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

Re:doesn't matter...

[Goalie_Ca]

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!

C++ XML API

[be-fan]

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++?

Standards

[Stanley Feinbaum]

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 ?

Re:Standards

[frawaradaR]

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.

Re:Standards

[MisterFancypants]

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:The W3C is a joke

[frawaradaR]

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.

IE6 W3 support

[Cardinal]

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.

W3C: stop now

[g4dget]

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

[g4dget]

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:Does anyone ever...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).