... And what's worse, you've been infected by the dreaded click-here disease. OK, OK, I _do_ know the argument that says at any given time, 90% of WWW users are complete beginners and need to be addressed as if they were imbeciles who haven't the remotest clue how to use their browser. How do you suppose an even modestly experienced webnaut feels when treated like that? I'm still putting my money on that historic tutorial where TimBL and friends told us: "Don't format for a particular browser" http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/DeviceIndependent.html and "Don't mention the mechanics" http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/NoMechanics.html A well made web page is not one that shows off to the reader with bushels of ostentatious tricks, to the point that they are left totally confused about what it was that the author was trying to tell them. No, it's one where the seams are well hidden, and the reader is given the impression that the page was composed specially for them and for their viewing situation, whatever it might be. ... Alan J. Flavell ------------------------------------------ Alan J. Flavell wrote: > And what's worse, you've been infected by the dreaded click-here > disease. One often-forgotten reason why "click here" is stylistically bad: there seems to be plenty of evidence that people often skim Web content rather than reading it in detail, at least until they encounter something especially interesting to them. Browsers normally present links in a way that makes them stand out. If the link texts are informative, one can quickly skim them and get a good idea of where a Web site might take them. But if the anchor text consists of "click here," "here" or even "press your right-arrow key here" then the reader skimming the links sees a bunch of repeated phrases that tell him nothing about where the links go. And because you want the link texts to stand out and be easy to skim, they should be as short as possible, so "click here" and its variants merely add cognitive complexity to the skimming process. Eric Bohlman -------------------------------- Chuck Bennett wrote: >.... Much better, I think, >to provide an alternative non-frames navigation page and put a link to >that in the NoFrames section - something like "Your browser doesn't >support frames. Click _here_ for non-frames navigation of this site." I >also like the idea of including a no-frames option (using this same >alternative navigation page) available to users whose browsers can do >frames but who personally dislike them. > What I did was to actually put the contents of the initial frame set into the NOFRAMES element directly. This way a non-Frames user doesn't even get told what he already knows - that he isn't use a frames-enabled browser. Stanley Friesen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Since the web became besieged by business, there have been a growing percentage of pages that use the brightest of white backgrounds. Sadly enough, they expect everything to look as though it just came from a commercial printer. It's unfortunate that "competent author" carries an implication of "mandatory white background", especially as this has little to do with the underlying code. A computer screen is a light source, not a reflective surface like a sheet of paper. I certainly don't turn on a light bulb and stare at it, and I don't expect people to look at bright white pages for an extended period of time. To an albino a bright white background would fall into the category of "glaring color"! The main thing to remember about design is to keep a good contrast between the foreground and the background. gordon ------------------------------------ I think there will be as many opinions as people on this one , but in general , solid colored backgrounds look more professional. The white ones tend to print better, but I'm partial to a solid black background myself, as I can get 99 percent of the white backgrounds bennies while still being different. If a background pattern does not obscure the content with it's complexity , and truly ads to the content , there is nothing wrong with it , except for those paying by the byte for their web access, in which case wall-paper is expensive and users will turn off images leaving your content to stand against whatever the bgcolor is. Dr. Clue (A.K.A. Ian A. Storms) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% What will happen if someone with a non-CSS compatible browser views a page controled with CSS? ... To make a further point..... How should one create a document that can be viewed with the same results on both CSS and non-CSS browsers? Sam ----------------------- > To make a further point..... >How should one create a document that can be viewed with the same results > >on both CSS and non-CSS browsers? Define "results". Mark A. Fuller ----------------------- > What will happen if someone with a non-CSS compatible browser views > a page controled with CSS? The style will not be present, as designed. That someone will still be able to access the content. > To make a further point..... > How should one create a document that can be viewed with the same results > on both CSS and non-CSS browsers? One should not worry over such trivial matters of presentation in every situation. If CSS is not supported, the user should be able to find his way around the site just fine. As long as you avoid making your content refer to a style as an essential navigational clue you'll be okay. Greg Berigan ----------------------- > What will happen if someone with a non-CSS compatible browser views > a page controled with CSS? The nice thing is, no page is controlled by CSS. I view pages all the time that use stylesheets to suggest layout and appearance, and I use Lynx and MacWeb, two browsers that have not heard of stylesheets. The wonderful thing about stylesheets is that the pages are perfectly readable without them. Authors who try to "shadow" words by having the same word appear three times, with the offset being just a few pixels will have those words appear as normal text, with no apparent reason for the repetition, but such is life. Generally, viewing pages in a nonCSS browser means the pages show up fine, with the defaults I have selected via my browser. Phil Stripling ----------------------- Phil Stripling wrote: > Generally, viewing pages in a nonCSS browser means the pages show up fine, > with the defaults I have selected via my browser. Sort of leaves one with the impression that some of this newer stuff is a lot of fluff. It's cute but fluff. Joseph Zorzin ----------------------- Veronica Karlsson wrote: > Joseph Zorzin wrote: > > Sort of leaves one with the impression that some of this newer stuff is > > a lot of fluff. It's cute but fluff. > > Yup, but it's honest fluff that doesn't pretend to be something it is > not (and cannot be). That's the whole point of it. Put the important > stuff in one file and the less important fluff in another. Those who > want to see the fluff can do that and those who don't care about it can > ignore it and concentrate on the content. I dub this the 'fluff & stuff' method. catnip ----------------------- Sam wrote: > What will happen if someone with a non-CSS compatible browser views >a page controled with CSS? It depends on how you wrote your html and css. You can do unintelligent things with CSS in order to get a certain presentation, but result in unstructured meaningless crud when viewed with no CSS. The classic example is applying negative margins to have the same word overlay itself 6-8 times in different colors, slightly offset. It looks nice in CSS, but seeing the same word 6-8 times in ordinary HTML display looks bad. The idea is, you should write your CSS and HTML in a manner such that it degrades to meaningful raw markup and content when CSS isn't applied. An example I'm working on can be seen at http://www.2ndlawlib.org/journals/csstable.html This is designed to replace my table use at /journals . It creates a columnar display in IE 4. But, NN 4 has some serious problems, so I withhold a fair degree of style from it. In NN4 you get basic style, but the index appears as basic bibliographic paragraph. In IE 3 you get even less style (because it gracefully ignores some things NN 4 doesn't). And in any other browser you get raw content and structure. You can look at it in all 3 browsers and, in NN 4, disable CSS in "edit | preferences | advanced" to see no style at all. This should be representative of how pages should degrade, and it should also demonstrate how a page can never be "controlled with CSS." Mark A. Fuller ----------------------- > What will happen if someone with a non-CSS compatible browser views > a page controled with CSS? Then the CSS styles will not display and javascript references to same will not work Dr. Clue (A.K.A. Ian A. Storms) ----------------------- > What will happen if someone with a non-CSS compatible browser views >a page controled with CSS? Well, such browsers render everything by their defaults. What else can you expect? Alexander N. Andreyev ----------------------- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Bia wrote: > something it seems like this group hates to do is really help > with specific changes.. I don't know about the rest of the "group" [sic], but what I hate is trying to explain a Newtonian physics concept to someone who keeps saying "But why do we have to have gravity" REBUS %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Alan J. Flavell" wrote: > REBUS wrote: > > # is a hash mark unless you need to tell someone to "press > > the pound key after leaving a message". > >Well, this is generated by the pound key on my keyboard: £ > >In iso-8859-1 it's the character 163 decimal, conveniently >expressed in HTML as £ or £ > >Cue jokes about "pounding on the keyboard". This is an off topic post. The point was there are language differences around the world (and we're only talking UK and US here) so there is not one correct answer, it depends on where you are and what you're doing. Ironically this is my view on HTML in general. Any one claiming to know the one correct answer just lacks experience. If I had a pound (of hash) for ever time I typed colour instead of color in my HTML i'd be a very stoned man. Just my two pence. : ) Stewart Dean %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Chris writes: > I am now totally confused about the differences between the > header command() and the 'font size=n' command. > > Which is better? I just switched my page all to 'font size=n' > thinking it would be better for my vistors. Now I've read that the > header command is better...which is it? What are the different uses > for each? The header element has uses other than setting the size of the font; I would suggest that using header to set font size is an erroneous use of the header element. If you follow that suggestion, then use font size to set the size of the font, and use

and so on to set headings for your content. The concept of headings is unrelated to the concept of font size in theory. You may have missed some earlier threads, but many people seem to find that using

for their important headings instead of gets them a higher listing in the pages served up by search engines. The theory seems to be that robots are programmed to assume that

indicates content of primary importance, while is ignored in indexing the page in the search engine. So, for example, if my site is about Guadeloupe, and my page begins

Guadeloupe

, that page is more likely to be included at the top of the list in search results than a page that begins Guadeloupe. It may be that the rendering of both sets if elements is the same in your browser, but the robots use the heading tag to determine (rightly or wrongly) the importance you attribute to certain text. My suggestion is that you use to identify important material in your files, such as the page "headline" and the headings of divisions. The element is deprecated (that is, it is suggested that it not be used) in HTML, if I recall. You have a good question, and I hope you read all the replies. Many people are confused by the _appearance_ of how certain tags are rendered, without understanding that the appearance in rendering is often a happenstance. As you read your responses, keep in mind that there is a disagreement over whether HTML should be used to define the content of the file (that is, a heading should be marked as a heading, using ) or to suggest appearance of a rendered file (by using, for example, to make text bigger than other text). I have given you a "define the content" answer with a reason for using that format -- search engines use

but not to index pages. Look for reasons in other answers, and pick the answers which you find most persuasive to fit your needs (you may not care about search engines listing your pages in high order and you do want big text). Phil Stripling --------------------------------------------- are ment to be HEADERS to sections in your page. They force a line break after they are finished and some clever HTML parser at a search engine might give text between the pairs more weight in it's indexing. The pair is more for setting attributes in-line as your text is rendered. It's not so much that one is better than the other , but rather that they have slightly different goals. Dr. Clue (A.K.A. Ian A. Storms) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Now, if only there was a 'life' validator somewhere... catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Kenneth wrote: > So, is validating your HTML still the way to go, or just ignore errors, and > making sure your pages work in all browsers by actually testing it? The following is an opinion. All flames will be cheerfully ignored unless they're really creative and worth saving. I think that validation is even more important now than it was prior to HTML4. Most of us are aware of the fact that M$IE will almost render a page drawn on a beer-soaked napkin and held in front of the monitor -- as long as it's right-side up. Any other browser will be less forgiving, and some are downright persnickety about correctly formed HTML. This does not mean that M$IE is a better browser, just that it is more tolerant of sloppiness. When it comes to learning to write HTML, M$IE is the teacher you don't want your kid to have. Ignorance is bliss, but it can get your butt into some pretty twitchy situations. As the language grows, it will become more difficult to get things right. HTML is nowhere near as interesting to learn as is, say, C++ or Perl, but the quest for features is bringing us ever more to absorb at an ever increasing rate. XML is on the horizon, and is bringing MathML along for the ride. DHTML is already with us, in it's infancy and screaming for more to eat and a fresh diaper. Java is what, two years old now? Three? Growing pains notwithstanding, I suspect that java may one day live up to it's hype and become de rigeur for us web tinkerers. JavaScript is already the norm for professional job-seekers, and more and more of those (usually clueless) folks who are looking to hire the likes of us are demanding at least one, and often two or three real programming languages in addition to the ability to write HTML (or at least run FrontPage...) (I have yet to actually deploy a cgi process written in C++, but I see the requirement for it in more and more ads. What the heck are these folks doing with it?) If the present state is any indication of what we can expect in the future, it would seem that validation is now more important, not less. If not for the rendering of the page, then at least for the self-discipline that it cultivates. This self-discipline should not be regarded lightly. The client I'm currently working with is a megalithic and very well-known corporation that we've all heard of, and employs about a zillion people. Some of those people fancy themselves to be web developers and routinely publish FrontPage garbage spew on the LAN/WAN/web. One of these locally-published pages is very popular with the people at the site -- but it only works in one version 4 browser. Unfortunately, this company has not widely deployed and does not officially support any version 4 browser yet. When the users call to report that the page is broken, the self-proclaimed guru tells them to clear their browser cache and try again. Even if it's their fifth call. Why does he say that? Because (and this is the most important part!) it is what worked for him when he developed the page. Because it works on his machine after he cleared the cache of the perfectly broken edition of his page. (All newbies learn this at some point, but this guy is still clueless and thinks it's some kind of magic.) Now, were he to validate his work specifying a DTD for the browser he's using, I suspect that he would get that ego-stroking "congratulations, this page validates!" message and assume that all is well. Would he be right? Not in my opinion. Not in the opinion of hundreds of people who cannot use the thing. But without some kind of validation, there's no guarantee that it will work in any browser that's not the one he's using. I had a conversation with this guy a few weeks ago, before his broken page was deployed, and gave him my usual derogatory monologue about FrontPage in particular and WYSIWYG's in general -- to which he replied that he prefers to "program" (his word) in HTML, but that his boss wants him to use FrontPage. Am I the only one who thinks he was bullshitting me? If this guy would take to time to understand what he is doing, and to cultivate the discipline to do it well, there's a very good chance that he would keep his job. As it is, it is only a matter of time before someone finally gets tired of this guy and says to his boss "I've called this guy seven times about this problem, and each time he tells me to do the same thing that does not work. Now either give me this information so I can do my job or I'm going to raise hell". Budda bump bump bump -- another one bites the dust. There's the requested horror story. How much do you want to bet that this guy is out peddling his skills as a web developer (employed by megalithic corporation we've all heard of) within six months, and is pissing off my potential clients that he's suckered in with his $39/page rates within a month after that? (Same guy emails about using "Pearl"...) I think that validation is just the way you earn your stripes. Sometimes it's just some minor little esoteric point that's keeping a page from getting there, other times it's an error that had been bugging you for an hour. Either way, there's no reason not to do it right, short of just plain laziness, is there? In the end, if it's just your personal page that's at issue, it's probably no big deal. The web is polluted with poorly done personal pages that nobody ever looks at anyway. (Then again, it looks a lot more impressive if you can stick the W3C's "validated" logo on the thing, even if no one ever looks at it unless you're running their browser!) But if it's a site you've been paid to deploy and it doesn't validate, you'd better hope that neither your client nor any of his employees, relatives, or friends has trouble seeing it, or, worse yet, emails him the results of a failed validation run. Scott's not the only one on the planet who knows the URL of the W3C's validator! (Hey Scott, howzit?!) There's my two cents' worth -- all cancellation requests must be accompanied by a ten dollar restocking fee. Sorry, no personal checks or credit cards accepted. No refunds on electrical parts, including bitstreams. ;) Art Sackett %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% >> How in blazes is the OS supposed to know you want to change the file name? Read your mind? << Not a good idea. The new mind-reading addons still have a lot of bugs to be worked out (particularly the NT version, wherein forgetting to set the Rorschach option to "no" causes ink to leak out of your disk drive). Not to mention the danger of daydreaming too near your Web server and inadvertently changing all of the filenames to something really Freudian. Jenna Farnham %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% David Kerr wrote: >Is there a list of the different MIME content types (that I don't have >to buy in a book)? I've been searching and searching to no avail! > Here's where you can find the Mime FAQ: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/text/faq/usenet/mail/mime-faq/top.html OG ---------------------------- David Kerr wrote: >Is there a list of the different MIME content types (that I don't have >to buy in a book)? I've been searching and searching to no avail! The official registry of Internet media types, also called MIME types, is kept at ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/ The registration procedure is defined in RFC 2048 which belongs to the set of RFCs which define the Internet media type concept. There are many other types actually in use; some of them are listed in http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/Book/Book-3ed/appb/mimetype.html Web user agents are not required to support any specific set of Internet media types. Generally speaking, the registered types have wider support than unregistered types (which may appear under different names in different contexts). Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Nerdscrape Exploder %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stewart Dean wrote: > ... I'm greatly offended by those sites which have the effrontery to tell me to get a better browser simply because mine has a 'frames off' switch! It seems to me that the Web enables more people to publicly display their incompetence and ignorance than I would ever have thought possible. The fact that so many seem to get away with it is even more astonishing! > Major sites have to 'work' for the majority. By work I mean be > attractive, informative and easy to navigate. A worthy aim, but why not 'for all' instead of just the majority? > The creators are more > than aware of all the issues you have mentioned and spend many hours > achieving an end result which solves these problems. I have to assume you're speaking for yourself here - from what I've seen on the Web I'm tempted to state that the opposite is the general rule. ... > If you think major site builders don't validate their sites you > serverly underestimate the web professionals out there. ... As far as underestimating the 'web professionals' out there goes, I think the problem is that many of them overestimate themselves. I guess they labour under the delusion that being 'professional' is synonymous with 'being right', yet at the first exposure of their pages to a validator they get 'found out'. When you consider how easy it is for anyone to run anybody's pages through a validator, I'm surprised that any self-respecting web professionals would dare to expose themselves or their clients to criticism by failing to check and correct their pages before exposing them to the world. OK, odd errors creep in now and again, but such is life. My advice to anyone seeking a good professional web design firm would be: Look up the web on one of the search engines, using strings such as 'web design' and the name of your preferred locality. Submit the URLs of likely candidates to Short-list those that pass validation. Simple eh? ... Iain Wilkie Logan ---------------------------------------- REBUS wrote: : Hmmm, If there was a "news" validator, how many major network/cable : newscasts do you think would pass? But there is a validator. It's called the Federal Communications Commission. Broadcasters are held to very tight standards regarding the technical characteristics of their signals as a condition of keepting their licenses. They have to periodically check their equipment to make sure they're putting out an in-spec signal, and document that they're doing it. The result of this requirement is that when you're an ad agency and you pay a network or station to run the ad you created, you *know* that anyone with a TV set that works will be able to see your ad. When you produce an ad for sneakers, you don't have to research the number of potential sneaker buyers who own Sony TVs vs. Zenith TVs and then decided whether to produce a Sony-optimized ad or a Zenith-optimized ad. You can design your ad to convince people to spend their money on your sneakers, instead of first convincing them to go out and buy a new TV set and then buy your sneakers once they're done with the payments on the TV. Aren't standards wonderful? Eric Bohlman %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Phaser2FunkFunk wrote: >Its >really not that important for personal pages. I mean do you visit some guys homepage >about his pet budgie and think "Hmmm, I wonder what his coding is like?", no, 'cos it >isn't important, but if you visit a web site design company you think "I'll bet they >can't even code their own site let alone another", am I right? Well now, if someone is offering advice, curiosity and caution might lead one to view the adviser's own work prior to following the advice and implementing it their own. Jim %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Erik Sandblom" writes: > Well 80-90% can. The luddite minority shouldn't obstruct everyone else, > especially since the proper way to deal with unknown fonts is to replace > them with default ones. Absolutely. using fonts instead of GIFs will be beneficial to the (erm) "luddite minority," as it will make web pages more content-based. Consider the options: 1. Content: Here is some text. Auxiliary: This text's style is (foo). This style implies, among other things, a font of (bar), whose method of displaying we will leave up to your UA. If it would like some help, however, here is a shape description and several URLs with downloadable versions... 2. Content: a reference to an image file. Auxiliary: Here is an object, which has several methods of representation, based on your hardware. The textual representation is (alt). If the author has not included any ALT-like representation that can be inlined into this file, you *have* to open another connection to get any content. The major difference between these two paradigms is that in the first, the main (or "Content") information contains the actual content. In practice, most web designers are lazy, and will cut corners on the auxiliary information. With fonts, content comes first and display is secondary. With GIF-text, display is first and content, in the form of ALTs, is secondary. Since we can only really count on the web at large to include the most basic information, we should take all steps necessary to ensure that this information is the *content* of the actual document. A big difference between fonts and GIFs is that fonts contain all you need in one file. Many (uh) "luddites" like me prefer to make only one HTTP connection when clicking on a link, and then get the auxiliary and their own discretion. With GIFs, this is a major problem, but with fonts, it's a minor point of rendering. Fonts can be ignored, which is their biggest advantage. (Think about speech-readers, LCDs in tiny consumer appliances, etc.) GIFs can only be ignored if time is taken to use ALT properly. We (ahh) "luddites" can't even get everyone to *use* ALT, let alone put something contentful in it. Best of all, the font information can live in the stylesheet, making the real HTML content and not GIF filenames. After all, how you get a font doesn't have to be tied to the various claims made on this thread about downloading something specific like TTF files (which "won't work on my mac! bloody murder!" etc). Stylesheets could easily specify simple options like relative width, sans-serif or serif, weight, etc and let the system come up with something. Or, (if you let me get really "out there"...) One could run a X font server that got fonts not from the local computer but a distributed internet-wide type registry. Just yell the font name at your local ISP, it pulls out the font desciption (automagically converted to the format your system likes) that was delivered to it from Germany somewheres last week, and uses local bandwidth to deliver it. This all happens *way* outside the browser code of course. See what I mean? the point it with fonts (and with stylesheets in general) you can be creative about how the actual drawing on the screen gets done, because that part is left up to the person who can figure it out best - the user. Decklin Foster --------------------------------------------------- Erik Sandblom wrote: > Well 80-90% can. The luddite minority shouldn't obstruct everyone else, > especially since the proper way to deal with unknown fonts is to replace > them with default ones. I'm only saying it would be nice if it was common to > use more different fonts than times, arial, and verdana. This has nothing to do with being a Luddite or not. It has to do with the ratio of size/bandwidth to real content. The purpose of the web is communication. Communication is best served when that ratio is low, and is ill-served when it's high. *IF* specifying a font enhances that communication, and that's a huge "if", then by all means, do it. But if it serves no purpose, then it is simply excess baggage, bad design, and a waste of space and bandwidth. The problem is that an awful lot of the people designing for the web have no training in typography, and *do not know* how to use it to enhance communication. There seems to be a strong tendency for them to attempt to enliven their sites by gratuitously using different fonts when in fact all they've really done is make their sites more difficult to use. What we're seeing now is roughly the same as what we saw when word processors first came into use: people were presented with a choice of N fonts and many felt that every single document they created had to use at least N/2, even if that made no sense. On the web, this shows up not only in the gratuitous use of different fonts, but graphics, Java, and all sorts of other quite-useful-in-their-place gadgets that frequently do more to obstruct communication than facilitate it. Rich Kulawiec %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% The basic moral is never expect the user to download anything - even the flash plugin! Stewart Dean %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Sun, 21 Jun 1998 04:55:35 GMT, daniel@ais.net wrote: > can anyone tell me can I register swedish domain name > in US, or do I have to do it in sweden? If you are refering to *.se domains, you need to have a "presence" in Sweden in order to register. (i.e. you need to live in, or have a registered organisation in Sweden) Registrations are done only through the Swedish Inter-NIC equivalent. -- Jan Roland Eriksson %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: (C&C)Re: HTMLStripper Was this a job posting that I missed?? catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Lee Skidmore wrote: > > Okay, so I have a single table, and I want some columns to have > background colours, and some to have no (therefore transparent) > backgrounds. > > Problem is when I leave out the bgcolor attribute (in the TD tag) on > those columns where I don't want a background - it puts in the colour of > the previous coloured column! > > ARGH! > > How can I make those damn columns transparent? If my guess is right and "single table" means a table consisting of one row only, then exactly the same problem was presented in a Finnish WWW newsgroup just a short while ago. The reason for the described erratic behaviour was invalid markup. I can reproduce Lee's problem on Netscape 3.04 and 4.05 (Linux) with the following piece of invalid markup:
Some data hereYet more data here
Both table cells get a red background on NS 3.04 and 4.05. As you can see there is no (table row) element around the table data elements, and that is illegal since table data elements *must* be inside a table row element. Also make sure that you have closed all table data and row elements. There are lots of free HTML validators on the net. They are invaluable when tracing problems. Use them. Anyway, perhaps style sheets would serve your purposes better: http://www.illuminati.org.au/htmlhelp/reference/css/ Saku Niskanen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > To change the active link color, use: > > This produces a page with purple links while the link is active because the > color code #DB70DB is the code for purple. > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Microsloth's Outloop Excess %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Jeff Thies writes: > I come from the javascript school of using what > works not what the language allows. You know I think JS may be the first computer language to inflict more damage than Basic. Scared? You will be. -- Chris Gray %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% I do things like this: perl -pi.bak -e 's/\cM$//' *.html perl -pi.bak -e 's/\cZ$//' *.html to get rid of Ctrl-M and Ctrl-Z when they sneak into my pages. Charles Gimon %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% [Users aren't automatically downloading the latest and greatest browser software: "Just because a company invents a better mousetrap doesn't mean consumers are going to rush out to get it, especially if they are already satisfied with what they have."] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Welcome to CIWAH, 'Usenet in microcosm'. Iain Logan %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind- boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." gene spafford,1992 ----- Also note: Spafford said that at a point _before_ the "flooding", and the need for binbot, cancelbot and spambot. :-) Tor Iver Wilhelmsen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (John Davidson Highfill) wrote: > i love having people visit my page but i have run into > a bit of a problem... people making direct links to my > images!!! > i was wondering if there is a way that i can make my > images viewable without allowing others to make direct > links to my files? thank you. I'm going to explain this in general terms, and leave it up to you to implement it however you wish. :) Get CGI-BIN access if you don't already have it. Write a program that takes an image name as PATH_INFO, sends the appropriate MIME content type for an image, and then transmits the actual data of the image. Modify that program to check the HTTP_REFERER variable before it does this, and reject or redirect any value that doesn't include, say, the hostname of your website. Replace your image links with calls to this program, with the image filenames as the parameters. If you do this right, when someone visits your site, the pictures will all come up just fine, but when someone links to them, they'll get... well, whatever you want them to get. :) -Dan Birchall (giving away all the secrets ;) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > Jean-Philippe Goldman writes: > > or more simply > > how can we draw a line from X1,Y1 to X2,Y2 within a HTML page In order to implement this particular abuse of HTML, I suspect you want to: 1. Define a TABLE structure with BORDER=0, CELLSPACING=0, and CELLPADDING=0 2. Define a number of rows equal to the absolute value of Y2-Y1 and a number of columns equal to the absolute value of X2-X1 3. You now have a grid sufficient for drawing a line from X1,Y1 to X2,Y2. In every grid element that the line runs through or nearly-through (determining how near is "near" is left as an exercise for the reader) place an opaque graphic. For every other grid element, place a transparent graphic. Ta da, line drawing in HTML in 3 "easy" steps. Next week: using this method to draw circles. .. Roger Carbol %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% skipper clark (skipper@cncnet.com) wrote on MDCCLXI September MCMXCIII in : ++ Hello. Would you please inform me as to the html of horizontal and ++ vertical scroll bars? Thanx. E-MAIL: brynriver@lycosmail.com $ ppmmake rgb:F/0/0 10000 10000 | ppmtogif -transparent rgb:F/0/0 > pixel.gif $ cat > page_with_scrollbars.html Scrollbars!

Lucky you! ^D $ Alternatively, make your browser smaller. Abigail %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > Please reply direct at jlippiner@iname.com Post to news, read in news. Mark Goodge %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "CAK" wrote: >The following, if correct, is of import: > >http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,23577,00.html?st.ne.ni.lh > So people don't always use the latest browser. This is no suprise. IE 3 and Netscape 3 I would consider to be the target browser for sites at the moment. I've seen some more right wing designers wish that the browsers would time out so they could impliment the lastest features. As many users are causual users and weekend surfers having to upgrade is just a complete waste of their time. Upgrading any browser over the web is, ironically, a very time consuming buisness (and in the UK time is money as we do not have free local phone calls). The version 3 browsers are, in many ways, better then the version 4 browsers. I think internet explorer 3 is a well designed bit of software but 4 goes into bloatware territory and is known to be unstable. Much the same story with Netscape. I do still bump into people using Netscaep 1, windows 3.1, 640 480 screen resolutions and lots of other old tech. If it ain't bust - why fix it? Do you really need a pentium to do word processing? Always have a healthy disrespect for technology. Stewart Dean %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Saturdays Grudge Match card the Validator triumphed over Netscape, Microsoft, Opera, Lynx and Sun. Large number of takedowns and penalties in all five rounds. On the second card, Validator conceded to W3. Rumours are that the "fix" was in early. Follow the blow by blow description at http://validator.w3.org/ Reporters note: The address used for lynx was http://lynx.browser.org/ which only suffered one scoring punch in half a page. I'm betting on the Validator from now on. Does the W3C sell T-shirts? Jeff Thies ------------------------------------- What are you on about? If you're going to use football terms get the right kind of football. Stewart Dean --------------------------------------- Err, boxing actually. What I think he is saying is that the home pages for all the companies/programs listed in the subject line failed to validate using the W3 validator service. David Rouse ----------------------------------- Dave, I e-mailed Stewart and explained what you have correctly sumarized. It was meant as a tweak. The danger of "thread wars" is so great that I might have errored posting this, even in a non-serious way. Jeff Thies %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Frank Cseh wrote: >I have a logo to display, on the first line of the page. >One image should be on the left, the other one in on the right. >I could solve this with a 2-cell table, but I'd like to do it without >table or frame. >Is it possible? You might give consideration to the following markup. Note essential attributes for are excluded for clarity only.


Following text. Robert G. Eldridge --------------- morgan wrote: > > > > >

> >
> >

Following text. Good advice. An effective, resilient, entirely valid, and often overlooked construction. > This is something I have frequently struggled with also and I always > resort to tables. A pity > I thought the
only worked in Netscape? It "works" in HTML. Current browser/versions seem to support it widely, and any that don't will provide a fallback that, while hardly pretty, doesn't lose any of the content. > I know the validator won't accept it. Then you "know" something that isn't true. I suppose you wouldn't consider consulting the HTML spec before posting misleading assertions? As webnauts, we ought to be the first to make use of the resources offered by the WWW. Alan J. Flavell ------------------------------- morgan wrote: >Alan J. Flavell wrote: >>Then you "know" something that isn't true. > >Don't be such a sarcastic little snot Alan. If I had not consulted the >HTML specs, I would never have even known of it's existence, now would >I? Nor would I have known to try it on my pages. >I have had validators refuse the tag,,, You mean, you have had so-called validators refuse the tag. Any real validator (i.e. something that uses a validating parser) will accept anything that is in the specified DTD. Richard Noteboom -------------------------------- >> >>

>>
>>

Following text. This doesn't seem to work if my interpretation of the original question is right. That markup would mean there is a paragraph break between the images. Rather, I'd use

FooBar Inc. Perpetuum Mobile Product Line

Following text. >This is something I have frequently struggled with also and I always >resort to tables. Well, I wouldn't say "resort to tables", if the piece of material being presented logically constitutes a table, such as two or more images which are really coupled in some sense. It's mostly a matter of taste whether you use a table or the solution outlined above. The use of a table is more flexible in the sense that it naturally extends to a case with any number of images >I thought the
only worked in Netscape? Am I mistaken? >I know the validator won't accept it.
is valid in HTML 3.2 and in HTML 4.0 Transitional. As far as I know, it works on practically all browsers. According to HTML 4.0, clear=all is deprecated in favor of style sheets as a presentational attribute. Jukka Korpela ----------------------------------- I mistakingly use the term validator much too loosely. It could have been a linter. Maybe, maybe not. I just don''t remember because I've tried many. Mostly I remember the frustration of having to remove the tag from several pages. morgan ---------------------------------- >

>FooBar Inc. >Perpetuum Mobile Product >Line >
>

>

Following text. Hello Jukka, Whilst your suggested markup is probably clearer in a markup sense I didn't suggest it for a practical reason. A popular browser, Netscape ver 4.* for Win95, when using a left aligned image followed by a right aligned image will, when the width of the two images exceeds the window width, cause the images to overlap instead of 'forcing' a horizontal scroll bar. This does not occur using the markup I suggested. What I suggested was to 'float' the first image left through the use of the align=left attribute and allow the following content to be to the right of that image. I then simply started that content with

and it just so happens to only contain an image. The align=right attribute of

being used to suggest that the content of the

, in this case only an image, is right aligned. One could take the view that the behaviour of Netscape when using your markup is entirely valid. Whilst that is another topic it is in all probability not what a typical user would expect, therefore when the combined width of the two images is typically to exceed the width of a users window possibly my markup is to be preferred. Robert G. Eldridge %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > and because i don't have access to CGI, i > can't do much either. > talk about being ironic! My trollometer signalled, but I'm afraid you're serious. IMHO you are trying to do something that's beyond your current possibilities. Jukka Korpela ---------------------------- > My trollometer? Is that an american slang or something (don't quite > understand)? It's USENET slang . It refers to trolling (i.e., fishing) for responses by posting something that is guaranteed to draw responses. Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Photoshop tips http://www.webslave.dircon.co.uk/photoshop/index.html %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Abigail wrote: > > B. Grimm (b_grimm@gmx.de) wrote on MDCCLXV September MCMXCIII in > : > ++ hi together > ++ is there a way to hide the html source code of a www page from viewing > ++ with browsers or other tools? > > Yes. 'chmod 000 page.html' should do the trick on most servers. > Otherwise, 'rm -f page.html' will do. > > Really, the only way to hide html source is by not sending it. > The browser *HAS* to know the source to display it. > Here she goes again, applying logic when the poster wants magic ;-) Kurt J. Lanza %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% murkosoft Microsfot Wiruz95/98 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stewart Dean wrote: > >In reality HTML is used for presentation and not logical structure. this is a work around, at best, a crutch. reminds me of buying a car to only sleep in it. seems you have trouble to understand the concept of logical markup. Ingmar Greil %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Stewart Dean ) wrote: >There are a few 'control freaks' in this group who use user style >sheets, turn off images and over ride browser defaults. Yes, there are. *Those* people, however, don't try to impose their individual ideas of layout on other people. On the other hand, there are a few control freaks in this group who use author style sheets, presentational markup and various other ways to make pages unusable to people who have a very valid reason for wanting to view pages in a particular font or colour scheme. Personally, I find the latter group of control freaks far more annoying than the former. -- Richard Noteboom %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Thu, 2 Jul 1998, chiarelli wrote: > I'd like to know what information my browser is sending when I make an > operation: > - clicking on a href > - typing the same adress directly You can use http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test-env to see the raw CGI environment. Here you will see the various bits and pieces that your browser sent via HTTP with the request. It's trivial to install such a script - many servers have one. NCSA is just an example. Write your own HTML document with a link in it to that URL if you want to see what happens when you use an HREF ("click on it", as you put it). If you want to find out what's sent when your browser requests an inline IMG, it's slightly harder. I have a script at http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/cgi/test-env that you can reference from IMG SRC= for this purpose. Perhaps I should put the perl script on the web so that people can install a copy for themselves. Note for purists: this is _one_ time where I feel that I can genuinely defend the practice of making an image of some text ;-) Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Jan Roland Eriksson wrote: > Chris Gray wrote: > > Andreas Prilop writes: > > > Tanfer Keskin wrote: > > > >I heard that both Windows 98 and NT 5.0 are y2k compatible. is this true? > > > > > > Yes. Y2K is no problem for Microsoft's products. All software will > > > work okay even after 1 January 1900. > > > > That can't be right: it implies that they work today ... > > ROTFL > > WinErr 625: Working error -- > The system has been working perfectly for the last 10 minutes... > Hey don't make fun of windows just because it doesn't work! hehehe Austin Johnsen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Alan J. Flavell (flavell@mail.cern.ch) wrote on MDCCLXVIII September MCMXCIII in : ++ On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, Leslie wrote: ++ ++ (with over-long lines) ++ ++ > If your computer has a sound card then you have volume control. Turn ++ > the volume down if you don't like sound files. ++ ++ My sound card is probably already busy playing something that _I_ want ++ to hear. Something off the MBone, typically. It's not unknown (thanks ++ to the vagaries of gatesware) for unsolicited access to the sound system ++ to cause Windoze to go into an endless loop issuing "sound system is ++ busy"-type alerts, or even hanging entirely and forcing a reboot. You ++ can be pretty sure readers aren't going back after that. If that's what ++ you want, just do it. While I agree that background sounds are as pointless and unnecessary as background images/colours, I would not regards Windoze going into an endless loop issueing as a reason not to use background sounds. The bugs you have in your browser and/or OS are not of a concern for the author of a web page. That's not what device independent information is about. Abigail ---------------------------------- On Sat, 4 Jul 1998 17:19:03 +0200, "Alan J. Flavell" wrote: >On 4 Jul 1998, Abigail wrote: > >> The bugs you have in your browser and/or OS are not of a concern for >> the author of a web page. > >That's a fair comment. Mind you, it's worth considering that there's a significant difference between sound and visuals, in this respect. Like most systems, my PC has only one sound card, and if it's being used by another app then it isn't going to be available to a web page. Sure, either the OS or the browser ought to be able to cope with that without crashing, but the fact remains that there's no aural equivalent of windows or X-win - I can *see* many apps open at once, but I can only *hear* one of them at a time. That's not a bug, that's a feature, and an intelligent web author will be aware of that and allow for it. >> That's not what device independent information >> is about. > >Since when are sound files "device independent"? The point I was trying >to make (albeit ineffectively, it seems) was that getting unsolicited >sound files flung at one isn't always convenient or purposeful. Being >offered sound files which one can take (if appropriate) or leave (if >not) is a different matter. Yes - I agree 100%. Mark Goodge %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "How the web works: HTTP and CGI explained", http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/%7elarsga/download/artikler/HTTP_tut.html %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ... You're still missing the point, or maybe you're just doing a finely-tuned troll here... I must be "worth my salt" as I generally run anything I do through multiple browsers, and multiple versions of each browser, on multiple operating systems. I believe the phrase "optimized for Netscape" is a misnomer; "optimized" to me implies that you'll get an enhanced browsing experience on that platform. It should not mean that the page flat-out won't FUNCTION under another browser, which was the case here. The phrase would be more accurate as "works only with Netscape". kathy %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Mark D. Oliver" writes: >SNIP< > frameset. However, when the user right-clicks on one of the documents and > adds a bookmark then they get the URL of the sub-document. Now when they > navigate back using the bookmark there are no side or top frames. Although I never right-click on one of a frameset, I often bookmark the particular file of interest so that I do not have to see it in the frameset the author has worked so hard to set up for me. I even pass the URL along to interested persons without the frame. > > Is it possible to force a URL destination for a bookmark? Or can someone > else suggest a way to handle this? Or, is it a > user-interaction/my-perception problem? With HTML, I am afraid authors cannot force anything on their readers. I would suggest that if your readers find something interesting, you should expedite their bookmarking the interesting part without "forcing" them to slog through the parts they do not find interesting. Is there any message in the fact that people are choosing to bookmark a file so they can view it outside the frameset? That seems to me to be feedback on your site construction. -- Phil Stripling ----------------- >...Is there any message >in the fact that people are choosing to bookmark a file so they can view it >outside the frameset? That seems to me to be feedback on your site >construction. Touché! Thanks for the feedback ... I guess you're correct. Providing a means of navigation only through other frames is probably not complete enough. Mark O. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% news@webslave.dircon.co.uk wrote: >Also bear in mind pages that 'gracefully degrade'. That is extended HTML is >used which, on clients that do not understand the syntax, are ignored without >making the page unreadable. Assuming one uses FONT elements and things like that instead of heading, consider what happens when you have, say,

Bla bla bla

instead of

Bla bla bla

What will happen then a) on a graphic browser set to ignore all font specifications on Web pages, b) on a text-only browser, c) in a speech generator, d) on a browser carefully configured to display headings in a manner suitable for a particular browsing situation? (As an example of d), consider a situation where one needs to have normal text quite large and needs therefore to have headings indicated using colors, underlining, font change, or whatever, since one cannot afford much larger font than the one in use for normal text.) It is true that using FONT &Co. you seldom manage to prevent the text "Bla bla bla" from being seen _at all_. (That's definitely possible of course. Just set the color without worrying about what the background color might be.) But in the cases mentioned, and in many others, you manage well to prevent it from being seen _as a heading_, i.e. from being presented in a manner which makes it observed as a heading. It would look like a short text paragraph, wouldn't it? Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Art Sackett wrote: >Abigail wrote: >> Really, the only way to hide html source is by not sending it. >> The browser *HAS* to know the source to display it. > >Is this a general knowledge, or a "biblical" one? The browser has a general knowledge of the HTML source. However, the source has a carnal knowledge of the browser. As evidence, any number of methods of screwing up the rendering. invalid@address.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stanley Friesen wrote: > >If you truly want precise design control, [PDF] is the only portable >way to go. And I know of at least one major organization that is >putting its principle documents online in PDF format. > >For *loose*, flexible designs that look different under different >viewing conditions, yes, you can use HTML. > >What *cannot* be done in HTML is to have *precise* designs. That >is the point people are trying to make when they say it isn't a >layout language. Right. It seems that what gets lost in these HTML-for-layout debates are words like "precision," "reliability," and "portability." "HTML can't be used for precise, reliable layout on any arbitrary browser." "What do you mean HTML can't be used for layout? Just look at half the pages on the Web! Of course it can be used for layout!" "I said precise, reliable, portable layout. It doesn't produce precise, reliable, portable layout." "You just don't get it, do you? People use HTML for layout all the time!" ...and the opposing sides continue arguing two separate points. Chuck Taylor %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Daniel R. Tobias wrote: > > Steve (post is in HTML) wrote: > > To see this signature file properly, you should be > > viewing it using MS Outlook, > > with I.E. 4.0 as your browser. > It's bad enough that web pages have "Best Viewed Using..." sections, but > do NEWSGROUP POSTINGS have to have them now??? The HTML "jaw drop heard 'round the world" award goes to those two lines... I mean, holy shit Steve; how the hell are you supposed to communicate with thousands of intelligent people on a world-wide message board when your messages require one specific newsreader? Isn't that like requiring glasses of one specific lens type in order to read a public message? Now will you do us a favor and stop hollering in Swahili from your Micro$oft-brand Soap Box(tm)98? Or at least turn off the damn HTML? Last time I checked, newsgroup postings were not supposed to be hypertext. Lord Xarph %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > Why? Why? why? why? Do people *insist* on putting 'under construction' > banners/icons/words/images/animations and other nonsense on their > sites?http://www.thelimit.com/lake/ Just think of them like the underconstruction signs you see out on the highway. They serve a very valuable purpose, when you see one, you know it is time to take a detour (wouldn't want to go down there, liable to get your browser hung up on an animated skull or something) Originality on the web is often the process of combining other peoples graphics in a *new* way. Jeff Thies %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Tero Paananen wrote: > >Don't give the client what he wants, give him what he needs. Or a >quote to that effect. > > -TPP Tero, I believe the quote is "Give clients what they ask for, not what they say." This is the key difference between doing web sites and running a successful web business. Can you do this dance.... REBUS -------------------------- >Don't give the client what he wants, give him what he needs. Or a >quote to that effect. What the 'client' needs is very often completely different from what he needs. I can't think of anyone who "needs" a (Mercedes, Porsche, Corvette, Cadillac etc. or Steak, Lobster, etc. or Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc.) but a huge number of people "want" them. How many of us "need" 300+ MHZ machines with 128MB RAM?, but most here "want" them. Reminds me of the story of the guy shopping for a drill bit: He doesn't want a drill bit or even a drill, he _needs_ a hole somewhere. My clients want/need increased revenue or market exposure. It is my 'job' to give that to them.... Gil Harvey %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Re: Dumb Question: Indented paragraphs in HTML ? Date: 10 Jul 98 09:50:20 GMT From: yoda@dagoba.org (Jedi Master Yoda) Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html Daniel Tso saw fit to expound: > This seems like a dumb question to me, but I can't find >out how one is supposed to do indented paragraphs in HTML. I >would have thought it extremely common to want to do this, but >apparently everybody is happy all the time with

and its >left-aligned paragraphs. I have yet to see any examples of >normal indented paragraphs on websites. Why is this ? And how >might I coded them in HTML ? (  maybe, huh...) I don't have anything useful to add to the CSS-based answers already given; but I would like to take a moment to congratulate Daniel on his very useful innovation of putting 'Dumb Question' in the subject line. If only more people would do this (and I've seen a lot dumber questions than Daniel's, don't you worry), those of us with power newsreaders that support killfiles (viz. anything except Netscape) would be a lot happier. Some other suggested codes: FLAMEBAIT: Isn't it only lamers and communists that use Lynx? INACCURATE AND MISLEADING ANSWER: Re: how to force subject in mailto:? THINLY DISGUISED AD FOR WEB DESIGN COMPANY: Please review my new kick-ass web s1te, d00ds JMY %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:59:51 -0400, Thus Spake "Michael" : >Advertising a web design business in alt.html is like going to an icecream >stand and trying to sell the owner a popsicle - we all can, or at least >desire, to design our own sites, silly. > >Michael.. > In some people's case, it's like going to a Mercedes-Benz dealership and trying to sell the owner a Yugo. Domo Arigato %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Ron Barnhart wrote: >If I'm not mistaken, there isn't any way to keep people from viewing >your HTML source code. IE always opens NotePad to display the source >and Netscape opens a separate Window in Navigator/Communicator to show >the source. To my knowledge, there is no way to disable this >function. Are you sure that "IE always opens NotePad"? My copy certainly doesn't "always" open Notepad. Quite often it informs me: This file is too large for Notepad to open. Would you like to use WordPad to read this file? I also wonder do Mac users of IE have Notepad? The 'always' word is a bit like 'force' in HTML. Robert G. Eldridge %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Kyle Scissons wrote: > I'm looking for a tag that will allow me to change the font of my page. >What is the tag, or how do I go about doing this? The tag is . No attributes are needed. Some people will suggest or something like that, but apart from needing complicated attributes with unspecified meaning, may cause real damage. In particular, a browser might recognize it and use the named font (which might be quite different from what the _author_ knows under that name) and some more or less randomly chosen font size, overriding what the _user_ prefers. never works, so it is much safer. It is a good old habit in Web browsers that unknown tags are ignored, and this is one of the areas where even Netscape and IE got things right. Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "H.T.M.L.: Hopeloze Tagset voor Middelmatige Layout" %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stewart Dean wrote: ... > Ask yourself - why do so many people use font >instead of header? For the same reason that I used physical markup when I had started writing Web pages: I aped other people's HTML code, didn't bother reading the specs, and didn't think what I was really doing and how things would work in different browsing situations. It took about two years to understand the simple idea behind Web authoring. YMMV. Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stewart Dean wrote: ... >I'm always carefull about my words. Let's see... by the way, there is an interesting, although minor, self-contradiction in the sentence above. :-) ... Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ... If you can't add anything Alan subtract yourself. Stewart Dean ----------------------- The only problem with Alan is too much starch in his cap. He is not all that bad , just a little rude , and arogant and in need of a chill-pill. I'm personally waiting for Alan J. Flavell version 3.1 with the new friendlier interface. ... Dr. Clue (A.K.A. Ian A. Storms) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Ingmar Greil wrote: > i am satisfied with the way my UA renders headers. most people are, i > should think. I very much doubt that. Most people seem to be dissatisfied by several aspects of the mass-market browsers' default presentation. However, there are at least two excellent solutions, maybe even three, that are preferable to having every goddamned HTML page impose yet another author's idea of ideal presentation - imposed without any real knowledge of the reader's browsing situation, eyesight or other needs (a few of the designs are beautiful, it's true, but most of them are a wretched mess, reminiscent of the 1980's DTP excesses). My suggestions, in order of preference, would be: 1. Have the browser makers put some effort into their presentation design, instead of trying to mimic some primitive and now obsolete graphical browser/version. 2. Teach the users better how to configure their browser to suit their needs. 3. Have some beneficent presentation designers distribute some style sheets that readers can configure to be their default stylesheet (MSIE4 etc.). Alan J. Flavell -------------------- Sue Jordan wrote: >Alan J. Flavell wrote: >> 3. Have some beneficent presentation designers distribute some style >> sheets that readers can configure to be their default stylesheet (MSIE4 >> etc.). > >That beneficent genius Todd Fahrner has begun this distribution, through >the Core Styles project at the W3C. > > > This is a very nice project, and is useful for generating *user* style sheets. It is less useful for generating author style sheets, as it generates styles that are fine-tuned to each browser - not good for generic style sheets. Stanley Friesen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% yoda@dagoba.org (Jedi Master Yoda) writes: > On 09 Jul 1998 10:43:55 +0300, Jukka Korpela saw fit to expound: > >I'd say that the links to the Sandia Reference (on each page!) > >hardly serve a useful purpose. Please notice that the Sandia Reference > >http://www.sandia.gov/sci_compute/elements.html itself says: > >"Last Modified: 7 December 1995 > >(The date is correct, this document is more than two years old.)" > > Anyone else think there's something odd about this? This page intentionally not updated to include this sentence. ;> -- Chris Gray %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Leslie writes >When most people have big, fast computers with all the bells > and whistles it may >then be time to consider adding all the flashy stuff. ... and then again, it may not, because the timescale we're talking about won't allow human perception to evolve to the point where bells, whistles, spinning tops and dancing lights will cease to distract the reader from the content. There's more to creating content - for any medium - than just using technology. Using the technology *appropriately* is the hardest part of all, and is perhaps most hard on the Internet because of the huge (infinite?) variety. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale..." Shakespeare might as well have been talking about the Internet ;) Colin Reynolds ----------------------------- Colin F Reynolds wrote: > Leslie writes > > When most people have big, fast computers with all the bells > > and whistles it may > > then be time to consider adding all the flashy stuff. > > ... and then again, it may not, because the timescale we're talking > about won't allow human perception to evolve to the point where bells, > whistles, spinning tops and dancing lights will cease to distract the > reader from the content. This is my rule in web design for my company's web site. Bells and whistles seem cool, but often they cause more trouble than they're worth. When people come to the site they're looking for something, and the key is to help them find what they're looking for. I find a lot of people at my company telling me that we should put animated graphics and such all over the site. Often the things they want to animate are things which we really don't want to draw attention to. For instance, we have an Intel Inside graphic on our site which is necessary because of our arrangement with them. There's a non animated and an animated one. They wanted to use the animated one, but it seemed pretty logical to me that since the graphic led to an offsite link and we really didn't want people to focus on it, it would be a bad idea to use an animated graphic, which would just increase download times, and distract users from the content on our site we wanted them to see. So when you think about using bells and whistles- think about whether they accomplish the goal of your site or whether they just look cool. Your site can look really cool, but if the visitor doesn't get what they're looking for, you're not accomplishing your objective. Occasionally I'll use stuff to make our site look a little cooler (like we have a little Javascript/Java applet on the front page, which gives more detail about the various sections of the site when they're moused over) but I only do it if it actually gives users something that will improve their experience on the website, and I never set it up so that important content is not accessible to all users. Also- for those of you who don't think ALT is worth it if most of your visitors use graphics, here's a story. I included ALT everywhere on the site because it's important to me- my boss couldn't have cared less whether I spent the time on it. We have pretty unreliable net access at work, and it sometimes goes into really slow mode. One day my boss was visiting our website, and our net was so slow, that the graphics on the front page didn't get a chance to load- it just sort of got stuck after loading the page itself. He came and thanked me for the use of ALT because for the first time, he realized they were there, and what they did, and why they might be useful- even to people with a company T1. He has since become a lot more trusting of my web design skills, and generally trusts my judgement when we discuss the wisdom of various web features- even though his first instinct is to go for flashy (as is typical in Marcom). Cari D. Burstein %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Moon <__Moon__@Uni-Duisburg.de> wrote: > IMO it's better to force HTML layout to look the same on almost every > browser. IMHO, it is better to allow HTML presentation to adapt to the presentation the user expects. As an example, if the user expects Mac-style form elements, then the browser should use Mac-style form elements. It's better for the user to experience consistent presentation, than for a given web document to produce the same presentation for every user. The diversity of presentation on the web is increasing. People are developing (and using) more devices that look very little like a standard computer monitors. Devices with different capabilities *must* use different presentation if they are to be usable. Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no software that processes H1 in any other manner than mapping it to some physical presentation features. Let's even ignore the fact that the presentation of first-level headings is, in a customizable manner, adaptable to various properties and restrictions of the presentation medium if and only if logical markup (such as H1) used, so it would be misleading to say that H1 is for physical presentation only. The point is that if the hypothetical lack of structural processing software made authors refrain from using logical markup (for some odd reason), the authors would thereby give their contribution to _making it pointless to ever write such software_. Preventing progress. Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On 16 Jul 1998 15:51:49 +0200, Chris Gray wrote: >catnip8@geocities.com (catnip) writes: > >: On Tue, 14 Jul 1998 10:07:02 GMT, steve.pugh@dial.pipex.com (Steve >: Pugh) wrote: >: >: >On 14 Jul 1998 09:28:34 GMT, tina@scandinaviaonline.se (Tina Marie >: >Holmboe) wrote: >: >: >> I respectfully suggest that the above be read with more than just a >: >> little tongue-in-cheek; preferably your own... >: > >: >Really? I'd never have guessed. And what I do with my tongue is my own >: >business..... >: >: It might make an interesting web page topic though. ;-) >If you mean what I think you mean, I think I mean what you think I mean. > I already found 70 pages using the Dutch >word for what I think you mean. Now what do they call it again in Swedish? Don't ask me. I'm French. We don't have words for that kind of thing (if you mean what I think you think I mean). ;-) catnip Hi Chris! Miss me? ;-) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% It's disappointing just how few pages are making use of the simple to inset an image into running text - everyone seems to immediately grab for the more complex and less resilient TABLE tag. I guess it's mostly just because they're using brain-dead wannabe-WYSIWYG authoring packages (what I recently saw aptly described as WYSIcrap). Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% t3dy@aol.com (T3Dy) writes: > > how do I implement different text colors in html? >SNIP< (Now it's a quick question. :->) Hi, Bill, There are a couple of ways to do it that I know of, neither of which is entirely satisfactory. One is -- for example, This text is (font color="red">is multi- colored. The element is deprecated in favor of stylesheets, the other way I know to do different colors for text. If you use , be sure to set your body background and link color attributes in the tag. People who have set their preferences for text and background colors may have set a background color to one of your text colors. If that happens, your text will be invisible against a background of the same color. By setting the colors in your HTML file, you can override that preference _if_ the reader has not set his browser to ignore your attributes. Not all browsers currently in use honor the element, so your colors will not be rendered for all your readers. Style sheets have their own newsgroup, and you can get tons of advice there for how to set up style sheets for your pages. Take a look at comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets for more information on style sheets. Be aware that not all browsers support style sheets, so your colors will not be rendered for all your readers. My suggestion is to use stylesheets; from my experience the results are better when it works, and the results are _much_ better when it fails. Keep in mind that you should consider what happens when your suggestions of color fail -- people who don't have browsers that recognize font, or people who have their browsers set to override your background and link colors and who have a background color set to one of your font colors. -- Phil Stripling | Sorry for the munged return The Civilized Explorer | address, but you know what. http://www.cieux.com/ | needs to be removed. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Tero Paananen wrote: > Pekka Saarinen writes: > > ... > > One last thing: I'd really like to solve this problem how to give > > non-java browsers an image instead of nothing: > > > > > > voila > Thanks a lot - the solution was TOO simple for me... :-) Pekka Saarinen ------------------------------- Pekka Saarinen writes: > > > > :-) Tero Paananen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Dear Spammer, By now, with all the media coverage, you may have realized that many people are irritated by your activities. But if you thought it ended at mere irritation, you haven't thought it through. Irritation is a form of stress, and as has been medically proven, stress kills. Ahah, you say, but your unsolicited commercial e-mail hasn't killed anyone yet. Perhaps it has... Through an interesting legal doctrine, the spam itself doesn't have to kill, it just has to begin a chain of events that result in death. Say you were driving drunk and hit another car. The driver of that car is put in an ambulance and rushed to the hospital, but on the way to the hospital the ambulance is struck by lightning and explodes, killing the passenger. You could still be convicted of his death. Why? But for your illegal act of driving while intoxicated, that person would have most likely made it home safe. Your reckless and selfish actions resulted in that person having to be in that ambulance and thus you are responsible for their death. Now let's look at your spam... it aggravates a man who then snaps at his wife over an insignificant thing. They get in a fight. He leaves the house, goes to a bar, has a few drinks... On his way home he gets into an accident, killing himself and the driver of the other car. But for your spam, he might have been in a better mood and wouldn't have fought with his wife, but no... your reckless and selfish actions resulted in the death of TWO people. You sick, shameless bastard! Thus when you -- with full premeditation and knowledge of the potential consequences -- send out a bulk unsolicited commercial e-mailing to millions of people, you are in effect committing attempted murder by a single individual on a mass scale heretofore unknown in the history of the world. Another interesting legal doctrine is that you may use as much force in the defense of the life of another from an attacker as you would to defend your own. That means that not just everyone with an e-mail address may kill you in self defense, but everyone in the world may kill you to defend the rest of us before your spamming has the chance to take another life. Please, save your own life as well as the lives of countless others. Don't spam... or we'll kill you. Gerard P.Nagle %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/godwins.law %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Date: 22 Jul 1998 19:38:17 GMT For anyone looking for XML discussion, the newsgroup was recently created. J. Kivi Shapiro %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Re:   doesn't work in Netscape 2.0 ??? How to work around? Samuel Neff wrote: > > Please advise. Was that still not working in NS2? I forgot. And I was surprised to see on a recent business trip just how widely NS2 is still in use on unix platforms, with the informants stating that either later versions were either not available for their OS at all, or the versions that were available were impossibly buggy, memory hogging, etc. Netscape dragged their feet for ages before finally implementing the short list of entity names that were proposed in the HTML2.0 spec (RFC1866). I think it's fair to assume that all browsers currently in use now are supporting the numerical character reference (&#number;) format for the iso-8859-1 character set, so in order to cope with these trailing-edge browsers like Netscape, you can use those. So use   Things aren't nearly so rosy, in general, when you're using a charset other than iso-8859-1 though. Netscape gets both entities and numerical character references spectacularly wrong, in various ways depending on which version you're using; early versions of MSIE3 were also partly broken, although later versions were fixed AAUI. Alan J. Flavell ------------------------------------- Dean Riechman wrote: > What does NS2 do when it encounters the   ? Does it leave a > space or just discard the entity name? For instance would "one two" be > rendered as "one two" or "onetwo" ? If it were compliant in handing unknown entities, it would render "one two" as "one two". Greg Berigan %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% If site designers would stop using browser detection as an excuse to provide stale "alternative" versions of their documents (or worse, "get a better browser" insults) to users of other browsers, then none of this browser spoofing would be needed. Portable markup is the solution. Browser detection is part of the problem. -- Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Samuel Neff uttered: >The variable navigator.userAgent hold's the following: ... on the client side. Rule #1 in web administration and authoring should be: Never trust the client side. You control the server, nothing else can be reliably known. Tor Iver Wilhelmsen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Bugscrape and M$ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% >I could get 5 MB free with my own ISP, although my site has grown larger >than that, and if the reliability of their Usenet server is any indication, >I'd hate to take a chance on their web server. Have you ever thought of using the 5 megabytes that your ISP gives you to host your pages from and just link your images to your geocities account. You get 11 megabytes for free on each geocities account. If need be, apply for another site, henceforth 11 more megabytes. If you need separate e-mail accounts to open with Geocities, open up one at www.hotmail.com. Give geocities that hotmail account as a POC for your second geocities account. Your html file could be saved on your ISP, so you wouldn't get that watermark. Build an index.html file on your geocities site in place of your main page now that automatically forwards to your ISP's index.html file. Why pay 4.95 a month for space when they give you space for free? :o) Petee %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stanley Friesen wrote: > reply@news.group.pls wrote: > >Just a little thing I need to add. > >Opera trys to follow the "standards" that are out there. > >Bugscrape and M$ can't even follow the CSS standard which is very good > >( > It is a little more subtle than that. > > An *author's* style sheet is supposed to override HTML stylistic > markup, which in turn is supposed to override a *user's* personal > style sheet, unless "!important" is set on the property. That's not how I have understood the latest CSS specs. Order of priority top to bottom... 1) User important styles 2) Author important styles 3) Author "normal" styles 4) User "normal" styles 5) Attributed HTML markup This order of priority in effect makes "Author important" styles quite redundant. New in CSS2 (CSS1 had "Author important" on top) Jan Roland Eriksson --------------------- > (CSS1 had "Author important" on top) Well, I think both CSS1 and CSS2 have "user has disabled style sheets altogether" on top ;-) Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > > try   (remember: the best feature of a text editor is find and replace). > > ;) > > Yeh! Why is that STILL missing from Notepad!? Because you're not running WinNT. the NT one also allows you to change thefont used (very nice since I prefer courier for my monospaced) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% the web hath no fury like a LYNX user scorned Jeff Thies %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% elizabethsugar@my-dejanews.com writes: > > Why are you people so anal about those of us who want to highly > format our web sites? We NEED it highly formatted on particular > intranet sites and even internet sites where if you don't format > the table and the list it looks really crappy with a huge font > or doesn't align correctly or whatever. > Hi, Elizabeth, Please be patient with me. Some people want to highly format their Web sites; whether it is needed or not _may_ be a matter of opinion. If the page is on an intranet, some have the point of view that this newsgroup is comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, where the 'www' means World Wide Web; an intranet is not a part of the WWW and those questions may well be off topic for a group about authoring html for the WWW. As to whether a site looks really crappy, one of the reasons for splitting the html authoring group into site design, style sheets, and several others was to stop the endless arguments on whether HTML is for layout or for content-based rendering. It _may_ be that the requests for help on designing the appearance of a site would be better received in a newsgroup which is chartered for that purpose. I don't read alt.html, but from the posts I have read in ciwah, I have the impression that queries concerning site design are accpetable in that newsgroup without too much bickering. On Internet sites, I think it is helpful to have people point out some of the problems with highly formatted Web sites. While you may be aware of all the pitfalls of doing a table that is not entirely visible on my monitor without horizontal scrolling in a huge font that I must use in order to read your content, others who are new to html _may_ benefit from learnging that some people can't read the text set at the author's point size, that not everyone's computer is identical to the author's, that different operating systems have different font sizes even if the point sizes are set for 12 points on both OSes, that my browser window is set narrower than yours because I have trouble reading from one line to the next, that my preferred font is New York at 12 points or Monaco at 10 because those are the most readable fonts on my computer -- and on and on. I find it helpful to read the several sides ot every argument and make my own judgment about what I should do as an author. May I ask that if you have points of view which differ from those expressed that you present your point of veiw rather than trying to shut off the views with which you disagree? I am sure I can learn as much from you as from the others who post here. > Please stop this line of wasting bandwith > and post constructive criticism and actual help. > I hope that you will follow this advice and post constructive criticism. If you find people asking questions that you think deserve a better answer, please add to the courteous discourse and post your polite response that provides what you think is the better answer. This post that you have made is a complaint, not actual help and not constructive criticism. -- Phil Stripling %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% YASWGB yet another site with guestbook! %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Christian Weisgerber wrote: > [...] > I also find 600 pixels window width a comfortable value on a 1152x864 > screen. > > The idea of blowing up a browser window to full screen size on an X > display is patently absurd to me. Reminds me of the muscle cars of the '60s--just because you had one didn't mean you had to burn the tires off! :) Lawrence R. Kellie %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% MICROSOFT: What`s gonna go wrong today? %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% - a URL is _not_ a file name. It might look like one, and it might in many cases map to one, and one might for a while get away with pretending that it is one, but sooner or later one then comes unstuck, and has to un-learn the original error. - The WWW cares nothing for the details of one or other OS's file system. As soon as you start explaining URLs in terms of the details of any specific file system, you're on the way to a dead end. I would not be willing to go any further along that path than to say that "URLs define a sort of conceptual file hierarchy, that you better keep clearly separate in your own mind from the server's real file system hierarchy". Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Robert G. Eldridge writes: > Phil Stripling wrote: > > > > One of the problems with "true" tabular data has not been mentioned: > > > > Phil Stripling Joel Shepherd > > 123 Easy Street 789 Baker Street > > Gerlach, NV Union Town, KY > > > > This table is obviously our names and addresses and can be grasped in a > > glance. With a "speaking browser" or screen reader, however, the user hears > > Phil Stripling Joel Shepheard 123 Easy Street 788 Baker Street Gerlach > > envee Union Town kay wye. This is a mess and may take some repetition to > > sort out what goes where. > > Given this would not the caring HTML'er markup the table as: > > > > >
Phil Stripling
123 Easy Street
Gerlach, NV
Joel Shepherd
789 Baker Street
Union Town, KY
> > instead of: > > > > > >
Phil Stripling Joel Shepherd
123 Easy Street 789 Baker Street
Gerlach, NV Union Town, KY
> > so that it has a greater chance of making sense in a wider variety of > user agents? Yes she would (and for good measure would probably wrap each address up in a P or ADDRESS element). And this is the kind of practical advice that Joel was asking for. The preferred version meets two criteria: 1) it is logical in the (weak) sense that the markup does not imply any logical relationships beyond those which really exist. The other version seems to imply that Phil is to Joel as Gerlach is to Union Town. 2) it makes sense when I read out the table cells row by row, with or without announcing the row and column numbers. The second criterion is of some practical importance, as it seems that many blind people use a combination of lynx with screen-reading software. The latter reads out what is on the screen without knowing why it was put there; so for these users lynx' non-implementation of TABLE is a real bonus. Chris Gray %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Joel Shepherd writes: > How is _not_ supporting tables a benefit? It's easier to understand how if you have used the web browsing mode of emacs (the text editor which is both a floor wax and a dessert topping). Operating within similar constraints to lynx, emacs-w3 does its level best to display tables "correctly" - and on many DTP-inspired web sites the results are well, interesting. -- Chris Gray %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% morgan wrote: > Jeff Thies wrote: > > Now, I realize that the web hath no fury like a LYNX user scorned, > > May I borrow that phrase? Sure, if for no other reason than I might need to deny authorship. It's occured to me that most of the people who design search engines are Lynx users. Think about that for a minute. Jeff Thies %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Alumna wrote: > Hi - I'm asking this here rather than in a javascript or HTML NG 'cos I > don't know quite what it is. I have come across several sites where the > transition from one page to another is not the usual 'snap', but is a > kind of video wipe - wiping in from one edge to the other, from the > middle outwards etc etc. When I looked at the source files, I couldn't > see anything there to make this happen - so, my question is - what is > this and how is it done? (I also wonder *why* it's done, but that's > another matter! ) They use meta tags such as : Donna M. Forosisky %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Peter> Peter or Angela 0> In 0> , 0> Peter wrote: Peter> Ideally (hah!) this is the situation Peter> Peter> protocol://server/dir/subdir/ad nauseam Peter> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Peter> Case insensitive| case sensitive You haven't read RFC 1738, have you? (Or perhaps you just failed to understand it - in which case why are you dishing out advice?) The scheme name must be in lower-case only, so there is no issue of case-sensitivity there. Host names may be in either case according to STD 3 and RFC 1034. They may be compared case-insensitively. Port numbers and article numbers contain no letters, so case-sensitivity is not an issue. The remainder of the URL (user, password, url-path, FTP type indicator, searchpart, gopher selector, message-id, newsgroup-name,) may contain letters and must be compared case-sensitively, with the one exception that the hexadecimal encoding of characters may be in either case. Peter> This is true for servers who use Unix as their OS, How many times does it need saying? An URL is a completely system-independent concept. Do you really expect a cache to find out what OS a particular server runs, and compare it against some "master list" of which OSes are case-sensitive (where would one get such a list? who would ensure that it's completely up-to-date?), simply to determine whether the current request matches an earlier one? Many servers will return the same resource for two or more different URLs. *That does not make them the same URL* By your reckoning, the URLs I have for "today's weather" and "the weather on 1998-08-04" are the same URL. Tomorrow the two will not return the same resource. Peter> A rule of thumb is to make the whole kit and kaboodle lower Peter> case That's a good rule-of-thumb; another is to use upper-case throughout. Some tools work better with one than the other. The important thing is that if there are several URLs for the same resource, you should be consistent - otherwise the server gets used unnecessarily (possibly costing you money), and the readers experience unnecessary delays (due to fetching documents which could have been cached). Toby Speight %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Miss Manners and backgroud music Date: 08 Aug 1998 12:27:17 -0700 From: Phil Stripling Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html Judith Martin is a Washington, DC, housewife who has a nice little hobby as Miss Manners, telling people how to act. Some poor benighted soul wrote in to Miss Manners and asked about inflicting the car stereo on people trapped in the writer's car. Miss Manner's answer, in part, was: Music is not actually a basic environmental condition that one must provide one's guests, although a great many people and business establishments seem to think it is. There is a multitude of musical preferences, as you point out; one of which is for silence. But (to continue your metaphor) a polite host does not have to ask guests to design their own entertainment -- only to offer them what the host guesses they might like and to let them take it or leave it. Miss Manners has spoken -- music on a Web site is to be offered, but not inflicted, so that guests may choose silence if they wish. So that's all on backgroud music. ------------------------- (catnip) writes: > >So that's all on backgroud music. > > So, now we know what *you* read in your spare time. :-) Yeah, but what music is he playing in the background while reading .... Victor Eijkhout %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Alan J. Flavell wrote: > catnip wrote: > > Alan J. Flavell wrote: > > > Michel Albert wrote: > > > > > > > > Need free pics fast...!!!! now..!! > > > > > >Veronica, it sounds as if this candidate for c.i.w.a.h needs some > > >of your ASCII art > > > > > >

Put it here?
> > > > Or that infamous 'knot' pic. ;-) > > Ouch! But that would be off-topic for HTML. :-} Lol...that's *exactly* what I said when I saw it. Experimental XML: Ouch!! catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% According to GVU's 9th WWW User Survey (Georgia Tech Universtity - April and May 1998), the breakdown of WWW users' browser use was as follows: Years on the 'net MSIE Netscape Other All 32.81 61.34 5.85 Under 1 year 47.10 51.45 1.35 1-3 years 32.98 62.27 4.32 Over 3 years 26.39 64.12 9.49 (source:http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1998-04/reports/1998-04-Technology.html) Lots of interesting reading in that (and the preceeding) surveys. -- Mike Churchill %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Somebody wrote: > [something] > I guess the kicker here is "versions ... of". Is Navigator 1.2 on a Mac68K the same as Netscape 4.01 on a Linux box? Or Netscape 1.1N on a Windows 3.1 doorstop? The problem is that if one says something not in the publicly available specs "works" on Netscape, one then has to prove that the technique or whatever "works" in ***all*** versions of Netscape, ever. Whereas, if one follows a standard, say URL addressing, and a browser claims to be able to handle URL addressing, and the browser flubs up, well, at least you've done the very best you could. Chris Burch %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Bill Braun wrote: > I've noticed that quite a few sites > have no reference to basefont in their documents. Thank heavens for that. > Is there a default > base font that is assumed by browsers if there is no basefont tag in the > document? The HTML specification says 3, as you could read for yourself: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/present/graphics.html#h-15.2.2 Of course, this is relative to whatever actual font size the reader has configured in their browser preferences. Size 3 only means "normal text", it does not refer to any particular size in points, cm, millradians or anything. So, think of 3 as "normal text", 2 as "smaller than normal" and 1 as "tiny", and you'll be fine. Naturally, like just about all presentational markups it's "deprecated" in HTML4.0. Style sheets are for suggesting presentation, and about time, too. Alan J. Flavell ----------------------- >So, think of 3 as "normal text", 2 as "smaller than normal" and 1 as >"tiny", and you'll be fine. Good luck putting information in size 1 for people with 100 dpi fonts (or others with setups that differ from the "windows norm", they will not be able to read the text. I would say that its hightly recomended to use +1 and -1 at the most. And 'normal' 'medium' and 'large' in the style sheets.. But thats another ng.. JdB - Jarle Dahl Bergersen ----------------------- > >So, think of 3 as "normal text", 2 as "smaller than normal" and 1 as > >"tiny", and you'll be fine. Perhaps I should have said "microscopic". > Good luck putting information in size 1 for people with 100 dpi fonts Well, if they use unusual fonts, but don't set up their browser preferences appropriately, surely they deserve what they get? If I get tiny, almost unreadable, text when the author wanted tiny, almost unreadable text, I have nothing to complain about, and I know what to do when I need to read that small-print. It's when idiot authors specify basefont=1 and/or put all of their _normal_ text inside size=1 font tags that I feel justifiably aggrieved, and wonder why these idiots haven't set up their own browsers properly instead of trying to fool mine. > I would say that its hightly recomended to > use +1 and -1 at the most. I've no dispute with that, actually. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Gerhard Kutzelnigg wrote: > usually I would say to exactly specify a frame size you would use > something like > > > > Well, the frame seems to have a width of 25 pixels. If I use cols="31,*"> it seems to have a width of 35 pixels or so. > > What I am asking is: Is there a way to EXACTLY tell the browser about > the frame size or does it just guess? > > Is it a bug in Netscape or is there a workaround (like writing the > frameset in only one line or so?) I've noticed this, too, and it's quite frustrating. I think it's buggy behavior on the part of Netscape. Additionally, I've noticed that the FRAME width will vary depending on the size of the total browser window--so if you resize Netscape, the FRAME width changes, too. I'm not aware of a good workaround, other than a) don't use FRAMEs or b) design to take the varying width into account. I'd be hear someone correct me, tho. -- Craig Becker %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% As far as I'm concerned, everyone benefits from a wider an array of browsers, engines, custom tools, and other agents for exploiting information on the World Wide Web in different ways. A site owner who doesn't want to accomodate anything beyond his favorite mainstream browser, screen resolution, and so on will hardly suffer any punishment other than anonymity, preceded perhaps by a little criticism he can safely ignore on his way to irrelevance. Charles L. Taylor %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% PR & AD Booth wrote: > REBUS wrote: > >And you can't get it in your head that 97% market share has no bearing on > >this, or for that matter, almost any discussion in this group. > >That's why 97% of the WWW-using public will read the HTML that you have >authored...take a quick glance at this NG's title...if it has no bearing, >then 97% of this same public are neither here nor there to what you create? >That's logic for you... Whatever the hell does the above paragraph means. First, the widely touted figure of 97% is a compendium of at least twelve different browsers, with at least three versions apiece, and spread out over three different operating systems. As I said before, even if IE4.0 had 100.01% market share you have enough variable left over to ensure problems unless you really understand HTML. REBUS %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Henrik Vestergaard wrote: > I've tried to validate a simple page from W3C HTML Validation Service. > How can it be, that it says there is no fault when I use "\" as a seperator > in a URL? ( ) URLs are opaque to HTML. The validator is only checking your conformance with HTML syntax. It isn't checking for valid URLs, any more than it checks for valid Javascripts or valid in-line CSS style specifications (although the content of these must still conform with the appropriate SGML content model, or they would be rejected for that reason alone). The URL that you supplied is perfectly valid HTML syntax, regardless of any argument about its validity as a URL. Alan J. Flavell ---------------------------------- Henrik Vestergaard wrote: > I've tried to validate a simple page from W3C HTML Validation Service. > How can it be, that it says there is no fault when I use "\" as a seperator > in a URL? ( ) A validator parses an HTML document and measures it against the document type definition (DTD) specified at the beginning of the document; no more, no less. It is not a linter, style checker, or other heuristic device. Your example concerns the HREF attribute of the anchor tag A. The "value" of this attribute may be a "string literal," i.e. a string of characters bounded by matching quotes. The HTML DTD and spec do not govern the content of such a string literal. is valid HTML, regardless of what a browser may do by it. Obviously, you were expecting the value of the HREF attribute to be a URL. URLs are defined by another spec, RFC 1738 and RFC 1808. But there are no DTDs for them, since they are not SGML applications. Warren Steel --------------------------------- hov@post8.tele.dk (Henrik Vestergaard) wrote: > I've tried to validate a simple page from W3C HTML Validation Service. > How can it be, that it says there is no fault when I use "\" as a seperator > in a URL? ( ) How is it supposed to tell the difference between the incorrect use of "\" as a directory separator and a reference to the file named "..\index.htm"? There's nothing wrong with a filename containing leading dots or backslashes in many filesystems. (Mac OS filenames aren't supposed to have leading periods, but you can have them. Programs like Fetch will replace the first such leading dot with "/". Macs use ":" for folder separation in paths.) Would you also have it give you an error if you used ":" in a URL? And didn't the NOS/VE operating system use "." for the same purpose? > Netscape won't use that link......... It would if there was a file by that name for it to retrieve on that page's base location (current directory if BASE tag isn't used). validates HTML, not URLs. Its only concern about arbitrary string attribute values is if they violate HTML syntax by not entifying or encoding characters like ". Greg Berigan %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% If you think otherwise, please notice that the first W in WWW stands for World, not Windows. Jukka Korpela %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Charles R. West, Jr. wrote: > Which was basically that the question was/is far too relative to be > answered without an uproar. Especially given the variety of what people will > see- different browsers, various options turned on or off, resolutions, > colors, tastes, etc. Have yet to find a site that looks the same to all, or > doesn't irritate someone, somehow. Changing something to meet one person's > criticism would just create another... <-- 3 dots.. Actually there is a very clear difference between flat-out errors on the one hand, and aesthetic differences on the other. To sweep technical mistakes under the carpet of artistic judgment is dishonest and silly. Miguel Cruz %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% PR & AD Booth wrote: > Remember this golden rule: > Thou shalt make thy page readable to the obstinate and obstreperous minority > that dost use Lynx... Remember the golden rule: on the Internet, everyone's free to make their documents inaccessible if they so choose. Readers are equally free to comment on this phenomenon. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > I went ot a page the other day and when i got there, [ ... ] > How did that person do that? > Hi There is a deep dark secret for finding out things like that. On your browser, there is a method of displaying the source of the page you are viewing. Use that method to look at the file, and you will see the markup and the links to other pages which may be being called to do the animation. Please do not tell anyone else about this secret. This is just between you and me, OK? Phil Stripling %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Timothy McClanahan wrote: > I have yet to see an ADA-compliant site that is really well-designed. Maybe you'd tell us what you find so bad about http://www.enhanced-designs.com/ , which has already been commended. > Those > seem to be mutually-exclusive things for web sites. OK, in _practice_ that often seems to be the case. As we see from discussion on usenet, many of the authors who design pages visually are forcefully opposed to anyone getting a look at their pages in anything other than the way that they "designed them for". Of course, on the WWW that isn't feasible, but they stubbornly want to, regardless. It takes an exceptional mindset to produce attractive and accessible pages. I make no pretence to being good at it myself: I concentrate on content and am no great shakes at design. But I think I can recognize quality when I see it. (You need stylesheets enabled, b.t.w). It only takes one good page to disprove the principle that you are claiming: that visual attractiveness and accessibility are mutually exclusive. I'd like to see more examples, but just the one is enough to establish the _principle_. Well done Tobias and Liam, is my verdict. Alan J. Flavell ----------------------------------- morgan wrote: > >. (You need stylesheets enabled, b.t.w). > > Sorry. no can do as I have taken your (and many others' previous > advice) and have decided to design for *all* browsers. You misundertand me. The content is fully accessible to you without style sheets, as far as I can see. The visual attraction is done with the stylesheet. They _did_ design for all browsers. They avoided the blunder of "designing _only_ for the lowest common denominator". Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Zachary Uram wrote: > What is the current state of math support in HTML? ... -------------------- (Christian Weisgerber) uttered: >- Put the equivalent LaTeX expression in the ALT attribute, hoping that > those users who can't/don't access the images can read LaTeX formulas. - Embed the LaTeX expression as "application/x-techexplorer", and provide an image as alternative content. :-) Tor Iver Wilhelmsen -------------------- Hell Hound a.o.d. [AGQ2] wrote: > The best way for ppl to see any of it is to make images within tables. You do this for a living, do you? > have set > heights and widths, with all the numbers, a decimal, all other chars, etc. have > ovelines of them (like n.gif, then have no.gif, where n is the number). Make > brackets and parenthesis twice, maybe 3 times the height of the numbers and > such. This would be where once it's done (the making of images), using a WYSIWYG > would actually have some practical use for making code to copy-n-paste. latex2html, for all its eccentricities, sounds positively easy in comparison. Take a look at a random example: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/preprints/1997/09/cpviol_glas/node1.html and let us know how you get on using your method, OK? Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stewart Dean wrote: > Darin McGrew wrote: > > On the WWW, I see no point in authoring for such a "selected audience" that > > even the most basic variations in browsing environment render your content > > less readable. > > You may say all reference sites should be totally platform independent - such > as news and goverment sites. The same could not be said for gameing, film, > design and other more style led sites. I can access movie information just fine from the Internet Movie Database using Lynx. I see no valid reason why I should be deliberately blocked from getting local showtime information from the MovieLink site using Lynx (unless I configure it to claim to be some form of Mozilla). When I'm using a graphical browser, some sites force me to scroll horizontally because my browser window is "too narrow". Others present short choppy lines and a wide right margin because my browser window is "too wide". Perhaps it makes sense to you. To me, it's foolish. -- Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On 6 Aug 1998, Darin McGrew wrote: > As long as you have good ALT text, you don't need a text-only version for > Lynx users. It might still be a good idea for those with graphical > browsers Oh, you've noticed that too! Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% In article <35CB9836.3B6C25D2@bju.edu>, Ben Young wrote: > Well Tor was right. The best way (and really the only way) is to use SSI. If > your server supports it that's the way to go. > > This should work: > > > > That should do it. The problem with this approach is that the text file will be displayed as HTML. This isn't a problem if that's what the author wants, but to display an arbitrary text file, a better approach is to filter the text file through a program like the following. #!/bin/perl print "
\n";        # start a PRE element
        while (<>) {
            s/&/&/g;        # convert & to &
            s//>/g;         # convert > to >
            print;
        }
        print "
\n"; Check your server documentation for the proper SSI syntax for inserting the output of a program into a document. -- Darin McGrew --------------------- #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w print "
\n", (map {s{[<&>]}{&#${\ord$&};}g; $_} <>), "
\n"; Abigail %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (William G. Schlake) wrote: > Web authors that create cutting edge sites are well aware of the > recommendations, they simply know how to go way beyond the shackles > under the phony guise of uniform access. I think what raises people's ire is referring to "standards" as "shackles" and referring to the idea of uniform access as a "phony guise." I wonder whether Beethoven ever felt "shackled" by the limitations of the standard orchestra, or whether he thought the idea that everyone who had ears could hear his music was a "phony guise." Ask the guys at Pininfarina if they ever felt constrained by the fact that the cars they designed had to yield to engineering constraints such as a place to put the engine. (Well, they probably did, but if they had ignored such constraints, what they designed could hardly have been called a car.) Limits are a vital component of art. It's easy to be "creative" when you have no limits. To do something new within the constraints of your medium requires true imagination. -- Jerry Kindall -------------------- Jerry Kindall wrote: > >Limits are a vital component of art. It's easy to be "creative" when you >have no limits. To do something new within the constraints of your medium >requires true imagination. I really see nothing at all wrong with 'vanity' websites. Some of the oddball ones are the most fascinating. Some authors are extremely good at convincing the viewer to enter their vision, many aren't. Perhaps some viewers appreciate rudeness or blatant unconcern for their viewing habits. However, I notice that some bleeding edge viewers tend to have multiple browser windows open at the same time and are also likely to be running RealPlayer G2, or QuickTime, Flash, etc. all at the same time as browsing in other windows. PS. I would bet Bach would love to have a Yamaha DX-11 or two, but IMNHO his efforts survived very nicely, and more importantly are just as relevant when played on a Moog or Yamaha as on the old Schnitgers. Ceylon Stowell -------------------- William G. Schlake wrote: > >Web authors that create cutting edge sites are well aware of the >recommendations, they simply know how to go way beyond the shackles >under the phony guise of uniform access. Web authors can create bleeding edge and polite web sites. There is nothing that says that you cannot both be innovative and considerate of the preferences of your viewers. There are artists making some very bleeding edge films out there. Some of them win awards at art shows attended only by other artists with egos so large they cannot simply understand that other folks also have egos. Most of these are starving. > >Anyone may follow recommendations or choose not to. Very simple >concept. It strikes me as odd that no choice is extended to the person >creating the web site. I thought it was pretty clear that the web author DOES have a choice. They can inflict their egos on viewers or they can try to communicate present, or sell effectively. The choice is always available for the web author. However, until web-browsing becomes mandatory, the viewers also have choices that smart authors pay attention to. This indeed is very likely to mean that the web author may choose to select their audience by their choice of presentation. This works best if the selection is what the web author intended rather than an unfortunate artifact of the author simply not stopping to consider that their presentation is part of the web site, and unfortunately the only one that viewers are likely to judge them on in most cases. Ceylon Stowell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Zachary Uram wrote: > Alan J. Flavell wrote: > > > > Well, for leading-edge browsers like Lynx, it's also useful to have LINK > > REV="made", as well as handy LINKs like REL="home" > > "leading-edge"? I thought lynx was a text-only command line browser? Those two statements are not incompatible. JMY ---------------------- Zachary Uram wrote: > > "leading-edge"? I thought lynx was a text-only command line >browser? So this new GUI Lynx is it like Athena? Where can I get it? Leading-edge in that is supports a whole load of stuff that Netscape and IE don't. When was the last time you saw Netscape do anything with a LINK tag (except for javascript and stylesheet ones)? Lynx is and always will be a text mode browser, even the Win95 version. There's no GUI Lynx. What ever made you think there is? ;-) Stephen Richard Pugh %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stanley Friesen wrote: > Hmm, how is braille emphasis done? In American braille, there is a symbol that means "the next word is in italics". (Actually, since the same symbol is used for boldface, it really means "the next word is emphasized", but it's called the italics symbol, and that's what new braille readers are taught.) It's used like this: This sentence has a _single word in italics. __This entire sentence is in _italics. (The doubled italics symbol "turns on" italics until the next single italics symbol, which marks the last italicized word.) -- Darin McGrew ------------------------------------------------ Jukka Korpela wrote: > Darin McGrew wrote: > > In American braille, there is a symbol that means "the next word is in > > italics". > > It seems that there are different variants of braille; my braille > reference does not mention such a symbol (but it mentions symbols for > Scandinavian letters which probably don't exist in American braille) > This is quite understandable due to differences in the scripts used > for various national languages. > Yep. In American braille, all accent marks are treated the same; there is no attempt to distinguish between any of them. Naturally, French braille is a little more careful about such things. There are even minor differences between UK braille and American braille. And then you have music braille, math braille (aka Nemith code), computer braille (which uses 8-dot characters instead of the traditional 6-dot characters), and other specialized braille codes. > If the same symbol is used for "italics" and "boldface", it seems that > a braille browser has difficulties in distinguishing between EM and > STRONG. Such a distinction is/was required by HTML 2.0, and it is a > very natural thing to expect. > > I wonder if new variants of braille will be developed, with some > _structural_ symbols effectively corresponding to some essential HTML > tags, indicating that a heading follows or a word being defined > follows. In a sense, that would be natural than using concepts > relating to typography. Now, this was just a thought experiment, but I > think it still shows why structural markup is to be preferred, since > it gives more flexibility. Well, here in the US there is an ongoing effort to create a "unified" braille. One of the stated goals is to make it easier to automatically convert electronic text into braille. Of course, since current literary braille (aka Grade 2 braille) uses all the 64 available 6-dot characters (sometimes for multiple purposes each), any new representations (e.g., boldface) must either steal an existing symbol or create a new multi-character compound symbol. Neither is an ideal solution. And of course, current braille users don't want anyone changing their reading and writing system. (Would print users would want to relearn their reading and writing system, just because it might make it easier for publishers to print new print books?) Darin McGrew ------------------------------------------------- (Darin McGrew) wrote: > (Would print users would want to relearn their > reading and writing system, just because it might make it easier for > publishers to print new print books?) It dependf. What wovld be the change? There wovld have to be fome compelling benefit fvch as making it eafier to read by eliminating confvfion between certain letterf. (We did it before.) Greg Berigan -- ,=<#)-=# (The War of the Worldf) ,_--//--_, _-~_-(####)-_~-_ Pleafe pardon any typof. Bandwidth if often at a premivm, (#>_--'~--~`--_<#) with connection too flvggifh to fvpport post-editing. -------------------------------------------------- Jukka Korpela wrote: > Darin McGrew wrote: >>In American braille, there is a symbol that means "the next word is in >>italics". > >It seems that there are different variants of braille; ... OK, so this implies that, at least in the version of Braille Darin is familiar with, a Braille browser would render and or by prefixing each word within it with the "italics" symbol. Right? Interesting. That is a truly unique way of rendering EM. Stanley Friesen --------------------------------------------------- Stanley Friesen wrote: > OK, so this implies that, at least in the version of Braille > Darin is familiar with, a Braille browser would render and > or by prefixing each word within it with the "italics" > symbol. Right? Not quite. As I illustrated in an earlier posting, when a phrase is italicized, the first word is prefixed with a double italics-sign, and the last word is prefixed with a single italics-sign, like this: >> __This entire sentence is in _italics. However, refreshable (paperless) braille displays generally display computer braille (an extended 8-dot braille) rather than literary braille (a traditional 6-dot braille). And they often have extra "status" characters that indicate text color, cursor position, and similar details that matter to computer users. So it is probably more complicated yet. And it depends on the user's configuration options, and whether he/she is using a "braille browser", or just a braille screen reader interpretting a graphical/text browser. -- Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Alan Richmond wrote: > catnip wrote: > > > > (Lately I've become obsessed with deprecated tags. I wonder if there's > > medication for that??) > > Depretaganol? [jots that down] catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Mon, 17 Aug 1998, Andrew Prazuch wrote: > Can someone tell me (or point me to a site with an explanation) what > browsers support HTML 4.0 Approximately none. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% catnip8@geocities.com (catnip) wrote: > > See? Even Alan agrees with me! So > there! :-) No no no catnip! You are _still_ using presentational rather than structural markup. I'm sure you really meant to write: See? ... So there! Regards, Paul (sticking his tongue in cheek) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Ranger Fox" wrote: > > Actually, there IS an alternative: Use style sheets > Define the table fonts once and it's set for all tables on that page: > I wonder how many years it will take for all people, who are right now just "facinated" about using CSS style rules in their HTML, to realize that _all_length_units_specified_in_rules_shall_have_a_unit. TABLE { font-size=12 } ??? 12 what? Elephants? 12px = 12 pixels, 12ex = 12 ex units (equal to 12 x the height of lower case letters) 12pt = 12 points (whatever that happens to be on a VDU) 12em = 12 em units (equal to 12 x the height of the last set font) and so on... These stupid _user_friendly_programmers at MS are once again setting a trap for people, no one needs to read up on specs because MS allways sets the [proper?] defaults for them. *sigh* -- Jan Roland Eriksson ------------------------------------------- And as I should have said in my previous post, if I had not got so carried away on the lack of units, the syntax illustrated up here is wrong too. TABLE { font-size=12 } - - - - - - - - - -^ There's no equal sign used between a property and its value. Try this instead... TABLE { font-size: 12pt } -- Jan Roland Eriksson %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Gerd Oldekop wrote: >I just want to stay with standard HTML. Standard HTML? From FP? You've got to be kidding. -grinch %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Gerhard Kutzelnigg wrote: > Abigail wrote: > > > > Netscape happily launches ghostview. > > Okay. But know how do you *surf* through postscript documents? What does that question mean? I do it with the page-up and page-down commands. > I mean if postcript was > that cute, Why would it have to be "cute"? It has a job to do, and it does that job. Pointless to ask why it doesn't do a different job. > why do we have html, javascript, java, postscript, activex etc...? Hmmm. > I don't want to present a book to my users in form of a postscript > document with perfect pixel layout. That's good. If you don't want to do it, then you don't need this solution. What's your problem? > I just want to give them interactivity, This is a common misconception. They already have "interactivity", it's built into their browser. They decide what they want to do, they do it, and the browser responds accordingly. What you probably want is to take away some of their freedom, in the interest of having then driven in the way that you will specify. There's nothing wrong with that, in appropriate situations, but it isn't the job that _HTML_ was designed to do. And that's why the WWW isn't limited to HTML, but has various media, each targetted at some different kind of purpose. > And I want it to look good And so do we all! But when that isn't feasible due to their browsing situation, you have to decide which is more important: to insist on the "look", meaning that you won't let them have access to the content in their sub-optimal viewing situation; or to make the content available as best you can, in spite of the shortcomings of their viewing situation. > and if this needs to be exact pixel > sized then it is like this. Er, yes? > Web surfers use browsers, not ghostview or whatever. False dichotomy. Alan J. Flavell ------------------------------------ Gerhard Kutzelnigg wrote: > In the WWW, with using HTML in a web browser, the web designer has to > decide how the website should look like. Why? For that matter, how? When someone's using Web-on-Call, the web "looks" like a telephone. > It's not up to the user. In comparision to the total freedom of the > surfer that would mean, that every program on a computer should be > completely configurable. What a giant task. Perhaps. But even Windows allows me to set my color preferences once and have them used by most applications. And even if I have to set my preferred font for every application, I only have to do it once and then it's done. And application/system vendors make it easier by selecting appropriate default settings. > I am not telling you postscript is bad, but I mean it's got nothing to do > with authoring.html. I may be wrong, but I thought PostScript was mentioned to illustrate its differences with HTML. PostScript is a lot of things that HTML isn't (e.g., a programming language, a pixel-specific page description language). Of course, HTML is a lot of things that PostScript isn't (e.g., a platform-independent hypertext markup language). They are different tools. Which is appropriate depends on what your needs are. The implication is, don't try to make HTML do PostScript's job. -- Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Degan) wrote: > >I considered style sheets, but am hesitating for two reasons: (1) I >don't know style sheets from onion rings ;-) [off topic post containing culinary reference] They're about the same. Just don't deep fry your style sheets. ;-) catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Richard Noteboom) wrote: >Dear Bill, > >Obviously you are as free with the rules of literary composition as >he is That should, of course, be "you are". (That should teach me not to start a msg. addressing the third person sing. and then change it to the second p. - bit like spelling errors in a post pointing out spelling errors :-) -- Richard Noteboom Richard@noteboom.demon.nl http://www.noteboom.demon.nl/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Dear Newbie, you don't waltz in here with a laundry list of questions and expect someone to hold your hand while you ask them all. That's not the purpose of this or any Newsgroup and such conduct is considered to be rude. First, READ the old articles to get up to speed. You'll find many, if not most of your questions already answered. Next buy a book and learn the basics, then try what you've learned...experience with HTML like anything else IS the best teacher. Then if you get stuck, ask A QUESTION, not over half a dozen at once. Come to think of it, that's good general advice for everyone that's looking for help. All of what you asked is possible, but you got to learn to walk before you run and most of what you want is more involved, so learn the simpler stuff first. Greg Berigan %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% BTR (best thing recently) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Gerhard Kutzelnigg) wrote: >On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Ingmar Greil wrote: >> and, BTW, who tells you i am using a visual browser? visually impaired >> as i might be, i might prefer a talking browser > If the web designer provides textual and graphical information to you, I > just wonder what browser ever would be talking to you and even describe > the contents of an image. Maybe in 2785, if earth still is. It is the author's responsibility to provide appropriate ALT attribute values for those images, even if those values are null strings. I don't know about your country, but here we have laws against discrimination on the basis of physical handicap (visual impairment). Greg Berigan ------------------------------------------- Gerhard Kutzelnigg wrote: > It's the same in the web. Either you surf to a site and look at the > information that is presented to you in whatever way, or you don't. But > you can't expect any web designer to create every site in all possible > data formats. Yes, if content is inherently visual (like a photo) or auditory (like a recording of a bird call), then it's going to be inaccessible to readers who lack the necessary media support. Yes, if an author has chosen to depend upon certain media to present his content, the reader can do little but complain or leave if he/she lacks the necessary media support. But this is a web authoring newsgroup, so it's appropriate to discuss how authors can better meet the needs of their readers. Most content on the web is textual, and can (and IMHO should) be accessible to the increasingly diverse assortment of browsing environments used by readers. When content isn't textual, authors can go the extra mile to make it accessible (e.g., long descriptions of images, transcripts of audio), but keeping textual content accessible is fairly straightforward and is something I expect competent web authors to do. -- Darin McGrew %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On 21 Aug 1998 17:05:04 GMT, abigail@fnx.com wrote: >Chris Gray (grayc@se.bel.alcatel.be) wrote on MDCCCXVI September MCMXCIII >in : >++ The combination of visual browser + screen reader is more problematic; if >++ background sound is stealing the sound system from the screen reader then >++ we are looking at a software conflict. Software conflicts are one of life's >++ greater annoyances, but usually someone finds a way to work around them. > >It doesn't of course always have to be or-or. I'm perfectly able to have >a conversation with someone while music is playing, and I bet most of >you have seen movies or television programs where the background sounds >aren't always turned off when someone utters a word. The problem Chris is talking about is worse than merely overlayed sounds. On some OS/sound driver combinations, only *one* program is allowed to use the sound card at a given time. If the visual browser is already using the sound card for a background sound, the screen reader will be unable to open the sound card in order to use it, and will thus fail to produce any sound. [I have had sound lock-out problems even on Win95, with my original clunky sound card: luckily I am not visually impaired, so this was not a real disaster for me, merely annoying]. Stanley Friesen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > Well, whoever thought the business angles up was quite clever, because it's > a good way for them to make some money within a flawed system. Sure, they'll make money. They might even make a profit. I'm cursing them for the user-confusion it will create. The first time I saw one, I thought "come.to? What kind of domain name is that? Is this a joke? Another InterNIC hack?" etc. until the country thing came to mind. Living in Canada, I get to see Frankstein domains like nissancanada.com, canadaadventure.com, and (though this is actually in the states) canadacollege.net. If lived in .to, I would be tearing my hear out. worship.us and ca.ca, anybody? Stephen van Egmond %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Jeff Thies wrote: > > So, basically, what you are saying is that it is impossible for an > > author to put quotation marks around a piece of text that isn't quoted > > material? > > Blockquote does not do that, Indeed it doesn't. It does nothing more than declare the text to be a block of material quoted from elsewhere. It leaves the presentation details to the client agent. > in NS and IE, it "indents" the left and right margin. ^^ Now you're making exactly the same mistake that you were accusing the other informant of. At the interworking inteface (i.e the document that comes down the line) there is no indent. It's the browsers that are, by default, representing this logical function by rendering with an indent. With a personal stylesheet, they'd do something else. "It" (the blockquote markup) does not indent margins. "They" (the browsers) do it. > Say, what`s this thread about? The usual. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% >>3, A good web server to publish one's web page on? > > >Try Geocities. Get serious! GeoCities just settled with the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) over infringement of its members' privacy (including mine and yes, I'm moving). Try %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% In article <6rjk9c$ri0$1@paris.magic.fr>, Paul wrote: >There should be an option in browser / Html tags so users comming to a site >would automatically download the fonts they don't have, so they would see >the site as it was meant to. A) Old news. Crack a book sometime. B) Don't forget that the point of HTML and the web is not to deliver pre-printed glossy images to everyone, but to allow information to be disseminated to people all over the place regardless of their particular equipment, software, or other factors. Miguel Cruz %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Joel Shepherd wrote: >The piece of advice most frequently offered when someone asks about >achieving a visual effect in HTML is more-or-less "if you must do this, >then don't use HTML". But the better advice is "learn what html can do, and stick with it and work within its limitations, and exploit its strengths". Rob Brown %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Miguel Cruz wrote in message <6rljbg$6bm$1@news.ycc.yale.edu>... >Rob Brown wrote: >I take it you're not a designer. HTML doesn't, and can't, provide the kind >of precision that I'd want in a nicely-laid-out document. PDF more or less >does. It would break my heart to see anything I did in HTML printed on >paper, because it looks so horrible (even if it's fine on the screen). Actually I am a designer. (industrial design and user interface design, not quite as much web design or graphic design). One thing I've learned, over and over and over, is that barriers to entry are a bad thing. Anything that makes it harder for someone to use or view your stuff, the less likely they are to use/view it. When it comes to the web, if it requires a plug in, forget it. People will simply hit the back button -- especially if the only reason the plug in is required is because the designer thinks it will be more "nicely laid out". If its something they really need (like a user guide), they will surely curse you as they install the plug in. Designing for the web is all about compromises. I would prefer the designer give up a bit of design perfection than waste my time and clutter my machine by forcing me to install a plug in. Try doing a survey of the real world and I think you'd find the vast majority of people out there would agree. >Likewise, for scientific, mathematical, technical, etc., documents, PDF >provides the sort of positioning and symbols that HTML just can't. I understand that, but of the 50 or so things I've bumped into that required pdf, I think I've seen one where it couldn't have been done as well in html (especially when you consider the convenience issue). Rob Brown -------------------------------------------------------- Rob Brown wrote: ... > >Likewise, for scientific, mathematical, technical, etc., documents, PDF > >provides the sort of positioning and symbols that HTML just can't. This is unfortunately still true. The HTML conversions that are available for latex (latex2html, and tth) are very ingenious, and very good in their respective ways, but they still leave a lot to be desired relative to the original, as compared with ghostview. > I understand that, but of the 50 or so things I've bumped into that required > pdf, I think I've seen one where it couldn't have been done as well in html > (especially when you consider the convenience issue). As you say, it's a matter of compromise. Fullscale mathematics really cannot be "done as well in html", honestly. Even if the HTML was being developed as the primary output, rather than as a by-product of publishing the paper version - as it is in the cases I have to handle. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Steve Linberg wrote: [a lot of stuff to indicate that we're mostly in agreement with one another] > If there were a browser that did HTML 4/CSS2 completely correctly, you can > bet you'd start seeing "Don't even try viewing this page without browser>" on pages everywhere. Hopefully, eventually, they'd say "Hmm, > maybe I should find out about this browser everyone's talking about." That seems contrary to the basic idea of encouraging people to create valid HTML pages. I get the sense that an author who would build a website compliant to HTML 4 and then put a "Best Viewed with the Foo Browser" warning on it is somehow missing the point. "Best Viewed with Something that Understands HTML" is fair but a bit obvious, I would hope. .. Roger Carbol ----------------------------- Roger Carbol wrote: > "Best Viewed with Something that Understands HTML" is fair but a > bit obvious, I would hope. Might seem obvious to you and me and some of the other participants oh this thread, but the vast majority of today's web designers wouldn't recognize real HTML if it hit them over the head with an . So to speak. HTML is whatever gets extruded by their WYSIWYG package. mumble. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Steve Linberg wrote: > rog@shaw.wave.ca wrote: > > Steve Linberg wrote: > > > rog@shaw.wave.ca wrote: > > > > We can already write correct code. Well, some of us, anyways. > > > > > By "correct" I mean "not hacked and twisted to achieve certain effects on > > > broken browsers," not "syntatically valid." > > > > I still stand by my original statement: We *can* write correct > > code, regardless of your definition of correct. Many people do not > > write correct code, for various reasons. But most of them still > > *could.* > > OK, I see what you mean. We can write correct code regardless of how the > broken browsers interpret it. I actually agree with this, but there is > that gray trade-off between "correct" and "usable" at this point that we > all have to contend with. > > > >> We already have the ability to use all of the wonderful CSS stuff. > > > > > > We do? What browser are you using that fully supports CSS? > > > > The browser that I happen to use, or that any one else happens > > to use, does not have any bearing on HTML authors' ability to > > use CSS. It may have some bearing on their motivation or decision > > to use CSS, but not on their ability. > > Again, as above, but wouldn't you like to be able to use CSS and actually > SEE the results of your work rendered correctly? There's some > satisfaction in writing correct, up-to-spec code, but if no-one can use it > (at least at present), it's of limited value, nicht wahr? > > > > Most authors have never heard of validating, I'd wager. But they'd have > > > to learn in a big hurry if strict browsers showed them their errors > > > instead of trying to render their broken code (and often succeeding > > > somewhat). > > > > Assuming they happen to use one of the strict browsers. > > Right. This is a tough one. I know a lot of people still using Netscape 1.12. > > > > They get no feedback that anything is wrong if all they think > > > to do is examine their page in a single browser on a a single platform to > > > see if it looks OK, which is what most people do, sadly. > > > > Since you acknowledge that many authors only use one browser, what > > leads you to believe that they're going to go out of their way to > > examine their page using a strict browser? > > Well, I don't assume that they will... but I think it will eventually > become a question of self-interest. People make web pages because they > want them to be seen (I think). If they make a page and get an email from > someone saying "Your page is a mess," maybe they'll clue in. Or if > they're trying to sell something on a web site and nothing happens, maybe > they'll wonder why not. Or maybe they won't. > > If there were a browser that did HTML 4/CSS2 completely correctly, you can > bet you'd start seeing "Don't even try viewing this page without browser>" on pages everywhere. Hopefully, eventually, they'd say "Hmm, > maybe I should find out about this browser everyone's talking about." > > > I do appreciate your viewpoint in the sense that it strikes me as > > being fairly optimistic. That is, I get the sense that you're saying > > "Authors are not TRYING to write broken HTML; they just don't know > > any better, and if they had better tools for receiving feedback > > about their broken HTML, then they'd fix it." However I may be > > misinterpreting you; sorry if it sounds as though I'm putting words > > in your mouth. > > No, I'd say that's accurate. I am rather optimistic and naïve about many > things. :) But as I mentioned before, I think there are other reasons why > it's in people's interest to write good HTML, and hopefully over time > these would come to the fore as the overall educational level of web users > about the medium increased. > > Of course, you could argue quite convincingly that this is unlikely... but > I guess I choose my orientation based on the hope that it can happen. (I > also vote for Green Party candidates, to give you a sense of the windmills > I tilt at...) > > > As much as I would like to agree with this viewpoint, I think it is > > more prevalent to have invalid HTML written by authors who simply > > don't care enough to fix it, and no amount of additional feedback is > > going to help them. They have to *want* to change, if I may be so > > overwhelmingly cliche. > > I agree. I hope that they will care when they realize more and more > people can't view their broken pages. And if they really don't care, then > maybe it's a survival of the fittest kind of situation. Eventually > they'll die off. You guys are targeting the wrong group. The "Webmasters" of which you speek are mostly overburdened stock clerks. Many companies believe that they can buy Front Page or Visual Page or Fred's Page ;-) and give it to a moderately accomplished user to put up a web site for them. Unfortu- anately many companies that make these tools and offer web site hosting are reinforcing this message. I suggest we start testing these authoring tools and looking at these host sites with this "better" browser to see who's playing and who's bluffing. Pat O'Hara %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Robert G. Eldridge) wrote: >garbage produced by MS Word that they purport to be HTML. >Subsequent editing "if you like" is not an option but a necessity. ...and a very unpleasant one, to say the least. Sherm Pendley %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% thwilson@bnr.ca (Diane Wilson) writes: > Diane Wilson | All their brains are in their heads, > dewilson@pobox.com | where brains ought to be. No one sits > http://www.lava.net/~dewilson/ | beside their brain. No one but me. > http://www.acm.org/chapters/trichi/ | Diane Wilson? Diane Wilson of the Three Fundamentals? 1. People don't like to read. 2. People don't like to scroll. 3. People don't like to wait for graphics to load. That Diane Wilson? http://www.lava.net/~dewilson/web/rant.html :-> -- Phil Stripling | Sorry for the munged return The Civilized Explorer | address, but you know what. http://www.cieux.com/ | needs to be removed. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Phaser2FunkFunk wrote: >Oh right, yeah. Like this you mean: > >Site 1. Tommy Hilfiger Watch - RRP £100, but this site sells it for £50. >However this site ONLY works in 800x600 >Site 2. Tommy Hilfiger Watch - RRP £100, this site sells it for £90. Works in >640x480 and 800x600. >I think I'll buy from site 2 'cos it looks nice. > >I don't think so. So, if I leave the site immediately on arriving, how do I *know* it sells the watch cheaper? I didn't view enough of the site to find that out! That is the whole point. If one cannot, or does not, reach the meat of the site - the offer to sell at a bargain price - one cannot take advantage of the offer. One generally only puts up with hard-to-use sites if one *already* knows they have something worthwhile to offer underneath all the trouble. (E.g. the Microsoft site, which is often the only route to get the latest patches for MS software). (Actually, I would probably not take such an offer as a $50 price for a $100 watch unless it was from a known reputable company, for fear I was purchasing stolen property, or that it was a credit card scam - there is such a thing as too good to be true). Stanley Friesen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Diane Wilson) writes: > Chris Gray writes: > > spacetime@earthlink.net writes: > > > > > > Computer technology (and monitor technology) is really advanced. > > > > Actually it's still really primitive (says my cat). Especially the monitors: > > still using cathode ray tubes, with heater filaments and high-tension power > > supplies? Give us a break. > > My cat is perfectly happy with CRTs and heater filaments. She loves > sleeping on top of the monitor; it's the warmest spot in the house. Obviously s/he doesn't share my cat's concerns about X-rays. (Can't resist speculating as to the precise gender of Diane's cat ...) Chris Gray --------------------------------------------------- |> Obviously s/he doesn't share my cat's concerns about X-rays. Actually, that particular cat died recently, but she was old and arthritic, so the heat probably kept her going. |> (Can't resist speculating as to the precise gender of Diane's cat ...) She was free to choose, of course. -- Diane Wilson %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Miguel Cruz wrote: >The web is wonderful, and certainly has a lot of uses. But that doesn't mean >that thousands of experience and scientific knowledge concerning presenting >information is suddenly useless. No, but the problem is people who know how to optimize something for print then think that all the issues on the web are the same. If you are going to put something on the web, you are going to be stuck with the limitations of the web (you can't take easily it into the bathroom with you, it might crash, etc -- whether or not you download the Acrobat plug-in)....but why add to that the limitations of print? Rob Brown %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Re: how to hide CSS from Netscape 3.x browser? Please help On Wed, 26 Aug 1998 11:52:26 GMT, tony_us@my-dejanews.com wrote: >I have used the following for my web pages. >... > > > >... >It works fine in IE 4.x and Netscape 4.x browser. However, Netscape 3.x >browser just shows the above text as they are. Is it possible to hide the >above CSS style from browsers that do not understand CSS? Try putting that material in the file "mystyle.css" and then replace the material in the HTML file with the tag: This has several salutory effects: a) Browsers that don't know about style sheets won't have any "action" to associate with rel="stylesheet" and thus will ignore it. Ergo, it gets ignored by older browsers. b) You can associate the same style information with multiple pages, which means that HTML and style information are clearly demarcated as separate. c) By not spreading style changes liberally throughout web pages, like chunky peanut butter, but rather controlling them more centrally, there will be a more consistent "look and feel" for the web pages. As soon as you have more than two or three web pages involved, the improvement in manageability starts to clearly emerge. d) People *with* CSS support only need to load the .css file once; it can remain cached. Web pages are, as a result, smaller and faster to load. Christopher Browne %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% spacetime@earthlink.net wrote: : I hate to say it, but the people with good monitors probably have money : and probably are the ones who should be targeted by online businesses. The relationship between someone's affluence and the size of his monitor is actually likely to be weaker than you think unless you're talking about a computer geek. There are lots of people out there, some of whom are very wealthy, who regard a computer as just a tool and don't feel compelled to upgrade it just to have the latest and greatest. They're off spending their money on their other interests. No self-respecting affluent computer geek would access the Web through AOL on a Packard-Bell machine, but that's exactly what plenty of yuppie families do; the web page designer who writes such people off because they don't meet his standard of hipness is writing off a big chunk of his clients' market. It's very easy for technical people to fall into the trap of designing products or services based on their appeal to techies rather than to "regular folks." This gives us computer programs designed to appeal to programmers, cars designed to appeal to automotive engineers, and the like. There *is* a limited and often lucrative market for such things, but you can't extend that reasoning to more general markets. In this specific case, it's a fair bet that what a Web designer personally finds impressive isn't going to be the same thing that John Q. Public finds impressive. In the 1970s and early 1980s, GM lost giant chunks of market share because it was selling the kind of cars its executives wanted to drive rather than the kind of cars that the public wanted to drive. For example, GM's executives didn't particularly care about gas mileage because they could have easily afforded to pay $100 to fill the tank up. But GM's customers worried about how their gas bills would fit into their budgets. Similarly, the typical Web designer loads his pages directly from disk or over an at-least-10MBPS link, so load time doesn't make an impression on him. But load time sure as hell does make an impression on the end-user trying to pull the page over a choked connection. Eric Bohlman %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Tim Fives wrote: : 4, I'm just curious but are there any other web brosers other than : Netscape and IE? Yes. It's important, though, to realize that "Netscape" and "IE" aren't two browsers; they're more than 30 browsers once you take version and platform differences into account. It's also important to realize that non-techie users typically stick with whatever browser came with their computer or ISP account and don't automatically upgrade, even if there's no charge for the upgrade. And it's also important to realize that many people are accessing the Web via computers they don't own, and aren't allowed to upgrade their browsers (that will be the situation for most of the intended audience of a business-to-business commercial page, for example). And it's also important to realize that many people can't realistically upgrade their browsers without also upgrading their computers because the newer versions of Netscape and IE make much greater demands on the system. And finally, it's also important to realize that even in a group of people using the same version of the same browser on the same platform, there's going to be *lots* of variation in things like browsing window size, color preferences, font preferences, enabling or disabling client-side scripting, etc. The upshot of all this is that except in a few special cases, you can't accurately predict the most important aspects of the user's browsing situation, so if you want your page to be influential and widely read, you have to resist the temptation to "optimize" it for a specific browsing situation. There's no harm in creating a page that offers additional bells and whistles in certain browsing setups, but there *is* harm in creating a page that *depends* on having a certain setup. And no, it is *not* possible to create a page that looks the same in all browsing situations, or even in anything close to a majority of them. Eric Bohlman %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Stanley Friesen wrote: > > Dunno, maybe there are lots of people who treat the Internet as a > toy instead fo a tool. All I know is I have never even *noticed* > I am missing something by not having Shockwave. (In fact, given > what it is, and the fact I only have a modem, not a T1, I simply > don't have the time to download Shockwave files - I have better > things to do with my browsing time). But if you don't have Shockwave, you miss out on "Slap a Spice Girl"! http://www.urban75.com/Punch/spicebelt.html -- --Daniel R. Tobias ----------------------- Gee, how can I live without slapping a Spice Girl. My life is soooo incomplete without it :-) I'll run right out and download Shockwave - NOT. ROTFL Stanley Friesen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (Legal advice on ciwah is not worth the paper it is written on.:-)) Phil Stripling %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "V. Mark Lehky" writes: > Perhaps I will change my original question to a poll. Hey, Mark, If you get _any_ useful information out of a poll on ciwah, would you let me know? :-> Phil Stripling %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Iain Wilkie Logan wrote: > However, a properly designed *speaking* browser will always be the best > solution - I believe the University of Hawaii has one available for free > download. This program _used_ to be called read2me or ReadToMe, which was easy to find with web searches and so on. For some reason of which I'm not aware, it's been renamed "HELP Read", which of course means you're knee deep in false matches from any search. Even "helpread" doesn't seem to find it. Anyhow, I guess it needs to be stressed that this is designed as a literacy tool, not as a screen reader for the visually impaired. But it seems to be a useful aid for normally-sighted authors who would like to get an idea of how their pages might come across on a screen reader. http://www.pixi.com/~reader1/ Yet another web site that has joined the "make normal text into something microscopic" bandwagon, it seems. And black text on a dark-ish blue background to boot. Oh guess what, it's "designed" with Front Page. No sign of any real HTML, just TABLE and FONT SIZE everywhere. A pity: this site is best viewed with Lynx, in spite of the stern untruth "This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them." Oh, silly me, this site is best heard with "HELP Read" - which doesn't mind the fact that the font size and colours make the page visually unusable at my default settings. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Anyone know if it's possible to do something like to bring all the jpg images in a directory to a web page? Tony ------------------------- Charles L. Taylor wrote: > Roger Carbol wrote: > > > >Well you could expand *.jpg into all possible permutations, for a > >given valid filename length. But even using 8-letter filenames, > >case-insensitive, results in a pretty darn long HTML document. > > It's still a ~.tools question. HTML can't do that on its own. Well, there's several aspects to this question. First of all, this URL obviously can't be the target of an IMG as was originally suggested, since that's supposed to take the URL of one image, not a whole list of the things. But aside from that, as far as HTML is concerned, a URL is just an opaque token, that if supplied as an attribute value may have to be entified (e.g & turned into & and so on) but is otherwise passed uninspected. So I'd say it's a servers question. If a server is presented with a URL, it's entirely free to map it into any resource it wants. That resource can perfectly well be a wildcard listing of some files, if the server chooses to implement that. In fact, try this: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/chartbl.x-html and you'll see our server doing something vaguely similar, thanks to Apache's "mod_speling". Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ... BTW, when you claim that there's no way to know if text enclosed by the BLOCKQUOTE element is actually quoted text, did you have one particular browser in mind? And were you aware that that the "bog two" browsers both display such text exactly as it should be displayed in according to most english language style guides? (Whoops! Typo up there: should be "big two". I kind of like the malapropism, though.....) ... Dan McGarry %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% I have a question about all this. In the end, discarding the intentions and the proper use of HTML will/may make the information inaccessible for some users. Lets say blind users (as a fairly large group which extends to those with just bad sight, like my grandparents) are this group. If the 'web designer' makes this decision to shut out this group of people. Often with an argument that he/she isnt targetting that set of customers or interest group. What happens if/when the said 'web designer' becomes blind or just old so he/she cant access information of his/her interest? Will the interest just disappear and will he/she steadfastly maintain the right to shut off certain groups of users? Here we have a format that can be used to let more people have access to information and still some see it appropriate to work against this idea. Often so that they can retain features found in other medias which didnt have the accessibility features of HTML. Oh, and I am one of those darn purists. Not perfect but trying to. /mill %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Dan McGarry wrote: > catnip wrote: > >John A. Grant wrote: > > > Jon Bloom wrote: > > > > ... > > > > > > > > Yeah, but then it degenerated into a "PDF sucks" thread. > > > > > > If I'm to blame, sorry about that folks. I tried to move it over > > > into a separate thread. > > > > Yes, John, you shall now be flogged without mercy using my secret > > method which involves a whip, peanut butter, and pistachios. > > What about me, catnip? I'm off-topic too!! > > I'd just like the peanut butter and the pistachios, please. Pathetic desperation. I like that in a man. ;-) catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Chris Gray wrote: > catnip wrote: > > > > Okay, I have to ask this: what's ? ;-) > > The Holy Grail of user-friendliness: Do What I Mean. > > Catnip, you should bookmark > . > Then you'll never again look dumb. ;> I'll bookmark that sweety, but that's no quarantee that I'll 'never again look dumb'. [twirls blonde hair & smacks gum] catnip Hi Chris! %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Jon Bloom wrote: > and if my browser >window is too narrow for the width chosen by the site designer I have to >resize or use horizontal scrolling. I hate horizontal scrolling. That's really the bottom line of all of this, isn't it? That catnip hates horizontal scrolling? I'd say so... catnip -------- Stop that. I just got off the phone with Bill Gates and he seemed very receptive to my proposal to redesign Internet Explorer to work in a marquee-only fashion: You get a window 10 pixels high and as wide as you like. Miguel Cruz -------- I'd like it 10 pixels wide, please. Jon Bloom -------- Abigails hate horizontal scrolling too. Abigail -------- >Abigails hate horizontal scrolling too. Okay. I'll amend that statement: We hate horizontal scrolling. That's really the bottom line of all of this, isn't it? That catnip and Abigail hate horizontal scrolling? I'd say so... :-P catnip -------- > We hate horizontal scrolling. That's really the bottom line of all of > this, isn't it? That catnip and Abigail hate horizontal scrolling? Hey I hate horizontal scrolling too! Chris Gray -------- >Hey I hate horizontal scrolling too! Revision 1b. We hate horizontal scrolling. That's really the bottom line of all of this, isn't it? That catnip, Abigail, and Chris Gray hate horizontal scrolling? catnip Hi Chris! ;-) -------- Stop. Stop now while you still can! 8^) Dan McGarry %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% oak wrote: > Thanks for the tips folks. Too bad it can't be done, I have a web page > which I periodically dump images into and it would save time if I > could just say 'load every jpg in that directory' - I'd definitely > put this in a wish list. Why must the solution be found in HTML? #!/bin/sh for i in *.jpg do altFile=`basename $i .jpg`.alt if [ -f $altFile ] then altText=`cat $altFile` else altText='[misc. image]' fi echo "\"$altText\"" done Just run the above script every time you add another image. > The way I have it > > seems to work out pretty well for me...is there a reason I shouldn't > do it this way? Are there browsers that won't undestand that syntax? First, I would expect very few browsers to support , given that the standards specify instead. Second, I would expect to be unreliable on the WWW because it's invalid syntax. The "*" is not alphanumeric, a hyphen, or a period, so the value must be quoted: Third, only a browser accessing your server's filesystem directly has any chance of interpretting "*.jpg" correctly. Any other browser will have no way to expand "*.jpg". -- Darin McGrew --------------------------- Darin McGrew wrote: > Third, only a browser accessing your server's filesystem directly has any > chance of interpretting "*.jpg" correctly. Any other browser will have no > way to expand "*.jpg". The _browser_ can't (browsers handle URLs, not filenames). But the server certainly can. (For accuracy, better check the URL RFC to see whether that "*" has to be escaped or not. As this is a what-if discussion, I'm not going to.) But, as I said before, putting such a URL into an IMG SRC doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, if you expect it to resolve into multiple images. Putting it into an A HREF="..." would be just dandy, when you've organised the server's handling of it. Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Re: Any Teen Webmasters? Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 16:53:13 GMT From: catnip8@geocities.com (catnip) Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html Apollo wrote: > catnip wrote: > > > > I'm 19. [twirls blonde hair & smacks gum] > > > > ;-) > >At least you're over 18. Now the carnal thoughts we have of you won't get >us tossed into prison. Actually, I'm *well* over 18 sweety. Now, what exactly were those carnal thoughts you were having? [wink wink nudge nudge] And...there's no guarantee that you won't end up in prison (if you're into that kind of thing). (Ooops. I'm off topic again.) [slaps her hand] catnip %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Michael David McCrea wrote: > ... > IMHO, the content is *always* more important than the font used to > present it. If I want to change the font, I'll save the page, strip the > HTML and open it in my word processor. (ps - I *never* do this) That parenthetical inclusion is the most telling part of this post. I wonder how designers would feel to know that the design they've laboured over for untold hours doesn't matter to the user nearly as much as decent content? I know I was humbled when I came to that realization. Dan McGarry %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% James Boon writes: > news@webslave.dircon.co.uk wrote: > > cburch@madison.k12.wi.us wrote: > > > Stewart Dean wrote: > > > > > > > >A validator will show you HTML errors but should be taken with a pinch > > > >of salt as they often are not aware of legal HTML extentions. > > > > > > Of course, if you create a DTD and a browser doesn't know how to handle the > > > extension elements, they *should* be ignored. > > > > DTD? Name a none SGML browser that uses the DTD. HTML browsers have never > > used the DTD so you're really barking up the wrong tree. > > I think what he meant was that if you write a code that conforms to a DTD > you've created, it may not be correct HTML, and so the browser may not > know how to handle the extension elements, and should ignore them, not > that HTML browsers used the DTD themselves. I think what he meant was that any text is an open ended universe where the interpreter can discover an infinite number of interconnections (or links), and that HTML qua HTML is unable to import unique and existing meaning, that, on the contrary, it is the author's _duty_ to show that what we markup is the coincidence of opposites (that is, where opposites coincide). Since this mirrors the inadequacy of thought, ultimately HTML is incapable of expressing any objective meaning not because of the inadequacies of the markup, but because of the inadeqacies of the human author, the author not only of the markup, but of HTML itself. Hope this helps. Phil Stripling ------------------------------- Chris Burch wrote: > Phil Stripling wrote: > > James Boon wrote: > > > > > > I think what he meant was... > > > >I think what he meant was... > > Apparently I wasn't clear somewhere... Oh well! So far I like Phil's > interpretation the best; he makes me sound smart. :) Well,it's not me -- that's what you meant, right? Phil Stripling ------------------------------ Phil Stripling writes: > I think what he meant was that any text is an open ended universe where the > interpreter can discover an infinite number of interconnections (or links), > and that HTML qua HTML is unable to import unique and existing meaning, > that, on the contrary, it is the author's _duty_ to show that what > we markup is the coincidence of opposites (that is, where opposites > coincide). Since this mirrors the inadequacy of thought, ultimately HTML is > incapable of expressing any objective meaning not because of the > inadequacies of the markup, but because of the inadeqacies of the human > author, the author not only of the markup, but of HTML itself. What Phil means to say is that the thesis of structural markup embodies a contradiction, in that markup can only be apprehended (and hence comprehended) through the act of presentation; even the "comprehension" attained by a non- human agent or arachnid requires the transformation of the marked-up text into an internal representation, which process itself contains all the elements of that which we call "presentation". From the realisation of this contradiction springs the antithesis of presentational markup, in which the act of presentation is anticipated and directed by the author. But this antithesis in turn contains a contradiction, because no author can anticipate every possible presentation of the marked-up text by every user agent, both those already existing and those yet to be created; thus the goal of presentational markup is seen to be unachievable, a fata morgana which ever lies just beyond the author's grasp. From this it follows that all authorship of HTML for the World Wide Web must strive towards a synthesis in which these contradictions are resolved or so balanced as to maintain a stable equilibrium on which the reader may rest his cup of coffee. > Hope this helps. Mee too. -- Chris "auch hier ruhft man, "Zurueck!" Gray ----------------------------------- >What Phil means to say is that the thesis of structural markup embodies a >contradiction, ... Don't be so wicked, Chris. Remember Americans don't have 'Pseud's Corner'. Jedi Master Yoda ----------------------------------- Chris Gray writes: >in that markup can only be apprehended (and hence comprehended) >through the act of presentation; Perhaps, then, the quantum effects that are thus invoked explain the difficulties with this medium. Maybe we're faced with a Wonderland version of Schrodinger's Cat: one that's all *but* the smiley. ;) -- Colin Reynolds Expertise is relative. Let me ask my brother - he might know... ----------------------------------- btw: http://www.pparc.ac.uk/freebies/saver.html Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% (catnip) wrote: > Here's an interesting article about a 'browser watchdog' group of > professionals who are interested in seeking Netscape & IE compliance > to HTML, XML, (and ECMAscript) W3C standards. > > > > Best of luck guys! Well - the Web Standards Project needs more than luck. We need people to speak out and express themselves. The goal of the WaSP is simple and should be obvious. No popular browser by the dominant vendors has complied with the MINIMAL standards of the w3c and other bodies - which is nuts. Why not, for a complete change of pace, release a browser that *meets* those standards, THEN add neat-o tags and