Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML (and XML derivatives) it causes problems in browsers designed for the sight impaired (and therefore violates Section 508).
It's true that layout tables are to be avoided (it's actually a form of lying: you're indicating tabular relations between the cells and rows of the table, while in reality there are no such relations - that's the main problem).
But, Slashdot is in good company: the W3C themselves use tables for layout! That's really the pits... Just check out "www.w3.org".
Slashdot also uses deprecated tags such as (font) and (b)
by not releasing a patch and instead just removing Gopher support, MS is leaving millions of people still open to vulnerabilities!
I don't really understand why MS should bother releasing a patch to this. That would be totally redundant since the Mozilla team has already made a very nice patch available to all. It's a bit of a download, but not much more so than the usual MS patches, and it's actually worth the download time. It fixes lots of other stuff too, e.g. the 'position:fixed' bug.
I tried out SOT and to my amazement it had no
support for UTF-8, only for UTF-7 and UTF-16 (at
least it claimed support for those two). This
seems ridiculous. UTF-8 is the most important
form of Unicode. Any app that supports Unicode really must do UTF-8 first of all.
Is this a problem in OpenOffice generally? Or is
is something peculiar to SOT?
I've added this to my personal style sheet
(automatically applied to every page):
object, embed {
display: none;
}
This keeps all Flash etc. invisible. On some platforms you can just uninstall the Flash plugin, but that doesn't work in the Linux Mozilla. (The ", embed" part is probably not necessary.)
The file to change is "userChrome.css", and can
be found in the "chrome" directory wherever
Mozilla keeps your personal settings, mail, etc.
And then, whenever you see an ad that is an
ordinary image, you can right click on it, and
check if it comes from some server that probably
only serves ads. If so, right click again, and
choose "Block images from this server".
Using all these tricks, you can get rid of
a lot of ads and other annoying material.
I had to change my font size from large to small, install small fonts, and reboot my computer. Why? Because the button on the web page to submit the resume was off-screen with my standard set-up of large fonts. It was unreachable, as this was one of those pop-up windows that is not resizable and has no scroll bars.
Why didn't you just hit CTRL-N to open the offending page in a new normal window with scrollbars etc.? Seems a lot easier...
Actually the current HTML spec is XHTML 1.0 Revision 2 [w3.org] released last week.
And just why do you exclude XHTML 1.1?
It's actually very unclear which version of
(X)HTML is the current "HTML recommendation". If
it's not XHTML 1.1 then I can't really tell from
the W3C documents which one it is.
Of course XHTML 1.1 is quite unusable in
today's browsers, but that's another matter.
You can't really (fully) use even HTML 2 in
them...
Of course, I can't speak any language other than English, so I personally won't be taking advanta Of course, I can't speak any language other than English, so I personally won't be taking advantage of this. I know other people will though, and thankfully it was easy enough to put in.
ge of this. I know other people will though, and thankfully it was easy enough to put in.
So you think Unicode is just for non-English text? Well, neither ASCII nor Latin 1 is really sufficient for English. There are plenty of characters above 255 in Unicode that are needed or useful for writing English. And then we have foreign names that tend to pop up in English texts with all sorts of funny characters that you need to write even if you only speak English.
I think more effort should be made to have more of these documents available in multiple languages. Many of the documents, such as the Patent FAQ, are only available in english. If this is really an international consortium then it should be treated like one. I'm sure there are plenty of willing translators out there. Or maybe they could at least run it through Babblefish [babblefish.com] for the time being.
Actually I agree completely, in principle, but in this particular case I think the best thing would be to use Bablefish to translate all the current English RAND documents into Russian, and then the Russian into Turkish, and then the Turkish back into English, and then finally publish the result instead of the current docs.
Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
IE's HTML parser is crap, if the HTML is fscked it guesses what it should look like. it shouldn't do that
Well, that it does, and I agree that it would be better if it didn't, but on the other hand Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Opera, ICab, Lynx and most or even all other browsers do the same! So why single out IE?
I'd like to point out that KMeleon, a free Windows clone using the Gecko engine (similar to Galeon), is advancing nicely. The latest version is surprisingly stable (most bugs are in the UI, not the rendering engine) and uses about half as much RAM as 'zilla.
What about i18n support, Unicode, etc. in KMeleonon? Does it include the full Mozilla i18n package (which is pretty impressive)?
As far as I can tell from the website and the pdf documentation (pdf?!) this whole Curl thingy is only about visual presentation: computer screen and print out(?).
Ordinary HTML is not locked to any particular medium. It could just as well be read with a braille reader or a voice browser (or in smelloglyphs by Martians...).
What I meant was that Netscape 5.x is caused by the user agent string of Mozilla, which is what you said (Mozilla/5.0....).
OK. I thought so. But this just underlines how cluelessly user agent strings are being handled, and again how worthless the resulting statistics are. If they don't even know what browsers there are out there, and how they identify themselves, what value will their statistics have?
Actually this kind of statistics has very little value. To the usual problems we can add the clueless handling of the user agent strings. Some report figures for "Netscape". I have no idea if that includes all versions of Netscape browsers. Version 6 is so different it makes no sense to bundle it with version 4.
And then there is Opera which presents itself _by default_ as MSIE 5 with an additional "Opera 5.02" added on at the end. How many just check for MSIE and miss the added "Opera 5.02"? I have seen sniffers that just check for "Opera/" + version number (e.g. Netscapes "Ultimate Browser Sniffer"). They miss "Opera " + version number. Opera can also spoof as Mozilla 5. And some don't report Opera at all, listing perhaps a cathegory "Others". Some _unknown_ part of MSIE (and perhaps of "Netscape" or "Mozilla") is probably Opera in these statistics!
Your "Neighbor Gargling" MP3 would have just as much right to be put up on Napster as any song under the protection of the RIAA. If you did rename For whom the bell tolls to some other name, the RIAA can challenge the song in court. Posting a covered song would likely be challenged as well.
Ok, so say I write and record a song called "My_Own_Song", and register that with me as the copyright-holder, quite legally, and start distributing it as "My_Own_Song.mp3", and then _you_ start distibuting "For whom the bell tolls" under the filename "My_Own_Song.mp3"! - Then what? When the big guys find out about this they'll sue _my_ pants off, right?
Second, the RIAA greatly underestimated the number of legitimate downloads going through the network, or fudged the figures a bit to improve their position during the trial. Maybe 40% of Napster's users really *do* use the service to trade bootlegs, live recordings, and other unregulated music.
There is a lot of copyrighted music that is not to be found in the song lists that Napster has been told to block. There is e.g. a world of music outside of the US. It's not suddenly legal to copy copyrighed songs that happen not to be on those lists.
The cornerstone of text in HTML and XML is Unicode.
It isn't.
Of course it is. All you have to do is read the specifications. Unicode is the Document Character Set of HTML. It's all there in the HTML specificaton. In XML Unicode is not only the Document Character Set but also the default encoding(s). And it doesn't matter for my point if this is good or bad. The deciscion to base HTML and XML on Unicode was made by W3C, and W3C also made Amaya. So something is not done in the right order here. Get text support right first. Then move on to less important things, like style sheets, MathML etc.
I've been trying Amaya once in a while for a long time. For all the hype about Mozilla, konqueror and many others, it's interesting that the W3C's effort should get so little attention.
Really?
The most important thing for any web browser is the capability to display text. The cornerstone of text in HTML and XML is Unicode. The main browsers have had Unicode support for years. The upcoming Mozilla has brilliant Unicode support.
So what about Amaya - the browser alternative from W3C, the organization that made Unicode the basis of HTML and XML? No support for Unicode!
Now, when was Unicode invented exactly? --- Oh, was it that many years ago? Oh my....
Why run Office 2k when you have a perfectly good application in Star Office?
Well, one reason could be the Unicode support
in Office 2K. As far as I know Star Office is
Latin 1 exclusively. Can you even do Russian
in Star Office? Can you mix Chinese and Russian
with e.g. French in Star Office? Is there any
other Linux program comparable to Word 2K that
can do stuff like that?
BTW: Does the Unicode stuff in Word 2K work under
Wine?
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that layout tables are to be avoided (it's actually a form of lying: you're indicating tabular relations between the cells and rows of the table, while in reality there are no such relations - that's the main problem).
But, Slashdot is in good company: the W3C themselves use tables for layout! That's really the pits... Just check out "www.w3.org".
Unfortunately "b" is not deprecated.
I don't really understand why MS should bother releasing a patch to this. That would be totally redundant since the Mozilla team has already made a very nice patch available to all. It's a bit of a download, but not much more so than the usual MS patches, and it's actually worth the download time. It fixes lots of other stuff too, e.g. the 'position:fixed' bug.
I tried out SOT and to my amazement it had no support for UTF-8, only for UTF-7 and UTF-16 (at least it claimed support for those two). This seems ridiculous. UTF-8 is the most important form of Unicode. Any app that supports Unicode really must do UTF-8 first of all.
Is this a problem in OpenOffice generally? Or is is something peculiar to SOT?
Mozilla can get even more ad-free.
I've added this to my personal style sheet (automatically applied to every page):
object, embed {
display: none;
}
This keeps all Flash etc. invisible. On some platforms you can just uninstall the Flash plugin, but that doesn't work in the Linux Mozilla. (The ", embed" part is probably not necessary.)
The file to change is "userChrome.css", and can be found in the "chrome" directory wherever Mozilla keeps your personal settings, mail, etc.
And then, whenever you see an ad that is an ordinary image, you can right click on it, and check if it comes from some server that probably only serves ads. If so, right click again, and choose "Block images from this server".
Using all these tricks, you can get rid of a lot of ads and other annoying material.
Most of this should work in Netscape 6 as well.
And I found this directory:
<http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3. 0rc3/RedHat/i386/>
And it's full of files dated today and yesterday.
But according to the release notes the new stuff should be in "/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3.0-beta2/".
Now, is "3.0.rc3" ("release candidate 3) older or newer than "3.0.beta2"?
There isn't supposed to be any RedHat RPMs for tthis new stuff, so these RedHat RPMs I found must be something older. But they were created today?
???
Why didn't you just hit CTRL-N to open the offending page in a new normal window with scrollbars etc.? Seems a lot easier...
There are no characters in Unicode between 128 and 160!
And just why do you exclude XHTML 1.1?
It's actually very unclear which version of (X)HTML is the current "HTML recommendation". If it's not XHTML 1.1 then I can't really tell from the W3C documents which one it is.
Of course XHTML 1.1 is quite unusable in today's browsers, but that's another matter. You can't really (fully) use even HTML 2 in them...
So you think Unicode is just for non-English text? Well, neither ASCII nor Latin 1 is really sufficient for English. There are plenty of characters above 255 in Unicode that are needed or useful for writing English. And then we have foreign names that tend to pop up in English texts with all sorts of funny characters that you need to write even if you only speak English.
Actually you need to check your bullshit information. Characters 160 to 255 take up two bytes each in UTF-8.
What's the problem? If you use the UTF-8 encoding
for Unicode, all your data will be ASCII compatible.
Actually I agree completely, in principle, but in this particular case I think the best thing would be to use Bablefish to translate all the current English RAND documents into Russian, and then the Russian into Turkish, and then the Turkish back into English, and then finally publish the result instead of the current docs.
Well, that it does, and I agree that it would be better if it didn't, but on the other hand Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Opera, ICab, Lynx and most or even all other browsers do the same! So why single out IE?
What about i18n support, Unicode, etc. in KMeleonon? Does it include the full Mozilla i18n package (which is pretty impressive)?
(Yes, I'm too lazy too check this myself...)
As far as I can tell from the website and the pdf documentation (pdf?!) this whole Curl thingy is only about visual presentation: computer screen and print out(?).
Ordinary HTML is not locked to any particular medium. It could just as well be read with a braille reader or a voice browser (or in smelloglyphs by Martians...).
Later releases of Mozilla correctly identify themselves as "6.0".
You mean "not yet released releases of Mozilla", I suppose. I just quoted the string that Mozilla 0.8.1 uses:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; 0.8.1) Gecko/20010323
Do you have a newer user Agent string for Mozilla with "6.0" in it? I don't think so...
What I meant was that Netscape 5.x is caused by the user agent string of Mozilla, which is what you said (Mozilla/5.0 ....).
OK. I thought so. But this just underlines how cluelessly user agent strings are being handled, and again how worthless the resulting statistics are. If they don't even know what browsers there are out there, and how they identify themselves, what value will their statistics have?
Netscape 5.x is what is in the user agent string of Mozilla.
No. This is Mozilla's user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; 0.8.1) Gecko/20010323
Actually this kind of statistics has very little value. To the usual problems we can add the clueless handling of the user agent strings. Some report figures for "Netscape". I have no idea if that includes all versions of Netscape browsers. Version 6 is so different it makes no sense to bundle it with version 4.
And then there is Opera which presents itself _by default_ as MSIE 5 with an additional "Opera 5.02" added on at the end. How many just check for MSIE and miss the added "Opera 5.02"? I have seen sniffers that just check for "Opera/" + version number (e.g. Netscapes "Ultimate Browser Sniffer"). They miss "Opera " + version number. Opera can also spoof as Mozilla 5. And some don't report Opera at all, listing perhaps a cathegory "Others". Some _unknown_ part of MSIE (and perhaps of "Netscape" or "Mozilla") is probably Opera in these statistics!
(I'm no Opera fanatic - quite the opposite...)
Ok, so say I write and record a song called "My_Own_Song", and register that with me as the copyright-holder, quite legally, and start distributing it as "My_Own_Song.mp3", and then _you_ start distibuting "For whom the bell tolls" under the filename "My_Own_Song.mp3"! - Then what? When the big guys find out about this they'll sue _my_ pants off, right?
There is a lot of copyrighted music that is not to be found in the song lists that Napster has been told to block. There is e.g. a world of music outside of the US. It's not suddenly legal to copy copyrighed songs that happen not to be on those lists.
Well, I didn't see no nothing, 'cause that ad is displayed in an "iframe", and my personal style sheet for MSIE includes this:
iframe { display: none !important; }
It disappearded without a trace. Good riddance!Iframes are hardly ever up to any good anyway.
Of course it is. All you have to do is read the specifications. Unicode is the Document Character Set of HTML. It's all there in the HTML specificaton. In XML Unicode is not only the Document Character Set but also the default encoding(s). And it doesn't matter for my point if this is good or bad. The deciscion to base HTML and XML on Unicode was made by W3C, and W3C also made Amaya. So something is not done in the right order here. Get text support right first. Then move on to less important things, like style sheets, MathML etc.
Really?
The most important thing for any web browser is the capability to display text. The cornerstone of text in HTML and XML is Unicode. The main browsers have had Unicode support for years. The upcoming Mozilla has brilliant Unicode support.
So what about Amaya - the browser alternative from W3C, the organization that made Unicode the basis of HTML and XML? No support for Unicode!
Now, when was Unicode invented exactly? --- Oh, was it that many years ago? Oh my....
Well, one reason could be the Unicode support in Office 2K. As far as I know Star Office is Latin 1 exclusively. Can you even do Russian in Star Office? Can you mix Chinese and Russian with e.g. French in Star Office? Is there any other Linux program comparable to Word 2K that can do stuff like that?
BTW: Does the Unicode stuff in Word 2K work under Wine?