 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group HTML/XHTML - Changing The Guard Major Keary |
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Those who write simple, static Web pages will be able to carry on doing much
the same thing, at least for a while. Web users don't readily upgrade their browsers, unless unconsciously
when installing a new version of Windows.
Older browsers will cause problems as Web authors shed deprecated tags and rely on style sheets for
presentation. There are methods of creating self-modifying Web pages, but that involves programming tools and
methods generally used by professional developers. They are designed to overcome browser differences rather
than chewing gum and fencing wire solutions. For example, Netscape has a <layer>
tag (but Internet Explorer doesn't), and IE5 has a <marquee> tag (but Netscape doesn't); a
self-modifying page uses scripting to enable a document to interact, so to speak, with different browsers in
order to achieve the desired display.
Regardless of your level of experience, or the kind of Web documents you create, the smart thing is to
become XHTML-aware.
Anyone involved in e-commerce applications for the Web will have to bring themselves up-to-date with XHTML
and other XML-compliant developments. Forms, as presently used, are pretty crude; a number of initiatives are
in the pipeline and which will provide flexible and far more effective solutions.
A Matter Of Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is not a formal international standards body, but it does observe the
protocols of the international standards community. Proper standards are important: they save confusion and
time. However, the birth of a proper standard can be preceded by an excruciatingly protracted gestation
period. The reason is that drafts have to be considered by all interested players, and conflicts resolved.
The discussion often throws up problems that no one had foreseen when the original proposal was put
forward.
A proper standard should be concerned with getting it right rather than getting it to market; innovation
should not, for its own sake, dictate the outcome; and decisions should be by consensus rather than the whim
of Gulielmus Portae of MercimoniMollis, Inc.
It is understandable that vendors become impatient and seek their own proprietary standards, but that can
lead to chaos as one competes against another. An example is ASCII, which was not intended as a standard for
computer applications; vendors ganged up on IBM with the result that we ended up with a 7-bit system that had
some twenty official variants. Vendors went their own way with 8-bit versions, of which there were
many.
The fact that a standard is promulgated does not mean the issuing authority becomes responsible for, or even
involved with, the development of applications. For example, JPEG (and all its siblings) is an ISO standard,
nothing more. Its specifications have to be met by anyone publishing software that creates, reads, or
otherwise deals with JPEG files. The JPEG facility in one graphics package does not necessarily replicate the
relevant source code in some other package. Each vendor either seeks its own solution, or licences source
code from another vendor. The standard ensures that a JPEG file created by, say, an Adobe application can be
read by one from Macromedia, and vice versa.
As a direct result of vendor contempt for standards, poor HTML was gang-banged and left wandering about in a
state of trauma. Born as a conforming subset of SGML, HTML has been sorely abused by browser vendors.
Attempts at rehabilitation failed. Version 3.0, intended to shake out the competing "features", did not get
agreement. Instead, version 3.2 - a much watered-down version 3.0-was released. Then came version 4.0,
but vendors seemed unwilling to budge.
The W3C solution was to revisit SGML and produce a completely new standard, XML, that would not be exposed to
the whims of vendors. At the same time, W3C has been realistic in recognising the need to provide for
transition. Even though many Web authors might not have taken up XML as eagerly as W3C had expected, at the
enterprise level there has been considerable interest in XML as an economical alternative to SGML and it's
potential for e-commerce solutions.
In the meantime non-conforming Web browsers still present a problem. The introduction of XHTML and its
ongoing development is leading to the release of fully XML-compliant browsers. Netscape 6 seems to be
fully XML-compliant; IE5 has partial compliancy; Opera is compliant; and W3C's Amaya -
both browser and editor - is fully XML-compliant and MathML-aware. Amaya is free and can be downloaded from
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/; it is well worth looking at, especially for
anyone wanting to use mathematical equations and expressions in Web documents. It is also noteworthy for its
documentation, which comes with a facility to sort and merge the online files into a proper manual.
Reprinted from the April 2001 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
