Anne van Kesteren: Weblog 4.2

Weblog on W3C, WHATWG, HTML, CSS, DOM, XML, HTTP and more.

Countdown

As I don’t have the time or the aspiration to write about all things happening right now in separate entries I wrap it all up into one. I’ve done such things before and I liked it. Not sure about you.

Through Technorati I found the first ‘big company’ weblog, open.info.nl from info.nl. Although not everything they create is perfectly cool (just check the homepage) there are some people from inside the organization pushing the envelop. Scanning the weblog makes me believe that the annoying message at the Rabobank website will disappear before the end of this year and that’s a good thing. (They also told me that at reboot 7.0, but when I read it on their weblog I remembered.)
There was a lot of talk about RSS this week. For example, there now is a Longhorn Team RSS Blog. Microsoft seems to get the weblog thing. Now all they need is some standards advocate to prevent creating broken stuff. See also Simple List Questions and Longhorn and Standards from Sam Ruby. There was also a post Adriaan de J. (seriously, what’s up with the full name?). Personally I’m not so sure what’s different from Microsoft’s approach compared to that from Apple with the exception that you can de-install Safari if I’m told correctly. Hmm, maybe that’s it. But still, RSS can be perfectly both a desktop and browser feature.
Fortunately Microsoft is not alone. Apple — “we’re quite cool and refreshing, but sue you nonetheless” — released some Podcast (iTunes) specific RSS extensions. Sam Ruby has questions.
If you missed it, the Internet Explorer team published a shocking article. Gervase Markham has comments. Me too, but I don’t have time to write everything up I want to say. One reason I like meetings.
No, I’m not keeping up with your blog. Now you know.
Language specific styling is hot. Well, Alexander Christiaan Jacob wrote about quotation marks and emphasis. Personally I had plans to write something about bidi formatting in CSS and XML; also about Unicode in XML. Both postponed.
CSS hacks are not forward compatible. Fortunately I’m aware of that problem. Still sucks though.
Zoom layout.
According to Mark Pilgrim OPML is out and XOXO is not. Actually, the later is its replacement. I guess that has nothing to do with Dave Whiner having invented OPML.
There was also a lot of fuss about accessibility. I personally agree with the working group. Let validation be damned, test if it actually works. Validation was of course an easy constraint to test but it doesn’t really prove anything. With an XHTML DOCTYPE on top and a text/html media type; what’s more accessible: <p>paragraph here or <span class="text">paragraph here</span>. Hah, I know, bad example. Be sure to read A principled argument from Matt May. You probably know that the WaSP has some accessibility task force with all high profile webloggers on it, right? I would like to know how many users are actually out there. What sites do they typically visit, in what visitor ‘categories’ can you place them in, et cetera. Are things like Jaws detectable, is there some server data? Those things.
Weblog UI and slugs. Who’s first with a GreaseMonkey script? Bonus points of you can make it also work in Opera for Opera user javascript and in Internet Explorer as bookmarklet.
Behaviour: everything old is new again.
rel=tag implies rel=nofollow. For now, just use rel="nofollow tag". Everything that doesn’t support that hasn’t got a conforming HTML 4.01 parser and should get one.
Javascript has a mime-type at last! Is it really that official already? Why isn’t there a published RFC? Still cool though. Firefox 1.1 will support all, plus extra. application/xhtml-voice+xml is also there — semi. For the Opera gang.
Closed World vs. Open World: the First Semantic Web Battle.

Finally, all my bookmarked posts in bloglines are cleared out. Time to start counting down at five; those who know will be quiet, me too.

29th June 2005

Browse through posts: XHTML because it has a DOCTYPE ← main → VPRO.

Comments

I guess that has nothing to do with Dave Whiner having invented OPML.

No. It’s not that it needs replacing because it’s Winer’s spec, it’s that that it needs replacing because it’s a typical Winer spec.
Permalink · 2005-06-30 01:38:56 · Aristotle Pagaltzis
Thanks Anne for the friendly note about our Info.nl Company Weblog.
A small correction however: Info.nl is no longer involved in creating (or designing) the Rabobank.nl website. We were heavily involved for quite a number of years, but alas, no longer. That being said, I myself was involved (for Info.nl) not too long ago for the Rabobank.nl project when they were developing their internet architecture. This is the period in which their stance on web standards, URI design, REST, etcetera was created. And also, we still do a bunch of other stuff for other Rabobank websites (they have quite a few).
But yes, you are right, before the end of this year we should see the end of the annoying browser warning at Rabobank.nl. Also see the Marc Cootjans interview on Emerce on the new Rabobank.nl initiative.
Permalink · 2005-06-30 07:22:26 · Edgar Vonk
You forgot the www out of 'betaversion.org'.
Permalink · 2005-06-30 08:17:28 · Robert Wellock
Hey, if the Rabobank is going to use REST, does that mean we can script the banking interface? ;-)
Permalink · 2005-06-30 09:25:12 · Mark Wubben
Hey, if the Rabobank is going to use REST, does that mean we can script the banking interface? ;-)
We're even using SiFR (jojo2 is on our team) :-) The banking interface will take a bit more time but it's in the planning. In the meantime you can greasemonkey to your heart's content.
Cheers,
Meint
Permalink · 2005-06-30 17:21:31 · Meint
Meint, yeah, I heard about sIFR in Copenhagen. Even mailed with Ron when I found out jojo2's e-mail address was from the Rabobank. Well, I'm interested in seeing what you guys will do with it. Good luck!
Permalink · 2005-07-01 14:46:16 · Mark Wubben

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