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This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

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Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#41

Post by fauigerzigerk »

EGreg wrote: post #36
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with freenet is that I don't want to blindly store or transfer other people's encrypted data. I think, if we take some of the powers away from the government, it is all the more important that we are able to make a judgement on the kind of content and communications that we want to support. No single entity should be able to control all access to information, not even a democratic government. But t…

If you don't store other's people data, who will? If those people store their own data, how will you get it if they disconnect their computer from the network, or it goes down? And more importantly, if their computer is the only place to get the data, then how do you make the "host" of the data untraceable?

I don't know. I guess the answer to your last question is that I don't want a system that thwarts all kinds of social filtering or control and at the same time makes it impossible to trace people who commit horrific crimes. I think we want to decentralize social control, not abolish it completely.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#42

Post by nokcha »

null_ptr wrote: post #29
haberman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What solution does CSS offer for three-column layout (with a resizable center column) that is remotely as simple as: Fixed left column. Liquid center column Fixed right column.

Fixed left column. Liquid center column Fixed right column. The whole point of CSS is to take things like width="200px" out of the markup.

>The whole point of CSS is to take things like width="200px" out of the markup.

I don't see how that's really an improvement in this particular case. In fact, I would say that using 'width="200px"' inline may actually be more readily understandable and maintainable than having the style defined somewhere else and then used only once. (I'm assuming that the 'width="200px"' is not duplicated multiple times in the PHP/Python/Arc/etc code that generates the HTML page. If the same style needs to be identified multiple times in the source code, then of course it may be a better idea to define it once and thereafter refer to it by name.) Are there any practical benefits that I may be missing?

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#43

Post by EGreg »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #41
EGreg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't store other's people data, who will? If those people store their own data, how will you get it if they disconnect their computer from the network, or it goes down? And more importantly, if their computer is the only place to get the data, then how do you make the "host" of the data untraceable?

I don't know. I guess the answer to your last question is that I don't want a system that thwarts all kinds of social filtering or control and at the same time makes it impossible to trace people who commit horrific crimes. I think we want to decentralize social control, not abolish it completely.

Well if you are looking for decentralized publishing but at the same time not anonymous, then that's what we're building!

http://myownstream.com

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#44

Post by billybob »

nokcha wrote: post #42
null_ptr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed left column. Liquid center column Fixed right column. The whole point of CSS is to take things like width="200px" out of the markup.

>The whole point of CSS is to take things like width="200px" out of the markup. I don't see how that's really an improvement in this particular case. In fact, I would say that using 'width="200px"' inline may actually be more readily understandable and maintainable than having the style defined somewhere else and then used only once. (I'm assuming that the 'width="200px"' is not duplicated multiple times in the PHP/P…

How do you know when you use a style the first time that you'll never use it elsewhere? If you've got many one-off style declarations, you probably don't have a very consistent graphical style.

Besides that, it's nice to know where all your styles live instead of having to grep your whole project. And inline styles take precedence over everything else, so mixing them with stylesheets can create havoc.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#46

Post by jamesbritt »

haberman wrote: post #13

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice . This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The W3C was originally created to standardize HTML, which was already being used by many vendors and users but in incompatible ways. That is exactly the right situation for creating a standard.…

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice. This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all.

The general view of the W3C as a standards body is broken.

The W3C gets companies and individuals together to hash out ideas for the Web. After some time and trial and error they assemble a recommendation. Hopefully people (i.e. the members of the W3C) put this into practice to see how well it flies in real-life. At some point, if the recommendation proves its worth, a standards body such as ISO or ANSI may want to formalize it. Or so it was.

Once upon a time yo could find on the W3C site a statement to the effect that they were not a standards body. However, some people who wanted to see the ideas from the W3C gain more traction (i.e. XHTML) started referring to W3C docs as standards, and the W3C as a standards body. Jeffrey Zeldman, in Designing with Web Standards [sic], says the use of the word "standards" when referring to these specs was, in fact, "a guerilla marketing maneuver."

This is not mere semantics. There is great value in making a distinction between well-considered ideas that still need to be battle-proven, and proper formal specs that have been sufficiently vetted.

Eventually the W3C began to believe the hype and now presents itself as a standards body, to the detriment of the greater Web community because, as you point out, they are "standardizing" things that people aren't actually doing.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#48

Post by alanh »

haberman wrote: post #13

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice . This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The W3C was originally created to standardize HTML, which was already being used by many vendors and users but in incompatible ways. That is exactly the right situation for creating a standard.…

Have you ever heard of HTML5? It is fundamentally a codification & standardization of existing practice (, parsing, short encoding meta tags) — and when it isn’t doing that, it addresses actual needs (like how to handle video and audio).

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#49

Post by Groxx »

Groxx wrote: post #35
haberman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to show what your CSS would be also. My point is that the CSS you have to write to get your example to look like mine is extremely complicated when all you have is the box model.

Like this: #left{ float:left; width:200px; margin-right: -200px; } #right{ float:right; width:200px; margin-left: -200px; } #middle{ float: left; margin-left: 200px; margin-right: 200px; } People tend to avoid this relatively simple solution because of the double-left-margin bug in IE 5 & 6, but that's getting to be an excessively old set of browsers. And even then, it's usually fixed with a "display:inline;" on the…

Downvote? It's correct, and it's exactly what was asked for. Here's a Fiddle demonstrating it: http://jsfiddle.net/yBs5V/

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#50

Post by thaumaturgy »

alanh wrote: post #48
haberman wrote: post #13

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice . This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The W3C was originally created to standardize HTML, which was already being used by many vendors and users but in incompatible ways. That is exactly the right situation for creating a standard.…

Have you ever heard of HTML5? It is fundamentally a codification & standardization of existing practice ( , parsing, short encoding meta tags) — and when it isn’t doing that, it addresses actual needs (like how to handle video and audio).

Are you seriously asking someone on HN if they've ever heard of HTML5?
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