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HTML to be 'Incrementally Evolved'
MrDrBob writes "It has been decided that HTML is going to be incrementally updated, as the W3C believe that their efforts with XHTML are going unnoticed or unused by many websites out there. HTML is going to be worked on in parallel with XHTML (but with no dependencies), with the W3C trying to evolve HTML to a point where it's easier and logical for everybody to transition to XHTML. However, their work is still going to attempt to improve HTML in itself, with work on forms moving towards transitioning into XForms, but bearing in mind the work done by Webforms. In addition, the W3C's HTML validator is going to get improved, with Tim Berners-Lee wanting it to 'check (even) more stuff, be (even) more helpful, and prioritize carefully its errors, warning and mild chidings'. This looks like a nice step forward for the W3C, and will hopefully leave all the squabbling and procrastination behind."
We cannot have new HTML without upgrading the best part of the web.
Example of server side blink
Wonderful!?
liqbase
HTML should go in a direction where content and form are truly separated. Have a document (or part of a document) mark the content in a purely logical fashion (like XML) and another document (or another part of the document) describe a presentation and which parts of the content to use where in that presentation.
HTML relies too much on the order of the content for presentation. It should be more like the workflow in a DTP program: Add a text box to the layout, then fill it with text.
What practical effect will this have? As long as browsers will render junk (X)HTML most people won't bother with an updated standard any more than they do the present one. Learning any proper coding system is work. What's the incentive other than pride in the craft? Firefox, IE, etc. make learning standards optional, which is just another word for more work.
I don't really see how this will improve the chances of their standards being adopted. It's not exactly like the leap from html to xhtml is all that confusing as is. This will just be even more confusing. Good luck getting all of the major browsers to support all of these incremental changes when they can't even keep up with the standards suggested years ago.
I welcome the idea that at last the W3C has get down from their high views and realize that most of the web is HTML and unless the web browsers are able to understand new markups the web developers can't use them. So instead of forcing everyone to dump everything they know the right approach is to fix existing problems in the current specs and move them forward to such ideal world step by step.
But I don't like the tone of the message itself as it refers to the WHATWG:
As the WG is currently formed by developers from 3 of the 4 browsers engines, it would be a real disaster to ignore all they current workLooking forward to more crashing browsers and garbled pages due to the new stuff. There's a LOT that can be done with standard HTML, even if it is tedious to do so, without turning it from something elegant into a whopper of a monster.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I think the way the W3C are going to try and go about it means that they'll gradually upgrade HTML so that there will eventually be a clear and simple transition path to XHTML, and therefore more websites will make the jump into the land of order.
The problem with XHTML is that if your code isn't absolutely perfect, the parser dies with (usually) unhelpful error messages.
This "feature" makes it unsuitable for sites that allow users to add content.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Why are webmasters who are currently ignoring XHTML going to be any more interested in Yet Another Dialect of HTML? At least XHTML has some advantages (like being a well-defined standard, being well-formed XML, and therefore being able to use it with XML technologies such as XSLT). It's not as if W3C provides the tools used by the non-conforming webmaster or anything. As long as there are significant numbers of sites that use bad HTML, and tools that produce more bad HTML, browsers will continue to parse bad HTML, and the pressure for people who don't care about standards to follow standards will remain slight. Come to think of it, even XSLT provides "un-XMLing" features when in HTML mode. If W3C announced a deal with Microsoft and Adobe to phase out bad HTML "features" from their website creation tools, there might be a chance of changing something...
Virtually serving coffee
HTML doesn't serve its purpose, because it doesn't mandate a lack of separation between content and style. For one, that means that it's difficult to process HTML pages with semantic tools. One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
Furthermore, creators of accessibility software are constantly marching uphill. Just yesterday the BBC had a report on how hard it is for blind users to use most plain HTML websites.
The W3C should release updated "HTML" specs only with both reference code for parsing, any state-setting, and any rendering, and validator with UI to test HTML for compliance.
UA makers should be able to submit to the W3C new proposed specs with both reference code and validator.
HTML versions should be date/timestamped, and validated between UA and server.
That kind of open, but moderated and encapsulated process will help ensure new specs are not only workable, but distributed to all UA makers (and programmers targeting them) uniformly. UA makers can produce their own code, as long as their HTML validates and the state/rendering results are consistent with the reference results.
A faster, more open, more comprehensive process. More uniform upgrades, more compliant/working websites, less programmers targeting specific browsers "because they work".
--
make install -not war
HTML at the moment is solid, robust, and gets the job done. As it has evolved it has gained additional features and power at each step, including CSS integration, better javascripting, DHTML, etc, thus leading at every step to a better end-user experience.
XHTML for all practical purposes, is HTML but with more errors. With XHTML, you get the power of being told that you have to put an end tag on all
tags. And, umm, not a lot else. The benefits of switching to XHTML are mostly theoretical.
The W3C needs to break the focus on validation, and get back to trying to work with developers and users to get what THEY want into specifications. It sounds like they realized that XHTML will not overtake HTML any time soon, and that they need to provide some sort of reason or reasons to make that change.
The ______ Agenda
HTML has been and continues to be "Good Enough". If there were some truly compelling reason to upgrade to something else most already would have. When image tags were introduced, people abandoned lynx rather quickly, the same goes for transparent gif support, CSS, etc. Its nice to try to bring order or whatever the goal of xhtml is but frankly if its got the ability to slap some text on page, embed and image and throw in a pretty background its good enough for most people, they know it, they are comfortable with it and they arent going to change without a really compelling reason.
The answer is - we DONT need it.
Honestly, I don't see the need for anything beyond HTML 3.2. All this new crap does is get in the way.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As a developer you soon notice that treating html as xml is an easy way to make generation easier and with less bugs.
xhtml 1.0 doesn't need the xml mimetype, only 1.1 does. The IE7 team's rationale is that they don't want to support the mime type until the xml renderer is capable of processing xhtml properly. Just "accepting" the xml mimetype and then using the html engine is cludgy, and I agree with him. But yeah: IE7 doesn't support xhtml 1.1. This is still planned for later (IE8?)
Jeremy
accessibility concerns i believe has to stop at a certain level.
What does redesigning the whole world over again for 10% of the population sound like ?
It sounds like overdoing it for me.
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Not in the mid-west; God designed their HTML.
I am sure Microsoft have their own view on this, so bollocks to standards.
What difference does it make if an ad is served using well formed markup?
Being forced to use well formed markup has the potential to stop some of the more scummy tricks advertisers use. It also forces them to employ people who understand document structure and these people would generally be opposed to obnoxious ads.
- programming language writers love the process of creating
something so much that they don't care about the consequences. Example:
Pascal. It was a wonderful language. It worked well. It was easy to use
also with low level stuff. Wirth developed Modula, then Oberon.
These were so radical changes that Pascal was killed.
- Small changes can be devastating. Example: why does XHTML
backslashes in hr or br tags.
These are completely unnecessary requirements. XHML did not take off
because who would want to wade through thousands of pages
in HTML written during the last decade and make those changes?
- Too hasty evolution can be a disaster: Example: I'm convinced that it
was the accelerated evolution of Java which essentially killed it
as a valuable tool for the web. What language architects often
are note aware of are the existing resources, books, libraries.
In the case of Java, applets written only a few years ago
suddenly would no more compile because of depreciated language.
Suppose a educator created a Java applet 8 years ago. She has long moved on
to other projects. The language changes. The tool is lost. We can see
that in many examples, where Java applets work different on different
browsers and operating systems. In the case of Java for the web,
Flash has taken over. Now Adobe might make the same error again,
and evolve it too fast. Sorry: a flash 13 plugin needed.
- The German language reform is an other example of
intellectual arrogance. It produced a lot of
controversy.
Language architects have to take into account the huge library
of existing books, textbooks etc, which become obsolete or
awkward after a change of language.
Evolution of languages is nothing bad. But it has to happen so gently that one can adapt and in such a way that old things are still readable and that porting of most existing material to the new level can be realized in time.Making buildings accessible during any further development is already mandated by law in the United States. Extending this requirement to websites is reasonable.
I believe that this is a response to the actions of the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) (X)HTML 5 and to Bjoern Hoehrmann leaving the W3C QA.
So it's not a new pie-in-the-sky idea like XForms or XHTML2, but something much more likely to be useful to web developers that need to work in a world where IE is (still) the biggest fish.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
we - 'not you', 'us' the other 'we'. there are numerous ways of pulling content and putting it online in an interactive manner.
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Not only that, but you can easily mix XML dialects in the same file. You can put XHTML, MathML and SVG in the same document, and then have them all exposed through the same DOM tree to your scripting. Sounds like a good reason for XHTML to me...
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"We" need xhtml, "we" pull web pages into XML parse trees all the time as part of our jobs.
Exactly. It makes life simpler when HTML is actually XHTML as we can use common, standard APIs and parsers and
get predictable, deterministic results. Accepting kludgey, broken, badly formed HTML and trying to parse it
is a much worse proposition than getting well formed XML.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
If your web site is part of a federal contract, it has to be compliant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
As it is, html serves its purpose
That's a ridiculously short-sighted assertion along the lines of: "The world only needs five computers" and "nobody will ever need more than 640 K of RAM." The Web is the most important application development platform in the history of computing and HTML still lacks some form and navigation widgets that were common on graphical platforms 15 years ago. These limitations mean that sites are full of accessibility and security-destroying Javscript.
I use HTML 4.01 Transitional in my pages. Why? I am the only developer, so i develop my pages semantically and leave the layout to CSS.
So why not use strict? It is illegal in strict to have a target attribute in anchors, for example. No iframes (if used wisely, they can be intuitive)
XHTML doesn't give me enough reasons to migrate, although i did use it for my old thesis project.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
For one, that means that it's difficult to process HTML pages with semantic tools. One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web [amazon.com] ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
Well said. This is exactly why we need XHTML.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
People use HTML (not always in the way it is supposed to be used of course..), and people generally don't use xhtml
There are 2 ways to deal with this if this isn't what you want..
1. Make HTML even more crappy and hope people stop using it (they will, in favor of the older less crappy version of course)
2. Make using XHTML easier and more attractive.
I don't see how you accomplish 2. by changing HTML
Yeah, technically the XHTML 1.0 spec allows to send documents with the text/html mime type, but please don't do it!
If you care about standards and want something readable by IE (which isn't always necessary), then better HTML 4 Strict than some XHTML Transitional sent as text/html (Gecko uses Standards Mode for the former and Quirks Mode for the latter).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
This may seem like a stupid question, but how else did we go from HTML 1.0 to 4.01 without the standard being 'incrementally evolved'?
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
One of the best texts I've read on this subject can be found here... http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
HTML doesn't serve its purpose, because it doesn't mandate a lack of separation between content and style.
Maybe HTML doesn't serve your purposes, but it certainly serves my purposes.
Personally, I couldn't care less about fuzzy concepts like the separation of content and style; I just want to be able to write webpages in nano which look decent to most visitors.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I take it you are not a programmer? Have you ever tried to parse a website for content? With HTML you are stuck with REGEX or some such hack, xml is simple, you run it through an xml parser and bam, you have a complete DOM tree.
I don't think their argument in that link is any stronger than "if you use the text mimetype, and then switch to the xml mimetype later, you'll get mad at xhtml. Therefore don't use xhtml".
The W3C page suggests that the xml mimetype is preferred, but that text is acceptible. I'd still argue that writing strict (and good!) xhtml 1.0 for now makes the transition later to 1.1 easier. If you write html 4.01 now, you'll have a slightly longer climb.
Jeremy
Exactly. Assembly works, why bother with so called "high level" languages?
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
Develop a few *actual* applications where the XML-compliance of XHTML is actually useful in an observable way, and everybody will start producing XHTML compliant code for new websites, lest they be left out from a new revolution on the web.
As long as the benefits are just hypothetical (with XHTML somebody could develop useful parsing applications based on commodity XML parsers), try actually developing some such apps that generate real, observable value today, and you'll start convincing people who don't care about standards for their own sake.
I do generally try to stick to XHTML 1.0, since I care about standards and ease of parsing, but the majority of people don't, and they are the target audience the W3C needs to work on convincing.
I'm looking forward to improvements to the validators. Especially a better differentiation between different types of errors.
When troubleshooting old web pages, it is quite annoying to have to wade through hundreds of 'required attribute "ALT" not specified.' or 'there is no attribute "HEIGHT".' to find the real cause of problems, like 'document type does not allow element "TABLE" here; missing one of "TH", "TD" start-tag.'.
Also, when trying to explain to clients why their old web site is crap and needs to be redesigned before it becomes practical to do small changes, a link to the validator page could be useful. We could say something like "see, it is full of bugs; we need to repair the chassis before we can start the paint job". But for that, I would rather show a link to a page with 10 bad structural errors, than to a page with 200 'required attribute "ALT" not specified.' which will not be taken seriously.
You don't need anything more than a simple text editor like nano to write XHTML, either. And if you even know how to use nano, then the usual excuse that it's too difficult to close tags after you open them (the only big hassle in XHTML) probably doesn't apply.
"XHTML is, however, a lot harder to write. HTML tolerates a lot of errors, XHTML technically tolerates none, though browsers usually overlook this.
It sounds like the adoption of XHTML is in the best interest of the professional IT community. As a more arcane and precise skill set, you will get fewer amateurs, easier maintenace, and be able to charge more for your services.
We are all just people.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
IE7 still doesn't support XHTML.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Without iframes (currently supported by IE, Firefox and Opera, at least) 4.01 Strict isn't workable for most sites that rely on third-party content for advertising -- eg, ads from Amazon. And that's a large chunk of the web.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
For 99% of the websites, all you need to know as 'the difference from HTML' is: http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp
That is for XHTML 1.0, though. XHTML 1.1, and the remaining 1% of websites which go deep into further XHTML functionality are a different matter.
i am a developer and i have ben hired to do many parsings of remote sites. I did it with php, and wrote my own routines based on the requirements. i never needed a whole standard changed to do a parsing.
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I'm pretty sure that you can't show me a single example of a page that validates as both XHTML and HTML, so you are sending invalid content under at least one of the mime types. And you are discriminating against non-IE users, because all the XML parsers currently used require the full data, while HTML parsers start parsing (and displaying) the page as soon as they can. And don't tell me "no problems reported": web browsers can display almost any crap you can put together, if you use standard DOCTYPEs and/or XHTML mimetype try validating your pages first.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
> Isn't XHTML suppose to be a transition path to XML?
No, no, and still no. It is a specific application of XML.
I've always thought of HTML as Extrementally Involved.
And I am guessing you used regex hacks? What if it had been simpler because people used something easily parsed? Would you oppose the car because the horse is "good" enough?
HTML is dead. It's been superceded by XHTML for years now.
HTML was a good idea with some rough edges. It took XHTML to smooth some of them out. Specs that are less vague, more complete, and leave less to interpretation will fix more problems in the future.
XHTML is simpler than HTML (contrary to popular belief) because the syntax and structure is more consistent than HTML. You don't have to wonder whether you need a closing a tag: all tags get closed. All attributes get quoted. All tag names and attributes are lower case. It's really not that hard; if you don't want to do it because you can't read it anymore (you capitalization whore), that's what syntax highlighting is for. You just have to put forth a tiny bit of effort to make turn these rules into instinct.
There are two reasons why the transition to XHTML hasn't happened:
As long as browsers try to interpret messy markup, few people are going to care. It's the "good enough" attitude. "Quirks mode" is the big bad here. Browsers and visual authoring tools need to tell users that the page they are looking at is non-conformant and warn that it may not behave correctly. No other softare on the planet is as forgiving of the data it handles as web browesers.
If GCC still compiled C code when curly braces, paretheses, and quote marks are omitted at random, how much shittier would all the C code in the world be?
At least the W3C is doing something about the quagmire, but working in parallel is just a waste of time. Let HTML be, it's old and busted. XHTML is the new hotness. The W3C can spew out all the Recommendations (the flimsient of terms) it wants, but no one is going to care unless there's some enforcement at the other end of the line.
One thing the W3C needs to do is get off the semantic web high horse; it's putting the cart before the horse. They need to evangelize correctness, and the semantic web (plus other aspects) will follow naturally.
So, all you so called "developers" and "designers", keep on churning out your HTML 4.01 Transitional pages (or let Dreamweaver do it for you) with bloated table layouts. You'll keep contributing to the problem.
Forcing it down our throats is wrong, in any language, and that's exactly the type of behaviour guaranteed to close a heart, forever. If you have to spend $10,000 to install wheelchair ramps, and not one wheelchair patron ever shows up, have you not wasted your money?
Doing things to "help" 1% of the population, when they don't even use the things we're forced to give them isn't compassion, it's stupidity.
If they USED the wheelchair ramps, I'd be all for them. If the visitors to my web site consisted primarily of blind people, I'd cater to them. But we're being asked by an external source, not our customers, to do things that are expensive but help nobody.
I don't call that compassion at all.
D
You didn't read the document, did you? You've got the W3C's blessing to serve XHTML as text/html, but there are differences in the way Javascript and CSS are processed when it's served on a page as application/xhtml+xml.
And who's fault is that? Certainly not the W3C's. They've been advocating the usage of CSS for style for years. Many of the HTML tags that only provide styling have been marked as deprecated in favor of CSS.
You could argue that they should have outright removed all of the HTML tags that only provide styling, but we all know that won't stop browsers from rendering them for compatibility.
If you really think XHTML is better, think again. While it doesn't support , it still supports , , , , , and more presentational tags. Also, since that strange browser from Redmond doesn't support the proper MIME type, XHTML is rendered as HTML anyway, making the effort useless.
No, the real issue here is bad web designers.
You can separate content and style using just normal HTML anyway, in which case it's perfectly fine to use all the HTML4 shortcuts like "".
Whoops.
"</>"
I think it's great that these guys are trying to improve an already existing standard.
What? They want to take elements away from us? Who the fuck do they think they are, I'm not going to change all the code on my webpage just because they say, "Oh, using <b> is so 1997, we're all using CSS now."
In short, they can pry my <s> tag out of my cold dead hands.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I am curious why there seems to be need to parse web pages. The only thing I can think of is for advertising, or to lift their data to display on another side, or as email bots. Why the huge need to parse other peoples web pages? I am sure their must be some legitimate reason.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Or are you talking about the need to write your own browser?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
nay i did not use anything related to regex. as i said, i always prefer to type my own routines, sometimes even for stuff that has ready made functions built in at php.
actually i am a cautious person, anything that makes some stuff easier may create problems for some other operation. hence, i dont get hasty in rushing in.
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Luckily I can see fine, but to visually impaired users, I would think e.g. menus consisting of images without alt text is a very real problem.
This may seem like a stupid question, but how else did we go from HTML 1.0 to 4.01 without the standard being 'incrementally evolved'?
Well, it sure as heck wasn't through intelligent design!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yes, that was in 2005!!! that's entirely out of line for a modern program. An XHTML page is not valid unless it has the proper header... his compatibility concerns are moot because XHTML does not have a compatibility mode... it's valid or it's not, make the web page authors bite the bullet and release proper code, don't crap out your product because users might not do it right.
So, wait. Webmasters are ignoring XHTML, so they're going to roll out yet another dialect of HTML that forgoes the advantages of XHTML, but slowly becomes XHTML-like, and expect everyone to suddenly flock to it?
Sure, as a webmaster, I can follow XHTML rules for any new page or script I write - for someone who already writes correct HTML, the nuances are not substantial. Tell a webmaster about the existence of the </p> tag and you're a third of the way there. But do they really expect I'm going to go back and rewrite all those pages I wrote back in '99? Where does the W3C get off remotely invalidating something that was correct when people wrote it, and expecting them to "fix" it? As long as browsers will correctly render old HTML, old HTML will persist.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
If God created the mess that is the world in six days, He should need a lot more time to create the mess that is HTML.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
The problem with "What you see is what you get" (html) "is What you see is all you've got" -- Dennis Ritchie
IMOSHO, html evolving into xhtml is the way to go. html doesn't do everything we need and xhtml/xml is too big a step for most people/websites/browsers to make.
The MS "no sue/patent deal" with Novell/Xandros is like the Pope blessing a Jewish wedding
Most people aren't seriously suggesting that all existing websites should be scrapped and redesigned from the ground up. However, if you're creating a new website or redesigning an existing one, imho it's selfish not to spend a little extra effort to make it accessible. It's also rather foolish not to take the opportunity to extend your skillset and improve your CV...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I don't think this is much a matter of wanting to conform to standards, as it is that the majority of web pages out there were probably built before XHTML became popular.
I think most professionals are probably coding in XHTML, whether by hand or by GUI program.
This is going to be one of those slow-adopting things just like everything else because you don't want stuff to break. Look how long it took us to get rid of the PS2-style mouse/keyboard ports on our computers, even though USB has been around for ages now.
-David
he prefers to be more immune to occasionally appearing php function exploits, and prefers to be free as birds whereas other developers have to revisit the work they did to earlier clients checking the possible expoitable functions.
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well, i think is stuff a little bigger would solve most accessibility problems.
Read radical news here
It seems to me the powerhouse developer crowd here will do just fine with whatever state high grade XHTML will be in once MS IE7 gets its act together and renders standards properly (3rd Quarter 2008?) However, the brilliance behind some of the initial design of HTML was that the inclusive concept of the Web only works if *everyone* feels they have a chance to get in on the fun.
Example: Miss Pelling is an assistant school administrator by day, takes care of her family, and plays Hearts on the third thursday of the month. She wants to make a small webpage to list the results of the four Hearts teams in her gaming group. She only has time to study a little HTML about 5 hours a month, and within 3 months her page is up, and a couple months later, she has fixed the worst of the initial goofs and found a nice background her nephew told her about. About in line with her patience level, starting with month 7 her page is just how she likes it, and she gleefully posts her victory.
I support a parallel development of a "Training Version" of HTML that slowly encourages some of the changes that will eventually prove necessary for someone who wants to graduate to XHTML. Many people want to learn comptuter skills in as forgiving an environment as possible. (Don't we always get called upon for "free IT" every time an Adobe PDF locks up the printer?) However badly distorted in Hollywood, Revenge of the Nerds nailed the mood dead-center: As of 1983, computers simply weren't ready for the masses.
I myself am not a professional coder. In my limited recreational time, I'm not interested in fixing obscure errors. I peeked at XHTML twice, and it's too much right now. But I am willing to fix some bad habits incrementally, so that some such year if I get a 3 month sabbatical, I might be able to learn. I think I just stumbled across some remark that says "tags should be in lower case letters". Oh.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Maybe you shouldn't be using such a shitty programming language, then?
PHP + "I write my own text-parsing routines because PHPs may be insecure, but mine definitely aren't" = kook.
My other car is first.
For development, I agree with you completely. Every page I author is written in a real XHTML templating language, but I do not serve XHTML. It's just not ready and serving XHTML as text/html is bad. Moreover, both the Gecko and WebKit developers recommend against serving XHTML and Trident (IE) doesn't support it.
tl;dr: XHTML is good for development, bad for serving and will remain that way till IE6 can be ignored.
No offence, but you just demonstrated your ignorance of the problem. For example, think about how making stuff bigger would help a screen reader parse a page and work out what were common navigational elements and what was actual content, and deliver the content to its blind user.
Accessibility is much more involved than making sure that the partially-sighted can make out the text as they squint at the screen.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
1. XHTML seems to reduce developer chioce rather than 'extend' it
2. disabled wise forget about xhtml.
3. 'new' ie hopefully wont crash with xhtml
4. ? still css issues with ie
I will deepen these points below.
The bbc article (quoted in comments) is rather dubious as xhtml reduces attributes like say description, it would appear the xhtml and section 508 is an 'either or' construct hence why people use 4.01 rather than validated xhtml.
As to 'flash' (see bbc) being the answer blurgh
Problem one: is not not insurmountable, you essentially throw away any old html code, and rethink and then recode the xhtml way since old html is 'bad/evil/something else'.
Problem two: Read the bsi document pas 78, a uk version of 508 - its damn funny these guys could not manage a party in brewery
Problem 3: while new ie might not crash when presented with a page of xhtml, its older sibings dont like it. I suggest the w3c and microsoft part company on any issue.
Meebo (im gateway, one of many im gateways of recent) where using html 4.01 and not xhtml standard - if the minds of meebo (a startup) find xhtml a waste of time?
What does that say about ie and microsoft's involvement in the w3c.
I have an idea. Since XHTML is XML and can be parsed as such (as stated in another post referencing WIKI) why not have the 'important' search engines out there give kudos points to those that use higher DTDs? I am imagining that if a document is valid XHTML, it can be indexed (XPath?, etc) easier and therefore processed with fewer 1s and 0s and with less ambiguity then HTML.
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
If God created the mess that is the world in six days, He should need a lot more time to create the mess that is HTML. Very true. Take a look at one of the shortest valid HTML files which uses a standard doctype:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<title</title>a
If you are only counting the length of the body (ignoring the length of the DTD, then this is shorter if one allows a nonstandard DTD):
<!DOCTYPE title PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<title</title>
Of course those examples are abusing the language, especially shorttag, but still...
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
You know the blink tag is based on AJAX when the Slashdot effect makes its blink rate slow down.
That is the LaTeX attitude in a Word world.
Presentation is everything. Humans are emotional, not logical.
PDF and Flash are damn close to what people want. The main thing holding them back is that they aren't as integrated into the browser as HTML.
I'm pretty unimpressed with what's been coming out of the W3C over the last few years; yes, they cleaned up the specs a little, but they produced a disproportionate amount of junk in the same time and I think most of their new standards have been flops.
I think the problem is that the W3C is trying to invent new stuff rather than standardizing existing practice after the market has decided on something. Unfortunately, that kind of approach not only risks going wrong, it attracts entirely the wrong kind of people to an organization like that.
me evading any possible security loophole does not mean php is shitty.
i said, i am a cautius person as nature, i tend to be ready for anything instead of getting caught unawares.
had my coding language in the main be something else, i would go the same way. truth is that, ANY language gets out in the exploit arena in this or that intervals. php, being something totally open, is much more successful in that respect.
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As someone mentioned upthread, accessibility for the disabled is a lot easier when you can parse XML for content.
nay, actually you have missed my point.
for starters, common navigational elements, with the now long standing tradition of the web, are on the left hand column of the 2 or 3 column web page, with the content being in the middle column in general. almost all internet users are accustomed to this layout. if some designer wants to break too further away from this sometimes boring tradition, well, thats a problem for them.
as for blind users, well, thats actually kinda what i am talking about.
there are stuff in the world that we cant make them fit to each and every people on earth.
do you think it is feasible to try to develop web pages, and leave aside that, god forbid, try to bring standards to the web in order to make blind people able to use internet comparable to a non-blind person ?
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How does 508 require validity?
W3C WCAG 1.0 requires validity at the AA (middle) level.
W3C WCAG 2.0 requires "well formedness" but not validity. The WAI chickened out there.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
I'm unclear as to whether or not you even have a point. Your English is virtually unintelligible.
In an accessible website, it should be possible to increase the size of all text without making the site unusable.
If content is properly separated from presentation using CSS, it should not matter how the web designer chooses to lay out a website, whether in a column format or something more interesting. It doesn't change how the screen reader parses the content, so I'm not sure I get your point. God forbid you're talking about table-based layouts, because that's where a lot of the trouble with accessibility comes from.
There are many needs that I can think off of the top of my head. I was tasked to write a small footprint browser in j2me a number of years back, and xhtml makes it MUCH MUCH simpler to do so. Also, for parsing your own content to apply decorator patterns and what not. Maybe doing a mashup with google maps and your local municipalities crime statistics (scraped from their pages). Tons of reasons.
Why on earth would blind people come and visit your site if you don't support their needs?
Wow, that's...really special.
Let me have your name so that I can make sure that neither I nor any company I ever work for hires you.
what a fantastic, sarcastic and unprofessional demanor you have there.
actually i already have a client base and i myself am picking who hires me at this point.
on top of that i really hate childish and impolite correspondence, so from now on if youll excuse me, ill just ignore you.
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Have you considered piping your html pages thru tidy(1) after you've finished working them out in nano? tidy will take a reasonable html 3.2 file and make it into valid xhtml at no cost to you. If you invoke it with "-clean", it'll even turn all your font tags into valid span tags with css styles embedded.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
im pretty sure my english is quite sufficient.
With css you already have the ability to determine which class text can be enlarged and which not. this is already possible with what html and css we have.
Table layouts are quite fantastic if one knows how to use them and what not to do.
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Try telling that to someone like my father, who has been confined to a wheelchair for the past 11 years. Suppose you were the owner of a restaurant. How would you like to lose business because of your adamant refusal to install a ramp? I cannot even begin to count the number of times he's been in that kind of situation, of whether or not he's going to go somewhere purely on the basis of whether or not he can get inside. Restaurants, stores, theaters, you name it - for every 1 that's accessible, there's probably 2 that aren't.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Actually most who parse other's webpages are in pursuit of stuff barely legal, or slightly illegal. generally it happens to be content retrieval of some sorts, or crawling other pages for data mining, or usage for search-engine like applications. one needs to be careful about those.
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Just because a XHTML document is structurally standards-compliant doesn't mean it's semantically standards-compliant. I can nest everything in DIVs if I wanted to.
It has become clear to me that you're not a native English speaker, so I apologize for harassing you over that.
However:
Table layouts are quite fantastic if one knows how to use them and what not to do.
Between this, and a comment you made further down about writing routines from scratch for parsing websites, it is quite clear that you have no fucking idea what you're talking about with regards to web design, or programming in general.
HTML neither provides logical structure to information nor provides a nice way to create rich applications. It was originally made to put near plain-text with hyperlinks online and that is pretty much all it's good for. It was a minor improvement over Gopher. Switching to XHTML + CSS does help a lot but it still is a pretty crappy solution. I'd rather they create a new format for the web, without all the pointless hold overs, that makes it easy to keep information, layout, and function as discrete components that can easily be modified or alternated individually. HTML was good because it was simple and just worked which is what you need to get a technology going but eventually you have to make something that works well if you want a concept to keep growing.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I've noticed that MSIE tends to render (valid) XHTML by just displaying the raw XML. I'd imagine that that's quite a barrier to adoption. Removing the DOCTYPE and avoiding CDATA sections seems to help, presumably because Explorer just assumes it's HTML in that case. But then it doesn't validate, of course. Also, what extension should be used for local files (e.g. documentation) if Windows users must be able to double-click the files to read them?
try phonenitics for b u r g h
who do I talk to at slashdot ?.
btw: i migrated a site from 'bad' html to xhtml so its doing it rather than just talking about it. If your flash fanboy/ or ie fan then please get well soon
The tag.
It's actually better to use HTML, even after all these years of xHTML in the wild.
All the hand wringing... really!
As long as there are window dresser's and make-up artists we'll continue to see XHTML-type evolutions. Missing are the journalists, librarians, ethnographers, anthropologists, etc... who could actually massage *content* into higher order contexts rather than reaching for new formats, colors, bells and whistles.
This is good, because it shows that capitalism works. The businesses that install the ramps get the business. If it's a lot of business, everyone would install ramps. If it's very little business (as I think), the people who install ramps will lose.
I'm not against installing ramps if company owners think they will benefit. I'm very much against the government putting a gun to your head and saying "Install ramps -- OR ELSE!", or people being allowed to sue businesses for not having ramps.
D
Does a good enough job for me, is accepted by all the major browsers, is an accepted standard, keeps content and style separate, and doesn't require as big a change from HTML transitional (tag soup) as there is going to XHTML. Not to mention that IE still doesn't handle XHTML properly, and as far as I'm, concerned, there just aren't enough reasons to change to XHTML.
One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
I think believing XHTML would improve on things is a bit naive. Having a page that is nothing but divs and spans is not an improvement over having a bunch of nested tables. And, yes, that would be the reality of an XHTML web.
I'm not a believer in the semantic web. As I understand it, the project is about designing a set of web languages so people can encode all semantic value in a way that allows computers to understand it. The idea is to iteratively improve these languages until we can encode semantic value in a way that is as meaningful to a computer as it is a to a human, and that is standardized so that all tools can make use of the same body of knowledge, thereby sharing that knowledge. This idea seems patently misguided. The only sensible way to make computers understand meaning is through automated learning. There is too much knowledge in the world for us to have to hold their hands. As long as we're forced to encode meaning, we won't be able to rely on computers to understand us in all real-life situations, meaning that anything that is truly mission critical won't be able to make use of this brave new world. In short, I don't expect the semantic web to produce anything that couldn't have been produced more easily without it.
Just because a XHTML document is structurally standards-compliant doesn't mean it's semantically standards-compliant. I can nest everything in DIVs if I wanted to.
And even if you didn't, what semantic value gets encoded into XHTML that is really useful anyway? For automated TOC and index production I can see it being useful. But for actually extracting any of the useful data of a document I can't see it helping much if it is XHTML.
You're probably not as smart as you think.
:)
:)
Every day I see websites, blogs, wikis, forums, and other such software all claiming "XHTML compliance". And sure, for the most part, many of them are well formed and run throught the w3 parser just fine.
HOWEVER, the vast majority of them are _not_ compliant!
Why is this? While the _markup_ is fine, the content is not being sent with the correct _mime type_, invalidating the document before parsing can even begin.
You see, the vast majority of XHTML documents are sent with the text/html header. Think of the mime type as being like an envelope that the document is sent inside.* The browser, when it gets the envelope, decides what parser it is going to use to process the contents inside. And it sees text/html, and sends it straight off to the tag soup parser, the _HTML_ parser, NOT the XHTML one.
The relevant standards show that unless you are serving "HTML compatible" XHTML (this is XHTML 1.0 transitional), you are in violation of the standards by serving XHTML as text/html. And since everyone's favourite web browser, IE6 (and 7), do not support proper XHTML mime types, you're stuck with at most XHTML 1.0 transitional.
And then, given the problems outlined with serving XHTML as HTML anyway, you may as well just use HTML 4 strict or transitional (if you want iframes).
So what does this have to do with this issue? Well, sure the vast majority of websites on the 'net do not use XHTML. But maybe that's partly because the user agent space simply isn't ready for it. Fix the user agents, then the supposed XHTML software out there can become compliant, and from there you may see more people make the transition.
Note: I'm not in any way defending _all_ of the websites out there that don't use XHTML. Just some of them
* With apologies to Martyn Smith, whom I borrowed the analogy from
Real men don't write sigs
Jesus, how hard is it to change from HTML to XHTML? Learn CSS (no hard task), get rid of stuff like frames and tables, and HTML Tidy.
I'm going to go against the grain here and (sort of) agree with you. I think that provisions need to be made for the handicapped, but I do think that we go overboard. In the town that I grew up in, they have a 2-story borough hall that was built in the 50's with no elevator. The place badly needed a renovation, but they were hung up by the fact that if they did ANY significant work to the place, they would need to install an elevator which would add considerable cost to the project.
:)
What had they done since the 1950's when a handicapped person showed up for a council meeting? Several men that were present would carry the wheelchair up the one flight of stairs. This cost the town exactly $0, and the handicapped person got to attend the council meeting. Yes, there are ALWAYS enough fit men present during council/zoning meetings, and nothing else really happens on the 2nd floor.
Eventually, the town bit the bullet and just installed the damn elevator... but what a waste of money. My town was fortunate in that it was quite wealthy... I imagine that there are towns that simply never upgrade their buildings because of laws like this. It's called an unfunded mandate, and in general I am opposed to them. If the state wants an elevator, then they should pay for a stinkin' elevator.
That said, the town has long made the first floor accessible by installing ramps. I don't think that installing ramps is a big issue for most businesses or governments. I mean, depending on your business, you probably want the place to be stroller-accessible anyway. There are some businesses with ramps that make me roll my eyes, though. There was an indoor skateboard park outside of Philadelphia with a handicap ramp
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I love all the new features and functionality that have been coming to us incrementally over the years - css, xml, xhtml, etc - to make life easier and more organized for a web developer. But the most frustrating part is that there will always be a huge base of software/systems only using the 'old' way of doing things. The only way I've been able to cope without losing my sanity is through 'progressive enhancement' techniques. The basic idea is that a web site starts out with the base level and builds up on that in a completely user transparent way. One example is with javascript on/off. Start by displaying a JS neutral site and then have a non-JS browser invisible tag that 'turns on' JS features and 'turns off' the non-JS components of a page. Perhaps these techniques can be used for future enhancements coming down from W3C
Vicito | The Group Messenger
1) Make a new proposed Standard.
2) Hope everyone accepts it.
(everyone rejects it)
3) Modify current standard to force people to accept it.
What's the point of a proposed standard if they won't accept rejection?
Have you read my journal today?
The <object> tag.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<object height="400" width="400" data="http://www.amazon.co.uk/" type="text/html"></object>
</body>
</html>
"This page is accessing information that is not under its control. This poses a security risk. Do you want to continue?"
Welcome to the wonderful world of Internet Explorer.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
No, XHTML 1.0 Strict is valid with a text/html header, however, it's not recommended.
That's what'a missing, a decent editor for XHTML that is:
- WYSIWYG (not everyone 'gets' style tags)
- Low Cost
- Cross Platform
- and easy to use
Many people are still using the likes of Claris Home Page, PageMill, Hotdog, etc. mainly because there are no good entry level web editors in thier price range or skill set anymore.
Same thing with ODF it may be a better standard but common people need to have access to it.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
when you use mime type text/html instead of xml the browsers that properly support XHTML have trouble with embedded CSS, SVG, and MathML because it's not using the XML parser because you "cheated". One specific vendor's broken implementation is preventing all the rest from moving forward. In the IE blog post they mention having "server side" check before sending the page.. .what a load of Bullocks!!
Set the width of a div in proportion to the total document width, then add equal margin space on each side. Voila.
Suppose you were the owner of a restaurant. How would you like to lose business because of your adamant refusal to install a ramp?
What an absurd question. Are you suggesting that there are restaurant owners that say to themselves "oh, I don't want to do something - I wish the government would pass a law to make me!"
A restaurant owner who didn't want to install a ramp would (by definition) be OK with the loss of business from people who couldn't enter their establishement (because if they *weren't* OK with it, they would build the ramp.
(For the record, I think that laws mandating accessibility are a good idea - it's just that your train of thought appears to have become derailed.)
Figures.
And let me guess, it doesn't bitch about <iframe> ?
See the handful of tags where it says "Allowed HTML" when you are posting to Slashdot? I seem to recall there being some suggestion that things like b for bold were discouraged, and that we are supposed to use stylesheets instead. NO WAY. Let me repeat that. NO WAY. Why? Because these handful of core tags are simple and easy to remember. If you start forcing people to use complicated stuff, we are just going to end up with more abominations like WikiText and WBBScript, which just re-invent the simple tags that HTML already has. Yuck. Please don't do that.
OTOH, if they are not talking about taking away my simple little tags, then sorry for the rant.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Clearly the Semantic Web is not targeted at people who have difficulty writing xhtml.
It is targeted at groups who have valuable information to exchange in a very flexible manner. For those people, the Semantic Web is taking off. Think mashups. Think databases.
What the world needs is a programming language platform that:
HTML then could simply be a hypertext sub-language of this language, and there would be no problem to extend it in arbitrary new ways.
Lol. I don't think that word means what you think it means...
`Bollocks', not log-hauling-bovines...
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
And it is clear to me that you are of the zealot type that sticks to mainstream or common beliefs at whatever cost. tables are already utilized in a huge ratio of the internet in sites serving a wide spectrum of services, and if done correctly takes off much load of the development.
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are we going to get concerns about the text mode browser and develop accordingly ? how much of the even current features of html, css or - god forbid - javascripts, (i dont dare even mention things like ajax) the text mode browsers support anyways ?
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This will mean at least one more "background color" parameter with a different spelling and syntax. Probably will depend upon its location within the HTML page.
The HTML language is a gawdawful language for doing anything. And to top it off, it's been modified, added to, plugged into, and garbaged up relentlessly by people who apparently have no concept of what a language really needs to display web pages.
I'll wait for the whole Internet structure to be torn down and replaced with something logical and therefore easy to use and program.
Fata viam invenient.
One of my favourite recent reads was Snow Crash , but I don't expect the Metaverse to happen anytime soon.
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That's not what the word valid means. I understand why it's a bad idea, and I generally use application/xhtml+xml, but that doesn't change the fact that the XHTML spec says that text/html is a valid application type for XHTML documents. Secondly, you obviously can't use text/html when you're not using a purely [X]HTML document. That's why application/xhtml+mathml (I think that's right...) and kin were invented.
If you even bothered looking at the book I cited, which can be found in any good university library, you would see that it's full of examples of current real-world uses of Semantic Web technology. Actually, as the first edition appeared in 2004 IIRC, the uses are already a couple of years old. The Semantic Web is already here, if not widespread. On the other hand, the fictional universe of your novel, a complete 3D world accessed by lasers shining on special eyeglasses, is nowhere in sight.
Yeah, it has no problem with iframe, although I seem to recall it bitches about those too if they're below a certain height and width, as people were using them to surreptitiously inject attacks.
From what I gather it's because IE treats all object tags as potential ActiveX components, which in turn is probably due to the browser's handling of MIME types.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
I reminded of Ayn Rand's "Anthem". This is sounds sooo similar to the difficulty of the story's postulate that the society had difficulty upgrading from torches to candles due to the approval process.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
I'm a little late in replying, but, I'm still going to :)
First off, I do not believe (X)HTML is still the way to go for web. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Flash advocate (*eek*) but it's simply horrible to do anything useful. I'd personally like to see a more 'software-development' approach to these things, but hey, that's me.
Anyway, IMHO, very bad and very good comments have been made for both HTML and XHTML. Yes, HTML 4.01 will get the job done in many cases, and no, XHTML isn't properly supported in the most-used browser: IE. What strikes me as odd as that it's seen as so either/or.
You can implement most XHTML things perfectly in HTML (as in, browsers will display it properly) and it does, very much, improve readability and maintainability. What makes me scream "wtf?!?!!" the most is people who disagree with that. Using lowercase tags, using " to encase attributes (and doing attributes the XHTML way), closing all tags, strict doctype, etc. It's just so much easier in the end, get used to it and you will not want to go back! All popular browsers will accept HTML formed like this perfectly. Since I switched to this (ofcourse including all the CSS and such, though CSS is still lacking in so many ways), development has actually gotten a lot easier, and my pages have the added bonus of being perfectly parseable by any XML parser. So no, it's not 100% HTML, it's not 100% XHTML, but it's nearly XHTML and looks good in HTML, cross-browser and all.
In the end though, it's still not 'how the web should be'.