AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS • Hacker News Board

Re: AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

#61

Post by icebraining » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 10:22 PM UTC

veosotano wrote: post #58

icebraining wrote: post #56

The terms to use and redistribute all source code for the AXR project WILL CHANGE in the future, since it will include clauses not included in any of the available free software licenses, mostly in aspects that will ensure the integrity of AXR as a web publishing platform. This is worrying. What exactly are you expecting to put in such clauses? Anything more restrictive than Apache v2 (like the current license, GPL)…

What I wanted to put in the final license was something along the lines of "an implementation of the specification is only granted the permission to use the technology if at the time of being released (out of beta) it is absolutely compliant with the specification, obtaining a 100% score on all the tests released by the official AXR community", to be able to ensure that we don't end up in the same situation as now, i…

I didn't understand: that's the copyright license of the code, or a license of the spec?

If it's the license of the code, then it's not GPL compatible and hence Firefox can't use it, since they tri-license GPL, LGPL and MPL.

Re: AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

#62

Post by icebraining » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

veosotano wrote: post #13

Hi there! My name is Miro Keller, and I'm the founder of AXR, so I'll probably be the best person to answer any questions you guys may have. So feel free to ask me anything about this project :) I'll try to answer all questions posed here, step by step: @shimonamit: The code is not the only part that's important here, it's just one piece of the puzzle. So how would you go about to determine what part of the code to s…

- It needs a way to be semantic, so that common things on the internet must be representable, such as products, events, flight reservations, etc. XML solves this with namespaces. - It needs to be able to provide a way to show documents written in that language in current browsers using a plug-in. XML solves that with XSLT (there will be a standard .xls file for easy backwards compatibility). - It should be able to be just uploaded on an FTP server by the average author, just as HTML, without installing server-side software or messing around with settings. - It should be easy to write for authors.

Isn't that what RDFa is? Which has to advantages over HSS already: 1) it's designed to extend HTML while remaining compatible with older browsers and 2) It's already used by big sites and understood by Google.

Re: AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

#63

Post by yuhong » Tue, Jun 14, 2011, 1:53 AM UTC

mambodog wrote: post #27

veosotano wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right: HTML is going to stay with us for a long, long time. This is not about eliminating it, but to try something new as an alternative. It's not XML with vector shapes, that's exactly what SVG is . Vector shapes would live all inside HSS, where you could reuse them, style them, give them flexible sizes, apply effects, etc... Once flexbox, grids and calc come out as official specs, you'll still have to wait u…

Once flexbox, grids and calc come out as official specs, you'll still have to wait until all browsers implements them, and then wait again until enough users update How would the situation be any different for AXR?

While throughout history HTML and CSS was designed so it would always fallback correctly, because in practice browser vendors did not always fully comply with the specs, it doesn't. For example, Netscape 4 had poor CSS support that often produced worse results than if CSS support did not exist, and even IE3 for example treated unknown font size units as px. Not to mention the IE vs CSS box model.

Re: AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

#64

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 14, 2011, 2:24 AM UTC

pornel wrote: post #12

Worse is better. Sorry, but HTML isn't going anywhere. XML had its chance — full support from W3C and implementations in all-but-one browsers for a decade now . text/html parsers survived that. I don't think you can convince all browser vendors to bet on XML again. They all opposed XHTML2. W3C tried to push XHTML2 without them and ended up making HTML even stronger. XML with vector shapes? We've got SVG. It may not b…

[deleted]

Re: AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

#65

Post by yuhong » Tue, Jun 14, 2011, 2:25 AM UTC

pornel wrote: post #12

Worse is better. Sorry, but HTML isn't going anywhere. XML had its chance — full support from W3C and implementations in all-but-one browsers for a decade now . text/html parsers survived that. I don't think you can convince all browser vendors to bet on XML again. They all opposed XHTML2. W3C tried to push XHTML2 without them and ended up making HTML even stronger. XML with vector shapes? We've got SVG. It may not b…

>XHTML1 had its chance - full support from W3C and implementations in all-but-one browsers for a decade now

FTFY.