Rubénerd Blog :)

An automatically posted Clipmarks blog entry failing validation

Having now used the Clipmarks service for a day now, I have to say I’m impressed. The interface for their Firefox plugin could use a bit of polishing but other than that it’s fast and easy to use, and the blog export feature after I’ve saved a block of text is insanely convenient… almost!

ASIDE: I’ve largely tried to avoid sites like this because I’m paranoid about having my own data locked away somewhere that if I chose to move to another platform or service I’d be stuck, but the fact Clipmarks lets me export all my items to my own blog makes me feel much better.

There are just three small problems preventing me going crazy and using this service to tag and subsequently share everything I come across with you all here:

1. Their white colour scheme doesn’t match other posts on this site at all.

2. It doesn’t automagically create grilled cheese sandwiches after it’s automatically posted entries to my blog after I’ve bookmarked something

3. The resulting automatically generated posts aren’t XHTML 1.0 Strict or even valid HTML 4.01, even if the quoted material was. They also generate a gigantic amount of HTML code for just showing what I’ve quoted plus a few links.

So close, and yet so far!

I can solve these problems by modifying the source HTML for each Clipmarks generated blog post after they’re published, but that negates any benefit of using an automated service in the first place!

I might contact the people running Clipmarks asking about whether future versions will have custom colours and XHTML validation options. If they ever implemented these features, this service might become more addictive than coffee! If they’re strapped for cash and time, I’d gladly pay a few bucks to unlock "advanced features".

As of February 2009, page 145 is one of the last ones!

Checking, correcting and validating malformed (or in most cases typo filled) XHTML code is a very useful thing to do when you’re sick because it takes almost no brains whatsoever to do and it keeps you occupied instead of watching daytime television.

I can now say with 99.95% certainty (my solicitor advises me against ever being 100% certain) that every friggen page and post on this blog is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Sheesh.

Tentatively every page and post is valid XHTML 1.1 as well with two caveats

1. I don’t have an XML declaration in the first line of the source so I don’t trip Internet Explorer’s Quirks Mode
2. Pages are still being served with the text/html mime type instead of the technically correct application/xhtml+xml, again for compatibility with even the latest versions of Internet Explorer such as 7 and 8 Beta.

Both of these could be handled and adjusted on the web server so that depending on what browser the client is accessing your site from you could dynamically add declarations and change mime types on the fly (I believe that’s the W3C recommendation with XHTML 1.1) but it seems like a bit too much trouble to deal with now. I’ll be keeping my eye on this though.

Obligatory Microsoft rant

Microsoft was sued by the European Union because they felt they were being anti-competitive by bundling Internet Explorer.

While I believe that suit did have some merit, the really should have gone after Microsoft’s appalling standards record instead. They’ve been responsible for untold amounts of damage by keeping back the progress of the internet and have caused frustration and head butting on walls by programmers and web designers.

What a mess!

I was under the impression that newer web standards emphasised the separation of content from presentation markup. This was the reason for the creation of CSS and relegating the humble table back to displaying… tabular data.

I’ve been an unabashed and unapologetic supporter of the web standards themselves, even if in the past my interpretations of them weren’t exactly correct ;-). I’m attempting to correct this though because I see real value in everyone being on the same page on net as it were. That was a really clever and entirely unintended pun. I’m not Bill Kurtis.

What concerns me though is the removal of the value attribute from the humble ordered list element. This attribute is vital for generating non-contiguous but ordered lists of items, or where selected items share the same value, such as this example of ranking some of the cities I grew up living in based on the amount of time I spent there:

<ol>
<li value="1">Singapore</li>
<li value="2">Melbourne, Victoria, Australia</li>
<li value="3">Adelaide, South Australia, Australia</li>
<li value="4">Brisbane, Queensland, Australia</li>
<li value="4">Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia</li>
<li value="6">Sydney, New South Wales, Australia</li>
<li value="0">Orion’s Belt, Far Far Away!</li>
</ol>

According to the W3Schools list element article, the value attribute was deprecated by the W3C for use in XHTML because you can "use styles instead". There’s just one problem with this line of reasoning: The value of a list item is NOT a style attribute, it’s DATA.

By removing this so called "presentation information" we’re also removing an integral part of the information itself which is absolutely unacceptable.

If we were to take what they were saying as Gospel and represented these values in CSS (it is possible), then we rendered our now standards compliant document using another browser that didn’t support CSS, we would be presented with a list without this data.

I urge the W3C (in my very limited capacity!) to seriously reconsider the omission of this attribute in their specifications.

One of the final pieces of the puzzle (to use a worn out cliche that long since overstayed it’s welcome) of moving web servers is making sure that the code in the blog posts here and for the show are valid XHTML (I had kept this in mind for several years, but I have made mistakes that need correcting). This is important for several reasons which I won’t bore you with here, suffice to say it has to do with moving over to a new server with a new theme, possible assignment marks and with some XML software I’m writing.

For those who are staring at me with blank faces right now (even more than usual I mean), XHTML is a reformulation of HTML into strict XML instead of the more lenient SGML. Alphabet soup sentences aside, pragmatically this means you can pass your web pages through a XML parser which allows you to do some really cool things like converting pages into other file formats, extract data more easily, use microformats to generate feeds, and so on. The theory also is because XML is stricter than SGML, pages written in XHTML are more "correct" and should be easier for browsers to render.

ASIDE: You can tell if a page has been optimised for an XHTML standard by looking at the head of the source code for a page for a DOCTYPE definition.

The current standards are XHTML 1.0 Frameset, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict (which is what I currently use). XHTML 1.1 also exists, but has seen limited adoption given Internet Explorer 6’s hostility towards the required xml version declaration which triggers it’s quirks mode which isn’t what we want!

There seems to be a huge difference of opinion between people who see the value of validating web pages with a XHTML W3C specification, and those who say it’s a waste of time and more of a hindrance to the web than an assistance.

I’m firmly in the first camp, but that’s not to say I approve of everything the W3C is doing with their specs. Unfortunately the way I see it, for every three steps forward they make, they take one step backwards. This means they’re definitely heading in the right direction and making progress (albeit at a snail’s pace), but they’re shedding some useful stuff along the way in their absolute rigid pursuit of code purity and correctness. Iframe elements and ordered lists come to mind, but I’ll save them for another post where I can elaborate further.

As of the 5th of February 2009 the home page of this blog is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, but there’s still lots of work to be done for individual posts. A lot of this can be done automatically with a few Perl scripts I’ve hacked together, but a few tags that will need replacement can really only be taken care of by a human looking at it and making the correct substitutions. At least I feel I’m making progress.

XHTML sounds like an isotonic energy drink. It doesn’t sound like Bill Kurtis, which is useful because I’m not Bill Kurtis.

Singapore photo by User:Majush on Wikipedia

This is yet another example of why growing up in multiple countries and cities stuffs you up as an adult. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have traded living in different places for anything in the world because it really opened my eyes and allowed me to expand my views of the world outside Australia, but it wasn’t all a free lunch. Like having prata and teh tarik at 3am. Where was I going with this?

Today’s example is the XML language attribute which the relative XHTML standards demand. I could just define the xml:lang and lang tags in the html element as "en" for English. The problem is English is so generic these days as to be next to useless. I use the original English spelling instead of American spelling for most words given I’m an Aussie, but I also use more than a few Singaporean colloquialisms. Aiyo. For this reason using "en-au" probably wouldn’t be completely accurate, but "en-sg" would be even less accurate. "en-gb" would reflect the spelling, but then there’s the problem that Google might index my page as one originating from the UK.

Do Austrians who have since moved to Switzerland or Germany have this problem? Or Germans who have since moved to Austria or Switzerland have this problem? Or do Schweizerdeutsch speakers who have since moved to Germany or Austria have this problem?

Perhaps I should just set my language to Klingon and be done with it.

As you may have gathered from reading previous posts, I’m a Mac OS X user on laptops and a hopeless FreeBSD fanboy on desktops. Therefore it probably wouldn’t surprise you to find out I’m not a fan of Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer, or Chuck Norris Explorer or whatever they’re calling it at the moment.

Why though? Is it the fact that it successfully and demonstrably held back innovation on the intertubes for so many years? Is it the silly user interface in version 7 which I get calls from people constantly asking me how they get to the menu bar? Is it the fact their CSS support is so patchy and inconsistent it makes a part of my work even more difficult than it has to be? Is it because it was bundled with a monopolistic operating system? Is it because the e logo just looks plain silly?

No. It’s for one simple fact: Internet Explorer doesn’t support the <q> tag!

Look at that browser Jean Luc, it doesn’t support my existence!

You could be forgiven for not knowing about this tiny little tag; it was included by the W3C back in the HTML 4.0 specification in 1997 to delimitate small inline quotations which are not large enough to justify the use of a block level element, but current versions of IE are the only browsers even in 2008 not to support it, despite every other game in town having no trouble with them.

For example, one of the sentences below is enclosed in <q> tags. If you’re using Internet Explorer they will look exactly the same:

Ruben Schade is an incredibly smart, devilishly attractive and very self deluded person.

Ruben Schade is an incredibly smart, devilishly attractive and very self deluded person.

But why is the lack of support for a seemingly insignificant and easily replaceable tag my number one gripe with Internet Explorer? Because of its stupefying simplicity! How difficult would it have been for Microsoft to have added full support for such a simple tag? It’s mind blowing!

<q>This is an inline quote, complete with CSS support!</q>

<span class="quote">Here's another inline quote, but with support for IE </span>

I guess until Internet Explorer 12 comes out some time after 2095, I’ll have to stick with using the latter example above. What a mess!

FOOTNOTE: For what it’s worth, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator (rest in peace), Apple’s Safari, KDE’s Konqueror and even zippy little dillo, links and lynx support the <q> tag. Obviously it’s not hard!

Further Reading

• HTML 4.0 specification: BLOCKQUOTE and Q elements
• W3Schools: The Q Tag
• About.com: What is the Q Tag and Why Should We Use It?
• A List Apart: Long Live the Q Tag!
• Internet Explorer Team Blog: Rowan points out lack of support for the simple tag!

Sometimes you find a webapp on the intertubes that’s so useful you’d be charged for criminally negligent conduct if you didn’t tell other people about it. As far as I understand it.

In this case it’s Texterity’s FreeSVG service which takes PDFs you upload, breaks them down into their individual components (including text, images, fonts and vector drawings), converts it all into an SVG file, bundles all the material into a zip file, then emails you a 48 hour link to fetch it. Very, very nice.

From their site:

FreeSVG is provided by Texterity to encourage the use of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) on the web and enable free, highly functional conversion of PDF documents into fully accessible and navigable SVG.

SVG is an industry standard, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specification describing text and graphics in XML. To learn more about SVG visit the W3C site at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/.

Now obviously for security reasons you’d definitely not want to use this service for confidential or sensitive information, but for general use it’s a fantastic solution, and has saved my arse many times!