Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with w3c

ISO, W3C, OOXML/ODF: How do tech standards impact you?

trcook — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:17:06 -0800

What's your stake in international tech standards and OOXML?(I'm working up a thesis and I could use some input from the computer literate world) Ok, so I'm getting set to do my masters thesis in Public Administration, and I've decided to write about the wonderful world of international standardization-- mostly ICT(read: tech) standards (eg. HTML5, CSS3, domain naming/registering rules via ICANN, OOXML, ODF, PDF, anything from IEC ISO IEEE JTC1, etc.)

One area that I am exploring is output legitimacy in the standardization process. I have a pretty good theory, but I need some ideas about where to investigate for evidence...

This is where you come in. If you feel inclined, shout out about any of the following:
Why are standards important(to you)?

How have ICT standards impacted you/your job?

Are there International standards you have resisted implementing at your job or on a project? why?

Any first-hand accounts of political manipulation of the standards development process.

What's your take on the OOXML/ODF controversy? How will it impact you/your work? What long-term effects do you think the controversy will be?

Much thanks all,
Tom

How do I convince my company to utilize Web standards?

relucent — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:17:39 -0800

Help me make a business case for HTML/CSS standards in my company's web-based software. I work at a software company. One of our flagship products is a web-based content management system, and there are many parts of the program where you can create documents in a WYSIWIG format, and later export this content as an HTML file. This is a huge selling point for our product.

I've been coding HTML since I was 12, and have been very much into standards-compliant XHTML and CSS for the past five years. So it greatly pains me to see that our application generates HTML like it's 1996. Visually, it looks terrible, and programmatically, it uses no style sheets and it is an absolute nightmare to look at the source when it's exported. We have had a number of issues reported by our clients with this, but our development department patches them up on a case-by-case basis instead of fixing the root problem, which is the horribly-formed code. Every time, it's the code.

I am not a developer, otherwise I would have fixed it myself over the course of a few weekends. But I want to make a case to our development VP that we need to utilize standards-compliant HTML and CSS whenever we deal with the WYSIWIG documents. It will take a lot of work because we've built up this Jenga tower pretty high, but if we do it right then life will be much easier in the future. This would be overdelivering on our big promises, as Seth Godin recommends, and it would show that we care about the customer even when it doesn't put dollars directly into our pockets.

The problem is, I can't think of a concrete case from a business perspective. It just feels wrong to me for our software to be writing HTML this badly. But it's hard to evangelize the good news of HTML standards when you can't think of any solid reasons. They think it's better to just band-aid the issues one at a time as they arise.

BTW, we develop software for a very specific industry, and it is not available to the public, so accessibility is not an issue. I know that's one of the main benefits for Web standards, but it's of very low consequence for us.

Also, I would still be pacified if our HTML and CSS didn't pass the validator 100%, but right now I have a feeling that if we ran it through the validator we'd take down W3C's servers. Really what I care about is that it is easy to work with, works cross-platform, and looks nice for our clients, and so I figure we might as well follow a few standards while we're at it.

Am I way too hung up on this, and I just need to get over it and let them do their thing their way? Or do I have a good reason to push for us using Web standards in our development?

Problems with XHTML content type.

The Confessor — Wed, 30 May 2007 14:04:08 -0800

I seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall in approximating W3C XHTML standards compliance on my website. From what I've read, XHTML should be served with content type application/xhtml+xml, rather than text/html, and recent versions of Microsoft and Mozilla browsers should support serving them as such. Well, they aren't. I set the content type and character set for all of my pages using the header statement in my primary include file, as shown here.

When I try to switch the content type (currently by commenting one line and uncommenting the other), however, the following happens:

Firefox 2.0.0.3 complains that this XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it, and displays a bare document trees.

Internet Explorer 7.0.5450.4 opens an Open/Save/Cancel for a file of type php_auto_file.

Opera for Wii shows the bare interface, stripped of all styling.

Can anybody help me figure out what's going wrong?

Looking for a modern DOM/XSLT/Xpath implementation in C

ChrisR — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:47:26 -0800

My boss has tasked me with tracking down a modern XML library written in C. The library has to run on (at least) RHEL3, Windows, and Solaris, but more is better. I've seen tDOM, but it doesn't look like it's as up to date as we need. However, I'm not too up on the standards (that's part of my quest) so I don't know for sure. It's possible that domc is what I'm looking for, but, again, I lack the knowledge of the standards required to judge it.

Can someone help direct my inquiries here? Are there other options? How would I best evaluate them?

W3C vs IETF

djacobs — Thu, 13 May 2004 13:56:42 -0800

The W3C has invited Atom to create a formal working group as a part of their organization, as opposed to the IETF. What are the major differences, politically and historically, between the IETF and W3C?

opml -> html

will — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 05:12:58 -0800

Anyone know a quick and simple way to convert opml files into html? I've found two good XSLT stylesheets, but the W3C XSLT Service seems to be fudging the links.