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Disclaimer: I'm no Google fanboy (in fact, I can be downright wary about them at times), but this post has several problems and incorrect assumptions:

"Most people know how overrated google has become. Why then do we keep writting about only the good things?"

Maybe it's because (less a certain section of the Slashdot audience where it's trendy to bash Google), "most people" (you know, the 90% of people on the internet who barely know which way round a mouse goes) find Google works perfectly well for them. And from personal subjective experience, it's a lot better than the majority of other search engines out there, and vastly better than the state the search industry was in before Google came along.

And, to be fair, they are extremely innovative as a company - look at the sheer number of products launched (even if they are beta)... can you name many other companies who even beta-release quite such a number of products with quite such regularity? Google also have a good track record of entering a moribund field (search, webmail, etc) and kicking the already-entrenched players up the arse.

They've mastered the Richard Branson/Virgin technique of analyzing an industry, working out what's wrong with every offering out there, and offering something which fixes it. It's not always disruptive tech, but can sometimes merely be disruptive feature-offerings.

"I don't read Cringely very often, but I've never seen even him have anything really negative to say about google. What's up with this? Is it just because they put out some nifty tools that raise large amounts of privacy concerns? Is it because it was ONCE a killer search engine?"

Well, Cringely's a bit of a fanboy, but I've seen him post a few less-than-glowing things about Google before.

"Why aren't poor search results being reported? For example, in the city of Vallejo, CA we are the only facilities based DSL provider and we even own vallejodsl.com, but up until today (which is the first time I've done this search in 2 months) we weren't even on the first 5 pages."

So what? Did you ever think that the website of a single local DSL operator in rural america might not be especially interesting to an audience spread across the entire globe?

You also don't say what search terms you were chasing, which makes this entire statement non-operative in terms of judging Google's performance.

By giving this example you also raise the possibility of the usual scenario - someone who's pissed off with Google because they can't get good rankings for their own pet site, not because it's generally poor at search.

"I've been given huge amounts of excuses for why that could be, but when 80% of the results were blackhat SEO tactics that shoved us back I could care less about them."

Well, you very obviously haven't got good advice. Might I suggest you start by updating the site to XHTML 1.0 (ideally Strict, Transitional will do), and make sure the code validates . If you haven't done this you haven't even taken the first steps you should have taken.

You should also take a lot of that text on the site out of images and put it in lovely plain (but styled) HTML. Google can't index text in images - this is pretty much SEO Baby-Steps lesson #2.

"We are a well established company (15 years in business) and there should be no reason why we should have been so low on the results. We have plenty of backlinks but google only lists like 36 while others list as many 3000. We stood in that "state" for well over 2 years regardless of what we did on our end."

Yes, there is a good reason: your website is crap and hasn't been SEOed at all. Apologies for being harsh, but you need to realise there's a buttload of things you could (and should) be doing, rather than just sitting there blaming the seearch engines.

The age of your business is immaterial

Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. If the media type remains unknown, the recipient SHOULD treat it as type "application/octet-stream".

Also, take a look at the validator results for the site.

More interestingly, the title of the error page is "403 forbidden." If this is really due to an overload of requests and they're trying to "restore your access as quickly as possible," then the error ought to be a "503 service unavailable."

Somehow I wonder if there's a different reason why this particular query is "forbidden..."

Reference: RFC 2616 Section 10

You're missing the point. If you go to my blog, as well as my content, you'll see current headlines from other sites I find interesting. How do you think they get there? Do you imagine I sit up every night carefully editing my pages and putting in new links? Hint: I don't. A little fragment of XSL pulls the current RSS from the sites I'm interested in, and integrates it into the page as it rebuilds it. And guess what? Those sidebars on Slashdot are just the same.

RSS may not be interesting to you on your browser (although with plugins like Wizz RSS for Firefox you may be missing something). But whether or not you know you're using RSS, you are using RSS.

And so you should, because it is exceedingly good stuff.

Thanks for replying. I must disagree with your comments regarding "stupidly long pages." All the functionality of multiple pages can be emulated with fragment URI's. At the same time, using fragment URI's makes searching an article much simpler, since you don't have to wait and load pages between searches. Try searching for "OBJECT element" in the URL I gave you, and imagine how big a pain the same search would be if the document was split up. You could easily even have a mini-TOC like the one at the bottom of the pages between the bigger sections, if you wanted.

Regarding advertising: I don't care one way or the other as long as it doesn't disrupt my flow of reading. Splitting pages up does that, hence the complaint. Privoxy can't do anything against it, either.

From the web-page:

"Also, if you're using IE you must know that it's IE's failure that the page doesn't render correctly and why PNG transparency isn't handled as it should. Use firefox damnit, at least until IE 7 is released)"

And then this :

w3 HTML validator. Result: Failed validation, 7 errors

Please don't lecture us on proper HTML coding when your own webpage doesn't even validate.

Sounds like a job for everyone's favorite do-everything markup language, XML! Seriously, why isn't it used to structure everything?

Will someone with a really innovative idea open source it from the beginning?

• Freenet
• The World Wide Web: both the Web server...
• ... and of course the Web Browser, too.
• Up to the moment, there's Wiki
• And if you go back far enough in history, there's that computerised psychoanalyst that's generally not used exceptby middle aged computer scientists. I can't remember it's name, but it has a built in editor, too.

So nothing very significant, no.

Oh, and your script might not run because it's not properly escaped with CDATA sections (you're writing XML), you're missing a namespace so it probably won't render properly (you're writing XML), it won't work at all in IE (you're writing XML), you're using stupid "click here" links, and you should be just doing this whole thing server side so you don't need this extra page at all. Not exactly rocket science.

RSS is gospel in Redmond these days

It must be a bit bittersweet, given that RSS is basically a sloppier version of Microsoft's "push" technology CDF, which was introduced with Internet Explorer 4.0.

IE supports more standards.

Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.

For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).

, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").

Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.

IE supports more standards.

Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.

For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).

, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").

Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.

What I would be curious to know is there any "pure" server-side solutions to determining screen resolution?

No. CC/PP is around, but practically nothing supports it as far as I know.

Here's a few ideas

Lastly, epic provides some great resources on the topic of what peoples privacy rights are: www.epic.org/privacy/drm/default.html

I'm not generally one to be dick about these kinds of things or so nit-picky, but if you're hailed as a major 'UI guru' and have Microsoft hire you and get a fucking mention on the old /. then please have a clue. Incidentally, I was always under the assumption is was important to practice what you preach or at very least let your outward work do your talking, not your PR skills.

Pardon, any oddities in my spelling/grammar as it's late and I've had a couple Guinesses already.

Well designed, huh?

His website layout is nice, but he should write it in valid HTML before he considers himself a UI guru. http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3 A//www.billbuxton.com/
---
I'm actually just a script.
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey

1. Enforcing the use of signed emails for all users.
2. After a limited time bounce ALL non-signed emails.
3. Be up-to date with the latest scams running around trying to fool web browsers.
4. Use a web browser that is less common. (Opera is not so common, but now both IE and Firefox are very common as browsers).
5. Cut down the use of plugins to the browsers - One way is "flashblock" for Mozilla. Also a plug in for IE called BHODemon may be useful. (or a similar)
6. Make sure that all YOUR web pages validates cleanly through W3C:s HTML validator.
7. Execute the browser and mail software with limited OS privileges. (if possible)
8. Start taking courses in high-grade computer security. This will definitely trigger paranoia.

Having learned the things I'm about to list in a less-preferred order, I recommend learning in this order. Some may overlap a bit.

First, learn a lot more about HTML than you know. Learn how to create the correct structure in your sites, and try to avoid excessive tags such as tables and divs. Use page headers (h1, h2,...) and paragraph (p) tags and avoid line breaks (br) unless you're actually attempting to do a line break and not just creating space. Here's a good article to read: http://brainstormsandraves.com/articles/semantics/ structure/.

Learn XHTML, and while you're at it, learn a little bit about basic XML and how it works. W3Schools has a good introduction. XHTML, XML. Don't go too far just yet with XML.

While you're learning XHTML, you'll inevitably encounter CSS. The W3C has plenty of links to articles. Make absolutely sure that you learn CSS, it is the pivot point of learning truly professional looking web development (even if you don't want to do it professionally).

Eventually, you'll need to either build your own system for a blog (as you mentioned you'd like to do), or use a blog management system such as Wordpress. If you choose to do it yourself, you need to learn 2 things. SQL and PHP. I recommend using MySQL (an implementation of SQL) because it's free. Most webhosts will support PHP and MySQL as well, so it's more widespread. W3Schools has the easiest introduction to SQL that I've seen. PHP.net has a complete PHP reference. Make sure to check out the mysql section, because that's what you'll be using most.

Scripting comes next. DevGuru has a pretty good, although incomplete reference for basic JavaScript. Basically, just do a search on Google for Javascript reference and you'll pretty much be able to find anything you want. As you get more advanced, try to understand more complex JavaScript such as the Prototype library, among others.

At this point, you'll have a firm grip on web development. Go back and refresh your skills with XHTML and CSS and you'll find out how much you still have left to learn.

There are many other things to learn about web development, specifically if you want to do web programming and application development. That's a whole other can of worms though.

The way I do things, there are several components to Web Development:

Document markup and design:
HTML: Used for document markup only!
CSS: Used to solve most display requirements

Content management / functionality:
Javascript: Client side DHTML (when you DONT want to refresh the page)
PHP: database interaction, web forms, etc.

The CSS links CanSpice points to are excellent resources. I think you should start there, regardless of wanting to learn a web programming language. Knowing CSS will benefit you to:

+ Start on the right path with web standards (as opposed to old HTML 4 sins that many webmasters commit to this day). HTML is NOT for display / design purposes, only for document markup.
+ Cross-browser functionality
+ Less code (you can usually do a lot more with a little css, compared to html)
+ Separation of design and code. You can keep all your css in an external stylesheet than can be updated independently of the site code.

As far as web programming, you basically have two sides:

1. Javascript
It is extremely useful for its DHTML capabilities. You can instantly move html elements around on a page and do some pretty powerful stuff with this. People hate it when they have to refresh a page for something as simple as sorting a table. This is where Javascript shines. Get started by learning the DOM (document object model). Keep in mind that each browser implements this model a little differently so you can consult each browser's documentation.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /workshop/author/dhtml/dhtml.asp (IE)
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/dom_shortIX .html (mozilla)
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html (safari implements this)
www.brainjar.com (great for DHTML as well as CSS)

(by no means a complete list but you get the picture)

2. PHP.
YMMV, but I have found this to be one of the easiest languages to learn. Other contenders in this category include: ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Perl, ColdFusion just to name a few. PHP has a very low effort to learn and there are tons of resources on the web to help you. The Microsoft languages (.NET stuff) are pretty powerful too, but you mentioned this is mostly for hobby reasons so I would recommend going with something with an open license like PHP. ColdFusion is also extremely easy to learn, but your host may not support it (and you may not want to have to purchase the Macromedia IDE for it).

Some great PHP resources:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/
www.w3schools.com

Good luck!

You'll hear lots of people talking about how you should use XHTML. Ignore them. You'll hear lots of people talking about how you shouldn't use XHTML. Ignore them too.

There's little practical difference between the two languages. Browser support isn't quite there for XHTML, so the chances of there being any practical benefit to you using it are small. People will say that the added strictness will help you learn, but you aren't going to notice that strictness unless you serve it in a special way or validate, and you can validate HTML 4.01 just as you can with XHTML.

A much more important distinction to be made is the difference between Strict and Transitional. Transitional includes all kinds of old-fashioned crap that you shouldn't be using. You should use Strict.

After every edit to a document, run it through a validator. The W3C has free validators that you can use. If you do it this way, you will quickly notice when you are doing something wrong.

Ignore all the buzzwords like Ajax for now. Most buzzwords are things you can learn afterwards and use to enhance what you already know; you should learn the foundations first. You need to have a good working knowledge of HTML, CSS, URIs, and HTTP. Javascript, a server-side language and SQL will come in handy later; PHP is far from ideal, but it's easiest to get hosting with it. Same goes for MySQL.

Remember that the foundation for a website is its HTML. Everything else is an optional extra. Don't write Javascript that breaks things for non-Javascript users, write good alt attribute text so that people with images unavailable can read your pages, etc.

There's a hell of a lot to learn, but don't be intimidated, because most of it's simple, and most of it you can learn piece-by-piece.

Lurk on the relevant Usenet newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.*, comp.lang.javascript, etc. Read their FAQs. Read the specifications for things like HTML, CSS, etc - they aren't that hard to read. Use Google before asking anybody anything. Ask smart questions.

When debugging something, save it to a temporary test page, and reduce it to the smallest amount of code possible that reproduces the bug. Nine times out of ten, you will find the bug by doing this. The rest of the time, you have a testcase to show people on the newsgroups.

Learn to hate Microsoft in advance. It saves time. You will wish you could travel back in time to kill Internet Explorer's dev team before they release it. It's that bad.

Who says this is suddenly an industry standard? Firefox and IE will use it ad they have a corner on the market, but has any standards organization said "this shall be the RSS icon?" It's a pretty big leap from Microsoft adopting something to it becoming a standard, despite their dominance of the browser market. And in case anyone has forgotten, MS tends to make hash out of standards it does adopt.

I forgot to mention that if the user is served text/html, he is also served the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype instead. Anyhow, I prefer to use XHTML 1.1 in my program because it enforces valid XML, and it will render according to standards compliance rather than quirks mode. The standards compliance mode for text/html isn't as strict as the one for application/xhtml+xml, so it's possible to introduce weird quirks into the styles when using text/html.

Thanks for the advice regarding the q= bit of the user agent; I never really considered that. I think I'll attribute your statement in the source for it as well. ;)

Also, thanks for the link to hixie.ch's XHTML rant, but I've read that months ago. I already know all the oddities of serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml (including the background of the document being styled to the root element; I do that on normal text/html pages in the first place). I send JavaScript (the _single_ script I have so far) as application/javascript. I use the business. I'm also looking into what other accessibility or news-feed XML namespaces I might be able to include. I'm used to doing XML stuff, so XHTML is simply just another XML format to me (with its namespace being at http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml). Since nearly everything is formatted in PHP, I've found that applying XSL[T]'s to my documents would be somewhat pointless. At least MSIE supports client-side XSL, right?

In this case it was probably a sensible choice. There are phones out there that only support the XHTML mobile profile or XHTML basic, and while they'll attempt to render normal XHTML documents they don't have a "tag-soup" parser available to try to render normal HTML. All of the latest phones have browsers capable of rendering normal pages (Opera with its small screen rendering, for example) but I think Google is also catering to the previous generation where XHTML support was just hacked on top of the WML (WAP markup) support using the existing XML parser.

In this case it was probably a sensible choice. There are phones out there that only support the XHTML mobile profile or XHTML basic, and while they'll attempt to render normal XHTML documents they don't have a "tag-soup" parser available to try to render normal HTML. All of the latest phones have browsers capable of rendering normal pages (Opera with its small screen rendering, for example) but I think Google is also catering to the previous generation where XHTML support was just hacked on top of the WML (WAP markup) support using the existing XML parser.

When I observe what's happening in the computer world, I see a many companies working really hard to make life easier for people who want an alternative. Some of them are even large, relatively stable companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, etc...

I try not to sound anti-Microsoft most of the time. Some people actually consider my advice valuable enough to help them make their purchasing decisions with regard to technology. So, I try to remain unbiased.

What really makes me smile, though, is when the largest and, supposedly, most stable of technology companies helps to make it easier to switch to an alternative.

In this case, Microsoft has effictively told all Apple computer users "We don't consider you valuable and we don't want your business."

It is not insignificant just because IE is free software. Consider the companies who do the majority of their business through the Internet. They also find it easier to choose an alternative. Now, if they want to keep their Apple customers and utilize the latest technology in their Web sites, they only need to design their Web sites according to a specification (W3C) which is supported by browsers on every platform. Reduce cost and development time with just a single site, without cross-browser tricks, and it works everywhere... Ok, that's ideal, not real, but it's an ideal that Microsoft has been effectively working against while every other browser development team works towards it.

I do not wish to digress too far, but consider this: Safari is based on a KHTML code base, which is derived from the KDE project, which is primarily used on the Linux platform, which is seen as a threat to Microsoft's business.

Every day there are new problems where legitimate businesses, who purchased all of their software legally are told that they need to pay a license fee to continue using it.

Even home users have problems. Given the nature of the latest version of the most common operating system, it's necessary to format the hard drive and re-install occasionally. But if you do it more than three times, you have to call Microsoft and convince them that you actually purchased your software so that you can have a new activation code. This one has personally affected me. Even though I have legally purchased more copies of Windows XP than I am using, I use a cracked "Corporate Edition" of the software because I don't want to deal with the hassle of Activation.

The company with the largest market share keeps irritating their paying customers. Businesses are already choosing alternatives in droves. Soon, even average users won't even want to bother with them.

Well... Apple users... Where do you want to go today?

--
-- Ghodmode

Competant developers have been using xhtml and css for 10 almost years

Ignoring for a second how these standards haven't been out that long, hardly anyone is currently supporting XHTML strict properly anyway: using the correct MIME type. In short, if it works in Internet Explorer, it's the wrong MIME type, even if w3.org's validator says it's fine. No company is yet happy with the idea of their web site not working in IE, so they use the incorrect MIME type.

Incidentally, there's a version of XHTML intended specifically to make sites easy for mobile devices and such to swallow: XHTML Basic. From W3's site:

It is designed for Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes.

I've never felt a need to use regular XHTML for my home projects, as XHTML Basic is more than enough, but I use the latter at work. Oddly enough, the article doesn't even seem to mention XHTML Basic.

Well, my biggest problem with that is that it doesn't take q values into account; I could accept application/xhtml+xml, but prefer text/html, a possiblity your script ignores.

The second problem is that you're lying about the page's content. Easily fixed with an s/1.1/1.0 Strict/ (please don't actually use this as there's a bit more to it than that); better fixed with some really simple XSLT (which is what I do on my website).

The third (potential) problem is that there are differences in the way CSS and Javascript work that can trip you up.

Unlike some, I have no objection to serving XHTML 1.0 as text/html (since it's explicitly allowed for if you follow Appendix C), but doing the same with XHTML 1.1 isn't allowed, and seems like nothing more than buzzword compliance. Unless you're using Ruby, the differences are pretty insignificant so you have no reason to anyways.

Which guidelines are we talking about?

The XHTML spec itself

That is talking about what you need to do in order to be a conformant producer of XHTML. It has nothing to do with what you need to do in order to be a conformant consumer of XHTML.

However it's not black and white, and your idea (which by the way isn't backed by any W3C spec) that XHTML compliance is all or nothing is wrong.

I never said that it is all or nothing. But you seem to think that 'nothing' is compliant. Surely Internet Explorer failing at everything that separates XHTML from HTML means that it is not compliant?

It's compliant to the level that it's compliant, no more and no less.

Now that's just silly. This isn't a sliding scale, something is either conformant or not, you can't just say "oh, well it does its best, therefore it's a bit conformant. The specification you just referred to includes a section on what it means to be a conformant user-agent. Internet Explorer is certainly non-conformant. It fails the very first requirement. I quote:

A conforming user agent must meet all of the following criteria:

1. In order to be consistent with the XML 1.0 Recommendation [XML], the user agent must parse and evaluate an XHTML document for well-formedness.

Which guidelines are we talking about?

I'm aware a W3C member published a Note saying that; just because it appears on the W3C domain, it doesn't mean it's the W3C's official position, and the Note states this.

I agree with the separate issues about XHTML compatibility -- it certainly isn't complete and they have much work to do.

However it's not black and white, and your idea (which by the way isn't backed by any W3C spec) that XHTML compliance is all or nothing is wrong. It's compliant to the level that it's compliant, no more and no less. You don't get to round the result to the nearest whole number and claim any more authority than an op-ed piece. You certainly don't have the W3C behind you on this one.

XHTML and, indeed, HTML were designed to be forward compatible and this nature means partial compatibility.

Get over it, nerd.

couldn't resist...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3 A//www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/wireless/library /wi-css/%3Fca%3Ddgr-lnxw01WirelessPages/

Here's Tim's brief list of his envisioned uses of the web, from 1990:

Here are some of the many areas in which hypertext is used. Each area has its specific requirements in the way of features required.

        * General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc.
        * Completely centralized publishing - online help, documentation, tutorial etc
        * More or less centralized dissemination of news which has a limited life
        * Collaborative authoring
        * Collaborative design of something other than the hypertext itself
        * Personal notebook

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html

The guy isn't an idiot. Apparently you haven't noticed that. He helped devise something that would have myriad uses, essentially limited only by the needs and imaginations of its users.

It's a MEDIUM.

For SHARING INFORMATION. And BEING CREATIVE. With MEANS for MOST ANYBODY to contribute and participate. And despite what you may tend to think, personal and interpersonal details (even on the level of gossip or the ravings of a hyper teenybopper) in fact qualify as information.

Care to explain how people using myspace makes you suffer? Maybe if they were wasting a limited resource like computer stations or bandwidth which you or someone else needed for a more urgent or immediate purpose, but it seems like you're simply ideologically opposed to people doing whatever they want.

Even today the web serves the same purposes that the guy laid out in 1990, just in much more fanciful ways, and more importantly on a web itself that is infinitely richer and wider.

Content is separate from presentation today (or should be), but it wasn't always so - CSS and stuff is a (relatively) new idea.

That's not really accurate. It's true that HTML 3.2 included a hell of a lot of presentational markup, but that was because the W3C decided to publish a specification based on what everybody was doing (i.e. browser extensions) rather than what should be done.

If you turn the clock back further, you'll find that older HTML specifications didn't concern themselves with presentation much at all, and were designed to allow varying styles, including stylesheets. For example, read the HTML 2.0 specification, and you'll see that provision is explicitly made for stylesheets. Yes, you can use CSS with an HTML 2 document, even though CSS hadn't been developed by the time HTML 2.0 was published. I quote:

The LINK element is typically used to indicate authorship, related indexes and glossaries, older or more recent versions, document hierarchy, associated resources such as style sheets, etc.

CSS is far from the first stylesheet language, there have been others, such as DSSSL. It's a shame browser vendors didn't implement stylesheets much sooner, but the fault lies with them, not with HTML, as you can see.

There was no *need* to separate content from presentation then

You are only really thinking about "presentation" in terms of the exact styling given to particular element types in a high-res graphical environment. Presentation is a wider topic than that. Separating content from presentation was just as necessary back then - otherwise you'd have content written on a terminal that can fit 100 characters in a row screwing up on terminals that can only fit 80 characters in a row, and so on. Tim Berners-Lee had this to say on the matter, in his book about the origins of the WWW, Weaving the Web:

A philosophical rule was that HTML should convey the structure of a hypertext document, but not details of its presentation.

As far as Tim using the term 'WYSIWYG', I think he's misusing the term as a synonym for 'graphical editor' as many people do, rather than having any deeper meaning.

Yes, what Tim means by WYSIWYG (I'm pretty sure) is immersive editing, a direct manipulation interface.

It's WYSIWYG if you think of the document in an abstract sense, separated from all style (or in your own style -- knowing that others will see it in their style).

According to this,

"It would browse http: space and news: and ftp: spaces and local file: space, but edit only in file: space"

so i'm guessing editing on the host machine only?

the extra step of requiring an account to be created (thus allowing spam accounts to be banned) would make automated spam far more difficult (especially if combined with a good captcha).

"good captcha"? Isn't that a contradiction, as Wikipedia:Captcha#Accessibility points out?

Before spending any money on an SEO book, people should make use of the free online resources, for instance Highrankings Forums.

SEM is hard work. But if you want to do it yourself:

1. Create useful content targeted at humans. Write clear, clean prose. Read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style online for free
2. Provide something unique and valuable on the site so people will link to it.
3. Advertise with Pay-Per-Click, even if it's just $50 per month. That will help you understand what keywords work best for your site, and which advertising messages resonate with the public
4. Validate your code. Program for accessibility using CSS layout. Standards-compliant HTML will load correctly and display useful information on browsers for Linux, Windows, Max OS, Blackberry, and other platforms. If your code is riddled with errors, or inaccessible links (Javascript, Flash), Googlebot won't be able to index your site or read all your content.

Do the above and you will be better than 99% of all web sites.

...so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley...

A trip....from Washington...to California...for an icon? I wish I could make trips around the country for such trivial purposes.

How about this instead?

----
From: jane@microsoft.com
To: john@mozilla.org
Subject: RSS icon

You: RSS icon.
We: Need RSS icon.

We coo?

-Jane

----
From: john@mozilla.org
To: jane@microsoft.com
Subject: Re: RSS icon

Sure.

-John

----

Honestly, 800+ miles to talk about a 28x28 pixel icon. God save their accounting department if they want to collaborate on something like those darn pesky standards.

...so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley...

A trip....from Washington...to California...for an icon? I wish I could make trips around the country for such trivial purposes.

How about this instead?

----
From: jane@microsoft.com
To: john@mozilla.org
Subject: RSS icon

You: RSS icon.
We: Need RSS icon.

We coo?

-Jane

----
From: john@mozilla.org
To: jane@microsoft.com
Subject: Re: RSS icon

Sure.

-John

----

Honestly, 800+ miles to talk about a 28x28 pixel icon. God save their accounting department if they want to collaborate on something like those darn pesky standards.

And no offense--sincerely--but it's not professional web designers' fault that you never bothered to learn !important .

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#font-desc riptions

Notice that you *can* embed fonts with CSS. No obnoxious Flash shit to deal with. Okay... it's MSIE only, but it is part of the CSS standard.

--
alex

• a) they can select a font of their choosing
• b) how to do it

so imo, mostly, this argument falls flat. Perhaps more important is the accessibilty of a website? Maybe this is more important:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Ha thats not even the worst part! You can provide your own font face src according to CSS2. Read here for more info. Its absurd using javascript and flash when custom fonts are already handled by CSS.
Regards,
Steve

As for history, I started using EMACS in 1979 at about version 134, when it was written in TECO on DEC PDP-10s. When RMS stopped maintaining it to move on to the GNU project he had just started, I took over its maintance for a year or so. One of the things I added in 1981 was M-$ (which I called "correct word spelling") and m-x check buffer spelling (which is a much better name than the present m-x spell-buffer).

If you use XML you should try James Clark's NXML Mode which uses Relax NG schemas. It gives you on-the-fly validation and completion when editing XML. Relax NG is very easy to use, especially in its Compact RNC form, which looks a lot like BNF but is isomorphic to the XML representation of the RNG Schema.

At work, I find it easy to develop Emacs-lisp scripts or even simply keyboard macros to do large refactoring jobs in Emacs. I often find that I'm the only person who can accomplish tasks that cut across programming language boundaries.

I used Emacs for several years to take real-time minutes for various W3C working groups, and made great use of the dabbrev-expand function (which I bound to meta-space). I like to think of it as an approximation to a Hidden Markov Model. In fact, at a Face-to-Face meeting in Cambridge, MA, I was able to type an entire sentence that the person sitting next to me spoke by typing only Meta-Space (and judiciously using only one or two letters to redirect the completions), a feat that lead many to believe that some form of magic was involved...Thereafter when others asked how our group had such complete minutes, people always responded, "Oh, he uses Emacs."

What does AJAX give you that Java applets do not?

The web is built around interlinked pages. Javascript manipulates those pages and relies on the browser's interface to make it work. Applets set aside a region within those pages and provide their own interface.

This sounds like an academic point until you realise that most of the web browser development that has taken place over the past decade and a half is centred around using the information in the pages. Some of the things my browser supports that work with the pages themselves but not within applets:

• My choice of font sizes
• Ad-blocking
• Find-as-you-type (find in general, for that matter)
• Opening links in new tabs/windows
• User stylesheets
• User Javascript/Greasemonkey
• Select text, right-click, look up selection in dictionary/thesaurus
• Select text, right-click, search the web for the selected text

...and a lot more that I can't think of off the top of my head. Basically the majority of browser development over the past fifteen years has been centred around manipulating the page contents, and when you lock up your interface and information within an applet, those features can't get at them, so they stop working.

What's more, even if you wanted to, it's extremely difficult to refocus browser development efforts to replicate these features for applets, because the way applets tie interface, information and executable together violates the Principle of Least Power.

Sorry not to explain more - but that was my point for "Listing 6. Handle the server's response" -> I tend to normally get XML back from the server and address said XML via XPATH. For Javascript XPATH libaries, I saw only 2 real choices: (1) Sarissa : http://sourceforge.net/projects/sarissa - which worked great, except on Safari. Then I tried googles lib at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/goog-ajaxslt/ - which is far superior in terms of browser support.

XPATH is a standardizied way to address (or query into, or parse) XML. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath - The only real calls I do for web apps look like: "/xml_response/manager/first_name/text()" which is rather straight forward and works in any language.

Like these! http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://web2.wsj2 .com/five_reasons_why_web_20_matters.htm