Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 January 29

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January 29[edit]

How to find out whole SEO website report?[edit]

Hi, I am anayka and i am seo i want to how we can get whole seo report of any one website . Which is helping me to find out my working strategy for working next to ranking up my web site rank in search engine.

By anaya, — Preceding unsigned comment added by 27.109.11.70 (talk) 07:51, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed the link to your web site, as this is not the place to advertise it. Have you read our article on Search engine optimization? That describes several ways to improve your ranking. Also just googling the term will return several links to advice on how to do so. Rojomoke (talk) 09:30, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Can you know absolutely everything about html?[edit]

Can you reach a point where you know absolutely everything about html? Or, are there still fringe cases where things break down in unexpected ways?--Scicurious (talk) 15:35, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Even expert programmers still use the reference material! HTML relates to a quite extensive body of technologies, and it's fairly small by comparison to other technologies! Here's a link to the official HTML / CSS Standardization website, managed by the World Wide Web Consortium. To the extent that HTML behaves in a standard way, that site is the authoritative place to get information. One theme that recurs through web design is the constant effort required to deal with non-standard behaviors and extensions. For every great programmer who complies with the standards, there are many more "elite hackers" who have found clever and horrible tricks to do non-standard things with HTML: so the great cat-and-mouse game continues. The worst part is, some of these "clever enhancements" are built into major web browsers. Thus, web page authors have to work extra hard to make sure behaviors are correct across a wide diversity of user-platforms.
It is worth saying that if the depth of your knowledge about HTML only includes a knowledge of the markup language rules, then you are categorically excluding knowledge about network transactions, web servers, scripting languages, rendering engines, data security, and the like. Furthermore, HTML exists in contexts far beyond the application to web pages delivered via internet... again, if you want to know everything that has any peripheral relation to HTML, you'll need to spend a long time studying a diverse range of related technologies.
Generally, we can broadly categorize this expertise by hierarchically arranging technologies, e.g. using the OSI model. HTML is usually grouped as a "presentation layer" technology.
Nimur (talk) 16:03, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It would be very surprising if the standard were sufficiently watertight that there were no unspecified cases. But even if the standard was completely and perfectly specified, in practice, it's unlikely that every browser programmer will have understood and implemented those specifications perfectly - so if you are determined to push the envelope, you'll very soon find that browser differences start to show up. The difficulty is that specifications are written in English - which is full of ambiguity and vagueness - so there is no way to test a particular implementation to verify that it meets the specification. Some standards (OpenGL comes to mind) include a supposedly comprehensive test suite - with the presumption that providing your implementation passes those tests, it's compliant with the standard. But gaps in the test suite leave ambiguity in the system. Another approach is to provide a "reference implementation" (MP3 does this) - and in cases of ambiguity in the English description, you can run your test case against the reference and whatever it does is "the right thing". But HTML has neither a comprehensive test suite, nor a reference implementation - so basically, it's down to hoping that there is no ambiguity in the English description...which there probably is. SteveBaker (talk) 16:51, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
There are subtle diffs in how HTML behaves on different platforms (and the version of O/S), as well as some things not being supported at all on some platforms. StuRat (talk) 17:46, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Review this, could be helpful... -- Mr. Zoot Cig Bunner (talk) 19:42, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree with a theme through these answers. HTML is HTML. It is independent of a platform or browser or network capability... HTML is just text in a text file. It doesn't "behave" in any way. The HTML renderer will behave in a certain way when it parses HTML. So, the answers here are answering: "Is it possible to know everything about every HTML renderer?" That is a completely different question than: "Is it possible to know everything about HTML?" - limiting this to just knowledge of the tags and all attributes for those tags, ignoring how they might be rendered. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 20:01, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
But, your observation is not accurate: for example, the HTML 5 standard explicitly specifies "Common Infrastructure" and prescribes a recommended, standardized rendering scheme. Of course, those standarizations are couched in very careful language defining how HTML user-agents "must" behave: "User agents are not required to present HTML documents in any particular way." Even still, these peripheral technologies that pertain to HTML are still documented as part of the standard. HTML is not just text - it is a semantic language, and also encompasses many ways for humans and machines to use and interact with that language. Nimur (talk) 16:35, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The documentation does suggest appropriate rendering. It is possible (but not likely) that someone could memorize that document. So, answering the question would be: "Yes. It is possible to know everything about HTML." However, the answers above claim that any way in which anyone in the world might decide to render HTML is intrinsically part of HTML itself. If you go with that definition of "HTML", then the answer has to be: "No. It is not possible to know everything about HTML because it is nobody knows of every single renderer implementation that currently exists and will exist in the future." So, in my opinion, it comes down to a pointless semantic argument. 47.49.128.58 (talk) 18:54, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Our question is in two parts:
  • Can you reach a point where you know absolutely everything about html?
  • Or, are there still fringe cases where things break down in unexpected ways?
Clearly it's possible to memorize the HTML specification(s) - and I'm quite sure that there are plenty of people who know it well enough (albeit without memorizing it verbatim) to be able to know what it says on any given point. But that's not what we're being asked...the question is more about whether knowing the entire specification is sufficient to be able to predict how a document should appear when rendered. I don't believe that's the case - and per our OP's second question - I'm quite sure that there is sufficient ambiguity in the specification that there are cases where the resulting rendering is subject to interpretation of the rules by each browser author....where the differences in appearance are not the result of bugs, extensions or omissions in the implementation and are not in the permitted range of variation laid out in the spec. SteveBaker (talk) 17:25, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt that anyone can know everything about something like that these days. Back in the 1970s I believe I knew everything about Fortran IV and everything that was documented about CDC's extensions. But then when Fortran 77 came out and CDC changed their extensions, I never learned it all about either of those. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 06:09, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]