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My first CS course explained when to use and when not to use floating point numbers. Obviously, there are retards like this, but either you know it or you don't know it. And if you don't know it, I would have to wonder what you do know. But I wouldn't hire you, that's for damn sure.

I gave up a long time ago waiting on browsers to support this font and that font... now i just embed them with flash using sIFR -> http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr

Oh, gee, YA /. Flash discussion, yet again heaploads of non-sense and misconceptions ... Ok, here we go:

Hoi Slashdot.

Veteran Flash Developer here, this is rumor / BS control - here are the facts:

At oh-sixhundred an EEV ... oh, sorry, wrong script ...

1) Flash is by far the most ubiqious end user plattform in existance. Period. It has been for a good decade. Since deployment of Java as end user app delivery method still sucks as much as it did already in 1999 and ActionScript 2 and AS3 have improved the Flash stack in leaps and bounds and are practically indistinguishable for Java in power and versatility, everybody in web technology who has more than two braincells is still betting his money and his pocket cash on Flash as a rich client plattform. All others have failed, and they have failed miserably. Everyone knows why, nobody is learning from it. And thus Flash remains.

And since JavaFX still is the typical Type-A botchjob Sun like do pull when they try to push Java into the appspace it was initially meant for, Flash can stay as crappy as it is and it still has nothing to fear. I wonder if Oracle can change this. They said they'll continue with JavaFX, but that can just so mean they'll continue to screw around like Sun did for 12 years in a row.

2) The web is - if anything - even more diversified than 5 years ago. Mobile doesn't help it. The first Flash Player for Android will have Flash at a solid #1 position again, for another 5 years at least. Not that I really love that, but we have to face the truth ... It will probably even give Android another solid boost vs. iPhone, which, strangely, would actually be a good thing.

3) The FOSS community is pushing Ajax Frameworks with a bizar amount of manhours and developer force, yet for Fonts, Animation and Sound there is no alternative. And if I look at the fuss I have to put up with to get a decent Ajax RIA running across browsers I can tell you this: For anything than the most well planned asynchronous built-to-fit purpose in a single webform, Ajax quickly becomes unbearably cumbersome.

And for tried and true decoupled business apps Tibco Gi is Ajax as about as good as it gets, but needs an experienced devteam to make use of - and then still are there only a few browsers supported. Ergo: Fallback to Flash (or Flex in this case).

4) RIA webapps are square pegs in a round hole. The web is document driven. Yet again and again people are going to try and carve the next nifty thing out of it, no matter what bizar hacks it takes. That's the way we are and it won't change. Not as long as my customers pay me good money to build Flash Applications. The last one took us two years and a team of 25, 7 of which were doing Flash/AS full time on the project. Just to give you an impression of the critical mass advantage Flash has over anything else. MS Silverlight included.

As long as everything else on the web is 10 years behind in enabling something like this, Flash will remain Number One. And no, Chrome with some OpenQL experiments or Ajax/HTML won't cut it. Trust me on this one.

5) Flash is not a security issue. Not compared to anything else on the web. ActiveX is, Flash is not. In fact, Flash has gained inroads in white-collar space based on its extremely conservative approach to security issues. Calling Flash a vector for exploits is just plain silly. Stop doing that, that's bad karma. Flash has other flaws that are plenty enough to rant about.

6) Flash has had serious flaws and shortcomings for 10 years now. Build a FOSS RIA kit that does away with them and Flash is dead in an instant, and the web is ours. Until then quit the non-sense. Ads aren't what drives Flash. Opinion leaders are. And those with the cash. And as long as the best webdesigners on the planet earn no more th

Because you somehow prefer sFir (Flash-based) headline fonts or text rendered into big headline images? Really, if a site has sucky typography (or content problems or lousy navigation or lame presentation) then just stay away. It's pretty much that easy.

WOFF, if it works, is a fine idea IMO. It's about time that typography grows up and comes to the web. Personally, I'm hoping that this succeeds wildly and increases interest in free/libre/oss fonts and font authoring tools.

Also consider that web-delivered fonts open the door to "render[ing] languages for which font support is usually lacking.". Folks in linguistic minorities can use this to share content without having to wheedle browser/OS makers for font support, and without any fiddly configuration on the part of the reader.

They already can.

Looks promising; found this in a link from TFA:

WEDJE is similar to the innerHTML method above except it creates what is effectively a cross-platform, cross-browser defer, enabling your script to load and execute asynchronously across all environments. We write out a div with javascript, then we create a script element with javascript, and then we append the script element to the div, again with javascript.

By linking elements together in this way, browsers appear to completely decouple the loading and execution of our attached javascript from the loading and execution of the original document, which is exactly what weâ(TM)re looking for.

Their example/demo worked in Chrome 2.x, and FF3.5 for me:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/06/widget-deployment-with-wedje

How to snatch an expiring domain

You could also try waiting till the domain expires and they have to renew and try to register it then before they do. That takes time and cunning skills.

There are so many people lined up to buy expiring domains that you really have to pay fees to a service that can pound the system with purchase requests to get one that way.

In early versions of Netscape, you could link to a remote font of your own choosing. The font-copyright people were up in arms about this, Microsoft didn't implement it in IE, and it was taken out of Netscape. That's why fonts on the web suck so much. You're either stuck with the lowest common denominator of fonts (Times Roman, Arial, Courier, or Comic Sans MS), or you can put a font into an image, which is silly but standard practice.

That's how we got into this mess.

Here's an example of a page that uses downloadable fonts. Unless you have a very old browser, it will look ugly. There's a more recent attempt to work around the problem with Flash. Wrong answer.

While I am against Microsoft's vision of DRM-laden fonts (the internet is open and free dammit) I welcome the future of font embedding. It would be a huge boon towards a semantic, searchable and accessible web. Designers would have no reason to insert images (or Flash) in place of text order to get the desired typographic effect.

Before you say "HTML is semantic, there is no place for presentation it the spec!" read the actual proposal, it's for the CSS spec, not HTML - right where presentation belongs. Quite frankly, it's silly that this isn't already in place given the rate that we continue to move away from print.

Link to the original image:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/scratch/myspace/cont acttable_myspace.gif

and the screen grab: http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/26/633799-h acking-john-mccain

For a snapshot of the web population at large, check this site:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

Their stats are updated regularly, they've got a reasonable level of detail, and lots of pretty graphs.

However, as others have pointed out, you need to be worrying about your particular audience more than anything else. A site like the one I've just given isn't all that useful unless you've got a really huge web site. So here's a three step plan for YOUR web site:

1) At first, design it to work smoothly with as many browsers as you possibly can.

2) Build up a profile on the types of users who visit your site. There are lots of programs that can help you do this. Google Analytics does a decent job, and it's free of charge. Another one is Mint, which some people swear by (it costs $30 USD). There are lots of others out there, of varying quality and abilities. Take your pick.

3) Once you've got a profile built up, tune your web site to suit the abilities of the browsers that most of YOUR particular users favor. You might discover that only 0.002% of your visitors are using Safari, meaning perfect compatibility with Safari is not a major concern for you. Or you might discover that the Opera users of the world swarm your web site like ants swarm spilled sugar, in which case Opera becomes a priority for you.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you want a fascinating read about grabbing an expiring domain, you might be interested in an excellent article by Mike Davidson about that very topic. There are a few legitimate businesses who specialize taking advantage of the loopholes in ICANN's expiration process. Really cool stuff.

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have a sneaking suspicion that they are the ones doing the parking themselves (that's where I do most of my domain checks), and just trying to get another $10 out of you for the domain.

I have first hand experience with this. (I just got cl1p.com back).

GoDaddy.com backorder does not work, and never will. This article here explains why.

Basically the expired domain market is owned 100% by three players. Snapnames.com, enom.com, and pool.com. These guys are first in line when a domain expires.

I purchased godaddy.com backorder service to get my domain back from a squatter. I noticed that I was expiring in Dec 06. So I waited. When it got closer to the expiry's date I did a google search and found that godaddy.com would not work. I registered at snapnames.com, enom.com, and pool.com and its a good thing i did. It seams that domaincontender.com (The register the domain was currently under) has some sort of deal with snapdomains.com and puts it up for auction a few weeks before it can go to the other two players.

If I haven't registered, it would have probably gone to some other squatter.

Try this article, http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03 /how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain/ from Mike Davidson (of Newsvine) on how he grabbed the Newsvine.com domain.

Any links? I found
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/07 /make-your-site-mobile-friendly
about server-side preprocessing to remove crud, but did you have something else in mind?
Rewriting it all in XML or WML is not very feasible for most sites...

ESPN.com had a high-profile conversion in 2003 that was supposed to reduce its load time and file size signficantly. A peek at the front page today shows that, in fact, the site is contained within divs. On the downside, however, it appears that the front page designers have gotten lazy -- currently the page does not validate against its embedded doctype.

As for why tables-based layouts are done 'everywhere', it could be because of a lot of reasons: no time to do a proper redesign, no desire to mess with a working display, old work habits from developers, not having adequately skilled resources doing the design, or any other reasons that lead upper management to believe that the cost/benefit analysis doesn't demand serious structural changes.

From my experience, two of the biggest hindrances I've seen to implementing a CSS-based design are making sure that the application developers that work on a site are on board so that their output html validates AND making sure that the html designer knows exactly what kinds of permutations of content might be generated from the applications used on the site. After all, most big sites are really just the results of application output, and without significant planning and design, it's far too easy for developers to fall back on the default output templates that their IDEs *cough*visualstudio*cough* provide.

As to your question of "It's my personal opinion that some things are just way easier to do with tables than CSS, and that's why people keep doing it. Am I right?", well, yes and no. Yes, it's easier to keep adhering to bad habits than it is to learn new habits. No, it's not any harder to develop alternate and comparable means of display using proper semantic markup and valid xhtml/css. No, I didn't say IDENTICAL designs, I said comparable; some table effects can be done only with, um, tables. But just as a serious print designer would be better served by setting type in an application like inDesign or Quark rather than making one big image file in photoshop, it's a matter of using the right techniques with the right tools.

That said, I think that the case for coding a proper xhtml/css site is compelling -- bandwidth savings (and improved browser response/user experience), minimal template changes for alternate content delivery, easier path to section 508 compliance, better search engine rankings in google, and forward compatibility are all legitimate reasons to consider using the display methods as they were meant to be used, not as they were hobbled together in the mid- to late-90s.

While your analysis of the e-mail is astute, I think you missed Zeldman's larger point, that this e-mail is just one piece of evidence in growing frustration amongst rank-and-file web developers with the W3C. Other developers have agreed.

I used to be a member of some W3C mailing lists, but got frustrated by the lack of momentum. Most of the e-mails were deflected as, "someone has already proposed that, read the archives!" or "that is not implementable." Constrast that to WHATWG, where my comment on a spec not granted me a reply from that spec's author, but also gave me a bit of enlightenment into the process.

I was a flag carrier, a proselytizer. Now I just read mozillazine and the Opera blog to see what's coming. It does seem to me that lately all the W3C is good at moving on is publishing standards other people wrote.

To customize your MySpace profile at all, you need to basically type up a full stylesheet to ovverride the existing one.

That would be easy, however as Mike Davidson discovered and showed us CSS hacking a MySpace page together is much much harder than just overriding the default styles.

• Page reduction (est.): 50KB
• Page views/day: 40,000,000
• Projected bandwidth savings:
  • 2 terabytes/day
  • 61 terabytes/month
  • 730 terabytes/year

I tested a few queries on it and it found everything I was looking for on the homepage. This is an interesting search engine though.

Slightly offtopic - does anyone have any information on how Google ranks pages? I've read this page which has some really good information in it, but does anyone know of any other guides on search engine optimization with google?

Or they could just use sIFR.

Tends to make pages look better.

I've been working for a web design company, and we've been doing alternative content on pages for a long time. Not an SEO optimizations, but more like using FlashObject for Flash , sIFR for headers and a few other "change h1 tag contents to image" OR "welcome to our website, you're seeing this text because you don't have css enabled' tricks.

Does anyone know how google treats alternative content? I mean - I'm happy that I'm listed in google, but since some flash alernatives tend to be descriptive (especially for product preentations) I'm not sure what google people think about that.

Thanks for help.

--
Spieprzaj dziadu!

I can't figure it out -- and I do believe that whoever DOES figure it out will have a pretty penny hitting them from the dead tree publishers.

Mike Davidson figured it out.

In a nutshell: accessible, degradable rich fonts for headlines/callouts. Check out the example and the discussion.

I can't figure it out -- and I do believe that whoever DOES figure it out will have a pretty penny hitting them from the dead tree publishers.

Mike Davidson figured it out.

In a nutshell: accessible, degradable rich fonts for headlines/callouts. Check out the example and the discussion.

The point is that it doesn't need XHTML + CSS + Javascript + Flash, it will render normal text if you don't have/want them. And yes, it works with FlashBlock too, as is mentioned in the article.

I think that font-fetish is something most people don't get. No one notices good font selection, yet they notice bad and it makes a huge difference to the readability and feel of a page. The web would be a much poorer, more HTML 2.0-looking, place if we could only have three fonts.

Insane... using flash and javascript to render unhighlightable text? Surely usability is more important than typography, no?

RTFM. And try the sIFR demo. If you did either of these, you'd see that the text certainly can be highlighted, copied and pasted, and so on. It's even searchable and degrades gracefully since non-flash and non-javascript browsers simply get an unstyled version of the text. This is the whole point to sIFR. The worst thing that I've seen about it is that the Adblock Firefox extension puts little tabs above the content block. But most users won't see this since relatively few people use Adblock and I can certainly live with it.

Finally, your post had nothing to do with the parent. If you mean to start a new thread, do it. Don't reply to an early post just to get yours near the top of the comments page.

The sifr link in the article is stupid. This is better

Hmmm what does Mike Davidson think?

He makes it LGPL but obfuscates it to obviously stop reusage?

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/2.0/ sifr.js

(Should i submit it on the[ ]daily)WTF(.com)?

By the way. Am i the only one who thinks that this JS+Flash combination - for a thing that is clearly a CSS's job - is nearly perverse?

So... I'd like to click on that link up at the top of his example page. Where does it go? How do I know it won't generate popups

If I can't tell within 2 seconds where the link goes, I'm not going to click on it. I also tend to forward URLs of interest to people, and use this right-click --> Copy link location... to do it. Why won't Flash let me do that? I know I can go to the page and up to the address bar, but that's not the point.

Considering they're at version 8.0 right now of their player, I can't imagine how hard it would be to interface with a browser's status window and at least tell me something.

• css/edge
• Glish CSS Layout Techniques
• Position Is Everything
• stu nicholls | CSS PLaY | CSS layouts
• A List Apart
• CSS Discuss

I'd love to look at the example, but Firefox crashes when I click on the link... :-(

Check out the example page here

Flash/ad blockers

We've worked with the developers of the Firefox FlashBlock extension to make sure sIFR text is automatically degraded to (X)HTML for users of recent versions of FlashBlock. When users install FlashBlock, they are demonstrating a bias against Flash (most likely because of the incredible amount of obnoxious and invasive advertising on the web these days) and we want to respect this bias. If users don't want to see Flash, we don't want to show it to them. sIFR runs fine under other extensions like AdBlock, but users can always disable the loading of sifr.js if they'd like.

sIFR produces highlightable text:

Demo here: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/2.0/

The text can be highlighted.
Check out this example page.
You can turn sIFR on and off to see the difference:

sIFR Example

Here is a quote from an excellent article from Mike Davidson's Blog where he talking about how domain names expire:

"Contrary to popular belief, domains do not expire when they say they do. If the owner of a domain does not renew by the expiration date of the domain, the domain goes into "expired" status. For 40 days, the domain is in a grace period where all services are shut off, but the domain owner may still renew the domain for a standard renewal fee. If a domain enters this period, it is a good first indicator that it may not be renewed, but since the owner can re-register without penalty, it can also just be a sign of laziness or procrastination.

After 40 days are up, the domain's status changes to "redemption period". During this phase, all WhoIs information begins disappearing, and more importantly, it now costs the owner an additional fee to re-activate and re-register the domain. The fee is currently around $100, depending on your registrar. When a domain enters its redemption period, it's a good bet the owner has decided not to renew.

Finally, after the redemption period, the domain's status will change to "locked" as it enters the deletion phase. The deletion phase is 5 days long, and on the last day between 11am and 2pm Pacific time, the name will officially drop from the ICANN database and will be available for registration by anybody."

The OS X calculator sure doesn't: 9533.24 - 215.10 =9318.139999999999. Another user wrote in to MacAddict magazine about this with some number around 40, I believe.

Thanks for your reply.

I have enjoyed your work and your sense of humor over the years. In every good mac the knife column there was always a point or two interspersed amongst the jokes and sometimes the jokes were the point. Half the fun was trying to deconstruct cryptic riddles for clues and the other half was trying to figure out if you had any real information or not.

And now my latest information in the form of an homage.

Wonder Twin Powers Activate

My faithful assistant Twinny, so named not because of sibling but because, depending on the day, she is literally two different girls, was reviewing the hours of messages she gets every day on her cell phone when she told me to check my messages because she had just forwarded something to me. Now I, being in between beverages as they say, was not in the mood to listen to another suitor/stalker embarrass the hell out of themselves as entertaining as it may be, but she said "This is real."

A tip. Finally a tip. But my cloudy enthusiasm quickly faded as I realized that although real it was a wrong number and this call had nothing to do with what I was currently searching for. I pass this information on only because Twinny's phone number seems to be one digit off from a large group of diverse and important people and her lack of message greeting seems to get people talking.

I will paraphrase the whole call in its entirety verbatim below:

The message seemed to be a reply from someone in the know who was replying to the question of why Bob Novack was not being threatened with jail time and did that mean he had burned his source to the prosecutor already.

The caller was offended by the original questioners logic. "You have it backward" he said and then explained that Miller and Cooper were much better suspects for burning their sources because they are jumping up and down making a big deal about this.

"That makes no sense." I yelled into the phone, fully expecting a reply. The caller on the other end predictably ignored me but after a pause he then continued.

"Look, the prosecutor doesn't want to make this a big case about journalist rights he just wants the name. The journalists don't want to make this a big case about journalist rights they just don't want their sources to think they will be burned. So we need an exit strategy."

"An exit strategy?" I intriguingly repeated back into the phone.

"An exit strategy" he repeated and then explained, "A deal is cut. Miller and Cooper burn their sources but jump up and down waving the first amendment and the prosecutor takes the names and builds a case around it. At the last minute, new developments are brought to light that make any journalistic testimony unnecessary and everyone is happy."

He then ended his call with some chit chat about dinner but in my haste to replay the message I hit delete instead. Like the Castle now all that remains are stories about messages of half conversations told by someone who is technically still drunk.

Guy Incognito
Journalist
Reason Covertly

I agree with the OP that it's a shame Microsoft stopped pushing its embedded fonts technology (though it does still work). I also think it's a shame that the W3 didn't approve the standard.

But what is stopping Opera or Mozilla from implementing its own truetype embedded font technology? I just don't understand it at all. Fonts already have a protection bit for copyright enforcement. It's not like it will install a virus on your computer -- it's more akin to a cookie.

It's incredibly frustrating to see people turning to Flash alternatives just to get the friggin' right fonts to display on their computer.

I'm not "on about" anything. I'll try to answer your subsequent questions however.

CSS doesn't render fonts, it defines them. The web browser renders the fonts by instructions from the CSS, not the operating system. the browser is in charge of rendering fonts although it may loan operating system fonts.
The web browser and CSS do not render fonts properly together compared to even a 500 year old book.

Take a look at a book - can you see the way the fonts are clearly rendered on the page? Now look at a web page - see the way they appear - that's your answer.

XHTML and CSS need standard fonts that display just as well as a font rendered in say for instance Macromedia Flash or an Acrobat PDF. They also need a standard for fonts, perhaps a set of imbedded fonts that don't change across browsers and operating systems. XHTML and CSS should look the same in any browser and on any computer, but they don't because the question of fonts has not been resolved.

The current limited set of jagged unaliased fonts that CSS defines are not good enough. There's a good outline on the problems of web typography here if you want to read more about the history, problems and temporary solutions used at the moment.

Hehe.

And why? Cos' the ringtone market has BY FAR larger
profit margins than the mobile handset industry itself.

Oh, and I told you so!

The technique is known as sIFR, popular amongst designer types because you get to use whatever font you like. When you point out limitations like this to them, they write it off as "edge cases" though. Who cares if it's annoying as long as you have nice fonts, eh?

Close actually. Now 9533.24-.1=9533.14, rather than 9533.1399999999

linky

Apple's in the entertainment business now -- extending the reach of your service/content is what it's all about. First BMW, now Motorola -- who's next?

It also makes me think that they're just testing the waters with this -- 12 songs is nothing. I'm thinking that data services (GPRS, etc.) fit in better with their business model -- especially with regard to syncing data. Also, 12 songs isn't a limitation if you have the data channel available to replace them at will -- a GPRS connection to your iDisk is all it would take.

It's also kind of funny that this was posted today...

-ch

Clearly you aren't a web developer.

Most of the web developers I know (and I know a lot) started out using tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive etc, which now output decent XHTML, but now they are starting to move toward XHTML and CSS in their designs (which are some of the best on the net, might I add), and they're switching to using text editors exclusively for writing the code, plus your standard graphics programs for the images. I do the same.

The great thing about XHTML is that is separates the content from the design, which in turn makes your code beautiful and easy to write and maintain. I was looking at an XHTML page I had written the other day, and I thought, gee, I could just put this up as plain text and people would still understand it. It was free of all that contextual crap (tables, font tags, one-pixel spacer images) that heavily-designed HTML pages of two years ago were full of. So no, a text editor is not just for writing static text. I use mine for every aspect of the design process, though, admittedly ConTEXT is not notepad, it's pretty close. And I would contest that the sites I develop aren't crappy looking.

You may be able to design sites with a tailored WYSIWYG HTML editor, but you usally have little control over how everything fits together, and it results in messy code that is hard to understand. If that works for you, then fine, great. All I can say is that you better "know some of this stuff" and how to do it without your XHTML editor -- learn it in notepad -- and then, once you see what was output by your editor, and if you have any respect for the XHTML standard and the ideals that the W3C had in mind when they thought of it, I have a feeling you won't go back.