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Firefox and Open Standards the Way Forward
lamasquerade writes "A major Australian newspaper has a lengthy and detailed feature on open source/standards, avoiding vendor lock-in, and specifically the increasing uptake of Firefox by major organisations' IT departments. It touches on security and price advantages of open source but mainly focuses on open standards -- the perils of vendor lock-in, and their importance to technologies like the Internet and digital music. Linux, OpenOffice.org and even Bugzilla get a mention and all told it is a very pro-open source/standards article, especially considering it is in a mass-circulation publication."
... it's in the other Fairfax paper too
Identical article, but shows that the coverage is even bigger than you might initially expect if you weren't familiar with Fairfax.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
The Age is the second most popular metropolitan newspaper that is distributed in the second largest Australian city: Melbourne, Victoria.
Whilst it is not as popular as the Herald Sun, the leading newspaper in Melbourne, it is regarded as the `more intelligent' paper whilst the Herald Sun is the tabloid equivalent.
It would seem this doesn't account for much, but greater Melbourne has a population of over 4 million and afaik The Age is relatively well known internationally.
Check out this from the article:
On standards, Firefox has an advantage over Explorer. That gives organisations latitude to commit to standards rather than to products. That in turn reduces the leverage that vendors have over customers.
Microsoft has hampered standards support in Explorer for five years with its go-slow campaign against the web. Standards-oriented page layout is not possible on most versions of Explorer (CSS box model). Explorer has never met standards for web document identification (HTTP MIME content types), or if one is supported, then simultaneously the other is not. Microsoft has shown an antipathy to web standards, because in the view of many they provide an alternative to the Windows desktop - Microsoft's core business. The success of web-based applications such as Amazon, Google, eBay, the open source Wikipedia encyclopedia and online banking point to the decreasing importance of Windows in a world where a web browser is sufficient.
Look, a major newspaper calling out Microsoft for its obvious "Go-Slow" campaign. When more and more businesses start understanding at this point, and more and more businesses start understanding the implications of the lock-in they have let themselves get into - then things will get interesting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Neither open standards in general nor the state of Massachusetts program (which was recently interpreted to allow in Microsoft's proprietary formats) mean that users get software freedom. For this, one has to request the freedoms of free software and avoid software which doesn't users these freedoms. So, no, it's not "all about standards", it's partially about standards. Free software (with a mature license that has something to say about modern-day freedom-removing dangers like DRM and software patents) will give you open standards, but open standards will not give you software freedom.
Photoshop's ability to load and save PNG files doesn't mean I can inspect, share, or modify Photoshop to suit my needs. Depending on the license agreement and the method by which I have to install the program, I might even be restricted from running the software whenever I want. The closest free software image editing program to Photoshop is The GIMP. The GIMP's native image format is well-documented, at the very least, within the source code of that program which all are free to inspect, share, and modify.
Digital Citizen
It's a Gecko bug, which has been fixed and will be included in Firefox 1.1. The fact that it's a Gecko bug is proven by the fact that ctrl+plus / ctrl+minus fixes it - if it were an HTML problem, it would display the same after changing font size.
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Also note that Slashdot works fine with Opera and KHTML-based browsers.
Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2175
Note that bugzilla blocks slashdot referrers.