Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Little Known HTML Facts

Here are some little or less known (X)HTML and CSS facts:

• You can’t put an input element right into a form element. You need to nest an element like “p” (paragraph) or “div” (divisor) first. Otherwise it’ll be invalid according to the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium validator) when using a Strict Doctype.
• Internet Explorer 6 does cope with multiple class names fine in most cases. So you can write HTML like <div class="day highlight">...</div>
• Netscape 4 used a rendering engine which was such a big hack, that if you turned off JavaScript, you also turned off CSS. These days, Netscape 4 is of course irrelevant.
• There are actually some reasonably well CSS features to handle dynamic pages – including the min-width and max-width properties – but they are completely ignored by Internet Explorer.
• CSS can render aural media, and includes properties such as voice-family: female.
• Internet Explorer 4 was far ahead of Netscape 4, but got never seriously updated in its CSS capabilities. It did get a major update in its DOM/ DHTML (Document Object Model/ Dynamic HTML) capabilities in Internet Explorer 5, though. Next to nothing new happened in version 6. Internet Explorer 5 however uses one interesting and proprietary CSS extension called “behaviors”. They make it possible to add functionality to an HTML page without changing any HTML (events get attached via CSS, and are handled by JS files).
• Most presentation-based HTML tags are deprecated in recent versions of HTML (like XHTML1 Strict). However, <hr /> (which means “horizontal rule”, even though this can be losely interpreted), is not deprecated. Some still prefer <div class="separator">&nbsp;</div>.
• There is an even stricter HTML flavor called ISO-HTML – it doesn’t allow “false” nesting of headlines, so that you need an h1-tag before you can include an h2-tag.
• HTML is platform independent and mostly works just fine on the printer, on Text-To-Speech (TTS) devices, and on mobile phones. In theory. In practice, you often need to find the right tool to make it work. (For hand phones, NetFront Access does a great job. Opera’s mobile version comes in a close second, but can’t compete here.)
  Knowing this, you will always snicker seeing web pages which link to a “print version”... CSS can handle this behind the scenes.
• So called “table layout”, which is mostly used on major web sites, is frowned upon by expert developers. They like to separate functionality, layout and content/ structure into three independent layers. An HTML purist will even expect his or her page to work fine if you remove the stylesheet completely.
• You can make Internet Explorer 6 to recognize title attributes only in acronym elements. “Abbr” (abbreviation) elements are not understood. This is why mostly, people use <acronym> to tag an abbreviation. On the other hand some purists believe “acronym” to be presentational, and ignore it altogether. After all, making suggestions on how letters are pronounced are a matter of “audio formatting”.
• The Semantic Web might not take off after all, even though it’s by the same guy who invented HTML and HTTP (Tim Berners-Lee). A counter-movement, known as the “lowercase semantic web”, tries to adopt more pragmatic methodology which shows results today (like in the results lists and ranking of search engines, which don’t rely on meta-data).
  The W3C is doing a good job but has problems delivering prototypes, readable documentation, and pragmatic, lean solutions. XML is becoming a monster of interconnected areas to understand, whereas one of it original purposes was to make things simpler.
• Small font sizes for the main body context are a major accessibility hurdle today, even though they look great on some displays.
• XML is not intended to replace HTML – it is the basis for XHTML, which is correctly called an “XML application”. XML might however be intended to replace SGML, at least in the HTML world. Most browsers on the other hand have such a fuzzy, forgiving rendering mode (they have to have this, to be competitive) that most pages do not validate according to either HTML “religion”.
• XHTML is by no means better suited for search engines than HTML. (Using CSS is somewhat superior to layout-based “tag soup” of deprecated HTML versions, because it creates leaner files – but this was also possible in HTML4 Strict.)
• Alt-text is not a description of an image, but a replacement for the image in case it is not displayed. This is a subtle difference. For many cases, alt="” does a good job – as the image might be purely illustrative, or just visualize something which the main text itself explains well. Also, “alt-tag” is wrong – it’s “alt-attribute”, or “alt-text”. (Opening and closing tags are what forms an element.)
• An ampersand character “&” must always be escaped like this: “&amp;” – even in URLs. At least if you want your page to be valid HTML.

Also see more little known HTML facts.

Thanks to Thomas Frütel, a translation to German is available.

Little Known HTML Facts by Philipp Lenssen

Microsoft Search Champs

“On Sunday I’m leaving for a short trip to Redmond, where I’ll be part of a new advisory group (“Search Champs”) that Microsoft is forming to provide feedback on their search engine development.”
– Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Mamamusings, 27 September 2004 [Via Zawodny.]

Microsoft Search Champs by Philipp Lenssen

Baby Google

File this one under “cute”: Lemuel in his Google shirt.

Baby Google by Philipp Lenssen

New My Yahoo

There’s a new My Yahoo. My Yahoo is a personalized, RSS-laden portal package to do pretty much everything (from finding a date, to finding a weather forecast). Here’s the detailed What’s new page. Also, Zawodny and the Yahoo blog report on it.

New My Yahoo by Philipp Lenssen

Bloglines Services

InsideGoogle points to the new Bloglines Web Services. Among other features, you can now tap the following RSS feeds:

• bloglines.com/rss/toplinks_inc - Increasing top links
• bloglines.com/rss/toplinks - Absolute top links
• bloglines.com/rss/toplinks_dec - Decreasing top links

Bloglines Services by Philipp Lenssen

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