Mark Pilgrim: All That We Can Leave Behind. A gentle introduction to migrating to XHTML 2.0, which, as intelligent people have noted, no one will do for years, if ever.
<br/>’s fame dates back to the Netscape 4 era, when CSS was sketchy at best andusing the proper elementmeant you were a chump whose pages looked like amateur scribblings.
On an unrelated note, my copy of Clerks has finally arrived. I’m celebrating via my HTTP headers.
We just started, with the Chewley’s gum representative.
Snowball.
37.
8 and a half.
The independent contractors on the uncompleted Death Star.
The perfect dozen.
It’s important to have a job that makes a difference, boys.
Title dictates behavior.
I’m offering you my body, and you’re offering me semantics. [This will be my new mantra whenever anyone mentions the Semantic Web.]
My love for you is like a truck, Berserker!
Comment by Eli Sarver — Wednesday, April 16, 2003 @ 10:15 pm
OK, but let’s try to keep this discussion PG-13.
Comment by Mark — Wednesday, April 16, 2003 @ 10:31 pm
In a row?
By the way, you have to check out the Clerks animated series at some point, because it’s great, and my friends and I communicate almost entirely with lines from the movie and the cartoons. “Bear driving car, how can that be!?”
Comment by nick — Wednesday, April 16, 2003 @ 11:10 pm
Hey you, get back here!
Comment by Matt Croydon — Wednesday, April 16, 2003 @ 11:25 pm
Ditto to Nick’s comment regarding the cartoons.
Nice comment, Nick … very pretty handwr^H^H^H typing. : )
“Oh No!”
Comment by Lucas Thompson — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 12:31 am
I wish he would bring out a boxed set with the lot of the them all in one (ahem) box.
Comment by Adrian Sevitz — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 4:54 am
Hi Mark,
Wenn I took a look at the xhtml specs a few weeks ago, I saw this: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-list.html#sec_10.2., take a look at point 4:
If an li element has an href attribute, and that element’s contents are selected, the link defined by the href attribute is followed.
In your article you totally ignore this, why? The only thing you changes was ul into nl, but you can also leave all the a elements out.
PS: sorry for my bad english, i’m dutch you see ;)
Comment by Anne van Kesteren — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 6:35 am
Yes, a future article will discuss the new “href everywhere” paradigm. One step at a time.
Comment by Mark — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 6:39 am
Do you have that one with that guy who was in that movie last year?
Comment by Johan Svensson — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 7:55 am
Happy Scrappy Hero Pup.
Comment by Mark — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 8:00 am
Don’t be such a semantic warrior.
- me to my wife, various times, locations, and reasons
Comment by Jerry — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 8:35 am
Snowball was one of Ernest Hemmingway’s cats, the all- six-toed one. All the cats currently living at the Hemmingway House (in Key West) are reportedly decendants of Snowball.
Comment by steven — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 9:09 am
Yes, but snowballing is something else altogether.
Comment by Mark — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 9:19 am
My love for you is ticking clock, BERZERKER! Would you like to suck my c- BERZERKER!
I’m a f- this bitch, I’ma f- that bitch … I’ll f- anything that moves!
An Asian Design major.
I’m not even supposed to be here today.
There’s a lot of beautiful women out there, but most of them don’t bring you lasagna for lunch; they just cheat on you.
Try not to suck any d- on the way to the parking lot … hey, get back here!
Comment by Joe Grossberg — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 11:57 am
Break his heart again this time, and I’ll kill ya, nothing personal.
I don’t appreciate your ruse, ma’am.
That’s nothing compared to how my cousin Walter died.
Jeff Anderson got all the good lines.
Comment by Dave S. — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 1:09 pm
I’ll be yet another person to recommend the animated series. I bought the two DVD set. All six episodes.
Though it’s actually twelve, because you get to watch them through, then watch them again with commentary mode. Absolutely brilliant.
I had seen Dogma, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, but had never seen Clerks. So I bought it and watched it on my laptop on a flight from Cincinnati to San Francisco. People looked at me strangely as I laughed out loud. The in flight movie was something serious, Lorenzo’s Oil I think.
Comment by Chris Thompson — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 1:43 pm
Since XHTML 2.0 is being defined as an “alternative” to XHTML 1.0, and not a replacement for it, there is a simple way to start coding a XHTML 2.0 version of a website after the specs are finalized but before most browsers support it. Just “link” to the alternate version of the site like many people link to their RSS feed:
[link rel="alternate" type="application/xhtml+xml" href="./xhtml2/" title="XHTML 2.0" /]
And then wait until most browsers support XHTML 2.0 before changing the “main” version of the site to 2.0. If enough people do this, it will encourage browser makers to support XHTML 2.0, but not isolate any users of non-supportive browsers.
Comment by DJ Dizzy Trizzy — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 1:43 pm
But, I love gatherings, isn’t it ironic?
Comment by Coty — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 2:26 pm
“I could never reach.”
Comment by ViceClown — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 7:19 pm
Damn, Mark, I had absolutely no idea that CSS classes supported multiple inheritance. That is just wicked cool.
Don’t forget to do an article on the additions, like <section>. That one is going to make coding templates for inclusion in other templates so much easier.
Comment by Michael Bernstein — Thursday, April 17, 2003 @ 11:50 pm
I hate to break this to you, but apparentley, the style attribute is coming back. See http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/newarchive/2003_03_02_glazblogarc.html#s902645 I promise not to tell anyone if you don’t :) I thought that Ian Hixson’s position seemed reasonable, but then there were a lot of arguments in www-html (several threads from http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2003Jan/thread.html) that I’m not sure I understood fully. I’m also pretty confused about what the l element means, since Danial glazman asserts in his latest entry (http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/ - permalinks don’t seem to be working) that “a line (l element) is not a line (of poetry) is not a line (well, a line).”.
Comment by James graham — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 6:01 am
I assure you we’re open.
Odd thing is, I only heard of Clerks via some Star Wars fanzine or other, writing about the contractors on the Death Star.
Comment by Martin Wisse — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 6:58 am
I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re right about the l element (what do you mean you knew all along?). There seems to be some discussion at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2003Apr/0224.html which essentailly agrees with your analysis.
Comment by James Graham — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 8:19 am
Perhaps I don’t have a full handle on the full XHTML 2 discussion (heck who does?) but my concern with removing the style attribute was that it made dealing with singleton items like images perversely difficult.
After all since HTML presentation attributes like height and width are deprecated and I’m not going to change the external style sheets for every single unique image, options are very limited. And unnecessarily bulking up the header slows rendering of the pages …
Sigh … I know that the style attribute is the enemy of reusability, but sometimes things are one-offs …
Comment by Style attribute when necessary — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 8:54 am
Re: Styling HTML.
There is a 4th way: [?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="main.css"?] works with XHTML 1.
Comment by Anonymous — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 12:19 pm
(I wasn’t trying to be anonymous in my stylesheet comment.)
Comment by Mark A. Hershberger — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 12:20 pm
Adrian: Many have hoped for such a box (myself included), but the movies were released by different studios. It can never happen.
You can buy the box, though.
Comment by AJ Schuster — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 12:47 pm
Adrian: Many have hoped for such a box (myself included), but the movies were released by different studios. It can never happen.
You can buy the box, though [http://store.yahoo.com/jsbstash/jertrilboxse.html.
Comment by AJ Schuster — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 12:47 pm
Don’t forget the Clerks Comic Book. This contains a “deleted scene” from the movie.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1582402094/qid=1050691293/
Comment by Tom — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 2:51 pm
Quote: “After all since HTML presentation attributes like height and width are deprecated and I’m not going to change the external style sheets for every single unique image”
Maybe it’s a surprise for you, but you may still use the height and width property on images. It’s possible with css though not neccessary.
Comment by Anne van Kesteren — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 4:48 pm
No one expects the Semantic Exposition!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61141&cid=5753607
Comment by Michael Bernstein — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 7:06 pm
Anne,
Well color me surprised … I saw height and width deprecated in the W3 specs and figured it wouldn’t validate as Strict so I’ve never used them since I started writing HTML and XHTML Strict pages.
I tested them out and they work fine up to and including XHTML 1.1 … I’ve definitely learnt something today!
Comment by Style attribute when necessary — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 7:28 pm
“I saw height and width deprecated in the W3 specs and figured it wouldn’t validate as Strict”
If you read the w3c discussion lists you’d see that Height and Width of an image were argued to be inherent properties of the image and therefore didn’t fall into the presentation category. A bit weird for sure.
Comment by MikeyC — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 8:13 pm
Don’t tell anyone, but in the scene where they’re driving to the funeral home, they’re going the wrong way. They should pass the junior high school *before* they go under the underpass.
Oh, and the video store where Randal goes to get the video about hermaphrodites is on the street I grew up on. :-)
OOOOOOH!! NAVY SEALS!!
Comment by ralph — Friday, April 18, 2003 @ 9:48 pm
Thought you all would appreciate this.
http://www.viewaskew.com/clerks/sounds.html
It, uh, probably smears the PG-13 rating that Mark was hoping for, though. ;-)
Comment by Ken Walker — Saturday, April 19, 2003 @ 12:23 am