The full (updated) text of Creating Applications With Mozilla, along with all the example source, is available for download at http://books.mozdev.org.
I went to public school, and I was bored long before I got to high school. The American education system is definitely designed *not* to do one thing: teach kids how to think.
Too much effort is spent on who, what, when, and where, leaving why and how by the wayside, all the while aiming at the imaginary median child. The below median kids are labeled as ADD or ADHD and pumped full of lithium and/or other drugs (treating the symptoms, not the disease), while those above the median are ignored because no one knows how (or has funding) to keep up with them.
Most people who visit w3schools.com are not the average user, they are developers: early adopters. It would take at least another 9 months for global Mozilla usage to reach half these levels.
The only real way to combat spam is to also stop sites and spammers from selling email addresses to each other. If the spammers don't have their most precious commodity, they can't spam.
I love png, their only drawback being the lack of a lightweight animation mthod (which mng certainly is not) until now. How did it take 6 years to come up with such a simple solution?
We all know how microsoft is seeking to expand its patent portfolio. Besides the obvious one (horizontal scrolling), how many more are wrapped up in the hardware and (*gasp*) the drivers for this? We all know how MS plays the game, do you think Logitech or anyone else would be willing to pay for license fees on n patents?
I've been thinking of a similar solution for a long while: a trackball on top of the mouse for scrolling. This allows 360 scroll directions, which would be very useful for games, but would get very annoying on the desktop where there are only two scroll axes (vertical and horizontal). To get around this, the driver would have a setting for the arc of the axes, from 1 to 90. When the scrollball is moved, the sensors would determine the ball's direction, and if the angle is closer than half the arc width to to axis, the motion is along the axis.
For example, assume 0 is to the right, 90 is up, etc, and the arc width is set to 40 dgrees. Any motion from 70 to 110 would scroll up, 160 to 200 left, 250 to 290 down, etc. Motion outside these ranges would probably need to produce no scroll or scroll on both axes equally (45, 135, 225, 315 degrees), to keep users sane while using 2-axis apps. non-linear scroll motion might be useful to some, but would probalby frustrate most.
By the way, for all you patent lawyer worms, this post is prior art
Brodie figured out that a document is really just a collection of pieces of text, and that it didn't really matter where each piece of text is physically located within the document's file.
This "epiphany" is probably the root of how messy the doc file format is.
It will happen, but everything that the article implies won't be included.
IE7 will be the same caliber of upgrade as IE6, but with much more user value (who cares about the stupid image toolbar?). Little to no rendering engine improvments will happen, but most if not all of the UI features (tabs, popup blocker, etc) will. Remember that IE is essentially a very hacked up version of Mosaic, a codebase that is nearly a decade old. I've heard rumors of a Windows XP2 full release (in about a year)... likely any IE7 would accompany it.
But I do suspect that any possible IE upgrade will not be solely driven by user migration. MS has finally realized that they made a mistake in letting IE lag behind in the marketplace... the users are forcing them to admit it.
The people who run Channel9 post vehemently that they can't promise any improved support for anything. Remember that IE is still the sam bowl of spaghetti that it was 3 years ago (plus being stale and moldy). Do we really expect MS to make major rendering changes (so they claim) to IE and support it while developing the Longhorn UI (a rehash of Mozilla's display architecture)? I don't think so. I'm not sure how likely IE7 for Win98 will be.
And of course, don't hold your breath for IE including useful developer tools (DOM inspector, etc)... it never was for developers, and it never will be.
The first time I read a story in the IT section, I immediately hated the colors. I don't mind the use of gradients, but the lack of contrast here makes the page almost unreadable.
Most 14 year olds who get space on Geocities can make a more readable (though almost always uglier) site. Not that/.'s design isn't the cutting edge of 1998, anyway...
Having just read Humphrey Carpenter's Biography of Tolkien, and in the middle of Tom Shippey's The Road To Middle-Earth, some relevant points are fresh in my mind.
When Stanley Unwin asked for a sequel to the unexpectedly popular Hobbit, Tolkien quite didn't know where to start, other than that the request was for "more about hobbits". There he began, but struggled to find the story for a couple years. He originally expected to produce a work of similar length.
Tolkien begins the Forward to FOTR with "This tale grew in the telling", and by telling he meant "writing". The Ring's purpose was not conceived until the writing of "The Shadow of the Past", where Gandalf explains its history to Frodo. Several characters were originally very different from their final forms; the most striking to me is that Strider was originally a Hobbit named Trotter, who kept the name long after becoming a Man (though tolkien noted several times that this name was wrong).
The vast majority of the "corrections" came as Tolkien dug deeper into the extant Silmarillion manuscripts, tying the unfolding story into his created mythology.
In several letters to Stanley Unwin while writing LOTR (a process which took 16 years), Tolkien repeatedly reported that the tale was "getting out of hand", and that he was not sure who its audience would be. Upon completion, Unwin was prepared to take the risk, even after upsetting the Professor to the point where Tolkien almost inked a deal for the book to be published by Harper Collins. Post-war paper availability and the well known discussion of splitting the book up and what the three volumes' titles would be contributed to this.
In the end, Tolkien was glad that anyone appreciated his work, with its many layers and facets. It could be said, however, that he was at times annoyed by his fame (he admittedly did not understand it), especially the all-hours phone calls and unexpected fans at his door.
The entire body of work set in Middle-Earth had two ultimate purposes: To create a place where Tolkien's created languages could live, and to attempt to replace England's lost mythology.
Philology was not just his work, it was his life. He loved words and studying how they eveolved, how they migrated and changed from people to people and century to century. From childhood, he either created or helped to create upwards of 20 languages, and spoke or read no less than nine "real" languages of varying ages.
Having studied almost every language of northern Europe, he could see how England's history had soiled its language, as far back as the Romans, then Saxons, Danes, Normans, and French (the last two also forcing Latin back into the mix). Tolkien held that the Normans did the most damage, and drew most heavily from pre-Hastings texts.
Tolkien knew that these reasons, one personal and one patriotic, did not give LOTR very much mass market appeal, having sprung from the mind of an old fashioned English gentleman, a scholar, who had very firm views of the modern world and staunch Catholic beliefs.
IE hasn't had any worthwhile rendering engine improvements since version 5, giving it the absolute worst standards compliance of any browser shipped today.
Never forget that IE wan't designed as a developer tool, is was designed to kill Netscape. True to MS form, trying to decipher any of IE's pitiful error messages will only cause migraines.
The W3C stopped development of their own reference browser (Amaya) because Mozilla's standards support is so good.
And stop using dreamweaver. It is incapable of generating compliant code, its javascript library is optimized for 3.x browsers, and no one ever learned HTML by using dreamweaver. It's appaling to me how many people claim to know (X)HTML but don't. Macromedia doesn't really give a damn about standards anyway. DW is also why no one seems to understand CSS... they never see it used effectively. All this and DW uses IE to render pages; see above for why this is bad.
Every so called "web designer" needs have their DW uninstalled and be forced to code pages by hand for a week to see how good they really are.
OneStat has shown a 1% drop in IE usage in each of their last two reports, the most recent of which was issued on May 28, well before the lastest crop of reasons not to use IE (usage then: 93.9%).
With the recent Moz/FF download increases and FF1.0 in September/October, it would not surprise me if IE usage dropped to or below 90%, with Gecko usage sitting at about 5-6%, before the end of the year.
Before they implement CSS3, they need to fully support older standards, like HTML4.
Regardless, this is nothing but a show. A year from now (or whenever XP2 get released), IE 7.0 will arrive, complete with popup/cookie managers and tabbed browsing, but with the same amount of standards improvements as 5.5 to 6 had. Which when you average out what they fixed in 6 compared to what they broke, didn't amount to much.
Why would M$ put effort and resources into IE at this point when Avalon is poised to take over the web (read: miserably crash and burn).
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.
The reason why most things on the Garden work in IE is because the design authors have no problems using IE-specific css hacks, most of which break css validation, and contribute to the life-support of IE.
Sadly, more than a few designers never actually learned css, they just started using Dreamweaver. Hence, they have no idea what css is capable of, and don't know how to fix css by hand.
M$ already is adopting (read; embrace & extend) Mozilla. There will be no new releases of IE beyond security patches. The beast's new browser will be integrated more tightly into Longhorn than IE ever was into previous Windows versions, and will apparently rely on an XML-like markup language called XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language or some such), which from what I've seen, looks and sounds a lot like XUL.
Once again, Microsoft is innovating what has already been done.
Code to the standards, and make sure your clients realize that even though "everybody" uses IE, it is a relic, essentially unchanged since version 5.0, released in March 1999. More importantly, IE still has poor support for W3C recommendations that existed for years prior to version 5.0. These things make sites harder to implement, take longer, and therefore will cost more. Your clients will understand that.
Evangelize standardscompliantbrowsers, both for your clients and for the users on their sites. Web developers are the only people who can drive these changes in the general public.
I can only assume this book begins by instructing readers to open Notepad and IE. Was there any discussion about the history of js (ECMA), how browsers differ in their implementations of js, and how ECMA compliant they are? If not, then the author is cementing IE's stranglehold on the web by teaching his readers wrong (non-standard) methods.
Does he mention other standards-compliant browsers and the development tools available with them? If this author is not at least teaching DOM techniques, the book is worthless.
Agreed, IE (and therefore Windows Explorer) sucks in too many ways to count.
If you want focus follows mouse, install TweakUI. It has lots of other nifty settings, too.
And you can have virtual desktops in Windows if you install a third party shell (that replaces explorer.exe) such as LiteStep or any of the other shell replacements for Windows, most of which are open source.
Slashdot Mirror
The full (updated) text of Creating Applications With Mozilla, along with all the example source, is available for download at http://books.mozdev.org.
I went to public school, and I was bored long before I got to high school. The American education system is definitely designed *not* to do one thing: teach kids how to think.
Too much effort is spent on who, what, when, and where, leaving why and how by the wayside, all the while aiming at the imaginary median child. The below median kids are labeled as ADD or ADHD and pumped full of lithium and/or other drugs (treating the symptoms, not the disease), while those above the median are ignored because no one knows how (or has funding) to keep up with them.
A slashdot design that doesn't suck and is readable.
Most people who visit w3schools.com are not the average user, they are developers: early adopters. It would take at least another 9 months for global Mozilla usage to reach half these levels.
I prefer to go by the stats published by OneStat.com in their Pressbox.
However, I do think the rest of the year will bring a significant change in browser usage.
The only real way to combat spam is to also stop sites and spammers from selling email addresses to each other. If the spammers don't have their most precious commodity, they can't spam.
I love png, their only drawback being the lack of a lightweight animation mthod (which mng certainly is not) until now. How did it take 6 years to come up with such a simple solution?
We all know how microsoft is seeking to expand its patent portfolio. Besides the obvious one (horizontal scrolling), how many more are wrapped up in the hardware and (*gasp*) the drivers for this? We all know how MS plays the game, do you think Logitech or anyone else would be willing to pay for license fees on n patents?
I've been thinking of a similar solution for a long while: a trackball on top of the mouse for scrolling. This allows 360 scroll directions, which would be very useful for games, but would get very annoying on the desktop where there are only two scroll axes (vertical and horizontal). To get around this, the driver would have a setting for the arc of the axes, from 1 to 90. When the scrollball is moved, the sensors would determine the ball's direction, and if the angle is closer than half the arc width to to axis, the motion is along the axis.
For example, assume 0 is to the right, 90 is up, etc, and the arc width is set to 40 dgrees. Any motion from 70 to 110 would scroll up, 160 to 200 left, 250 to 290 down, etc. Motion outside these ranges would probably need to produce no scroll or scroll on both axes equally (45, 135, 225, 315 degrees), to keep users sane while using 2-axis apps. non-linear scroll motion might be useful to some, but would probalby frustrate most.By the way, for all you patent lawyer worms, this post is prior art
This "epiphany" is probably the root of how messy the doc file format is.
Now back to the rest of the article...
It will happen, but everything that the article implies won't be included.
IE7 will be the same caliber of upgrade as IE6, but with much more user value (who cares about the stupid image toolbar?). Little to no rendering engine improvments will happen, but most if not all of the UI features (tabs, popup blocker, etc) will. Remember that IE is essentially a very hacked up version of Mosaic, a codebase that is nearly a decade old. I've heard rumors of a Windows XP2 full release (in about a year)... likely any IE7 would accompany it.
But I do suspect that any possible IE upgrade will not be solely driven by user migration. MS has finally realized that they made a mistake in letting IE lag behind in the marketplace... the users are forcing them to admit it.
The people who run Channel9 post vehemently that they can't promise any improved support for anything. Remember that IE is still the sam bowl of spaghetti that it was 3 years ago (plus being stale and moldy). Do we really expect MS to make major rendering changes (so they claim) to IE and support it while developing the Longhorn UI (a rehash of Mozilla's display architecture)? I don't think so. I'm not sure how likely IE7 for Win98 will be.
And of course, don't hold your breath for IE including useful developer tools (DOM inspector, etc)... it never was for developers, and it never will be.
I ask only because that is how long it will take to watch^H^H^H^H^Hplay Final Fantasy X-4
The first time I read a story in the IT section, I immediately hated the colors. I don't mind the use of gradients, but the lack of contrast here makes the page almost unreadable.
Most 14 year olds who get space on Geocities can make a more readable (though almost always uglier) site. Not that /.'s design isn't the cutting edge of 1998, anyway...
Having just read Humphrey Carpenter's Biography of Tolkien, and in the middle of Tom Shippey's The Road To Middle-Earth, some relevant points are fresh in my mind.
When Stanley Unwin asked for a sequel to the unexpectedly popular Hobbit, Tolkien quite didn't know where to start, other than that the request was for "more about hobbits". There he began, but struggled to find the story for a couple years. He originally expected to produce a work of similar length.
Tolkien begins the Forward to FOTR with "This tale grew in the telling", and by telling he meant "writing". The Ring's purpose was not conceived until the writing of "The Shadow of the Past", where Gandalf explains its history to Frodo. Several characters were originally very different from their final forms; the most striking to me is that Strider was originally a Hobbit named Trotter, who kept the name long after becoming a Man (though tolkien noted several times that this name was wrong).
The vast majority of the "corrections" came as Tolkien dug deeper into the extant Silmarillion manuscripts, tying the unfolding story into his created mythology.
In several letters to Stanley Unwin while writing LOTR (a process which took 16 years), Tolkien repeatedly reported that the tale was "getting out of hand", and that he was not sure who its audience would be. Upon completion, Unwin was prepared to take the risk, even after upsetting the Professor to the point where Tolkien almost inked a deal for the book to be published by Harper Collins. Post-war paper availability and the well known discussion of splitting the book up and what the three volumes' titles would be contributed to this.
In the end, Tolkien was glad that anyone appreciated his work, with its many layers and facets. It could be said, however, that he was at times annoyed by his fame (he admittedly did not understand it), especially the all-hours phone calls and unexpected fans at his door.
The entire body of work set in Middle-Earth had two ultimate purposes: To create a place where Tolkien's created languages could live, and to attempt to replace England's lost mythology.
Philology was not just his work, it was his life. He loved words and studying how they eveolved, how they migrated and changed from people to people and century to century. From childhood, he either created or helped to create upwards of 20 languages, and spoke or read no less than nine "real" languages of varying ages.
Having studied almost every language of northern Europe, he could see how England's history had soiled its language, as far back as the Romans, then Saxons, Danes, Normans, and French (the last two also forcing Latin back into the mix). Tolkien held that the Normans did the most damage, and drew most heavily from pre-Hastings texts.
Tolkien knew that these reasons, one personal and one patriotic, did not give LOTR very much mass market appeal, having sprung from the mind of an old fashioned English gentleman, a scholar, who had very firm views of the modern world and staunch Catholic beliefs.
The monkey to correctly enunciate a single English word, and in the company of fellow monkeys slips into fits of screaming:
IE hasn't had any worthwhile rendering engine improvements since version 5, giving it the absolute worst standards compliance of any browser shipped today.
Never forget that IE wan't designed as a developer tool, is was designed to kill Netscape. True to MS form, trying to decipher any of IE's pitiful error messages will only cause migraines.
The W3C stopped development of their own reference browser (Amaya) because Mozilla's standards support is so good.
And stop using dreamweaver. It is incapable of generating compliant code, its javascript library is optimized for 3.x browsers, and no one ever learned HTML by using dreamweaver. It's appaling to me how many people claim to know (X)HTML but don't. Macromedia doesn't really give a damn about standards anyway. DW is also why no one seems to understand CSS... they never see it used effectively. All this and DW uses IE to render pages; see above for why this is bad.
Every so called "web designer" needs have their DW uninstalled and be forced to code pages by hand for a week to see how good they really are.
OneStat has shown a 1% drop in IE usage in each of their last two reports, the most recent of which was issued on May 28, well before the lastest crop of reasons not to use IE (usage then: 93.9%).
With the recent Moz/FF download increases and FF1.0 in September/October, it would not surprise me if IE usage dropped to or below 90%, with Gecko usage sitting at about 5-6%, before the end of the year.
Before they implement CSS3, they need to fully support older standards, like HTML4.
Regardless, this is nothing but a show. A year from now (or whenever XP2 get released), IE 7.0 will arrive, complete with popup/cookie managers and tabbed browsing, but with the same amount of standards improvements as 5.5 to 6 had. Which when you average out what they fixed in 6 compared to what they broke, didn't amount to much.
Why would M$ put effort and resources into IE at this point when Avalon is poised to take over the web (read: miserably crash and burn).
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.
The reason why most things on the Garden work in IE is because the design authors have no problems using IE-specific css hacks, most of which break css validation, and contribute to the life-support of IE.
Sadly, more than a few designers never actually learned css, they just started using Dreamweaver. Hence, they have no idea what css is capable of, and don't know how to fix css by hand.
M$ already is adopting (read; embrace & extend) Mozilla. There will be no new releases of IE beyond security patches. The beast's new browser will be integrated more tightly into Longhorn than IE ever was into previous Windows versions, and will apparently rely on an XML-like markup language called XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language or some such), which from what I've seen, looks and sounds a lot like XUL.
Once again, Microsoft is innovating what has already been done.
Code to the standards, and make sure your clients realize that even though "everybody" uses IE, it is a relic, essentially unchanged since version 5.0, released in March 1999. More importantly, IE still has poor support for W3C recommendations that existed for years prior to version 5.0. These things make sites harder to implement, take longer, and therefore will cost more. Your clients will understand that.
Evangelize standards compliant browsers, both for your clients and for the users on their sites. Web developers are the only people who can drive these changes in the general public.
In parent, s/Ferrari/Mustang/
Shouldn't the need for this tell companies that real people want to talk other real people when they use the phone?
I can only assume this book begins by instructing readers to open Notepad and IE. Was there any discussion about the history of js (ECMA), how browsers differ in their implementations of js, and how ECMA compliant they are? If not, then the author is cementing IE's stranglehold on the web by teaching his readers wrong (non-standard) methods.
Does he mention other standards-compliant browsers and the development tools available with them? If this author is not at least teaching DOM techniques, the book is worthless.
Agreed, IE (and therefore Windows Explorer) sucks in too many ways to count.
If you want focus follows mouse, install TweakUI. It has lots of other nifty settings, too.
And you can have virtual desktops in Windows if you install a third party shell (that replaces explorer.exe) such as LiteStep or any of the other shell replacements for Windows, most of which are open source.
Let's hope whoever does catch the authors, and collects the bounty, dontates the money to the SCO Defense Fund