Slashdot Mirror

If only Slashdot's supposedly nerdy user base were capable of understanding the anchor tag. Would be a great business idea, probably.

FTFY

Maybe they could just use the title attribute so that we could get tooltips about what something means without having to load an entire wikipedia article.

The big difference between mouse and (single-)touch interaction is the lack of a hover concept. Whether an application uses Flash or HTML technology has nothing to do with whether it uses hover or not. So in theory, Flash vs. HTML and hover vs. not are orthogonal; how does this differ in practice?

If you think all there is to making browsers work is to use different CSS files, then you haven't done much work. CSS!=HTML. Take for example HTML button:

Always specify the type attribute for the button. The default type for Internet Explorer is "button", while in other browsers (and in the W3C specification) it is "submit" . . .
Important: If you use the button element in an HTML form, different browsers will submit different values. Internet Explorer will submit the text between the and tags, while other browsers will submit the content of the value attribute. Use the input element to create buttons in an HTML form.

W3Schools is the one that is skewed.

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser aternatives.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Enough propaganda already, Linux is around 1% and has been for years. Admitting this isn't going to change anything.

5.1% according to w3schools. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Statcounter's statistics are skewed because they include virus information and AV update sites, which the average Windows user has to access about four times a day.

In the decades that I've spent reading newpapers and news magazines, I've noticed that citing sources is something that tends to stand out - because it is rarely done by those publications. You mostly only see such attributions in "editorial" content, not in "news".

You and I may think that "journalists" should cite their sources, or link to them in online stories. But a brief search through archived newspapers and other news publications show clearly that the people who produced those publications didn't think that such citation was necessary.

So this "newspaper" is actually just following traditional newspaper practice. The online world has developed a somewhat different standard, since (as TFA and others have pointed out) it's very easy to include links to sources in your HTML. But we shouldn't be surprised that journalists from a newspaper background don't think this way. Those archived newspapers show that they never have.

So we should approach this as a "teaching moment". We should treat them as n00bs in the online news arena, and patiently explain to them that their age-old practice of not mentioning the sources of their information is not socially acceptable in the brave new world of Internet journalism.

Perhaps a way to encourage them might be: Whenever we read a news article that contains no links, we send them a link to a description of the syntax of a hyperlink. If they get enough of these, they might get the idea and start including links in their news articles.

It might not hurt to reply to a lot of comments here on /. with the same link.

Anyone got other URLs that would be as good as that one for explaining how hyperlinks work?

Since when could slashdot not show a greater than symbol?

Um... when did Slashdot support greater-than characters in comments? Try the HTML entity, > (>). You may also be interested in less-than (<) and ampersand (&). Others can be found here.

Use the HTML entity &gt; to get >, &lt; for <, and so on. Slashdot accepts most common HTML entities, but alas—not unicode.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-na-monthly-201002-201102

Was that link supposed to have web stats for Linux usage? I didn't see any. Googling though I did find this: OS Platform Statistics. It shows web stats for Linux being above 5%. The stats have Linux breaking 5% in November 2010. Going further and comparing Linux stats with Windows stats, it has all versions of MS Windows having 86.5% of the OS market in December. In February it was 85.9%. In the same tyme period both Linux and Mac OSX gained share.

Again going further, there's OS and browser spoofing. Using Firefox I don't know how many webpages I've landed on that says "Best viewed with X" where X is a version of IE. Spoof IE on those pages and some render fine while others don't.

Falcon

w3schools gives FF slowly declining since 2009 (it peaked July 2009): http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

That's for their website and not the web itself and it largely varies based from website to website. In fact, Firefox usage has been on the rise on my own site, even over taking IE usage. Definitely looks like Firefox is dead and IE will continue to rule!

Millions download latest Firefox
Mozilla celebrates more than five million downloads of its latest browser, however Firefox's market share is declining.

The article goes on to say that the 5.5 million downloads is short of the 8 million downloads Firefox 3 saw, that it has gone from a peak of 24% to 21% now etc. Those are at least reasonably supported facts, until the ZDNet crap which in one sentence goes

w3schools gives FF slowly declining since 2009 (it peaked July 2009): http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Firefox is currently at about 42%, and it's not even its higher share (w3schools browser statistics).

Linux hasn't gone very far in the home desktop market, still being behind MacOS and all

Linux is actually making good progress in the desktop world. Look, w3schools shows Linux at 5%, an all time high and not that far behind Apple. I actually know normal people, not geeks, who have installed Linux entirely as their own idea. And of course, Linux rules the world in phones at the moment, and soon in tablets as well. It's only a short jump from tablets back to the desktop.

What lunacy...I guess Linux didn't go anywhere either cause it's open source...or Chrome.....or Firefox.....

The Mozilla Foundation lives and dies by the add click.Where would Firefox be without the port to Windows?

Unrestricted net assets - Revenues and other support (2009)

Royalties: $101,537,000
Contributions: $50,000

Note 2 - Summary of significant accounting practices

(e) Receivables

Receivables consist primarilly of amounts due from contracts with multiple search engine and information providers

Mozilla Foundation and Subsidiaries

As a desktop client OS, the traditional community-oriented Linux distribution may not be six feet under. But neither is it in the best of health:

Net Applications (March)

Linux 0.92%
iOS 1.8%
Android 0.5%
Operating System Market Share

Statcounter (March)

Linux 1%
Top 5 Operating Systems

W3Schools (January)

Win 7 31%
Up 31% since January 2009
Linux 5%
Up 3% since March 2003
OS PLatform Statistics

Javascript is turned on in 90-95% of browsers in use.

Me working for Google is irrelevant: Most people leave Javascript enabled and don't block it.

You can go ahead and take pride in being 90-95% wrong, through. Yer bad to the bone, you are, a real rebel, the way you fight... well, reality.

Actually, HTML5 (the topic of this story) does have support for 'photographs' and other figure content:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figure.asp

And thus captions:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figcaption.asp

Actually, HTML5 (the topic of this story) does have support for 'photographs' and other figure content:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figure.asp

And thus captions:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figcaption.asp

why the fuck would you use a url obfuscator when you have html at your disposal?

In general, only someone who is utterly ignorant cannot find something good about the opposing side - if there was nothing good about it, people wouldn't use it.

Wow, Nonexistent you say?
I disagree completely. And apparantly so does google. Got all those on my first half-hearted search.

I get a *LOT* of interesting stuff for my coding (be it Java, Python, PHP or .NET) from 3rd examples and tutorals online, anyone can.

I didn't say PHP didn't have any IDEs, and note I qualified .NET as having *ONLY* one more IDE, and not in the main 'win' category. I can get at least C# in many/most IDEs that also run PHP. If either wins that category, it's by only a very small margin.

That's the way it's been in the past, but assuming these statistics are correct, it will hopefully be left to die soon.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp/

You associate that site with w3c!? Blasphemy!!!!

Woops, here is the correct url: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

chrome nearly hit the Double-Digit mark by the end of 2009.. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp/

CSS Media Types

Really? I'd like to know where you get your stats from. According to numerous sources, including W3's OS Statistics ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp ) DESKTOP linux users number about 5%. and that doesn't include the VAST number of servers.

W3schools is hardly representative for the average Internet user (it might have been 15 years ago). Linux 0.98% and falling

"Barely holds 1% of the market"

Really? I'd like to know where you get your stats from. According to numerous sources, including W3's OS Statistics ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp ) DESKTOP linux users number about 5%. and that doesn't include the VAST number of servers.

Linux in the server market outnumbers windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems in the last few months "Linux/unix and variants" passed 50% of ALL server use.

with most of the people in Internet Security working on a platform that's NOT windows, there's good reason it's as well secured as it is. (that and anybody can find/fix a bug in the open source world. but that's another topic entirely ;)

You use the html "a" tag to make a proper link.

(how do I make a proper link here - without the whole url showing up?)

Psst: just use the standard html tag <a href="url">surrounding your comment words</a> in your comments.

How exactly is it bullshit? WinXP is still the most popular OS by far and in a few short weeks with the release of IE 9 will be stuck with an outdated browser. Due to bad design decisions at MSFT that cause IE in XP hook deep into the system and files connected to it required to run Windows Update (which you can check yourself by running one of several "IE Removal Tools" which actually remove IE instead of hide it from view) make it even more attractive and dangerous.Finally as long as WinXP is supported what features Vista and 7 have is irrelevant as I showed above they are by far the minority when it comes to IE.

And then finally you have the actions of the MSFT "security team" themselves. While the other browser makers opened support tickets and continued working with the writer right up until release MSFT closed the ticket and cut off contact with the writer until he told them he would release into the wild, which then got back responses like "PR Nightmare" and who then tried to stall for time by saying it wasn't replicable with the July tool even though after confirmation by the writer that yes, the July tool found the same bugs they admitted they found that as well and couldn't explain cutting the support ticket but I can.

If you look up the history of the IE security team you'll see time and time again researchers finding bugs, doing the right thing and handing the info to MSFT, only to have the bug ignored until they threaten or release into the wild. This has happened over and over again. so why you would say it is bullshit when we have a history of being a day late and a dollar short is beyond me. And why anyone would use IE in this day and age when there are much safer browsers out there where the teams behind it seem to really be on the ball and listen is frankly more than a little crazy. Finally I know this is only an anecdote but here in the shop I've found by moving users away from IE I've had their rate of infection drop by a good 75% on fully patched XP machines tells me all I need to know in all honestly. IE simply isn't safe for general usage, and I've seen that with my very own peepers. Believe what you want.

I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.

I would actually dispute all of your comments, but picking up on the last point in bold, one of XML's key features is "mixed content", which is apparently (according to http://yaml.org/xml.html) not possible in YAML.

"The test, funded by Microsoft That says it all."

page 12 of the test PDF:>
"ABOUT THIS TEST This private test was contracted by Microsoft’s SmartScreen product team..."

Paid for by Microsoft, although really google should just ignore these fake tests since IE usage has dropped from 45% to 28% while Chrome went from 4% to 20% from Jan 09 thru Nov 2010.

So shut-up Google, you're winning.

In web browsing market share, Linux has 5.0%, while OSX has 7.7%. In servers (and other, embedded network devices), Linux has many times as many users as OSX. Counting mobile phones (including Android) there are about as many iOS users as Linux users, but iOS is not OSX, and so there's already more Linux users. Among developers, where the difference between iOS and OSX creates two separate groups with little overlap but where Linux and Android groups largely overlap, there are so obviously more Linux developers than either OSX or iOS (or dual) developers that it's not worth looking for a citation. Linux has more users and more developers, even though it doesn't have a genius marketing company like Apple with a mass market to sell into to swell its ranks.

Sun, IBM, Apple, Google all compete in markets using OS'es as a competitive tool, even if not directly competing in an "OS market". Because only Microsoft competes directly in the OS market, though "competes" is a fuzzy term for a monopoly, which is the definition that excludes Sun, IBM, Apple and Google from competing. Yet Red Hat does compete, and it's nearly a $BILLION now. Sun used Solaris wrong to compete, but it could have used it (or Linux) to compete well, just as IBM does with Linux (and AIX).

Look, you keep making assertions that you don't even back up, let alone cite with some independent facts. I keep citing the inarguable realities of success and failure, and citing facts from independent sources when they're actually arguable. You're not changing, and you've given me no reason to change. This is boring.

Goodbye.

based on w3 reports, IE6 usage is down to 4.8% http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp
Also note that most IE6 users are using it in their work environments, where they are bound to IE6 because of enterprise software they use (and upgrades are costly)

According to W3Schools, FireFox didn't support XSLT before version 3 and Opera didn't before version 9... But IE 6 supported it.

For those too lazy to search you can check out the w3c browser statistics here and you'll notice that the stats are:
IE: 31.1%
Firefox: 45.1%
Chrome: 17.3%
Safari: 3.7%
Opera: 2.2%

Those are the estimates for September and I'm assuming that's from all of the doctype fetching. Though, I predict that Firefox will lose numbers to Chrome soon because FF isn't what it used to be, rather Chrome is what FF used to be to IE back in the day IMO.

Safari doesn't display anything. I see the problem. Same problem as their website.

Note: The tag is deprecated. There's articles as far back as 2006 saying to stop using the embed tag.

Sorry, so sorry. I'm way too lazy to copy and paste, please learn how to insert a link: Learning HTML

actually here in NZ itunes is much more misleading, they have two radio buttons "visa" and "mastercard" once you select one, you can't de-select it, but if you don't select either you can continue on.

I'm usually fairly clued up, but even this had me stumped, especially as thats not how radio buttons "should work"

More like "barely clued up" - read up on how a radio button works. Like here.

Ah, i knew i had the link somewhere!. It averaged out at about 4.64% not bad, actually. True, these are far from perfect statistics, but non the less an indication that linux is definitely moving in the right direction.

One more point to mention: I'm actually VERY unimpressed with the Mac OSX numbers - I'm wondering how much publicity and fame they have (and how much money spent behind it), yet their market share is still under 10% (less than twice that of linux). Sorry fanboys :-p

Queue the picture featuring a pair of laughing girls.

Well as a matter of fact, 51.7% source of the computers are still using windows Xp so it, in my oppinion, isn't that strange that this problem has appeared. I myself would be one such example of potential victim since my laptop is incompatible with W7 due to compatibility issues with the gfx drivers. I can imagine that there are many out there who are in the same situation. Not only this but during the time Vista was distributed there were also a lot of computers who were sold with Windows Xp because people didn't want the flawed Vista system.

It's an uphill battle, and we've still got a ways to go, but Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically has been making great strides here.

Linux is treading water.

In most stats, it is barely visible as also-ran.

Stat Counter Global Stats

I want expecting this.

But the Linux Stat Counter stats for countries like Argentina, Brazil, Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, Venezuela etc., are really quite pathetic. Either these countries have gone off-line or the FOSS geek has spent too much time listening to his own propaganda.

The picture is somewhat less bleak in Uruguay - one of OLPC's great success stories. But in Rwanda - where OLPC had a confirmed, significant, deployment of 100,000 units - Linux is easily outpaced by OSX and Win 7.

Top Operating System Share Trend, iOS Tops Linux

Even when you factor in Android, the numbers don't change all that much.

OS Platform Statistics

24% Win 7: Up from 0% in Jan 09, Linux 4.5%: Up from 2.2% in Mar 03. The W3Schools stats for Linux are as good as it gets.

Anyway...
As for line art type things, logos, illustrations, interface elements simple vector graphics can be superior because there is no need to send every pixel, when just the coordinates will suffice.

For example, say, for some weird reason, I wanted to use one image a box with a solid color, rounded corners and an alpha channel so the rounded part will show the background through. (reference w3c image below) And lets say I wanted to use it as a background image to 10 different sized divs on a page. (common for a rect with rounded edges) The SVG is 361 bites. I did a screenshot, moved to photoshop and saved as gif and png both with 8 colors so the edges weren't to jagged. The gif was 804 bytes and the png was 522. The SVG is considerably smaller.

Now, consider that when using different sized version with the SVG I only need one file downloaded 10 times. With the png/gif, while I CAN use the same for each one, letting a browser resize your images for you is not going to be pretty. So you would need use many copies of the image at different sizes. Probably not all 10 sizes, but you don't want a small one blown up 10x any more than you want a huge one shrunk to 1/10th.

Now in the context of what we're talking about, a Google TV interface, there's going to be a TON of interface elements in use. think of all the widgets..

Now, I'm not by ANY means saying save your family pics or a movie as vector. Each format has it's place. Personally I don't use SVG at all, it's not worth the trouble. My whole comment was just based on how I remember people extolling the virtues of SVG to save bandwidth, but now google says to hell with bandwidth, use bitmap to save CPU.

http://www.w3schools.com/svg/tryit_view.asp?filename=rect4

Ubuntu did contribute something: getting Linux to 5% of Internet traffic on OS Statistics. Isn't the increase in notoriety enough?

Not the OP, nor is this probably the most definitive scientific source for such statistics, but the w3c at least has been reporting XP use as levelling off and dropping. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

The XKCD made the same mistake many slashdotters make when talking about 1080p, being "PC diehards" they don't realize that 1080p refers to the vertical resolution, not horizontal. 1080p is 1920x1080. you couldn't buy a cell phone with a 960 horizontal resolution screen until recently. Even the N900 is only 800. And also until quite recently, the most common computer resolution was 1024x768, only the most hard core of PC owners (like XKCD's creator) had those big ass 1600x1200 monitors, which still doesn't match the 1920 horizontal of 1080p. In 2004 there will still plenty of web browsers running at 800x600!

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp

The XKCD made the same mistake many slashdotters make when talking about 1080p, being "PC diehards" they don't realize that 1080p refers to the vertical resolution, not horizontal. 1080p is 1920x1080. you couldn't buy a cell phone with a 960 horizontal resolution screen until recently. Even the N900 is only 800. And also until quite recently, the most common computer resolution was 1024x768, only the most hard core of PC owners (like XKCD's creator) had those big ass 1600x1200 monitors, which still doesn't match the 1920 horizontal of 1080p. In 2004 there will still plenty of web browsers running at 800x600!

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp

Read all about it:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_a.asp

Using JavaScript and HTML for the UIs of real applications remains fundamentally flawed.

Yeah, no one would seriously implement an application with the UI written with HTML, CSS and Javascript... like Firefox itself...

But in all seriousness, would you care to elaborate why Javascript (for the pedants out there, yes, I really mean ECMAScript) is so bad? I think in itself it's a fine language in itself, especially given its original purpose. Sure, it's dynamically and weakly typed, but as long as you're aware of it and its implications it's not really an issue. And being a prototype-based language is a plus in my opinion, class-based OOP wouldn't really offer any advantages in web programming, and you can emulate it if you're so inclined. Having first-class functions and closures is great, and makes up for many of the shortcomings IMHO.

No, the issues with Javascript aren't really issues of the language itself:

• Books/websites about it are in many cases outdated and/or simply wrong. As a simple example, quoting from here: If you assign values to variables that have not yet been declared, the variables will automatically be declared. (that is, omitting the var keyword) ...sure. Although you end up creating, or worse, overwriting, a global variable. But hey, same difference, right? If you really want to know the language, and not just learn some web 2.0 tricks du jour, get this book. You won't regret it.
• DOM implementations have some huge differencies. But DOM is not part of the ECMA spec, and I guess although MS has improved their CSS support, they don't want to make my job too easy. Although it's unlikely you'll notice the differences if you use one of the available frameworks (just do yourself a favor and don't use prototype.js).
• It can be used to do horrible things. And I'm not just talking about malware, Javascript is probably one of the most abused languages, in the sense what kind of websites have been created with it. Thankfully web developers seem lately to be getting the point that "even though you can, doesn't mean you should".

But again, none of those are issues with Javascript, the language, so I'd very much like for you to enlighten me.

I don't know where you get your statistics from, but a quick google search of 'OS Statistics' yields this page: clicky
Please explain what you consider 'hardly anybody'. Because I consider 31.5% (win7 + vista) of all computers on the web a significant portion.