W3C Releases Drafts For DOM L2 And More

W3C standards getting out of hand by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 18:44 · Score: 3, Funny

Who needs more than h1, b, and i tags for documents?

Re:W3C standards getting out of hand by Trusty+Penfold · 2002-11-09 18:51 · Score: 1

Me; I need <ecode> (Whatever _that_ is)
Re:W3C standards getting out of hand by GimmeFuel · 2002-11-09 19:01 · Score: 4, Funny

You're forgetting the tags that are the basis of strong web design, like marquee, blink, bgsound, etc. Script tags are also very useful, for scrolling status bars, alerts that tell you how cool the page is, text that follows your cursor, and anything else you can copy/paste from annoyinghtmlforaolers.com

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live(free) || die;
Re:W3C standards getting out of hand by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · 2002-11-10 10:23 · Score: 1

This is a blinking marquee you know! Isn't it nice?........

Mmmmm, Moz now does *everything* and more. This has got to be enough to convert the un-washed IE masses... surely?

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Jacob Neilsen

doesn't matter... by adamb0mb · 2002-11-09 18:44 · Score: 3, Insightful

doesn't matter how many standard that w3c sets, MS is never going to follow them. They'll just set their own standards, and those will become the de facto standards... its rough, but its the ways it is...

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www.punkmafia.com
"I am insane, and you are my insanity"
--Bruce Willis, 12 Monkeys

Re:doesn't matter... by Goalie_Ca · 2002-11-09 18:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

I agree exactly with that. How many standards does IE 6 adhere with. One of my professors actually uses microsoft office (or some other ms product) to make the website and its components and it is a pain in the ass to access unless i'm using IE 6. In fact i was using mozilla and I ended up missing 6 pages from a document. I don't see why and how MS needs to break standards other than for their own agenda. If they do set their own standards it should be something the whole world can agree upon. Communication technologies should all follow standard protocols!

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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Re:doesn't matter... by ender81b · 2002-11-09 19:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

Ok... you tripped mode.

I work in a student computer lab for a fairly large university, about 28,000 students. You wouldn't *believe* the problems I have to deal with because of stupid, and I stress stupid, professors using stuff like MSword/powerpoint for their class notes and webpages.

I'll give you a few examples. Powerpoint is the most common for posting class notes. All good and fine because thanks to OpenOffice even a linux box can read pp slides just fine. The problem is printing them. Since we have only dot matrix printers (long story...) if the professor uses too weird a color scheme the slides don't print worth a damm, even with 'print only black/white' option checked. Problem #1.

The bigger problem is when they use MSword to post syllabi, notes, etc. Students have a problem viewing them at home for whatever reason (most likely they are using an old version of word) and they have to come back to campus to look at this stuff. It is insane. I always direct them to install OpenOffice but sometimes they might only have a modem so it isn't really an option. And if you talk to these professors about only posting stuff in MSWord they get defensive and say such things like 'everyone uses it' and other to the like. Try pointing out that just clicking 'save as rich text format' will cover 99% of the stuff they publish just doesn't work. Sigh. It is becoming a real problem. Same with webpages - what standards, microsoft is a stanard, I'm sure this would work fine if you would use a *microsoft* browser, etc, etc.

Not that all professors are dumb, a lot use things like rich text format and try to stay away from word but alot don't. It is a major headache to some students, and for me. And don't even get me started about how IE handles word documents - has the nasty tendancy to embed them within the current frame which causes havoc with printing, saving, etc - at least for your average student.

Seriously, more teachers need to be educated on thigns like open formats. For instance, it wouldn't be that hard to devolp a campus-wide XML format and a nice little front-end for making syllabus's, class notes, outlines, etc available to all faculty. That way you could ensure that everyone had equal access to the documents instead of forcing students to use MS products.
Re:doesn't matter... by taion · 2002-11-09 19:47 · Score: 2

I don't think that's necessarily true. It's a given that Microsoft's track record in terms of standards compliance has been exceptionally poor relative to Mozilla and other similar efforts, but "MS HTML" is somewhat closer to w3c's standards at the present than they were previously.

Also, while IE is the most popular browser, it's not the only one, and a not insignificant proportion of the population uses Mozilla, Opera, and other browsers. Somewhat hypocritical of me, since I'm currently using IE on my Windows partition, as opposed to Mozilla on my FreeBSD partition, but on purely technical merits, IE isn't really the best browser, and the optimist in me is convinced that the greater portion of the online population will eventually go for the better solution. On the other hand, if they don't, why should we worry about it? The proletariat can do as they please. So long as "MS HTML" doesn't somehow become entirely proprietary, we retain the ability to access it, plus we get to view properly-rendered pages. Whee.

Don't forget, either, that Microsoft actually is a member of the w3c. Microsoft can be accused of many things, but blatantly violating one's own standards is a rather stupid thing to do.

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Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
Re:doesn't matter... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 20:20 · Score: 0

You might try to get a campus-wide license for Adobe Distiller and make people post pdf's instead. Then people can use Word or TeX or whatever and still be able to post things.
Re:doesn't matter... by ender81b · 2002-11-09 20:27 · Score: 2

indeed. I forgot to mention alot of people do post things in .pdf's - it just depends on if the department spent enough to buy the liscense for whatever product be it distiller or acrobat. Or if they know/have the inclination to spend the money which kindof gets back to the original point of believing microsoft *is* the standard.
Re:doesn't matter... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 20:35 · Score: 0

Because it takes years of bureaucratic dicking around before committee's actually produce anything. Look at Sun's "Liberty Alliance" framework committee. They haven't even come up with a working prototype yet, and it's nearly been 2 years. On the other hand, Passport has 120 million users (yes, 80% of them are Hotmail users). It may be proprietary, but it exists and works here today. The Liberty Alliance has produced nothing but vapor.
Re:doesn't matter... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 21:19 · Score: 1, Informative

You can create PDF files for free by setting up a generic Postscript printer, printing to a file, and using Ghostscript to convert to PDF (it comes with a ps2pdf script). Or you can use ps2pdf.com to convert it online.
Re:doesn't matter... by mijok · 2002-11-09 22:02 · Score: 1, Insightful

In case you haven't noticed MS benefits enormously by breaking standards and creating their own. To the average user MS standards are the only standards and since OpenOffice, Mozilla etc. can't implement .doc and their html 100% correct it makes them look bad, ie. "that must be crapp, my homepage looked good in IE"

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Karma. Moderation. Is my .sig good now?
Re:doesn't matter... by Sycraft-fu · 2002-11-09 22:23 · Score: 1

Well if your university wants to have something like you suggest, they need to do it. They need to implement a campus wide system that all professors have access too. They then need to make training either available or possibaly manditory on how to use the system. If they really want it to take off, they need to mandiate its use.

However, I really don't feel much sympathy for students as I don't see professors using MS Office, or whatever else they like as a problem. There is always teh simple option of attending class and picking up the hardcopy when it is passed out. Indeed many classess I have taken have no website at all, and it is your responsbility to attend class and get your informaton that way.

Also, all the universities I have seen do at least a passable job (and usually much better) of providing computer facalities in places like the main library. It is not hard to go to the library and print what you need.

If you want to mandiate that professors all must use a given system for their websites, fine, but you'd better be prepared to make sure it works WELL and provide any and all necessary support for them to use it. Otherwise, they need to be allowed to use what they like.
Re:doesn't matter... by Ed+Avis · 2002-11-09 23:30 · Score: 1

At university I found you could usually tell how good a lecturer would be by the material used for slides. Those using LaTeX and its slides package usually had the most interesting courses (if more difficult); those with wordprocessors in the middle; PowerPoint usually meant fairly fluffy. There were exceptions and it wasn't a perfect correlation, but it was certainly a factor in choosing what course to take.

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-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Re:doesn't matter... by smittyoneeach · 2002-11-10 01:25 · Score: 1

How about a VBA macro to translate MSWord into HTML. Sure, some fidelity loss, and getting the professors to use it would be like pushing Jell-O up a hill with a toothpick, but it would be something...

--
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Re:doesn't matter... by jpt.d · 2002-11-10 04:46 · Score: 2

I wouldn't want to even read what that html would look like after that. Can't they just write their documents in XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2? After they got the original document done, their style would (should) be the same for each presentation.

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What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Re:doesn't matter... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 06:36 · Score: 0

Actually, in some cases IE "does the right thing". Netscape may be more "standards compliant" in some areas, but table rendering (or other minor typos) should not break your page. If all you are doing is writing HTML that will pass the W3C parser (which is full of bugs), that's fine, but nobody gives a fuck, because we're obviously not your target audience!

If a browser catches an exception and uses a heuristic to render the page correctly, that's too bad. If it renders incorrectly that's a bug in the heuristic, not the renderer. If it renders correctly through chance (a buggy renderer), well, that's a lucky break, and I'm not going to complain about it. It'd be nice if Microsoft was open to bug reporting or allowing users to fix them, but they aren't, and their browser is still better than Netscape.

I don't advocate authoring HTML with MS Word, or believe Internet Explorer is 100% standards compliant. But the #1 reason Microsoft is still in a position to abuse it's monopoly is because they've had the ability to keep the user in mind. At least in the past.

Posted from Mozilla on Linux.
Re:doesn't matter... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 07:21 · Score: 0

They're just trying to be like MS. Note the stinking vapors that belch out of the red pits of Redmond so frequently...
Re:doesn't matter... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 07:21 · Score: 0

What a load of crap.
Re:doesn't matter... by alexpage · 2002-11-11 03:57 · Score: 1

Just a suggestion, but if you work there, can't you make an ISO of the Windows versions of OpenOffice, Mozilla etc. which you can hand out to students who have old versions of Word? You could probably justify the (small) expense by explaining that it discourages student piracy, and it'd help them with their work (especially if you configured OO to save as something like Word97 by default).

Doesn't help your professorial problem whatsoever, just something I do at work - when people have Word document version problems, I go round and install OpenOffice.

No. by Trusty+Penfold · 2002-11-09 18:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner

When there was 1 standard (HTML), browsers didn't behave predictably.

Now there are more, there is more scope for implemetations to have their quirks, not less.

Standards are large and complicated descriptions of expected behaviour. Each implementor may have a slightly different interpretation. Different implementations will have their strengths and weaknesses which make different parts of the standard easier or harder to implement fully and/or correctly. There may even be reasons why an implementor may choose to ignore part of a standard (perhaps it is difficult and he believes that users don't want or need that functionality yet).

Unfortunately, standards are an ideal to aim for, not a description of reality.

Re:No. by IanBevan · 2002-11-10 09:29 · Score: 1

You are indeed correct. XML took the correct approach - any non-standard XML found *must* result in the parser stopping with an error, rather than trying to make sense of what it finds.

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Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.

C++ XML API by be-fan · 2002-11-09 18:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

I've been looking around for a nice simple API to XML parsers, and I've yet to find one. Java and Perl both have clean, native-feeling XML APIs (JDOM and XML::Simple) but so far, the only C++ ones I've found map closely to DOM's overly complicated object model, and don't "feel" like C++ libraries (they don't use the STL and whatnot). Anybody know of a library along the lines of JDOM except for C++?

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A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Re:C++ XML API by sporty · 2002-11-09 18:58 · Score: 3, Informative

Have you tried the Xalan type stuff? http://xml.apache.org

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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Re:C++ XML API by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 19:05 · Score: 0

and too bad the PHP ones are all difficult to use and require a custom compilation of several trees :(

I'm going back to ASP.net :(
Re:C++ XML API by be-fan · 2002-11-09 19:15 · Score: 2

Xerces C++ is a very good XML parser, but it's for really heavy duty stuff, not at all like JDOM or XML::Simple. Plus, the API is almost 1:1 to the DOM API, and isn't very C++ at all. From the Xerces C++ page:

"For portability, care has been taken to make minimal use of templates, no RTTI, no C++ namespaces and minimal use of #ifdefs."

The API is basically C with classes, uses XMLChar * instead of std::string, etc. I'm looking for something more along the lines of the Boost or Loki libraries in that they integrate cleanly with the STL.

Let me use JDOM and XML::Simple as examples. They both simplify the (IMHO too complex) DOM model, as well as fitting closely to the language. JDOM, for example, uses standard Java strings and containers, while XML::Simple uses Perl associative arrays.

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A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Re:C++ XML API by lpontiac · 2002-11-09 20:14 · Score: 2

I haven't used it yet, but looking at Arabica is on my todo list. No STL integration, but it does deliver std::string or std::wstring.
Re:C++ XML API by KidSock · 2002-11-09 20:31 · Score: 5, Informative

I've been looking around for a nice simple API to XML parsers, and I've yet to find one. Java and Perl both have clean, native-feeling XML APIs (JDOM and XML::Simple) but so far, the only C++ ones I've found map closely to DOM's overly complicated object model, and don't "feel" like C++ libraries (they don't use the STL and whatnot). Anybody know of a library along the lines of JDOM except for C++?

Someone posted a neat little class to the expat mailing list ~2yrs ago. Basically it was just a Node class with STL list for children and a hashmap for attributes. It was very small, clean, and was in essance a DOM. It used expat but trust me, the code was so tiny you could use any parser with it. It was like 200 lines of code.

I liked it so much I created the same thing in C called domnode.

Search the expat archives. Wish I could give you more to go on.
Re:C++ XML API by KidSock · 2002-11-09 20:56 · Score: 3, Informative

Found it:

http://mail.libexpat.org/pipermail/expat-discuss/2 001-September/000249.html">
Re:C++ XML API by Ed+Avis · 2002-11-09 23:27 · Score: 2

It's probably not what you want but FleXML is a very fast way of parsing XML that conforms to a particular DTD. It's like lex and yacc - is that C++-like enough?

I completely agree about all the weird reinvent-the-wheel stuff that DOM and similar libraries contain: it would be so much better if they could use the STL in C++ and native data structures in other languages (nested lists in Lisp, etc etc). It's just that a basic function call interface is the lowest common denominator, so if you want the same library on every language you have to invent a whole new list and tree API. Perhaps this is an indication that the same library on every different language isn't such a good idea. (Think of the Mozilla debate: 'the same on every platform' versus 'native on every platform'. I have a feeling that in programming languages as well as GUIs the second choice is better.)

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-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com

Standards by Stanley+Feinbaum · 2002-11-09 18:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

Web standards set by the W3C have little meaning right now. Standards are controlled by marketshare, and Internet Explorer has been the leading browser for at least a couple of years. Surely Mozilla and Opera will follow these standards, as they always have, but will IE do the same?

Perhaps it's time we stopped sitting on our thumbs and complaining about Microsoft ignoring standards. An outright ban of IE is needed, from workplaces, schools, ect... Sites should block access to people using IE. This is the only way we can get our rights to web standards back!

Seriously though, does anyone have any ideas on how we can take control of web standards away from MS ?

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Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!

Re:Standards by Soko · 2002-11-09 19:11 · Score: 2

Perhaps it's time we stopped sitting on our thumbs and complaining about Microsoft ignoring standards. An outright ban of IE is needed, from workplaces, schools, ect... Sites should block access to people using IE. This is the only way we can get our rights to web standards back!

Y'know, in a perfect world, I'd whole heartedly agree with you. Is it a perfect world? Hence, the diatribe.

Seriously though, does anyone have any ideas on how we can take control of web standards away from MS ?

Ooops, sorry. Cancel diatribe... ;) Seriously, I don't think we as a community can really do anything substancial to Microsoft, since they don't want to listen to us anyway. Advocacy is about the only weapon we have, unless you come up with the "next killer app" that everyone needs and exclude any browser that doesn't follow the W3C standards you espouse . When you do that, you can set terms. Until then, we're just a bunch on Don Quixotes, tilting against windmills.

Sorry for the dose of reality.

Soko

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"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Re:Standards by Oluseyi · 2002-11-09 19:19 · Score: 1

Seriously though, does anyone have any ideas on how we can take control of web standards away from MS ?

Why bother? Have you taken a look at these standard recently? They're huge and unwieldly. Perhaps a more attainable goal is to develop the next generation of browsers - a blank context for multimedia rendering as directed by the server-side script. Sort of a Shockwave Flash as a native platform.
Re:Standards by eddy+the+lip · 2002-11-09 19:30 · Score: 4, Informative

Somedays I'm more optimistic. Today's one of those days (tomorrow may not be 'cause I'm digging deeper into IE's weird-ass DOM than I usually care to). But...

Most web developers that have been around for a while would rather code to standards than to marketshare. Standards give you the promise of backward, and more importantly, forward, compatibility. It's also a helluva lot easier to sort out your code when a client asks for a redesign in a year or two if you've been conscious of more than just "making it look right" in the popular browser of the day.

Markup designed for IE only often does truly evil things on other platforms - there's going to be more cellphones and PDAs accessing web pages, not fewer. There are also serious organizational advantages to coding to standards - more tools for handling your pages, it's easier to whip up a quick perl script to process standards compliant HTML...the list of advantages is long.

Just like any other field, there's a trickle-down effect. Not everyone will write good, W3C compliant code, but more will, more often. And despite their megalithic, feudal mentality, Microsoft will have to pay attention. IE6 is still a long ways away from adhering to standards, but it's much, much closer than IE4 was. This seems to have been in large part a reaction to developers bitching about their lack of compliance. I'm hopeful the trend will continue.

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This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Re:Standards by frawaradaR · 2002-11-09 20:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

Yeah, some really popular sites (like Slashdot) need to use standards compliant code and not cover for browser bugs. Wired recently went XHTML and CSS2. This is the way to go. If a browser can't render it, file a bug. If it doesn't work in IE, too bad!

My own homepage doesn't render in anything but Mozilla, currently, but small, personal sites aren't gonna break or make anything (unless they come in the millions, which is unlikely).

The people at Mozilla have provided us with a tool of 99% perfect rendering. Now it is up to the web site maintainers to actually enforce the use of Mozilla (or any other browser that fully adheres to standards; there is no other currently).

But Slashdot won't take this upon its shoulders, because it doesn't believe in standards, just like M$.

So M$ wins.

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frawaradaR anahaha islaginaR!
Re:Standards by MisterFancypants · 2002-11-09 20:36 · Score: 2, Interesting

Surely Mozilla and Opera will follow these standards, as they always have, but will IE do the same?
That depends quite a lot on your definition of ALWAYS as it applies to Mozilla...Considering Mozilla was originally based off the Netscape source code (though I realize now it is been virtually completely rewritten). People seem to forget that Netscape were the kings of non-standard HTML as an attempt to "lock-in" customers. Hell, IE still to this day includes Mozilla in its user agent header to work around all the sites that would deny access to anything other than Netscape, back in the 2.0 era.
Re:Standards by whereiswaldo · 2002-11-09 20:45 · Score: 4, Informative

If a browser can't render it, file a bug. If it doesn't work in IE, too bad!

Many sites can get away with this, but many cannot. If I'm selling a product on the web, I'll make darn sure that 99% of my customer's browsers work with my site. It's a good ideal to say "fix your IE bugs", but often not realistic.
Re:Standards by whereiswaldo · 2002-11-09 20:47 · Score: 2

Hell, IE still to this day includes Mozilla in its user agent header to work around all the sites that would deny access to anything other than Netscape, back in the 2.0 era.

At this I am very surprised. It's Microsoft's style to turn around and bite people in the ass when they have the upper hand. I wonder why MS hasn't "forced" Netscape only sites to change by updating their agent header?

DOM Lvl 2 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 18:55 · Score: 0

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

I just wish one little thing by euxneks · 2002-11-09 19:00 · Score: 1

My Hope is that they eliminate javascript from all web-browsers, not just the ability to remove javascript... ELIMINATE IT. I have no need for it and I don't go to any webpages that are reliant on it. The last thing I need is some sleezy company (like maybe microsoft or something) popping up an annoying advertisement on my desktop.

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in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Re:I just wish one little thing by tq_at_sju · 2002-11-09 19:05 · Score: 1

javascript is good for helping forms behave certain ways, like allowing you to change how a drop down list works etc....Javascript is definitely needed to add to the functionality of html forms, other then that i agree with you totally

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http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Re:I just wish one little thing by King+of+the+World · 2002-11-09 19:12 · Score: 1

I use Javascript to give live feedback on form input using regular expressions. DHTML tree-view menus can be useful for expressing a lot of information.

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--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Re:I just wish one little thing by Cheese+Cracker · 2002-11-09 19:24 · Score: 4, Informative

JavaScript is good for many things, like eliminating travel to server for doing basic input checks, make HTML documents smaller (and thereby faster to transmit), dynamically creating HTML in a frame etc. Other people can probably give you more examples.

If you got a problem with popup ads, then please download the Opera browser... you'll find F12 to be your best friend. ;)

If you really want to crusade against something, then VB script is a better candidate or why not Outlook... the worst virus spreading software ever created.
Re:I just wish one little thing by bm_luethke · 2002-11-09 20:59 · Score: 2

Outlook... the worst virus spreading software ever created.

that reminds me, since I do not use outlook/express for e-mail (I use mozilla at work and opera's stuff at home) I just set my adress list to use public addresses @ microsoft.com, that way if for some reason (someone else in the family ignores one of the computer commandments and opens some virus in an attachment) it simply sends the crap to microsoft and no one else

junk snail mail is also handled by removing the postage paid self-adressed enveloped and filling it with metal scraps and placing in the mail (receivers are charged with postage) - make the spammers/virus enablers pay whenever you can.

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------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Re:I just wish one little thing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 21:22 · Score: 0

javascript is good for helping forms behave certain ways, like allowing you to change how a drop down list works etc....
That's fine, as long as the form works without Javascript enabled. I frequently see dropdown navigation lists with no submit button beside them. If Javascript is off, you can select a page from the list, but there's no way to actually navigate to the selected page - this can be very confusing for users.
Re:I just wish one little thing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 21:31 · Score: 0

DHTML tree-view menus can be useful for expressing a lot of information.
Only if they're implemented properly. Each element in the list must be initially visible, then hidden using Javascript while the page is loading. This way people with Javascript enabled will see a collapsed tree (and be able to expand nodes), and people with Javascript disabled will see a fully-expanded tree.
If the nodes were initially hidden, there would be no way for users to see the tree if they had Javascript disabled (I've noticed this on several web sites).
Re:I just wish one little thing by skunkeh · 2002-11-10 00:31 · Score: 2
There are some excellent accessible, standards compliant scripts now for creating trees / drop down menus from HTML nested lists - browsers without javascript see the list, while browsers with javascript get a nice expanding tree. Two examples:
- aqLists
- Using Lists for DHTML Menus
Re:I just wish one little thing by King+of+the+World · 2002-11-10 06:54 · Score: 1

Only if they're implemented properly.
Good point! Moron! What on fucking earth did you think I meant? Yeah yeah, implement tree-view menus is a fucking awful way. That's what I meant. Goddamn fucking moron.

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--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all

Something about reading Eolas thingie.. by euxneks · 2002-11-09 19:07 · Score: 1

Seriously though, does anyone have any ideas on how we can take control of web standards away from MS ?

I remember a slashdot link somewhere mentioning something about IE getting eliminated due to some sort of plugin junk?

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in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Re:Something about reading Eolas thingie.. by stevejsmith · 2002-11-10 02:48 · Score: 1

As hypocritical as this may seem (we don't like vast patents, but we don't mind when they apply to Microsoft), I think it's out only hope. I don't see this company as one that just wants to get out there and earn money, I see them as one who doesn't like Microsoft, but woudln't mind earning some money on the side. If somebody could get them to exclude Microsoft from using the technology outright until they followed some rules (standardization, etc.), we could really give Microsoft a run for there money. Sadly enough, it seems to perfect, and I predict the company will eventually bow and just accept a nice fat check.
Re:Something about reading Eolas thingie.. by stevejsmith · 2002-11-10 02:50 · Score: 1

Woops...sorry for the constant spelling mistakes. I *really* think Slashdot should implement some kind of editing system. Say, you can edit it for five minutes after you posted, as long as nobody has replied, and you get a little link that says you edited and links to the original version.

Ugh...
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment Note: chances are, you're behind a firewall, or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. We know about those kinds of errors. But if you think you shouldn't be getting this error, feel free to file a bug report, telling us: Your browser type Your userid "614145" What steps caused this error Whether you used the Back button on your browser Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy, or any sort of service that gives you an IP that others are using simultaneously How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day Please set the Category to "Formkeys." Thank you.

The W3C is a joke by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 19:08 · Score: 2, Insightful

What good is a standard if you never hold anyone's feet to the fire if they don't support it? If developers never have any incentive to actually get it right? If the standards are so vague that it allows for interpretations that can be so drastically different that the standard becomes useless?

Has any company yet written a complete CSS1 implementation? A complete working version of DOM0? Yet here we are toiling away on XHTML and CSS3(!) and DOM Level 2. And they don't even seem to give a rat's ass if anyone actually follows the rules.

From what I hear about CSS3, it's going to be such a massive specification that no company (save Microsoft, if they actually gave a damn) would possibly be able to implement it.

What are we doing? The W3C puts out specifications that by the year become less and less relevant because their possible implementation date grows further and further remote. We'll see CSS3 arrive but will we ever see it in action? Or will it be supplanted by CSS4 and 5 which we will also never see? In the meantime we see developers actually building websites entirely out of Flash because there's one reference implementation (one version, period) and it just works. Is that the future we want?

It's time to hold these clowns accountable. Make them do some real work: make them create a working version of their spec. Make them brand one developer's work as a reference. Make them do something to prove that these standards are more than just empty clouds of words!

Re:The W3C is a joke by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 19:18 · Score: 0

What good is a standard if you never hold anyone's feet to the fire if they don't support it? If developers never have any incentive to actually get it right? If the standards are so vague that it allows for interpretations that can be so drastically different that the standard becomes useless?
True. Similar to opensource certified there should be free W3C certified compliance with standards.

CSS is becoming a complex syntax of its own, I would have preferred if they went to XML by now.

Flash isn't one version. Everyone knows that. Ahhh. yes, you're a liar / troll. Good one.
Re:The W3C is a joke by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 20:19 · Score: 3, Informative

Has any company yet written a complete CSS1 implementation?
Yes. Mozilla. Got most of CSS2 as well.
A complete working version of DOM0?
Once again, Mozilla. Also supports DOM1. Oh, and most of DOM2. See the Mozilla DOM Support doc for the details.
Yet here we are toiling away on XHTML and CSS3(!) and DOM Level 2. And they don't even seem to give a rat's ass if anyone actually follows the rules.
Good job the Mozilla developers care then. Mozilla supports XHTML and some CSS3 (see below) and DOM2 (see above).
From what I hear about CSS3, it's going to be such a massive specification that no company (save Microsoft, if they actually gave a damn) would possibly be able to implement it.
Mozilla implements bits of it, mainly as vendor-specific extensions. No, that's not the same as proprietary. Vendor specific extensions are allowed by the spec if implemented correctly e.g. properties should be prefixed with -vendorname- (Mozilla uses -moz-).
Re:The W3C is a joke by frawaradaR · 2002-11-09 20:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

Mozilla supports XHTML and some CSS3 (see below) and DOM2 (see above).

Unfortunately, Mozilla does not support DOM 2 HTML in XHTML... and probably never will, because the bug assignee doesn't seem to care about this rather crucial bug.

Btw, DOM 0 is not a standard, but a collection of common garbage from the old days. It is supported in Mozilla only for backward compatibility, and people shouldn't use it in design. Mozilla explicitly does not support IE and NN4 only stuff such as document.all and document.layers.

--
frawaradaR anahaha islaginaR!
Re:The W3C is a joke by bartok · 2002-11-09 20:36 · Score: 1

It's better for the W3C to release specifications early on than to have each vendors wait for it, and in the mean time, develop their own proprietary solutions. Browser developers are much lees likely to roll their own proprietary specifications if they can just read a W3C one and worry only about the implementation details.
Re:The W3C is a joke by IamTheRealMike · 2002-11-10 02:15 · Score: 4, Informative

What good is a standard if you never hold anyone's feet to the fire if they don't support it? If developers never have any incentive to actually get it right? If the standards are so vague that it allows for interpretations that can be so drastically different that the standard becomes useless?
You have to have standards. The W3C are the people who are widely recognized as being the technical lead for the net. Now they don't make law, quite right, but if there was no W3C then Microsoft really WOULD own the web: as it is, we can and do take them to task when they break the rules. They can ignore us of course, yet whaddaya know but IE6 supports DOM/CSS Level 1. Not a particularly impressive achievement, but it's a start.
The standards are actually very precise, which is one reason they are seens as being very large. There is hardly any room for interpretation in stuff like the DOM, CSS, XML etc. Of course, sometimes when the internal architecture of IE mandates it Microsoft simply ignore things, the mime-type issue being a good example, but also the fact that you have to specify node.className = "class" to set the style on a new element, as opposed to setting the class attribute (which works fine in Mozilla). Why? Because (according to an MS developer) internally the MS dom is based on object model attributes, so that's what you have to set.
Has any company yet written a complete CSS1 implementation? A complete working version of DOM0? Yet here we are toiling away on XHTML and CSS3(!) and DOM Level 2. And they don't even seem to give a rat's ass if anyone actually follows the rules.
[sigh] Yes. Mozilla supports DOM and CSS Level 2 and they have partial support for Level 3 now. Level 0 is the term used to refer to the pre-standardized technologies, it doesn't actually exist as a standard so EVERY browser that can script web pages has a level zero DOM. It should be noted that TBL himself has stepped in on occasion to tick off Microsoft about stuff like browser blocks, bad HTML etc.
From what I hear about CSS3, it's going to be such a massive specification that no company (save Microsoft, if they actually gave a damn) would possibly be able to implement it.
Then you hear wrong.
In the meantime we see developers actually building websites entirely out of Flash because there's one reference implementation (one version, period) and it just works. Is that the future we want?
Developers do not build web pages out of flash. Marketing departments do. Luckily most web pages are not built by marketing.
It's time to hold these clowns accountable. Make them do some real work: make them create a working version of their spec.
Poor troll. The W3C already implement all their standards, go to w3.org and download Amaya. Nobody uses it for actually browsing the web, but there it is, proof that an actually very small organization with very few coders can implement their standards.
Re:The W3C is a joke by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 09:47 · Score: 0

[sigh] Yes. Mozilla supports DOM and CSS Level 2 and they have partial support for Level 3 now.

They don't support it completely. Ask 'em.

Then you hear wrong.

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, do you?

Developers do not build web pages out of flash. Marketing departments do. Luckily most web pages are not built by marketing.

You're pathetic.
Re:The W3C is a joke by vidarh · 2002-11-11 22:09 · Score: 2

The vendors are heavily represented in the W3C, and the discussions are open. Anyone can start implementing the specs way before they're final. It's not like people are waiting until the W3C releases the specs before starting to work on implementations. Much of the discussions in the W3C are based on what issues pop up as people try to implement various aspects of working drafts.

DOM not HTML by krokodil · 2002-11-09 19:14 · Score: 3, Informative

Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when playing around with HTML documents?

You seems to confuse DOM with HTML standard. DOM does not enforce HTML document structure, it is just OO representation of HTML and XHTML documents.

Re:DOM not HTML by Admiral+Burrito · 2002-11-09 19:27 · Score: 2

DOM can be used to "play around" with HTML documents, after they have been loaded by the browser.

I seem to recall some web site using Javascript to expand and collapse discussion threads. Think it was kuro5hin. I'm not sure if it's using DOM to do that, but that is the sort of thing you can do with DOM.
Re:DOM not HTML by OffTheRack · 2002-11-11 16:17 · Score: 1

DOM is also the term applied to OO instances of XML documents.

huh? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 19:17 · Score: 1, Funny

WWE Releases Drafts For Doom II And More

what does that mean?

*squints*

I gotta get some sleep..........

Ohhhh... _DOM_. by TheSHAD0W · 2002-11-09 19:33 · Score: 3, Funny

I thought they released a draft for DOOM 2.

Yeah, considering how long ago it was released, the draft for it would be just about due...

Yea, bash MS some more... by Proc6 · 2002-11-09 19:51 · Score: 3, Flamebait

... when Netscape did it to themselves. If you want to talk about standards, go look at charts showing what CSS properties Netscape versions properly support and which ones IE supports. IE kicks its ass all over the place. Netscape is downright broken on some very easy things. Now the new Netscape based on Mozilla, I can't comment. But that's when someone else did all the work for them, maybe Mozilla is fine. But IE is a pretty fast, stable browser that has supported more standards, more correctly than any version of Netscape prior to Mozilla. And if you want to talk about "MS's proprietary HTML tags", yea, Netscape did the same shit, so would anyone trying to own marketshare.

How about an example from around the time of the Great Browser Holy Wars...

NETSCAPE ONLY TAGS - blink - layer - keygen - multicol - nolayer - server - spacer

INTERNET EXPLORER ONLY TAGS - bgsound - iframe - marquee

Hmm... looks like Netscape had more.

Look around you, proprietary "anything" is how you keep money coming in and marketshare up. If youre talking about some kind of open source, community developed code, like Mozilla, then yes, please avoid proprietary stuff. But quit bashing Microsoft just because they have a good browser that supports standards at least as well as their only major competitor and are using the same technique as just about every other capitalist on the planet to make more money and keep investors happy. Netscape sucked and deserved to die.

Now go ahead, mod me down because I stood up for MS.

--

I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!

Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by PhreakOfTime · 2002-11-09 20:14 · Score: 1

It was a choice of either a mod, or a comment. I like discussion better than point systems.

I tend to agree with you on the CCS sheets. For example, in IE there is a CSS that allows me to do a hover color change WITHOUT using the seemingly more popular java code. I like it, its a better design for sites in my opinoin, netscape(older versions) craps on it though.

However, I dont really agree that netscape sucked and deserved to die. Without it there would have been even less innovation. Even now, I use opera over IE because of the ability to go to different and seperate connection by using a simple tab layout at the top of the screen all contained in one program. Whereas to do something similar in IE, I have to open up half a dozen instances of explorer
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 21:13 · Score: 2, Insightful

IE didn't start supporting CSS until after MS totally *destroyed* Netscape in the browser wars, so that's not why Navigator lost. Mozilla has excellent CSS and DOM support.

There are some sites that are absolutely committed to IE and use evil tech like VBscript. Mostly, sites are optimized to IE's idiosyncracies. Since there's no W3 standard on rendering broken, non-compliant code, IE made it render a particular way while Netscape rendered it a particular way. With proper, compliant code, the pages look close enough or at least don't entirely die when you load them. And of all those non-compliant tools, I typically only see iframe, spacer, and bgsound being used.

But as IE market share grew, lazy/ignorant web designers (which includes Frontpage users) started to test only for IE. When MS destroyed Netscape, most web designers stopped testing for alternative browsers. So Microsoft indirectly caused mass W3C noncompliance.

I think the problem with your post is that you confuse standards with features. CSS support is a feature. An analogy: the DMV license application form in my state comes with a voter registration form attached. DMVs aren't required to attach forms; it's just an added bonus to promote voting. But, the voter registration form has to be standard. If my DMV office created a "SDMV voter registration form" that had extra questions like political ideology and sexual preference, any other DMV would wonder what the hell the DMV branch was thinking when they made the form.

It does seem that Mozilla is a lot more willing than the old Netscape and Opera to render broken, non-standard HTML pages, although IE will still render the mind-bogglingly broken things.

With Mozilla 1.1, I have seen _no_ pages that only work in IE ( excluding those using Evil MS Tech (tm) ), and a minority (usually made by non-professionals) that totally screw up the rendering.
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by pavera · 2002-11-09 21:21 · Score: 1

Um... your comment regarding CSS is not true about later versions of netscape (6.0 and on) I use that mouseover color change all the time with CSS, and it renders perfectly in mozilla, netscape 6, 6.1, 6.2 and 7... sure netscape 4 doesn't support it but IE 4 didn't either, so thats a silly argument. I could tell you that mozilla is better than IE because IE 3 won't even open up MS's own home page anymore... but thats irrelevant.
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by skunkeh · 2002-11-09 21:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

Shock horror! Browser released in 1996 fails to support latest web standards!

If you want to bash Netscape, aim at Netscape 6 or 7 (both of which have superb standards compliance thanks to the Mozilla project). Netscape 4 simply isn't relevant any more, and hasn't been for several years. It's only big companies and institutions who don't want the hassle of upgrading their site-wide PCs that are keeping it alive, and with any luck even they will give it up soon.
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by zyklone · 2002-11-10 02:33 · Score: 2

IE6s :hover is pretty much broken. You can change the color yes, but you can't get change the display: of a box within the :hover element.

No nice popup menus in other words ..
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 07:04 · Score: 0

There are still more people using Netscape 4 than Mozilla, Opera, and Konquerer combined. At least twice as many, by my logs.
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 08:56 · Score: 0

Netscape 4 didn't support the contemporary standards even when it came out. What "latest web standards" are you talking about? CSS1?
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 12:17 · Score: 0

The AOL/Nutscrape fanboys are really out in force today.

I bet you've never even heard of "JavaScript Style Sheets" or "document.layers" or any of the other fine proprietary Nutscrape divide-the-web standards in Netscape 4. Then compare it to the oh-so-terrible IE 4.0 and see what's missing.

And if you want to talk about completely irrelevant -- just check out any release of Netscape 6. Crashy, slow, bad DOM support, no users, no need to support it.
Re:Yea, bash MS some more... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 12:20 · Score: 0

Except 90% of Netscape users are on Netscape 4.x, while only about 1% of IE users still use IE 3.0.

Get that last 5% of the market off Netscape 4, and people will stop complaining about it. Since Netscape hasn't produced a product that will do that, they deserve the shit they get.

Does anyone ever... by AcquaCow · 2002-11-09 20:04 · Score: 2, Insightful

bother writing compliant html? People will always dream up crazy site designs, they are going to go with whatever technology they can use to make that design a reality. Look at flash, look what happened with DHTML. Netscape's DHTML manual went into documenting aspects of DHTML that weren't even supported in their browser.
Standards can be made, don't expect that people will ever follow them.

-- AcquaCow

--

up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...

Re:Does anyone ever... by frawaradaR · 2002-11-09 20:36 · Score: 1

Them designers would probably be shocked to find out that it is much easier writing cool design using proper standards. Not to mention how much easier it is to remake the design or just change it a bit...

The maintenance factor should be of major importance to businesses... as it is, they have sloppy code that takes years to debug (font tags, inline propriteary javascript, both CSS and styled HTML, sniffer code and so on), and they have to maintain several versions for various browsers. Maintaining one standards compliant version with style separated from content is so much economically sane.

--
frawaradaR anahaha islaginaR!
Re:Does anyone ever... by AcquaCow · 2002-11-09 20:53 · Score: 1

Now, I write some fairly base HTML, no more than font, table, p, and br tags really. I wrote a decent layout for my site (dcw.govsci.com). True it may never get updated, but I wrote it knowing how Netscape likes its html and how IE liked html. Page in the end looked perfect in IE, but rendered mainly single column in Netscape. There were several little `quirks` I had to work around and kludge before it really worked properly in Netscape as well. Things I shouldn't have had to work around. For instance, I have a java applet on my site. I think the width of it is set to 429, the containing cell is set to 430px wide. If I take that java applet up to 430px wide, it completely breaks my site. But only in Netscape (older versions, not moz). I had all cell padding off, everything I could think of. Its just how Netscape handles that particular applet different from IE/Moz/etc. I only tested for Moz/IE/Netscape at the time though, opera wasn't even remotely popular (or even out) when I came up with that design.

This has become a slightly longer rant than I wanted to write (esp at near 4am) but I suppose my point was that sure Netscape and IE are both rendering the HTML to standard but they handle certain objects differently causing the coder (me) to be forced to adjust their site accordingly to kludge around those slight differences. Standars or not, there are still differences.

If we can come up with one solid independent rendering engine that is both fast and highly portable, use that in all browsers, I think we'd be set.

5 mins to 4 am...its time for bed.

-- AcquaCow

--

up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
Re:Does anyone ever... by Ed+Avis · 2002-11-09 23:12 · Score: 2

Does anyone ever bother checking that their HTML is compliant? By which I mean validating it against the DTD. This ought to be an elementary step in HTML writing - just like compiling a C program is a first step towards checking it works - but it seems so difficult to set up that hardly anyone does it.

Most Linux systems nowadays include nsgmls, but that command has so many obscure options and SGML prologues are hard to understand. There needs to be a single command 'html_validate' which runs nsgmls with all the necessary command-line options (and obscure environment variables, and DTD files stored in the right place) to validate an HTML document. If that existed then I'd run it every time before saving my document and I'm sure many others would too. But at the moment setting up nsgmls to do HTML validation (at least on Linux-Mandrake) is horribly complex. (Especially if you want to validate XML as well; you need to set environment variables differently between the two uses.)

--
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Re:Does anyone ever... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 23:28 · Score: 0

Yep. I hit W3C validator all the time. They probably hate me.
Re:Does anyone ever... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 01:06 · Score: 0

People should be castrated for not using a DTD...
Re:Does anyone ever... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 02:31 · Score: 1, Interesting

Yes, I do. And I do it without ever once querying browser make or version. The catch? I've stopped supporting NS4 and IE4. That makes all the difference. It's hard, though. And once you start using the DOM extensively you need to test every single line of code you write and have backup plans for every possible contingency. So far though, I'm doing better, not worse, than in the old days of if((is_nav3 || has_frames) && ((!ie || has_jscript11) || iesubversion != 4)) pathology = (stupid_table_bug ? offset-10 : offset).
Re:Does anyone ever... by Fweeky · 2002-11-10 03:10 · Score: 2

[Does anyone ever...] bother writing compliant html?

Yes, I do, all the time.

The current site I'm designing for gets about 35,000 visitors a day, and it's going to be XHTML 1.1 (served as application/xhtml+xml to accepting clients, no less) with a full CSS layout (with the XHTML being semantically rich so it's not required; no DIV/SPAN soup), and hopefully level AAA on the Web Content Accessability Guidelines 1.0.

I do the same for tiny sites too; the latest being a site for a diving club.

I have noticed a trend towards larger sites redesigning for XHTML and CSS recently; what was the trend for personal sites seems now to be migrating up the hierachy to larger sites such as Wired and AllTheWeb. I don't expect this trend to reverse.
Re:Does anyone ever... by Vantage13 · 2002-11-10 04:49 · Score: 1

You've got to be kidding me. You've never used the W3C validator? I couldn't live without that thing...

http://validator.w3.org
Re:Does anyone ever... by Ed+Avis · 2002-11-10 10:43 · Score: 1

I don't have a permanent net connection so it's a bit awkward to use the validation web page; in any case, I'd have to write code to provide a command-line interface to it (I want the validation to run whenever I hit a keystroke in Emacs, ideally - and then hit Enter to jump to the offending line).

--
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Re:Does anyone ever... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 11:25 · Score: 0

You have divs on aagh.net.
Re:Does anyone ever... by Fweeky · 2002-11-10 12:40 · Score: 2

ou have divs on aagh.net.

Yes, used sensibly to denote sections, since HTML provides no better way to mark them up yet.

There's nothing wrong with using DIV and SPAN, it's just when that's all you have that things get questionable.

Compare:
<div class="entry"> <div class="heading">Foo Bla Blerg</div> <div class="body">Wimble <span class="important">blergle</span> bloo.</div> </div>
To:
<div class="entry"> <h1>Foo Bla Blerg</h1> <p>Wimble <em>blergle</em> bloo.</p> </div>
Now, which do you think has more semantic meaning and will degrade better? :)

With CSS, both can easily be made to render identically, but the second non-DIV-and-SPAN-soup version degrades much better. Unfortunately a worrying number of people seem to think the former method is what CSS is all about -- the default Movable Type templates are a good example of this brain damaged view of HTML :)
Re:Does anyone ever... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-11 05:59 · Score: 0

Ahhh! Thank you very much. I see what you're saying.

Standards by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 20:06 · Score: 0

Adherable standards are nothing that can be quantifyable by any rational standards. When said company uses the resources of said network infrastructure to come up with a solution to point A, point B is usually ignored, and the modest user base is left out from the masses that scower the land.

Take for example Exterior Coding levels of generation. It is a simple way for marketing executives to focus on the real problem that encompasses the world while avoiding the rich data gathering that is available on the market.

Just my 2 cents!

Re:Ohhhh... _DOM_. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 20:07 · Score: 1, Funny

And I keep seeing "w3c" and thinking "wc3! cool a warcraft 3 article...oh wait."

Eh? by Wrexen · 2002-11-09 20:10 · Score: 5, Funny

Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide

Soon to be followed by the Acronyn Formation Policy (FAP) ?

Re:Eh? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 07:34 · Score: 1, Insightful

See "House at Pooh Corner", by AA Milne.

Maybe WOL really was right!
Re:Eh? by IanBevan · 2002-11-10 09:24 · Score: 1

The DNA (National Dyslexics Association) will surely complain....

--
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.

Not "Proposed" Recommendation anymore, it's final by mdubinko · 2002-11-09 20:21 · Score: 3, Informative

>2 proposed recommendations: XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0 and HTML DOM 2.

XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0 is a final W3C Recommendation, not proposed.

-m

--
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com

Standards by Cheese+Cracker · 2002-11-09 20:38 · Score: 2

Nice with standards... now we just have to sit back and wait for people to follow them. That could be a while since there are quite a few developers who don't give a darn to adhere to them.

Re:Ohhhh... _DOM_. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-09 20:38 · Score: 0

I keep seeing 'Wing Commander 3'.

IE6 W3 support by Cardinal · 2002-11-09 20:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

Actually, IE6 does a decent job. Their DOM1 support is good, their CSS1 is more or less complete, but their CSS2 is pretty crappy. Fixed positioning doesn't work, selectors like E[attr] are missing, etc.

Lately I've been working on an app for a company's internal use, which means the delightful situation of being able to dictate minimum browser requirements. As a result, the app is designed for IE6/Mozilla. All development has been in Mozilla, and a lot of DOM use goes on. And it all works in IE6, no browser checking anywhere. My only regrets is I can't make use of the more advanced selectors provided by CSS2, so the HTML has a few more class attributes than it would need otherwise. But, overall, not bad.

Another positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml. So at last, XHTML documents can be sent with the proper mime type.

So despite being a Mozilla (Galeon) user, as a web developer who makes heavy use of modern standards, I look forward to seeing IE continue to catch up to Mozilla so that I can worry even less about browser-specific issues.

Re:IE6 W3 support by The+J+Kid · 2002-11-10 02:38 · Score: 2

as a web developer who makes heavy use of modern standards, I look forward to seeing IE continue to catch up to Mozilla so that I can worry even less about browser-specific issues.

Ah, yes, the 'Not having to worry about browser-specific issues" notion. You haven't exactly been a web-dev long enough, have you? (:P)

This is _exactly_ what we thought HTML 3.2 would turn out to be....and look at how wel that worked!

And anyway, if it isn't W3C standards, it's resolution, colors (allthough that's fixed now...sortof) etc.

--
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Re:IE6 W3 support by Fweeky · 2002-11-10 02:57 · Score: 2

nother positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml.

Great, except XHTML is supposed to be served as application/xhtml+xml, which IE6 SP1 still wants to download rather than display.

I guess text/xml is one step closer, though.. assuming it works properly.
Re:IE6 W3 support by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · 2002-11-10 11:22 · Score: 1

IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml

Not on my Win2K-SP2 machine it don't! The example site http://www.mozillaquestquest.com/ still shows up as an XML tree view.

Good link to hixie.ch BTW - its convinced me to try and stick with HTML4 as the prefered output format in the short term!!

Slightly OT, but does anyone have a decent strategy for figuring the correct output for a given UA? Specifically, IE doesn't mention "text/html" in its Accept header.... which is a bit of a pain in the arse really. Thus, I need a default output format, and thus that needs to be "text/html" for the minute. (FYI I'm transforming raw XML data using an XSLT doc based on the Accept header).
Re:IE6 W3 support by Hestas+Coyote · 2002-11-12 02:26 · Score: 1

Quote: Ah, yes, the 'Not having to worry about browser-specific issues" notion. You haven't exactly been a web-dev long enough, have you? (:P)
HTML 3.2 was a poor bastardization in an attempt to create a working standard between the two big boys of the time, IE and Netscape.
I am hoping your were being sarcastic. But just in case you weren't. HTML 3.2 is such a limited set of standards, it no suprise that we saw large percentage of IE and Netscape only sites.
HTML 4.0 should have brought things back together. But by that time, IE had managed to saturate enough of the market, that their ideas of standards became the way to do things, not W3C.

the last hope of the doomed by myowntrueself · 2002-11-09 20:54 · Score: 1

is not to hope for safety... in the form of standards that are adhered to!

--
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.

Sorry... by WhaDaYaKnow · 2002-11-09 21:00 · Score: 4, Informative

Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when playing around with HTML documents?

One simple example: innerHTML. This 'property' is not part of ANY W3C draft, yet many, many websites use it because both IE and Mozilla (Netscape) support it.

Even though M$ is on the committee, their own browser still has plenty of features that are not defined in XHTML 1.0, DOM (level 2 or 3), CSS or whatever. And of course 99% of all web 'developers' are more than happy to use these features.

Re:Sorry... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 04:42 · Score: 0

What is the equiv. to innerHTML in the w3c standards? I've never been able to find that. (I don't want to have to create all of my html tags and append them to the dom one by one)

Also, finding the x, y coords of where the user clicked in a div that can scroll. Can't seem to find that either. I had to use e.layerX which is a Mozilla only thing as far as I can tell.
Re:Sorry... by WhaDaYaKnow · 2002-11-10 07:07 · Score: 2

They want you to use DOM methods such as insertNode etc.. It's much more cumbersome, and that's why a lot of people think innerHTML should be part of the W3C draft.

look here for more info

DOM-2 irrelevant to cross-browser issues by Brother52 · 2002-11-09 22:11 · Score: 2, Informative

Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when playing around with HTML documents?

As long as you do things strictly DOM-1 way, current browsers have been working pretty much predictably for quite some time. I develop sophisticated DHTML and test it in IE, Mozilla and Opera, and I never have a problem as long as I use only DOM methods (which can sometimes be quite limiting, but bearable overall).

A lot of people still do pre-DOM legacy DHTML because they have to make 4.x-compatible sites, but that's another story. DOM-2 may be more featureful, but it doesn't promise making cross-browser development any easier. It can make it harder indeed if not implemented accurately and timely among different browsers. Given a lesser incentive to implement it (DOM-1 is OK for most things), I find it quite possible.

W3C: stop now by g4dget · 2002-11-09 23:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

The W3C should have stopped with a full specification of HTML. Anything they have been doing beyond that has been doing more harm than good. The web succeeded because HTML was simple.

Of course, some client-side code is useful, but unfortunately, the major contenders have dropped the ball on that one. The W3C has given us JavaScript+DOM+CSS+..., but it's way too complicated for the vanishingly small amount of functionality, and nobody has managed to implement it correctly; in fact, I doubt nobody knows what a correct implementation would even mean. Flash has become ubiquitous, but it just isn't suitable for real GUI programming and is effectively proprietary. And Java could have been a contender, but Sun has chosen to keep it proprietary, and the once small and simple language has become unusably bloated.

But, hey, that means that there is an opportunity for better approaches to client-side programming. Curl might have been a candidate if it weren't for the ridiculous license. But someone outside the W3C will do something decent that catches on sooner or later.

Re:W3C: stop now by Sycle · 2002-11-09 23:43 · Score: 1

If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?

Should everyone just copy whatever Microsoft comes up with, because lets face it, they have the largest userbase? Somehow I don't see people here appreciating that.

I mean sure, you can say "wah wah, Microsoft didn't follow the standards, wah wah, Opera doesn't do this yet, this standards system is flawed!" but if there is no reference point for any of these things, how could you possibly expect things to improve?

One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed, not just silly ideas implemented by bored programmers, so if they're going to exist, then better an appropriate committee come up with workable drafts than a lone company goes ahead and does what they feel like. (heck that's one of the main reasons MS came up with so much funky spec breaking stuff - call it embrace and extend if you want, but they wanted to do things before the standards were there, which is why we have this mess)
Re:W3C: stop now by g4dget · 2002-11-10 00:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

Should everyone just copy whatever Microsoft comes up with
Everybody is, for practical purposes. Who do you think is dreaming up a lot of the stuff that comes out of the W3C? Look at the authorships of the standards. And if you sit in those meetings, you'll quickly see that Microsoft doesn't often take "no" for an answer.
Microsoft has even told us why they like their standards to be complicated: they believe that if they just make it complicated enough, nobody else but them can implement them. Of course, Microsoft's reasoning is at the level of Wiley Coyote, with Open Source being the Roadrunner, but what can you do.
One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed,
We have a problem with creating dynamic web content, but the current crop of W3C standards for addressing that problem isn't working; it has turned into a Rube Goldberg contraption. Someone needs to start from scratch, and the W3C appears to be incapable of doing it.
If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?
Of course, things need to get written down and standardized. But the way standards are supposed to work is that people try things out in practice, whatever works well survives in the marketplace or among users, people create multiple implementations, then people get together and work out the differences among the implementations, then it all gets written up as a standard, and finally everybody goes back and makes their implementations standards compliant. It's a long, tedious process, but it does result in reasonable standards that real people can actually implement.
What the W3C is often doing is using its position to create completely unproven systems on paper and let the rest of the world figure out how to deal with it. Or, worse, the W3C is used by powerful companies to push through "standards" that haven't stood the test of time and for which only they themselves have a working implementation. If you give that kind of junk the stamp of approval of a standards body, you make things worse, not better.
Re:W3C: stop now by IamTheRealMike · 2002-11-10 02:24 · Score: 2

The W3C has given us JavaScript+DOM+CSS+..., but it's way too complicated for the vanishingly small amount of functionality, and nobody has managed to implement it correctly; in fact, I doubt nobody knows what a correct implementation would even mean.
Huh? JavaScript is the Mozilla implementation of ECMAScript, a standard (not W3C) invented by Netscape. The DOM was also a Netscape idea, now standardized. CSS was originally proposed and largely designed by a guy from Opera. There are quite a few implementations out there actually, the idea that W3C technologies are too large to implement is crazy. Look at Mozilla, Amaya, even Konqueror is getting there now.....
The W3C should have stopped with a full specification of HTML. Anything they have been doing beyond that has been doing more harm than good. The web succeeded because HTML was simple.
Yes, and now it's ubiquitous do you really think we need to keep it simple? Being simple was great when the web was small, it let it grow very quickly. Why should we keep it simple now? Just for the sake of it? I'd rather have power. If that means there are only 3 or 4 quality implementations as opposed to 20, then so be it.
The world is not a simple place, and the things we want to do with the web nowadays aren't simple either. If you want simplicity then feel free to write a web browser that only understands a subset of the standards, they are layered so people can do this. Just bear in mind that it won't be useful for browsing the web, because a lot of people like powerful technologies and use them.
Re:W3C: stop now by g4dget · 2002-11-10 12:03 · Score: 2

Huh? JavaScript is the Mozilla implementation of ECMAScript, a standard (not W3C) invented by Netscape. The DOM was also a Netscape idea, now standardized.
Yes, but the W3C gave it its blessing and built lots of other standards on it.
Why should we keep it simple now? Just for the sake of it? I'd rather have power. If that means there are only 3 or 4 quality implementations as opposed to 20, then so be it.
You are confusing complexity with power. The W3C standards are complex, but they aren't powerful. And that's the problem. Despite all the junk coming out of the W3C, it's still basically impossible to do reliable animations, drag-and-drop, document image display, editing, and other commonly desired things in web browsers.
I want to do complex things, but after 10 years, the W3C standards still don't support it.
The world is not a simple place, and the things we want to do with the web nowadays aren't simple either.
Yes, and the W3C fails to meet the needs of people who want to do complex things. All the W3C does is provide people with ever more complex ways of doing simple things. That is not progress.
If you want simplicity then feel free to write a web browser
More likely, there are new web browsers and plugins around the corner that build on HTML/XHTML, but come up with better ways of doing the other stuff. It's harder now than it was 10 years ago, when any kind of bogus idea could succeed, but it's still possible. Perhaps Curl could have succeeded in that area if they had open sourced it. But something else will come along.

No need - they have Passport by DrSkwid · 2002-11-09 23:10 · Score: 2

Here in the UK the Govt. has snuggled up nicely and they rolling out IE Only Govt. Services.

Changing headers is no use in that scenario

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

Just because you don't feel the need .... by DrSkwid · 2002-11-09 23:21 · Score: 1

I use it to help cache my site.
The banner rotation is via js so that the main page can be cached.
(but not annoying pop-up/unders - some of us realise they are a detraction).
Our banners don't link to any external sites.
The banner is part of the web frame of reference.

We have over 500 pages of content so I'm sure you'll excuse us our right to present deep links on our main page.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

er, yes. by DrSkwid · 2002-11-09 23:26 · Score: 3, Informative

http://validator.w3.org

Is a great tool.

If your code is valid HTML then if anyone complains that their X browser doesn't render it properly that's your first point of defense.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

This is a troll, right? by Sycle · 2002-11-09 23:31 · Score: 1

Or are you really demanding we all take a nice big step backwards and remove the capacity for client side scripting because you're a caveman and can't understand what it's used for?

Do you think javascript == popup windows? The open window call is abused, and I'd like to see the spec implement some kind of suggested behaviour along the lines of disregarding popups that aren't user activated (Mozillia already does a great job of this, but making it part of the spec would be superior) but to lose client based scripting would be a blow to the usability of the Internet and the palette of web designers trying to make intelligent sites.

Client side form validation, adapting pages, and heck, even silly stuff like graphical rollovers which you can't do in CSS yet, are all things the Internet benefits from. Only an idiot would fail to anticipate how their page would work to users who don't have Javascript turned on, but it can make the experience run that much nicer and efficiently.

Not to mention that nuking Javascript, an open, standards based, accessible language, will simply promote the use of obnoxious propriety technology like Flash.

Let's not forget JS, VBS & JSCRIPT by DrSkwid · 2002-11-09 23:34 · Score: 2

Javascript was a Netscape invention.

Hows about that for non-standard!

My first introduction to the DOM and Scripting was builing an I.E.4 Based VB Script application for Boots The Chemist Intranet. That's about as non-standard as you can get. The VBS/JS step debugger in Visual Studio was useful if you could get it going.

These days there are few differences between the different javascript/dom. (getting xml documents without screen refreshes is unfortunately one of them *sigh*). My favoured route is develop in Mozilla then test in I.E. I've done a drag and drop HTML email editor that works in Moz IE & Opera. The scope of Javascript doesn't really get excercised as far as I've seen round the web.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

wc3 and doom l2 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 00:06 · Score: 0

my glasses....

client side scripting: good, JavaScript: bad by g4dget · 2002-11-10 00:41 · Score: 2

Those are all useful things to do. The problem is with how JavaScript does them. For example, for making HTML documents smaller, a client-side macro facility would be more reliable, more efficient, and simpler. For doing input checks, a pattern language would be better. And on and on.

If JavaScript (by which I mean JavaScript, DOM, DHTML, etc.) were a simple, if limited, solution to those problems, it would be OK. But it isn't. It is much more complicated than technically better solutions, yet it still is extremely limited.

Simple and limited, and complex and powerful are both acceptable engineering tradeoffs. But complex and limited and buggy is a bad engineering tradeoff. And that's JavaScript.

Who needs W3C standards by forged · 2002-11-10 00:42 · Score: 2

Microsoft are rolling their own anyway (.NET), and with their monopoly over 90% of the desktops and IE6 high in this prominent spot, I fail to see how this will make a difference to end-users...

Re:Who needs W3C standards by ThePeeWeeMan · 2002-11-10 02:17 · Score: 2, Informative

Just thought I'd point out that W3C standards and .NET are orthogonal; .NET doesn't specify anything about how to render web pages or do client-side scripting.

Now, if you were talking about SOAP...
Re:Who needs W3C standards by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-11 01:37 · Score: 0

Now, if you were talking about SOAP...
...you'd be talking about a computer-to-computer message format with no relevance to the display of web pages.

It is not only Web development by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 01:12 · Score: 1, Insightful

Maybe, you are missing the point on that W3C is centering its efforts in other applications that web development. Say documents representation (XML), machine understandable information, web information retrieval and so.
OWL is about information retrieval, and 'XML-Signature XPath Filter' is about document signing.
The DOM stuff, is no more only a Dynamic HTML stuff. DOM is important because it is being actively used to manage XML documents, and previous specifications are very clumpsy because they are a compromise between previous brosers specific market standards.
Maybe, it is a need to develop some simple DOM stuff from scratch instead of adding levels over a compromise approach. And again, as said above, give a reference implementation, to start with.

Vokimon

XHTML MIME types by yerricde · 2002-11-10 02:58 · Score: 1

Another positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml.

How did you get text/xml to work in IE? When I try it, I get a collapsible tree view of the document's source code.

--
Will I retire or break 10K?

JS is a standard by yerricde · 2002-11-10 03:12 · Score: 1

Javascript was a Netscape invention. Hows about that for non-standard!

Was. Now it's an international standard, called "ECMAScript" (ECMA-262) for the language and HTML DOM Level 2 for everything under document.

--
Will I retire or break 10K?

Re:XML API by nitehawk214 · 2002-11-10 03:26 · Score: 1

I ran into this problem recently at work. I am developing for an app server in java, and we have decided to have it run through XML. This way we can have our powerbuilder gui app and our java servlet website (using xslt) use the same appserver. We tried using Apache's jxpath, but I found it too limited in its support for xpath.

Instead I implemented my own jdom like system that uses xpath to find noes in a document using Xalan's xpath API. This gives me the flexibility of xpath and the usefulness of a DOM-like XML api. I was thinking of porting it to C++ for use at home.

--
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust

mozilla is run by netscape by Kunta+Kinte · 2002-11-10 03:36 · Score: 2

Now go ahead, mod me down because I stood up for MS.

I wish I had mod points, I would mod you down. Not because you stood up for MS, but because I don't think you know what you're talking about.

Most of the work on mozilla is done by netscape employees. I would guess much more that 3/4's of the mozilla code is written by aol/netscape'rs

And as such, most of the kudos for mozilla's design and engineering accomplishments goes to the netscape engineer staff. There are a lot of very smart people in that group. I encourage anyone to try following mozilla's development for a while. Track a bug, follow discussions on #mozilla, etc. I don't agree on a lot of what the moz dev team does ( sometimes my opinion is they back-burner linux bugs for windows ), but I have a lot of respect for them. And you should too.

People say "netscape sucks", "mozilla rules" not realizing that mozilla today would be a much smaller project ( read not as many platforms, not as many standards ) if it weren't for the hardwork and dedication to open-source of AOL/Netscape

--
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW

Small mistake by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 03:43 · Score: 0

XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0 is actually a Recommendation and not a PR as stated in the article

Help, About by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 03:57 · Score: 0

Wow, I didn't know that if you go to any built in MS program like MS paint or notepad, if you click on help, about you can view the EULA for WinXP!

Re:Help, About by LPetrazickis · 2002-11-10 06:31 · Score: 1

Wow, I didn't know that %windir%\system32\eula.txt didn't exist and that I should check the path and try again. If Microsoft can't find it's own EULA, what chance do I have?:)

--
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.

Ontologies by Lysander+Luddite · 2002-11-10 04:09 · Score: 2

The ontology project seems kinda cool, but it iwll never be practical for anything but the most stringently controlled or automated Intranet.

Re:Ontologies by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 08:38 · Score: 0

This is sort of what it's designed for. There
are plenty of communities which have a pressing need for an ontology language though, and have a complex enough interaction between their web sites that it an ontology would be a good solution.

Phil
Re:Ontologies by Lysander+Luddite · 2002-11-13 10:19 · Score: 2

I dunno. Unless you're in some specialized field like Animal Biology I just don't see much need. What I've read of ontologies (limited to iaslash, boxes and arrows and the like - not a scholarly program like the one at FSU) makes it sound like a holy grail to me. There is no objective way to permanently organize data that changes, especially in a business environment.

I'm glad the W3 is there, pushing this, but I hope ontologies aren't just a web fad and can mature to a usable component of 'the semantic web'.

(Of course I also hope to one day get back to school or get a job that pays more than my expenses ;P)

Standards *DO* work. by rocjoe71 · 2002-11-10 05:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

...Because I use them all the time, testing against Mozilla 1.x, IE 6.0, 5.5 and 5.0.

MSDN clearly marks out which functions are standard to and which version of HTML/DOM they are complying to.

Mozilla is almost de-facto compliant because that's the only thing they have to work from and they don't have an agenda like interoperation with MS Office/Front Page.

Standards compliance does work, it's the lazy/inept authors of web pages that are to blame for faulty product resulting from an ad-hoc approach to web page development.

Then again, like the saying goes: "A bad workman always blames his tools..."

--
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)

Re:Standards *DO* work. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-11 06:47 · Score: 0

Why do these comments always get modded up? It is *not* the job of the developer to enforce standards... it is the job of the implementor. There. That's my piece.

*** Note: This is no more of a troll than it's parent.

Alternate Reality? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 07:25 · Score: 0

Perhaps they're setting the standards in some alternate reality, but not here.

The computer industry must love standards... by oakwood · 2002-11-10 09:28 · Score: 1

...that's why it has so many of them.

BTW, anybody know who originally said this many many years ago?

Amaya *cough* *cough* :-) by Lazy+Jones · 2002-11-10 10:56 · Score: 2

W3C's idea of a web browser. Hey, it already supports some CSS2 features!

Amaya

I'm all for standards, but they should have a basis in reality (read: working implementations) and not be some committee's idea of a good idea.

--
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)

Smaller than JDOM by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 11:01 · Score: 0

Don't forget the opensource Java SmallXMLParser and SmallHTMLParser. They parse documents into ArrayList instances of Node classes.

suggestion by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 11:13 · Score: 0

Just a suggestion. Create a campus-wide policy for your IT department: no support for any file posted to the web that is in MS DOC or PPT format. Add any other formats that are troublesome.

Yes, Microsoft Word and FrontPage do generate bad HTML. Yet, reading their HTML is a lot easier than reading MS PPT or MS DOC.

As for Mozilla not printing some pages, please consider filing a bug on that. It's something that Mozilla should not do.

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