8 items tagged “markup”
2009
Django ponies: Proposals for Django 1.2
I’ve decided to step up my involvement in Django development in the run-up to Django 1.2, so I’m currently going through several years worth of accumulated pony requests figuring out which ones are worth advocating for. I’m also ensuring I have the code to back them up—my innocent AutoEscaping proposal a few years ago resulted in an enormous amount of work by Malcolm and I don’t think he’d appreciate a repeat performance.
[... 1,674 words]In defense of web developers. Zeldman: “The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day.”
[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for. Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup. Whether or not you like the proposal itself the explanation is a fascinating read.
We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used, and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant to write rel="" but wrote rev="". To be precise, the most commonly used value was rev="made", which is equivalent to rel="author" and thus was not a convincing use case. The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".
OWASP: XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet. Comprehensive set of rules for avoiding XSS—there’s a bit more to it than just escaping all output variables, since you have to take markup context in to account.
2008
CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS. Nat has published the slides and notes from her BarCamp presentation this morning. I’m really excited about her approach, which involves designing a “CSS system” of markup patterns and CSS that embodies the design of an individual site. Future maintenance can then take this overall system in to account, which is assisted by a defined ordering system and shared vocabulary.
2007
I've been in this web standards game for five years now and probably have over 100 standards-based sites under my belt. I can count the number of times I've be involved in a redesign where no changes were made to the markup on one finger.
2002
YAML
I forget quite how I got there, but the other day I found myself reading about YAML—YAML Ain’t Markup Language. It looks really interesting. YAML aims to be an easily human readable format for storing and transferring structured data—so far, so XML. Where it differs from the IT world’s favourite buzzword is that YAML is specifically designed to handle the three most common data structures—scalars (single values), lists and dictionaries. Here’s a sample (taken from the official specification):
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