Just to clarify something about CSS2.1.
The name "CSS2.1" is short for "CSS Level 2, Revision 1". It's an update of the earlier W3C CSS2 Recomendation. CSS2.1 is still "CSS2", it's just the revised version.
When someone asks for a browser to support CSS2, it is implied that what they want is for the browser to support the current revision of CSS2, namely, CSS2 revision 1.
CSS2.1 is in CR, which is the call for implementations stage. It is appropriate for implementors to implement CSS2.1. It is not a draft. The only changes that will be made to the CSS2.1 spec are changes in response to implementors finding errors in the specification, such as contradictory requirements or ambiguities. CSS2 revision 1 is much more implementable than the original CSS2 Recommendation, since it is simply that recommendation, with several years of editorial work applied to fix all the mistakes the working group has found and been told about.
(Note that CSS2.1 and CSS2 are at the same state in the W3C process — they are both at the "call for implementations" stage. The difference is that the name of that stage changed between 1998 and 2004. What used to be called "REC" or "Recommendation" is now called "CR" or "Candidate Recommendation". The new stage currently called "Recommendation", which indicates that the specification has reached a very high level of implementation maturity, didn't exist back in 1998.)
Once again. CSS2 has been updated. The update is called CSS2 revision 1, or CSS2.1 for short. CSS2.1 is still CSS level 2. CSS2.1 is what CSS implementations should be using as reference if they want to implement CSS level 2.
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Last week, Nadia, Alex, and
Aly planned to go to Prague to visit the city with a friend of Aly's
who is in Prague. Since I've wanted to visit the city for some time, I
took the opportunity to go there myself to meet up with them.
Nadia lost
her passport, so never made it. The friend with whom we were
staying had asked one of his friends, Mike, whether he could house a
couple of us, and then went off with Aly to go skiing, so it ended up
being Alex, Mike and myself, who had never met before, visiting the
city together.
We drank "to random friends", which seemed appropriate.
Prague itself is beautiful. Most of the buildings in the city are
very old, many of the roads are paved with cobblestones (and kept that
way, unlike in Oslo where cobblestones are repaired by pouring tarmac
into the holes). The public transport system is probably the best I've
ever seen, in every respect: frequent, punctual, very modern vehicles,
cheap, 24 hour service, good coverage, well maintained tracks.
Many people there speak English, more so than in Germany, although
less so than in Oslo. It snowed most of the time we were there.
On Saturday I visited The Castle, met up with Mike and Alex, and
then visited The Clock, The Bridge, and The Wall. On Saturday evening
we went to a tiny Jazz club and listened to a local band called
"Vertigo Quintet", who were very good. On Sunday we did some more
sightseeing. One building we passed, the Dancing House or something,
looked very funky.
I have a theory as to why it looks the way it is. I picture the
following scene, a few months before construction began: the architect
looks at his carefully constructed paper and plastic model sitting on
the desk where he is about to present it to his customers and their
investors. He carefully lays a white sheet over the model, after
making one final check.
He then goes down to meet them at his office's reception, so that
he can escort them to his office. In the meantime, the catering staff
enter the office and bring the drinks for the meeting. Before leaving,
the caterer sits back on the desk in the middle of the room, admiring
the view out of the window. A crunching sound emanates from under the
sheet, and the caterer jumps up in panic, smoothes down the sheet, and
runs out of the office.
In walks the architect and his customers and their investors. He
begins talking about how the design is a brilliant symbol of power and
modern design, a carefully calculated speech that forstalls any
objections that the customers might make, since he doesn't want to
spend another six months designing a new building. As he finishes his
explanations for the design, he yanks the sheet covering the model,
showing the model in all its crumpled and broken glory. "Amazing!"
exclaims the customer, who was taken in by the speech, before even
looking at the model. "I love it!", says the lead representative from
the investor's side, for the same reason. The other representatives
all agree that this is clearly a brilliant design, not wanting to
cross their bosses.
The customers agree to the design, and leave, before the architect
has any chance to explain that this is not the design he had in
mind.
On Sunday evening we played Settlers of Catan Travel Edition.
Great game. I bought it a few weeks ago but this was the first time
I'd played it (Alex brought it with him, by the way, not me!). Kam,
Wilhelm and I played it on Tuesday as well. It is good.
Then Aly and her friend came back from skiing and we all went
bar-hopping. We settled on a cocktail bar where I sampled a number of
drinks, although to be honest I thought the strip club we tried before
it would have been more fun.
On Monday we visited the zoo, where a lovely cat came and sat on me
and purred, much to my happiness. And there were other cool animals
too, I guess.
Altogether, I liked Prague very much.
I'm getting tired of hearing XForms advocates say things that are
either misleading or clearly wrong, so here's a quick list of myths,
or misleading truths, about XForms, which I have heard recently (most
particularly during the multiple demos of XForms software at the
plenary in Boston last week).
- XForms is declarative
-
XForms has declarative aspects, just like HTML. But it isn't
exclusively declarative. XForms in fact introduces a primitive
XML-based scripting language (called XForms Actions)
to perform imperative actions.
For example, you can use the setfocus
element to set the focus to another element, or the load
element to make the UA follow a link.
- Scripting is bad for accessibility
False. Scripting doesn't hurt accessibility. What hurts
accessibility is when semantically meaningless elements are given
some sort of device-specific behaviour (for example, making a
div
into a checkbox or a scrollbar, or using the
font
element for headers).
- Script is harder to maintain than XPath expressions
False. It depends entirely on what you're doing. The reason most
JavaScript on the Web is a mess is because it is badly written; the
same would happen to XPath if the same authors used that
instead.
- HTML mixes presentation and content — XForms doesn't
False. HTML doesn't mix presentation and content — authors
do. XForms doesn't prevent the two from being mixed, in fact one of
the big things people are pushing these days is SVG+XForms, which is
the ultimate mix of presentation and content.
- XForms is better than HTML because it is media-independent
False. Both HTML and XForms are as media-independent as each
other. If XForms is better it has nothing to do with one or the other
being media-independent.
- HTML mainly specifies how the control should look, while
XForms specifies what the control should do
False. HTML doesn't specify how the controls should look at
all.
- HTML has limitations, so it had to be replaced with XForms
False. It's easier to fix HTML than to replace it with an
entirely new language.
- HTML requires authors to use hacks; XForms doesn't because is
cleanly designed
False. HTML doesn't require authors to use hacks, browser bugs
do. And there's no reason
to believe that XForms UAs will be any less buggy than HTML UAs, if
it's the same programmers writing both UAs.
To demonstrate some of these points, I took the XForms Calculator
example, which was used as an example of some of XForms' power at the
W3C Plenary last week, and made an HTML version.
Note that I didn't fix any of the bugs in the sample — there
are a number of ways in which this demo is broken. I just converted
the existing XHTML1+XForms+XForms Actions+XPath to the exact
equivalent HTML4+JavaScript+DOM to see how it would compare.
Feature |
XForms version |
HTML version |
Media independent? |
Yes |
Yes |
Mixes content and presentation? |
Yes |
Yes |
Mixes logic and UI? |
Yes |
Yes |
Could be written so that the presentation, UI, and logic layers were all separated? |
Yes |
Yes |
Uses imperative scripting constructs? |
Yes, e.g. to set the operation of the "=" button:
<xf:toggle case="add"/> |
Yes, e.g. to set the operation of the "=" button:
operation = add; |
Uses declarative constructs? |
Yes, e.g. to register an event listener:
<xf:action ev:event="DOMActivate">...</xf:action> |
Yes, e.g. to register an event listener:
onclick="..." |
Markup for the cell that contains the "9" button |
<td>
<xf:trigger>
<xf:label>9</xf:label>
<xf:action ev:event="DOMActivate">
<xf:setvalue ref="/equation/displaybuffer"
value="/equation/displaybuffer * 10 + 9"/>
<xf:setvalue ref="/equation/display"
value="/equation/displaybuffer"/>
</xf:action>
</xf:trigger>
</td>
|
<td>
<button onclick="display = displaybuffer
= displaybuffer * 10 + 9; update();">
9
</button>
</td>
|
Number of namespace prefixes |
174 |
0 |
File size |
9.4KiB |
3.9KiB |
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It finally got to me. The amount of spam I was receiving finally
hit a critical point. I was off the grid for a couple of days, and of
the 938 e-mails I had when I got back, half were from automated
systems (like Bugzilla), and half were spam, with the remainder (like
half a percent or something) being from the three or four dozen
mailing lists I'm subscribed to. I think there was one interesting
e-mail out of the 938.
So. All my mail now goes through Razor, Spam Assassin (set to a
pretty low tolerance level), and GMail's spam filters, before being
redirected into my inbox. I don't plan on checking for false positives
too much, so if you want me to read your mail, I would encourage:
- Using plain text e-mail; not HTML mail.
- Replying in context, quoting just what needs quoting; not
top-posting and including the entire thread in the mail.
- Spelling correctly.
GMail in particular seems to have no compunction about flagging
valid mail as spam if it looks even slightly boring.