I'll tell you what, why don't you volunteer to re-write all of the flash-games on the web so that blind people can play them? When you're done, I'll assign you some music sites that you can re-code for the deaf.
This is a total red herring. The fact that there are some media-specific situations that cannot be made accessible to people with certain disabilities is not at all relevant to the point, which is that by targeting only popular browsers, you may exclude people with disabilities who cannot switch to more popular browsers. Can this be justified in specific instances like Flash games? Sure! Does that make any difference to the 95% of invalid web pages we are talking about? Nope.
With XHTML, there are two different types of validation, "strict" and "transitional"
No, there are not two different types of validation. There are three different document types, each of which has non-negotiable strict rules.
And one may argue, from some certain point of view, that these might be degrees of compliance to XHTML.
One may argue, from some certain point of view that the moon is made of cheese. The fact that somebody might make the argument does not make the concept any more valid.
If you write a document that conforms to XHTML 1.0 Transitional, it is totally 100% valid and totally 100% in compliance with the XHTML 1.0 specification. You can't get "more valid" or "more in compliance" by switching to Strict. It's considered a best practice, but best practices are not validity or conformance. If they were, then they wouldn't be best practices, they would be required by the specification.
This is true for plain old HTML4, however the newer (and arguably improved) XHTML standard is a bit more strict about it.
The OP didn't say that he was using XHTML, he said he was using HTML.
Now, most browsers won't choke on not closing your paragraph tags and will get along as if you did close them, probably due in great part to HTML4, which is why the grandparent doesn't bother with it, but this doesn't really make it a standard.
No, it being in a standard makes it a standard.
Implementation defined behavior is not a good way to go about things if you want to have many different compatible browsers (for example, this is why there is only one Perl5 interpreter), because different browsers may choose different ways to handle the ambiguous code.
It's not "implementation defined behaviour", the behaviour is defined in the ISO 8879:1986 (SGML) standard, and the closing tags for <p> elements are optional precisely because this can be determined in an unambiguous way.
When a link is possibly important to a user but would in fact break the flow of their current activity, a link should be set to open in a new window - preferably one which does not go full screen to hide the window they are really using.
If you use the target attribute, you have no control over the size of the window and it is very likely that it will obscure the current window. You need JavaScript to get the effect you desire, and if you are using JavaScript, why bother with a new window when you can dynamically display the content in the context of the current page?
An immense number of people are taught in school that so long as you try, it doesn't matter if you don't succeed. It's for self-esteem or something. So they grow up thinking that if they make even the barest half-hearted attempt at getting it right, it's "unfair" to point out that they have in fact failed.
'Looks good in Internet Explorer and doesn't seem to crash Firefox or Opera' may not be a standard, but it satisfies the bulk of most web-sites' customers. I'm a FF user and include myself in that group.
The problem with that attitude is that not so long ago, Firefox wouldn't be in the list, and for many developers (including some I worked with this week) Opera is still not on that list. It's like Internet Explorer only websites, except only slightly laxer. So you use Firefox. Lucky you! How about all the people who use something less popular, e.g. Konqueror? How about all the people who must use something that will never be popular, such as people with disabilities? Shall we just say "tough, get off the web"?
As long as they work I don't care.
"Working" is not a property of a website. "Working" is a property of a combination of a website and a browser. You can't say that a website "works", only that it works in particular browsers.
Indeed. If you read the full report, you'll see that a similar study in 2001 yielded 0.71% valid pages, and a similar study in 2006 yielded 2.58% pages, so 4.13%, while still very low, is a decent improvement in the right direction and it seems to be accelerating.
Yes. HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 each have two DTDs: a "transitional" DTD that allows presentational elements and a "strict" one that disallows them.
No, that's something different. There aren't degrees of strictness when it comes to validity. If a document claims to be a Strict document, and makes a single mistake, then it is invalid. If a document claims to be a Transitional document, and makes a single mistake, then it is invalid. In both cases, it's an absolute rule with no laxity.
Incredibly slow moving in a highly evolutionary environment
That's hilarious. We still can't use CSS tables or generated content on the web - features that were published by the W3C in the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago because Internet Explorer doesn't support them yet. We need to use JavaScript frameworks or otherwise normalise event handling because Internet Explorer doesn't support DOM 2 Events - a specification published by the W3C eight years ago (event Internet Explorer 8 won't support this). And SVG anyone? XHTML? MathML?
Get back to me when browsers make it out of the 90s before telling me the W3C is "incredibly slow moving".
There aren't degrees of validity. A document is either valid or it isn't. You can't be "more strict" when validating something, if a tool offers you an option like that, then it is doing something other than validating, it's probably linting as well. There's at least one widely-used "validator" that doesn't actually validate at all.
For example, I never close paragraph and line break tags, but otherwise my html is compliant.
Yes you do. If you didn't close them, your pages wouldn't work in any browser. What you mean is that you don't explicitly close your paragraph and line break elements. And you don't have to. The closing tags for <p> elements are optional and the <br> element type is empty. Those are not errors.
only recently added websites or also websites and old pages that exist longer than the standard they validated against exists ?
MAMA didn't validate against a single document type. They validated against the document type that each individual document claimed to be. So all the ancient HTML 2.0 pages out there will correctly be identified as valid in they are, in fact, valid HTML 2.0.
Your vote doesn't count anyway. It's the "swing voters" who decide elections, the uninformed nitwits who don't even look at the policies of each candidate. They're the ones who re-elected Bush.
So do what I'm doing. Stay home and don't vote.
When Bush was re-elected, only about half the people eligible to vote bothered to do so, and Bush only got about half of those votes. Bush wasn't allowed to remain president by that 25% alone, he was also allowed to do so by the 50% that didn't vote, including yourself. As much as you complain about Bush, you are part of the problem, and by not voting, you endorse the next president, whoever it is.
That said, Windows Vista almost disqualifies as an OS because the OS itself utilizes most of the resources on the computer, leaving little for application programs.
Yeah, like I'm going to take "a lesson in OS" from somebody who says things like this. You are twisting your definition of an OS because you have an axe to grind. Hardly the most reliable "teacher".
I dunno, it works out if you do consumer OSs:
Win 3
There were two versions of Windows before Windows 3, that's why they called it Windows 3. And Windows 3 wasn't an OS, it was a shell that ran on top of DOS. Some people say that Windows 3 was an OS because it had drivers for certain pieces of hardware. I disagree, unless you are willing to call all the contemporary games with Soundblaster drivers "operating systems" too. The first consumer OS Microsoft produced was Windows 95. It still used DOS as a makeshift bootloader, but that's about it.
What are you attempting to fix? I'm not talking about all people who avoid things like Facebook. I'm talking about the people who make it a point to highlight their ignorance by throwing in totally unnecessary things like "(whatever that is)". It's a specific tone that only some people use, and in my experience, it's a dead giveaway for a certain attitude. Read the Onion piece, you'll see it there too.
If you're asking whether I personally am impressed by someone bragging about how he refuses to use Facebook or GMail: it impresses me about as much as someone who brags about not having heard of some television show.
In fact, the entire submission reads like a pastiche of Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television. I understand wanting to protect your privacy, but this guy really does seem to treasure the fact that he is clueless about Facebook etc. Whenever I've ever heard anybody say anything like "their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is), it's always been with a condescending "I'm too good for crap like that" tone. This guy doesn't want privacy, he wants to feel better than everybody else.
The spec is a little odd in this regard. It says that GETs should be idempotent -- repeating the request shouldn't change anything. That is not the same as saying that performing the request the first time shouldn't change anything.
Have you actually readthe spec? Yes, it says that GET requests should be idempotent. It also says that GET requests should be safe. These are two different things. Saying that it requires GET requests to be idempotent, but this doesn't mean that they should be safe is technically true, but ignorant of what the specification actually says.
For example, clicking a "remove this from my shopping cart" link twice would have the same result as only doing it once -- the item is gone. But the request is still idempotent. That doesn't mean that you should do that, but it does conform to spec.
Straight from the spec:
Implementors should be aware that the software represents the user in
their interactions over the Internet, and should be careful to allow
the user to be aware of any actions they might take which may have an
unexpected significance to themselves or others.
In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and
HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action
other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe".
This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT
and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the
fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.
Naturally, it is not possible to ensure that the server does not
generate side-effects as a result of performing a GET request; in
fact, some dynamic resources consider that a feature. The important
distinction here is that the user did not request the side-effects,
so therefore cannot be held accountable for them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a total red herring. The fact that there are some media-specific situations that cannot be made accessible to people with certain disabilities is not at all relevant to the point, which is that by targeting only popular browsers, you may exclude people with disabilities who cannot switch to more popular browsers. Can this be justified in specific instances like Flash games? Sure! Does that make any difference to the 95% of invalid web pages we are talking about? Nope.
No, there are not two different types of validation. There are three different document types, each of which has non-negotiable strict rules.
One may argue, from some certain point of view that the moon is made of cheese. The fact that somebody might make the argument does not make the concept any more valid.
If you write a document that conforms to XHTML 1.0 Transitional, it is totally 100% valid and totally 100% in compliance with the XHTML 1.0 specification. You can't get "more valid" or "more in compliance" by switching to Strict. It's considered a best practice, but best practices are not validity or conformance. If they were, then they wouldn't be best practices, they would be required by the specification.
The OP didn't say that he was using XHTML, he said he was using HTML.
No, it being in a standard makes it a standard.
It's not "implementation defined behaviour", the behaviour is defined in the ISO 8879:1986 (SGML) standard, and the closing tags for <p> elements are optional precisely because this can be determined in an unambiguous way.
You missed my point. Please keep in mind the difference between tags and elements. This is "an unclosed p tag":
This is a <p> element without an explicit closing tag:
If you don't close your tags, all your pages will break and no browser error correction will save you.
If you use the target attribute, you have no control over the size of the window and it is very likely that it will obscure the current window. You need JavaScript to get the effect you desire, and if you are using JavaScript, why bother with a new window when you can dynamically display the content in the context of the current page?
An immense number of people are taught in school that so long as you try, it doesn't matter if you don't succeed. It's for self-esteem or something. So they grow up thinking that if they make even the barest half-hearted attempt at getting it right, it's "unfair" to point out that they have in fact failed.
No, closing tags for <p> elements are optional in HTML 4, HTML 3.2 and HTML 2. I don't think any version of HTML has required them.
Don't be silly, everybody knows you use CSS for that. (Cruelly Sadistic Styleshocks).
The problem with that attitude is that not so long ago, Firefox wouldn't be in the list, and for many developers (including some I worked with this week) Opera is still not on that list. It's like Internet Explorer only websites, except only slightly laxer. So you use Firefox. Lucky you! How about all the people who use something less popular, e.g. Konqueror? How about all the people who must use something that will never be popular, such as people with disabilities? Shall we just say "tough, get off the web"?
"Working" is not a property of a website. "Working" is a property of a combination of a website and a browser. You can't say that a website "works", only that it works in particular browsers.
Indeed. If you read the full report, you'll see that a similar study in 2001 yielded 0.71% valid pages, and a similar study in 2006 yielded 2.58% pages, so 4.13%, while still very low, is a decent improvement in the right direction and it seems to be accelerating.
Webkit based browsers do.
No, that's something different. There aren't degrees of strictness when it comes to validity. If a document claims to be a Strict document, and makes a single mistake, then it is invalid. If a document claims to be a Transitional document, and makes a single mistake, then it is invalid. In both cases, it's an absolute rule with no laxity.
That's hilarious. We still can't use CSS tables or generated content on the web - features that were published by the W3C in the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago because Internet Explorer doesn't support them yet. We need to use JavaScript frameworks or otherwise normalise event handling because Internet Explorer doesn't support DOM 2 Events - a specification published by the W3C eight years ago (event Internet Explorer 8 won't support this). And SVG anyone? XHTML? MathML?
Get back to me when browsers make it out of the 90s before telling me the W3C is "incredibly slow moving".
There aren't degrees of validity. A document is either valid or it isn't. You can't be "more strict" when validating something, if a tool offers you an option like that, then it is doing something other than validating, it's probably linting as well. There's at least one widely-used "validator" that doesn't actually validate at all.
Yes you do. If you didn't close them, your pages wouldn't work in any browser. What you mean is that you don't explicitly close your paragraph and line break elements. And you don't have to. The closing tags for <p> elements are optional and the <br> element type is empty. Those are not errors.
MAMA didn't validate against a single document type. They validated against the document type that each individual document claimed to be. So all the ancient HTML 2.0 pages out there will correctly be identified as valid in they are, in fact, valid HTML 2.0.
When Bush was re-elected, only about half the people eligible to vote bothered to do so, and Bush only got about half of those votes. Bush wasn't allowed to remain president by that 25% alone, he was also allowed to do so by the 50% that didn't vote, including yourself. As much as you complain about Bush, you are part of the problem, and by not voting, you endorse the next president, whoever it is.
Yeah, like I'm going to take "a lesson in OS" from somebody who says things like this. You are twisting your definition of an OS because you have an axe to grind. Hardly the most reliable "teacher".
Huh? A Linux distro is not a shell. Linux distros provide shells, but are obviously far more than that, most importantly, they include the kernel.
The analogous package to Windows 3 would indeed be X. Nobody thinks X alone is an operating system do they?
What wasn't "GUI'ized"? Windows 3? You aren't making sense.
Yep, you're right, I forgot DOS :). What I should have said that it was the first consumer OS in the Windows family.
There were two versions of Windows before Windows 3, that's why they called it Windows 3. And Windows 3 wasn't an OS, it was a shell that ran on top of DOS. Some people say that Windows 3 was an OS because it had drivers for certain pieces of hardware. I disagree, unless you are willing to call all the contemporary games with Soundblaster drivers "operating systems" too. The first consumer OS Microsoft produced was Windows 95. It still used DOS as a makeshift bootloader, but that's about it.
In theory, yes. But half of the reason why testing is necessary is because this isn't always the case in practice.
And here is the corresponding scientific study.
What are you attempting to fix? I'm not talking about all people who avoid things like Facebook. I'm talking about the people who make it a point to highlight their ignorance by throwing in totally unnecessary things like "(whatever that is)". It's a specific tone that only some people use, and in my experience, it's a dead giveaway for a certain attitude. Read the Onion piece, you'll see it there too.
Actually, KlaymenDK, the hardcore privacy nut that posted this Your Rights Online submission, prefers 80s music, as you can see by browsing thousands of songs he has listened to recently.
In fact, the entire submission reads like a pastiche of Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television. I understand wanting to protect your privacy, but this guy really does seem to treasure the fact that he is clueless about Facebook etc. Whenever I've ever heard anybody say anything like "their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is), it's always been with a condescending "I'm too good for crap like that" tone. This guy doesn't want privacy, he wants to feel better than everybody else.
Have you actually read the spec? Yes, it says that GET requests should be idempotent. It also says that GET requests should be safe. These are two different things. Saying that it requires GET requests to be idempotent, but this doesn't mean that they should be safe is technically true, but ignorant of what the specification actually says.
Straight from the spec: