Slashdot Mirror

_Sharp'r_ writes "This new security audit from Texas is an example of why the solution to medical privacy isn't to store it all in a big government database. The report describes a myriad of problems with state health and welfare agency's information security. Some of the problems cited include lack of firewalls, wide open wireless access points and all the other "usual suspects" that we've come to expect from a government security solution. The network is especially vulnerable to internal misuse, according to the report. For example, 'poor access controls' allowed a Department of Health customer service employee to create 74 fraudulent birth certificates. The report found that many of the agencies' nearly 50,000 workers have access to "tremendous amounts of decentralized, confidential data." You can also access an html formatted version of the full report."

Reeses writes "Adobe has asked a U.S. District court to allow them to embed ITC and Monotpye fonts in their documents, claiming "Adobe has asked the court to declare that Adobe's popular Acrobat product does not violate certain provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as claimed by ITC and Agfa Monotype." Which is interesting after the Skylarov/Elcomsoft debacle from a year or so ago. I guess they figured that it didn't apply to them since they enforced it."

Reeses writes "Adobe has asked a U.S. District court to allow them to embed ITC and Monotpye fonts in their documents, claiming "Adobe has asked the court to declare that Adobe's popular Acrobat product does not violate certain provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as claimed by ITC and Agfa Monotype." Which is interesting after the Skylarov/Elcomsoft debacle from a year or so ago. I guess they figured that it didn't apply to them since they enforced it."

Ogerman writes "At long last, Heroine Virtual's Cinelerra 1.0 has been released. This successor to the discontinued Broadcast 2000 project is absolutely amazing and should give Adobe Premiere and others a run for their money as it continues to mature. So, fire up those digital camcorders, get to work on all your latent indie-film ideas, and help put ol' Jack V. out of a job. Here's the 1.0 Press Release." For those unfamiliar with Cinelerra, check out the screen shots.

bugninja writes "According to an article at News.com, Adobe wins 2.8M from Macromedia today for using some patented interface stuff in Flash. But this isn't the end, further legal battles could require that Flash be removed from Macromedia's list of "products for sale". We may not all be Flash lovers, but is it right to take a good product away from so many people who really do like it just because another company's product isn't taking over the market like they hoped it would?" Update: 05/03 13:29 GMT by J : Speaking of Flash, yesterday eEye discovered a very serious security hole in the version of Flash distributed with most copies of Windows. Go download the fixed release.

tal-home writes "Newsforge has a story about the decision Dreamworks made to port ALL of their front-end servers and workstations to Linux. Their new movie, called 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' which will hit the theaters in late May, was created in a 100% Linux enviroment, unlike older movies like Shrek and Lord of the Rings that used IRIX servers as a rendering farm. It's a good time to mention that this move by DreamWorks also includes porting the artists workstations to Linux, in addition to the servers. Redhat and HP helped out in the switch." Word has it that Adobe may be pursuing unix versions of it's toolset as DreamWorks isn't the only shop switching.

Max Groff writes "This brief ZDNet article (printer-friendly version) describes how Adobe is considering leaving its Asian markets due to the apparently high levels of piracy across the Pacific. This change would not only cut off the marketing of Adobe products to Asian markets, but also halt the development of much of the company's Asian-language software."

As promised chrisd back with his report from the expo floor at MacWorld and a brief note about what Linux can learn from the Macintosh. Walking the show floor at MacWorld, I'm beginning to feel a little sorry for people who are Windows boosters. Where do they go for their community? The Mac folks have MacWorld and WWDC, we have LinuxWorld, O'Reilly and Usenix, but they have what? Comdex? There is no MicrosoftWorld. Whether this is a result of their size or what, I couldn't tell you. But there is a similar feel that the "Linux Faithful" and "Apple Faithful" share and that is that we are clearly part of a user and developer community.

Yesterday, I reported on the Jobs keynote and his ability to expand his reality field to encompass and entire ballroom. Today, do people still feel energized by his talk? Some were still pumped just to a part of the show, gasping and oo'ing and enjoying the melodrama of it all, but the next day there was a collective vibe of "well, was that it?". This is not to say that they were disappointed by it, but they perhaps wanted something more. The rumors had been flying for months about a flat screen iMac, and since that was what Apple brought forward, it was going to been seen as an evolutional, and thus anti-climactic, step, even if it was daringly packaged.

Many noted that they were expecting a speed bump for the G4 towers, but with Seybold coming up in February, many expect Apple to announce their tower update then to a more professional audience.

At the Tuesday keynote "The Power of X", Phil Shiller and Avie Tevanian talked about OS X and what it means to apple and to the future of the Macintosh platform. Apple is stressing how stable and crash proof OS X is and what this can means to the "Apple Faithful". They discussed the kernel, the media layers, security and the user interface and how it all works together. What they've done with their BSD derived core is really impressive. As part of the keynote, Tweak Films showed off an OS X based deep ocean wave visualization app that they assert they ported from Unix in weeks, with significant functionality gains.

The show floor itself was bouncy fun. For me it was a nice change from the austerity of a Linux exposition and it's focus on sheer functionality, capability and commerce. Large exhibitors included Alias|WaveFront, Adobe (not having anyone at this conference arrested, I noted), FileMaker pro, Microsoft and a number of other software development houses. As I walked the floor, I made a mental note of applications that were available for both Windows and the Macintosh. The reality is that there isn't much that is specifically for the Mac intosh, with the obvious exception of the hardware from apple, with all the vendors one ends up asking, what is unique here?

What Apple has that is unique, and sadly Windows and Linux both lack, is cohesion. Everyone with devices and software for the Mac seem to work so well with each other and the OS. We should strive to emulate that cohesion whenever practical for open source software. Before, the apple story was cohesion without stability or power. Now, with BSD at it's core, you can bet that Apple will be able to attack Windows, SUN and Linux on the power front. A year from now it will be interesting to see how many people are running apache to serve pages from their Apple machines, and I will be unsurprised if someone is giving an apache serving presentation at the next Apple WWDC.

Please note that I have posted some pictures of my trip to MacWorld, with some pictures of the new iMac and of the keynote.

ghost_crab asks: "After finally getting the guts to fdisk all my M$ problems away, I find myself happier and less stressed. Now all I want for Christmas is a good, solid Flash editor, a la Macromedia's Flash, or even Adobe's Live Motion, neither of which run well with WINE. I have queried both companies for projected *nix releases, and both have instead emphatically supported the EvilEmpire. A search with Google and of SourceForge gives one little hope. Is anyone working on Flash for Linux? Open Source or Not - I would be thrilled to pay for a good Flash Editor. Is there hope for those of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach Windows for even one more day?" Is there anyone out there working on replacements for the plugins that are only available for Windows?

Flash support on Linux has always been questionable for me. I can get it to work in Netscape Communicator. Mozilla doesn't seem to want to recognize the plugin and Konqueror? Well, Konqueror just locks up hard when it encounters Flash content...either that or it throws up lots of windows when it tries to go to Macromedia's site, which bothers me to no end. Unless other OSes gain access to richer-than-HTML-content, their users will slowly find themselves left behind in a web that's becoming more and more centered on Win32-only content, which would not be a good thing.

RickMuller asks: "I'm interested in molecular graphics, a field entirely dominated by OpenGL. I would love to see something more web-friendly come along. I've worked with VRML and Java3D, and have been very puzzled why these technologies didn't become ubiquitous. Now there are new 3D efforts by Adobe and Macromedia (the Adobe Atmosphere download is available as a beta-download and is way cool!). The press is heralding this as the 3D web revolution. Why should these technologies succeed when VRML or Java3D failed?"

RickMuller asks: "I'm interested in molecular graphics, a field entirely dominated by OpenGL. I would love to see something more web-friendly come along. I've worked with VRML and Java3D, and have been very puzzled why these technologies didn't become ubiquitous. Now there are new 3D efforts by Adobe and Macromedia (the Adobe Atmosphere download is available as a beta-download and is way cool!). The press is heralding this as the 3D web revolution. Why should these technologies succeed when VRML or Java3D failed?"

Stef Hoesli writes: "Adobe, who gave us a smoothly working beta version for Linux of their fine word processor, will not release FrameMaker commercially on Linux. They sent out an e-mail to beta testers with the sad news. "

aibrahim asks: " I recently found out about W3C Specification for Scalable Vector Graphics from the Adobe SVG site. So I was looking around for programs that would allow me to work with SVG on Linux, or any OSS system for that matter. Adobe plans on making almost their entire product line work with SVG, including Photoshop. Corel has released an SVG Filter. Yet, I couldn't find a single product with a Freshmeat search that mentions SVG. Looking on SourceForge reveals two projects: Gill and Savage. Neither of these projects have posted any files as of 9/2/2000. Are there any free software projects with a usable SVG product? Can anyone comment on when any such project may come to fruition? Lastly, since Adobe is including SVG features in Photoshop has anyone even mentioned it to the GIMP ^[?] develeopers?"

Spoing dropped this bit of informative info into the bin: "Last week, a friend of mine griped that he didn't know of an easy way -- short of getting Adobe Capture and paying per-use licence fees -- of creating searchable PDFs. I scoffed, and told him I've done it many times, and it was free -- as in beer and speech. Dumbfounded, he pushed me to show him how, and I did; print to a Postscript file, and run ps2pdf on it...done! Since every document could be output as Postscript, his problem was solved. If he wanted to batch process the documents, he could set up a few scripts to simplify the task. While he was impressed, he ended up asking what seemed like an easy question; 'Can you do the same with a scanned image?'" And therein lies the question...

"After a week of on/off searching, I did find some good references as well as nearly all the parts necessary for the job, including open source OCR engines, PDF and Postscript tools, search engines, and the like.

Unfortunately, I came up with only two solutions -- neither of them Open Source, and most quite costly (premium beer); Adobe Capture or dedicated "PDF scanners" like this one.

My question to the Slashdot crowd is this:

1. Is there a cost-effective way of moving existing dead-tree documents into either HTML, PDF, or other searchable mixed text and graphics format?

We all deal with a mix of electronic and printed documents -- and you're like me you've paid for some of them in both formats.

If you're like me, you buy new documents in electronic, searchable, format when you can. How many of us have O'Reilly's Networking Bookshelf, or some other CD texts ready to search on our notebooks and networks?

Yet, I have a four foot wide stack of technical documents and books that just isn't going to come with me on each plane trip. I'm not going to get rid of them -- they are still valuable -- but I can't figure out how to make them useful more often.

The available tools for capturing paper and converting it into searchable PDFs is costly, and is geared toward corporations that can justify the costs by the number of users. To me, a per-use licence of Adobe's Capture --

1. Adobe Capture - Prices

   Adobe Capture - Features

-- is just not cost effective.

If the document is already a text document -- even if it's in some word processor I don't use -- generating PDF files is easy and cheap;

Print a document to a Postscript file, or create one. For example a simple text document is trivial;

1. enscript file.txt -p file.ps

Convert the resulting Postscript file to PDF;

1. ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Converting a paper document to PDF is also easy. Just scan the image and use tiff2ps or jpeg2ps to create the Post script file. The only problem is that the resulting PDF is a bitmap image and isn't searchable.

Interestingly enough, TIFF -- a format used extensively for scanned documents -- does support TIFF+Text, but usually as an extention to TIFF and isn't really an optimal format; The Unofficial TIFF Home Page.

So, if you want to search the documents and keep the formatting and diagrams, you're back to paying Adobe for Capture or some other nearly as expensive method. "

Spoing dropped this bit of informative info into the bin: "Last week, a friend of mine griped that he didn't know of an easy way -- short of getting Adobe Capture and paying per-use licence fees -- of creating searchable PDFs. I scoffed, and told him I've done it many times, and it was free -- as in beer and speech. Dumbfounded, he pushed me to show him how, and I did; print to a Postscript file, and run ps2pdf on it...done! Since every document could be output as Postscript, his problem was solved. If he wanted to batch process the documents, he could set up a few scripts to simplify the task. While he was impressed, he ended up asking what seemed like an easy question; 'Can you do the same with a scanned image?'" And therein lies the question...

"After a week of on/off searching, I did find some good references as well as nearly all the parts necessary for the job, including open source OCR engines, PDF and Postscript tools, search engines, and the like.

Unfortunately, I came up with only two solutions -- neither of them Open Source, and most quite costly (premium beer); Adobe Capture or dedicated "PDF scanners" like this one.

My question to the Slashdot crowd is this:

1. Is there a cost-effective way of moving existing dead-tree documents into either HTML, PDF, or other searchable mixed text and graphics format?

We all deal with a mix of electronic and printed documents -- and you're like me you've paid for some of them in both formats.

If you're like me, you buy new documents in electronic, searchable, format when you can. How many of us have O'Reilly's Networking Bookshelf, or some other CD texts ready to search on our notebooks and networks?

Yet, I have a four foot wide stack of technical documents and books that just isn't going to come with me on each plane trip. I'm not going to get rid of them -- they are still valuable -- but I can't figure out how to make them useful more often.

The available tools for capturing paper and converting it into searchable PDFs is costly, and is geared toward corporations that can justify the costs by the number of users. To me, a per-use licence of Adobe's Capture --

1. Adobe Capture - Prices

   Adobe Capture - Features

-- is just not cost effective.

If the document is already a text document -- even if it's in some word processor I don't use -- generating PDF files is easy and cheap;

Print a document to a Postscript file, or create one. For example a simple text document is trivial;

1. enscript file.txt -p file.ps

Convert the resulting Postscript file to PDF;

1. ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Converting a paper document to PDF is also easy. Just scan the image and use tiff2ps or jpeg2ps to create the Post script file. The only problem is that the resulting PDF is a bitmap image and isn't searchable.

Interestingly enough, TIFF -- a format used extensively for scanned documents -- does support TIFF+Text, but usually as an extention to TIFF and isn't really an optimal format; The Unofficial TIFF Home Page.

So, if you want to search the documents and keep the formatting and diagrams, you're back to paying Adobe for Capture or some other nearly as expensive method. "

Spoing dropped this bit of informative info into the bin: "Last week, a friend of mine griped that he didn't know of an easy way -- short of getting Adobe Capture and paying per-use licence fees -- of creating searchable PDFs. I scoffed, and told him I've done it many times, and it was free -- as in beer and speech. Dumbfounded, he pushed me to show him how, and I did; print to a Postscript file, and run ps2pdf on it...done! Since every document could be output as Postscript, his problem was solved. If he wanted to batch process the documents, he could set up a few scripts to simplify the task. While he was impressed, he ended up asking what seemed like an easy question; 'Can you do the same with a scanned image?'" And therein lies the question...

"After a week of on/off searching, I did find some good references as well as nearly all the parts necessary for the job, including open source OCR engines, PDF and Postscript tools, search engines, and the like.

Unfortunately, I came up with only two solutions -- neither of them Open Source, and most quite costly (premium beer); Adobe Capture or dedicated "PDF scanners" like this one.

My question to the Slashdot crowd is this:

1. Is there a cost-effective way of moving existing dead-tree documents into either HTML, PDF, or other searchable mixed text and graphics format?

We all deal with a mix of electronic and printed documents -- and you're like me you've paid for some of them in both formats.

If you're like me, you buy new documents in electronic, searchable, format when you can. How many of us have O'Reilly's Networking Bookshelf, or some other CD texts ready to search on our notebooks and networks?

Yet, I have a four foot wide stack of technical documents and books that just isn't going to come with me on each plane trip. I'm not going to get rid of them -- they are still valuable -- but I can't figure out how to make them useful more often.

The available tools for capturing paper and converting it into searchable PDFs is costly, and is geared toward corporations that can justify the costs by the number of users. To me, a per-use licence of Adobe's Capture --

1. Adobe Capture - Prices

   Adobe Capture - Features

-- is just not cost effective.

If the document is already a text document -- even if it's in some word processor I don't use -- generating PDF files is easy and cheap;

Print a document to a Postscript file, or create one. For example a simple text document is trivial;

1. enscript file.txt -p file.ps

Convert the resulting Postscript file to PDF;

1. ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Converting a paper document to PDF is also easy. Just scan the image and use tiff2ps or jpeg2ps to create the Post script file. The only problem is that the resulting PDF is a bitmap image and isn't searchable.

Interestingly enough, TIFF -- a format used extensively for scanned documents -- does support TIFF+Text, but usually as an extention to TIFF and isn't really an optimal format; The Unofficial TIFF Home Page.

So, if you want to search the documents and keep the formatting and diagrams, you're back to paying Adobe for Capture or some other nearly as expensive method. "

petard writes: "Law.com ran this article on how Adobe is suing MacNN over an article which appeared on AppleInsider with detailed information on and screenshots of Photoshop 6, currently in (non-public) beta. Could this be bad news for other rumor sites, and possibly even sites like Slashdot? Hope MacNN wins ..."

When you "purchase" software, what do you get? Increasingly, the answer is: nothing. Nothing tangible; no rights; and no resale value. This rant is spurred by Microsoft's changes to its distribution policy for all future editions of Windows. No longer will you receive a CD which is capable of installing the operating system with your new computer - Original Equipment Manufacturers are forbidden to ship you one, even though you just paid ~$100 for the software, and even though the change makes customers less than happy. Meanwhile, Adobe's chairman has the gall to tell us it's our own fault. I take a look at the future of software licensing.

MS's most recent abuses of its customers are just the latest in a series of increasing restrictions. OEM's are no longer permitted to include full-capability Windows disks with new machines - instead, what you'll get is either a disk image on your hard drive or an image on a "recovery CD". The "recovery CD" must be crippled so that it won't run on any hardware except that specific machine.

So what you bought is either some extra bits on your hard drive (sure hope you didn't want to use the full capacity of the drive; sure hope your disk doesn't fail) or a nearly-useless CD which is solely capable of restoring your PC to its original state - you'll have to backup and restore all of your data, reinstall all other software, re-change all settings you've customized, etc., if you ever use that CD. But you're a Microsoft customer [motto: "Your time isn't worth a bucket of warm spit to us"], so get used to it.

If you did something foolish, like swap in a new hard drive, or a new motherboard, well, I'm sorry, but you've lost any ability to restore your Microsoft operating system. And naturally, of course, you won't be able to copy it to another computer - even if you delete it from the first one. You can't sell it, you can't lend it, hell, you can barely use it yourself. Office 2000 with its forced registration procedure is much the same, and we're now getting submissions about this from people who didn't catch stories last year about it. Office 2000 binds itself to your system with the registration in exactly the same way as the "Recovery" CDs must be bound by the OEM to the system they ship.

The main effect of this will be to eliminate the concept of "used software". Software vendors like this; they can sell more retail copies if there's no aftermarket.

Generally, copyrighted works are governed by what is known as the "first sale" doctrine. This means that once the copyright owner has sold the item the first time, they lose all control over it - it can be resold without limitation. This matter originally came up when a book publisher was trying to prevent Macy's from selling books at a discount price. Essentially, the publisher (Scribner and Sons, still in business today) had a nice scheme going where it set "minimum" prices for its books. In fact, the scheme is practically identical to the scheme that music publishers have going today, and that software publishers like Microsoft are now moving to.

A brief quote from one of the cases:

The appellant is the owner of the copyright upon 'The Castaway,' obtained on the 18th day of May, 1904, in conformity to the copyright statutes of the United States. Printed immediately below the copyright notice, on the page in the book following the title page, is inserted the following notice:

The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright.

The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "That sounds just like a shrinkwrap license on software! Or it sounds like what the giants of the music industry [Sony, Time-Warner, MCA, Polygram, Bertelsmann and EMI Music] do with their 'Minimum Advertised Price' policies, which has resulted in a class-action suit and an ongoing FTC investigation!" Am I right?

So how did the Court look at this particular issue?

What does the statute mean in granting 'the sole right of vending the same?' Was it intended to create a right which would permit the holder of the copyright to fasten, by notice [210 U.S. 339, 350] in a book or upon one of the articles mentioned within the statute, a restriction upon the subsequent alienation [transfer of property] of the subject-matter of copyright after the owner had parted with the title to one who had acquired full dominion over it and had given a satisfactory price for it? It is not denied that one who has sold a copyrighted article, without restriction, has parted with all right to control the sale of it. The purchaser of a book, once sold by authority of the owner of the copyright, may sell it again, although he could not publish a new edition of it.

Software publishers have this in mind. So they don't actually "sell" anything at all. If you make a contract to license something, the terms can be anything that a court doesn't regard as "unconscionable" - whatever the other party demands. So in fact copyright has almost nothing to do with the "sale" of commercial software products - companies could just as easily license to you software written by, say, the Federal Government (which would be in the public domain) They don't need copyright at all, since the contract alone is sufficient to bind your permitted activities, if the courts say a binding contract has been created.

The idea here is to get away from copyright, because copyright has all those nasty exceptions carved out by the legal system such as the "first sale" doctrine. But if you license something rather than sell it... and if you can cripple it with technology so that regardless of what the law says, the product can't be resold... ahhh, then you're in business!

Why have courts permitted software licensing to usurp copyright? Why do book-title-page-licenses not bind you but back-of-a-software-box-licenses do? Why doesn't the purchase of a copyrighted piece of software entitle you to do just about anything with it except sell copies, just like the purchase of a book does? It's a long story, but basically, I think it's because the first cases to hit the court system looked a lot like standard corporate contract disputes rather than mass-market sales. Individuals have only started purchasing software at retail within the last ten years or so. And now that people have caught on that this is a Bad Thing, we get laws like UCITA, designed to expressly legitimize these sorts of licenses. Remember that UCITA applies to software-hardware combinations as well, so your next PC might have a license agreement applying to the hardware.

But back to what started this rant. Microsoft's licensing. Microsoft has wanted for some years to move to a rental system, where not only do you not actually purchase anything for them, you get to pay for nothing every year. (In fact, they delayed the announcement of it so it wouldn't overlap with the anti-trust decision - might look bad to be simultaneously losing an anti-trust suit and announcing how you were going to get millions of people to rent software from you.) That way they can extract truly maximal profits from their operating system - raise the rents when it seems appropriate, cut sweetheart rental deals with some companies and viciously expensive ones with others, depending on whether or not you testified for the DOJ...

Microsoft has a couple of goals here, you see. Getting shrinkwrap licenses validated by the legal system allows them to control pricing in much the same manner as Scribner and Sons' attempt at book-wrap licensing. And building protective technological measures into their software, such as the OEM system-lock for the operating system or Office 2000's single-system registration procedure, allows them to get around the first sale doctrine - you could sell the item, copyright law says you can, but you can't sell it, because the software won't work for anyone else.

At a minimum, you could donate it to a charity or school when you're no longer using it and get a tax break. But that Windows 2000 Recovery CD or an already-registered Office 2000 CD are just coasters. Microsoft, of course, can cheerfully continue to donate software licenses and take tax write-offs for the full retail price of the software, a strategy which saves them hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes every year at a cost to them of approximately zero. And don't you dare to try to circumvent those controls in order to exercise your legal right to resell the software - that's a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I doubt you want to spend five years in prison.

In a non-monopoly marketplace, the fact these two products are worth a lot less to you than their predecessors would force a reduction in price. Instead, Microsoft raised the prices on both. Lawyers have considered the interplay of contract, copyright, and technological restrictions - here's a paper, here's another - but the time is long past for this issue to be considered by the public.

And that's why the threats of Adobe chairman Warnock are the last straw. Microsoft and all the other familiar names in commercial software have been increasing their restrictions for years. It doesn't have anything to do with piracy; we're

"...going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. [We're] going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."

regardless of what the fictitious figures of the Business Software Alliance say about copyright infringement. Listen to what Warnock is saying: if only we evil customers didn't make copies of software, Microsoft wouldn't force computer manufacturers to cripple the Windows installed on their machines. Yeah, right. Tell me another one, John.

But Warnock is absolutely right: it's a failure of the general population that is responsible for this licensing mess we're in. The failure is: insufficient regulation of the software industry.

If you buy a car, you are almost certainly protected by state "lemon laws". They were enacted to prevent the abuses that were extremely common, and so you acquired certain minimum rights in the purchase transaction which cannot be waived: if the car breaks down all the time, you can return it and get a refund plus your expenses paid. No matter what the sales contract says. Similarly there are restrictions on just how small the fine print can be, how egregious the interest rate can be, etc. The laws have had a salutory effect on auto sales - dealers are much less likely to try to cheat customers, and manufacturers have incentives to build better-quality cars. It is, in fact, a win-win situation - even though auto manufacturers screamed that laws like these would put them out of business in a week.

We haven't got anything of the sort with software purchases. And like Adobe's chairman just told us, the race to the bottom - who can have the most restrictive licensing, who can gouge the customer the most - is in full swing. It took a long time to get lemon laws enacted across the country, many years of abuses and horror stories, many years of opposition by the automobile manufacturers doing exactly what the software manufacturers are doing now: dumping buckets of cash into Congress. Are we going to learn from our experiences of the past and put some restraints on these abusive restrictions? Are we going to makes software sales into sales, and make software companies stand behind their products? We are, no doubt about it; abuses like these will only be stood for so long. The question is only this: How long will we stand for it?

What do you mean I don't own my software?
Adobe software is owned by Adobe. When you purchase software, you purchase a license to use the application. The use of the software must be in compliance with the End User License Agreement that is included with the software. Misuse of software is punishable by Federal Copyright Law.

-- from http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/main.html

We can fix that, Adobe.

We got a lot of (shall we say) slightly impertinent questions for Web Standards Project co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman, but that's okay. He reads Slashdot and knows the nature of the beast, and he's hard-core enough to give as good as he gets. So set your humor module to high, then sit back and enjoy Mr. Zeldman's (appropriately impertinent) answers to the 12 questions we forwarded to him.

1) Here's my question:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by FascDot Killed My Pr

If you're such a hotshot web designer, why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design: Putting an "entry page" that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?

Jeffrey:

I'll answer this one piece by piece.

"If you're such a hotshot web designer."

Never claimed to be. Roblimo wrote that glowing description. It's not surprising that some of you, who have no idea what I do, were pissed off when those words of high praise took you to a very simple, low-bandwidth, personal site.

I wish Rob had said "Zeldman is a co-founder of The Web Standards Project" (WaSP), and had explained what the WaSP does, maybe even mentioning the role we played in getting Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and begin building Mozilla around the standards-compliant Gecko core. I'm guessing people would have overlooked my supposed "design sins" or their distaste for the color orange on my personal site if they had a better idea about what I actually do.

For those who don't know, the WaSP organized a petition drive to persuade Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and build its new browser around Gecko. Then-group-leader George Olsen of WaSP, along with ThunderLizard's Jim Heid, got 2,000 developers to sign the petition. Netscape is a company that listens - at least, for the last two years, it has been listening - and you all know the result: an upcoming browser that is designed to fully comply with HTML 4, CSS-1, the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript.

No disrespect to Roblimo either. I dig the guy. And what he said is true in a sense. I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.

By the way, I wasn't upset by what Mozilla did; I was flattered by it. You may think it is ugly design, though I'm sure that none of you said so to Mozilla because you believe in the project. It's weird to me that the same people who dig Mozilla would be rude in their comments to someone who, at least in a small way, helped influence the direction of that browser, and who also influenced the initial DESIGN of that project, but whatever. I also talk with Microsoft, because the goal of WaSP is to get standards in *all* browsers, and the fact that I talk to engineers at that company may make me evil incarnate in your book. I can deal with that. If we get better browsers, I'll be satisfied.

I do get copied a lot and often those copies are better than the original. In that sense "VIEW SOURCE" functions like "OPEN SOURCE." ;) I am happy when someone takes an idea of mine and makes it better (and their own).

"why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design"

I've been designing websites for five years. I don't claim to be a genius and I'm far from the best designer on the planet, but your take on cardinal sins of a profession you do not participate in is about as meaningful as my comments on your programming decisions would be.

You are parroting Jakob Nielsen or some other expert whose work you've read. You haven't read my work on the same subject (no problem) and you don't know my work as a designer (no problem). Just as in programming, design is about decisions. A designer never sins. He/she makes informed decisions. If you get to know the work, you may understand why those decisions were made. If you never bother to engage with the work - if you merely believe that all design must conform with a small set of rules written by one or two people - you don't understand the nature of the thing you are criticizing. Especially if you spend all of five seconds looking at it, and then rush to be the first to post a rant. There are rules of grammar, too, and James Joyce threw them all out. True, I ain't him. But I am me. All designers make decisions, and if the entire web looked like http://www.useit.com I don't think that would be such a great thing. Anything that departs from the look of http://www.useit.com is violating at least a few of Jakob's "rules," and that's the nature of the beast.

"Putting [up] an 'entry page' that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?"

The bandwidth sucked is exactly 4K. I think you can handle it.

The "entry page" is a temporary placeholder while I rethink the front end of my personal site. Notice the words "temporary," "placeholder," and "personal." The previous front page was navigational in nature, and it is archived at http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html . The name refers to the fact that the page revealed a bug in recent builds of Mozilla. I have left it online so the Mozilla folks can use it to track down and fix that bug, which they are doing now.

Recently, I've been focused on WaSP and A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), a web design magazine and mailing list I co-founded with Brian Platz. The content on my personal site (275+ pages) has not been my most recent focus, so I determined a while back that it was silly to stop the visitor with a primarily navigational page. I should explain that some people visit zeldman.com for entertainment like The Ad Graveyard; a completely different audience visits for web design info, such as the Ask Dr Web tutorial; and so on. To accommodate those very different visitors, I initially had a core page that was navigational. I didn't put real content on page one, because I was accommodating maybe six completely different audiences, and there was nothing in all that content that would appeal to ALL of them. On http://www.alistapart.com/ I start with content on page one, because the audience is more unified.

Even that old navigational page (http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html), with all its rollovers etc., was very low-bandwidth. I recently got to look at it while stuck at an airport in Stockholm. The airport had five Windows boxes sharing one 56K modem. I looked at some of my favorite sites, and they were all crawling onto the screen. I was pleased that my own front page loaded instantly. I design for low bandwidth, which explains why my work rarely looks like that of "such a hot shit designer." Back to the point. I haven't yet figured out how to restructure the front end of my site, so I put up a 4K placeholder with a bone-simple rollover and a 6 second refresh to the single page at my site that I have been focusing on lately.

Now you know why I have a temporary entry page; now you know why it does "nothing" (it is temporary, and what it does is redirect you); and now you know that it does not suck bandwidth.

How it "makes it difficult to 'back' out of the site" is a mystery to me, so I can't comment on that clause in your question. Personally I find database driven pages much harder to navigate and back out of than 4K html pages. And with browsers that suck, frames-based pages can also be tough to navigate. My 4K page is frameless HTML.

2) I have a question:
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Skinka

What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?

Jeffrey:

Yes, I've read them, yes I've written on the subject, yes yes yes.

Along with another WaSP member, I helped influence Microsoft to make ALL web text resizable by the user in IE5/Mac for reasons of accessibility and usability, and we are hoping to get the same from Mozilla. (At the moment, this feature is only available in IE5/Mac. It should be in every browser. It's not in the Windows version of IE and it's obviously not in the current version of Navigator.)

Why small fonts? Personal design decision on a personal site. You can enlarge the type in some browsers, not all. That day is coming.

There are methods of CSS that allow you to resize type in *all* browsers.

Why do I often avoid those methods?

Because they are not supported in most "CSS-capable" browsers.

Absolute font-size keywords are broken in Navigator 4 (all platforms) and IE5/Windows.

Percentages and ems are broken in Netscape 4.

Points are meaningless on computer screens, and the reliance on points in Style Sheets is a widespread authoring error.

Until all browsers support standards, designers will be stuck using pixels or FONT SIZE tags. Or simply making no effort at all to control the appearance and size of type on the web page. If this bothers you, join The Web Standards Project.

(Warning: it is orange. If you "can't get past the color" then I guess you'll have to let big browser companies determine the fate of the web.)

Unless you design web sites every day, you have no idea of the compatibility nightmares involved. But in your own work, I'm sure you have plenty of examples of brain-dead decisions by others that force you to use hacks and workarounds. It's the same in web design.

At the moment, the main text at http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html (the one page in all my work that most Slashdotters seem to have looked at) is laid out with ems. This is wonderful, scalable technology. You can easily enlarge or reduce the type in just about any browser.

Except, of course, that it doesn't work at all in most versions of Navigator 4. If you're using Navigator - and you know you are - you will see large ugly type, not the type treatment I intended. Until we have standards, that's just the way it will be.

3) Not to flame, but...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mr.nobody

I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.

Jeffrey:

Another cardinal sin.

Hmm. Let's see.

The status bar *does* reveal the url of the page it links to - just like an untreated status bar would do. It also provides ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND COMMENTARY. I guess that's a bad thing. I can't see why, but I guess I'll take your word for it. URL = good, URL + additional information = bad. Because you say so.

The title tag also provides additional information, but Question #12 told me that that was okay, even good. Whew! That's a relief.

4) where's the interview
(Score:4, Interesting)
by geekpress

Jeff, I programmed for a web design company in which design issues totally trumped more practical concerns like download time. (In one case, I was forced to create absurdly complex html tables just so that the designer could get his one-pixel rounded corners on his notecard design.) What do you see as the appropriate balance between aesthetics and practical usability?

P.S. That company is now out of business, thank goodness!

Jeffrey:

I almost always design for low bandwidth.

I was creative director at a web firm and had designed a layout with thin black borders (yes I do this same thing over and over again) for a database driven site that would be creating tables on the fly. The design effect would not render in Navigator, but the page still looked fine in Navigator, even without those little black outlines.

It was possible to FORCE Navigator to display the effect by surrounding every table with an additional, empty table. That is sometimes okay, obviously - I've been doing it since we could begin applying rudimentary styling to tables - but on a large page full of data, it would unnecessarily increase the bandwidth per page, force all browsers to burn cycles as they calculated the appearance of complex table-in-table displays, possibly cause display errors, and completely yoke the content to the presentation, making it that much harder to fix later, when we have better browsers.

So I told the company president it was a usability nightmare and a waste of resources and bandwidth and therefore not worth doing.

He told me to do it anyway.

So I quit my job and started my own company.

Rounded edges, high bandwidth, all that stuff can be fine in the right situations, as long as alternatives are provided and rules of accessibility are respected. Usually I persuade my clients to go in the low-bandwidth direction, and I almost always go low-bandwidth on the noncommercial sites I do (zeldman.com, http://www.webstandards.org/ and http://www.alistapart.com/ ).

But high bandwidth is fine for the right audience. Consider http://www.praystation.com, which is a brilliantly designed site by Joshua Davis. It's amazing work. The audience for that site is primarily Joshua's fellow designers, and most of them have T1 or DSL access. Since the site's goal is to push design as far as it can go on the web, and since the audience is known to have fast connections and a desire to see great design, there is absolutely nothing wrong (and lot right) with the higher-bandwidth road taken by this project.

5) Optimism?
(Score:5, Funny)
by Chalst

How hopeful are you that Microsoft can be coaxed into making IE standards compliant? What exactly do you think Microsoft's motive was in not supporting HTML 4.0 completely?

Jeffrey:

It varies by the hour. Sometimes I think they are going to do this and simply have not committed to it because they're not sure they can pull it off. Sometimes I suspect that as the current market leader (guys with the most users) they think they don't have to bother with this. ("Our way *is* the standard." That kind of thinking.) And sometimes I reckon that they're doing this to fuck up Mozilla. ("You're going to support standards? Well, we have more users. You lose.") I don't *know* what they're thinking, but I suspect that different people there are thinking combinations of all the above.

I do know there are engineers there who are committed to supporting standards. Not only because I've met some of them through my work with WaSP, but also because - in the case of IE5/Mac - they've actually pulled it off. Remember, Microsoft (along with Netscape, Sun, invited experts, etc.) helped come up with these standards in the first place. Why would you design blueprints and then not follow them when you build the house? The engineers who participate in the standards process are committed to complying with standards. Some people in management may not be. Or they may be delaying, for short-sighted competitive reasons, or from fear of committing until they are sure they can do it right.

HTML 4 - the LAST HTML - includes dozens of accessibility improvements, and it is insane for any company not to fully support that. Without full support for HTML 4, millions of web users get hurt. That's morally wrong, and it's also just plain bad for business. I think that in time, all browser companies, including Microsoft, will come to see that. I also think the W3C's recent hiring of a conformance manager (http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=517) signals that the W3C will soon take a more active role in "helping" companies get with the program, support standards, and stop screwing up developers and web users in a game where everybody - including the browser companies - eventually loses.

6) Balancing Technologies
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Proteus

As you are no doubt aware, the technology that drives web site design is advancing rapidly. However, there are still a lot of users who run older browsers, or prefer to use text-only browsers such as Lynx.

Obviously, one wants to reach as large an audience as possible, but not "lag behind" too far. How do you go about balancing the use of newer technology on a site without alienating users of older software, disabled users, and text-only browsers?

Jeffrey:

Using HTML 4, ALT tags, and the TITLE tag goes a long way toward achieving this goal.

So does using CSS for type, instead of FONT FACE and FONT SIZE tags that yoke content to presentation.

I do both these things, and all the other little things you have to do, for instance with framesets. I think there may be some really old (1996) framesets at zeldman.com where I left out full content inside the noframes tags. I'm cleaning that up as quickly as I can. At ALA http://www.alistapart.com/), wherever I used framesets, I included the full text inside the noframes tags, and I also included TEXT versions of all articles.

The next stage is full separation of content from structure, and that means using HTML 4 and CSS (and eventually, replacing HTML 4 with XHTML; and eventually, migrating to XML).

We can't safely do that yet. Gecko is still in development, Netscape 4 has appalling "support" for CSS, IE5/Windows has better but far from complete support, and the only released browser that gets it right - IE5/Mac - has a 6% market share.

SOON. Not soon enough, but SOON, we will look back on this era of stupidity and laugh. Oh, how we will laugh. This is the TRON era and we are striving to reach the MATRIX era.

7) Reverse scenario question...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jonny Royale

Have you ever seen anything come from a browser publisher "extending" a standard (Microsoft, Netscape, other), and thought "Gee, I wish that was in the standard"? Examples?

Jeffrey:

Yes.

LOW SRC was a funky old tag from Netscape (dating back to Netscape 1.1) that allowed you to slip a low-bandwidth image into place, and then have it replaced by the more bandwidth-intensive image when the latter finished downloading. For people with very slow connections, it was a useful hack. It also enabled creative web designers to add a certain amount of "SFX magic" (cough) to even the most primitive pages, viewed by the oldest browsers, under the most adverse conditions. That's gone. Too bad. I miss it.

Because of browser offsets in all released versions of Navigator and most versions of Explorer, I wish the "four horsemen of non-validation" (leftmargin, topmargin marginwidth and marginheight) had made it into HTML 4.0 transitional. We won't need them eventually, but until the browsers are smarter, we still do need them. The W3C is always ahead of what the browsers can deliver, of course; but by discouraging these dumb proprietary tags, the W3C has put us in the position where PAGES THAT WILL NOT WORK without these tags will fail at http://validator.w3.org. That kind of failure discourages developers from building standards-compliant pages. It is a small thing, and it is transitional, but DURING THE TRANSITION, I would have liked to see those four stupid tags get approval with a benevolent sigh.

On the other hand, designers who know what they are doing may include these tags and ignore those validation errors, but don't tell the W3C I said so.

Given the brain-dead way Navigator 4 and IE4/5/Windows handled absolute font size keywords in CSS, I *sometimes* wish font size tags were not discouraged YET. I hate them and hardly ever use them, but (for instance) there's no way to get small type in Linux that is actually READABLE without relying on these dumb old non-standard tags. What I really wish in this case, of course, is that Netscape and Microsoft hadn't fucked up this simple CSS technology. So I take the FONT SIZE tags thing back. Uh, never mind. I just wish Netscape and Microsoft had gotten CSS right the first time.

8) Banners
(Score:5, Interesting)
by TheTomcat

This is only vaguely related to design, but directly related to the web, and functionality.

We all know that banners don't work anymore. The only way a business can profit from banners is to show thousands per day. Most users don't even SEE banners anymore. We avoid them the same way we dig in the couch for the remote when commercials interrupt The Simpsons.

Do you have any suggestions to make future, content-based sites profitable?

Jeffrey:

There are several issues here. One is, a lot of the best work is done as a labor of love, and always will be. Those who need a revenue model before they are willing to even think about working will lose one of the golden opportunities of the web, which is free expression and the building of communities, regardless of financial issues. For instance, Slashdot was born as a community and still is one. Eventually, Slashdot got into a position where it could make money, but Slashdot is true to itself and was not corrupted or changed by any commercial considerations. So it is possible to make a good thing and not blow it when the cash register starts jingling. But a lot of other sites and communities have turned to dreck when money was involved.

We all agree that banners suck - Roblimo even wrote an article for ALA on that subject, back when ALA was just getting launched. With a big enough readership, banners *can* be profitable, as they are at Slashdot. But I agree that most of us just hate 'em.

Sponsorships are another possible means of revenue. "This issue of Webmonkey brought to you by Hewlett-Packard." With an entertaining HP minisite available at the click of a link, for those who care. Kaliber 10000 (http://www.k10k.net) has gotten Apple sponsorship, and all that means is, there's a tiny Apple link in the top right hand corner of the front page. If you click it, you get a popup window with text on why the site's designers like their Macs, and links to some current movies in Apple Quicktime format.

The Cluetrain guys have spoken about this model of corporate sponsorship as well.

I think about it sometimes. For instance, http://www.alistapart.com/ could be "brought to you by" Macromedia or Adobe. But to tell the truth, I don't really pursue this idea because I'm not motivated by money when it comes to creating web content. I simply want to create or choose the right content, and totally control it, and I'm not sanguine that I could do that if I *had* corporate sponsorship. Thinking about it some more is on my to-do list, but it's about 500 layers down in the list. I make enough money designing websites that I don't worry about "revenue models" for my content sites. It is a real issue, though. Just one I haven't bothered with personally, yet.

9) Jeff, your CSS suck
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Nicolas MONNET

I quote from your website:

H1 {font: bold 24px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 0xp;}
H4 {font: 12px verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px;}

So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?

Jeffrey:

Refer to the answer to Question 2. Also refer to this Word from the WaSP column:

http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

The best way to style text - and the way the W3C recommends - is to use relative sizes or absolute size keywords.

Both these methods are completely broken in Navigator 4. Totally frickin' useless. Don't shoot the messenger. Netscape agrees, and that's why they threw out their old rendering engine and started from scratch.

And absolute size keywords are stupidly mis-supported in IE4/5 for Windows, where "medium" means large, and "small" means medium.

Faced with this maddening stupidity on the part of browser makers, designers/developers have two choices:

Do not style text at all. Have a nice day.

*OR* rely on pixels, which work in all "CSS-capable" browsers.

I sadly choose the latter until the browsers fully comply with W3C standards.

As to POINTS versus pixels, points are absolutely meaningless on the web, and the fact that they are used by thousands of developers who should know better proves only how little CSS is understood by the development community.

Certain point sizes may work on your platform in your style sheet. That proves that certain point sizes work on your platform in your style sheet. Cross-platform it is not transportable, and points are print-based units of measurement that have no meaningful relationship to the wonderful world of monitor resolution.

For a good discussion of CSS problems, see Todd Fahrner's "Beyond the Font Size Tag: Practical HTML Text and Styling" at http://style.metrius.com/font_size /livetext.html (Unfortunately, even some of *THESE* techniques do not work in more recent versions of Navigator 4.)

In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now. Since neither has dominant marketshare, developers will still face huge obstacles when trying to do something as SIMPLE and BASIC as size text on the web. Many will stick with pixels, which are the only CSS technique that actually WORKS across browsers and platforms.

In addition to all these nightmarish problems with our browsers, there are special challenges with Linux, because unless Linux users install additional scalable fonts, you can follow all the rules for good CSS, and avoid "problem" font sizes, and still create pages that look jaggy or are unreadable on a lot of people's machines. I worry about this all the time, but I don't have a solution for it. I have actually gone back to using the stupid The way to advance the medium is to get absolute font size keywords and relative font sizes right in CSS, finish implementing HTML 4, and give us the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript. (And then wait two years for users to upgrade.)

10) Pixel based alignment and HTML
(Score:4, Insightful)
by mcelrath

One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?

Jeffrey:

Separation of style and content is the way forward.

The problem is the browsers.

When I revised my "Ask Dr Web" tutorial at http://www.zeldman.com/askdrweb/, along with other pages at http://www.zeldman.com/, to use CSS layouts instead of tables, certain versions of Navigator 4 began crashing.

Actually crashing from basic CSS-1.

I wrote about this at A List Apart, ("The Day the Browser Died") and because of this, Netscape invested some time and resources to fixing some of these bugs in Navigator 4. It didn't catch them all, and it didn't catch them in Linux. These bugs will never be fully fixed in Navigator 4, because Netscape is wisely spending its energy to finish the Mozilla browser. Unfortunately, this means that Netscape users will continue to face serious usability hazards throughout the web until Netscape 6 is released ... *OR* it means that developers will continue to use TABLES for layouts for the next two years (as Jakob Nielsen has predicted).

If you look at these pages - http://www.zeldman.com/steal.html or http://www.zeldman.com/icon.html are other examples - you will see that we are talking about extremely BASIC layouts. An expert from the CSS pointers group actually volunteered hours of her time trying alternate combinations of the very basic CSS on those pages to see if she could find ways to stop Netscape from crashing. She could not; neither could I. Netscape did what it could for its 4.0 users, but it can't do anything more until the next generation is released.

On my personal site I made the tough decision to leave these pages as-is. I don't have time to recode them all using tables.

You can agree or disagree with that decision.

Linux folks can either use the Mozilla or Opera betas to navigate those pages in safety and comfort.

It's worth noting that W3C pages also crashed Netscape 4, for the same reason.

What happens when Netscape's browser is this badly damaged? I get hate mail from people who don't understand the issues involved. I also got a letter of thanks from Netscape's Eric Krock, because good companies WANT us to help them find bugs in their software.

As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use font size=1 to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font.

See above for the explanation as to why developers are stuck using 1994 technology to support late-1990s browsers. The same questions, the same answers.

The good thing - the ONLY good thing - about the font size tag is that it is user-resizable. The rest of this has been answered above.

Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.

Right, although in some cases it is justified.

As another example, many pages use the table , and layer to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.

Yes, that is usually a bad design decision. Whenever possible, I use what Glenn Davis (WaSP and Project Cool co-founder) calls "liquid" design ... design that reflows to exactly fit the visitor's monitor. That's almost always a better way to go. Examples of my liquid designs include http://www.alistapart.com/, http://www.the-adstore.com, and most of zeldman.com. If you dig long enough in zeldman.com, you'll come upon pages older than the NYC subways, that simply use BAD design ... though at the time, it wasn't all that bad.

Liquid design is not always appropriate but it is generally best.

What are standards groups doing to fix this?

Nothing. The W3C can't make better or more intelligent designers out of people, and neither can the WaSP, whose sole purpose is to agitate for W3C standards in browsers (and eventually in web authoring tools).

We can try to lead by example. http://www.webstandards.org/ is liquid (aside from the front page, which is "semi-liquid" owing to the large low-rez graphic) and it validates.

MEMBERS of standards groups can write articles on the subject and hope that people read them. Of course, if people "can't get past" a 4k splash page, they will not learn about my articles on the subject.

Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement table width=30ch to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?

Standards bodies can recommend certain authoring practices, and they can develop standards that make such practices possible, but they cannot enforce good authoring.

11) Evaluate Slashdot
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?

Jeffrey:

It's a community and it works. It has achieved visibility, notoriety, and even commercial success without giving an inch. Pretty awesome achievement. What would I change?

Sometimes the longer threads take a long time to load, due to back-end technology, platform and server issues. The technology works better on Linux than it does on my platform of choice (Mac OS) but, hey, that's okay.

I know you want me to comment on the design. Design is subjective. Black backgrounds and teal are not my favorite color scheme (though I used black backgrounds at the 1995 Ad Graveyard (http://www.zeldman.com/ad.html) and the January 1997 Furbo Filters so who am I to talk? The main thing I was trying to do at Furbo was get CSS to work - and to let people know about Craig Hockenberry's and my Furbo Filters, which were the only Photoshop plugins at the time that dealt with the web-safe color palette - at least to our knowledge.)

I might change the color scheme and some other things if Rob Malda went on a crack run and asked me to redesign Slashdot, but that ain't likely to happen. And I think the design of Slashdot is just fine. It focuses you on the breaking stories, allows you to read more (or not), and provides access to almost everything else on the site via small navigation units. In terms of usability it is damn good, and it has plenty of attitude.

Of course, it commits the "cardinal sin" of teal, but I can get past that.

12) Do you agree with Nielsen?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox columns by Jakob Nielsen.

Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?

Jeffrey:

I agree with his comments on oral sex and wearing white after Labor Day.

And I like that he can get $25,000 to talk for an hour. I'll do the same for half that amount.

I also agree with Jakob that most websites should be usable by as many people as possible.

What I have done about that is help found The Web Standards Project, so we can actually achieve that goal instead of using duct tape and lasagna to build sites that work for "most" people. And I try to make my pages accessible in spite of the limitations of current browsers and some of the cross-platform issues discussed above.

If you are interested in my views, you can read them at http://www.alistapart.com/, Adobe.com (here, http://www.adobe.com/we b/columns/zeldman/20000320/main.html, for instance), http://www.webstandards.org/ and of course at http://www.zeldman.com/. If you can get past the 4k splash page.

At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).

Thanks! The reason Slashdot chomps title tags is probably because they are not supported in Netscape yet. They are an important usability feature, and in some browsers they also offer nifty low-grade special effects - along with the opportunity for contextual ampliciation or ironic commentary.

jeffrey

Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little.

http://www.zeldman.com
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.happycog.com
http://www.webstandards.org

Viking Coder and Rares Marian sent in submissions asking about recommendations on systems for high quality video editing. They have concerns about the hardware and the software necessary for such tasks. I figure all of you folks out there who have some experience in this area should be able to help them out. (Read More)

Viking Coder asks: "Hello, I'd like to get involved with Digital Video recording and editing, and I was wondering what other people were using. The iMac at first seems a good option, until you see the limited hard drive and editing capabilities. Are there any pre-packaged solutions that would make for a better system? How about Linux or W2K compatibility / support? Any Open Source solutions to what would be obvious roadblocks?"

"So, I've been looking to build an eMonster 550R from eMachines, with a $500 DVRaptor from Canopus, also loading in a 30G EIDE (UDMA) HD, and Adobe Premiere 5.1, running everything from my (company's) Sony DCR-TRV103.

Am I in for a rude shock, or am I going to love what I can do? Are there other options I should be aware of? Will uLead's Media Builder (?) blow me away, or is Adobe the way to go? Is there an obvious winner card that makes the DVRaptor look silly? Is a 30G UDMA enough? Any caveats? (Like, 7,200 RPM for instance?)"

And from Rares Marian: "What tools, OSes, platforms, and hardware do I need to put a good machine together? I'm currently considering the following:

• Platform: Athlon 700, Alpha, G4, SGI
• OSes: Linux, Windows, AmigaOS, BSD (are they there yet?)
• Tools: Broadcast 2000, Premiere
• Systems: PC, Amiga, Mac, Alpha, SGI
• Hardware: Linux Multimedia Labs LML33, VideoToaster

I've had some quotes from $2000 for an Amiga3K setup (hey they used it on Babylon 5, Jurassic Park, and many TV stations still use it) to an $8000 Windows Athlon based machine. Any ideas? Hint: Small Budget No Limits. (From home video to full blown Internet based publishing)"

If you've been following the events surrounding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, perhaps in regard to the DeCSS lawsuits, you may have noticed part of the DMCA is not in effect yet and the Copyright Office is taking comments on it. The time period for comments ends today, but that's okay, because even if you don't get in comments today you can file Reply Comments until March 20, and you can always reply to AOL/Time Warner's submission (mirrored here). A number of Slashdot posters have submitted comments as well, but included below is my set of comments to the Copyright Office. Out of 71 comments filed and available so far, only Time Warner's is favorable toward the DMCA.

(Note to would-be commenters: make sure you read the rules before sending in comments. You can send comments in plain text or as a PDF file [see createpdf.adobe.com], but it must be as an e-mail attachment, not in the body, addressed to 1201@loc.gov.)

Comments on 17 USC Section 1201(a)(1), Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Michael Sims
76 Swan St.
Staten Island, NY 10301
(718) 556-1002
<michael@slashdot.org>

David O. Carson
General Counsel, Copyright GC/I&R
P.O. Box 70400
Southwest Station
Washington, DC 20024

By e-mail: 1201@loc.gov
Comments on 17 USC Section 1201(a)(1), Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Dear Copyright Office,

My comments on this section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are simple: I recommend that the Librarian of Congress find that enforcement of Section 1201(a)(1) will adversely affect non-infringing uses of copyrighted works for ALL CLASSES of copyrighted material, and thus the prohibition in subparagraph (A) should not apply to any user for any copyrighted work for the next three years.

Digital copyright protection systems offer the potential for copyright holders to totally eliminate any "unauthorized" uses through technology. The copyright system employed on Digital Versatile Discs (DVD's), for example, does not permit users to make copies, grab still screenshots or audio snippets, or even to play the disc in an unauthorized piece of hardware, on an unauthorized operating system, or in an unauthorized country. This is the model for future digital distribution systems. No technological system can tell whether a user is making "fair use" copying or not, so they restrict all copying.

Users already pay for whatever unauthorized copying may occur. See 17 USC Sec. 1004, which describes the government-mandated royalty payments on digital audio recording devices and media, which go to producers of copyrighted content. Everyone who purchases any equipment relating to digital audio pays a tax directly into the pockets of the recording industry, whether they ever infringe any copyrights or not. These forced royalties were put into place specifically to compensate copyright holders for the alleged "casual copying" that users would perform.

There is already plenty of copyright law on the books. Copyright infringement is unlawful and punishable. By definition, a corporation pursuing claims under the copyright infringement laws is enforcing its rights to the maximum extent of the law - so what use is the prohibition against circumventing access control measures? The only use of such a prohibition is to attack conduct that is NOT infringing, yet still involves some sort of access to a copyrighted work, since infringing conduct could be attacked under other parts of the copyright laws. The usual name for conduct that isn't infringing but involves copying from a copyrighted work is "fair use".

And of course "effectively controls access to a work" reaches far beyond a copyright holder's rights under our current laws. The phrase is not "effectively controls copying of a work", though even that would eliminate fair use copying. Copyright is the right to prevent copying. The right to prevent or regulate access to a specific work is one that has never been enforced by copyright - when one book vendor tried to do so, the Supreme Court ruled against them, in BOBBS-MERRILL CO. v. STRAUS, 210 U.S. 339 (1908). Once a book is sold the copyright holder loses all powers over it - the purchaser can sell it again, loan it out, or read it in the country of his choice. Under section 1201(a)(1), a digital book author could restrict any or all of these abilities, and violating the restrictions would be grounds for civil and criminal penalties, including up to five years in prison. Once more: reading a book in a location or manner not authorized by the copyright holder could land you five years in prison. In a world that is rapidly moving to digitization of all works of creativity and scholarship, this is a frightening thought.

I'm not sure I can emphasize this enough. The only purposes which 1201(a)(1) can be used for is to restrict consumers from non-infringing copying and from accessing the copyrighted content in the time, place and manner of their choosing, which has never been a legitimate subject of copyright rights. That is, if a lawsuit is brought against someone, only two situations can exist: either that person was actually infringing copyright, in which cases claims could be brought under both the copyright infringement statutes and this circumvention provision; or the person was not actually infringing, in which case the claim under this provision would necessarily affect non-infringing conduct. In the first case this provision is simply tacking on more liability to the copyright infringement codes (which Congress should do independently if it wishes); in the second case it is making tort-feasors or criminals out of persons who have not infringed copyright in any fashion.

So we've established that the only conduct which section 1201(a)(1) affects is conduct which is non-infringing copying, or unauthorized access. Nothing in the law requires copyright holders to set "fair" standards for access to works - for instance, a digital book, perhaps a work by Stephen King or Danielle Steele, could cost $5 for individuals to buy, but $500 for libraries to buy. The mass market books could be issued with the "access restriction" that the purchaser may not lend the book to anyone else, ever, and thus the library would have no recourse but to purchase the $500 lending-permitted version. Access could be further restricted by only allowing the purchasing library to lend the book out; inter-library loans would be a thing of the past. Or maybe digital books would expire after a set time period; trying to gain access to them afterwards would be a violation. Naturally, copyright holders will seek to maximize their profits by setting the most restrictive access terms that the market will accept. Conduct like this is allowed by the law, hugely profitable to copyright holders, and under section 1201(a)(1), taking any action to circumvent it is illegal.

The Federal Register notice asks for specific examples of abuse. As an example, the standard for Digital Versatile Discs forces DVD players disable the user's ability to fast-forward when instructed by the disc. This allows copyright holders to include advertisements in the content which the user has no choice but to watch. If I want to be able to make certain non-infringing uses of a DVD I've purchased - such as watching only the 90% of the content which is not advertisements while skipping past the rest - the access controls in the work prohibit me from doing so, and the DMCA prohibits me from circumventing those access controls. There are hundreds or thousands of examples of abuses related to the software field. Many software programs limit their use to a single machine CPU, prevent users from making back-up copies of the original software, inform on users via the Internet to the company which produced the software, and otherwise limit the user's ability to copy or access the software in the manner of his choosing.

Access controls will also adversely affect the ability of libraries to archive copyrighted works. Digital Versatile Discs may last as little as 5-10 years (that is how long CD's last) and the access controls built into all DVD players and recorders mean that is impossible for a library to transfer a copyrighted work to a new medium for archival purposes. While a library's rare book collection can be digitized so that even when preservation efforts fail, an authentic copy remains available, no such preservation measures are allowed by the DMCA.


I hope I have made my point adequately. Honestly, the Librarian's action on this matter is likely to have little practical effect. Section 1201(a)(2) of the law, already in effect, outlaws the production, importation or distribution of any devices (including software code) which would circumvent access control measures. This part of the DMCA is already being used against individuals who wanted to play DVD's on an "unauthorized" computer operating system, Linux, and constructed a device to allow them to play lawfully-purchased DVD's on computers running Linux. The outcome of that lawsuit is not yet determined, but it is clear that making lawful, non-infringing uses of lawfully purchased DVD's (the defendants have not been accused of any copyright infringement whatsoever) is being hampered by the DMCA.

Thus, even if the Librarian accepts my recommendation and negates the effect of 1201(a)(1) for the next three years, a library may still find itself in the position of being permitted to circumvent an access control measure but not being allowed to construct or otherwise obtain a "device" which would allow them to perform it, unless the library desired to be sued by a copyright holder. However, if the Librarian were to reject 1201(a)(1) for all copyrighted works, this would send a strong message to Congress that the current attitude toward protecting copyrighted works, which involves no consideration of the fair use rights of the public, is unacceptable to the library community.


-- Michael Sims
Feb. 16, 2000

After A long time, Adobe finally start to release few applications for Linux. The first application is Adobe Distiller server for Linux. The other (which I find more interesting) is Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.6 (it's beta) and you can get it Here. Its good to see Adobe start porting their applications to Linux, and I hope they will port all the others (hmm, Illustrator maybe?)

The return of SEGV brings with it a review of Michael J. Hammel's The Artists' Guide to the GIMP. This is an interesting book for those artists and wanna-be artists using the GIMP, and wanting to learn more what you/they can do-click below for more information. The Artists' Guide to the GIMP author Michael J. Hammel pages 340 publisher S rating 8/10 reviewer SEGV ISBN summary A well-done user manual for the GIMP. Walks the reader through common GIMP tasks with practical advice and suggestions.

User Manual

The GIMP has been hailed as an open source alternative to such commercial image manipulation "killer apps" as Adobe Photoshop. However, there are obvious areas where the GIMP falls short. For example, it does not come with a commercial quality printed user manual.

Now GIMP aficionados have an option: Michael Hammel has written what amounts to a user manual for the GIMP. It is "meant to be a reference guide for non-technical users -- people who want to use the GIMP to do real work."

Topic Coverage

The book covers release 1.0 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. The first half covers GIMP features and functionality. The second half contains many examples of filters and script-fu effects applied to images.

The book does not cover GIMP development, particularly plug-ins and scripting. However, the author does mention that these are potential topics for revised editions.

The introductory chapters cover such basics as graphics formats, colour models, resolution, and so forth. The author also briefly covers SANE, Ghostscript, the GFig plug-in, the gimprc file, and fonts.

Explanatory Style

The author adopts a relatively informal explanatory style which I found easy and enjoyable to read, while not detracting from the topic at hand. It is clear that the author understands what he is writing about, and also how to communicate with the casual reader.

He offers tips throughout the text, from effective settings for specific dialogs to how to scan three-dimensional objects. He's also at ease enough to criticize aspects of the application where deserved, such as inconsistent dialogs or awkward interfaces. This honesty reassures the reader that he's on her side.

The author points out where GIMP and Photoshop are alike and differ, which will be a boon to readers with experience with the latter.

Tutorial Approach

Many of the chapters conclude with a tutorial summarizing the material covered: 16 pages in all. They are easy enough to follow and serve to reinforce the concepts learned.

Frequently the author employs a "how-to" approach when describing a feature. For example, he uses an image of a skyline to demonstrate how guides can help select buildings. He enumerates the steps you might take to correct a scanned image.

Book and CD-ROM

The book is printed on glossy paper in full colour. This is important, as many of the images illustrate subtle graphic effects. For example, an image may be a slightly brightened or blurred version of another.

I'm not sure how well the book would stand up to everyday use. My copy developed a cracked spine, so it's possible to lose a page or two if the reader is not careful.

The CD-ROM contains the software, although I'm sure most will acquire later versions from the net. It also includes the book's tutorials, images, and more images from the author's collection, as well as documentation, resources, and links.

There are plenty of tables of shortcuts and modifiers, but strangely no quick reference card (an obvious added value).

Drawbacks

The book as one or two minor drawbacks. Generally, there are a couple of places where the text could have been improved.

Some extended explanations (e.g., crop tool) are very confusing. The reader is hard put to make progress without the application running in front of her. Admittedly, part of the blame for this lies with the application itself.

The author references some Linux Journal covers, yet does not provide their images for illustration.

Summary

I've seen industry award-winning commercial user manuals, and this book is in that league. If you're looking for a simple user manual for the GIMP, this is it.

If you're looking for a more advanced manual or reference, you might be a little bit disappointed. There are still stones left un-turned.

If you're looking for an art book, again you might be disappointed. It isn't a text on graphic design, although there are tips throughout.

It's a user manual for the GIMP.

You can pick it up at Amazon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
1. Introduction
2. GIMP Basics
3. GIMP Windows
4. The Toolbox
5. Selections
6. Layers and Channels
7. Colors and Text
8. Drawing and Painting
9. Using Transforms
10. Gradients
11. Scanning, Printing, and Print Media
Part 2: Filters and Script-Fu Effects
12. Artistic
13. Blur
14. Colors
15. Distorts
16. Edge-Detect and Combine
17. Enhance
18. Glass Effects
19. Light Effects
20. Map and Miscellaneous
21. Noise
22. Render
23. Script-Fu
Glossary
Appendix A: The gimprc File
Appendix B: Keyboard Shortcuts
Appendix C: Adding Fonts to Your System
Index
About the CD-ROM

Chanman writes "If you thought the US Government was bad, you should see what crap the Canadian government has come up with. Effective January 1, 1999, the government is imposing levies on audio recording media at the rate of *50 cents* per 15 minutes of each digital audio recording media sold or imported. With a CD at 75 minutes, that means a extra $2.50 (CDN) per CD, which is more than what blank CD media costs. The full text of this abomination is available in the " Canada Gazette" on the Government of Canada web site The relevant information is on page 121 onwards. A link to a viewer for you PDF impaired people is here "