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You'll see that it has already done this. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp And there's campaigns to kill IE6 inc. Google & Youtube. IE6 MUST DIE! http://ie6update.com/ http://iedeathmarch.org/ Hopefully with the release of Karmic people will move away from XP/earlier. But the only thing that will kill it is M$ stop supporting XP! And have notices telling them to upgrade.

It did that ages ago! FF owns the browser share market: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp So many people are trying to kill IE6 right now, inc. Google & Youtube It has really low market share and it hates standards. Make it die!

Windows 7 had 1.9% market share before launch?

Net Applications and W3Schools have been tracking Win 7 since January:

Top Operating System Share Trend. OS Platform Statistics

October

NA
Win7 2.15%
Linux 0.96%

W3S
Win7 4.4%
Linux 4.2%

In the W3Schools stats it took Linux six years to move from 2% to 4%. Win 7 three months.

Oh I'm so tired of this tired old mantra.

Ok...name one fully proprietary standard or protocol that is absolutely critical to, in the broad sense, the functioning of the internet at large... I'm waiting.

If everyone relied so much on standards, why do all the major browsers support .innerHTML, which is not part of W3C ? Because Microsoft did it first (right or wrong, it works, and is a lot cleaner than all that messing with DOM nodes)...

That's one of maybe a handful of things they may have gotten sorta right, depending, of course, on the viewpoint of whichever web developer you'd ask...see here. Ajax is DOM based, lots of sites use Ajax. Including /. That tells me DOM isn't the widely spurned standard you portray. Further, we can see here that IE, in fact, also supports it. Even further, when reading here, under 'Nonstandard Features', the article notes...

Internet Explorer has introduced a number of extensions to JScript which have been adopted by other browsers. These include the innerHTML property, which returns the HTML string within an element; the XMLHttpRequest object, which allows the sending of HTTP request and receiving of HTTP response; and the designMode attribute of the contentDocument object, which enables rich text editing of HTML documents. Some of these functionalities were not possible until the introduction of the W3C DOM methods.

'Nuff said.

and the competition had to make a choice between :-

1) Aceepting that standards are out-of-date before they are ever finalised (because anything decided by a committee of 1000's is doomed to failure)

Lolwut? Aceepting? How is that done? When & how did the W3 standards become "out of date"? What's the qualifier, oh, great all-knowing master of teh vast intarwebs? Oh, also, here's a tip. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're an IE user based off your enthusiastic support for Bill & Steve, or at least their browser. If there's no spell-checker in IE, there's always wordpad. [WINKEY]+R, type "Wordpad", hit Enter. Voilà! That way you won't seem quite as idiotic & incoherent when you post. Unfortunately, the content of your post is just something for which I can't render proper assistance. But I do wish you and your IQ the best of luck. You'll need it.

or

2) Risk having the world saying "Firefox / Safari / Opera sucks because the DHTML don't work like is does in IE".

Yes, everyone is saying those browsers suck, in the form of using them more while abandoning IE... This should be obvious, amirite?

So what it really boils down to is a case of the other browsers playing a game of "you should follow standards like we do, unless MS or someone else do something better, in which we'll ignore the principles we were founded on and simply follow the leader instead".

LOL, disproven.

Or perhaps would you have all browser development forbidden until the HTML5 spec is finalized when ? 2025 ?

I guess you're an expert on these things, yes? I think listening to someone who can't even spell-check would be a good idea.

Windows 7 beta had an awful lot of trouble running my XP games. I hear it is better in the final release, but I haven't tested it yet.

Wine is getting better and better at running games. If you like older games, Wine might run more of your games than Windows 7. Not to mention Linux has tons of great, free games.

Linux played nicer with my Radeon HD 4850 when I bought it in march than the 7 beta did.

Most webcams just work in Linux with no driver downloads or tweaking. Many old webcams don't have newer drivers for Windows. Honestly, I'd bet Linux today supports a higher percentage of webcams than Vista and 7 do.

I use Wells Fargo and e-banking works fine in Firefox. Which e-banking site requires ActiveX? If it doesn't use ActiveX, you can likely use a User Agent Switcher in Firefox, and then it will work fine in Firefox.

Seriously, which major bank's site doesn't work in Firefox?

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

Firefox holds a larger market share than IE now. I can't recall the last time I ran into a major site that didn't work in Firefox on Linux, except for video playing sites with custom plugins.

Have you tried Linux recently? Download an openSUSE 11.2 beta and install it on your computer of choice. I bet 100% of your hardware just works. You may need to install a video driver (1-click install) if you want full 3D acceleration, but many chipsets get 3D support even with open drivers.

I just installed Vista for a gal on her laptop that got hosed. Vista didn't recognize the chipset, NIC, wireless, bluetooth, video card, etc. out of the box. I had to have a second computer to download all the drivers, that I had to hunt down from multiple sources. Even worse, on Linux, a simple "lspci -v" would tell me exactly what hardware I had, so I knew what drivers to grab. Windows told me jack and shit. I spent an hour after install hunting down drivers.

Wake up and smell the 21st Century. Old assumptions about Linux shortcomings rarely hold true anymore.

That people aren't comfortable with Linux isn't Linux's fault.

In less than one year the Win 7 Beta/RC went on from nothing to capture a 1.5% share of the global desktop.

OSX 10.5 with its impeccable UNIX roots took 3%.

Vista holds about 20% of the market.

Linux simply seems to have run out of gas. Top Operating System Share Trend, OS Platform Statistics

Linux's part of the bargain is complete.

The bargain is never complete until you make the sale.

I wonder how many of the Windows 7 "parties" will really be Linux install fests.

Win 7 ended the 2008 holiday shopping season in January with a 0.13% share of the desktop. Linux with 0.91%.

Linux begins the 2009 holiday season with 0.95% of the desktop and Win 7 with 1.5%. Top Operating System Share Trend

The W3Schools OS Platform Statistics are no more cheering:
at its present 1% a month growth, Win 7 needs only a month to overtake Linux even there.

WalMart.com alone lists over fifty laptop and desktop systems eligible for a free upgrade to Win 7. $400-$1700.

That's a broad spectrum of product for the middle class market - and there are going be a lot of folks looking for help with their Win 7 install.

The settings file is settings.xml, and can be read by other xml parsers.

Typical output from saving settings would be something like this:

http://www.w3schools.com/XML/plant_catalog.xml

(Although for a settings file, there's no need to have characters like $; for storing text, there would be)

You'll notice the ASCII text and lack of attributes on anything - but it still gets the job done and people call it XML. You can insist I didn't create an xml parser, and I will agree with you - I created a ProgramSettings parser, and it generates 100% valid (but very simple) XML.

Again, the purpose was not to parse all XML files, or greatly increase the attack surface by having tons of complicated syntax. The purpose was to store and retrieve program settings to/from an easy to edit format.

I guess I just got tired of ini. Spent too long configuring Samba on Ubuntu. ;)

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

Or, for the more graphically inclined... see that pink slice? That's Opera.

"Google needs Apple to increase their mobile app install base, and ultimately Apple will need Google to keep up the iPhone's functional parity with the rest of the market."

I think Apple needs Google more than Apple knows. Google has made great strides in just ten years, rising from virtually nothing to offering the best search engine, having a near monopoly on online advertisement, offering their own cellphone OS, their own browser, and soon their own operating system. And we still love Google.

Apple's been around for 25+ years, and how many people use their Safari browser? 3%, vs Google Chrome's 7% within just one year. Is there anything Google can not do? Does Google "need" anyone, or do they need Google?

How does this rate insightful, when the fellow knows nothing about his topic?

The Win 7 RC stands up very well against Linux in the most frequently quoted stats: Operating System Market Share, OS Platform Statistics

HTML5 canvas has a lot of potential. Once accelerated 3D graphics in the browser is standard, the potential uses and demand for content will be huge: visualizations, innovative interfaces, attention-grabbing content, digital art, games...
But IE doesn't support canvas so any site that relies on it for anything more than trivial rendering will be unusable by almost half of Internet users (current IE browser share: ~40%, according to w3schools). Probably Microsoft sees canvas as a threat to Silverlight so won't work with it until they absolutely have to.
Here's a canvas animation demo I wrote. Looks fine on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iPhone... barely works on IE using emulated support for the canvas element.

The Net Applications stats for August:

XP 71.8%
Vista 18.8%
OSX 10.5 3.5%
Win 7 1.2%
OSX 10.4 1%
Linux 0.9%
W2K 0.9%

Operating System Market Share

These global stats are built from about 160 million hits per month to its clients' websites:

Additional estimates about the website population:
76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
43% are commerce sites
18% are corporate sites
10% are content sites
29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..) About Our Market Share Statistics

Linux fares somewhat better in the W3Schools OS Platform Statistics. But the trend line is as flat as the Kansas prairie.

You know what the next step is, right? (It's not PROFIT!, but it's not far either.)

The Net Applications stats for August have Win 7 at 1.18% and Linux at 0.94%. Operating System Market Share

The developer-oriented w3Schools OS Platform Stats show Linux at 4.2% and Win 7 at 2.5%.

But Win 7 went from 0% to 2.5% in eight months. - and it got there with zero OEM system installs.

It took Linux six damn years to claw its way up from 2% to 4%.

Oh, come on - really? Then how come many websites don't work with Opera, or Safari or sometimes even Firefox or Chrome.

Yes really. Until IE6 usage drops off, people will still develop for it.

According to these guys IE6's market share is still way higher than Chrome, Safari or Opera.

Trust me, it's a pain in the butt. Here at work we test with IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox and Safari. Started some testing with Chrome, but most of our websites are for business users in the manufacturing sector, and we haven't seen a lot of adoption there.

It really really sucks, but you have to play to the browsers with the market share or people will go to a competitor.
(Or they'll send a nasty email that gets routed to the president of the company. Not that that's happened or anything)

Honestly if we actually had a customer using Opera and they complained about it, we'd have to start running through our test matrix with that too.

More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers.

The geek came into the netbook market thinking that this time he held all the high cards.

But XP on the Atom platform cleaned his clock.

Vista and Win 7 RC have five times the market share of Linux in the W3Schools OS Platform Stats

It took Linux six long years to move from 2% to 4% in these stats.

Win 7 six months from 0% to 2%. This is on a site which has Firefox at 47%. Browser Statistics Month by Month

I've seen estimates of Windows users that begin at around one billion.

That should tell the geek something about support for development, support for applications, support for hardware, the validity of the UI -
and a hundred other things that a modern, technically competent, end-user oriented OS simply must have.

The week at TigerDirect:

15.6" Acer Vista Premium Notebook. AMD Dual-Core. 3 GB RAM, Radeon HD3200 DX10 graphics, 320 GB HDD, DVD Burner. Etc. $450.

Windows isn't crap. It isn't an ass-rape.

That kind of trash-talk leads absolutely nowhere.

The Windows system is competitively priced. It runs everything in closed and proprietary software - everything free and open sourced.

This is what sucks the air out of the room.

More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers.

The geek came into the netbook market thinking that this time he held all the high cards.

But XP on the Atom platform cleaned his clock.

Vista and Win 7 RC have five times the market share of Linux in the W3Schools OS Platform Stats

It took Linux six long years to move from 2% to 4% in these stats.

Win 7 six months from 0% to 2%. This is on a site which has Firefox at 47%. Browser Statistics Month by Month

I've seen estimates of Windows users that begin at around one billion.

That should tell the geek something about support for development, support for applications, support for hardware, the validity of the UI -
and a hundred other things that a modern, technically competent, end-user oriented OS simply must have.

The week at TigerDirect:

15.6" Acer Vista Premium Notebook. AMD Dual-Core. 3 GB RAM, Radeon HD3200 DX10 graphics, 320 GB HDD, DVD Burner. Etc. $450.

Windows isn't crap. It isn't an ass-rape.

That kind of trash-talk leads absolutely nowhere.

The Windows system is competitively priced. It runs everything in closed and proprietary software - everything free and open sourced.

This is what sucks the air out of the room.

Yes, I understand that and thanks for the links.

But I believe you're missing my point: why would one use HTML/JavaScript to access webcam or USB stick on your machine, using questionable bleeding edge markup, while 10MB Java runtime already works now and is stable for long years?

Please get me right: I am OK with HTML5 and innovations, but I still see no point to be literally limited to Ajax within a browser. For example, Java Applet works way faster than equivalent complex JavaScript GUI, that is done in SmartClient or ExtJS, just loads a bit slower (yes, a bit, because my applets are only 80-100Kb jar). Additionally, Java Swing is much easier to develop, rather then JavaScript/Ajax. If you use JNLP (Java Web Start) it will work for you even faster, because it will cache your jar and start just right away for you. Because your app is not just reflections or animations. It is much more and browsers are needs to become literally a virtual machine for HTML and JavaScript with a plain canvas. And that's what Java Swing already today is. Personally, for me would be much more sense to get running Android on a regular netbook, because I can write Java Swing apps just like this and also have them working offline (unlike Ajax app).

Video tag: yeah, that's how it looks like here http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_video.asp on Mac's Safari 4 for me.

Why is every Windows release candidate a Slashdot news?

Because in the W3Schools OS Platform Stats the Win7 RC has half the market share of Linux and Vista/Win7 five times that of Linux.

What I find amazing is that you actually believe that it was from 2003 simply because the web page has a date written on it. Do you know how easy it is to fake that?
 
Jesus Christ, people. Don't believe anyone. Not even me! Test out the faking if you want.
 
Here are some helpful resources:
 
  Information on modifying web pages
 
  Description of your mentality right now, MindKata

But I also think it's silly to assume and design for Javascript

According to 95% of users have JS on. There's no reason to essentially design two separate sites to support the other 5%. And it could be argued that that 5% could either easily turn it back on if they choose (in which case, they're the lazy one), or is using something really really old and has no need to, or doesn't want to.

I'm not a web developer, but it seems obvious to me that while it's possible and often sensible to include the other 5% (which may include spiders, which you typically want), ignoring them because you don't have time for two designs is not at all silly. They may not even be the type of people you want on your site anyway.

Looking at W3Schools stats on it it's about 5%. I've seen some stats suggest as high as 16% around 3 years ago:

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

I feel Javascript is an important technology and rather than fucking around with all the proprietary crap like Flash we should be strengthening Javascript so it's more secure and more useful, in fact, a lot of browser vendors seem to be doing this, and those Chrome demos posted a few months back were agood example.

But I also think it's silly to assume and design for Javascript unless Javascript is the whole point of your site. There's so many sites out there that use Javascript for things like drop down menus and sometimes even positioning where CSS would suffice and not require Javascript support it's silly. To turn away 1 in 20 users doesn't seem the brightest idea unless you're building a web application where absolutely the only way to do what you want to do is to use Javascript.

Javascript shouldn't be a requirement for the vast majority of the web, only for those sites that truly need it.

> I am on KDE 4.3 RC2, so things may have been fixed from whatever KDE you were using. Which
> version have you? Can you test with KDE 4.3?

I'm using 4.2.96 (4.3 RC2) as packaged for Kubuntu 9.04.

> > Konqueror: (1) Ctrl-C doesn't copy the selected text; I have to use the context menu.
> > This only seems to affect pages in frames.
>
> I cannot reproduce, and you point to a specific site?

Any site with frames (that I've tested):
http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_frame_cols

> > (2) Websites seem to use the KDE-wide "View Background" colour as the default background:
> > this can lead to black text on a dark/black background. Decoupling the default website
> > background colour and the View Background colour would help.
>
> Again I cannot reproduce. What site, and what is your background colour setting?

Black or blackish. It probably affects any site that doesn't have a background colour of its
own, for example:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html

> > Application launcher (classic, not Kickoff), "Computer" submenu: (1) displays storage media
> > along with Places under "Places", not under "Removable Storage" (which displays the Places
> > instead). (2) Both types of misplaced entry are dead to mouse clicks.
>
> Is this an English installation, or translated? I do not have that issue in neither my English nor
> Hebrew interfaces.

English. The equivalent tab in the Kickoff menu works, by the way.

> > Kate: (1) I don't think the "Open Recent" list is working properly. (2) Sometimes cursor
> > colour = background colour, especially (exclusively?) after (highlighted?) braces and after
> > search or replace operations (which may also highlight text... hm).
>
> I don't have this issue, either! And I use Kate a lot.

Hm again. I've seen complaints about both (1) and (2) before, so it's not just me... black background
again; it's possible the cursor turns black rather than background-coloured.

> > KRunner/Quicksand: In the "Task oriented" interface mode, results are displayed in black no
> > matter the background colour.
>
> Which theme? I cannot reproduce this, either!

Any theme I've tried! The results list box that pops up to the right of the main search box always uses
the "View Background" colour (black, unsurprisingly) with black text (except for the highlighted entry).

"Command oriented" mode has readable text, although I don't understand its autocomplete function.
I type "fetc", it completes "fetchmail" and puts the cursor at the end of it, but I still have to type
"fetchmail" before "Run fetchmail" appears below.

> > Windows List widget: Right-clicking an entry and picking "Move" or "Resize" just teleports the
> > pointer over to the respective window without going into move/resize mode. It works fine via the taskbar.
>
> I cannot find that widget, though I have seen it in the past. Again, I am useless!
>
> > PowerDevil: DPMS settings don't seem to take effect. Can use separate Display control,
> > though. (Haven't tested this on 4.3 RC2 yet.)
>
> I don't use those features, so I don't know. Sorry.
>
> > Kwin cube: With "hovering windows" activated, panels sometimes poke through or overlap windows
> > on rotate.
>
> I don't use those effects.
>
> > kded4: Sometimes this process jumps to about 50% CPU and stays there until I kill it. (May have
> > been fixed with the recent upgrade to 4.3 RC2, bit early to tell.)
>
> This sounds serious, please file a bug!

There's this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi

The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.

According to whom? Even on w3schools.com, which is visited almost exclusively by web developers, more than 14% of people are still using IE6.

Quoting w3schools on anything - in particular browser stats - marks you out as an imbecile. Please, for you own good, refrain.

The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.

According to whom? Even on w3schools.com, which is visited almost exclusively by web developers, more than 14% of people are still using IE6.

According to StatCounter: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-US-monthly-200807-200907 . Their graph shows IE6 at 9.45% in July, just barely dipping below 10% for the first time ever.

The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.

According to whom? Even on w3schools.com, which is visited almost exclusively by web developers, more than 14% of people are still using IE6.

hexadecimal digits?

The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.

According to whom? Even on w3schools.com, which is visited almost exclusively by web developers, more than 14% of people are still using IE6.

Amazon Best Sellers in Software Updated hourly.

1 Win 7 Premium Upgrade
2 Win 7 Professional Upgrade
3 MS Office Home and Student 2007
5 MS Office Home and Student 2008 - Mac
12 Outlook 2007
17 Street & Trips 2009
18 Win 7 Ultimate Upgrade
30 XP Home Full Version
31 MS Office Standard 2007 Full Version
35 Street & Trips with GPS 2009
36 MS Office Small Business 2007 Upgrade
38 XP Pro SP3 System Builders
40 MS Office Small Business 2007 Full Version
41 MS Office Pro 2007 Full Version
45 MS Works 9.0
50 Windows Live One Care
56 Windows XP Pro SP2 Full Version
79 MS Vista Premium Full Version
95 XP Home SP2 Upgrade
97 Vista Home Premium Upgrade
98 Publisher 2007
99 Access 2007

At any given moment about 1 in 4 of the software bestsellers in software will be Microsoft products for the Windows market. Office 2007/8 has had an extraordinarily successful run.

OS Platform Statistics For June

XP 67%
Vista 18%
Mac 6%
Linux 4%
W2003 2%
Win 7 2%
W2K 1%

The OS stats are from a pro's development-oriented site that shows a 50% share for Firefox. It is not preposterous to imagine Win 7 overtaking Linux before its official launch in October.

W3 Schools which has an admitted alternate-browser bias does not show any sort of abrupt drop-off for IE, and if anywhere were going to, I would think it would be this site. In fact, it shows Firefox dropping for the first time since September of last year (when Chrome was initially released), but only half a percentage point. IE7 is losing ground to IE8 rather quickly, but IE6 actually gained a half a percentage point since May. Chrome is also up another half a point, and nothing else really had enough movement to be worth mentioning (Safari up a tenth, Opera down a tenth).

There's a little-used standard that came out of the W3C along with XSLTs called XSL:FO. You write your document in XSL:FO markup, and then one of any number of processors like XEP to convert it into PDF or what have you.

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

One of the original purposes of it was so that you could use XSLTs to transform the same XML data into both XHTML or XSL:FO for publishing. The standard never took off though. XSL:FO just doesn't have enough options to be typographically interesting, compared to SVG.

Of course, the right answer is LaTeX, but you might want to give XSL:FO a try for familiarity's sake.

Try reading the documentation (one of many possible sources) before speaking up on a subject you know nothing about. And remember: a closed mouth gathers no foot.

The anchor tag, <a>, has to have a name attribute to be useful in its eponymous function. Or to put it in blunter terms, if you ain't got a <a name="there"></a>, you can't do a <a href="#there">Goto There </a>. And despite how harmful gotos might be in other environments, on these Intartubes, it is these gotos that put the hyper in the web.

I'd show you how it works in this post, but in its infinite mechanical wisdom the slashdot lameness filter prevents self-referential links in the comments. Prolly a good thing, considering what the younger members of our population are sometimes like.

Now get offa my lawn!

*NOTE: "Ã" is slashdot's lame interpretation of the euro symbol.

HTML Entities are your friend

Maybe MSFT can copy Linux and make it a live distro so people can try it out before full install... wait, that'll never make them bite. Nevermind.

It may not be a "live distro," but Win 7 has already captured about half the desktop share of Linux. Operating System Market Share

Net Applications is mass-market oriented. If your gadget can access the web, Net Applications will track it.

W3Schools is developer-oriented. But even there Win 7 has 1/4 the share of Linux. OS Platform Statistics

It took Linux six damn years to move from 2% to 4% in the W3Schools stats.

Win 7 gets a 1% share in five months.

But on the other hand, so many new devices connect to the internet, smartphones, gaming consoles, media players etc. They do not run IE and web developers do not want to add hacks specifically to support IE. Further the general population no longer blames the web site if IE does not render it correctly. So Microsoft can no longer work around the bugs in IIS in IE and laugh at the frustration of rest of the world. Once upon a time, if IE renders it correctly and others don't, no matter how much you protest and point out the errors in the website's code, no body would listen. No longer.

So if you are a Microsoft employee, and you work in IE team, jump ship when you still can.

Opera is is in trouble. .
Its desktop share is less than even Chrome.
As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.
See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here

I don't understand the problem here. Microsoft have far more Windows testers than every other OS put together.

Mods: please read the links before moderating.

That's only because everyone daring to USE a Microsoft product is treated by Microsoft like a beta tester.

Mods: please read the links before moderating.

First, Forgive me if I didn't look closely enough, but I'm not seeing how these statistics are substantiated. On your first link it says one thing and on the other its completely different and what makes this source so valid over something like http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Now to the point: So what if ie6 is a dev pain, that isn't news. Yes, you build for current standards, but you should also build so your site will gracefully degrade, not just regarding client-side script (JS), but with your markup and styles as well. Just because a visitor can't receive your site exactly the way you want them to, doesn't mean you should instruct them to upgrade just for your site. I'm sorry but if a front-end developer's biggest complaint is accounting for ie6, they should just deal with it and stop whining about ie6 usage and new standards that conflict with the browser. ...Or you can ignore ie6 and its users and justify your elimination of a user market share however you see fit. Please just stay off your soapbox because trying to get others to hop on your bandwagon using a broken record is just annoying

The guy forgot just one important thing: Most people don't use Firefox.

Regardless of whether or not it is not more than half of web surfers, plenty of people use it. In fact, the percentage is so large, 'most' is moot. Most surveys show at least 30% market share.

Also, the number of FF users isn't worth bringing up anyhow - This article in no way says, "Teh Interwebs as we know it are ovur!". TFA simply says that this is a good STEP toward a more democratic web, although the TFS certainly sensationalized it quite a bit.

Numbers really don't matter here. What *does* matter though, is the idea that Jetpack has indirectly brought with it -- more control over web content. This will undoubtedly spread to other browsers in the form of plugins and such, making browser market share irrelevant.

It's still not groundbreaking, but it's not quite as trivial as it sounds.

You're right. The usual way to do this, in Windows applications, is to simply not allow the character and to beep. See: MaskedTextBox for the .NET version, which also triggers an event so programmers can add custom logic.

Yes, that is a Windows Forms thing and not a web form thing, but there's nothing stopping you from hooking a text input's onkeypress event.

Oh, but wait! Web forms don't allow you to set colors on specific characters in input or textarea! How exactly does IBM plan on doing this?

I assume that most Javascript validation waits until all of the text has been entered.

Your assumption is false. It's called an OnChange event: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_onchange.asp

I am not a "Web programmer" but anyone with even a passing familiarity with JavaScript has seen this.

The first claim in the patent is: "1. A system for providing real-time validation of text input fields in a Web page comprising:a validation-enhanced text input element configured to contain an attribute for a validation expression for a text field in a rendered Web page, wherein the validation-enhanced text input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; andan input text validator configured to validate a user-entered character of the text field against the validation expression in real-time and visually indicate invalid user-entered characters."

So these losers have filed a patent application in which the first claim is exactly nothing but a completely standard bit of JavaScript code. People have been doing this kind of real-time validation and response for years and years and years. JavaScript is designed to do it.

This is by far the most egregiously stupid patent application we have seen on /. in a long time.

Why IBM is doing this is a complete mystery, although "never assume venality where stupidity will do" comes forcibly to mind.

I've always taken "market share" stats with a grain of salt.. or three. IMHO, it's akin to comparing Windows market share to Linux. The far majority of x86 compatible pc's delivered are sold with a Windows license.. and subsequently, IE. If and when the customer removes windows and installs Linux (or as I suspect most do, installs a dual-boot configuration), how is it counted that the user is likely using Linux at least half the time, if not the far majority of the time? Does that Windows license get removed from the "market share?" No, it doesn't. Windows comes with IE. Who's counting whether or not IE or Firefox is being used more on said PC? http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp/ tells a rather different story. So, who's counting, and who do we believe?

YMMV but to give you an estimate W3Schools is a good starting point.

HTML entities, learn them and love them. (Slashdot doesn't support all of them)

Or you could use these stats, which show 4% from browsing OSes.

You'd think this showed more desktop usage, as most people don't use a server OS (that's used for servers) to browse the web - hence the Windows 2003 server showing at 1.7%

Dragonfly = Firebug (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_opera.asp)... well, kinda. But it's a step in the right direction.
Right on point with YSlow.
ColorZilla > ColorPicker IMHO
Also check out "Web Developer" by Chris Pederick - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60.

Opera's "shiny stuff" is nice, but for srs business - FF FTW.

Agreed, w3schools is best.
--
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something - Plato

I always recommend the W3 Schools web site for beginners. It's free and contains enough info to get anyone off to a good start. http://www.w3schools.com/

Linux shines a little brighter here.

But not by much.

Linux is flat-lined on the Net Applications charts, always has been. If it was a patient on a respirator, you would pull the plug.

But even the w3Schools stats show only bare 2% growth in market share for Linux over the past five years.

Yes, so that the rest of the world can spend an extra 20% of their time, on every single website, to benefit your browser.

No, you're doing the math wrong. That's not "the rest of the world", that's "the rest of the *web developers* in the world".

For every web developer user who wants standards support, there are maybe a thousand non-web-developer users who want more speed, more browser features, better usability, better security, etc. So why is the majority of browser development time spent on the *minority* of users? It's retarded.

And, again, Microsoft is following the same retarded path as its competitors in this space. Although at least IE8 added a lot of user-facing fetures in addition to better standards support.

How about this: Since everyone else is already much closer, why not ditch Trident and embed Webkit or Gecko?

Microsoft has a standards-compliant HTML renderer. They use it in Visual Studio and Expression Web. It's not really web-ready, as it doesn't have plug-in support or even Javascript at the moment, and it's super-slow... but if Microsoft were to replace the rendering engine of IE, they'd use that one, since it's developed in-house.

Clearly, you are not a web developer.

Yes, because non-web-developers frequently slam up against the dispHTMLElementCollection retardedness I linked you to in my last posting.

I am a web developer, in fact. Well, something like that-- I'm a specialist in web analytics, which involves tons of Javascript. (Not as much web design-type tasks, though.)

Maybe you're jealous of my "easy" job, but if IE was gone tomorrow, I'd have 20% more time to spend doing something useful. And we all know what happens with 20% time.

More Slashdot posting?

Of course, you've shown your cards, you're squarely an MS fanboi -- so I am sure, in your world, other browsers should just suck it up and conform to the defacto standard, and the Web should go back to the 90's habit of slapping "best viewed in IE x.x" disclaimers on the page and calling it a day.

Yes, because there's clearly no middle ground at all.

Look, whether you like (or admit) it or not, IE shares something like 95% of the standard with every other browser. That's damned good. If you were writing a cross-platform desktop application, you'd find that virtually every widget works entirely different between OS X, Windows, Gnome, and KDE... you'd find that the APIs for those environments are nothing alike each other, you'd find that features you rely on on one OS don't even exist on others.

Your job *is* easy.

CSS is a styling language. WTF do I need math for?

For one thing, CSS has multiple measures, some of which are machine-relative and some of which aren't. Why can't I set the height of something to "5em + 5px"? A simple addition problem, which I can't pre-calculate because at design-time I don't know how many pixels are in an em. (Plus, it could be a non-whole-number value where pixels have to be whole numbers.)

Look at the list of CSS units: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_units.asp
Here are the ones you don't know at design-time: in, cm, mm (based on screen res), em, ex (based on default font size), point, pica (based on screen res)
Here are the ones you do: %, px

Right now the only way to make use of one of these measures from each category is to use two different elements with different styles, one with the "known" value and one with the "unknown." That's retarded.

The only reason is because the creators of CSS lacked imagination. The fact that you *also* lacked the imagination to come up with a scenario like this just tells me that you've been working in CSS too long.

Honestly, how much time was it?

I don't know, the W3C moves at such a glacial pace anyway, I suppose that it doesn't matter.

Oh, first the standards were crap, and now the job is "easy"?

"easy" in a relative