Tag: w3c

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Microsoft Joins W3C SVG Working Group

Microsoft is joining the W3C SVG Working Group. Presumably that means there’s some interest in SVG for IE or Silverlight or both. I wonder what led to the change of heart.

I pretty much wrote off any chance of SVG being mainstream in 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was previously somewhat of a SVG pusher, but Macromedia obviously is the home of Flash. As expected the SVG love dried up. The gap that Adobe filled was adding support for SVG to IE. If IE supports it natively that’s a game changer.

Gecko already has decent support for SVG. WebKit has support for a while. Opera has support as well. Without analyzing in too much detail there should be a subset that’s usable across current browsers and hopefully IE by the time IE 9.0 ships.

I must admit given the choice I’m still more interested in Microsoft supporting <canvas/>, but no word on that as of yet. I’m still hopeful.

Hooray for web standards!

Categories
Internet

W3C On DTD Perversions

According to the W3C Systeam’s blog, there’s a lot of poorly designed software out there. It’s pretty rare that something has a legitimate need to pull down a DTD in order to work. They should never be requesting it on a very frequent basis. It’s a very cachable asset. The post includes some pretty impressive stats too:

..up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven’t changed in years.

They also make a few requests which really all developers should follow. Here’s my summary:

  • Cache as much as possible, to minimize your impact on others (not to mention improve your performance).
  • Respect caching headers
  • Don’t fetch what you don’t need
  • Identify yourself. Don’t use a generic UA.
  • Try not to suck.
Categories
Web Development

XHTML FAQ

A grreat FAQ on XHTML is available, and I encourage all fellow web developers to read up. I found a few interesting things:

First read this:

strong>Why is it allowed to send XHTML 1.0 documents as text/html?

XHTML is an XML format; this means that strictly speaking it should be sent with an XML-related media type (application/xhtml+xml, application/xml, or text/xml). However XHTML 1.0 was carefully designed so that with care it would also work on legacy HTML user agents as well. If you follow some simple guidelines, you can get many XHTML 1.0 documents to work in legacy browsers. However, legacy browsers only understand the media type text/html, so you have to use that media type if you send XHTML 1.0 documents to them. But be well aware, sending XHTML documents to browsers as text/html means that those browsers see the documents as HTML documents, not XHTML documents.

Then read this:

Why is it disallowed to send XHTML 1.1 documents as text/html?

XHTML 1.1 is pure XML, and only intended to be XML. It cannot reliably be sent to legacy browsers. Therefore XHTML 1.1 documents must be sent with an XML-related media type, such as application/xhtml+xml.

Now in the source of that webpage, I see:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
</html>

but Mozilla says:

Type:  text/html

Does anyone taste dogfood? Will the net ever move to towards xml? Not even the W3C feels it’s safe to move.

I don’t think we will ever see websites that say:

Type:  application/xhtml+xml

On a sidenote: Does anyone know what versions of Internet Explorer support this trick? Is it 5.0+? Or just 6.0?

Categories
Mozilla

W3C Web Applications/Compound Documents

Daniel Glazman points out a new position paper Hixie (most likely) authored.

Most interesting he concludes:

I think this paper is going to face a fierce resistance…

Personally I give my vote on most resistance to Microsoft.

I’m curious what others think reading some of these. It’s really quite interesting. I’ve had a great time reading since Hixie mentioned it on his blog the other day. This is the stuff I enjoy reading most. It’s like SiFi, and reality merging into one. Ok, enough geek speak, time for work.

Categories
Tech (General)

Microsoft and Standards

Microsoft recently redesigned their website (at least their homepage). As you may know, they aren’t a big backer of standards.

Look how well their page validates.

This concludes this episode of Microsoft-doesn’t-care-about-technology.

Validating as XHTML is even more fun.

Apple isn’t perfect, but isn’t to bad either.

This website is fine though 🙂

Go standards!

Categories
Internet

Owning the Internet

It’s becoming more and more common these days…

ISO Codes

Tim Berners-Lee wrote a nice little letter regarding a proposal for Licensing the use of ISO codes. I have to personally agree with Berners-Lee on this one. It’s getting a little rediculus what people claim ownership of.

Can It trademark the word “internet”? Please?

Verisign

According to slashdot ICANN posted an advisory.

IMHO, since Network Solutions (Verisign) is a company contracted to provide such services… they should act appropriately. I personally believe it’s time for the Department of Commerce to step in and take control of the situation. They allowed NetSol to get into this seat of power.

You need to look no further than at the Terms Of Service to see how they abuse their position:

My favorite is this:

Sole Remedy.

YOUR USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH ANY OF THE MATERIALS, RESULTS OR OTHER CONTENTS OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR WITH THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, OUR PRIVACY STATEMENT, OR OTHER POLICIES, YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR OUR SITE.

So they are now telling us… if we don’t like their service… we should ditch the internet. Or resort to using IP addresses. How about request the Department of Commerce and ICANN to unplug them next time around? Put them out of business. Completely revoke their contract next time around leaving them to be nothing but a reseller.

COST OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES.
The Verisign Service(s) are provided to you free of charge.

At least they aren’t charging us for the right to allow them to make money off of our typo’s. Thank you for not requiring us to pay for it! Thank you Verisign for not charging us!

Seriously. Some companies are just plain sick. I really hope Verisign loses big on this. VeriSlime has been a big problem for years. Now they just pushed it to a whole new level.