh download will get a good enough browser

And why are there fresh downloads of browsers? Because someone somewhere has fixed a bug or two. What is a bug? Something that causes a deviation from expectation. What is expectation? Display valid and compliant content.

Re:It's a lobby for style sheets

[King of the World]

What are you saying? That a fresh download shouldn't be necessary with good software?

Software will always have bugs. Newer standards will come. Upgrades are necessary.

CSS is for separating structure from presentation

[starvingartist12]

Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure, and the geometric structure is what the user sees.

With proper HTML and CSS use, the abstraction at the presentation level doesn't actually break the structure. It merely seperates presentation from structure, while keeping structure together with the content/data.

Scott Andrew said it best here:

"...this illustrates a common misunderstanding about CSS. CSS is for separating structure, not content, from the presentation. Markup is meant to give meaningful structure to content. The content can come from a database or text files; the structure from page templates, a CMS or XSL transformation. Keeping your content free of meaningless structural elements allows you to pour your content into another structure suitable for different devices. CSS allows you to apply client-appropriate and easily-varied visual style to that structured output, without having to alter your markup."

Standard HTML for slashdot?

[chipotle_pickle]

Very funny. But how could the page widening function be implemented using valid code?

Re:Standard HTML for slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Page widening function?

Return of the wasp?

[racerx509]

The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant never left!

Re:CSS is for separating structure from presentati

[Animats]

With proper HTML and CSS use, the abstraction at the presentation level doesn't actually break the structure.

But you don't get proper HTML and CSS use. You get whatever somebody used to get the thing to look the way they wanted it. Correct semantic structure is not near the top of most web designers' priority lists.

Same Old WSP Crap

[asackett]

The thing that Zeldman's Disciples still have not figured out is that there are poor people who are or would be well-served by web access. Standards are great, but those of us who build web sites have to consider the fact that there are folks out there driving tired old corporate cast-off equipment, stuff that cannot handle a modern web browser.

They tell us that browsers are free for the downloading -- because they are not paying telephone charges by the minute.

They tell us that Browser X is a "light" download, but don't consider that it won't run on a tired old 80386 with four meg of RAM.

They tell us that supporting old, tired machines and the poor people who use them is "holding back progress" -- only because it holds back THEIR progress. They simply refuse to consider the little girl in South Africa whose progress we're supporting by not adopting the latest standards. Her father is proud to be able to provide her with that unreliable dial-up that tops out at 18kbps.

Not me, thanks. Until the older technology falls out of use, I'll continue to do the things that Zeldman's Disciples hate.

It's only accessibility if real people using real equipment can make use of the content.

Re:Same Old WSP Crap

[King of the World]

o \
\ /

Re:Same Old WSP Crap

[jonasj]

To support the progress of a girl in South Africa with an 18kbps connection, you use deprecated layout tags in your web pages, thus making them a lot bigger and bandwidth-requiring than they would be if you had used clean, strict markup with css for layout? Why?

Even Netscape 3.x will handle an XHTML 1.0 Strict page just fine if you stick to old tags... the CSS will simply be ignored, thus saving a lot of bandwidth.

Re:Same Old WSP Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the usability/accessibility will be fucked for this user, basically.