2007-07-01 [20:09:00.0000] wtf is "next column" in 3.15.11.1.9.1 ?? [20:09:01.0000] i really have to pay more attention when writing up these algorithms [22:36:00.0000] i found tens of thousands of documents last modified in 1990 that claim to have class=MsoNormal [22:36:01.0000] sigh [22:57:00.0000] where? you googled? [22:58:00.0000] wow, the sheer number of pages with screwed-up markup is amazing [22:58:01.0000] duryodhan: part of my research [22:58:02.0000] ohh ok [22:58:03.0000] the sheer number of screwed up markup ... heh [22:59:00.0000] take today ... I am a developer who wants to make a site ... [22:59:01.0000] what should I do? [22:59:02.0000] XHTML5, XHTML 1,2 , HTML4 , HTML Forms. WebForms 1.0 , XForms , use DOM to check forms or use XForms .... [22:59:03.0000] ? [23:00:00.0000] I mean, probably a decade later many of these will become obselete [23:00:01.0000] and someone will look on them as docs with screwed up markup ... [23:00:02.0000] today? just use HTML4. [23:00:03.0000] ok [23:00:04.0000] today is a little .... [23:00:05.0000] XHTML5 isn't done yet, XHTML 1 isn't supported by IE, XHTML2 isn't done yet, XForms doesn't work in browsers [23:01:00.0000] why do we have web forms as well as XForms ? [23:01:01.0000] dunno, ask the xforms guys [23:01:02.0000] it's pretty common for groups of people to try to invent new replacement technologies [23:01:03.0000] (XForms using something like orbeon) [23:01:04.0000] sometimes new technologies take off [23:02:00.0000] (most often they don't) [23:02:01.0000] heh... haven't you guys made web forms ? [23:02:02.0000] web forms is just a fancy name for what html4 does [23:02:03.0000] web forms 2 is just the next revision of html4 forms [23:02:04.0000] it's part of html5 [23:02:05.0000] k [23:02:06.0000] the name "web forms 2" is likely to die a peaceful death [23:02:07.0000] heh, isn't that a whatwg spec ? webforms 2? [23:03:00.0000] duryodhan: yes, but it will be integrated into the larger HTML5 spec in the future [23:04:00.0000] assuming the xforms guys don't get in the way and try to push their xforms transitional instead [23:04:01.0000] my point is ... with so many specs ... many docs will still be again with "screwed up markup" in a decade [23:04:02.0000] so we really haven't learnt from our past ... [23:04:03.0000] screwed up markup isn't caused by having many specs [23:04:04.0000] XForms guys are putting webforms 2 as a Xforms-minimal or something ... [23:05:00.0000] they're working on "XForms Transitional", I believe [23:05:01.0000] yeah [23:05:02.0000] so i found over 100000 html files with a last-modified date of 1988. [23:06:00.0000] wtf [23:06:01.0000] well I was looking at developing a way for forms to have digital signatures ... and I still don't know a good way :( [23:06:02.0000] Hixie: time travel. how many from 1987? [23:06:03.0000] there are just so many possibilities .. [23:07:00.0000] jruderman: around the same [23:07:01.0000] that's really weird, I find it hard to believe there are that many servers out there with clocks set so wrongly [23:07:02.0000] jruderman: i even found hundreds from 1662. [23:07:03.0000] that's impressive [23:08:00.0000] yes. [23:08:01.0000] Hixie: 1662? :O [23:08:02.0000] I'm sure the internet archive will be very interested in those historical documents :-) [23:09:00.0000] Found anything from BCE? [23:10:00.0000] Lachy: they were all used for writing "the da vinci code " [23:10:01.0000] my methodology was to look for the first 4 digit number in the last-modified field that was not preceded or suceeded by numbers or a + [23:10:02.0000] so i couldn't find anything BCE [23:10:03.0000] wouldn't surprise me htough [23:10:04.0000] what if it was preceded by a - > [23:10:05.0000] ? [23:11:00.0000] i'd take it but ignore the - or > [23:12:00.0000] I meant to write "what if it was preceded by a '-'?" Ignore the '>' [23:12:01.0000] i treated -s like spaces [23:12:02.0000] even more impressive is the thousands of files from dates greater than 2010 [23:12:03.0000] oh, then you might have counted timezone offsets as years [23:13:00.0000] i got a million or more from 2099 [23:13:01.0000] and almost 200,000 from max time_t [23:13:02.0000] so is the conclusion that we can draw from this, that the last modified date is completely useless? [23:15:00.0000] well, I suppose it's still somewhat useful for setting the If-last-modified-since HTTP header [23:16:00.0000] also a lot from 2099 and 2100 (like, over a million and over half a million respectively) [23:18:00.0000] is there any correlation between dates the use the correct format and those that have plausible dates? [23:20:00.0000] my hypothesis would be that servers that are configured to send the right date format are more likely to be configured with more accurate dates, and the others are just broken and unreliable. [23:21:00.0000] i dunno [23:21:01.0000] there were a LOT of different formats [23:21:02.0000] like, thousands [23:21:03.0000] the spec allows three [23:21:04.0000] which maps to about 10 actual formats [23:21:05.0000] which spec? [23:21:06.0000] http [23:21:07.0000] ok [23:21:08.0000] I thought it only allowed one. [23:21:09.0000] nope [23:22:00.0000] it defines three formats, all retarded [23:23:00.0000] oh, I see [23:23:01.0000] Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT ; RFC 822, updated by RFC 1123 [23:23:02.0000] Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT ; RFC 850, obsoleted by RFC 1036 [23:23:03.0000] Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 ; ANSI C's asctime() format [23:24:00.0000] yeah [23:24:01.0000] so the second one, i ignored [23:25:00.0000] http://junkyard.damowmow.com/284 is an older version of this data btw [23:25:01.0000] the first is at least somewhat sensible [23:26:00.0000] the last one is just a really strange order [23:26:01.0000] the junkyard one doesn't exclude the + character [23:27:00.0000] hence all the low numbers [23:27:01.0000] and the peaks at 100s [23:28:00.0000] how do you explain the peaks at dates like 1428? [23:29:00.0000] 1969-70 can be explained because that's the epoch [23:30:00.0000] yeah 2038 can be explained too [23:30:01.0000] yeah, the max 32bit time [23:30:02.0000] #### only means thousands, so it could just be one misconfigured site [23:31:00.0000] 2250 i don't get [23:33:00.0000] so how many does ########## represent (the 2007 value) [23:35:00.0000] I'm surprised there aren't peaks at years like 0030, 0130, 0230, etc. for timezone offsets [23:35:01.0000] # = one order of magnitude [23:36:00.0000] there aren't that many :30 TZ offsets [23:39:00.0000] ok [23:41:00.0000] ########## is in the billions [23:42:00.0000] aargh! It really annoys me how some people conflate making content accessibile with providing fallback to those without the necessary software [23:44:00.0000] the most annoying thing for me in public-html is the way most people jump to a solution rather than determining the problem [23:46:00.0000] yeah, that too. I tried getting people to focus on the problem months ago, and it didn't really work then, and still not working now [23:47:00.0000] like in the whole headers="" debate, I tried to talk about how we could make tables accessible without needing headers, and basically got accused of ignoring the needs of the accessibility community [23:47:01.0000] yeah [23:48:00.0000] it's ridiculous [23:48:01.0000] although, Henri seemed to get a really good response from Aaron (I believe) that showed significant improvement [23:50:00.0000] this one ttp://www.w3.org/mid/4680E4F5.6080903⊙mn and http://www.w3.org/mid/4680FE26.9090802⊙mn [23:51:00.0000] yeah [23:51:01.0000] let's hope people go more in that direction [23:53:00.0000] what year was cellpadding="" invented? [23:54:00.0000] i have about 250,000 documents labelled 1990, and about 250,000 documents labelled 1990 that have an element with a cellpadding="" attribute [23:55:00.0000] /me dismisses the 1990 data [23:58:00.0000] the sheer number of different doctypes is insane [23:59:00.0000] Hixie: HTML tables were invented around 1995-96 and published in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1942.txt [23:59:01.0000] that includes cellpadding [00:00:00.0000] yeah so basically anything before 1995 is statistically insignificant [00:00:01.0000] pity [00:00:02.0000] not surprising though [00:42:00.0000] wow [00:42:01.0000] limited quirks was in the 0%-2% range until 2004, then it jumped to 11%, 13%, 20% in 2006 [00:47:00.0000] what do you mean by limited quirks? [01:05:00.0000] Lachy: "almost standards" [01:05:01.0000] ok [01:06:00.0000] I wonder if that's because tools like Dreamweaver started producing reasonable code with transitional DOCTYPEs around that time [01:08:00.0000] actually, dreamweaver was doing that in 2002 when they released Dreamweaver MX [01:16:00.0000] it started around 1999, with xhtml [01:53:00.0000] year over year, the most popular class names are very variable [01:55:00.0000] oh nm [02:04:00.0000] hmm, is dropping in usage [02:04:01.0000] that's encouraging [02:04:02.0000] isn't [02:05:00.0000] my 2000 data is borked [02:05:01.0000] probably skewed by one site or something [06:22:00.0000] /me kind of dislikes it when the spec has exactly the same paragraph repeated in two different places, since his spec<->testcase annotation script uses regexps within paragraphs to identify the right sentence for each test and gets confused by duplicates :-( [06:35:00.0000] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/30/irony style="" (quote from a t-shirt with red text) [06:43:00.0000] webben_, in my experience, Mozilla bug commentators saying "X is available in an extension, therefore it shouldn't be in the base software". is a common mistake caused by underestimating the difficulty of finding+installing extensions. It's not particularly striking. [06:46:00.0000] (Personally I think longdesc= is a waste of time for a browser to support, but not because there are extensions that support it.) [06:48:00.0000] the fact that ATs already support it is the strongest reason to include it, but in practice, I think it has failed [06:51:00.0000] I thought longdesc seemed like a good case for a microformat [06:52:00.0000] Dashiva: do you mean ? [06:53:00.0000] No, more that the use case seems so limited, it would make more sense to let the group actually using it decide how they want it, and keep it out of the main spec [06:53:01.0000] This is orthogonal to fallback/alt content for images, though [06:57:00.0000] oh well, the legal stick of accessibility has been waived again :-/ [06:57:01.0000] why is it that when accessibility advocates can't come up with a rational argument, they always fall back to the legal stick? [07:00:00.0000] Well, maybe they realize there are no carrots available? [07:17:00.0000] If the Web had smell-o-vision, would accessibility advocates fight for longdescs of odors on behalf of those with no sense of smell? [07:19:00.0000] A perfume site that made use of smell-o-vision would probably provide a description of the smell anyway for all users, so they can know what it's like before sampling. [07:20:00.0000] But that's just like now [07:20:01.0000] Everyone is disabled with respect to smelling on the web [07:20:02.0000] Why don't we have accessible smells? [07:25:00.0000] Are there any free non-patent-encumbered media formats for odours? [07:27:00.0000] It would be a pain if you had to use multiple encoders (encodours?) since the common browsers all support different formats :-( [07:36:00.0000] it looks like Sony already has a patent on one form of the technology http://theredactor.blogspot.com/2005/04/birth-of-smellovision.html [07:37:00.0000] http://blog.teledyn.com/node/2286 [07:38:00.0000] of course, it's another case of the US patent office granting another invalid patent for a non-existent invention [07:41:00.0000] you can patent things that haven't been invented? [07:41:01.0000] apparently Sony can [07:41:02.0000] why am i not surprised [07:42:00.0000] I really do not get the whole