Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Who needs more than h1, b, and i tags for documents?
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...
www.punkmafia.com
"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.
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...
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 ?
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
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!
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.
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.
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...
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!
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...
Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide
Soon to be followed by the Acronyn Formation Policy (FAP) ?
>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
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.
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.
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.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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:
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.
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...
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
The ontology project seems kinda cool, but it iwll never be practical for anything but the most stringently controlled or automated Intranet.
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)
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)