What have they done!?

A

aioe-user

Too many years ago to remember I got my first lesson in
creating HTM pages and here's what an entire HTM file
with the letter X then looked like.

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»

Total size 28 bytes, and if you wanted to format it like

«html»
«body»
X
«/body»
«/html»

then you were definitely a 'bandwidth HOG'.


It was nice, it "was" both lean and (therefore) fast!
An important consideration back when 56k was still
unheard of. As a matter of fact taht hould STILL be an
overriding consideration because according to

http://www.webusability.com/user_profile_stats.htm

1/3 the US is STILL on 56k, and probably 80% of the
world 'net' population will stay on 56k it for decades more.

Today that kind of simplicity would be lightning fast,
maybe even too fast and so most people would add a few
more words and things of that nature.


So lately I decided to show my first ever HTM page to the
W3C facility ...it failed from A to Z so for now I'll
just think of it as a WC facility (between friends as I
well know that there must be standards). Anyway, I next had
the composter "correct" the same page and that version passed
but did so only by becoming a 281 byte file instead of 28
which, unless my math has also been left in the dust, is close
to a *10 FOLD BLOATING COEFFICIENT!*

(the files and reports appended below)


Then it got much worse. Another page flunked because it
was missing 'empties' like alt="" (up another 600 bytes
for a page with 100 of them). This kind of insanity is
like having to paint "not painted" on a car that is not
painted. Sheeee!

Boys & girls, I can well understand that some commercial
and/or cultural imperatives have requirements which the
industry tries to satisfy as best it can. Those with a
need for flaming dildos and singing monkeys on web pages
have rights too. But dammit, did you have to kill the
purtity of the original as a timeles option?

Has someone forgot that HTM is still as much a transport
language as US-ASCII is? Who the hell wants more bandwidth
if it will be gobbled up the next day?

Go ahead and do all the MM and all the style sheets you want
but don't muck with basic HTM's sanctity. I want my FAST
pages to pass every test ..if they cannot BE the test itself.

KISS, KISS, KISS. Remember that the Amiga could fly with
no fans and no hard drive and that today's leading 0-noise
projects are aiming to return to that ideal :)


Cheers.





= Done with Seamonkey Composter ==================
= 10 times the size with a 1,500 byte error report


«!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"»
«html»
«head»
«meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"»
«title»
«/title»
«/head»
«body alink="#33cc00" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#0000ff" text="#000000"
vlink="#ff0000"»
X
«/body»
«/html»

....

The document ..was checked and found to be valid HTML 4.01
Transitional. This means that the resource in question identified
itself as "HTML 4.01 Transitional" and that we successfully performed
a formal validation using an SGML or XML Parser (depending on the
markup language used).

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional To show your readers that you have taken
the care to create an interoperable Web page, you may display this
icon on any page that validates. Here is the HTML you could use to add
this icon to your Web page:

«p»
«a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer"»«img
src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-html401"
alt="Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional" height="31" width="88"»«/a»
«/p»


If you like, you can download a copy of this image (in PNG or GIF
format) to keep in your local web directory, and change the HTML
fragment above to reference your local image rather than the one on
this server.

A full list of icons, with links to alternate formats and colors, is
also available.

If you use CSS in your document, you should also check it for validity
using the W3C CSS Validation Service.

If you would like to create a link to this page (i.e., this validation
result) to make it easier to revalidate this page in the future or to
allow others to validate your page...
===========================================================





= Done with nedit ================================
= 28 byte file & a 3,200 byte error report =======


«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»


....
No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.

I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any
of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding
information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm
falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the
validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents.

Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and
pointers on how to fix this problem with your document.
No DOCTYPE found! Attempting validation with HTML 4.01 Transitional.

The DOCTYPE Declaration was not recognized or is missing. This
probably means that the Formal Public Identifier contains a spelling
error, or that the Declaration is not using correct syntax. Validation
has been performed using a default "fallback" Document Type Definition
that closely resembles "HTML 4.01 Transitional", but the document will
not be Valid until you have corrected this problem with the DOCTYPE
Declaration.

Learn how to add a doctype to your document from our FAQ.

This page is not Valid (no Doctype found)!

Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an
SGML parser.

1. Error Line 1 column 0: no document type declaration; implying
"«!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM»".

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»

The checked page did not contain a document type ("DOCTYPE")
declaration. The Validator has tried to validate with a fallback DTD,
but this is quite likely to be incorrect and will generate a large
number of incorrect error messages. It is highly recommended that you
insert the proper DOCTYPE declaration in your document -- instructions
for doing this are given above -- and it is necessary to have this
declaration before the page can be declared to be valid.

?
2. Error Line 1 column 11: document type does not allow element
"BODY" here.

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»

The element named above was found in a context where it is not
allowed. This could mean that you have incorrectly nested elements --
such as a "style" element in the "body" section instead of inside
"head" -- or two elements that overlap (which is not allowed).

One common cause for this error is the use of XHTML syntax in
HTML documents. Due to HTML's rules of implicitly closed elements,
this error can create cascading effects. For instance, using XHTML's
"self-closing" tags for "meta" and "link" in the "head" section of a
HTML document may cause the parser to infer the end of the "head"
section and the beginning of the "body" section (where "link" and
"meta" are not allowed; hence the reported error).

?
3. Error Line 1 column 26: end tag for "HTML" which is not finished.

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»

Most likely, You nested tags and closed them in the wrong order.
For example «p»«em»...«/p» is not acceptable, as «em» must be closed
before «p». Acceptable nesting is: «p»«em»...«/em»«/p»

Another possibility is that you used an element which requires a
child element that you did not include. Hence the parent element is
"not finished", not complete. For instance, «head» generally requires
a «title», lists (ul, ol, dl) require list items (li, or dt, dd), and
so on.
======================= END ===============================
 
N

Neredbojias

Too many years ago to remember I got my first lesson in
creating HTM pages and here's what an entire HTM file
with the letter X then looked like.

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»

Total size 28 bytes, and if you wanted to format it like

«html»
«body»
X
«/body»
«/html»

then you were definitely a 'bandwidth HOG'.


It was nice, it "was" both lean and (therefore) fast!
An important consideration back when 56k was still
unheard of. As a matter of fact taht hould STILL be an
overriding consideration because according to

http://www.webusability.com/user_profile_stats.htm

1/3 the US is STILL on 56k, and probably 80% of the
world 'net' population will stay on 56k it for decades more.

Today that kind of simplicity would be lightning fast,
maybe even too fast and so most people would add a few
more words and things of that nature.


So lately I decided to show my first ever HTM page to the
W3C facility ...it failed from A to Z so for now I'll
just think of it as a WC facility (between friends as I
well know that there must be standards). Anyway, I next had
the composter "correct" the same page and that version passed
but did so only by becoming a 281 byte file instead of 28
which, unless my math has also been left in the dust, is close
to a *10 FOLD BLOATING COEFFICIENT!*

(the files and reports appended below)


Then it got much worse. Another page flunked because it
was missing 'empties' like alt="" (up another 600 bytes
for a page with 100 of them). This kind of insanity is
like having to paint "not painted" on a car that is not
painted. Sheeee!

Boys & girls, I can well understand that some commercial
and/or cultural imperatives have requirements which the
industry tries to satisfy as best it can. Those with a
need for flaming dildos and singing monkeys on web pages
have rights too. But dammit, did you have to kill the
purtity of the original as a timeles option?

Has someone forgot that HTM is still as much a transport
language as US-ASCII is? Who the hell wants more bandwidth
if it will be gobbled up the next day?

Go ahead and do all the MM and all the style sheets you want
but don't muck with basic HTM's sanctity. I want my FAST
pages to pass every test ..if they cannot BE the test itself.

KISS, KISS, KISS. Remember that the Amiga could fly with
no fans and no hard drive and that today's leading 0-noise
projects are aiming to return to that ideal :)


Cheers.

I kinda agree with you, notably on the 'alt=""' thing and stuff of a
similar nature. That's what _defaults_ are for. Even something like a
missing doctype could default to a basic implied doctype and not produce
a validation error if the geek-elite were a little more well-rounded in
the synoptic housing.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

Scripsit aioe-user:
Too many years ago to remember I got my first lesson in
creating HTM pages and here's what an entire HTM file
with the letter X then looked like.

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»

That must have been in some other universe. In this universe, HTML tags
start with "<" and end with ">", not guillemets. If you meant to "protect"
newsreaders from treating your message content as HTML, then the answer is
that people of course need to use newreaders that don't do such
Total size 28 bytes,

Why would that matter? You could shrink the invalid document to
X
and have it rendered the same way.
It was nice, it "was" both lean and (therefore) fast!
An important consideration back when 56k was still
unheard of.

What's the problem, really?
So lately I decided to show my first ever HTM page to the
W3C facility ...it failed from A to Z

The only thing that passing the "facility" requires in your example is that
you put a suitable doctype declaration at the start (and you can actually
get away with it if you like) and a <title> element, which is definitely not
281 byte file instead of 28

Are you serious in your ignorance or are you just trolling?
Then it got much worse. Another page flunked because it
was missing 'empties' like alt=""

Really? How many bytes does alt="" add as compared with the image size?
Again, are you trolling or just clueless?

The rest of your post (a bulk of output from some software) suggests that
you are both clueless and trolling. Please keep using the same forged
identity until you have any clue. Thank you in advance.
 
K

krzywon

«html»«body»X«/body»«/html»
Total size 28 bytes

This is not a complete HTML document. Read the MODERN standards.
1/3 the US is STILL on 56k, and probably 80% of the
world 'net' population will stay on 56k it for decades more.

You should only be worried about single bytes if you're still using a
2400 baud modem. For a 56k you get trouble downloading when you have
100s of kB and MB.
Then it got much worse. Another page flunked because it
was missing 'empties' like alt="" (up another 600 bytes
for a page with 100 of them). This kind of insanity is
like having to paint "not painted" on a car that is not
painted. Sheeee!

You're asking people to write thin HTML to save on download time, but
you have a single page with 100 pictures? A little contradictory, me
thinks! Also, the alt tag is not an 'empty' as you say. Many people
with impaired vision surf the internet every day! How do you think
they find out what pictures are on your site? Their screen reader
reads the alt tag.
«!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"»
«html»
«head»
«meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"»
«title»
«/title»
«/head»
«body alink="#33cc00" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#0000ff" text="#000000"
vlink="#ff0000"»
X
«/body»
«/html»

Simple fix, write your HTML to 4.01 Strict standards and use a style
sheet to remove the inline styles. The link requires a single line of
html. Once the sheet is downloaded the first time, it is in the users
cache.
Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional To show your readers that you have taken
the care to create an interoperable Web page, you may display this
icon on any page that validates. Here is the HTML you could use to add
this icon to your Web page:

This isn't required. Anyone can check the validity of your HTML and
CSS simply by going to the W3C.

The modern standards were written to help people write simple markup
that is inter operable and easy to maintain. It would be difficult to
overhaul the look of your site, especially if you had more than 10
pages. Please do not promote markup from 1997. Times change, please
don't be left behind.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

Jukka said:
Scripsit aioe-user:

If your page is view with Lynx what will your image mean, or via a
screen reader for someone who is blind? Back in the 90's it was not
considered, that is not a defense to remain clueless!
Really? How many bytes does alt="" add as compared with the image size?
Again, are you trolling or just clueless?

The rest of your post (a bulk of output from some software) suggests
that you are both clueless and trolling. Please keep using the same
forged identity until you have any clue. Thank you in advance.

I bet "dollar to donuts" a bit of both. I highly doubt that he has any
association with "Lawca Corp."...

http://www.whois.org/whois_new.cgi?d=NO&tld=org
Whois.Net

....yet was clueless enough to use *their* domain to munge his email. Get
a clue buddy, if you feel the need to hide your identity, pick something
that is absolutely invalid, "(e-mail address removed)",
and not tromp all over someone else's domain.
 
L

Leif K-Brooks

Neredbojias said:
I kinda agree with you, notably on the 'alt=""' thing and stuff of a
similar nature. That's what _defaults_ are for.

alt="" is very rarely a reasonable value. More often than not, when the
alt attribute is omitted, there is a useful, non-empty value that the
Web designer was simply too lazy to add. Having those cases flagged by
the validator seems like a good idea.
 
N

Neredbojias

alt="" is very rarely a reasonable value. More often than not, when the
alt attribute is omitted, there is a useful, non-empty value that the
Web designer was simply too lazy to add. Having those cases flagged by
the validator seems like a good idea.

Depends on the attitude you have. I host many pages that are basically
mini art galleries: selected images by a certain artist or under the
auspices of a particular theme. Now sure, I could alt each thumbnail with
various information such as pic title or description of the image, etc.
But it's still just a thumb, and for those who can't see the thumb, one
must presume he/she can't see the image-link, either, so why bother with a
description to something inaccessible? To put it in even simpler and more
general terms, I do not accept the universality of the necessity for alt
text and believe disclaimers are usually mere pedantry.
 
C

Chris F.A. Johnson

Depends on the attitude you have. I host many pages that are basically
mini art galleries: selected images by a certain artist or under the
auspices of a particular theme. Now sure, I could alt each thumbnail with
various information such as pic title or description of the image, etc.
But it's still just a thumb, and for those who can't see the thumb, one
must presume he/she can't see the image-link, either, so why bother with a
description to something inaccessible?

That is exactly when you *should* use alt text. If I am viewing
the page in Lynx, I can select an image and have it open in
whatever viewer I have set Lynx to use. If there's no alt text, I
won't know what it is and probably ignore it.

The time that it makes sense to use an empty alt attribute is when
the image adds nothing substantive to the page, e.g., when it is
purely decorative or redundant.
 
D

dorayme

"Chris F.A. Johnson said:
ume he/she can't see the image-link, either, so why bother with a

That is exactly when you *should* use alt text. If I am viewing
the page in Lynx, I can select an image and have it open in
whatever viewer I have set Lynx to use. If there's no alt text, I
won't know what it is and probably ignore it.

The time that it makes sense to use an empty alt attribute is when
the image adds nothing substantive to the page, e.g., when it is
purely decorative or redundant.

If it is a terrible bore to add alt text to images, and assuming
that one overcomes the boringness of naming pictures in some
meaningful way (I tend to in order to keep track of them) then
you can let your machine fill in alt text with some simple GREP
replacement, taking the text in the src name and repeating it
with or without the file extension. Better than no alt text and
definitely better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.
 
A

aioe-user

Jukka said:
Scripsit aioe-user:


That must have been in some other universe. In this universe, HTML tags
start with "<" and end with ">", not guillemets. If you meant to
"protect" newsreaders from treating your message content as HTML, then
the answer is that people of course need to use newreaders that don't do
such
<font size="7" color="red"><blink>silly things</blink></font>

Agreed, as for the actual reason in this universe it's because
Thunderbird wouldn't post it with html tags in it and replacing
them was two second fix.

Why would that matter? You could shrink the invalid document to
X
and have it rendered the same way.

I do't think that was ever the idea.

Are you serious in your ignorance or are you just trolling?

Copy/paste/measure will give you the numbers


Really? How many bytes does alt="" add as compared with the image size?
Again, are you trolling or just clueless?

The rest of your post (a bulk of output from some software)

It's the output from the w3c validator, the URL is shown.
suggests
that you are both clueless and trolling. Please keep using the same
forged identity until you have any clue. Thank you in advance.

Believe whatever you like.
 
A

aioe-user

krzywon said:
This is not a complete HTML document. Read the MODERN standards.


You should only be worried about single bytes if you're still using a
2400 baud modem. For a 56k you get trouble downloading when you have
100s of kB and MB.

I worry about single bytes that all add up and I have a high
speed broadband connection. The reason I do have it now is
that my 56k line had become virtually UNUSABLE because of all
the bloating that's being done (albeit mostly but not entirely
by content).
You're asking people to write thin HTML to save on download time, but
you have a single page with 100 pictures? A little contradictory, me
thinks! Also, the alt tag is not an 'empty' as you say. Many people
with impaired vision surf the internet every day! How do you think
they find out what pictures are on your site? Their screen reader
reads the alt tag.

No. Let people write complex pages and/or style sheets when they
feel they should. My point was that I saw no reason to junk the
basic and simple standard that started it all. I prefer to do
thin (your word) html.
This isn't required. Anyone can check the validity of your HTML and
CSS simply by going to the W3C.

You're commenting on w3c output; I think their idea was precicely
to help people find out where they might validate a page. Thanks
for the comment all the same.
 
D

dorayme

aioe-user <[email protected]> said:
I worry about single bytes that all add up and I have a high
speed broadband connection. The reason I do have it now is
that my 56k line had become virtually UNUSABLE because of all
the bloating that's being done (albeit mostly but not entirely
by content).

It is almost unforgiveable for a website to have its content fill
it out when that content could have simply been left out to
enable a superfast download of nothing.
 
A

aioe-user

Jonathan said:
...
I bet "dollar to donuts" a bit of both. I highly doubt that he has any
association with "Lawca Corp."...

http://www.whois.org/whois_new.cgi?d=NO&tld=org
Whois.Net

...yet was clueless enough to use *their* domain to munge his email. Get
a clue buddy, if you feel the need to hide your identity, pick something
that is absolutely invalid, "(e-mail address removed)",
and not tromp all over someone else's domain.

What on earth are you talking about? (e-mail address removed)
isn't obvious enough for you?

My ISP provides NO usenet service and aoie was one of very
few free servers I found that allows posting. In addition I
believe that using the aoie-user alias was a condition for
the free use of 25 postings/day (can't really remember and
you crap sure ain't worth the time to look it up).
 
A

aioe-user

dorayme said:
It is almost unforgiveable for a website to have its content fill
it out when that content could have simply been left out to
enable a superfast download of nothing.

Unfortunately in the case of too many sites even a slow load
of nothing would be better than a fast load of what they offer.
Except you cannot tell until they're loaded.

Considering that my broadband connection has to be satellite
or it's 56k landline, and that it costs exactly nine times the
56k it replaces, I'm actually considerig terminating it and
returning to 56k. That of course will mean that any home page
that takes more than 3 seconds to load just won't sell me
anything because I'll never read it. Come to think of it, that
would make a very good standard: 3 seconds on 56k or forget it.
 
D

dorayme

[QUOTE="aioe-user said:
It is almost unforgiveable for a website to have its content fill
it out when that content could have simply been left out to
enable a superfast download of nothing.

Unfortunately in the case of too many sites even a slow load
of nothing would be better than a fast load of what they offer.
Except you cannot tell until they're loaded.

Considering that my broadband connection has to be satellite
or it's 56k landline, and that it costs exactly nine times the
56k it replaces, I'm actually considerig terminating it and
returning to 56k. That of course will mean that any home page
that takes more than 3 seconds to load just won't sell me
anything because I'll never read it. Come to think of it, that
would make a very good standard: 3 seconds on 56k or forget it.[/QUOTE]

I absolutely agree with everything you say. I have examined the
difference between not downloading anything on 56K and
downloading nothing and it is an interesting difference. I know
this: it takes the same time.
 
T

Toby A Inkster

aioe-user said:
«!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"»
«html»
«head»
«meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"»
«title»
«/title»
«/head»
«body alink="#33cc00" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#0000ff" text="#000000"
vlink="#ff0000"»
X
«/body»
«/html»

This can be reduced to:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title//<p>X

and it will still validate. Won't actually *work* in any browser that I
can think of, but it will validate. If you want a page that both validates
and works:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title>Meaningful title</title>
<p>X

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!
 
D

David Dorward

What on earth are you talking about? (e-mail address removed)
isn't obvious enough for you?

It isn't obvious enough for spammers' email address harvesting robots.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

David said:
It isn't obvious enough for spammers' email address harvesting robots.

Nope since he is still using it.

Let me spell it out for him, even though *you* think you have a phony
email address, you have created one that *could* be real, and worst is
the domain "no.org" is *real*. Someone pays for it, the Lawca Corp.
Which means the spam that is generated for *your* phony email address
*their* mailserver has to deal with! Now do you see the offense?
 
C

Chaddy2222

This can be reduced to:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title//<p>X

and it will still validate. Won't actually *work* in any browser that I
can think of, but it will validate. If you want a page that both validates
and works:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title>Meaningful title</title>
<p>X
Mine is probably a little bit better structured, but here is what I
came up with.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title> a title</title> <p> some stuff </p>
I tested in IE6 and it did work.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

Toby said:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title//<p>X

and it will still validate. Won't actually *work* in any browser that I
can think of, but it will validate. If you want a page that both validates
and works:


Works in SeaMonkey 1.1.1, Firefox 2.0.0.3, Mozilla 1.7.12 and Opera
7.54-9.2.

And no-go on NN 4.6 and no surprise...IE 4.0-6.01
 

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