Re: W3C Home page switched to full CSS layout

>Le jeu 05/12/2002 =E0 18:04, Jim Ley a =E9crit :
>> Firstly of course, it's XHTML, so SHOULD be being served as
>> application/xhtml+xml but is not. How do we evangelise W3C Notes if
even
>> the W3 ignore the SHOULDs they contain?
>
>It is my intention to make sure this will evolve, thanks to the trick
>documented at
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2002Dec/0005.html

My browsers sends accept headers including "application/xhtml+xml; q=0"
There's nothing more I can do as a client to make it clear that I do not
support, and therefore cannot render XHTML in an appropriate manner, I do
support text/html.  Why will the W3 not send me an HTML representation of
their homepage, why insist on XHTML 1.0?

>But we need some wider experiment before that (as you know, some quite
>widespread browsers do not support application/xhtml+xml)

Indeed, and many do not support  application/x-chickens  that's why we
have the accept-headers!  There's no lack of browser support of HTML 4.01
so, indeed it's difficult to find a UA that will have any problems with
it unlike the xhtml, why not serve it?  Rather than work at trying to
match Appendix C, which as we see later, is already causing difficulties.

>> Beyond that, in what way is W3C an Acronym?

>It is, W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium. It's not a standard
>acronym, but remembers that's the point of using <acronym> and <abbr> is
>to help people understanding the underlying text, much more than to
>determine if something is an acronym, an abbreviation, a geekism, etc.

It is an abbr surely, so use the appropriate markup - I do not want my
speech agent to attempt to say "W3C" as a word, it's not going to do a
good job of it.  I realise that you're using acronym for browser support,
but I see no point in breaking the semantic meaning of a element purely
to get a particular visual representation in some browsers.

>> Why are classes being used as
>> purely presentational not semantic classes (e.g <span
>> class=3D"invisible"> )

>More generally, I could tell you that the fact the class is called
>"invisible" doesn't mean anything, but in the mind of the conceptor of
>the page. What if I told you that by class=3D"invisible" we meant "links
>to skip navigation blocks"?

Of course, my issue is that the name is suggestive of a particular visual
rendering, and that the span in question was there purely for the
presentational effect.

<span class="invisible"><a class="bannerLink"
title="Skip introductory links and the mission statement"
href="#technologies">Skip to Technologies</a> | </span>

Is the pipe character really useful to the situation where's it would be
"invisible", would not normal whitesapce be better, especially as the
UA's I'm aware of will distinguish the link as a link in any case, so

<a class="bannerLink invisible"
title="Skip introductory links and the mission statement"
href="#technologies">Skip to Technologies </a>

Would've been appropriate and would've included purely presentational
elements, this is what's done elsewhere with the <p class="invisible">
... </p>  I also think another name would've been appropriate just to
stop people thinking it was presentational.

My criticisms were intentionally petty, the page has to be beyond any
complaint.

Cheers,

Jim.

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2002 12:47:06 UTC