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Not just spell check, but how about implementing a global spell-check service like some other systems?

Seems like Microsoft spends a whole boatload of developers working on the wrong issues.

Web developers want to use most of what ACID3 suggests, and IE seems to be lacking AGAIN.

How is it, that Webkit AND Gecko managed to go from some 30 - 40 % score on the ACID3 Test to 100% within a year, and even the constantly manpower-starved KHTML team managed to come close to 100%, but all-powerful Microsoft continues to miss the boat almost completely?

The saying goes that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but years and years of basically ignored web developers, plus a new Microsoft only, non-standard format (Silverlight) makes it look like Microsoft's sleazy attempts to hijack the internet communication protocols are not over yet.

http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/?Qwd=./Exactly_correct&Qiv=name&Qi...

i am actually really looking forward to a final release of silverlight 4. the besta shows a lot of promise and i really like the technology in general.

http://www.neowin.net/news/live/09/11/18/silverlight-4-beta-availab...

one of my other things i really like is Yahoo's YUI (version 3 especially). If you haven't heard of it check it out. it's BSD license as well.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/

Edited 2009-11-18 21:12 UTC

I probably would like Silverlight technology too, if it were an openly standardized, freely reimplementable platform.

But as a closed and patented technology, controlled by a company known for monopoly power abuse, it simply is not a viable way forward.

You know, Google Wave is new too, and the company behind it is as powerful as Microsoft, but Google made the APIs and the communications Protocols open, and even open-sources a client and a server for others to build on. So Google Wave will not lock-in anyone.

And just preceding the bit about requiring Silverlight to view the IE9 demos, this gem can be found...

To their credit, they didn't say they were going to use them...

I was pleasantly suprised the video's aren't Silverlight only, but you could also download MP4, etc.

But they are not on that site, they are on this site:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/IE-9/

Yes, they are a bit hidden, but the links are their.

HTML 5 ? with video support ?

I don't like them forcing me to use silverlight. We don't need more buggus closed plugins.

I wish they stop making such hype without good results.

Yes, instead we should use loose web standards like HTML 5 video tag that won't work on every browser since W3C is so f--king weak piece of shit organization that they can't even demand using specific codec. Instead web devs can roll dice and decide which users won't have access on content, good job W3C!

That codec issue is way overblown. The img tag doesn't have fixed formats either. And for good reason. A couple years from now we'll probably have new improved codecs and then you don't want a video tag stuck on an old format.

True, but you don't have to create 3 separate versions of the same image file just to be compatible with the three main platforms. The lack of a standard codec for the video tag means that Flash will remain the preferred video delivery method for most content producers/distributors.

If you want to deliver video over the web without requiring viewers to install additional software, there will be two main choices. One, use Flash and support all three major platforms with a single file. Or two, use the video tag which will (probably) require providing a WMV version for Windows users, a MOV/MP4 version for Mac users, and an OGV version for Linux/UNIX users/everyone else (which also means greater time/resources spent encoding the videos, greater server diskspace requirements, more work testing each version of the video, etc).

Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, it's not hard to predict the typical response if I were to offer those options to a boss or paying clients.



Here's hoping. At this point, I think the best (realistic) outcome would be for the MPEGLA to "pull a Unisys" with h.264 licensing (which would probably spur a large-scale migration to alternatives).



That hasn't really been a problem with images (modern browsers can still render GIF files, for example).

If you provide ogv, it can be viewed with firefox and chrome regardless of the OS, right?

The others can well make do without viewing the video (or install a plugin if they insist on viewing it). This is especially true for websites that target technical audiences.

If you provide ogv, it can be viewed with firefox and chrome regardless of the OS, right?

The others can well make do without viewing the video (or install a plugin if they insist on viewing it). This is especially true for websites that target technical audiences. "

True. For that matter, most technical users would be more than happy with plain text link to download file and play it offline (speaking for myself, at least). However, for most content, technical users are a small portion of the audience.

But when providing content to a general, non-technical audience, there are different concerns - especially for commercial content producers & distributors. They want the largest possible/potential audience, so they want to minimize the amount of effort that's required from users in order to view their content.

That is funny.
W3C didnt 'decide' aka 'force' a codec because it wasnt influenced by companies. The situation over there is NOT a 'lets decide' one. Its a matter of not having a perfect option. Actually w3c couldnt even decide because each browser may just do it the way it wants.

You have no idea what the f--k you are talking about. HTML is at least open. Want to get trapped in silverlight hell? Be my guest, im not following. I dont want a single company's not-open technology on web.

Microsoft is trying to support html5 but its fanboys are not happy with it. lol

I was pleasantly suprised the video's aren't Silverlight only, but you could also download MP4, etc.

But they are not on that site, they are on this site:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/IE-9/

Yes, they are a bit hidden, but the links are their.

Yeah, because Microsoft promises are worth gold.

Microsoft's promise to not follow standards is worth gold.

In contrast to yours, my post (the one to which you replied) noted actual facts.

In talking about IE9, Microsoft indeed made:

- No promise of SVG.
- No promise of DOM2.
- No promise of SMIL.
- No promise of compliant ECMAscript (perhaps though there is a JIT compiler).
- No promise of Theora codecs with the HTML5.
- No promise of attempting to pass acid3 compliance tests.

Ergo, their future plans for IE9 clearly do keep Microsoft's browser 10 years behind.

Plain, simple, unadulterated facts.

Edited 2009-11-18 23:05 UTC

They didn't say they wouldn't implement those standar eather, right? those are "unadulterated" facts.

Edited 2009-11-18 23:12 UTC

When Microsoft were inundated with feature requests and bug reports from users complaining that their IE browser did not comply with web standards such as DOM2 and SVG, Microsoft simply marked them as "will not fix".

They remain that way to this day.

Do you actually do any worthwhile web development? Anyone who does knows that on this particular note MS has definitely been the problem. Like any company, there are things they do well, and things they don't. IE is definitely on the DON'T DO WELL side of the equation.

In saying that, if they do in fact fully support in a standards compliant manner the things they are saying they will kudos to them for taking onboard what web devs have been telling them for a long time.

i think by saying "a long time" you're vastly understating things

Edited 2009-11-19 08:09 UTC

I would love to run a survey of some kind asking developers what they care more about, border-radius or SMIL.

I am a huge web developer geek, my blog is written using html 5 semantic elements and all the CSS3 that is implemented at the moment by anyone. I've got a bookshelf full of javascript books, and enjoy learning new web frameworks on the weekends. And I had never heard of SMIL until you started complaining about it.

Just out of curiosity, what are you wanting to do with it that you can't do now because IE doesn't support SMIL? From what I have read it looks like hypercard on the old macs, are you looking to blow the world away with another myst game or something?

I hadn't either, but having just read about it, it looks like it is supported by WMP, Quicktime, Totem and Amarok, among other players, but is not natively supported by any web browser. It also looks like a fairly redundant technology in a web browser considering you can do the same things with CSS/DOM/Javascript.

I hadn't either, but having just read about it, it looks like it is supported by WMP, Quicktime, Totem and Amarok, among other players, but is not natively supported by any web browser. It also looks like a fairly redundant technology in a web browser considering you can do the same things with CSS/DOM/Javascript. "

SMIL compliance comprises two of the acid3 tests (subtests 75 and 76).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Standards_tested

Browsers will not score 100 on acid3 tests without compliance to SMIL.

Safari, Opera, Epiphany and Google Chrome score 100/100.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integration_La...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG_animation



SVG animation is the standards-compliant way of doing animations instead of Flash or Silverlight.

Edited 2009-11-19 00:46 UTC

How about pointing us at all of the wonderful websites that are currently based on SMIL ... ?

Edited 2009-11-19 02:25 UTC

How about pointing us at all of the wonderful websites that are currently based on SMIL ... ? "



Chip on your shoulder much?



You are asking about chickens and we haven't got an egg yet.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/smil-animation-and-...

Anyway, currently, a site that has SVG games or animation might well use SMIL, but it probably uses javascript instead.

Here is a site where you can get a tatse of what is possible, IF you have a compliant browser:

http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGAnimations.htm

The rarity of such sites for real is very much the whole point though. SMIL and SVG are standards that were first recommended in basic form circa 2000, and more advanced form circa 2005.

We could have had the equivalent of flash (.swf) and silverlight interactive (non-video) functionality on all platforms without browser plugins way back in 2001, but it didn't happen because a certain vendor refused to support SMIL, SVG, compliant javascript and DOM2.

Still, there is the odd place where you can go:
http://scriptdraw.com/
http://aviary.com/home

Flash and Silverlight plugins are awkward proprietary work-arounds for the failure to support those standards.

Flash and Silverlight plugins can these days be used by software suppliers to control which suppliers may, and which may not, produce products which can be used to browse the rich web. It can be used to control which architectures and platforms are, and are not, viable.

That is just wrong. It is a situation which desperately needs to be fixed.

Edited 2009-11-19 05:52 UTC

Indeed-- the egg being browsers that actually support the feature that we are discussing.


Yes, those work in Chrome and Opera, but not Firefox.

The problem really seems to be the poor definition of SMIL. There are actual SMIL documents with the MIME type application/smil+xml. SMIL documents and embedded SMIL are not supported natively by any web browser.

What you seem to be referring to is SVG animation which is a slightly modified and extended version of the animation portion of the latest W3C SMIL recommendation. Webkit and Presto support SVG animation to various degrees.

SVG animation is only related to SMIL in that the same tag names, attributes and behaviors were chosen for the animation support in SVG. SMIL itself is a separate technology.


I think you'll find that most people, including me, would agree that, all other things being equal, open solutions are best on the web.

The reality of the situation is that these solutions are not all equal. SVG, the audio/video tags, and SMIL are all fragmented standards that have to be clumsily tied together through Javascript and DOM. Not to mention the fact that they are severely lacking in performance.

Ignoring politics, the proprietary solutions win hands down.

Both Flash and Silverlight provide fully featured multimedia platforms. In the area of tools, Flash has excellent support and Silverlight isn't very far behind. From the performance angle, Flash is a bit of a dog, but is slowly improving and the latest versions are finally taking advantage of hardware acceleration. Silverlight is the undisputed king of rendering performance among web tools and its HD video delivery is second to none.

If this is so vitally important to you, I'd suggest that you spend less time proselytizing on the web and instead, go apt-get yourself a copy of kdevelop and get cracking on a decent framework to tie all those open web technologies together, on tool support for SVG animation and on modifying both Cairo and Skia to use hardware acceleration to improve their horrid rendering performance.

The crown here is still up for grabs, but technology is going to win this one. Not politics.

Nah. Fanboys don't write code. They just take to the forums, whine, and complain.

Edited 2009-11-19 10:09 UTC

Both Flash ans Silversight are hacks. They suck, plain and simple, and by design at that. They are not accessible, ON PURPOSE. It's designed to present you with annoying adverts that can't be easily skipped without another hack on top of it.
SVG is accessible and is not designed to sell expensive toolkits but to provide useful content. Reason #1 why SVG is not used that much is because IE doesn't support it. And you can write all the tools and libraries you want, while IE does not support it, developers won't use it.
I do web development and would like to use SVG but I always have to work around that because most of the web users are using IE.

So, in other words, you singled out Microsoft even though open source browsers don't support SMIL at all -- or support it very badly -- and there isn't any appreciable SMIL content even available. This is why I don't take you seriously, lemur. This is just another example of your unreasonable bigotry. You don't seem to get this: Just because a standards body ratifies something doesn't make it significant or meaningful as a standard. What matters is ADOPTION. Look at HTML5. The whole industry has decided that it's important, and the market is dragging Microsoft along. Not so with SMIL. It's shelfware.

Edited 2009-11-19 09:52 UTC

SMIL won't ever take off while IE does not support it. The problem is IE, it's not hard to get. You keep accusing lemur2 of religious anti-Microsoft feeling, but you seem to be religiously defending Microsoft anyway. SMIL may not be the most important thing, but he has a point. He also cited SVG. Why can't a browser support SVG in 2009? IE is the #1 reason why the web sucks today.

This is a chicken and egg-problem. But if the browsers support it, the webdevelopers would start to use it. SVG and canvas is used in Google Maps (for non-IE browsers) for example.

It appears that Safari was able to pass acid3 with abysmal SMIL support (http://blog.codedread.com/archives/2008/03/26/webkit-nightly-not-sm...) so acid3 is in no way an indicator of proper SMIL compliance.

Just out of curiosity, I went to w3schools to try out some of their SMIL examples, and none of them worked on the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

Attempting to load a .smil file directly results in the various browsers either displaying the source or attempting to download the file.


Interestingly enough, that is the page I used for reference when making my original comment. Perhaps when digging through it, you missed this relevant piece:


Wikipedia could very well be wrong, but my experiences seem to prove otherwise.

Do you know of any SMIL examples that actually work in a web browser?

I'm waiting for lemur2 to post links to all of these supposedly great SMIL sites that we're all missing out on.

The hate is strong with this one...

I think you need to use SMIL embedded in the page. Like SVG is often used.

The web has gotten more compatible in recent years. But the remaining blight has mostly to do with incompatible Javascript. As a desktop admin, I can tell you that if the page doesn't look quite right, my users grumble a little. If it doesn't work at all then they shout. And often that means resorting to IE under Crossover Office.

And it makes me want to Kill! Kill! Kill! ;-)

By comparison I put SVG, CSS3, and SMIL all in roughly the same insignificant category.

Fair point.

However, when DOM2, SVG, CSS3, and SMIL are used in conjunction with compatible (and fast) ECMAscript, then web sites can deliver rich content to ANY browser on any client platform, and this can be done at least as well as other proprietary solutions such as Silverlight or Flash.

The bold bits are the vitally important bits.

IMO any requirement to have a particular platform or propietary software blob (including codecs) in order to view some types of web should be utterly shunned.

Edited 2009-11-19 00:33 UTC

Agreed. My main point is that the only person on the internet that seems to really care about SMIL is lemur2, us web developers care much more about CSS and Javascript.

ever ran acid3 through the w3c css validator?

ever ran acid3 through the w3c css validator? "

Ever seen a requirement that a test suite must itself pass the things it tests for?

the acid tests aren't really designed for standards compliance, they are more for corner cases and failovers. the w3c validator probably just isnt built to handle that many unrealistic scenarios at the same time.

well, how would you handle a negative value when only positives are alowed?
ignore the sign? take the nearest valid value? ignore the whole line? or render it contrary to the standart?
and now you expect the browser to guess what the autor things is right?

if you want to test correct rendering, give it something correct to render

well, how would you handle a negative value when only positives are alowed?
ignore the sign? take the nearest valid value? ignore the whole line? or render it contrary to the standart?
and now you expect the browser to guess what the autor things is right?

if you want to test correct rendering, give it something correct to render "

A set of test cases which test only for behaviour with correct data input?

How much real testing have you ever done?

Keep hearing this response. No, the Acid3 test itself doesn't pass validation - it's not supposed to. The W3C validator is a test for the correctness of the content. The Acid tests are for the correctness of the browser, and that includes testing whether the browser handles invalid content correctly.

If you ask me, I'd say that the big mistake was in deciding to handle invalid content without flashing a big error and aborting in the web developer's face. If you coded an ODF document in vi, in binary mode, by hand, and just guessed whenever you weren't sure of the codes... didn't bother to use delimiters properly, would you expect it to load succesfully? Display properly? Well... why should you expect deverse web browsers to "just figure it out" reliably? As standards go, web standards suffer from the problems of the nebulous RS-232 standard... to about the power of about 15. Maybe 20.

I'm mixed on that. As a developer, I'd very much prefer something that fails clearly and cleanly, instead of behaving unpredictably - that way potential problems are much easier to find.

As a user though, I'd really rather the browser try to deal with the fact that developers aren't always as perfect as they should be...

If the authors had been forced to to write proper documents from the beginning, users wouldn't have to care about sloppy documents, browser devs wouldn't have to worry about sloppy documents (malformed documents could be categorically rejected as a security risk) and page authors wouldn't have to worry about how various browsers deal with their and others' sloppy documents. It would have been a win-win-win-win situation instead of the lose-lose-lose-lose mess that we have now. And have no good way of escaping from.

I share your ambivalence. What choice have we now? But the situation that we are in is such an unnecessary train wreck. And we *should* recognize it as being a train wreck, so that we can avoid the next one. Not that I'm particularly hopefull on that count.

Edited 2009-11-19 02:34 UTC

As a developer who has spent most of my time using systems languages and only rarely worked in web land, I certainly agree. Building a web page feels like a guessing game in a way that is very disconcerting to a C/C++ programmer.

But I have often wondered if the precedent of lax interpretation of HTML created by the earlier browsers provided a level of accessibility that contributed to the pervasiveness of the web today. I guess we'll never know.

It's by design.

The standard specifically says, if you don't understand a part, please skip it. That means older browsers are able to view a lot of newer content.

If you have a browser that doesn't understand SVG at all, you might be able to see the text embedded in the SVG. That's by design.

No HTML was specifically created to allow older browsers to view new content and skip anything it doesn't understand. That's how it's suppossed to work. The ACID3-test was specifically created not only to test new tech. but also to let all browsers reliable fail in the same way.

ODF is not binary, it's a zip-file. Editing with vi would not make a lot of sense directory. Editing ODF-XML-files with vi works very well thank you very much. Just zip it afterwards and it's possible to create valid ODF just fine.

Three words: Developers Developers Developers

Nice to see that Microsoft got the priorities again wrong, please the shiny things audience and deliver incomplete crap underneath and tell the developers that is all you got, live with it.
My personal guess is they have lost the developers community, in a developers centric site I have less than 10% IE overall and those are mostly hits from major corporations. Until they fix the basic issues like SVG support ecmascript compliance etc.. they wont get them back no matter how shiny the next version of IE is, period.

The only care about Windows developers, Windows developers, Windows developers.

The web is something standanding in the way of their desktop monopoly, because it makes the desktop you use irrelevant.

But whose fault is that? Or did I forget those five years of complete web stagnation and spyware/virus rape?

It was all just a dream...

Yeah. That all happened in Season 9 of "Dallas".

People keep using it because of incompatibilities because of lazy developers. The only real way around it is adopting what Google has which is provide the webkit technology via a plugin.

They did - it's called IE7. Anyone still using IE6 is doing so either because they're stuck with some corporate web app that won't work on anything newer, or because they don't know or care about upgrading (XP machines won't upgrade the browser automatically, afterall).

What about all those corporations that have lots and lots of Windows 2000 desktops ? Their is no IE7, IE8 or IE9 for Windows 2000. Not only that, but Microsoft says: we support Windows 2000.

I don’t know, Firefox-maybe? Companies have had five years to work on adoption.

If it cheers you up, Microsoft are going to stop supporting Windows 2000 completely in July 2010.

Hehe -

That should teach corporations not to trust Microsoft technology.

There are obviously some companies, which got locked into IE6 so thoroughly, that until today the cost of migrating to SOMETHING other seems to be bigger than putting up with the considerable cost of maintaining an outdated software stack.

Now I ask: What do corporations think about Silverlight? Is it a good idea betting the company's IT infrastructure on something which most likely will be obsolete in 10 years, with no low-pain upgrade path available?

I hope to get proven wrong, but until today Microsoft managed to create lock-in's that have been strong enough to hinder migration even from Microsoft technology to Microsoft technology. TCO if a format also contains migrating away from it some time in the future.

Fortunately for companies that need to still be running IE6, there is available a plugin for IE far, far better than Silverlight.

http://blog.chromium.org/2009/09/introducing-google-chrome-frame.ht...

Hopefully one can browse the modern web without having to escape from IE6.

Edited 2009-11-19 12:11 UTC

Why do you think this problem doesn't apply to other commercially supported systems? Software gets old and due to dependencies, new stuff doesn't always work on old versions. It's not like the cost of maintaining the old system is so high, otherwise people would be upgrading more.

I have yet to see an internal silverlight adoptions in one of the corporations I have been in, my personal guess is, first of all they are pretty slow movers anyway, secondly most of them have been burned by the entire IE6 stack that they are even slower to adopt yet another Microsoft only solution (Java however is everwhere internally in those corps on the server stack, they love simply the multi platform capabilities and that they can scale their installations upwards infinitely)

Somehow, my heart fails to bleed when Silverlight Windows version suddenly gets one more feature than the Silverlight Mac version.

They are planning to make silverlight a new way of making windows applications (to replace windows.forms, IIRC). As a technology, it's every bit as exciting than a new version of MFC would be - that is, unless you are a windows developer, you just don't need to care.

Somehow, my heart fails to bleed when Silverlight Windows version suddenly gets one more feature than the Silverlight Mac version. "


This comment as well as Silverlight itself shows just how profound is the utter lack of understanding of what is meant by the word "standard" amongst Windows people.

http://www.w3.org/standards/webofdevices/independence

http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/

http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/deviceindependenceauthoring#w3c_a...

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/



http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/20/2314220/New-Microsoft-Silve...

I like this quote:
"Silverlight is the Zune of application frameworks."

Classic.

This one isn't bad also:
"A cross platform framework having platform specific features is hardly superior."

Edited 2009-11-21 11:11 UTC

Since when was Silverlight a standard?

And since when did we need to care about windows-and-mac-only technology?

Edited 2009-11-21 11:28 UTC

Since when was Silverlight a standard?

And since when did we need to care about windows-and-mac-only technology? "

Since its purpose was announced as being a technology to deliver material over the web.

The public access web.

You know, similar to public television broadcasts ... must follow standards. No cartel-members-equipment-only broadcasting allowed.

See ... I told you Windows people just didn't understand standards.

It pretty much failed at that (ajax, JITted javascript and html5 is currently eating the remnants of its lunch). Now, IIUC, it's being pushed as a "normal" application development framework. It might work okay at that, and to satisfy that purpose MS needs to add certain "unsafe"/platform dependent features.



What makes me one of the "Windows people" again? I work on Linux at my day job, and use Linux pretty much exclusively at home.

What makes me one of the "Windows people" again? I work on Linux at my day job, and use Linux pretty much exclusively at home. "

Well, "Linux people" wouldn't think of Silverlight as any kind of application development framework.

Sounds unlikely, because Silverlight indeed is one.