Slashdot Mirror

You know, with the magic of the internet, you can actually cite references inline. It's kind of the whole point of hyperlinking.

Seconded.

My only "programming" experience was some light VBA, I was able to pick up VBS in no time, mostly using Microsoft's site and help file http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/

There are also site's out there with plenty of code ready for use and a buttload of books.

http://www.w3schools.com/vbscript/default.asp
http://www.ss64.com/wsh/functions.html

Mac and Linux have approximately the same desktop share... The trend is generally around 3%, with Linux slightly ahead.

w3school stats, highly unscientific

And, as a recent OSX switcher, you really don't miss the second mouse button... AppleKey + Click works, and it doesn't inconvenience me.

*has just spent three wonderful weeks discovering his new powerbook*

No, a hack doesn't know when he's using BBCode and when he is using HTML. Preview also helps.
HTML link guide
BBCode Guide

www.w3schools.com changed the way it shows browser statistics?
They are saying that FF use is decreasing.
Maybe because Bill is worried about this and...

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

Funny. My desktop environment integrates with any browser.

And what desktop is that? It sure as hell can't be Windows. Because I have to use Windows at work, and Firefox does NOT integrate with it. At least not in the manner Konqueror does.

Is there something wrong with having a choice of browsers? It doesn't matter what ftp client I use to access an ftp site. Except for some Microsoft-only mail servers, it doesn't matter which email client I use to get my email. Do I need to worry about which news reader I use to access usenet? No! But when it comes to http, suddenly I start seeing "Best Viewed With Another Browser" buttons. As if they're somehow proud of it. Stupid.

XMLHttpRequest() is important

The XMLHttpRequest isn't a web standard. To quote w3c: "The XMLHttpRequest object is not a W3C standard."

Google hasn't rejected you as a customer.

I'm not talking about google, I'm talking about those sites who have a product to sell but which require specific browsers. I don't have this problem with Amazon or any of the other major retailers. But I find it every so often with the same guys. Like yesterday trying to buy a piece of software from this guy, where the "checkout now" button wasn't even a link. Did I need flash loaded? Was he trying to do something too fancy in javascript? I have no idea, and I wasn't about to read through the page source to find out. I simply left instead.

And before you blame Konqueror on this, I was using Firefox at the time.

It is the Free Edge, and you're going to pay a price for it.

I know I pay a price for it. If I didn't want to pay the price then I would be just another good little sheep with Windows and Internet Explorer eating McDonalds hamburgers and laughing at Friends episodes and listening to Britney Spears. The price to be a clone is oh so small...

But that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that most front end web "developers" aren't "developers". Consider the guy I mentioned above. Why should I have expected his shareware program to be in any way worthwhile when his webpage was such crap?

When I ran Linux as my primary, I had to give up things too, like playing movies.

First, I use FreeBSD instead of Linux. Second, I have no problems playing movies, either off of DVDs, or as quicktime/mpg/rp/etc files. Even within Konqueror if I wish.

While most desktops may be MS windows based, a significant portion of the target audience (internet using and aware) are using firefox (19.7%) http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp , and as it is generally the early adopters using something like etax, is likely to be even more than that. The ATO is excluding or alienating maybe 30% of their audience.

Some statistics to see why software is developed for Windows only. Linux 3.5% Mac OS 3% Windows Over 85% Source http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp And this site probably have an inflated percentage of alternative OSs as a lot of the visitors are web developers and designers. While Windows has such a large share of the desktop market then this is the way it is going to be.

"The browser statistics below were adjusted in July 2005 to reflect page views instead of visits."

So it's not an actual decline, just that Firefox users seem to generate a bit more "visits" than "page views". Dunno why this is the case

I was going to attack your reasoning on your other points, but figured others would do that (and quite possibly better) but this struck me as interesting:

Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.

(I'm assuming you meant <1%)

Since surveys are starting to put linux at over 3% of desktops (and in any case, comparable numbers, or even more than Macs, which few people would not call "user friendly") it must, therefore, be "user friendly"?

I would submit that at the least that 3% has been convinced it is...

Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny

PS. have a look at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp, http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/35688.html

While w3schools' browser stats may not be representative of the Internet using population as a whole, the fact that FireFox's share has been steadily increasing probably indicates that FireFox's share has probably been increasing in the general population. Is it over 25% like at w3schools? I'd be (happily) surprised if it is, but I doubt it. Like you said, that is a technical site without as broad an appeal.

Though on my own (lousy, low traffic) site, I get close to a 50% FF and IE split (and I do filter out my own hits), so maybe the general population has a higher FF usage rate than the technical population? Nah, that'd be giving the average online idiot way too much credit :)

I wish more big sites published these kind of stats, but doing so would probably be more trouble than they're worth. Or maybe in some cases, they're worth too much to give away for free.

IIRC, Slashdot stopped publishing browser stats because they showed a lot of readers were browsing a Linux site using IE on Windows. That's probably still true today.

Intuition is good and will get you far.
You should also be familiar with authoritative resources for issues like accessibility.
You can learn HTML, CSS and much more on line.
If you choose to go-it-alone, you might wind up as a clueless website author.

Intuition is good and will get you far.
You should also be familiar with authoritative resources for issues like accessibility.
You can learn HTML, CSS and much more on line.
If you choose to go-it-alone, you might wind up as a clueless website author.

Based on the review, it sounds like this covers topics so basic; one would be better served by a resource such as w3schools, or something along those lines. I recommend the Zen of CSS Design, which I found to be a great read for those who have gotten the basics down.

Very true. And the reason for this is so many people have Windows. Almost 90% of PCs on W3C have some variant of Windows. Baring in mind that this will be particularly techie community, it doesn't bode well.

The fact of the matter is, for most manufacturers, it just isn't cost effective to make their devices compatible with Linux, then test against various distros with various kernel configurations on various hardwares just to tap into under 4% of the market. Firefox has almost 1 in 10 people on the web, and some businesses still think its not viable to support it.

It's going to take some dedicated geeks to introduce Linux to the general public. Without market share, no-one's going to bother.

Linspire and (though it pains me to say this) Xandros are two viable distros that are either ready or nearly ready for the main-stream market. Hell, even SUSE is pretty useable for Linux n00bs.

As for lack of support, there are plenty of forums full of friendly people willing to help, or providing in depth documentation.

Give a man Linux, and he'll use it, get stuck and return to Windows. Teach him to use Linux, and how to find help, and we've improved our market share.

Dell recently committed to purchasing 300,000 14" widescreen laptops a month from a single Chinese supplier. That is one model in one segment of its product line.

Windows users upgrade within the Windows family. Mac users within the Mac family, even the pros tend to stay with what they know. OS Platform Stats

Apple sells an upscale urban lifestyle, Dell and Microsoft solid middle-class values. There has never been the slightest doubt where the real money is to be made in the North American market.

For me, MacOS X truly combines the best of the open source and proprietary worlds. I can use a slick and stable GUI, running all the slickest proprietary applications such as Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. On the same machine I can also run all the open source web software I could ever want. And I can even copy that software and have it run fine on a Linux server without missing a beat. So I know exactly where JWZ's coming from, and it's interesting that we followed such a similar path. I joined Apple before he did probably mainly due to my need for proprietary software like Final Cut and Photoshop.

I salute Apple for continuing to push the envelope in designer guis. Nonetheless, Apple is still closed source, has a smaller developer army than Linux, is not as adaptable as Linux, and is falling further and further behind Linux in desktop adoption. Got to be a story in there, hmm?

As usual there are some people who have to keep repeating the same stupid idea's.
Frames CAN be useful e.g. I made a management module a while ago with a javascript tree. If frames didn't exist that would mean the tree would have to be regenerated every time you click on an item. Without frames the app would have been slower and would have used a lot more resources.
Frames (iframes especially) are a great way to create a very dynamic web application without having to reload the whole page and waste bandwidth, processor time, ...
Or how did you think Gmail checked for new messages every $blah seconds. Other great examples of the use of frames are w3chools' tryit-editor or realtime previews of html used in CMSystems such as mambo

Like most people I greatly dislike websites that use frames form navigation menu etc. However just because something is often misused that doesn't mean we should ditch it altogether (no matter what Jacob fucking Nielsen says).

The number only seems high because for years the word market-share has been mistakenly used to describe installed base instead of percentage of sales each quarter.

Well, I'm more than a little skeptical of these numbers, because by nature they're talking about Macs connected to the internet, and these numbers do not jibe at all with any results we've ever seen from web use in general.

I'm responsible for tracking web use at my company (a division of the largest media company in the world, but I'll keep it anonymous beyond that), and we get significantly under 10% of our unique visits from Macs - and we're a creative company.

I can't post those numbers but I will post the platform numbers from my own web site, linked in my sig. A lot of these visits come from Slashdot, which is itself pretty Mac-heavy:

34165 Windows XP
3482 Windows 2000
2435 Mac Power PC
1221 Linux
1192 Windows 98
541 Windows ME
208 Windows NT
44 Windows 95
31 FreeBSD
6 Sun
1 WebTV
631 Unknown

If you don't believe my numbers, plenty of more reputable services track web usage as well (Google used to, W3Schools still does). All of these numbers more or less agree and none of them are even close to 16%. And these are tracking real usage, not market share.

So, if 16% of all computer users use Macs, and by definition (based on the test in the parent article) all of those Macs are connected to the internet, then doesn't it seem a bit odd that so few of those Macs are actually used on the internet? That such a large percentage of people buy them and then just let them sit there?

I realize a computer may be on the internet but be used for something like video editing, but that wouldn't account for such a large percentage, especially when the same is true for PC's.

No sir, I believe the numbers I've recorded myself... not such obviously inflated numbers that came from who knows where.

This site shows Mac usage at around 3%. 16% seems a little high, unless they counted everything non-Windows as Macintosh.

But this doesn't explain why the marketshare on major websites and even web development sites is so poor: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp - 2.9% vs Linux's 3.3%.

This trend is echoed everywhere online.

I find it hard to believe that only approx 10% of the installed base of Macs are online...

XP seems to have become the dominant platform, even among web developers. with W2K fast fading. OS Platform Stats March 2003-April 2005

In two years, Linux and the Mac have shown little growth at all, while XP's share has doubled.
If this is what the world looks like to a web developer, I don't think Microsoft has much to fear in the mass consumer market, where the browser wars translate into serious money and power, W2K was never a factor, and where Win XP has been the default OEM install since August of '01.

Win XP... 64%
W2K........20%
Win 98......4%
Linux.........3%
Mac...........3%
Wi n.NET.. 1%
Others.......0%

The Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation was created in July 2003 when AOL laid off the employees involved in the Mozilla open-source browser team.

-http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_mozill a.asp
That article never said anything about that...

W3 shows IE at 65%, Opera at 2%, Firefox at 25%, Mozilla at 3.5%, and Netscape at 1%. While this is the lowest IE has every been, its decreasing slowly.

Beating Microsoft shouldn't just be at having a larger market share - that is just propaganda and a "my browser is better than your browser" argument.

IE was only ahead because of the way it locked people into writing for the funny way it displays pages. When IE had 95% market share, web developers wrote for IE only. Now Firefox has 25% market share on some sites, web developers are writing for both browsers, at least. And when sites work the same in any browser, users can change browsers at will, without anything bad happening. Suddenly, Microsoft have lost the main thing that makes people keep IE.

And when is IE7 coming out? By the looks of it, sometime next year, which gives Firefox plenty of time to continue what it's doing. Firefox's being "poised to beat" Microsoft looks more likely than you'd think from looking at the market share stats.

I think your numbers are wrong http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

The term's "semantic markup". Basically the notion is that using more descriptive tags can potentially tell user agents (be they browser or spider) a little bit more about the content.

However, it's not solely in XHTML. The tags exist in HTML 4.

I'm personally amazed that people talk so much about the strong and em tags so much when there's a ton of nicer introductions such as label and optgroup that get little to no press.

The term's "semantic markup". Basically the notion is that using more descriptive tags can potentially tell user agents (be they browser or spider) a little bit more about the content.

However, it's not solely in XHTML. The tags exist in HTML 4.

I'm personally amazed that people talk so much about the strong and em tags so much when there's a ton of nicer introductions such as label and optgroup that get little to no press.

Who to believe? W3Schools indicates 25% Firefox usage http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

2005 IE 6 IE 5 O 7/8 Ffox Moz NN 4 NN 7

May 61.9% 3.1% 1.9% 24.6% 3.6% 0.2% 0.9%

Apr 62.3% 3.4% 1.9% 23.9% 3.5% 0.2% 0.9%

Mar 63.8% 3.9% 1.8% 21.8% 3.7% 0.2% 1.0%

Feb 64.8% 4.2% 1.9% 20.4% 3.9% 0.2% 1.1%

Jan 65.3% 4.4% 2.1% 19.3% 4.0% 0.3% 1.1%

FIREFOX is spreading like profound epidemic. No less then Computational triumph of human spirt.

Actually, it's not as outragious as you might think, according to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a spfirefox usage trends are heading that way. At least in the web development community anyway.

check this out as well

It's called HTML. Learn it. Love it.

there are reliable statistics to suggest that it's less than 5%, actually.

It may not be a majority or even a large minority, but 8% is indeed considerable because it forces developers to recheck their code with Firefox. And indeed, developers do seem to be watching. Just check out the W3C browser statistics which are as good a gauge as any for what developers are using. For those who don't feel like following the link, probably within a month, fully 25% of developers will be using Firefox.

More than that, if you imagine that there are 300 million people on the web (I don't know what the figure is now; it's just a guess), and 8% use Firefox (24 million), a company who thinks they can gather, say, 1/6 of that submarket, probably considers that a decent consumer base (4 million customers).

like

safari on tiger anyone ?
please post a screenshot of that I would really be intrested

stats on web browsers market share
w3 numbers

Remember that it still only has 5% market share or so against the IE monolith

According to W3Schools, your 5% is more like 22%.

Hmmm.. that's actually not HTML. Here is the HTML 4.0.1 reference. No url tag.

"Relatively high" as in 90% of the desktop market, with XP's share growing at a rate of 1% a month, or ten times the growth of Linux. Operating Platform Statistics

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp

That is a very good resource for the beginner to intermediate XML user.

I wonder how closely related it is to the statistic that 29% of people surfing the web have the screen res at 800x600. If the computer isn't broken (all jokes aside) and the user doesn't mind scrolling sideways a lot, a non-techy will probably keep that machine until dies.

Visit:

http://www.w3schools.com/

Good stuff, easy to navigate, covers the basics, free.

Firefox, of course

And here's a HTML tutorial about how to do links.

I will post AC because clearly one of you is homicidal about this, but I would say first that Apple wrote a DTD for their plist format, and not an XML schema (which should be said is a different thing), and if we're upset that they used the older DTD intead of namespaced XML then that seems to be an issue apart from what's going on here (it might have something to do with the fact that Apple hasn't implemented namespaces in NSXMLParser, but i digress).

Now, when you write a DTD, you do have to specifically lay out your one-many relationships; you don't get them "for free" with XML. They're easy to write in instances of the doc you're specifying, but if you do not declare that an object can hold 0,1, or N instances of an object inside it, your DTD is not compliant (Despite the claims of the fellow named after the Horta). Also, his insistence that the reading app can type a number or string based on looking at it (without specific typing) is pure PHPism and an abuse of CDATA-- a number is a different thing from a string of unicode, and if I read in "31.4" as a string, I'd better get a string back out.

The proposed plist for an Info.plist in the parent is not an apple plist, since you're using CFBundleVersion etc as an element, when in fact it's supposed to be a key in a dictionary object. Plists are supposed to serialize only NSArray, NSString, NSDictionay, and NSValue (NSNumber). If you do it like apple wants you, then the unserializer only needs to know how to unserialize these four classes, and can access the data collected within using friendly methods that everyone is aware of (objectAtIndex,objectForKey,etc). The XML you propose only makes sense if you're serializing an object that encapsulates bundle information (and ONLY bundle information), which I suppose is okay, but objects do not exist to make pretty XML, they exist to give user functionality. If all Cocoa objects serialized to pretty XML, you'd need a HUGE XML schema to describe it all-- see MS Office's XML schemas for that sort of thing.

Now, with these four classes, an app can easily represent all the data an office XML doc could represent, except the developer only needs to know about four classes, some 20 lines of DTD, to know what can own what, and where it's acceptible or not to stick something.

And I personally value the w3schools a lot more.

What they say is Firefox has a 20.4% market share and mozilla a 3.9 for february 2005. Which seems quite incompatible with your overall 10%.

We experience about the same figures on our webservers.

And don't forget when you analyse web logs to verify that your server handles correctly the Internet Explorer Popularity Theft Bug.

According to these statistics Firefox is already over 20% marketshare. Why is there such a discrepancy between the two?

lasindi

Sorry for the munged links. corrected:

Source 1: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
Source 2: http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm

But unfortunately, Microsoft still has 95+% of the browser market.

Really? I know W3Schools.com is biased toward web developers and thus toward savvy users, but its February 2005 stats show 25.1% Gecko share (Mozilla Suite + Netscape 7 + Firefox) and only 69.2% IE 5/6 share. Or are you counting Gecko on Windows as a Microsoft client?