lucumr

At the moment I’m working together with the rest of the webteam of the ubuntuusers Team on the new portal of ubuntuusers.de based on django. One of the things we will do is consolidating all templates. And while doing so we have to decide to use an HTML/XHTML standard which we will use including the correct mimetype and doctype.

And selecting that is the hardest part because once you’ve decided on something you have to live with the consequences and cannot really change. For example HTML and XHTML have a slightly different DOM or different rules for CSS (CSS for example has an exception that allows background colors on the body-tag to affect the whole page, this exception does not exist for XHTML). Without a doubt many people use XHTML in a wrong way. Just have a look how many people serve their webpages as text/html and only use HTML semantics. They break if you serve them as application/xml+xhtml or render in a wrong way.

But why does XML and SGML have different semantics? SGML itself was created long ago (I assume IBM has something to do with it, at least it’s predecessor was created there) and is an insane specification. At least that’s what the web told me. I cannot tell you if that’s true or not because the standard itself is not available without paying for it :-/

From what sources tell me XML is an subset of SGML. I wonder how that’s possible tough, because there are syntactic elements that in my opinion are not compatible. For example clash XML’s self closing tags with null end tags in SGML:

XML <br /><br />
SGML: <p/This is some text in a paragraph/

Because the slash has a special meaning in tags in SGML it clashes with the closing slash of XML tags. Also SGML is apparently case insensitive where XML is not. Maybe I’m also wrong there and that part is up to the DTD, but quite frankly. I don’t care. I don’t even are about clashing slashes in tags because no browser implements the correct SGML behavior. And if they would do, we would all see invalid output because the web is not valid. It’s not and it will never be.

But what’s indeed ridiculous is that it’s incredible hard to write pages that are semantical and syntactical correct to both HTML4 and XHTML. However you have to make your documents compatible to both if you want to your page to be valid XHTML and render correctly. The reason is that no browser today selects the render mode by Doctype, and even if they would do, other browsers would break then on the huge number of pages that incorrectly use XHTML.

XML is strict, very strict. Syntactical errors appear as big red error messages. I for myself have to work on the wiki markup for the new portal and one of the things I have to deal with is balancing elements. That is possible and simple, but what’s harder is adding paragraphs without breaking things. And that’s not that easy because not every element is allowed in a paragraph and a paragraph cannot be mixed with every element thanks to inline versus block elements.

Even HTML5 disallows that mixing of different element types but at least it doesn’t complain. Sure, I could send the output through a validator and tell the user that his markup is bullshit and he should correct it. But I won’t do that. Users give a fuck about their markup. And I cannot bloat the parser more than it is now. Server resources are limited and additional validation for such a high traffic site is nearly impossible.

Fortunately browsers will never show you those errors because they parse XHTML with their tagsoup parser they use for HTML too. Even tough, if we cannot ensure that all of our pages are valid XML and XHTML we are not allowed to use the doctype because it would break browsers that support XHTML.

While this is hard for webdesigners and especially for programmers that want to create parsers that generate XHTML it’s an even harder job for the developers of browsers. In the end they have to have two independent parsers for HTML and XHTML. This makes it hard enough for the big browser vendors Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Apple, but even harder if you are new to the market and want to ship your own one. Because you not only have to be compatible with the new XHTML standard, but also the old HTML one. Nobody will translate all the old documents to XHTML I’m sure ;-)

Details about the issues are summarized here:

• The <?xml> prolog, strict mode, and XHTML in IE — Chris Wilson, Microsoft
• Understanding HTML, XML and XHTML — Surfin’ Safari Weblog
• Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful — Ian Hickson
• Quick Guide to XHTML — Anne van Kesteren
• The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types — Mark Pilgrim

Without a doubt we will have fun with XHTML in the future. Probably the web stays like it’s today, we will still use the tag soup parsers, people will write XHTML that is HTML in fact and browsers will interpret it like that.

For me the decision is HTML4 at the moment, with the subset that is valid for both HTML4 and HTML5. That could make it easier for transition once the standard is ready (and I hope it’s earlier than 2022) and it’s good idea now too. Who needs an u-Tag anyway?

Microsoft once again supported a study that should prove that Microsoft products are superior to Open Source projects. This time the company that did the dirty work this time is Wipro, an Indian based technology company. Conclusion first: schools are happier with Microsoft solutions than with Open Source solutions, being Microsoft powered also means that your system is more stable and of course cheaper too. I guess nobody is surprised about those results.

But what’s remarkable about that study is this:

For the purpose of study segmentation Wipro defines Open Source schools as any school that has adopted greater than 50% use of an OSS solution — in terms of installed base — on any one of the three ICT platform aspects. All schools not meeting these criteria are defined as Microsoft schools.

First of all: What’s a school? Surprisingly there is no definition in that paper. There are enough schools powered by non Microsoft UNIX systems which are not open-sourced. So are those Microsoft schools now? It’s interesting because it looks like that fight Microsoft is fighting is only against Open Source, leaving out proprietary solutions of competitors. The cool thing about this study is that they actually found open source schools:

For me this is great news. I expected that the result of the study would be: there are no open source schools. Because with the definition of what’s an open source school from above in mind there are at least 73 schools in Europe that use more than 50% open source software. My school advertised some time ago that they used Linux on their computers but that was two years ago, only additionally to windows, nobody knew how to use LILO and the rest of the system was closed. So there is hope :D

Also the quotes are…. well…. priceless:

“We have about 20 dual-boot machines that came preloaded with Linux but no one ever uses them; everyone just prefers Windows.” — ICT Manager, Spanish secondary school

Everybody prefers in th in this context basically means: “everybody just knows”. But hey, they came preloaded with Linux, that’s good news, so there are actually companies shipping Linux.

“At our school, many of the computers are equipped with both Microsoft Office and Open Office — but the students have a significant preference for the Microsoft solutions. — Director of ICT for a secondary school in France

Who’s surprised this time? Raise your hands. Now!. No hands? except of some hands in the digg corner
That really reminds me of my school, two years ago. We had (and still have) a proxy that filters incoming and outgoing data for “bad content”. Usually you don’t see that proxy, it just asks you for a password and blocks some useless websites like any URL with the word “nintendo” in it. That worked for a long time pretty well until /var was full and the proxy just locked any access because there was no more space for logging and $admin was unable to enabled log rotation or just find the issue. However. The result was that I installed portable firefox und my homefolder and just not enabled that darn proxy in the settings. After the issue was resolved by an external administrator I continued using firefox. Two weeks later the proxy was once again down but when I logged in I found out that one of my friends copied the portable firefox installer to the communication drive and even some really dumb users were using it. That trend continued and even when the network was working flawlessly again the firefox was still in use.
Two years later: Firefox is installed by default, just with the proxies enabled in the config. Because $admin is still the same nobody locked those configuration values (although it’s possible) and most of the users just disable that proxy because it takes equally long to enter your password or just disable the proxy. And nowadays you see far more firefox users than IE users in the computer rooms.

So what’s the conclusion of that firefox story? (At least in our school) people pick the default because it’s the default and not because it’s better. If you are used to IE, MS Office and friends you won’t switch yourself because it “just works”. But not necessarily better.

The rest of the paper isn’t better, just another quote that is equally funny:

The ICT Manager pointed to the role of Microsoft PowerPoint in lesson
presentation. He stated that, “simply put, on Open Office, our results do not have the same visual quality as the
lessons our teachers create using Microsoft PowerPoint.”

Visual quality?

If you are still interested in that paper, it’s downloadable as PDF from the Microsoft website here: Wipro: ICT in European Schools.