Doubtful... Any fresh download will get a good enough browser
And why are there fresh downloads of browsers? Because someone somewhere has fixed a bug or two. What is a bug? Something that causes a deviation from expectation. What is expectation? Display valid and compliant content.
You missed a line: "while I agree that there are too many cases of webpage developers stressing design over content, there are other cases where the design augments the content"
Its because I am not convinced that design can add anything to good content other than eye candy. If the content sucks, dressing it up doesn't make it any better.
70% of my NS users are on 4.x or below, which poorly handles CSS.
Rather high usage for an Internet web-site. Unless its something like an OS/2-user focused web-site (guessing by your identifying URL).
Is Netscape 4 a good enough reason to prevent standardising and making content inaccessible? In your case, you'd need a rewrite of your websites when Netscape 4 finally disappears (happy 5th birthday NN4!) to achieve compliance.
Its in these sort of situations that a technique like Dancing with Crawlers come in handy. Since its a good idea to separate content from presentation, its feasible to deliver compliant HTML and CSS presentation to all user agents (including our friend Googlebot), but just for Netscape 4 adopt a tables based layout.
Templating with good scripting languages like Perl and PHP make this technique useful, and advantageous benefitting both from compliant and accessible websites and the Netscape 4 dillema.
I never understood how WaSP's suggestion of preventing users from seeing a requested page and redirecting them to a holding "upgrade your browser" page was making the content more accessible.
At least they are on the right track now by focusing on getting web authors and developers to create standards-compliant and valid markup.
The web is about content, not browsers. It is the content that people want. If a browser finds itself unable to display valid and compliant content, they'll quickly fix their browsers.
Three elements is not "many many". Quite a lot of the presentational elements have already been deprecated in favour of stylesheets. Elements i and b can be replaced by "non-presentational" emphasis and strong.
Re:It's a lobby for style sheets
on
Return of the WaSP
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· Score: 3, Informative
Why should there be "abstraction" at the presentation level? It might help the content creator, but it doesn't do much for the reading end.
Tables are meant for tabular data - no-one is saying not to use tables for tabular data. What they are saying is not to use tables for _layout_.
Given a table - how do you tell whether its for layout or tabular data? I doubt you could always get it right.
adding a layer of abstraction doesn't help when extracting the meaning of the content
The meaning of the content is in its document strucutre, not in whether its left or right aligned. Presentation just makes content look presentable, not add meaning to it.
a h1 element will tell you more about some text than a font-size.
Decoding programs have to expand out all the style sheet stuff
No they don't. Presentation doesn't add anything to the content. How a heading is displayed gives no more significant information than knowing a piece of text is a heading.
The only time your statement could ever be slightly accurate is if people insist on using tag-soup instead of logical HTML markup.
Yes, you can make something _look_ like a heading by sticking it in a paragraph and alter the attributes of that paragraph to _look_ like a heading. There's no point in doing so, since the structure of the elements doesn't describe the structure of the content adequately -- that's tag soup.
Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure
Disagree. Abstracting the presentation (those bits that don't add value to the content structure but only describe style attributes) will clarify the geometry of a document right down to a clean hierachial list of nodes that are easily traversed.
Parsing an XML file is much easier than a random tag soup. And it can be done with standard freely available tools.
Speaking as someone who decodes elaborate HTML material with programs
These programs will be common accessories to the normal web user (transparent to them of course), precisely because of the direction WaSP and others want to go.
the different browser interpretations of a particular piece of HTML has always been a problem and, though better, it is still an issue.
That's not a problem, that's the benefit a truely accessible world wide web offers. Its only seen as a "problem" by designers that insist that it is they that control the presentation to users.
When markup is authored to leverage the content rather than its layout, then the difference between interpretations is to the benefit of the end-users.
No irony in that statement at all. Standards compliance does not indicate CSS _has_ to be implemented or used.
The idea is that HTML is given to the relevant user agent, and if they want to use a style sheet to "enhance" the layout, they can. User can also decide to ignore all web-author specified styling.
how the heck would you set up your layout without tables?
Cascading Style Sheets. HTML was meant to represent the structure of the content, not its presentation. Style Sheets are the suggestions of layout and style.
I also don't understand how they can claim that web designers should design a single page that can be used both on desktops and handhelds. OK, maybe if it's just plain text that would work. But any more complicated layout is going to have to be redesigned completely for a handheld.
That's because you are stuck in the mindset that layout is done in the HTML. By moving layout suggestions to the stylesheet, there's a clear seperation between the content and the layout/presentation. That means the same content can be displayed on both devices, the browser making full use of the style-sheet, while the PDA uses a minimal or no stylesheet at all. The HTML just encapsulates the structure of the content (in that _this_ is a heading, _that_ is a paragraph), while the style sheet describes how to display it (headings should be bold, red and s_so_ big).
By a clear separation, accessibility to an HTML page is increased.
Re:Important not for what they standardize...
on
Return of the WaSP
·
· Score: 1
Went to this w3 validator, and ran it on www.washington.edu. Gives a LOT of stupid errors, such as saying the tag was never opened (yes, is there).
A lot of errors are a result of earlier problems, in your case for starters, the link element is incorrectly terminated with a / (you have specified HTML4.01 Transitional, not any XHTML flavour).
what's wrong with "just reply"? Surely anyone using an email client can click Reply, then Send.
Keep them somewhere where you can access them, since if you are worried about being branded a spammer, do something positive and record accurated when a person signed up and protect yourself.
They can't deny sending you the email if you have the complete email headers. Its like spammers denying sending out email when the headers indicate that it originated from their servers (albeit confirmation emails don't require forged email headers).
Take some proprietary operating system code of a popular GUI based OS.
Now someone finds a backdoor to this, how long does it take for this company to provide a freely available fix?
Now, after the fix is applied, what guarantee is there that the proprietary system doesn't have any more backdoors? There isn't any, but if you sign an NDA you could probably view the source to confirm your suspicions (Shared Source).
How is Shared Source, in this regard, better than Open Source?
Open Source benefits in security measures because of the independance of its white-hat hackers. Microsoft has no department worthy of comparison to these geniuses.
Its funny to note that white-hat hackers are the ones finding these security breaches, and these are published. Its funny to note Open Source arena reacts much quicker in providing patches than Microsoft itself. Its funny we have the freedom to explore whether code is satisfactory for use with Open Source, but this is denied to us by proprietary code.
Open Source doesn't have any NDA leaks, everything is in the open and accountable. MS use contractual means to protect their source, how often does a criminal or terrorist abide by a contract?
just because it's MS platform only doesn't mean it can't be open source
Certain MS SDK's have a clause that prevents it being used in open source development. IIRC it is against the EULA of Windows XP to use VNC to remotely control a that PC.
So are you absolutely sure your above statement holds, and what are you basing this statement on?
I hate spam as much as anyone. However, I'm concerned about the burden of proof issue. Anyone who has operated a large opt-in list knows that some percentage of users don't remember opting in
A proper opt-in can only be done by asking for an email confirmation, so keep all your email confirmations, and there's the proof you need that they did indeed opt-in.
This quite simply makes chess a finite subject. Large and complex yess. But still finite. What this means is that eventualy we will be able to build a computer that can analize every chess move all the way to the eventual end of the game in order to NEVER make a move that can result in it lusing the game.
Analysing every chess move is inefficient, since quite a number of them would transpose into already seen positions. As a result the number of positions would be smaller than the total number of chess moves in every position. Now considering that the number of possible chess positions is more than the number of atoms in the universe, you are going to need a rather unique storage method that can store millions of positions per individual atom to come close to completely solving chess.
So you are going to have to trim corners somewhere. Where? Take those positions that are unlikely to occur - how do you figure that out? By evaluating each position, which again would require you to analyse every single position.
Chess is a mathematical nightmare. Complete 6 piece endgames already require over 4Gb of storage - how much would a 32 piece endgame cost in comparison?
Yes, chess will be solved. But not in our lifetimes, and possibly by a non-human civilisation.
The Mono folks might be keen on the idea of integrating.NET into GNOME, but the rest of the GNOME community will have to be convinced that incorporating anything from Microsoft into their cherished GNOME is a good idea
What is Mono: a project to create an Open Source implementation of the.NET Development Framework. Note the important word that you've conveniently left out: _Development_ (as in Programming or Writing Code).
What is.NET Development Framework: a new platform for writing software. (Not webservices, not passport, not Hailstorm, not server applicatiosn).
So what do we have left: A runtime environment, a class library, a new language called C#, and a language specification -- and the ability to use other languages, such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, C, C++, Haskell. The documentation for this is available from Ecma as a documented standard -- it just _happens_ to be submitted by Microsoft. Microsoft has submitted the specifications of C#, the runtime, the metadata and the other various bits of the.NET development platform to the ECMA for standarization.
Integrating the.net development environment into Gnome is exactly the same as implementing it in any other language, such as C. Note that you can write Gnome applications in Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, C - so why is it a problem writing an application in a standardised language like C# ?
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button.
The "Just Hit Delete" argument does not hold water. The spam problem is more than just cluttering up an inbox. It is called spam for a very good reason (based on the Monty Python sketch where Vikings were drowning out conversation with their Spam song). With spam on the increase, you have a less and less chance of being able to send email to and receive email from others. Yeah, you'll get your fair dose of spam, but that's about it.
What happens with spam is that it rises in volume (pun intended - both loudness and quantity), which then blocks out legitimate conversation. Notice that spam runs tend to be in the thousands, and with lists of 50 million email addresses - whether valid or not - it takes up a significant portion of bandwidth (and even more so on non-existant email addresses).
Once the spam email arrives in your inbox, the most significant damage has already been done. Network congestions, mail servers falling down - there is a serious risk of legitimate email not being delivered. How much legit mail have you not received - how do you measure that?
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered
Absolutely. You have the right to choose - but how do you get to choose what email you want to receive. You have the choice between a spam and a legit email - only one can get through. Surely you'd want the legit email? So why can't I have that choice? By filtering out spam, there's a much better chance of my preferred legit email getting through.
All that blocking open relays does is a tradeoff. I'm happy for my service provider to do this, so I continue my subscription to them, because it results in a tradeoff that the mail I want will get delivered - it is my email box.
Spam is destructive, both financially and architecturally. Its a lot more than mere line-items in your mailbox. It is the fundamental problem that will prevent the web from being a place of free expression and collaboration.
From past experience, advocates of the "Just Hit Delete" argument don't understand the real damage spam causes. They just see the list of entries in an inbox, they don't see the vast quantities of email that don't arrive.
Hence the advice of running your own mail server is probably the only way you'll understand the seriousness of the problem.
Where do you draw the line between valid HTML and tag soup? Tag soup being the constructs used to layout a page visually (layout tables, br's, empty paragraphs) with tags that hide the true document structure.
Its easy enough getting an HTML page to validate correctly, but if the tags do not accurately describe the document structure - thats tag soup. This makes pages useless outside of a GUI browser context.
Slashdot Mirror
Doubtful ... Any fresh download will get a good enough browser
And why are there fresh downloads of browsers? Because someone somewhere has fixed a bug or two. What is a bug? Something that causes a deviation from expectation. What is expectation? Display valid and compliant content.
Then try bgcolor/background/text/link/alink/vlink for many many
These are not elements, they are attributes which have been deprecated because there are CSS equivalents that should be used.
What information is clearly emphasis, and not strong?
The sort of information that clueless website authors who can't tell the difference between elements and attributes need constant reminding of.
You missed a line:
"while I agree that there are too many cases of webpage developers stressing design over content, there are other cases where the design augments the content"
Its because I am not convinced that design can add anything to good content other than eye candy. If the content sucks, dressing it up doesn't make it any better.
70% of my NS users are on 4.x or below, which poorly handles CSS.
Rather high usage for an Internet web-site. Unless its something like an OS/2-user focused web-site (guessing by your identifying URL).
Is Netscape 4 a good enough reason to prevent standardising and making content inaccessible? In your case, you'd need a rewrite of your websites when Netscape 4 finally disappears (happy 5th birthday NN4!) to achieve compliance.
Its in these sort of situations that a technique like Dancing with Crawlers come in handy. Since its a good idea to separate content from presentation, its feasible to deliver compliant HTML and CSS presentation to all user agents (including our friend Googlebot), but just for Netscape 4 adopt a tables based layout.
Templating with good scripting languages like Perl and PHP make this technique useful, and advantageous benefitting both from compliant and accessible websites and the Netscape 4 dillema.
I never understood how WaSP's suggestion of preventing users from seeing a requested page and redirecting them to a holding "upgrade your browser" page was making the content more accessible.
At least they are on the right track now by focusing on getting web authors and developers to create standards-compliant and valid markup.
The web is about content, not browsers. It is the content that people want. If a browser finds itself unable to display valid and compliant content, they'll quickly fix their browsers.
"here's a page with a masthead, nav, footer, and we've built it all into a table"
Its not the browsers fault at all that web developers are using the wrong constructs. Tables are for presenting tabular data, not layout. Stylesheets are to be used for laying out content.
Your argument falls flat purely because you insist on using tables for purposes it was not intended for.
NS can have trouble with 1 pixel high table cells
What's a one-pixel high table cell adding to the value and context of the content -- nothing.
Why would someone have a table cell one pixel high for displaying tabular data? If you need a pixel extra for your padding, use a stylesheet.
Using CSS to suggest a layout is a standard technique. The tools are there to create the layouts you need - use them.
Three elements is not "many many". Quite a lot of the presentational elements have already been deprecated in favour of stylesheets. Elements i and b can be replaced by "non-presentational" emphasis and strong.
Why should there be "abstraction" at the presentation level? It might help the content creator, but it doesn't do much for the reading end.
Tables are meant for tabular data - no-one is saying not to use tables for tabular data. What they are saying is not to use tables for _layout_.
Given a table - how do you tell whether its for layout or tabular data? I doubt you could always get it right.
adding a layer of abstraction doesn't help when extracting the meaning of the content
The meaning of the content is in its document strucutre, not in whether its left or right aligned. Presentation just makes content look presentable, not add meaning to it.
a h1 element will tell you more about some text than a font-size.
Decoding programs have to expand out all the style sheet stuff
No they don't. Presentation doesn't add anything to the content. How a heading is displayed gives no more significant information than knowing a piece of text is a heading.
The only time your statement could ever be slightly accurate is if people insist on using tag-soup instead of logical HTML markup.
Yes, you can make something _look_ like a heading by sticking it in a paragraph and alter the attributes of that paragraph to _look_ like a heading. There's no point in doing so, since the structure of the elements doesn't describe the structure of the content adequately -- that's tag soup.
Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure
Disagree. Abstracting the presentation (those bits that don't add value to the content structure but only describe style attributes) will clarify the geometry of a document right down to a clean hierachial list of nodes that are easily traversed.
Parsing an XML file is much easier than a random tag soup. And it can be done with standard freely available tools.
Speaking as someone who decodes elaborate HTML material with programs
These programs will be common accessories to the normal web user (transparent to them of course), precisely because of the direction WaSP and others want to go.
The Semantic Web is just an extension of the WWW.
the different browser interpretations of a particular piece of HTML has always been a problem and, though better, it is still an issue.
That's not a problem, that's the benefit a truely accessible world wide web offers. Its only seen as a "problem" by designers that insist that it is they that control the presentation to users.
When markup is authored to leverage the content rather than its layout, then the difference between interpretations is to the benefit of the end-users.
No irony in that statement at all. Standards compliance does not indicate CSS _has_ to be implemented or used.
The idea is that HTML is given to the relevant user agent, and if they want to use a style sheet to "enhance" the layout, they can. User can also decide to ignore all web-author specified styling.
how the heck would you set up your layout without tables?
Cascading Style Sheets. HTML was meant to represent the structure of the content, not its presentation. Style Sheets are the suggestions of layout and style.
I also don't understand how they can claim that web designers should design a single page that can be used both on desktops and handhelds. OK, maybe if it's just plain text that would work. But any more complicated layout is going to have to be redesigned completely for a handheld.
That's because you are stuck in the mindset that layout is done in the HTML. By moving layout suggestions to the stylesheet, there's a clear seperation between the content and the layout/presentation. That means the same content can be displayed on both devices, the browser making full use of the style-sheet, while the PDA uses a minimal or no stylesheet at all. The HTML just encapsulates the structure of the content (in that _this_ is a heading, _that_ is a paragraph), while the style sheet describes how to display it (headings should be bold, red and s_so_ big).
By a clear separation, accessibility to an HTML page is increased.
the next BLINK tag
Flash -- if Macromedia's Usability drive doesn't take off.
Went to this w3 validator, and ran it on www.washington.edu. Gives a LOT of stupid errors, such as saying the tag was never opened (yes, is there).
A lot of errors are a result of earlier problems, in your case for starters, the link element is incorrectly terminated with a / (you have specified HTML4.01 Transitional, not any XHTML flavour).
W3 Link element spec
Not much point specifying one HTML recommendation and following another!
Disable ActiveX scripting too, otherwise you'll hit an IFrame with a src of a gopher URL.
They should do that to the tossers that author "Internet Explorer only" websites. Then the rest of us can have some decent content instead.
At M$ they have a team of 500 code monkeys working on it
And they'll probably ignore the complete works of Shakespeare when its produced by bitching how it doesn't compile.
Now you have to disable javascript entirely, or hope you have a "block javascript redirection" option.
what's wrong with "just reply"? Surely anyone using an email client can click Reply, then Send.
Keep them somewhere where you can access them, since if you are worried about being branded a spammer, do something positive and record accurated when a person signed up and protect yourself.
They can't deny sending you the email if you have the complete email headers. Its like spammers denying sending out email when the headers indicate that it originated from their servers (albeit confirmation emails don't require forged email headers).
Uhhhh, because the source is open?
Take some proprietary operating system code of a popular GUI based OS.
Now someone finds a backdoor to this, how long does it take for this company to provide a freely available fix?
Now, after the fix is applied, what guarantee is there that the proprietary system doesn't have any more backdoors? There isn't any, but if you sign an NDA you could probably view the source to confirm your suspicions (Shared Source).
How is Shared Source, in this regard, better than Open Source?
Open Source benefits in security measures because of the independance of its white-hat hackers. Microsoft has no department worthy of comparison to these geniuses.
Its funny to note that white-hat hackers are the ones finding these security breaches, and these are published. Its funny to note Open Source arena reacts much quicker in providing patches than Microsoft itself. Its funny we have the freedom to explore whether code is satisfactory for use with Open Source, but this is denied to us by proprietary code.
Open Source doesn't have any NDA leaks, everything is in the open and accountable. MS use contractual means to protect their source, how often does a criminal or terrorist abide by a contract?
Actually, I'd like to see where you got that claim from that MS SDKs can't be used for open source apps.
The SDK for pocket PC apps IIRC.
just because it's MS platform only doesn't mean it can't be open source
Certain MS SDK's have a clause that prevents it being used in open source development. IIRC it is against the EULA of Windows XP to use VNC to remotely control a that PC.
So are you absolutely sure your above statement holds, and what are you basing this statement on?
I hate spam as much as anyone. However, I'm concerned about the burden of proof issue. Anyone who has operated a large opt-in list knows that some percentage of users don't remember opting in
A proper opt-in can only be done by asking for an email confirmation, so keep all your email confirmations, and there's the proof you need that they did indeed opt-in.
This quite simply makes chess a finite subject. Large and complex yess. But still finite. What this means is that eventualy we will be able to build a computer that can analize every chess move all the way to the eventual end of the game in order to NEVER make a move that can result in it lusing the game.
Analysing every chess move is inefficient, since quite a number of them would transpose into already seen positions. As a result the number of positions would be smaller than the total number of chess moves in every position. Now considering that the number of possible chess positions is more than the number of atoms in the universe, you are going to need a rather unique storage method that can store millions of positions per individual atom to come close to completely solving chess.
So you are going to have to trim corners somewhere. Where? Take those positions that are unlikely to occur - how do you figure that out? By evaluating each position, which again would require you to analyse every single position.
Chess is a mathematical nightmare. Complete 6 piece endgames already require over 4Gb of storage - how much would a 32 piece endgame cost in comparison?
Yes, chess will be solved. But not in our lifetimes, and possibly by a non-human civilisation.
What is Mono: a project to create an Open Source implementation of the
What is
So what do we have left: A runtime environment, a class library, a new language called C#, and a language specification -- and the ability to use other languages, such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, C, C++, Haskell. The documentation for this is available from Ecma as a documented standard -- it just _happens_ to be submitted by Microsoft. Microsoft has submitted the specifications of C#, the runtime, the metadata and the other various bits of the
Integrating the
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button.
The "Just Hit Delete" argument does not hold water. The spam problem is more than just cluttering up an inbox. It is called spam for a very good reason (based on the Monty Python sketch where Vikings were drowning out conversation with their Spam song). With spam on the increase, you have a less and less chance of being able to send email to and receive email from others. Yeah, you'll get your fair dose of spam, but that's about it.
What happens with spam is that it rises in volume (pun intended - both loudness and quantity), which then blocks out legitimate conversation. Notice that spam runs tend to be in the thousands, and with lists of 50 million email addresses - whether valid or not - it takes up a significant portion of bandwidth (and even more so on non-existant email addresses).
Once the spam email arrives in your inbox, the most significant damage has already been done. Network congestions, mail servers falling down - there is a serious risk of legitimate email not being delivered. How much legit mail have you not received - how do you measure that?
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered
Absolutely. You have the right to choose - but how do you get to choose what email you want to receive. You have the choice between a spam and a legit email - only one can get through. Surely you'd want the legit email? So why can't I have that choice? By filtering out spam, there's a much better chance of my preferred legit email getting through.
All that blocking open relays does is a tradeoff. I'm happy for my service provider to do this, so I continue my subscription to them, because it results in a tradeoff that the mail I want will get delivered - it is my email box.
Spam is destructive, both financially and architecturally. Its a lot more than mere line-items in your mailbox. It is the fundamental problem that will prevent the web from being a place of free expression and collaboration.
From past experience, advocates of the "Just Hit Delete" argument don't understand the real damage spam causes. They just see the list of entries in an inbox, they don't see the vast quantities of email that don't arrive.
Hence the advice of running your own mail server is probably the only way you'll understand the seriousness of the problem.
Designers ought to write 100%-valid html, period.
Where do you draw the line between valid HTML and tag soup? Tag soup being the constructs used to layout a page visually (layout tables, br's, empty paragraphs) with tags that hide the true document structure.
Its easy enough getting an HTML page to validate correctly, but if the tags do not accurately describe the document structure - thats tag soup. This makes pages useless outside of a GUI browser context.