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That's essentially an argument for needing more competition in the online payments and credit card processing marketplace. It says nothing about BitCoin itself, only about what services currently work with it. There is nothing that intrinsically makes it any cheaper, either to transfer, or to convert to local currency (it's not like we actually ship physical bills around regularly either; the currency you use online is an e-currency too for all practical purposes); the fees are lower now, but they fluctuate wildly. See September of '17 through March of '18, where transaction fees were steadily above $2, peaking at $55/transaction in December, and that's before the cost of converting to and from local currency (you might say "But I can use BitCoin directly and never exchange to local currency", but of course, the same argument applies to U.S. dollars in theory, but it doesn't work out in practice in most countries).

Sure, if you're making $10K transactions, fixed per-transaction fees hardly matter if they avoid percentage fees. But when you're making small purchases in the $20 range (using it as an actual currency), which is the vast majority of what people use PayPal for, paying $2 on the transaction fee is roughly twice what any credit card processor or PayPal charges. You could reproduce the same advantages by shopping around for online payment services or just accepting payment by check, ACH, etc. You might say "but those are inconvenient and almost no one uses them!", and I'd respond "So, same as BitCoin then?"

But I have run VS Code on Ubuntu, so that is not a reason to switch to Windows.

https://www.sitepoint.com/visu...

I think control is going to have to be exercised at the browser design level. The browser will have to limit CPU usage for each tab, and limit it more or stop all scripts completely when the tab is out of focus.

It would be nice if we could get sites to not run miners when you're running on batteries, but that may be hard to enforce. It also brings back the problem of mobile devices being harder to monetize.

That's fine for passwords that don't affect the path to e-mail. In fact, some sites embrace passwordless login through one-time tokens sent through e-mail. But it wouldn't work for the password to the user's Internet connection (PPPoE, RADIUS, subscription hotspot with a captive portal, etc.) or to the user's e-mail itself.

Nor does it work if your site has a lot of users such as jondeanmack, who expects to be able to register without providing a means of password recovery.

I've been aghast at the broad adoption of thick client JS frameworks on the open web and a growing open hostility towards progressive enhancement, as if it's somehow not possible to build a single page app without totally breaking everything that makes the web a great platform.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that the vast majority of websites should not be using one of these, as the majority of these frameworks are incompatible with progressive enhancement and progressive enhancement is still the best way to build most sites. I firmly believe vanilla JS should be everyone's default. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are very narrowly tailored. I think this article which outlines those exceptions should be required reading for every web developer.

It seems like a lot of people these days don't realize you can build single page apps using progressive enhancement. And when you do, they perform better and are more fault tolerant while avoiding an unnecessary hard JS dependency. This whole stereotype you hear from people about single page apps being the future and progressive enhancement being the past is the most annoying false dichotomy ever. You can do both so long as you consider choices other than big, largely badly designed frameworks. It seems like most people who use Angular just want to make websites that don't reload the page when you click links. Maybe consider using a client-side router library instead of a giant monoframework. Way less code that has to be dumped on the user.

I'm not saying it isn't possible to use the big monoframeworks responsibly. The article above outlines good use cases for them. If you're building a client-only Electron app for instance, then go nuts with React or whatever if you like it. But seeing people design regular websites on the open web that are mostly just text, forms, and images using things like Angular and React is the biggest, most depressingly popular cargo cult antipattern we've seen since the days of Flash sites.

I use PHP, though I sometimes have to hold my nose.

Why? Because I'm not a purist, I'm a pragmatist. I'm not hung up on whether the tool is "good" or "bad" but rather what it can do for me. PHP allows me to get good performance in the least time. I rarely have months of schedule and millions of dollars to build a site, so efficiency counts.

By way of rebuttal: Can Great Apps Be Written in PHP?

Java's 'demise'? I think that's a bit of an exaggeration.

Wow you seriously don't have any idea what you are talking about. Most of the web application development world had abandoned MSIE around 2001,

Abandoned IE? IE dominated from the late 90s to the mid 00s. No amount of revisionism will dispute this fact. It's not like I work(ed) for Microsoft or enjoyed supporting IE6 later in its life, it's just a fact it was immensely popular for multiple reasons. This was the infamous era of applets and ActiveX, static webpages, single user computers, Sub7, Melissa and peak AOL. Web application development was IE centric, especially in the form of intranet sites, which were responsible for it being around an unnaturally long time. This isn't about ideology, it's simple business, you target what your customers run and at the time that was IE(6).

Version numbers weren't important, features were: you could build a new-skool web site using Phoenix and then hack it to look less-than-shitty in MSIE (does that sound familiar? It's still the process most of follow today).

The person who replied named Firefox specifically, not Phoenix, nor Firebird. You're moving the goal posts. Compared to the popular browsers at the time few people would've been using it prior to 2004 because it simply didn't exist as such. Regarding the claim about the process "most" follow today, (anecdote? are you the arbiter of the world wide designer/developer leauge?) , it's focused around Chrome and if they're half way competent Firefox. Why? Because laziness isn't new or unique to this industry. Just to be clear, how do you determine laziness? There are things called vendor prefixes which enable non-standard vendor specific CSS. Lazy folk will just use the popular ones which typically mean webkit specific. Things have improved as support for HTML5 and CSS3 increases. I'd love for ISPs to release the metrics for the User Agent strings for a more objective list of browsers/devices instead of relying on sites people visit. Google.com might be a worthy runner up, but here's a wiki page citing several stat sites in the browser wars.

The Wikipedia article on Firefox doesn't cover all that, so your apparently insightful research simply isn't.

For the record this is just a topic which I've firsthand experience with and calling it research cheapens the term and I'm not involved with the articles I referenced in any way. I just did some admittedly quick searches for supporting citations where possible, honestly, what is/was difficult is finding information on Netscape and IE JavaScript performance. There is a reason why Netscape users jumped ship and it took writing something from scratch to succeed. Your post contains no links, for those who aren't familiar with the details of the situation the more information available the better. My post isn't gospel and citing wikipedia doesn't grant one authority, it's simply convenient. Lots of sites have disappeared over the last ~15 years to boot. What would really help is finding a side by side comparison of the features supported by each browser (including Netscape!) I often search for things on my own, and I don't think I'm alone in this practice and I encourage anyone to do the same when educating themselves.

As an aside, revisionism is rampant. Look at Windows XP being lauded as light on resources, which at the time it was considered a busted pig compared to Windows 2k and 98 on this very site.

You think those XP users know that Linux exists? Most people don't even know what a browser is, and you think they are competent enough to seek out and install an operating system? Until you see preinstalled Linux boxes advertised heavily, mainstream adoption isn't going to happen.

What jobs numbers

OK, let me look that up for you, hmm?

Jobstractor shows 12,558 Java jobs, as opposed to 1908 C++ jobs and 1087 C jobs. And that was in 2012. It got even more tilted in 2013. So there are over 4 Java jobs for each C/C++ job, by that accounting, and most other sources show similar results.

Or maybe you'd prefer WantedAnalytics, which analyzes tech jobs and who lists the top 5 as SQL, Javascript, java, PHP. C++ doesn't even make the list.

Every single survey I've seen in the last 3 years has had Java and web languages like PHP on top, with C/C++ fading usually into 5th or 6th place, if even that high. Web technologies and managed languages are what's important now, and this trend is only going to accelerate as mobile becomes a bigger and bigger share of the industry. I'm sorry that you're stuck in the past. I hope you manage to learn some new skills before your niche falls into insignificance.

OK, let's back up a second and make sure that we are not kidding ourselves into thinking that any music played on a computer cannot somehow be recorded.

The record labels and movie studios have become comfortable with analog reconversion for private use that includes a DAC-speaker-microphone-ADC or DAC-display-camera-ADC in the path, just not digital reconversion that doesn't include this highly lossy step. Besides, a lot of video streams are considered rentals, and the provider wants to deter users from keeping the video past the rental period, which is a violation of terms of service.

I'm also not going to google for you how to maintain session state without cookies.

I just did, and I'm going to explain why I don't like the solutions that I found on the first couple pages of results.

• Associating a session with an IP address allows session hijacking if multiple users are behind one NAT or proxy.
• Including the session ID in all URLs and as a hidden input in all forms is fragile: someone using the back button would end up starting a new session. And as this page points out, it's more vulnerable to session hijacking when a user shares a link to product pages that happen to include old session IDs that may refer to private information.
• Storing a session ID in the modification date of an image is also fragile, as it causes session loss when a device's RAM fills up and the user's browser starts purging things from cache. I don't see how it would work anyway, as there's nothing to associate the HTML page load with the image load other than the IP address, which I mentioned above.
• window.name requires JavaScript and doesn't obey the same-origin or even same-domain policy.
• HTTP authentication requires users to register and log in before shopping, which users find prohibitively inconvenient.
• This page recommends making an order form that lets users copy and paste SKUs from another browser window and key in quantities, but it's almost as inconvenient as a phone order.

What keywords should I have used instead?

But as long as you make sure that the back buttons works, on all pages, all the time, even on your landing page

Cookies handle the back button better than the leading cookieless solution (session ID in URL) does.

you will be a much better developer.

I have tried to keep to this philosophy on an online store that I maintain on behalf of my employer, even though it does use a session cookie, does use the occasional (optional) animation, and does use the occasional (optional) script. We don't use anything like the Facebook/Twitter/Google+ social recommendation crap that too many sites use.

jQuery is a shitty Javascript library that, on the client side, slows down websites, increases development time, and generally makes cross-browser scripting impossible. It's worse than useless.

Node.js is essentially Javascript without the browser, plus a few extras. There are various uses for it. It can be handy, but it's far from the panacea it's made out to be by its proponents.

They're quite different. The only similarity I can come up with is that both are over-hyped.

In addition "MS" is no more valid of an abbreviation than "M$".

Completely wrong.

* It's their vender prefix on the Internet: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/vendorspecific. Note also that mso is called out separately as Microsoft Office.
* Until the latest IE they had MSIE for "Microsoft Internet Explorer" in their user agent string
* The Microsoft developer network is called msdn.
* Microsoft Network is abbreviated msn.
* Look at their original logo: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Microsoft-Firma-15584/News/Microsoft-Logo-Windows-8-1020153/galerie/1984053/
* It's composed of the words Microcomputer Software
* It's in a lot of the old 8.3 exe file names, eg. msoffice.exe
* Look at all of these MIME-types that specifically have ms as the abbreviation for Microsoft: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application, http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/video

Using the stock ticker symbol as the "only valid abbreviation" is bizarre.

Otherwise Microsoft wants the name spelled out.

This might even be true in some senses eg. for publicity (I can't find anything to specifically confirm or deny that in a quick search), but it definitely wasn't always true and they're still generating new things with MS as the abbreviation so it's at best inconsistent.

Trying over and over and over to tell people they are "childish" just makes you look childish.

How so? I don't see it. And obviously since you're telling him he looks childish, you therefore look childish for telling him that (and by extension, I'm being childish now by pointing that out).

If it's "childish" then it will stand on it's own that way

People like you posting this sort of knee-jerk response every single time somebody says M$ just looks like desperation.

I don't even understand. Desperation? I literally don't know what you're trying to communicate there -- I know it's negative, but I don't know what negative thing.

There are a lot of childish nicknames that go around for things people don't like: M$, Faux News, Obummer, Mittens (for Mitt Romney), Rethuglicans, Demoncrats, Scroogled, Crapple, and on and on and on. Even when I'm on somebody's "side" in a particular argument, it makes me discount them (for instance, I'm unlikely to be on the side of Republicans on many debates, but "Rethuglicans" is just crass).

I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves aren't all that pleased with South Korea's ActiveX install base. If you follow the browser at all, they've been trying to kill ActiveX more and more for the past half decade or so (with Flash as a very notable exception).

We sometimes have upwards of 1,000 people browsing the site at the same time, so my sense is that we shouldn't need massive amounts of power or bandwidth... but, somehow that's not working on our current host.

Your current host can't handle that?!?

whatever.

Check your ISP. If you have a decent business account with them, they probably have hosting as part of your plan. Why pay more when you don't have to.

Or just google it

Have a look here

Those same companies keep coming up.

Yahoo! has hosting services.

This!

[ A summary of a discussion from http://www.sitepoint.com/open-source-licensing/ and lots of good links re licensing issues. ]

The parent easily spent an hour or few putting that together.

Another good resource is one of the chapters of http://producingoss.com/

I published a project on github a year or couple ago. It is/was in an alpha state and not functional, so there's no huge interest. Figuring out what license to use took some time because of interactions with other efforts. My project makes use of files licensed under the MIT license. I expect to eventually contribute my code to another project that uses what seems to be an ISC license. I need the user to download a library that's only available as source. Not the most complex situation, but researching the license options takes time.

I can imagine that some people want to publish their code, but are either unaware that the default license is "all rights reserved", don't care, or care but don't want to spend the time to figure out what's appropriate.

The default license is "all rights reserved". When you create a new (public) project, github should require you to acknowlege that or to specify a license. A link to a good discussion of licensing issues could be included. The list of licenses to choose from should include "all rights reserved" and "see project-specific license". I'm not sure that "public domain" should be on the list because IIRC you need at least a minimal license to say "no warrenty" and provide a "limitation of liability". Project owners could still leave their code unlicensed.

First, let me say that I agree with you completely. You're not the first person to come up with the idea, I recall that being hashed out a while back and found this site that references it:
http://www.sitepoint.com/open-source-licensing/

*** Update from the bottom of this post ***
It is probably worth reading all of this and clicking the many links. After spending over an hour and a half on this silly quest I have managed to find some suitable tools that will help you (and others) as well as a variety of resources which we could use to easily create our own such tools. It's a good idea and an idea that is long overdue. There are some, it turns out, that have already attempted it but I am thinking a more robust solution would be an excellent addition to the community. I've done "my part" at this point but I'm probably willing to get my hands a little dirtier if need be but I suspect there are people here who have skills I don't and who have skills that aren't as rusty as my own.

Either way, be sure to read this as there are some decent links and there are some actual scripts that people have coded that do accomplish this task. The links are in the list and I've made an effort to describe them to some extent or at least indicate their importance so that you can narrow down which ones you wish to review and which ones you can just safely ignore. I don't think you (and I) are the only folks who are interested in it so the time invested is likely not wasted. Thanks for the thought process which engaged my brain hamsters. I enjoyed the chase.
*** End Update ***

Anyhow... That would be an excellent addition to the web. I've never seen anything of the sort actually done about it though it's been pondered in the past so I meandered off to Google and pulled a couple of links out of my favorites to see what I could come up with. But, be aware, I don't have exactly what you're looking for (or know if it exists as of yet) but I'll add to this post as I search and if I can't find what it is that you're looking for (it seems unlikely and I'm not sure why - it's pretty obviously something that would benefit the community and it doesn't look all that difficult) I can at least provide you with the resources to create the tool you're looking for. Hopefully that helps...

You can kind of do it on your own, manually, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses

Larry Rose's book 'Open Source Licensing' is available free online, specifically chapter 10 applies:
http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

This is not even remotely what you asked for but still interesting and on-topic (and I want to share it):
http://www.tldrlegal.com/compare

You could get SOME of that data here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

This one isn't complete but is simple and easy (and, like the last one, new to me):
http://jan-krueger.net/doc/opensource-licenses.html

In my search I found this, which isn't what you wanted but is a start:
http://creativecommons.org/choose/ (It looks to be pretty basic, and it is, but it is a good start.)

Another one that is new to me but pretty quick and easy to use. Still not what you wanted though:
http://www.croftsoft.com/library/tutorials/opensource/

This one looks a lot like the one from Wikipedia, I've not checked to see if it is a duplicate or not:
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_o

Interested parties should also check out Build Mobile Websites and Apps for Smart Devices.

This. How can people not know this has existed since forever as a CSS property?
It is madness I tell you.

No wonder the web tech is sitting in the 1500s, nobody knows what the hell the features are.

Might as well post this and destroy the sites speed further, a very useful thing in CSS that gets rid of the need for ID Abuse.
http://css-tricks.com/how-nth-child-works/
Actually, I won't link it since the site is slow as hell already, only the worthy will copy and paste or bother to right click and go.
Good luck, Arthur.
Actually this site loads quickly and is more detailed
Nth Child expressions
Most useful thing in CSS for selection.

I wonder what other features people don't know about.
So many new and older things that get obscured by "hey check this new useless feature out, DRM for HTML5" and other fun stuff.

When I search for "browser usage" Chrome typically lists #1: http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-january-2013/ http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

The tabs Go UNDER the address, period. Stop. Done.

http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-tabs-above-below/

Chrome, Opera and Firefox seem to disagree. Mozilla even has a nice little list with the reasoning for it:

1. The conceptual model: the address bar and controls apply to the current tab.
2. App tabs: like Chrome, Firefox 4.0 will allow you pin small regularly-used tabs to the tab bar. The address bar and other controls will be removed for these web applications.
3. Tab-based UI: Firefox 4.0 will show windows such as downloads and the bookmarks organizer in tabs. It makes no sense to have the address bar and other controls visible.
4. Notifications: some error and warning messages now appear below the address bar.

The part in bold is what I think really decides it. Putting everything related to that specific tab (the url, notification dialogues, etc) under it makes more sense, especially with the themes most browsers have now that have inactive tabs in the back with the current tab's edges extending down to connect with the rest of the page specific things.

Google has been doing all of this, but they do it really sneakily. Most of their marketing is really wise social engineering, the best example of being constant bombardment to download and switch to Chrome if you use IE.

To be fair, they may need to see it more often. They have lower IQs.

When you get that "You need an administrator password to do this" and don't get the login it is usually because you are trying to go into a restricted system area and it is trying to keep you out because Windows naturally can't tell the difference between a seasoned admin and a total dumbass that will bork his system.

The way you get around that is quite easy, there are two ways to do it: One place a link to the program that is giving you that either on the desktop or start menu with "run as administrator" checked. Windows figures if you have enough knowledge to know how to do that you should be left alone. Two you can use the God Mode trick which gives you access to pretty much anything and everything from a central location and all as admin. Pretty handy if you are having to tweak a machine or do a lot of work requiring admin.

As for network properties again God Mode or shortcut, although I do agree mixing network and sharing was a dumb idea, networking should have been left a separate UI. But if you are on a laptop that moves a lot or for other reasons you need to tweak networking a lot just make the start menu shortcut it really cuts down on the clicks.

As for the network problem, have you tried tossing the network drivers on that box? I have seen network problems like that in 7 be solved by simply tossing the crappy third party driver and using the Windows built in one. I have found especially on the Realtek NICs that often only the drivers that came with the board and the Windows ones work as the updated drivers usually break more than they fix.

Finally about security I have to agree 110%. I have watched the infection rates of customers fall off the map simply by getting them onto Windows 7. With Vista they fought the OS more than they worked, but with Windows 7 they seemed to have knocked out the bugs and made it intuitive enough that even those like my dad can find new features they didn't even know existed. For me I'd say the combination of MUCH better security and increased intuitiveness is worth the little UI "nigglers" that can usually be worked around quite simply with a minimum of fuss.

True indeed. In fact, I would go farther. I think this has the potential to become a classic textbook example of number theory.

This is an impressive and visually interesting application of basic number theory. I would not be surprised if we began seeing the presentations modelled on the Legion of Lego showing up in the slides of number theory lectures in the near future.

Not sure if there's even a point of mentioning this, but SQL Injections existed before XKCD made that comic...

It's not like supporting xhtml content type is a requirement for supporting xhtml syntax[...]

Yes, it is a requirement. When you serve xhtml with content type text/html, you're simply exploiting a bug in browsers that makes them ignore xhtml constructs that aren't legal html. More info here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393445#q8

[...] or mathml syntax for that matter.

Mathml is not a separate syntax. It's simply an xml namespace. If a browser is going to support xhtml properly, then it will have to support xml, and supporting xml means you already have automatic support for parsing mathml. Rendering mathml correctly is another matter. It's correct for a browser to ignore tags that it doesn't understand, and in the case of mathml, this actually results in a pretty reasonable fallback (looks OK on the screen, has some chance of being usable by blind users).

xhtml content type support is not trivial, because it requires an entirely different xml based parsing engine rather than an html based one.

It is trivial, because xml is a stable, well-defined format for which there are a gajillion different free and non-free parsers available. The reason html parsing is so incredibly hard is that real-world browsers all try to incorporate heuristics for recovering from badly formed html; if they didn't do that, they wouldn't be able to render a large percentage of html web pages. Since xhtml isn't allowed to be malformed, parsing it is trivial.

Its JPEG form wasn’t its source form.

And if you don't want to install Java, there's an image of the text (at least I think this is the same, but the author didn't bother putting any on his site so I can't be sure). Not very readable; I think this could be improved on.

Citation needed

You can start here.

A lot of it is buried history at this point. Apple's followers don't really want to know that Apple's legal muscle drove Microsoft's competitors out of the PC market, and facilitated the Windows GUI monopoly.

Here are a few pointers, mostly around PHP web app security:

- http://www.owasp.org/ - the Open Web Application Security Project has a comprehensive list of things to cover - see their http://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Top_5 (top 5 PHP issues) in particular

- http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-security-blunders/ Top 7 PHP security blunders - use =htmlspecialchars= for output of variables to page and do MySQL string escaping

- http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050707.php3 - ensure include files can't be reached directly from HTTP.

- http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1121901&cid=26797895 - use http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.filter-var.php -PHP Filter features]] (only in PHP 5.2.0 onwards)

- http://sucuri.net/ - monitors your site for free to detect compromises that affect readable pages

Final point: don't "filter out" dangerous characters, this is never ending and can never be done - instead, for any given parameter or input field, define the valid characters (e.g. alphanumeric, date, etc) and specifically allow ONLY those characters. This 'filtering in' approach is far safer.

There is a good posting explaining why Ecofont doesn't offer any advantage over a light serif on Fontblog (only in German, here's an English summary). Fontblog is written by typography professionaly and can be trusted on these things.

Correct me if I'm wrong

You're wrong. SVG can be embedded in any HTML5 document. Microsoft hasn't announced SVG support in IE9 yet, but it's likely.

I just learned something...

There are ways to achieve each of the various things you mention. See this, this, and this.

This only happens on new installs

Well, according to what I read here:

The browser ballot screen is a web page that will be shown to any European Windows user who has Internet Explorer set as their default browser. It will appear:

• following a new installation of Windows 7 during the first automatic update
• during a future automatic update of Vista and XP, and
• whenever the user chooses to return to the web page.

Open Source Silverlight: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/06/18/moonlight-open-source-silverlight-on-mono/

MS Office: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

Now what *I* find weird is that apple can lock their phones to specific networks, restrict any and all apps they want to on phones and also limit the OS that should run on any x86 hardware to only hardware they make as well as fail to make their software run on other platforms in which many cases even Microsoft makes its software run on Apple (which Silverlight does thank you, as well as office thank you..)

The fourth most visited website is generally considered to be a major website, and it has dropped support for IE6.

I don't break functionality of IE6 sites, but if the off by three bug shows up on IE6 whatever, It's an old browser,and people that use it, like the people that use Netscape 4 don't really expect the web to work completely correct.

...at least according to this article. The author makes a convincing argument that MS took a bath with that price in order to keep Linux from gaining a toe-hold in the netbook/notebook market, and also credits the threat of Linux Netbook Popularity with the extension of XP to 2010 and modifications of specs on Windows 7. A good read.

You mean something like what this article outlines? Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!

For anyone wondering, parent is talking about a preorder tree traversal algorithm:
Link 1
Link 2

And parent it right. I was doing an adjacency list in MySQL for a while, because I thought that preorder trees were just a little too complicated, but they are *way* easier and more intuitive.

Look it up yourself:
http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/vertical-align

IE 5.5+ supports middle, but both IE and Firefox have trouble with anything but top, bottom, and middle.

You might also try

http://reference.sitepoint.com/css

Does anyone know if this is still in effect?

1. When a user has a problem with a website in IE8, they can click the "Compatibility View" button to revert to IE7 rendering.
2. The URL is sent to Microsoft who compile a list of IE8-incompatible websites.
3. This list is sent to IE8 users so the site can automatically switch to IE7-mode for everyone.
4. If your website is fixed or is accidentally added to the list, you can add a meta tag to disable compatibility mode!

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/02/19/ie8-standards-mode-opt-in/
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/12/03/compatibility-view-improvements-to-come-in-ie8.aspx

Does this seem like a way for Microsoft to require people to mark their pages as "standards compliant" in a Microsoft-specified syntax?

It seems like IE8 users would click the compatibility mode button not because they think the site should render better in IE7, but because it doesn't look right. Won't this populate Microsoft's "render as IE7" list with sites that are just poorly rendered in IE8? Surely this can't be what's going on. It'd be a train wreck in progress. Any good, standards-compliant pages IE8 can't render very well get rendered even more poorly unless you put MS markup in them?

Can't be.

My guess is that MS are engaged in some kind of gambit to pollute the existing DOCTYPE standard somehow, by requiring browser-specifying markup, but it's not clear to me exactly how. Well, IE8 is here. We'll see what happens.

I started trying to learn Rails with this book, but found the dearth of RESTful development methodology leaves this book almost completely useless. Best practices are important to learn especially when just starting out. I would recommend Simply Rails 2 as a much better starting point for the beginner. I switched over to Simply Rails 2 and it provided a much better foundation upon which to build a working knowledge of Ruby on Rails.

I am not alone in this assessment. Here is just two people that think the same thing.

Since returning HTML would not be covered, AHAH requests would not be covered.

Even under a typical AJAX environment, switching the encoding from XML to JSON might work around.

You should be using AHAH anyway.

What do you mean by AHAH? Are you implying that not using query suggestions or client-side pre-validation creates a better user experience?

• Did all FOUR microsoft Quirks modes (IE8 standards, IE7, EmulateIE7, IE8 quirks) make it into the final version?
• How about blacklisting of domains for Quirks mode? google.com is blacklisted - how about your domain?

As the release of Internet Explorer 8 approaches, Microsoft's IE Team has published a list of differences between IE7 and IE8, and how to fix code so that it will work on both.

Compatibility issues can be solved very easily: Remove the detection code that detects IE8 as an obsolete browser and prevents you from visiting the website that requires you to upgrade to a later version.

Hell, it's already happened with Opera 10, which gets detected as Opera 1.0.

Boo! Put it on Hulu so Canadians can watch it too!

I don't understand these networks. They don't seem to understand that the internet is a global community. With TV there's no guarantees that you're hitting the correct audience, so the desire to filter the audience(so that it is "correct") is understandable when the opportunity arises - but what they seem to forget is they lose out on evangelical advertising because of that filtering.

I'm Canadian, but I spammed all my American friends about Hulu, and now they all watch TV there. If a show isn't available on Hulu, then we'll look for it elsewhere. If we have to jump through hoops to watch it(AOL, ABC, CBS, BBC, etc. etc.), then we won't; we'll just torrent it.

I think they'd be best off streaming it with or without ads to other countries, just to capitalize off word-of-mouth advertising. Stuff that can be watched by anyone on the internet spreads rapidly - See: Dr. Horrible, Monty Python

Networks like this will never get my endorsement - but not because of me; it's because they block me.

The problem with teaching PHP to beginners is that you also need to teach them HTML.

No, actually, you don't!

For your enlightenment:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-command-line-1/
http://gtk.php.net/
http://www.php-qt.org/
http://php-tk.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
http://www.bluem.net/downloads/pashua_en/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpopengl/

Yeah right History of the GUI

"Both VisiOn and GEM had their proponents, but neither made a major dent in the consumer market, which continued to be dominated by the twin monoliths Apple and Microsoft."

"So why didnâ(TM)t Amiga wipe both Apple and IBM/Microsoft off the PC market? As usual, we have a patchwork of reasons. The best guess is that Amiga made the same mistake as the Tucker passenger auto made⦠it was too far ahead of its time too fast, and couldnâ(TM)t take advantage of its own capabilities. The heated competition that existed between Amiga and Atari worked to Microsoftâ(TM)s advantage, as did Amigaâ(TM)s spotty ability to keep their dealers and customers happy. Adding to Amigaâ(TM)s problems were the first machinesâ(TM) failure to settle on a single GUI (one Amiga user tells me that the early models had different interfaces depending on which program was running). But whatever the reasons, Amiga was one sharp puppy, and deserved a better fate â" though today Amiga is neither gone nor forgotten; a new OS called âoeThe Digital Environmentâ is being touted as the next step in GUI-driven operating systems. We may hear from Amiga again before all is said and done.

Yet another mid-80s contender in the GUI wars was the Atari ST. Atari, much better known for their video games, produced a PC that featured the GEM OS. Like the Amiga, the ST couldnâ(TM)t compete with the big boys, nor could it compete with Amiga for gamers, but its sophisticated sound processing capabilities earned it a niche with audio editors and musicians."

If Microsoft did not have Windows the Amiga and Atari ST would have duked it out until one of them won. because Amiga and Atari duked it out, Microsoft eventually won. Dealers and customers weren't happy with the Amiga because Microsoft made software developers sign an agreement not to develop business software for the Amiga or Atari ST and only for Windows or the Macintosh. Apple made Apple dealers promise not to support or sell Amiga or Atari computers because they claimed they cut into Macintosh sales.

>>>"âoeI had an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Microsoft because it and it alone â" unlike Xerox, Apple, Amiga and many others who tried before it â" was the one that finally delivered a usable graphical interface on ubiquitous, inexpensive hardware. Microsoft often wasn't the first, and its software wasn't often the best, but it was inarguably the one that delivered on the early promise of personal computing in a way no other software maker did. Microsoft â" more than any other company â" opened up computing for ordinary people. I loved Microsoft for that.â "

"â" Fred Langa"

Microsoft won because PC clones were cheaper than Amiga and Atari ST systems, mostly because they were sold almost at "cost" with that Microsoft MSN or AOL $500 rebate in agreement with 2+ years of $22/month dial-up Internet access to turn a $800 PC Clone with Windows into a $300 PC Clone with Windows and a hard drive that outsold the $500 Amiga 500 and Atari 520 ST systems with a hard drive. Then sometimes the terms of the rebate caused people to pay back $300 of the $500 rebate when they canceled their MSN or AOL accounts because of the poor quality and high price. Amiga and Atari did not bundle in an "Internet Rebate" with their computer systems and it made dealers and users upset.

This book appears to contain inaccuracies. For instance, this page indicates that Safari through version 3.0 does not support widows. Without even considering that Safari 3.1 was a substantial upgrade in CSS support ... Apple says Safari has supported widows and orphans since Safari 1.3.

The ultimate CSS reference is Google. Just follow their search results and not their example.

CSS isn't all that difficult, but it's the edge cases and browser incompatibilities that are likely to cause you headaches. There are many excellent sites out there tracking these topics, and collectively they do a better job than any book could hope to do.

Yes, there are many excellent sites out there. For example, here's one really excellent site by Tommy Olsson and Paul O'Brien, hosted by some publisher called SitePoint.