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W3C Releases Drafts For DOM L2 And More
TobiasSodergren writes "People at W3C seem to have had a busy Friday, according to their website.
They have released no less than 4 working drafts
(Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide,
the QA Working group - Introduction,
Process and Operational Guidelines,
Specification Guidelines)
and 2 proposed recommendations:
XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0
and HTML DOM 2.
Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when
playing around with HTML documents? Hope is the last thing to leave optimistic people, right?"
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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"I am insane, and you are my insanity"
--Bruce Willis, 12 Monkeys
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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
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..."
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See "House at Pooh Corner", by AA Milne.
Maybe WOL really was right!