Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Anyone with any ideas?
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.
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.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
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
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
So, does slashdot.org comply with the standards stated in the article? If not, why?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
do not read this line twice.
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
Here's a good explaination of the font issue and why IE is the worst for individual font sizing.
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eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
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
Anyone or anything that stands up to prevent the next BLINK tag from running rampant on the net deserves some respect...
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
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".
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
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 documentIt seems standards are not so standard.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
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.
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
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
what is that little 'a' stand for? Or is it a backronym?
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
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?)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
Find free books.
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.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.
o script.htm
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/3boxn
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.
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.
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
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.
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."
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.
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.
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