HTML Compliance + Legal issues with GIF

[Ben Walding <be...@walding.com>]

What is our stance on HTML compliance?


My thoughts:
1.  Ideally we should be aiming for HTML 4.01, verging on XHTML
2.  Shouldn't we use <br/> <hr/>  over <br>     <hr>  (my preference is 
yes, but apparently some old browsers don't like it)
3.  CSS - Shouldn't we be using CSS 1 (2?)  where possible?
4.   PNG - Shouldn't we be using PNG exclusively for lossless images?  ( 
Don't use PNG for alpha transparency images - IE6 does not render them 
correctly). This is necessary for both technical and legal reasons.
(http://www.smartisans.com/burn_all_gifs.htm)


Apart from people who generate non-project sites using Maven, we should 
be able to assume that most people who will visit project sites will be 
using relatively modern browsers / or browsers that can ignore markup 
they don't understand.  If you look at the output from JXR you can see 
some pretty "old-school" HTML - eg font tags!


Cheers,

Ben

Re: HTML Compliance + Legal issues with GIF

[Brian Ewins <Br...@i-documentsystems.com>]

Ben Walding wrote:

> What is our stance on HTML compliance?
>
>
> My thoughts:
> 1.  Ideally we should be aiming for HTML 4.01, verging on XHTML 

absolutely.

>
> 2.  Shouldn't we use <br/> <hr/>  over <br>     <hr>  (my preference 
> is yes, but apparently some old browsers don't like it) 

<br /> usually works, <br/> doesnt (note the extra space in the first one).

>
> 3.  CSS - Shouldn't we be using CSS 1 (2?)  where possible? 

I thought we were (the tigris skins, etc)

>
> 4.   PNG - Shouldn't we be using PNG exclusively for lossless images?  
> ( Don't use PNG for alpha transparency images - IE6 does not render 
> them correctly). This is necessary for both technical and legal reasons.
> (http://www.smartisans.com/burn_all_gifs.htm) 

No, though it would be simpler to track legality if nothing was GIFs. 
Maven isn't generating the images (as far as I know); it is the tool 
that generates (or decodes) gifs that has to be licensed. eg. since here 
we use photoshop & fireworks we're ok. Looking at specific images maven 
uses - the jakarta logo was hacked together in SVG by myself; I also 
generated the PNG versions using Batik (they're there on the Apache 
site, you could link to them instead). The GIF versions were created 
from these originals by Nicola Ken Barozzi, I believe he used one of the 
Adobe tools to do this (ie it was licensed). I don't know about the 
'Maven' logo, but it wouldn't be difficult to ensure legality.

Its unusual to find a tool that creates GIF that's unlicensed these days.

>
> Apart from people who generate non-project sites using Maven, we 
> should be able to assume that most people who will visit project sites 
> will be using relatively modern browsers / or browsers that can ignore 
> markup they don't understand.  If you look at the output from JXR you 
> can see some pretty "old-school" HTML - eg font tags!

ewwww.

- Baz



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