"The TABLE tag is for tabular data only, don't use it for arranging the page". What crap. The table tag is amazingly useful, it works in all browsers, and no I don't mind in the least typing TR and TD everywhere. It's simple and it works.
Unless your reader is blind or visually impaired, and using a screen reader, in which case your page will blow up spectacularly. Or if they try to access your page via a mobile phone browser. Etc., etc.
Attention all web developers: please read this and think about how broad the range of web users truly is.
(Oh, and if you don't give a flying fark about blind people or phones -- moving your style instructions from the HTML into CSS files will cut down on the total volume of info your users have to download by an order of magnitude, reducing your bandwidth costs.)
You jest, but it is actually that simple. HTML 5.0 = HTML 4 with some new sugar + XHTML parser strictness.
The result is that browsers will show you the finger if you don't code to the standard.
I'm a participant in the HTML Working Group and I can tell you that this is incorrect. You're thinking of XHTML2, not HTML 5. XHTML2 has the XML parser strictness and pages will fail to display if they're not well-formed. HTML 5 is going the complete opposite direction, assuming that people will code poorly and defining failure modes for browser vendors to follow when that happens.
Anytime you find yourself writing a letter to explain how a screw-up of yours is going to cost your employer a billion dollars (with a "B"), it's probably a good time to dust off the old resume...
If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive)
And this is different from the present-day American economy how, exactly?
WTF does managing the flow of information have to do with a $1 million grant? Am I missing something else?
Yes: the need for the managers of a publicly held company to come up with a plausible rationalization to give their shareholders for spending $1 million on something that (a) isn't part of their business plan, and (b) isn't a standard philanthropic/charitable (aka tax deductible) cause.
They are not technically savvy and haven't a clue what an RSS feed or reader is. I guarantee you that this is the majority of web readers.
They don't need to know what RSS or feeds are to get benefit out of them. A 2005 study by Yahoo (warning: PDF) found that
Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
Note that while only 4% of surveyed users used feeds knowingly, nearly a third were using them overall, through aggregation portals like My Yahoo and the new iGoogle. So you don't need to know what a feed is or what "RSS" means to get use out of it. And since the study came out, this has only become more true, with major browsers like Firefox, IE7 and Opera adding feed discovery and aggregation tools within the browser itself.
I think you mean "you can't win with people". In any sufficiently large population, there's going to be a few people who are dramatically more predisposed to griping and/or are dramatically less adaptive to change than the average person. So if it's any consolation, you'd have had to deal with the same idiots no matter what industry you worked in;-)
When the company IPOed, they issued two classes of stock: one that you could buy (Class A), and special shares for Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt that carry 10 times the voting weight of the shares available on the public market (Class B). The result is that anything that Brin (founder), Page (founder) and Schmidt (CEO) don't want passed can't be passed by a shareholder vote; ordinary shareholders simply don't have the voting muscle, even if they all voted together.
Google's rationale at the time was that this arrangement would free them from pressure to constantly be posting higher earnings each quarter. In their SEC filing, they included an unusual "Letter from the Founders" that defended the approach:
The main effect of this structure is likely to leave our team, especially Sergey and me, with significant control over the company's decisions and fate, as Google shares change hands. New investors will fully share in Google's long term growth but will have less influence over its strategic decisions than they would at most public companies...
Academic studies have shown that from a purely economic point of view, dual class structures have not harmed the share price of companies. The shares of each of our classes have identical economic rights and differ only as to voting rights.
Google has prospered as a private company. As a public company, we believe a dual class voting structure will enable us to retain many of the positive aspects of being private. We understand some investors do not favor dual class structures. We have considered this point of view carefully, and we have not made our decision lightly. We are convinced that everyone associated with Google--including new investors--will benefit from this structure.
(Emphasis mine)
It's hard to read the part about "retain[ing] many of the positive aspects of being private" as anything other than "we don't want shareholders telling us how to run our company". And given how the stock is structured, shareholders can't, unless they can win over one or more of the three top execs at Google to their point of view.
If this was happening to the New York Times, we'd be up in arms and this would be under "Your Rights Online" or "Censorship." But somehow this is a story about Comscore. I'm not saying that that aspect of the story doesn't have merit, but there's an equally important issue here that needs to be explored.
It's not censorship for an advertiser to decide to stop advertising in a particular publication. Advertisers don't have any obligation, legal or moral, to spend their advertising dollars on one publication over another. If the money you were spending on advertising was actually hurting your sales you'd have to be an idiot not to stop, at least until you could determine if the problem was something you could fix rather than something inherent in the publication (like, say, some horrible offensive language in your ad that you could remove or re-word).
Dealing with issues like this is why most legitimate publications (like the NY Times) maintain a strict separation between the people who do advertising and the people who do editorial content, so that pressure from advertisers can't influence editorial. If an advertiser threatens to walk from the Times, their response is to have their advertising people go beat the bushes for new advertisers, not to stomp their feet about how unfair it is.
We all know that Microsoft is going to play games with DirectX. And not the fun kind - the buy vista or go fuck yourself kind, wherein the next Halo and the next everything-not-based-on-an-ID-engine will only run on Vista.
I thought the same thing about Windows 2000 when WinXP came out. I kept waiting for the "next DirectX version will be XP-only" shoe to drop. And it never did. In fact DirectX still works on Win2K, Windows ME and even Windows 98, despite many other MS products being XP/Vista-only at this point (like Internet Explorer).
Not to say they won't try it this time, but so far they've been very conservative about removing DirectX support for older Windows versions, which is why my games partition still runs Windows 2000...
Another example of brainier-than-usual video that isn't mentioned in TFA is bloggingheads.tv, which hosts hour-long dialogues between two experts on various issues of the day (mostly political, but sometimes they have science, religion & culture too).
Of course, since "experts on various issues of the day" tend not to be among the most attractive people in the world, and the video is just of them talking, I have no idea why they don't just do audio-only and save bandwidth. But if you've got a Mickey Kaus pin-up on you're wall, consider your day made!
As far as Outlook killers are concerned, Mozilla has been an Outlook killer for a very long time. Even with something as lame as courier Mozilla can easily work over 12G+ IMAP mail folders. Outlook (prior to 2003) caused massive corruption crashes and loss on anything above 2G (after the local cache exceeded 1G).
When people talk about "Outlook killers" they're not thinking about e-mail -- Outlook is universally recognized to be a crappy e-mail client (even by Microsoft's own developers). What they're thinking of instead is the groupware component -- shared calendars, meeting scheduling, task tracking, and so on.
As you note, there are tons of FOSS projects out there that convincingly work better as e-mail clients, but there has never been anything that comes close to it as a groupware client, and that functionality is what ties lots of businesses to Exchange/Outlook.
I still design pages using HTML 3.2 standard. Life was happy when pages were small and simple. I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript. Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them.
If you are sticking to the HTML 3.2 standard you are doing exactly the opposite of what you state. Before CSS, HTML documents had to have tons of redundant markup for formatting embedded inside them. Using CSS, you can move all that stuff into a single file that the client only has to fetch once, and which can then be cached locally by the browser. You can replace hundreds or thousands of FONT tags with a single one-line directive in your CSS file. That means more efficient use of bandwidth, not less. CSS is a fantastic tool for reducing page weights and download times -- especially compared to porky HTML 3.x pages.
And as for "HTML doing things formerly reserved for Javascript", I literally have no idea what you're referring to. HTML elements can't have logic embedded in them without Javascript. They can't change based on user actions or page state without Javascript. They can't alter page presentation without Javascript. And on and on.
Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object.
Proprietary binary blobs like Flash are completely different beasts from standards like HTML and CSS, and have nothing to do with the problems the W3C and WHATWG are working on. They are trying to make the Web better so that there is less demand for proprietary binary blobs! How on earth is that a bad thing if you hate proprietary binary blobs?
OK, I'm a curmudgeon. There, happy?
If you're rejecting better technologies out of hand just because you decided in 1997 to stop paying attention, you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
On my first scan of the/. home page this morning, I read this headline as "Bad Meth Causes Explosion at CERN Collider". Needless to say, the actual story turned out to be a lot less interesting than I thought it would be:-D
"Pick up where Flock left off"? That implies that Flock development is over. It sure doesn't look that way from their Web site or their blog... if they're dead, someone might want to tell them;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Not explicitly, but if you participate in the mailing list your name and e-mail address will be visible via the Web archive.
The working group is open to the public and costs nothing to join. If you don't like the state of HTML, come over and help make it better.
Unless your reader is blind or visually impaired, and using a screen reader, in which case your page will blow up spectacularly. Or if they try to access your page via a mobile phone browser. Etc., etc.
Attention all web developers: please read this and think about how broad the range of web users truly is.
(Oh, and if you don't give a flying fark about blind people or phones -- moving your style instructions from the HTML into CSS files will cut down on the total volume of info your users have to download by an order of magnitude, reducing your bandwidth costs.)
Microsoft has several people participating in the HTML Working Group, and Chris Wilson, the leader of the IE team, is the chair of the group. So you don't have to worry about Microsoft being left out.
I'm a participant in the HTML Working Group and I can tell you that this is incorrect. You're thinking of XHTML2, not HTML 5. XHTML2 has the XML parser strictness and pages will fail to display if they're not well-formed. HTML 5 is going the complete opposite direction, assuming that people will code poorly and defining failure modes for browser vendors to follow when that happens.
Anytime you find yourself writing a letter to explain how a screw-up of yours is going to cost your employer a billion dollars (with a "B"), it's probably a good time to dust off the old resume...
No need to be alarmed. That's just the RIAA's "Customer Relations" page on their site.
And this is different from the present-day American economy how, exactly?
Yes: the need for the managers of a publicly held company to come up with a plausible rationalization to give their shareholders for spending $1 million on something that (a) isn't part of their business plan, and (b) isn't a standard philanthropic/charitable (aka tax deductible) cause.
They don't need to know what RSS or feeds are to get benefit out of them. A 2005 study by Yahoo (warning: PDF) found that
Note that while only 4% of surveyed users used feeds knowingly, nearly a third were using them overall, through aggregation portals like My Yahoo and the new iGoogle. So you don't need to know what a feed is or what "RSS" means to get use out of it. And since the study came out, this has only become more true, with major browsers like Firefox, IE7 and Opera adding feed discovery and aggregation tools within the browser itself.
That's easy. Just go forward in time a few years and find them in the bankruptcy notices.
Finally! An office suite on OS X that works just like OpenOffice does on Linux! ;-)
So that's where all those old programmers went after Y2K!
I think you mean "you can't win with people". In any sufficiently large population, there's going to be a few people who are dramatically more predisposed to griping and/or are dramatically less adaptive to change than the average person. So if it's any consolation, you'd have had to deal with the same idiots no matter what industry you worked in ;-)
I take it you've never been to New Jersey.
Because sometimes "something's broken" means "I can't turn on a light". Like, say, if the power connection fritzes out.
... because they don't have to.
When the company IPOed, they issued two classes of stock: one that you could buy (Class A), and special shares for Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt that carry 10 times the voting weight of the shares available on the public market (Class B). The result is that anything that Brin (founder), Page (founder) and Schmidt (CEO) don't want passed can't be passed by a shareholder vote; ordinary shareholders simply don't have the voting muscle, even if they all voted together.
Google's rationale at the time was that this arrangement would free them from pressure to constantly be posting higher earnings each quarter. In their SEC filing, they included an unusual "Letter from the Founders" that defended the approach:
(Emphasis mine)
It's hard to read the part about "retain[ing] many of the positive aspects of being private" as anything other than "we don't want shareholders telling us how to run our company". And given how the stock is structured, shareholders can't, unless they can win over one or more of the three top execs at Google to their point of view.
It's not censorship for an advertiser to decide to stop advertising in a particular publication. Advertisers don't have any obligation, legal or moral, to spend their advertising dollars on one publication over another. If the money you were spending on advertising was actually hurting your sales you'd have to be an idiot not to stop, at least until you could determine if the problem was something you could fix rather than something inherent in the publication (like, say, some horrible offensive language in your ad that you could remove or re-word).
Dealing with issues like this is why most legitimate publications (like the NY Times) maintain a strict separation between the people who do advertising and the people who do editorial content, so that pressure from advertisers can't influence editorial. If an advertiser threatens to walk from the Times, their response is to have their advertising people go beat the bushes for new advertisers, not to stomp their feet about how unfair it is.
Somebody has found a way to make OpenOffice slower! I am in awe.
I thought the same thing about Windows 2000 when WinXP came out. I kept waiting for the "next DirectX version will be XP-only" shoe to drop. And it never did. In fact DirectX still works on Win2K, Windows ME and even Windows 98, despite many other MS products being XP/Vista-only at this point (like Internet Explorer).
Not to say they won't try it this time, but so far they've been very conservative about removing DirectX support for older Windows versions, which is why my games partition still runs Windows 2000...
Another example of brainier-than-usual video that isn't mentioned in TFA is bloggingheads.tv, which hosts hour-long dialogues between two experts on various issues of the day (mostly political, but sometimes they have science, religion & culture too).
Of course, since "experts on various issues of the day" tend not to be among the most attractive people in the world, and the video is just of them talking, I have no idea why they don't just do audio-only and save bandwidth. But if you've got a Mickey Kaus pin-up on you're wall, consider your day made!
When people talk about "Outlook killers" they're not thinking about e-mail -- Outlook is universally recognized to be a crappy e-mail client (even by Microsoft's own developers). What they're thinking of instead is the groupware component -- shared calendars, meeting scheduling, task tracking, and so on.
As you note, there are tons of FOSS projects out there that convincingly work better as e-mail clients, but there has never been anything that comes close to it as a groupware client, and that functionality is what ties lots of businesses to Exchange/Outlook.
If you are sticking to the HTML 3.2 standard you are doing exactly the opposite of what you state. Before CSS, HTML documents had to have tons of redundant markup for formatting embedded inside them. Using CSS, you can move all that stuff into a single file that the client only has to fetch once, and which can then be cached locally by the browser. You can replace hundreds or thousands of FONT tags with a single one-line directive in your CSS file. That means more efficient use of bandwidth, not less. CSS is a fantastic tool for reducing page weights and download times -- especially compared to porky HTML 3.x pages.
And as for "HTML doing things formerly reserved for Javascript", I literally have no idea what you're referring to. HTML elements can't have logic embedded in them without Javascript. They can't change based on user actions or page state without Javascript. They can't alter page presentation without Javascript. And on and on.
Proprietary binary blobs like Flash are completely different beasts from standards like HTML and CSS, and have nothing to do with the problems the W3C and WHATWG are working on. They are trying to make the Web better so that there is less demand for proprietary binary blobs! How on earth is that a bad thing if you hate proprietary binary blobs?
If you're rejecting better technologies out of hand just because you decided in 1997 to stop paying attention, you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
On my first scan of the /. home page this morning, I read this headline as "Bad Meth Causes Explosion at CERN Collider". Needless to say, the actual story turned out to be a lot less interesting than I thought it would be :-D
"Pick up where Flock left off"? That implies that Flock development is over. It sure doesn't look that way from their Web site or their blog... if they're dead, someone might want to tell them ;-)