I really want one of these:

Mozilla Firefox may only be a pre-release version, but it’s already making inroads, at least in blogging circles:

Anyway, the presenter was doing his pitch in a polished way and at one point he said he wanted to show us a "really cool" feature and he looked up into the audience and said "Show of hands…How many of you use Internet Explorer?". Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we’d fix IE so you could use it?"

Still no hands….

Yes, I know that’s not indicative of the general public, but still, that’s pretty funny.

The W3C have released an FAQ for XHTML, and the 6^th working draft of the new XHTML2 specification. [via Slashdot]

There’s not a lot of new stuff in the FAQ, mostly just answering criticisms and legacy questions about implementing XHTML, but one question was interesting: Is <img> being replaced by <object> in XHTML2?.

No. <img> is being replaced in XHTML2, but by something else (although you could use <object> if you wanted).

The design of <img> has many problems in HTML:

• It has no fallback possibilities, so that if you use an image of type PNG for instance, and the browser can’t handle that type, the only alternative is to use the alt text. This fact has hampered the adoption of PNG images, which in many ways are better than GIF and JPG, since people have continued to use the lowest-common denominator format, to ensure that everyone can see the images.
• The alt text cannot be marked up, so that if it gets used, you just get the plain text.
• It is possible to include a longdesc link to a description of the image, to help people who cannot see, but it is seldom implemented.

What XHTML2 does is say that all images are equivalent to some piece of content; it does this by allowing you to put a src attribute on any element at all. What this says is: if the image is available, and the browser can process it, use it, otherwise use the content of the element. For instance:
<p src="/map.png">Exit from the station, turn left, go straight on to <strong>High Street</strong>, and turn right</p>

…

(The rest of the answer has to do with having fall-back images and using content negotiation.)

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