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Future for Web Standards Pondered
An anonymous reader writes "With the next version of Internet Explorer tied to the release of longhorn, and still years off, what hope is there for innovation in CSS, SVG, XHTML and other web standards? Is the future of the web similarly tied to Internet Explorer and Longhorn? This article ponders this gloomy future, and sees a ray or two of hope."
i hope that windows just uses mozilla firebird. it would be best if everyone could just simply code for the superior web browsing application. Though adware would become a fast issue due to the open source....
1) I believe Konqueror is the best browser currently out there. Some will complain that it is not available for Windows. But then, why should, or since based on Qt, why shouldn't it be possible
2) The most important thing for standards is that not patented technology will be allowed to sneak into the standards.
Many of us have been conditioned to think that both standards and innovation are good things. And the latter is an overused word that Microsoft marketing has forced into the memestream. But really, standards tend to stifle innovation.
Actually, there might be hope if Mozilla was available as an Internet Explorer plugin.. similar to adobe pdf and macromedia flash plugins. When a page wanted to use the mozilla renderer for advanced features, it would simply tell them to install a plugin, which most IE users don't think twice about. Eventually, these users may get tired of seeing most everything in a plugin browser, and may want to try using mozilla standalone.
where there is no one dominating operating system?
XHTML-MP+SVGT11 Recommendations
Microsoft's whole goal in the IE/Netscape war was to make its webpages incompatible with Netscape. We still see crap like that today.
I think the only hope for actually implementing web standards lies in demonstrating the superiority of products like Mozilla Firefox. Don't expect any development from Microsoft on this front; the more exclusive they can make their browser, the better (in their eyes).
I don't expect to Longhorn/the new IE giving anything helpful to web standards.
If we Ignore the attempts of Microsoft and others to make the web dependent on proprietary formats, etc. for a moment, the future of the web is quite exiting.
I'm talking about the Semantic Web, which is an attempt to deal with the IMO biggest problem with the web, and especially searching the web for information: you can only search according to syntax. Words, regexes, etc. is really the best you can do right now.
Searching would be so much better if we had semantics. Semantics would make searches and web pages in general much easier for computers to index and relate to what is actually being searched for.
An example: searching for "a yellow car for sale in $CITY, with a cost between $VAL1 and $VAL2." would not give a lot of unusable results today, but the semantic web would return what is actually asked for.
Of course, all this is just theory, and a best-case scenario example. And there are lots of obstacles for the semantic web; many people are happy with the web as it is, and it will take a long time to implement it.
Probably, some ideas would be incorporated slowly into the web as we know it now.
"As a brief aside, if I were Google ..., who are rumored to be working on client side technologies for managing information, I'd put a lot of energy into Mozilla, and release a Google branded browser..."
Mozilla, and Open Source in general has an amazing window of opportunity right now. A product tie in like the one described in the article is exactly what is needed.
IE looks as if it will remain stagnant for at least another couple of years. If there is a Mozilla marketing arm, they should be jumping in with both feet.
Similarly, now is the time for Open Office to get the MS Word compatibility bugs sorted out and to mount a big attack on the corporate sector.
If the Open Source community waits another year or two MS will steamroller them with the latest and greatest MS OS and Office packages. If they jump now and can find backers to finance PR and advertising, groups like Mozilla could make major gains.
Three Squirrels
You can see it on the streets. "Damn I hate these popups." "Use Mozilla."
As long as we keep telling everyone that there is an alternative superior to IE, they will begin using it. Eventually, people will have to build websites for Mozilla, and then we will be back to the IE/Netscape wars. Except this time, nothing new will be coming from Microsoft for several years.
I strongly suggest we build our websites with XHTML and CSS and ignore IE. We can put a message on our sites "We have detected that you are using IE. We require a standards based browser. Please download Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera."
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
That said, XHTML is fucking stupid.
And that statement is based on what?
As a developer, I find XHTML to be a huge improvement on HTML - it just makes more sense. No more half-assed guesses as to whether or not a tag needs to be closed or VARIATIONS in tag name CASES that SEEM to BE randomly switched BETWEEN by CERTAIN web designers.
Tables are discouraged which means XHTML code written by a competent developer is much simpler, presentation and content are easier (but IMHO not yet easy enough) to separate so designers have an easier time of things, the structure of XHTML is consistent, unambiguous and - assuming you avoid going crazy with namespaces - easier on the eyes of a developer, and much more easily parsed.
So what exactly was your gripe with XHTML?
Yeah, right.
- Do you have iTunes on their Windows machine
Literally millions of people use a big chunk of Safari on Windows. It's the browser built into iTunes. It works today.
So arguably the quickest, most standards compliant browser around, which by the way is based on the open source
Blah. I was following this guy's argument until I came to this part. Are there seriously "millions" of windows users really using the iTunes browser ? That number seems a bit high given how many songs Apple has sold. Also, i'd challenge that Safari is even close to being the "most standards compliant browser" around. If you're working off a W3C checklist, I'd say Mozilla has it beat by a longshot, and makes a much more meaningful dent on the web applications side of things than Safari does, which is another big battle against IE altogether. I just can't believe that anybody really thinks for a minute that the whole future of the web and the battle of winning the hearts and minds of "millions" teeters on whether or not a browser supports CSS text shadows..-- Maciek
So briefly stated, this is likely to be tagged as troll or flamebait, but there's a lot of truth behind this.
It is inarguable that a lot of the best innovation in the history of any industry has been made by people who go outside current standards ("Here's to the crazy ones...") and build something that is the best that they can make it first, and worry about the other considerations later.
[Note that "best" can have many contradictory meanings: best in some narrowly defined performance criteria (fastest, highest, biggest, smallest, etc.), or broad appeal (most general utility, most sell-through), or most efficient, least polluting, cheapest/easiest to manufacture, etc.]
Sometime these evolve into "de facto" standards, and it can be difficult to turn those into "open standards" where there's a level playing field for others beside the first-to-market to gain traction.
As a response, there have been many efforts to develop standards in advance of actual product. In my experience (CAD interchange languages in the 70's and 80's, XForms today), progress on these standards is relatively glacial, and they are often passed over by the industry at large.
I submit that both approaches are good, and that we ought to strive for a healthy tension between them. This argues for moderation by those who cling to the "purity" of their ideals as circumstances change out from under them, and for a willingness to exercise enlightened self-interest and surrender proprietary advantage, vs. rapacious exploitation of current dominance. (We know who we're talking about here...)
To that end, I'd rather see some of the browsers take some risks in advance of accepted standards, at the risk (and expense) of requiring a few willing innovators to perform some extra work ("click here for a non-fizbin version of this site").
Just for a couple of examples, why not re-think where some of later innovations are supported? Can the concept of tabbed browsing by pushed up to the server, so a web designer can deliver a set of related tabs to the client? Could support of the portal/portlet structure be pushed into the client, so that the work of rendering and compositing a page full of portlets can be offloaded from the server, and servlets can execute more autonomously when appropriate?
Yeah, I myself was a netscrape 4.x holdout (I basically moved from 4.x straight to Mozilla .6, I hated IE so much, even tho it was a better browser for much of that time)
I gave up support for non-CSS browsers a long time ago (excepting Lynx, my pages are still Lynx-readable). CSS design is just so incredibly cleaner and more functional.
Not to mention that Moz and/or FireFox with certain extensions is such a pleasant testing environment, with resizing to different screen-sizes, validation testing, and debuggers!
I now carry a dislaimer on my site that only appears if you're using IE or another CSS-deficient browser.
Man, remember when we were all pissed at Netscape for the Netscape 'extensions' to HTML (like tables) that were not fully supported in non-NS browsers? Those were the days.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
How right you are about the "raped form of CSS." I've just read some MSDN articles about ASP .NET 2.0 and its new features, one of which of course is "skins and themes." The entire article lacks mention of how these themes are implemented in the html, only that they use special MS .NET files and how to set them up. I really fear that these things are just going to slap more "IE only" tags into the html, which pretty much makes it f**cking useless to me. I need an IDE the helps create sites that can display in any browser, not just the latest "greatest" version of IE.
.NET generates in order for it to use CSS and other standards. Which sucks, since that IDE is pretty nice, and ASP.NET 2.0 has some pretty sweet features, albiet they are semi-broken from my point of view.
So once again I'll probably be stuck tweaking the code that VS
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
I have to disagree about Konquerer being the best browser because I've seen a ton of rendering problems. In fact, I would almost say it feels more like netscape 4 to me when I use it.
Oddly enough the Mac version (safari) doesn't seem to have as many rendering problems.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Read all the notes on w3schools.com, and use google religiously when you have questions. Also, be sure to look at the CSS source code on csszengarden.com, because it can save you a lot of time to learn through example. Keep it simple, too.
> I've managed to get my head around XHTML, but when I try to use CSS, I have trouble doing even the most basic layouts that could easily be achieved with s.
I had the same problem, until I ditched tables for div tags and css classes. Using the id tag is the key to getting layout right, and nesting your divs correctly will help too.
Start with one container div that holds everything, and that's your page. Give it an id class like: id="container", and in CSS, use the # symbol to identify it.
for example (in the CSS file or style tag):That would be for an id tag in your div: > I can understand why Slashdot still uses them.
They kinda have to at this point. The Slash system is too entrenched in HTML to change direction. Why? Because many comments would break XHTML, and there is no point using CSS without using XHTML, IMHO.
> With CSS, nothing seems to 'just work' on every browser. The W3C specs are confusing. And there's no decent HTML/CSS editor (as in the Dreamweaver kind, not the Vim kind) that I know of for Linux, so it has to be done by hand or elsewhere (Wine/Windows, et cetera).
I recommend doing everything by hand. You'll learn more and your code won't break as much, and you can quickly repair it if you know your system well. Or you could just download a package that lets you quickly post news to your site without having to change your templates every page. I've created one at sourceforge called Gemsites that will be releasing a 2.0 version soon, and while Gemsites used to be a Slash clone, it's now a standards compliant blog/photoblog package.
> What's the best way for a n00b like myself to learn and use CSS in the real world, where some people use Mozilla, some use Opera and Konqueror, and a lot of people use Internet Explorer?
Talk to people like me over email and I'll help you.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Would it be impossible to make web standards a browser plug-in? Something like an XML DTD that would be automatically downloaded every month and contained the lastest standards rules, so that all browsers would support the latest features as soon as they are published? Or maybe it's not as simple as that. Maybe there are rendering engine issues, etc. Still, it would be nice.
Where he errs, IMHO, is in the assumption that innovation will be incremental. He seems to be implying that the most we can expect from the future of the web are some (gasp!) cool new CSS features.
I beg to differ. The future of the web will ride on the wave of two related trends, both of which have revolutionary rather than evolutionary implications:
- Increased client computing capacity - back in the mid-90s it was all the average PC could handle to render a complex HTML page. Nowadays PCs are at least one order of magnitude faster, and a lot of the processing currently relegated to the server could be offloaded to the client. The reason that this hasn't yet occurred is that no browser has the appropriate plugin architecture. It is possible to develop plugins for major browsers, but there is no proper framework to integrate these plugins into a cohesive whole. Instead, an increasing number of networked apps are eschewing the web browser altogether in order to provide a better user experience (e.g. IM, P2P file sharing, online gaming, VoIP, etc.).
- XML - for all the hue and cry, the only significant impact of XML on the web since its inception 6 years ago is RSS. RSS is certainly cool, but it's just one XML-based language, and the whole premise of XML is that it enables the creation of multiple vocabularies. So there's a huge opening for someone to create a browser that intelligently processes XML vocabularies. This would include managing the relevant XML schemas (perhaps using a centralized repository), rendering the XML in various ways (perhaps including HTML templates and autogenerated forms) and persistent storage/retrieval. This is basically the goal of RDF, but besides taking what I consider to be a number of unfortunate design decisions, the RDF designers have essentially ignored the need for a new browser architecture to make XML use on the web an attractive alternative to HTML.
None of this is easy, of course. But considering the potential rewards of owning the new new browser architecture, I have no fear whatsoever that innovation will stagnate just because Microsoft decides to take itself out of the game for a while.Nonetheless, most of these applications would be that much more valuable if they were integrated together. To achieve this, a platform is needed that permits inter-plugin communication: a shared data model, a high-level framework for UI development and way for plugins to exchange messages. Think Eclipse for networked apps instead of development tools and you'll be on the right track.
Peer Pressure
Hopefully they will, but remember google toolbar does not work with mozilla, yet. Also FireFox needs to be extension API stable (ie: not changing every release) before companies like Google can start writing customizations and extensions for it.
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Sure, IE's marketshare may be shrinking - however, will the drop in marketshare really be enough to give an incentive for a mass exodus from IE?
Average Joe will probably be using Internet Explorer for Windows, and he definitely doesn't care about web standards (nor does he probably know what they are, anyways). If you tell him to download a different browser, he'll simply shrug off your suggestion, since he believes that he'll be inconvenienced by the fact that he has to download...a different browser.
In order to change the future of web standards to a much more optimistic one, we, the coders, designers, developers, etc. must perform some kind of action. We must evangelize web standards, and educate other coders, and even users, about them. Eventually, users will have an incentive to change their browsers, simply on the basis that their favourite pages won't work in IE anymore.
It won't be the users who will directly cause the change. It will be us, the ones who actually use these standards. We have a 2-3 year timeframe before Longhorn comes out; the opportunity to increase the efforts to spread the word is now.
Is far from true.
.Net thrives on it.
.Net framework. It can do everything you have expressed.
XML is integrated so deep into almost every technology available for internet development it is considered a ubiquitous skill for any level of developer.
WebServices are run by it.
Databases talk in it.
Office applications communicate with it.
Many large websites use it to render their entire sites.
And BTW the lofty platform/framework of which you speak is completed and needs only widespread adoption. It is the
blah
I have "converted" several of my non-techie friends and a few of my co-workers to Mozilla. I installed the plug-ins for them so their experience was seamless. My friends now swear by Firefox as their browser and refuse to use Internet Explorer. Word of mouth is Mozilla's best friend. Once people start to use the browser and realize how much better it is (no $41Tware via ActiveX, no pop-ups, and tabbed browsing to name a few) then this may be yet another door to open on the path to Enlightenment.
has anyone else had similar results w/ their immediate and not-so immediate humanoid contacts?
What the techie crowd continues to forget is that the vast majority if computer users are now "appliance users". In the past, computers didn't become widely popular because it was impossible to pin down what a computer did. Toasters make toast. Dishwashers wash dishes. Computers.... er, compute. The popularity of the web and email in particular have transformed the computer into an appliance that enables email and provides eye candy. There are a dozen MUAs better than Lookout Express, too, but the same problem applies. You have to know there is a problem and it has to actively interfere with your normal usage before you will do anything about it. And the average user has been trained by years of unstable software, mutually incompatible drivers and endless virus/worm attacks to accept that this is just the normal state of the art. Until you find a way to convey to the average appliance-class user that there even is a problem with IE (or Windows, for that matter), Microsoft can do whatever they want and ignore any or all standards.
Now, if the majority of websites (where the techies have a bit more representation) were to start coding IE-hostile HTML without the beancounters' veto having an effect, there might be a possibility of getting the message across. Start with the pr0n sites.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
SVG 1.2 is likely to be a disaster in all browsers, since the spec is focusing on creating an application delivery language rather than a graphics language (see the support for opening and writing to network sockets, for example).
Use the edit css extension in firefox, then you can see the results of your CSS coding in realtime.
Then a bit later test in IE and smack your forehead when you realise how backwards it is in supporting simple css.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
IMNSHO, the web should be: - An easy way to access information
That is the entire point of seperating content from presentation. That is what XHTML & CSS is striving for.
- Simple, adhering to the lowest reasonable common denominator that works across all common browsers (HTML 4, limited CSS, etc.)
That is the entire point of seperating content from presentation - let the client deal with what it can deal with. Many modern authors/designers are learning how to design their css to present, ie. Nav4 with a plain, easy-to-access, no-frills page; IE with a nice look; and, for the rest, the best.
- Not filled with bloat and fluff that doesn't help me access information (such as flash intros, flash menus, Java menu crap, etc.)
If your XHTML/CSS sites are bloated compared to the same thing done with tables and *barf* font tags, you've done it wrong. Period. Tho, how you equate java menus/flash whatever with XHTML/CSS/SVG is a mystery to me. i don't know of any browser which uses a plug-in to render xhtml/css. SVG yes, but that'll be folded in soon enough. In any case, once again, the whole point is to seperate content from presentation. Yes, this really does make things more accessible. Maybe go back and have another look at what they actually are.
Many of the webmonkeys I've known in my company that complain about such things not working are the same people who couldn't do HTML by hand if they wanted to, insist that beauty should take priority over functionality, and develop IE-only pages because they never thought to test any other browser and then blame those browsers for not supporting the latest, greatest standard.
They're idiots, then. Fuck 'em.
Here's a tip: if you want people to use your stuff, you have to provide it in a format their tools can understand. You can't expect everyone to upgrade, so you have to work to your audience.
So, you side with the monkeys, then? What's the point you're trying to make here? Sorry, i didn't get your "tip". Thanks for trying though.
So I don't really concern myself with the new standards. Besides, for me, I have little to no use for them at the moment anyway.
Maybe you don't, but try doing this with gif image replacement., Oh, horrors - you need an SVG plug-in, So sorry. (just hit submit if you're not sure what you're looking at, btw). Do you think any of this would be possible without some standards?
So understand if I'm wary about any so called "improvements" to what already works pretty darn well and is just now starting to truly work the same (mostly) in most mainstream browsers.
This statement, more than any other, shows you are completely without clue here.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
The solution is simple; switch end users away from IE, to *any* other browser (just as long as said browser does not use IE as the rendering engine). It doesnt neccessarily have to be Mozilla/Firefox, it could be Opera. Any browser that has all the basic features; web standards complicance, popup blocking, extensibility, etc. Theming isnt neccessary, but its always nice.
I work as field networking tech for a local SORC (Small Office and Residential Computing) company. Every chance I get, I urge users to ditch IE and move to something better. Usually, they ask me to install it for them, and I gladly do so.
Most end users dont understand spyware, dont know or care what web standards are, but they *DO* know about popups... That in itself is one of the biggest selling points for alternative browsers. If it stops popups dead, the end users will like it.
It is unfortunate, though, that most end users are unaware of browser hijackers. They just assume that random porn popups and huge annoying toolbars are "part of the web experience". Most users dont realize that the only reason thier web experience sucks is because of the browser they are using. Heck, for most end users, the web *IS* the browser.
For any tech who has contact with end users; I urge you to reccommend them to switch away from IE. Granted, doing so will effectively remove them from your list of regular customers for browser spyware removal, but it will greatly improve thier web experience, and, eventually, the web itself.
Maybe after the 10th web page with "Your browser doesn't support current standards!" they'll start to think about it.
This was the way of the WWW in the last century. But this time it's not about fancy new proprietary features of one single browser. Now it's for a good cause.
The browser wars are over. MS won, they achieved an absurd marketshare. A new war began while the smoke was still rising from the browser battlefield: the standards war.
I've noticed that all the ire, hated and derision that web developers held for Netscape 4 has in the last 18 months shifted to IE. Developers finally realize standards not only allow for cool things to be done, but also that those things only have to be done once. Chances are it won't work in IE. Avalon (the IE rendering engine) has barely changed since IE 5.0. Mozilla, Opera, and KHTML continue to implement standards released as far back as 1999 while IE arrogantly takes a nap within sight of the finish line. All of us need to stand along the race course with gatorade for the tortoise.
How to do that? Joe Public needs a reason to download a modern browser (which IE certainly isn't). When I tell people I haven't seen a popup in almost 3 years, the invariable gape is followed by some question akin to "How is that possible?" I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser since .8 was released. I point the soon to be former web victim toward Mozilla (not Firefox, because the next step is telling them how to avoid mail virii by not using outlook), and not once has anyone ever looked back. Evangelism is how web standards will be able to sneak past the sleeping hare to win the race. Or war, however one wished to view it.
In order for standards to work, they must implement all the necessary features and allow users to follow the standards easily.
XHTML, CSS, SVG are OK for document presentation, but most webpages are not static documents, they incorporate interactivity. The aforementioned standards do little for interactivity, so authors turn towards Flash, ActiveX. And no, Javascript doesn't help, Javascript is a pile of shit that's too simplistic for programmers and too complicated for non-programmers.
A successful web standard must incorporate one well-defined and easy-to-use language to implement basic GUI elements and operations. It must also implement one other well-defined and complete language to implement more complicated programming tasks that may be needed for complex web pages. These two standard languages are missing.
A successful web standard must also be easy to support by IDEs geared towards non-programming authors. XHTML and CSS are great, but few web authoring tools generate code in these languages in a manner consistent with their original intent. Same goes with Javascripting (or what should be replacing it). Standards must be usable by IDEs.
If you want to avoid a single-company web, you must have everything availale: Standards that are complete and usable (i.e. easy to understand by non-programmers), Several web browsers that implement complete standards, Several IDEs that allow authoring by non-programmers.
And if you think web-authoring should be the sole domain of highly-skilled programmers, think again. It's that attitude that lets MS take everything over. MS will create products that are usable by casual authors and these authors will use MS products only and flood the web with MS-only documents.
My initial argument was aimed mainly at the XHTL 1.0 strict or "no layout tables" crowd.
The best example of CSS use I've seen to date is Chapter 1 of "Eric Meyer on CSS" where a single layout table is used to generate 3 columns. Everything else is CSS. This seems to be the best compromise. To me the whole CSS-P spec is badly thought-out. It seems it was hacked onto CSS1 but it has become the hobby-horse of the "no layout tables" movement which is quite puzzling since it is the weakest link in CSS implementation.
Ever tried horizontally aligning elements within the left and right columns of a 3-column CSS layout? It's a no-brainer with tables but a PITA with CSS. How about a photo gallery? Yes, it can be done but just look at the CSS code and the table-based code. I know which one I think is more intuitive
I'm surprised that nobody (at least who's been modded up enough) seems to have said anything about two particular projects that attempt to deal with a couple of the main problems that developers tend to have with MSIE.
"IE7" is an Internet Explorer hack that parses standards-based CSS that you provide in a page, and mangles it so that earlier versions of IE display it how it's supposed to be displayed.
"PNG in Windows IE" is a hack that tells IE to use a separate ActiveX control to load any PNG's in the page, instead of the internal image display code. This causes it to get alpha blending right. (I think there are a few variations of this hack around the web besides the one I've linked to.)
Both are javascript hacks that you can include at the top of a page and add the appropriate construct around them so that only IE will see them. Clearly they're not perfect, and I'd be edgey about using them in important websites without a lot more testing.
But has anyone actually used them effectively? How useful are they?
I've managed to get the PNG hack working, but I still haven't been able to get IE7 going. (Possibly something to do with the server sending the wrong MIME type.)
Plain old HTML is OK. XHTML + CSS is better. But the real future of the web is XML.
.Net relies heavily on XML and is strongly oriented towards web services. EI was very early in supporting XML + XSLT (but, of course, not-quite-standard, the pricks!). Microsoft, through VB, has historically been successful in selling tools for client-server style development, and that model is strongly intrenched in the community of corporate developers on the MS platform, (and older platforms like CICS).
Unlike HTML and XHTML, which are essentially document presentation languages, XML (used semantically) gives you complete separation of content from layout, style, and formatting. This gives the browser more freedom to render a given chunk of content in different ways -- radically different visual layout, braille, speech synthesis, etc. This also gives you the ability to write client-server applications using XML over HTTP as the communications protocol.
This is, almost certainly, where Microsoft is heading.
This kind of web app has real technical advantages over an html based web app. More work is done on the client. A richer GUI can be used. Smaller downloads per page-hit. There's greater decoupling between the server and the client platform. An XML based web service could support browser based and non-browser based clients. Easier to automate (screen scraping made easy!).
As to rendering XML content on the browser, my feeling so far is that neither CSS (in its current form) or XSLT is an optimal solution. CSS is limiting, and tricky to get basic things to work. (vertical centering, anyone?) More importantly, CSS is tied to the assumption that the thing you're formatting is a document. What if it's not? Think arbitrary XML here -- database records, spreadsheet cells, a stock ticker, a graph of a mathematical formula, whatever. XSLT is more general, but just plain quirky and weird. Functional programming is foreign to most of us who cut our teeth on curly braces.
It's strange to me that no-one on slashdot seems to recognize this. This isn't that far outside the box folks! It's not all div tags vs. table tags. Zoom out to the big picture. Think a little.
-cbare