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?"

Comments

doesn't matter...

[adamb0mb]

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...

Re:doesn't matter...

[ender81b]

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.

No.

[Trusty Penfold]

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:Yea, bash MS some more...

[skunkeh]

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.

Standards *DO* work.

[rocjoe71]

...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..."