Top all-time · #1598
Anne’s Blog
Personal blog · annevankesteren.nlwebprogramming
Anne’s Blog is a personal blog at annevankesteren.nl about web and programming. Since 2008, 45 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “W3C forks HTML yet again”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Anne van Kesteren's blog covers web standards, browser behaviour, WHATWG and W3C history, XML and XHTML, HTTP and CORS. HN readers link it as a reference on those topics.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says they religiously followed everything the author wrote and used his XHTML-serving snippet, calling him a teenage hero.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- W3C forks HTML yet again5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-21
- /2007/10/xml54 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-03-11
- Fetch Standard 1012 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-07-21
- Faster DOM2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-25
- /2007/10/http-method-support2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-29
- Custom elements no longer contentious2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-08
- Undue base URL influence (2024)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-08
- Same-origin policy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-24
- Update on standardizing shadow DOM and custom elements2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-07-28
What Hacker News says?
But XSLT is not strictly required for styling. In fact, Firefox also supports an out-of-band stylesheet inclusion via the `Link` HTTP header [1]: Link: </style.css>; rel=stylesheet (Yes, this works even without <?xml-stylesheet?> PI others have mentioned.) I think the best strategy for Google is to support this and simultaneously ditch XSLT. This way nothing is truly lost. [1] You can test your browser from: https:/…
Comment linking /test/html-element/style-header.php
on “XSLT RIP”Submitted Faster DOM as a story · 133 points
HN discussionA number of folks involved in WHATWG work bought into the XML vision initially, but reality has a strong text/html bias and we've been able to adjust views as experience has accimulated. See https://annevankesteren.nl/2011/02/xml-tired (Personally, the first time I managed to get funding to work on a Web engine was to make Gecko's XHTML-as-XML support better. At the time, I thought it was so important that I sought…
Comment linking /2011/02/xml-tired
on “Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec”Submitted DOM: attributes sadness as a story · 52 points
HN discussionSome history here: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG#History - https://annevankesteren.nl/2011/02/html-development - https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film-at-11 - https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/when-standards-divide/ Differences between the W3C HTML 5.2 spec and the WHATWG Living Spec: https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/W3C-WHATWG-Differences
Comment linking /2016/01/film-at-11
on “Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec”Submitted Live stylesheet editing as a story · 31 points
HN discussionThe browser must not know the content (or the hash of the content) of files on your intranet (or any other domain that is not the one you are visiting right now.) See https://annevankesteren.nl/2015/02/same-origin-policy and http://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/subresourceintegrity/#c...
Comment linking /2015/02/same-origin-policy
on “Do not let your CDN betray you: Use Subresource Integrity”Submitted W3C forks HTML yet again as a story · 23 points
HN discussionhttp://annevankesteren.nl/2010/09/draft-vs-standard
Comment linking /2010/09/draft-vs-standard
on “Swift Has Reached 1.0”Submitted Firefox OS is not helping the web as a story · 19 points
HN discussionHardly open. It'd be like if Google rewrote the Gmail frontend to native dart and then just blamed the other browsers for not having a native Dart VM. Dart is even standardized (by ECMA), unlike HLS which isn't standardized. Relevant: http://annevankesteren.nl/2010/09/draft-vs-standard
Comment linking /2010/09/draft-vs-standard
on “Swift Has Reached 1.0”Submitted Undue base URL influence (2024) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHi there, one of the WHATWG HTML editors here. > Meanwhile, W3C HTML5 has defined releases that are thoroughly scrutinized, reviewed, and debated in endless committee meetings. While this was true in the past, these days it's not really the case. They mostly just copy and paste our work without scrutinizing it, and usually without understanding it (as can be seen by the bugs they introduce during the copy-and-paste…
Comment linking /2016/01/film-at-11
on “HTML 5.1 is a W3C Recommendation”Submitted Using SSH securely as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAh, the times when I was always trying to serve my site in the strictest way possible. I religiously followed everything Anne van Kesteren [0] wrote, and used his code-snippet [1] to serve application/xhtml+xml to browsers that supported it. He was my same-aged teenage hero :) [0]: https://annevankesteren.nl/ [1]: https://annevankesteren.nl/2003/09/send-applicationxhtmlxml
Comment linking /2003/09/send-applicationxhtmlxml
on “HTML comments work in JavaScript too”Submitted URI Design (2004) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionXHTML was too rigid - as a user agent it should try to render a document, rather than tell the user: "tough, the developer screwed up". So XHTML lost to the much more forgiving HTML. There was an idea to make a forgiving XML for web use cases: https://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/xml5 but it never got traction.
Comment linking /2007/10/xml5
on “Should the web platform adopt XSLT 3.0?”Submitted Fetch Standard 101 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's two questions here: 1. Does it work (i.e. trigger standards mode) in all browsers 2. Does it specifically identify content as HTML5 (as opposed to 6) i.e. versioning For 1, html5 puts versions of Firefox into quirks mode so it's no go. For 2, versioning HTML5, I'm going to take a handy shortcut and assume that if Microsoft supports something it's probably bad for the internet. There's a comment from Hixie he…
Comment linking /2005/07/html5-doctype
on “What does HTML5 mean for us?”Submitted Making the DOM Faster – Anne’s Blog as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes. Most browsers support all of the HTTP methods via the XmlHttpRequest object. http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/http-method-support
Comment linking /2007/10/http-method-support
on “Complete Noobs Guide to Hacking Nginx”Submitted HTML components as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's actually possible to do away with the HTML altogether (or rather have a 0-byte HTML file) by using the Link HTTP header to specify the stylesheet - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/styles.html#h-14.6 There was a fun demo that showed exactly this, but I can't seem to find it now. This page - http://annevankesteren.nl/test/html-element/style-header.php - uses Link header but also uses some HTML. [edit - fixed…
Comment linking /test/html-element/style-header.php
on “No HTML needed”Submitted W3C Forks HTML Yet Again as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Firefox doesn't natively support web components FWIW, that's because there hasn't been a reasonably stable, agreed upon collection of specs for us to implement. Custom Element only reached multi-vendor agreement a few months ago ( https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/02/custom-elements-no-longer... ). Polymer is a useful library, but it only represents a single vendor's vision, not any sort of standardized specificatio…
Comment linking /2016/02/custom-elements-no-longer-contentious
on “Ask HN: What are the cons of Google Polymer?”Submitted Same-origin policy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm guessing it's yet another hostile fork: https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film-at-11 As far as I understand, they (the W3C) do this every few months in an attempt to wrest defacto control of HTML back from WHATWG. They copy the WHATWG spec, strip out the licensing and authorship information, and publish as "their" HTML spec. Then a few months passes, their copy falls behind the actively edited WHATWG one, so th…
Comment linking /2016/01/film-at-11
on “Working on HTML5.1”Submitted Unicode Normalization (2009) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Hm, that's strange. I'm pretty sure XML5 killed DTD outright, other than having a doctype definition. Perhaps the spec was outdated a bit. I'm just going by what is at https://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/xml5 which gives the impression that <!ENTITY> declarations are still allowed.
Comment linking /2007/10/xml5
on “The Goals of XML at 25: and the one change that XML now needs”Submitted Improving the DOM, Anne van Kesteren as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
