Slashdot Mirror

That only works if every webpage in the world decides to say 'FUCK YOU!' to IE6. And that would require every web developer to say 'FUCK YOU!' to 25% of the web population. That will not happen.

The ordinary user does not care about what browser they're using. They care about the accessing content. If one site says 'sorry, please upgrade your browser.' then users will simply migrate to another site. And that site'll have more visitors.

Take Facebook, for example. They had a whole fancy Ajax-y redesign. They also didn't support it in IE6, and told people to upgrade or use Flock, Firefox or Safari. Fantastic news - but the point here is that IE6 users were not excluded outright, because it made best sense for them [Facebook] as a business.

As someone who's hacked about with CSS and javascript a bit, I would rejoice if I heard IE6 had just died a long, drawn-out and tortuous death. Firefox has considerably helped with this, but non-technical people do not care. And since lots of non-technical people use IE6, developers cannot stop supporting it; it's a chicken and egg problem.

Unfortunately, short of a Windows Update that upgrades IE6 to 7 or 8, IE6 is not going anywhere soon.

For someone who accuses me of being 'silly' (what are you, twelve?), you completely avoided my point: this is still a government-mandated change. I couldn't even begin to predict how much damage Microsoft would do to their relationship with the government if they acted the way you're 'predicting'. It is not Microsoft saying how a computer should operate, as pointed out in the article it is the current administration who wants limits on what will run and what won't.

As for your 'advantages of free software': Too easy.

First, it's easy to tell what works and upgrades are already painless.

Ubuntu and nVidia drivers. Not all upgrades are painless, because you can't foresee everything. Developers are human, not robots. There are plenty of instances where upgrades break something important.

Second, if something does not work, it will be fixed quickly.

From linked article:

RHEL Linux average time to fix any class of vulnerability: 58 days.
Microsoft windows average time to fix any class of vulnerability: 13 days.

Third, and most importantly, the software does not have "owners" who want to mess with other software "owners".

Tell that to Gentoo users that have had several developers quit over the last few months due to differences of opinion. A lack of ownership can actually negatively impact development when there are conflicts that can't be resolved due to a lack of a resolution path.

And is Apache really more of an innovation than Linux?

You must be kidding, right? With Apache market share being 63% and Linux being what? Like 3%? Even if we're talking just about servers, it's got less then 30%. With Apache leading the web server innovation and Linux just trying to replicate more advanced OSes in OSS context (if we're talking about desktops)... ...sure, mod me down. Still, that doesn't prove me wrong.

Many CSS users want to be able to take a heading or a short piece of text in the HTML and use CSS to replace it with an image. Users with graphical browsers should see the image. Users with text-only browsers should see (or hear) the original text. Search robots should also see the original text. (They often don't treat alt tags the same as normal text.)

One popular way to do this is Fahrer image replacement. This technique uses a piece of HTML like this

<div>
<span>Hello world!</span>
</div>

div {
background-image:url("hello_world.gif");
background-repeat:no-repeat;
height:35px;
}

The problem with Fahrer image replacement is that several screen reading programs don't pick up the replaced text. Many other image replacement techniques have been devised.

Which image replacement techniques do you think are okay to use? Which, if any, do you consider abuse of CSS?

this also proves "People are Stupid" - Terry Goodkind

Because XHTML is a pointless and overhyped waste of time and energy at this point.

Read more of Stuart's thoughts on his website:

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2002/11/28/whats

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2005/02/21/xhtmlHtml

Because XHTML is a pointless and overhyped waste of time and energy at this point.

Read more of Stuart's thoughts on his website:

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2002/11/28/whats

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2005/02/21/xhtmlHtml

I haven't read the book myself, but well done on a coherent review that covers the resurgence of unobtrusive scripting. The author is quite well respected in the community, and I can only hope books like these begin to replace the "omg dhtml netscape 4!!11one" fare usually found on shelves.

I think AJAX et. al. could be a bit of a diversion though from the ideals of "unobtrusive scripting" though. Many sites using XMLHttpRequest and similar techniques aren't easy to degrade in older, non-JS-supporting browsers. GMail, for instance, had to write another whole separate version using plain HTML for legacy useragents; this seems a little beyond the "progressive enhancement" ideals in which JavaScript adds to, rather than replaces, essential page functionality. I'm putting together my own LGPL'd AJAX library that operates via plain HTML links and forms (and yes, those IFRAME hacks you speak of are really hard to get right!). So in theory it should degrade well.

And what the heck, while I'm self promoting, here's my free event manager script that works around IE memory leaks, as well as making the whole cross-browser-event-handling stuff easier (which is still the main annoyance when writing cross-browser code -- hurry up and implement DOM Events, MS!). Hope any other JS coders here find it useful.

There is almost nothing that can't be done in any modern browser. What exactly do you mean by "dynamic"? Check out some of these sites.

JavaScript, used correctly, is good. Look at all the compliments Google gets on GMail and Google Suggest or what people are doing with unobtrusive DHTML.

If anything you should be encouragine this guy to write good JavaScript so you don't have to put up with the bad stuff.

Where I work, we design our sites to work with IE; Not my decision

You see, if you actaully follow some _very_ simple standards, you will get sites that work in the major browsers. Don't do stupid things like use document.all, use document.getElementById instead. When you refer to a forms "controls" such as textarea and inputs, don't just use FormName.inputName, use docuemnt.FormName.inputName. It only takes one second to look at a site your building in IE and Firefox.

If I am doing a web app, I only use Firefox to test with. Firefox has tons of great extenstion to make it much easier to do web development. Once everything is working. I then go through the app with IE to make sure it works. If I find a problem with IE, I make changes as needed. However, 99.99% of the time if you follow the simple rules above, your web sites/apps will work in the major browsers.

I do GUI, server and web based apps. I put the same level of effort into web apps as my C/C#/Java GUI/Server apps. If I need some DHMTL type functionality, I spend an extra 5 minutes to write or find something that works with the major browser. For example, I wanted a popup calendar. There are tons of crappy IE only popup calendars on the web. However, I spent an extra 2 minutes on Google and found this one, Calendar Components III. I wanted a JavaScript based table sorter and found this one, SortTable. You just drop SortTable into a page and it does the rest and makes all your tables sortable in IE _and_ Firefox/Mozilla. The point of all of this is that it takes no extra time to do things right and not have silly IE only requirements. The only things that should be IE only is if you are for some reason using an ActiveX control.

Google updates every month, and every month webmasters throw hissy fits over PR and SERPs.

I get SEO spam simply for being the technical contact for a couple of domains at work, and I will bet my bottom dollar that anyone who does business with those people will be wiped of the map come the next update.

By contrast, all the sites I manage still show up as usual. I've been no.1 on key terms for a while, simply 'cos the sites provide relevant, useful info in a well-structured manner, and doesn't mess around with Google.

One thing I am curious about is whether or not Stuart Langridge's accessible image replacement technique counts as an attempt at spamming Google: after all, it hides header text behind images...

There are some excellent accessible, standards compliant scripts now for creating trees / drop down menus from HTML nested lists - browsers without javascript see the list, while browsers with javascript get a nice expanding tree. Two examples:

• aqLists
• Using Lists for DHTML Menus

PHP is a widely used embedded-in-html scripting language, but it is by no means the first. PHP started off as a templating language, but features were continually added which it caused it to grow beyond Server Side Includes. As such, PHP is not a well designed scripting language. If you separate your code into functions, it is extremely difficult to track down errors, because you only get the line that the error occured on and not the line that called that function.

PHP is definitely very easy to start programming dynamic web pages, but it is
increasingly problematic as your code base grows. If you primarily do web
design and just want a little dynamic content, PHP's shortcomings won't affect
you. However, web based applications will run into problems with PHP
repeatedly. Besides the problem where it copies objects out of an array
when you use a "foreach", you are also stuck remembering to put an amperstand
in front of every object so it gets passed or assigned by reference and not
value.
For example:
$x = $obj; # $x is a copy of $obj
$x = &$obj; # $x and $obj refer to the same object

Besides the overhead of copying large objects, it just creates one more
"gotcha" that you have to remember to avoid. It is not that good code can't
be written, but it is so much easier to write problematic code.

Other projects for embedding scripting into HTML:
http://pmz.sourceforge.net/

http://webware.sourceforge.net/
http://www.kryogenix.org/code/castalian/

http://www.zope.org/

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Reference/Produ ct s/PerlEx/Embedded.html

Going to the main site (broswer experiments), you can quickly find yourself face to face with an online version of that Microsoft paperclip thingy. Great.

Going to the main site (broswer experiments), you can quickly find yourself face to face with an online version of that Microsoft paperclip thingy. Great.