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