W3C Releases Drafts For DOM L2 And More 150
TobiasSodergren writes "People at W3C seem to have had a busy Friday, according to their website.
They have released no less than 4 working drafts
(Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide,
the QA Working group - Introduction,
Process and Operational Guidelines,
Specification Guidelines)
and 2 proposed recommendations:
XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0
and HTML DOM 2.
Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when
playing around with HTML documents? Hope is the last thing to leave optimistic people, right?"
Re:C++ XML API (Score:3, Informative)
DOM not HTML (Score:3, Informative)
You seems to confuse DOM with HTML standard. DOM does not enforce HTML document structure, it is just OO representation of HTML and XHTML documents.
Re:I just wish one little thing (Score:4, Informative)
If you got a problem with popup ads, then please download the Opera browser [opera.com]... you'll find F12 to be your best friend.
If you really want to crusade against something, then VB script is a better candidate or why not Outlook... the worst virus spreading software ever created.
Re:Standards (Score:4, Informative)
Somedays I'm more optimistic. Today's one of those days (tomorrow may not be 'cause I'm digging deeper into IE's weird-ass DOM than I usually care to). But...
Most web developers that have been around for a while would rather code to standards than to marketshare. Standards give you the promise of backward, and more importantly, forward, compatibility. It's also a helluva lot easier to sort out your code when a client asks for a redesign in a year or two if you've been conscious of more than just "making it look right" in the popular browser of the day.
Markup designed for IE only often does truly evil things on other platforms - there's going to be more cellphones and PDAs accessing web pages, not fewer. There are also serious organizational advantages to coding to standards - more tools for handling your pages, it's easier to whip up a quick perl script to process standards compliant HTML...the list of advantages is long.
Just like any other field, there's a trickle-down effect. Not everyone will write good, W3C compliant code, but more will, more often. And despite their megalithic, feudal mentality, Microsoft will have to pay attention. IE6 is still a long ways away from adhering to standards, but it's much, much closer than IE4 was. This seems to have been in large part a reaction to developers bitching about their lack of compliance. I'm hopeful the trend will continue.
Re:The W3C is a joke (Score:3, Informative)
Not "Proposed" Recommendation anymore, it's final (Score:3, Informative)
XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0 is a final W3C Recommendation, not proposed.
-m
Re:C++ XML API (Score:5, Informative)
Someone posted a neat little class to the expat mailing list ~2yrs ago. Basically it was just a Node class with STL list for children and a hashmap for attributes. It was very small, clean, and was in essance a DOM. It used expat but trust me, the code was so tiny you could use any parser with it. It was like 200 lines of code.
I liked it so much I created the same thing in C called domnode [eskimo.com].
Search the expat archives [sourceforge.net]. Wish I could give you more to go on.
Re:Standards (Score:4, Informative)
Many sites can get away with this, but many cannot. If I'm selling a product on the web, I'll make darn sure that 99% of my customer's browsers work with my site. It's a good ideal to say "fix your IE bugs", but often not realistic.
Re:C++ XML API (Score:3, Informative)
http://mail.libexpat.org/pipermail/expat-discuss/
Sorry... (Score:4, Informative)
One simple example: innerHTML. This 'property' is not part of ANY W3C draft, yet many, many websites use it because both IE and Mozilla (Netscape) support it.
Even though M$ is on the committee, their own browser still has plenty of features that are not defined in XHTML 1.0, DOM (level 2 or 3), CSS or whatever. And of course 99% of all web 'developers' are more than happy to use these features.
Re:doesn't matter... (Score:1, Informative)
DOM-2 irrelevant to cross-browser issues (Score:2, Informative)
As long as you do things strictly DOM-1 way, current browsers have been working pretty much predictably for quite some time. I develop sophisticated DHTML and test it in IE, Mozilla and Opera, and I never have a problem as long as I use only DOM methods (which can sometimes be quite limiting, but bearable overall).
A lot of people still do pre-DOM legacy DHTML because they have to make 4.x-compatible sites, but that's another story. DOM-2 may be more featureful, but it doesn't promise making cross-browser development any easier. It can make it harder indeed if not implemented accurately and timely among different browsers. Given a lesser incentive to implement it (DOM-1 is OK for most things), I find it quite possible.
er, yes. (Score:3, Informative)
Is a great tool.
If your code is valid HTML then if anyone complains that their X browser doesn't render it properly that's your first point of defense.
Re:The W3C is a joke (Score:4, Informative)
You have to have standards. The W3C are the people who are widely recognized as being the technical lead for the net. Now they don't make law, quite right, but if there was no W3C then Microsoft really WOULD own the web: as it is, we can and do take them to task when they break the rules. They can ignore us of course, yet whaddaya know but IE6 supports DOM/CSS Level 1. Not a particularly impressive achievement, but it's a start.
The standards are actually very precise, which is one reason they are seens as being very large. There is hardly any room for interpretation in stuff like the DOM, CSS, XML etc. Of course, sometimes when the internal architecture of IE mandates it Microsoft simply ignore things, the mime-type issue being a good example, but also the fact that you have to specify node.className = "class" to set the style on a new element, as opposed to setting the class attribute (which works fine in Mozilla). Why? Because (according to an MS developer) internally the MS dom is based on object model attributes, so that's what you have to set.
Has any company yet written a complete CSS1 implementation? A complete working version of DOM0? Yet here we are toiling away on XHTML and CSS3(!) and DOM Level 2. And they don't even seem to give a rat's ass if anyone actually follows the rules.
[sigh] Yes. Mozilla supports DOM and CSS Level 2 and they have partial support for Level 3 now. Level 0 is the term used to refer to the pre-standardized technologies, it doesn't actually exist as a standard so EVERY browser that can script web pages has a level zero DOM. It should be noted that TBL himself has stepped in on occasion to tick off Microsoft about stuff like browser blocks, bad HTML etc.
From what I hear about CSS3, it's going to be such a massive specification that no company (save Microsoft, if they actually gave a damn) would possibly be able to implement it.
Then you hear wrong.
In the meantime we see developers actually building websites entirely out of Flash because there's one reference implementation (one version, period) and it just works. Is that the future we want?
Developers do not build web pages out of flash. Marketing departments do. Luckily most web pages are not built by marketing.
It's time to hold these clowns accountable. Make them do some real work: make them create a working version of their spec.
Poor troll. The W3C already implement all their standards, go to w3.org and download Amaya. Nobody uses it for actually browsing the web, but there it is, proof that an actually very small organization with very few coders can implement their standards.
Re:Who needs W3C standards (Score:2, Informative)
Now, if you were talking about SOAP...