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:doesn't matter... (Score:3, Interesting)
C++ XML API (Score:4, Interesting)
Standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps it's time we stopped sitting on our thumbs and complaining about Microsoft ignoring standards. An outright ban of IE is needed, from workplaces, schools, ect... Sites should block access to people using IE. This is the only way we can get our rights to web standards back!
Seriously though, does anyone have any ideas on how we can take control of web standards away from MS ?
Re:Standards (Score:3, Interesting)
My own homepage doesn't render in anything but Mozilla, currently, but small, personal sites aren't gonna break or make anything (unless they come in the millions, which is unlikely).
The people at Mozilla have provided us with a tool of 99% perfect rendering. Now it is up to the web site maintainers to actually enforce the use of Mozilla (or any other browser that fully adheres to standards; there is no other currently).
But Slashdot won't take this upon its shoulders, because it doesn't believe in standards, just like M$.
So M$ wins.
Re:The W3C is a joke (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Mozilla does not support DOM 2 HTML in XHTML... and probably never will, because the bug assignee doesn't seem to care about this rather crucial bug.
Btw, DOM 0 is not a standard, but a collection of common garbage from the old days. It is supported in Mozilla only for backward compatibility, and people shouldn't use it in design. Mozilla explicitly does not support IE and NN4 only stuff such as document.all and document.layers.
Re:Standards (Score:2, Interesting)
That depends quite a lot on your definition of ALWAYS as it applies to Mozilla...Considering Mozilla was originally based off the Netscape source code (though I realize now it is been virtually completely rewritten). People seem to forget that Netscape were the kings of non-standard HTML as an attempt to "lock-in" customers. Hell, IE still to this day includes Mozilla in its user agent header to work around all the sites that would deny access to anything other than Netscape, back in the 2.0 era.
IE6 W3 support (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately I've been working on an app for a company's internal use, which means the delightful situation of being able to dictate minimum browser requirements. As a result, the app is designed for IE6/Mozilla. All development has been in Mozilla, and a lot of DOM use goes on. And it all works in IE6, no browser checking anywhere. My only regrets is I can't make use of the more advanced selectors provided by CSS2, so the HTML has a few more class attributes than it would need otherwise. But, overall, not bad.
Another positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml. So at last, XHTML documents can be sent with the proper mime type [hixie.ch].
So despite being a Mozilla (Galeon) user, as a web developer who makes heavy use of modern standards, I look forward to seeing IE continue to catch up to Mozilla so that I can worry even less about browser-specific issues.
W3C: stop now (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, some client-side code is useful, but unfortunately, the major contenders have dropped the ball on that one. The W3C has given us JavaScript+DOM+CSS+..., but it's way too complicated for the vanishingly small amount of functionality, and nobody has managed to implement it correctly; in fact, I doubt nobody knows what a correct implementation would even mean. Flash has become ubiquitous, but it just isn't suitable for real GUI programming and is effectively proprietary. And Java could have been a contender, but Sun has chosen to keep it proprietary, and the once small and simple language has become unusably bloated.
But, hey, that means that there is an opportunity for better approaches to client-side programming. Curl might have been a candidate if it weren't for the ridiculous license. But someone outside the W3C will do something decent that catches on sooner or later.
Re:W3C: stop now (Score:4, Interesting)
Everybody is, for practical purposes. Who do you think is dreaming up a lot of the stuff that comes out of the W3C? Look at the authorships of the standards. And if you sit in those meetings, you'll quickly see that Microsoft doesn't often take "no" for an answer.
Microsoft has even told us why they like their standards to be complicated: they believe that if they just make it complicated enough, nobody else but them can implement them. Of course, Microsoft's reasoning is at the level of Wiley Coyote, with Open Source being the Roadrunner, but what can you do.
One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed,
We have a problem with creating dynamic web content, but the current crop of W3C standards for addressing that problem isn't working; it has turned into a Rube Goldberg contraption. Someone needs to start from scratch, and the W3C appears to be incapable of doing it.
If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?
Of course, things need to get written down and standardized. But the way standards are supposed to work is that people try things out in practice, whatever works well survives in the marketplace or among users, people create multiple implementations, then people get together and work out the differences among the implementations, then it all gets written up as a standard, and finally everybody goes back and makes their implementations standards compliant. It's a long, tedious process, but it does result in reasonable standards that real people can actually implement.
What the W3C is often doing is using its position to create completely unproven systems on paper and let the rest of the world figure out how to deal with it. Or, worse, the W3C is used by powerful companies to push through "standards" that haven't stood the test of time and for which only they themselves have a working implementation. If you give that kind of junk the stamp of approval of a standards body, you make things worse, not better.
Re:Does anyone ever... (Score:1, Interesting)