Re: [WSG] Followup to Tuesday's Brisbane Meeting
On 17/06/2005, at 10:01 PM, Lea de Groot wrote: August will see us avidly listening to John Bates talking to us about Internationalisation (geez, no wonder it is routinely abbreviated to 'i18n'!). I've been told it's shortened for two reasons: Firstly, it's much easier to type. Secondly, it solves the internationalisation problem of isation vs ization :) Dean ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] more on flashish stuff: SVG
On 12 Apr 2005, at 04:59, Alan Trick wrote: Hi, I'll sort of try this again, and hope the gods don't mail-bomb us :P. SVG isn't quite flash, because it's not proprietary technology, but it's not terribly accesible either, because as far as I know, mozzilla is the only browser to have any built-in support for it (adobe has an svg plugin for IE). I guess one of the biggest differences here is that SVG has a future, where as flash is bound to the world of proprietary formats. Has anyone here actually done any development with SVG? I have :) The majority of interest in SVG at the moment comes from the mobile market. SVG Tiny is a required format for all handsets sold on Vodafone (and other carriers) in Europe, as well as a bunch of other places (see svg.org for a list of handsets and links). On the desktop, SVG is supported natively in Mozilla/Firefox (if you get the right build) and in Opera 8 beta. There's also the Adobe SVG plugin which was bundled with Acrobat Reader for a period. It's been a while since it was released, but Adobe have publicly stated their commitment to SVG, and the next release in particular. Meanwhile, development on the SVG standard itself is very active. You can see the list of companies involved by looking at the author list in the SVG specification. It was interesting to see that the major use case for SVG is applications, rather than animations. This probably comes down to the fact that the most popular animation tool outputs SWF/Flash, while programmers are more comfortable (or not uncomfortable) in a more development-oriented environment. Since SVG can be text, all a generator needs is a print statement. On the client side, it's the standard Javascript/DOM environment. Unfortunately, the majority of interesting use cases for SVG are on company intranets. They choose SVG because they don't want to be locked in to the whims of a single vendor. As for accessibility, we put a huge amount of effort into this. The SVG format was designed to be accessible, and is more accessible than Flash. The problem is that access tools haven't quite harnessed the power yet (which is understandable since it's tough to make money in that area so they concentrate on the most popular format, HTML). I'll end the advertisement here. Dean -- dean jackson world wide web consortium (w3c) - http://www.w3.org/ graphics - interaction svg specification editor mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Asterisks in W3C spec
On 15 Mar 2005, at 18:10, Sigurd Magnusson wrote: I keep seeing asterisks in the W3C spec but cannot see a glossary anywhere. As an example, with the img element in xhtml 1.1, the attributes 'src' and 'alt' are both marked with an asterisk. Why? http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/ abstract_modules.html#s_imagemodule It means it is a required attribute. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstraction.html#sec_4.1. (sorry this response is late) Dean ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
John,
On 22 Feb 2005, at 15:42, John Allsopp wrote:
I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly
looking
at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation
in this area?
Sure.
I think the real benefit of standardisation and standards bodies is
not necessarily the standards they develop (in a sense, it's not even
necessary, and arguably not even advisable they develop those
standards, at least not from top to bottom) but that by anointing
technology it becomes a common good.
Agreed. It seems to be a fairly common discussion topic nowadays as to
whether or not a standards body should be generally creating or
generally adopting. My take is it depends.
The alternative is industry standards that is winner takes all
proprietary technologies, which are the property and strategic asset
of their creator.
XUL/XAML is a very good example of this. XUL was developed at Mozilla,
whose implementation was a great proof of concept. It's a shame that
early on in its development Mozilla didn't take it to WC
By this you mean flush it down the toilet? ;)
and say, look here is this really cool technology that works, would
you guys like to work with us to standardize this?
Or maybe they did and I don't know about it.
As far as I know, XUL was never a submission to W3C. I know a lot of
W3C Groups have considered work in the general area (including XForms
and SVG, and obviously CSS has been thinking about UI). In the cases
I'm aware of we were hesitant to start down the road of defining a UI
toolkit (we'd heard many horror stories of how much effort it is to
complete such a task).
However, maybe we were wrong? Maybe XUL is a comfortable sweet spot?
Unfortunately now we have two competing technologies that are similar,
leading to years if not decades in the delay of the adoption of XUL
like solutions.
Interesting that you think the appearance of XAML will have an effect
on XUL adoption, since XUL has been around for so long. I'm not saying
that I think it won't delay adoption, just that I don't know :)
I'm hoping that the fact that proprietary Web Application technologies
such as XAML and Flash are getting more attention means that we are
approaching the point where we could think about standardisation in
this area. I also think it's so broad a field that we shouldn't think
that one size will fit all. That's like saying you should only ever use
C++. However, XUL may be a great start.
Just as an aside why
circle and not solid class=whatever
.whatever {shape: circle}
This is a good question. The reason is that you still have to define
all the properties of the circle (eg. radius). This could certainly be
done via CSS:
.whatever {display: circle; radius: 10cm} // note I used display
because
// I think it's a better
match
This seems ok for circle (CSS x,y could be used to position). However,
what about a general polygon, or an arbitrary shape?
.whatever {display: polygon; points: 10,20 23,23 . }
You'd end up inventing a bunch of properties for the many structural
attributes. As these can be quite complicated, it means your CSS
parser would require a whole set of additional micro-parsers.
In the end I think you'd come to the conclusion that CSS is a pretty
good technology for styling HTML, an acceptable technology for laying-
out HTML, and probably not the right technology for displaying arbitrary
content as graphics or very complex text.
Furthermore, just as a h1 in HTML is always a heading, a circle
in SVG is always a circle. Having just a solid element and using
CSS is similar to having only div in HTML (with display: heading1).
Are we off topic?
Dean
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Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
On 22 Feb 2005, at 21:07, Patrick Lauke wrote: Dean Jackson [snip] I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly looking at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation in this area? I'd welcome some standardisation, but as John Allsopp already mentioned, MS went the XAML route...so once again, any standardisation work done on the XUL end will only mirror, or run in parallel to, the MS way. XUL is a much smaller technology than XAML. It's so much smaller that I doubt it will mirror the MS route. It also isn't really a competitor to XAML. It's the combination of technologies (XUL, XBL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG, etc) that provide an Open alternative. The good news is that enough of this platform exists today, enabling a bunch of fantastic Web Applications. It is also an evolutionary approach. The only saving grace (although I'm not sure of the practicality) would be that both XUL and XAML are XML based, and could - in theory anyway - be transformed from one to the other in a hopefully straightforward way. XAML is an XML serialisation of the Windows object hierarchy (which you could think of as the Win32 or .NET API). This isn't strictly true, but I think it's close enough to make the point, which is.. Basically, XAML is tied to Windows. It is conceivable that you could implement XAML on another platform, just as the Mono project is implementing .NET. However, some pieces of the technology will be extremely hard to replicate, and some may be covered by patents. There's also the code embedded in XAML files (e.g. C# or ASP) that is (typically) Windows specific. Therefore, I doubt you'll be using the fact that both are XML to transform between one and the other. I know of people that have transformed between XAML and other formats, but this is mostly for static images, not applications. As always though, I certainly could be wrong! Dean -- dean jackson world wide web consortium (w3c) - http://www.w3.org/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Centre DIV Vertically? Any compliant methods?
On 23 Feb 2005, at 09:49, John Allsopp wrote: John, What I want is the ability to align the content of a DIV, for instance, or any block element, vertically, and I'm asking why it wasn't included in CSS-1. I can't think of any policy-type reason why it wasn't, that's all, and I don't see vertical alignment as being directly related to table-cell display either. I think you want the 'display-align' property from XSL:FO. http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html#area-alignment Unfortunately, it's not available in CSS 1, 2, 2.1 or 3 (yet?). It will be available in SVG 1.2 (we added a new property before realising that XSL:FO had already done it the right way). I wouldn't be surprised if Bert gave a reason as to why 'display-align' will not be in CSS. I can't speak for Hakon Lie or Bert Bos but... The original proposal was taking shape in 95/95, really before the abomination of tables for layout had ruined the web :-) So I'm guessing that it simply wasn't something everyone wanted to do, like it is now. Ditto multi column layout f'rinstance. Yeah! Wouldn't it have been fantastic to have a real multi-column, grid-like layout mechanism? (It probably *still* would be fantastic to have one :). It would also be nice to bind an HTML element to a particular cell in the layout, allowing the author to order the source in the most appropriate manner and not resort to floats and abs positioning to achieve the layout they desire. Maybe Bert will have an answer :-) In my experience Bert always has the answer, and if I notice I disagree with him then that's usually first step towards realising I'm wrong :) Dean ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
On 22 Feb 2005, at 11:34, Patrick H. Lauke wrote: Jixor - Stephen I wrote: I have previously encountered XUL but only just started to look into it. I have found it so far (only worked with it for one day) to be really interesting. I was wondering what other wsg members thought of it and maybe if they could give me some background or forecast regarding the tech, will it be superseded, is it still in development, etc. What I found most interesting is the fact that there is a lot of XUL markup which is squarely presentational in nature. After a long time striving for semantic XHTML markup with separate presentation in CSS, it feels like a huge step backwards being expected to mix it around like it's 1996 again. I try to make a point of personal discipline to apply the same strict sense of separation of content and presentation in my XUL, as if it was any other standards-based web site. I think it is worth considering that not all markup languages are able to separate presentation from content. Some markup languages are purely presentational in nature. One example is SVG, which can be styled via CSS, but that is only manipulating the presentational properties -- CSS can't turn a circle into a rect. Other examples are XSL:FO and MathML (to some degree). I think XUL falls mostly into this camp. I would assume that many people's gut reaction is WTF!?!, especially after the long, hard battle to get people to use CSS properly with HTML. This is probably a valid reaction, but I believe presentational markup languages are unavoidable. However, it's not all that bad. We're looking at technologies like XBL to transform a semantically rich markup into a presentational system. In the same way as CSS decorates an HTML tree with presentational information, XBL could decorate an XML tree with presentation and behaviour. This allows the author to use the highest level language available (eg. higher than HTML which isn't terribly semantically rich). However, I fear this topic is beyond the scope of the web standards list (as it's, of course, not a W3C standard), so I think I'll leave it at that now... I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly looking at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation in this area? Dean -- dean jackson world wide web consortium (w3c) - http://www.w3.org/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] CSS3.0
I realise that many people have already responded. Sorry for the echo. I'm not in the CSS working group, but I do work for W3C. On 17 Feb 2005, at 10:31, David R wrote: Just out of curiosity... Is the CSS3.0 Spec finalised, or are they still accepting suggestions and comments? I'm not sure there will ever be a CSS 3.0 spec. Rather, CSS 3 (the technology) consists of a number of modules. Some modules are further along the standardisation process than others. I'm also not sure that the CSS WG have ruled out adding new modules or removing existing ones (for a good reason of course :). Maybe once all the modules are W3C Recommendations, there will be a proclamation that CSS 3 exists. Are we still accepting comments? Yes. We accept comments at any time in the process. Some Web Essentials 04 attendees may remember somewhere during one of my incomprehensible rants I mentioned that the phases Last Call and Candidate Recommendation are very important because there is an obligation for the W3C to respond to every comment (no matter from where it comes). Most Working Groups try to respond to all comments all the time, but that can be very time consuming (especially for a popular tech like CSS). So please, send in your comments. On anything W3C-related. In my perfect world, you'd all feel as if you are part of W3C. You already have a huge influence on the work, even though you may not be the ones sitting around a table and fighting. Because I really want to suggest multiple background images for CSS3.0 (provided it isn't suggested already) Multiple people have pointed at yesterday's draft which has this feature. [Aside: My personal opinion, as someone who is more graphics oriented, is that this solution still needs work] Where do I find the Suggestion Box for the W3C? ;) For CSS, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dean -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] w3c badges
On 18 Oct 2004, at 12:50, Rick Faaberg wrote: Hi all, Who can I send a suggestion to at W3C that they make their web badges a lot more subtle (and smaller) so that I would actually use them on my sites? I work for the W3C and I've heard your suggestion. While I'm not the badges guy, I know they have many people ask for different badges all the time. I don't think there is any way to make everyone happy. My advice is to make your own badge, or use text, or have nothing. If you do put something there, IMO the most important thing is the link to the validator, so that (a) people can check you are not lying :) and (b) that random web people who have no idea what that means can follow the link, learn about what it means and hopefully decide to do it on their own site. Dean ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] w3c badges
On 18 Oct 2004, at 13:37, Ryan Christie wrote: You're free to make your own W3C badges to place on your site. Most people I see, incl. myself, just use text links in the footer. W3C won't hunt you down for infringement or anything. There are definitely some copyright issues in using the logo without permission, so I suggest you make your own Validation badges or use text (which is what at least 90% of the people doing this use). If you really want to do something graphical, then my advice is to approach it in the same manner as site design. Make it interesting. Make it stand out (or not, if that makes more sense). You're right though, if they had some quality official badges that didn't stick out like a sore thumb, I'd probably use them alot more often. :) So would I :) Dean -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rick Faaberg wrote: Who can I send a suggestion to at W3C that they make their web badges a lot more subtle (and smaller) so that I would actually use them on my sites? Or do I just put up text that says W3C Valid? Is that what you do? Or just forget it entirely, 'cause who beside developers care in the first place? Best, Rick Faaberg -- Ryan Christie| e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Harrisonburg, VA | w: http://theward.net ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] should you refuse to support IE?
On 18 Oct 2004, at 21:10, Mark Harwood wrote: Not commercialy, but personaly on your own blog sites are other little community sites? I've just redesigned my blog (www.phunky.co.uk) and in doing so i decided i was not going to touch some of the minor issuse that IE has with my site, although it would only take me a little bit of time to get it 100% in IE aswell why should i? Ive placed a small disclaimer on my site stateing why im NON-IE but my only worry is that new clients or outsourcing companies may see this and think The guy hates IE, he could be a git to work with (which i am :D) I just wanna know your view on ditching IE on purpose? Avoiding your question for just a second Would you intentionally build a car park that stopped Toyotas from entering? Remember that it is one Web for all people and all browsers. Some people *have* to use IE. I'm not defending IE. I know it is a pain to support in some cases and that the general consensus is that there are better browsers around. But I wouldn't want to make the Toyota drivers seem unwelcome, just because there are Ford cars available. This is very different from saying Ford rocks!. Now, to answer your question, should I put non-ie on my site?, I'd say no. I'm in favour of you *not* doing the extra work to avoid bugs, and I'm in favour of you promoting the browsers you like (rather than dissing the ones you don't). But that's just me. Dean ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Is XHTML harmful?
On 7 Oct 2004, at 02:09, Vlad Alexander (XStandard) wrote: Hi Kim, Ian Hickson is _not_ saying XHTML is harmful, he is saying that serving up XHTML with the wrong MIME type is bad. That's right. It's probably not the best title for the document, but my feeling is that people using the ... considered harmful approach are typically looking more for attention than for examination. Nevertheless, it's still an interesting read. Today, the real benefits of XHTML are on the production side. Say your CMS has 1000 documents and you need to change the class name of a div tag in all 1000 documents. If your content is in XHTML, you can use XML related technologies like DOM or XSLT to process all 1000 documents quickly and accurately because XHTML can be processed by XML parsers. I agree. Using XHTML over HTML brings some benefits that are hard to measure. The way I think of it is that XHTML allows more people to use your content in ways that you didn't originally expect. For example, at W3C we extract a lot of semantic info from our XHTML pages: building calendars, issue lists, relationships between pages, etc. This could all be done using HTML, but XHTML makes it easier (much wider range of tools in the XML world). The same goes for modifying pages. I have a huge range of tools available to do a site wide change with XHTML, and these tools are interoperable because they conform to the XML specification. If my Web guy gets hit by a truck, then I can call up another developer and assume that her XML skills will be enough to do the job (even though she may not be familiar with the tools). Then there is the whole Web Applications trend. Again, HTML and XHTML are pretty much the same in functionality here, but if I'm using an application on the Web then I want to make sure it is well-formed and well-structured. I don't want a typo by a web developer (such as leaving off an end tag) to cause my credit card to be debited twice. That's an extreme example, but in the general case, would you really run an application on your desktop that you were not sure was compiled correctly (or had millions of compiler warnings)? Allowing sloppy markup in applications is a security risk IMHO. On the design front, if you are thumping your head against a wall trying to wonder why the page is off by three pixels, wouldn't you like to rule out as much as possible in order to reduce the number of places you look for the bug? In most cases, this is easier with XHTML - you can check the document and then focus on the CSS. While the existing browsers are parsing and rendering HTML faster than XHTML, then you can serve XHTML 1.0 as HTML. I'm not sure exactly why HTML parsing/rendering is faster than XHTML, since in general it is much easier to right a high-performance parser for a strict language than a less strict one (and HTML also carries years and years of quirks to handle). Maybe it is just that the HTML code has been around for so long that it is highly optimized. Let's hope the desktop browsers will move into 2001 soon ;) To ask the question the other way around, what are the real benefits of using HTML over XHTML? I'm interested to hear the reasons (and I'm sure they are valid). Dean From: Kim Kruse [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 10:53 AM Subject: [WSG] Is XHTML harmful? Hi, First of all... I'm sorry if this is off topic. I've been telling people (the few who asked me and through my website) to use (valid) xhtml because it a W3C recommendation, it's device independent, (valid) xhtml can be processed by an XML parser, better accessibility, less code, faster processing of code in modern browsers, forward compatibility etc. I guess that's the standard opinion on xhtml or am I completely of track here? After I participated in a discussion over at the Project Seven newsgroup I'm having doubts! The reason is some very well put arguments from among others, Al Sparber. One of the arguments was less code. Not even close to html 4.01 (See sample 1 below), html 4.01 is also device independent AFAIK. Xhtml is not being processed faster than html 4. Actually there should be no real reason to use xhtml unless you're using xml. _Sample 1 - html:_ !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd; html head meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 titleUntitled Document/title /head body pHello World. pimg src=img.gif width=10 height=10 alt=some description /body /html _Sample 1 - xhtml:_ !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd; html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; head meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 / titleUntitled Document/title /head body pHello World./p pimg src=img.gif width=10 height=10 alt=some description //p /body /html Now what really worries me is this article http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml where
