Re: [WSG] making money out of web standards
The voices are telling me Marilyn Langfeld said on 12/29/2004 6:44 AM: I wanted to add that I've had success with small businesses by describing how easily their sites can be redesigned using CSS (show them CSS Zen Garden). If they've already gone through a redesign, they've been impressed. If not, and they are fearful of making mistakes with the first go, their fears can be alleviated. That, added to SEO optimization, works better than describing band width issues, for me. One of advertising's old saws is "sell the sizzle, not the steak." Knock them out visually, then show them usability and logical information architecture, and finally hit them with some of the extras you throw in for free (like low bandwidth, accessibility, cheap uability on any device -- hiya right back, Miriam ;-) Speaking of that, let's be careful to specify what we're selling and what we aren't. There's usability on cell phones and Palms that results from a full-bore multi-media development with exhaustive testing on a roomful of devices. And then there's usability on multiple devices that just sorta shows up when you avoid doing stupid things. The latter we can sell cheaply. The former costs an arm and a leg. In fact I'm starting to get worried about the whole issue of "if I mention it, what do I have to deliver so that the customer buys off on it?" On another tack, if you've really got brass galumpkes, you could try a number like this: "So, did you ever have a site get so 'mature' that you pretty much had to throw the whole thing out?" "Wanna do it again?" "So what are you doing differently this time to make sure that doesn't happen? Hm?" Btw, I just got to the XSLT discussion today, right after I finished doing some. You're welcome to examine, steal, criticize or whatever: http://www.crispen.org/sync/rr-bookmarks.php>. You can see the XSLT and PHP from links on the page, and because some folks on another list had asked about it, I actually commented it. Perhaps even correctly. ;-) -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ What we're looking for: destinations. What we end up getting: journeys. ** 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] Color Scheme Tools (Was: My Site)
The voices are telling me Krassy said on 12/21/2004 7:23 PM: A while back I had compiled a list of some good Color Scheme Tools here: http://www.krassycandoit.com/blah/2004/06/color-scheme-tools.html Me too: <http://toolkit.crispen.org/index.php?cat=color> Most of the color tools that were mentioned in this thread now appear on that list. This is an amazing coincidence. ;-) -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. - Wilson Mizner ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help **
[WSG] Nested cites?
I'm beginning to suspect nested might make sense sometimes. The XHTML 1.0 spec doesn't specifically prohibit them, and neither does the DTD, nor are the description and examples in the HTML 4.01 spec at odds with what I'm suggesting. Here's an example: Greed is good. Greed works. -- "Gordon Gecko" in Wall Street Let me offer my reasons for suggesting that this strange looking usage might be all right after all. First, if I were speaking of the movie, I believe it would be perfectly correct to say: I think Michael Douglas did a wonderful job in Wall Street. Likewise, I think it would be correct to format my sig line as: I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. -- Wilson Mizner or a quote from another movie: We're depraved on account of we're deprived -- West Side Story And that's why it occurs to me that when the material contains both an attribution and within that attribution the name of a work, as in my original example or as in this slightly more complex example: We're depraved on account of we're deprived -- Stephen Sondheim, lyrics to "Officer Krupke", West Side Story the most natural way to write it would be with a nested , as I've just done. There's a presentational advantage. You could easily style it so the name of the work is returned to normal text (assuming the default is to present cites in italics): cite cite { font-style: normal; } But, more importantly, I think it stands up semantically. I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, however, especially by someone who knows it's illegal. Generally when I'm the first to think of something (and google indicates I am) it's because it's either trivial or really stupid. Btw, the W3C validator likes it fine, tidy doesn't care for it much. Here's an example in real life: <http://blog.crispen.org/archives/2004/12/13/greed/> In searching for whether anybody else had thought of this cockamamie idea before, I found a treasure. At <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/HTML3.2/5.15.html> Jukka Korpela describes the W3C authors' language specifying as "laconic". -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. - Wilson Mizner ** 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] PNGs and IE windows
The voices are telling me Kevin Futter said on 9/29/2004 6:19 PM: My understanding is that while IE Win supports the display of PNG files, it doesn't support any of their transparency features. If you want to use transparency for images in a cross-browser safe way, GIF is really your only option. I wouldn't be holding my breath for IE to catch up either ... Close. MSIE 6/Win supports GIF-style transparency (pallette mode, one color 100% transparent). What it doesn't support is variable or alpha-channel transparency. I have a couple of examples and a few words about PNGs at <http://toolkit.crispen.org/formats/png.html>. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Browse Happy - Online, Worry-free - http://browsehappy.com/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/ Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004 See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help **
[WSG] North Alabama gig
I got an email from a friend at Intergraph Public Safety in Huntsville AL (USA) who was looking for people with HTML, XML, CSS, and VBScript(!) skills to work on getting their customers configured and teaching those customers how to reconfigure their systems on a product which I surmise from his note will be at least partially web-based. I suspect my friend is still a little hazy on the requirements. You no doubt noticed that the magic words "accessibility" and "standards" are nowhere in that description. However, I figured if I could refer somebody "enlightened" to them, it would be a good deal for everybody. Please contact me off the list if you live close enough to north Alabama and might have time to do this job. No idea how long it lasts or what the pay is. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/ Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004 See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help **
Re: [WSG] Oh, the humanity!
The voices are telling me that Martin J. Lambert said on 7/16/2004 7:35 AM: I agree with most of what you wrote, but just wanted to address this one point. I used to work for CDNOW before it went under, and can tell you why it isn't a simple site of static pages - there's WAY too much music out there, changing MUCH too quickly, to ever hope to keep up with it manually. > That said, there's absolutely no reason why it couldn't be a simple site of database-driven *templates*, each of which adheres to web standards and is accessible to all visitors. I've done it myself, on a site that actually licensed much of AllMusic's content. Yeah, that's what I meant. It's insane without a database. Sorry for being unclear. And I have no deep objection to client-side bling-bling when there's some approximation to a point to it. For instance, a dear friend Cindy Ballreich designed some sites for Ticketmaster that would show you in 3D what the view was like from the seats you were about to buy, buddy Linda Branagan did some product demos in Shout3D where it was like holding the product in your hand, Virtual RealEstate in Germany let you configure your apartment online, and some other friends have done some good things with server-side scripting, DOM, and DHTML all of which clearly added value. And of course, the badgers. But I have yet to discover what the throbbing, shifting, peekaboo list items at allmusic.com add to except to my frustration. I call to mind another site we all know, because there's a message there: zombo.com. The *point* of Zombo is that it's useless. And I suspect most pieces of Flash substitute zombo for value on their websites. If I want to know what Ida's next record after _Will You Find Me_ is, I don't understand why they can't just tell me. But perhaps I'm just an old grouch, hopelessly behind the times. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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] Oh, the humanity!
The voices are telling me that Art Grauer said on 7/14/2004 9:09 AM: AMG has posted a response to the criticism of the new design here (amusing): http://www.gloriousnoise.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1992 [snip] [From the reply]: SUPPORT OF NON-IE FOR WINDOWS BROWSERS Optimizing a site of allmusic's complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat. This isn't a simple "brochure-ware" site of static pages. While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don't have the necessary resources to do so. [snip] I think it may be a case of a design team being in way over their heads... Now we can get specific. They've made some fundamental mistakes about the purpose of their site. The question is (as always), who are the players, and what do they consider to be value? I suggest that there are two major players: (1) Site visitors and (2) The site owner Now we can ask what represents value to each of them. (1) Site visitors Information. Mostly text, mostly lists: Albums by the artist (title, date, label) Songs on the album (title, composer, time) Personnel on the album (name, instrument) Review of the artist Review of the album (2) The site owner Links to their chosen "buy it now" site Ads Sound clips, album cover pictures, and artist pictures represent additional value to site visitors, but almost no one goes to allmusic.com to get those things. They're of secondary importance to the site visitors, and probably of negative value (considering the bandwidth they consume) to the site owner. Eye candy and the stylish stuff is tertiary. Now that we know what the site owner and the customer consider to be value, we know the first question we can ask: "What's the best way to deliver text, ads, and 'buy it now' links?" Nobody has to tell members of *this* list that anything that isn't signal is noise. Anything that isn't directly delivering what the players consider to be value is taking value away from the players. And yet you and I know they spent a huge fraction of their budget on the bling-bling. They spent it on things that don't add any appreciable value. And for certain classes of visitors -- owners of premium browsers, people with different abilities, people with different web surfing devices, people who are smart enough to turn off ActiveX and active scripting on MSIE -- they spent money to take away value. Let's hit that quote again: > This isn't a simple "brochure-ware" site of static pages. Why not? And this: > Optimizing a site of allmusic's complexity and size for all browsers > and operating systems is no small feat. What is the business value of complexity? -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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] Web Accessability IE Toolbar
The voices are telling me that Lee Roberts said on 7/13/2004 7:36 PM: Interesting concept there and I'm glad it works. Problem is still the same. No one made a tool for Opera. You just hacked a solution to make it do what you wanted it to do. Without your excellent knowledge and fine instructions the average computer user wouldn't know how to do those things. Actually, if you read closely, what I posted is a way to combine the already existing and excellent web developers' menu by Toby Inkster, which you can get at <http://goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/?page=10> and Rijk van Geijtenbeek's blog menu. I just included the link to my blog because: (a) I'm a blog pimp, and (b) At least one of y'all is going to want to put on both the blog menu and the W3Dev menu. I know, you *say* you'll never want to, and then I get these whining emails: "You broke my blog menu!" I hate to be so disagreeable (well, that's a lie, I love it), but in fact there's quite a few neat-o tools for Opera, and with a little effort you can find links to them on Opera's website. Here's one <http://www.crispen.org/etc/search.zip> they probably won't link to. Opera gets a couple of bucks for having their search menus point to some corporate search engines. You can't begrudge them the money, but there's others I like better. Unzip this in your profile directory for Opera 7.5. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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] Web Accessability IE Toolbar
The voices are telling me that Lee Roberts said on 7/13/2004 11:28 AM: The Gecko based browsers are fluid due to their open source nature. Opera could be easily supported, but no one makes tools for that small group. Au contraire: <http://blog.crispen.org/archives/000302.html> describes hot to install the w3-dev menu and the blogging menu. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *
[WSG] Oh, the humanity!
Just in case anybody asks you, "but how do you *know* the Allmusic Guide is lame?" and you don't have one of Scott Yanow's reviews handy, now you have the definitive answer. Just click! <http://www.allmusic.com/>. Besides being insanely slow and buggy, the new AMG site has this notice in bright yellow at the top of every page: Notice: You are accessing allmusic.com with a browser that is not currently supported. The appearance and functionality of the site could be impacted. allmusic.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.5 and above for Windows. I mean, it's bad enough that they're launching an MSIE-preferred site at the very moment that everybody and his dog are jumping *off* MSIE. It's bad enough that for more than a year everybody has been going standards and accessibility and these guys spent perfectly good money and what they got was an old-school tag-soup site. But browser checking??? That's *so* 1997! Does it validate? you ask. (You are Stoner Smurf, aren't you?) You must be mad. Is it accessible? Let's ask Cynthia (you'll have to type it in yourself, but trust me, it's spectacular). OK, slow, invalid, unaccessible. All we need is the lava lamps. Way to go, AMG! The original of this article (with a few more links -- you can tell what they are from the context) is on my blog, which, lacking all sense of common decency, I now shamelessly promote: <http://blog.crispen.org/archives/000514.html> -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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: Future.....(was: Re: [WSG] iFrames vs Scrolling Divs)
The voices are telling me that Lee Roberts said on 7/8/2004 7:45 AM: JavaScript was created in 1994 by the Netscape Communications Corporation. Probably worth saying "Brendan Eich" about here. I believe most folks credit him with a substantial part of the work. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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] I've done it again ...
The voices are telling me that Mark Stanton said on 7/6/2004 6:33 PM: I have a wiki on my site, so that I can categorize and annotate my bookmarks. It's become a huge organic sprawling beast in less than a year, but *so* useful. The resources section of the WSG site is meant to be just this type of beast (http://webstandardsgroup.org/resources/) except that is nice & public and administrable by all WSG memebers. Come on guys - lets make it a worth while resouce! I agree it's a super resource and one I've used many times myself. And I'll try to remember to put any exciting discoveries I make in standards-based web development on the wiki. :-) But for keeping working notes for my own use, I keep a little archive around. I've got a del.icio.us account, but that's mostly for web pages. Most of the stuff I want to stash is stuff I find in email, so I went for a tool that's designed to store email and sort of organize it. It helped the decision process a little that I've been a developer on the hypermail project for about 10 years. ;-) So when I get a letter or a USENET news posting I find interesting, I send it to a qmail alias that pipes it through hypermail and into the archive. I've got it set up to stash incoming mail in an mbox file as well as the HTML archive, so every now and then after I'm done with a bunch of messages, I'll take them out of the mbox file and regenerate the HTML archive. You're welcome to snoop if you want: <http://toolkit.crispen.org/archive/>. <http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypermail/>. If you need a hand getting it going, let me know. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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] file extensions
The voices are telling me that Peter Firminger said on 6/12/2004 7:48 PM: Not a good idea for the average website. If you're running amazon.com then there would be a reason to do it but for most of us maintenance would be an issue. Not even a good idea for Amazon. If you stop putting "extensions" on file names, then your web server has to look inside the stream it's serving, read the "magic" header information, and figure out the MIME type from that. E.g., "ff d8|de ff eo something something JFIF" means it's "image/jpeg", "#VRML V2.0 utf8" means it's "model/vrml". If this seems like a roundabout way to do things, go with your feelings, Luke. I used magic just for fun on a Sun 3-60 I used ages ago as a web server for my group at work and just as quickly took it off because it slowed even the tiny amount of traffic we were getting to a crawl. Now I'm sure the relevant code in Apache is lots faster now, as are CPUs, but if you've got a site like Amazon, I'll bet you'd notice the difference. Just to save a stamp, someone asked if such a thing is ever done in the wild. The only example I've ever seen is w3.org. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * 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] Site Critique - developer checklist
The voices are telling me that Russ Weakley - Maxdesign said on 5/29/2004 4:28 PM: Rev Bob, I'd be very careful about Bobby. This has been discussed on-list a few times, but here is a recap: [snip] Many thanks. I should have suspected that. It's not like nobody's ever heard of that subject ;-) Off to mine the archives. Thanks for the links. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] Site Critique
The voices are telling me that LC 55 said on 5/29/2004 2:29 AM: Russ wrote, "Would be good for the group to add/edit this list so that we could have a solid checklist - "WSG's things to check during development". Excellent checkpoints Russ and it certainly got me thinking of additions but I fear more coffee is needed at this end. Just had a Coke, so I've got a caffeine buzz and a sugar buzz, so I may wade in (or perhaps "step into it"). I've been thinking about this one to figure out how to say it. I think a developer should at least visit Bobby/CLiFsays/whatever. This may not be the proper group on which to say that I think our developer should also do what's necessary to pass Bobby, etc., including the unmeasurable suggestions, but I do think that. And I think it's sensible for someone evaluating a site to run it through Bobby (etc.) and see if the evaluation shows any sillies. Yes, I definitely think my brain was stretched thin trying to get around that one. Let's try again. While I don't personally agree that you can ignore Bobby's advice, I can see how some people could agree, and I don't want to have that fight here. Indeed, I respect their opinions. However, a developer who doesn't at least *look* at what Bobby says hasn't done the job, imho. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] CSS editor
The voices are telling me that t94xr.net.nz webmaster said on 5/28/2004 9:55 AM: Topstyle Pro 3.10 Pro is a better bet. Even tho there are copies floating around the net - one even on FOSIs site where ever that is. I purchased mine, I strongly recommend it for CSS editing. It wormed its way into my workflow until I can't do without it. It's got a very real-world license: you can put it on your desktop and your laptop, for example, and Nick is a decent guy who really supports his products. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] Good DOM tutorial?
>>Does anybody know a good DOM tutorial? Patrick Griffiths: They seem to be few and far between, but this: http://www.brainjar.com/dhtml/intro/ and then this: http://www.brainjar.com/dhtml/events/ are by far the best DOM tutorials I've found. Jeff Lowder: > > Hi Rev > This is probably a good one to start on. > http://www.w3schools.com/dhtml/default.asp Patrick H. Lauke: > This got me started fairly quickly with my JS DOM experiments http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/index.php?tut=0&part=24 Tonico Strasser: > Quirksmode.org has many good background informations and compatibility charts: <http://www.quirksmode.org/> Thank you all. I'm off to read. Btw, this is by no means ready for public consumption, but y'all might find a link or two you hadn't seen before on some of the pages I've put some content on: <http://web-building.crispen.org/>. And I expect there might be a grotesque error or two that somebody might set me right on. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *
[WSG] Good DOM tutorial?
The discussion about validating forms led me to download the DOM Level 1 spec again from the W3C, and after a moment or two I remembered why I'd scrubbed it off my disc the last time. It was either that or grab my Uzi and hunt down the people who wrote that spec. Right now I'm dependent on the kindness of strangers (the folks who wrote Opera's and Moz's JavaScript and DOM engines) for accepting some really evil code. Does anybody know a good DOM tutorial? -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] Tables are bad because...
The voices are telling me that Patrick Griffiths said on 5/19/2004 7:43 AM: Who are all of these mad heavy-handed authoritarian web nuts that you're talking about? ;) /me fires up Xnews, looks to see that comp.infosystems.www.authoring.* are still there. Yup. /me scratches head. :-p -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] back to basics
The voices are telling me that [EMAIL PROTECTED] said on 5/18/2004 8:43 PM: So, yes, ' is a better solution than the one I posted. Except that [censored] MSIE doesn't display the apostrophe. It gets it fine (as slapping onto the top and renaming it to "foo.xml" demonstrates), but when it comes to displaying it, it can't be bothered. I toad you I'd subtract from the sum of human knowledge. Back to lurk. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] back to basics
The voices are telling me that James Ellis said on 5/18/2004 6:06 AM: I have a feeling ' won't work in IE for Windows. I've used ' everywhere with success. Right you are. You can tell how often I fire MSIE up on this box. Slap an XML header on it, rename it foo.xml, and MSIE renders it like a charm. Boy, Microsoft sure pays attention to them DTDs, don't they? :-( -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] back to basics
The voices are telling me that [EMAIL PROTECTED] said on 5/17/2004 8:26 PM: I can't find a way of escaping a single quote inside the attribute, ... b ) declare an entity in an inline DTD declaration at the top of the document to signify a single quote. eg: ]> Excuse me for possibly subtracting from the sum of human knowledge, but I don't recall reading in the original problem statement that it had to be a *semantic* single quote, which means the entity ' would do just fine. The DTDs for XHTML at the W3C refer to <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-special.ent> which includes ' Perhaps somebody can tell me whether or not it's an urban legend (for once the Microsoft XML documentation is obscure) that putting on an XML header automatically gets you ' regardless of DTD? -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] Re: Site Review and IE5 issue
The voices are telling me that Christian Ottosson said on 5/14/2004 4:21 PM: This is an autoresponder. I'll never see your message. Why do you subscribe to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> then? You just asked an autoresponder why it subscribed. You shouldn't anthromorphize autoresponders. They hate that. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] XHTML/HTML
The voices are telling me that YoYoEtc said on 5/14/2004 5:57 PM: So does that mean if I put "XHTML 1.0 Transitional that any code that is of either HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0 will be accepted by validators? I see my validator is presently set at HTML 4.0 Transitional so I assume that means that the validator will accept anything between HTML 3.2 (which I believe is the version just prior to 4.0) or 4.0. Pretty much. I'd like to throw in an opinion I haven't seen much around these parts: the darn spec is five years old, isn't it about time we go to strict? And so I did. And what I discovered, apart from a few things which are annoyances at first (you'll be surprised what kinds of things have to be enclosed in paragraph or div marks) that it wasn't that hard. Seriously. It wasn't that hard. What's more, I'm writing (well, mostly Amaya and TopStyle are writing) actual XHTML. The "transitional" part just admits a whole bunch of extra crap in there which is mostly *not* semantic markup (imho). A small, simple subset of HTML (with a couple of grammar tweaks like and ). And what I'm left with is web pages that don't need to be scraped, they can be *parsed*. Data miners? I'm ready. Active server pages? Like rolling off a log. When you've got your content into semantic XHTML markup, each part practically sits up and tells you what table in your database it belongs in. I think going halfway you're just borrowing trouble. Valid XHTML Strict is a much smaller set of valid words than valid XHTML Transitional. So simplify, learn the smaller set. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *
[WSG] Taking unnecessary cheap shots
The voices are telling me that Kay Smoljak said on 5/14/2004 1:10 AM: I blogged it: http://kay.smoljak.com/archives/?dont-be-a-dinosaur Oh. Well. In that case! There's a peripheral issue that's been bugging me. And since I think y'all would like to read it in pretty pumpkin colors: <http://blog.crispen.org/archives/000433.html> -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] Forms, labels & headers
The voices are telling me that Bert Doorn said on 5/8/2004 9:28 AM: Been there and I do agree in principle - I like compact code that makes sense. But if it takes me 5 hours of experimenting to get a "CSS Only" layout working in multiple browsers, I can't help but think "why bother". Because the second time you do it, it won't take 5 hours. Especially when that same layout takes 5 minutes using tables and most visitors can't tell the difference. You have a defined, repeatable process (even if it's only "fire up $STEAM_AGE_WEB_PAGE_EDITOR") for making tag-soup web pages. You don't have a defined process for making standards-based web pages. Until you do, you're comparing apples and oranges and complaining to us that the oranges we're showing you aren't red enough. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] Question on javascript
The voices are telling me that Chris Blown said on 5/7/2004 2:28 AM: Likewise, never rely solely on javascript based form input validation, you should always check form inputs server side. Hear, hear! Always write your PHP, CGI, etc. as though some pimply little kid is going to throw a ton of crap at it to see if he can defeat it. Because sooner or later that's *exactly* what's gonna happen. Which reminds me, and the real reason I wrote: does anybody know where I might find some good script stress testers? I basically just type stuff into form fields that I know can give scripts problems (backslashes, shell commands in backquotes, long strings, special characters) but there's got to be a better way than that. Or is this too far off-topic? -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] WYSIWYG editor
The voices are telling me that Kay Smoljak said on 5/6/2004 9:16 PM: I don't see the confusion. The post asked about a WYSIWYG editor the generates XHTML and CSS, not component that integrates with a Web app. The same poster clarified in the third post in the thread with: but to edit documents on the web Oh, fooey. I did see that but I was too dim to figure it out. Next time, slap me upside the head and I might figure out you're saying something I should be paying attention to. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * 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] WYSIWYG editor
The voices are telling me that David Gironella said on 5/6/2004 5:26 AM: Anybody know a WYSIWYG editor but that generate XHTML with CSS? Whenever I need to slam some text and pictures into a page, I use Amaya <http://www.w3.org/Amaya/>. It used to be real flaky, but it's been a lot more solid in the past 6 months or so. Floats still give it fits sometimes. But the quality of XHTML it produces is, imho, very good. When I take it into TopStyle Pro and run Tidy on it, Tidy doesn't have to do very much. And at least it doesn't molest existing XHTML like the old-timey editors do. Btw, WYSIWYG and XHTML + CSS is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? You want clean, valid semantic markup that you can style any way you want to. It never turns out exactly that way -- the styles do feed back into the document content -- but you can get pretty close, and having a good process like one recommended here not long ago: <http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/process/> will help you avoid some iterations on that theme and start off a little smarter than you did the last time. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people "Everybody But Me" * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *