While developing a woefully oppressive model of Internet management, Iran is participating actively in international talks about Internet governance that are being held as part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the press organisation said.
Of course the US isn't perfect. But I trust our guys over the Iranians and Chinese any day of the week.
You might cause me to moderate my stance if you could tell me even one thing changing Internet governance from the US to the world would improve the Internet. I've shown how doing this would make things worse; tell me how it would make things better.
Do you want the Internet controlled by the UN, where dictatorships like the Chinese and their friends have enormous power?
What advantages are there to having the Internet controlled by the UN?
It's been controlled by the US for all this time, it's worked fine during this time, what do we - meaning not only the US, but the world - gain by having it under UN control?
You are, in fact, correct. There is no boost in speed. 1.67ghz yesterday, 1.67ghz today.
As someone who's quite likely to buy the 17" model, I can say that the increase in resolution was more important to me than the 0.2ghz increase in speed some people had anticipated. And the price decrease was certainly welcome.
Aperture looks fantastic, but I think they'd sell a lot more copies at $299 than $499. Ouch! I think it's comparable in complexity and sophistication to Motion, which also sells for $299, so I'm really disappointed by the price. Also, it lacks layers, although it does support non-destructive editing, so it can't serve as a substitute for Photoshop, although I'm quite sure that I'll prefer it to Photoshop for the things it can do. Since I work for an educational institution, I can and most likely will buy it at the $249 educational price, but as a hobby photographer I couldn't just ify $499, while I was able to justify $299 for Motion just fine.
The UN has given us the uber-corruption of Oil-For-Food, the gross incompetence of their headquarters renovation efforts (1.2 billion proposed cost, which could build you an entire city if you wanted), peacekeeping efforts that led to prepetual war, and so on and on.
Now, the Chinese and other repressive nations are proposing to use UN muscle to put controls over the Internet.
Do you really feel this is the right direction?
If you do, I hope you'll join the Chinese Internet and enjoy.
I'd like to preserve what we have, in all its messy freedom. If other countries want to enjoy messy freedom, leave 'em in. If they want to create an authoritarian garbage heap, let 'em start their own net and attract people to it.
I don't really care who runs the Internet as long as it's done well and with freedom. Our guys have done a pretty good job. Replacing them with the Chinese and their pals doesn't strike me as a step in the right direction.
The US did found the Internet, and that gives us a bit of an advantage.
If other countries don't want to play in our sandbox, let them create their own version of the net.
I'm thinking of moving outside of the US to take advantage of a warmer climate and a lower cost of living, and even so I'd rather the US win this particular battle, because above all, I believe in freedom.
If we can export freedom, great. If we can't, well, let them roll their own.
The iPod photo never had a built-in camera. Might have sold better if it did.
I bought my business partner an iPod photo for Christmas and he absolutely loves it and the ability to have all his photos on it. So it's not that it was a bad product, it's that it was at the wrong price point. Current iPods have the same features the iPod Photo did, and I'm betting people love the ability to have their photos on it and flip through them.
I think people will really love the larger color screen in the new Video iPod for their photos, if nothing else. And I notice from the comments that a lot of people seem to be keen on buying the TV series, so any prediction that it will be a flop is likely to be a bit overblown.
However, I do expect the Nano to remain number 1 because it's so cute.
I think the elegant simplicity had a lot to do with it, too. I suspect people are sick of portable devices so complex the average person has no clue what features exist, let alone how to use them.
I played with a Treo and a Blackberry and the Blackberry has much more that feel of elegant simplicity than the Treo. True, the Treo does more, but I walked out of the store feeling that the Blackberry was the better choice. (I use a Sidekick II which I like even more, but again, it's closer to the ideal of elegant simplicity to it than the Treo).
Incidentally, this means Palm's apparent move towards Windows CE (or whatever it's called this week) is even more misguided, since Windows on a phone is the absolute opposite of elegance or simplicity. I tried a WinCE phone about a year ago and recoiled in utter horror when exposed to the UI. Perhaps they are better now, but I have a tough time believing it.
I probably used it at about the same time that tape was created, since I graduated high school in 1980 and had a summer job dabbling with one of them.
They did some very cool things, yes, but at least the ones I used were dog-slow because of all the overhead associated with the windowing system and the like.
I hate to say it, but I remember actually preferring the PDP-10. Primitive compared to the Lispm but it was less overwhelmingly complex and actually had an easier time keeping up with my typing.
Another problem is that people committing this kind of fraud are unlikely to have assets beyond a computer, a rented apartment and maybe a cable modem, iPod and cheap sportscar.
So a $500,000 judgement against them is probably worthless, since bankruptcy law generally allows you to keep what you have that's worth less than a few thousand dollars.
I wonder why Apple gets complaints like this when my T-Mobile Sidekick has exactly the same problem, and nobody seems to think twice about it, probably because if you put ANY LCD device in a pocket, it's going to get scratched.
I'm sure if I had a Treo or a Blackberry, and I put it in my pocket, it would do the exact same thing as the Sidekick. Since there are no cases I know of that actually allow you to operate the Sidekick while it's protected inside, this seems like it's likely to be more of a problem with a Sidekick than an iPod.
My iPod 40gb from a generation ago has the same problem, incidentally. But again, since I expect it to get scratched in my pocket, it doesn't bother me. I have retired it from pocket service and now use it in conjunction with my stereo, but that's because I don't like walking around with earbuds, missing the world. It's great with my stereo and I'm very pleased with it regardless.
There was, however, plenty of warning for the hurricane, and no warning at all for 9/11 (at least not to Rudy).
Since the issues that have come up concerning the hurricane are mainly about what the Mayor and Governor could have done and what they did not, criticising them as being incompetent is entirely valid. They could have done things they did not, and it would not have cost significant amounts to do them.
New Orleans is/was a city, so I don't see how your argument makes a lot of sense.
It was competence (Rudy) vs incompetence (the New Orleans mayor), not urban versus rural.
I've lived in both a major metro area and a rural area, and I suspect that the sheer cheapness of rural areas is more cost-effective. The cost of building a high-rise building is higher per capita than single family homes until land becomes extraordinarily expensive.
Also, rural areas have very little crime and so they require far less in the way of police protection, which makes life a lot less expensive.
However, I'd rather live in an urban area. It's more fun. Although I might consider a beachfront house in a rural area if I could find it cheap. But I think I'd have to leave the US to do that.
The only flaw in the device is T-Mobile's service, which is, well, variable.
When I lived in Los Angeles, it was extremely flaky.
Here in Pittsburgh, surprisingly, it actually works better. Strange. But there are still places where Verizon service is far superior.
Another problem is the lack of support for JavaScript, I suppose, but the only mobile phone I know that has it is the Blackberry, and its support is so slow it had might as well not exist.
I think a lot of the time people make things over-complex because they feel they're elegant or beautiful. All I want to do is have a section of a page with HTML that I will swap for another block of HTML. In that case, using XML with all its complexity is just plain dumb. It happens that this is just a block of HTML and the only real action performed with it is to save or not to save changes, which of course requires contact with the server.
I'm not doing a network monitoring tool, I'm not doing a dynamic stock quote display tool. Those things might benefit from a client program that actually understands what it's being told. My much simpler application does not.
The reason I've been a bit strident and critical of the other methodology in this thread is that I think there are a lot of people who need simpler solutions than are often given, but it's much easier to find articles on a solution that's over-complex for 98% of all jobs. All too often, overcomplex solutions end up in the development horror you mentioned you had earlier with Netscape 4, although of course much of the problem was that Netscape 4 is just not suited for the task.
I think we've reached agreement, then, that for what I'm doing, my solution is probably the best. I appreciate the time you've taken in responding to my various messages.
I used to think exactly as you did. But we're not in the good old days of Netscape 4 anymore. In all modern browsers, we can, in fact, reliably change data within our web pages using the document.innerHTML property. I don't think there's any reason now not to use that to limit the amount of data we have to send, and give our users a better experience.
The approach shown in the link I was sent as one of the first replies to my message looks pretty good and I'm going to be trying it over the next few days. If you (or anyone else) wants to drop me a line, I will share my experiences.
I can just add the total to the one text field I'm sending. You'll always want it, so it will be right there. I wasn't thinking about that because my real application is not a shopping cart, and does not require ANY manipulation done to the data once it's in the browser. It just has to be slotted in the right place. I think the right place for manipulation is the/server/, not the browser.
I'm not planning on creating something complex that needs to understand the data pushed to it. I'm trying to avoid that, you see. Remember, the other nice fellow who responded on this thread had huge, huge problems and created something with hideous complexity. I want to create something with wonderful simplicity.
I'm investigating the solution proposed to me in one of my responses right now.
Here's the HTML I would send back to the browser from my server side code:
2 Hat, 1 Chair, 1 Dog
That's many fewer characters than the XML.
Now, it's true that if I loaded the entire catalogue into my browser, then it would be faster to put in an xml version of everything and be totally responsive once the catalogue was loaded. But then I wouldn't have to communicate with the server except for the final confirmation of the transaction. Unfortunately that kind of thing would be so slow to load (assuming a reasonably big catalogue) and so I doubt customers would prefer it. Also, cross-browser testing would be a throbbing migraine:-(.
What I want to do, essentially, is to change HTML within a page to whatever's generated by a server-side script. For example, let's say my application was a shopping cart.
I want to replace the former value of the span called cart containing cart contents with, say, "Cart contents: Foo $53.95, Bar $25.75, Baz $32.95"
So all I want is for my server-side script to output Cart contents: Foo $53.95, Bar $25.75, Baz $32.95 to the client, and have my client take that string and set cart's innerHTML property to it.
I don't see the advantage of telling the server to give me the XML representation of that, sending it to the client, and having the client parse it and eventually come up with a innerHTML property for cart of Cart contents: Foo $53.95, Bar $25.75, Baz $32.95
Because I'm a curious guy who wants to be open-minded, please tell me the advantage of the latter. It strikes me as about ten times more complex, and thus far more likely to run into memory leaks and other icky things than my idea. In addition, it's far more likely to run into compatibility problems on the client side, which are horrible to diagnose in my experience.
What I'm really trying to do is keep as much on the server as possible and minimize the use of JavaScript, which in my experience is a hideous swamp of incompatibilities. My mantra is to put as little on the client side as humanly possible.
Among other things, this makes the mobile phone version easy. Instead of having AJAX refresh a table cell, I'll have it go to the server and pull the exact same HTML code I would have had in the cell.
That sounds a lot easier to me than building two systems, one of which uses XML to talk to a "rich client" and the other which uses straight HTML for mobile phones.
I would send a request and get a response from the server, as a character string.
I could then do something like
(html) <span id = "willchange">This will change</span>
<td onclick = "changeit();">... </td>
(js)
function changeit() {/* send the request from ajax *//* tell it to call receive_data when it gets something */ }/* Call whenever data is received from the server */ function receive_data(data_from_server) {/* make ajax request */
document.all.willchange.innerHTML = data_from_server; }
That seems a lot simpler than all this parsing, no? All I need to do is make the request, get the HTML back from the request and substitute it in the right spot. It should be dead easy... right?
Okay, let me try to understand this. I'm putting together a brand spanking new web application that would greatly benefit from this technology. But to me, simplicity is the cardinal rule. Why do something in 50 steps, translating data from one langugage to another, when you can just keep it in one?
I have over a decade of experience writing programs that spit out HTML. Why not have my Perl scripts spit out garden variety HTML which can then be substituted appropriately on the page?
It seems to me that would be simple, clean and functional. And it might be a simple matter of saying my content type is text/html instead of application/xml.
Why put the burden on JavaScript on the client, when I already know how to do it on the server? In terms of server processor time, it's just as easy to spit out HTML directly than it is to spit out XML and translate it to HTML on the other side.
And if it is easy to do this, I'd appreciate a link to a tutorial.
That being said, it would be nice if the music industry charged less for the download version because they are giving you less. In your example, this is the case. SuperWidget is $10 direct and $30 at the store.
Right now, with Steve Jobs' $0.99 pricing, an album costs about a third less for download than it does at retail. Of course the retail markup is about that third, so minus the fairly trivial physical costs, the price you're paying Steve is about the same price you'd be paying the label.
Regardless of whether you really, really, really want the CD case etc, or whether you don't care, it's a nice gesture to pay less to get less.
I know I would buy many fewer songs on iTunes without the uniform pricing, so I think in the end the labels' desire for higher prices is highly self-destructive.
Wow, Acronym Soup. No wonder I always hated Windows:-).
Is this still true of the modern Office, which I thought was developed by an entirely different group, especially for the Mac?
I know they did something like what you describe at one point, and that created Office Version 6 for the Mac, one of the most disasterous releases for any program.
Slashdot Mirror
Money quote:Of course the US isn't perfect. But I trust our guys over the Iranians and Chinese any day of the week.
You might cause me to moderate my stance if you could tell me even one thing changing Internet governance from the US to the world would improve the Internet. I've shown how doing this would make things worse; tell me how it would make things better.
D
All true enough, but you're ignoring my point.
Do you want the Internet controlled by the UN, where dictatorships like the Chinese and their friends have enormous power?
What advantages are there to having the Internet controlled by the UN?
It's been controlled by the US for all this time, it's worked fine during this time, what do we - meaning not only the US, but the world - gain by having it under UN control?
D
You are, in fact, correct. There is no boost in speed. 1.67ghz yesterday, 1.67ghz today.
As someone who's quite likely to buy the 17" model, I can say that the increase in resolution was more important to me than the 0.2ghz increase in speed some people had anticipated. And the price decrease was certainly welcome.
Aperture looks fantastic, but I think they'd sell a lot more copies at $299 than $499. Ouch! I think it's comparable in complexity and sophistication to Motion, which also sells for $299, so I'm really disappointed by the price. Also, it lacks layers, although it does support non-destructive editing, so it can't serve as a substitute for Photoshop, although I'm quite sure that I'll prefer it to Photoshop for the things it can do. Since I work for an educational institution, I can and most likely will buy it at the $249 educational price, but as a hobby photographer I couldn't just ify $499, while I was able to justify $299 for Motion just fine.
D
The US originated the Internet.
The UN has given us the uber-corruption of Oil-For-Food, the gross incompetence of their headquarters renovation efforts (1.2 billion proposed cost, which could build you an entire city if you wanted), peacekeeping efforts that led to prepetual war, and so on and on.
Now, the Chinese and other repressive nations are proposing to use UN muscle to put controls over the Internet.
Do you really feel this is the right direction?
If you do, I hope you'll join the Chinese Internet and enjoy.
I'd like to preserve what we have, in all its messy freedom. If other countries want to enjoy messy freedom, leave 'em in. If they want to create an authoritarian garbage heap, let 'em start their own net and attract people to it.
I don't really care who runs the Internet as long as it's done well and with freedom. Our guys have done a pretty good job. Replacing them with the Chinese and their pals doesn't strike me as a step in the right direction.
D
The US did found the Internet, and that gives us a bit of an advantage.
If other countries don't want to play in our sandbox, let them create their own version of the net.
I'm thinking of moving outside of the US to take advantage of a warmer climate and a lower cost of living, and even so I'd rather the US win this particular battle, because above all, I believe in freedom.
If we can export freedom, great. If we can't, well, let them roll their own.
D
The iPod photo never had a built-in camera. Might have sold better if it did.
I bought my business partner an iPod photo for Christmas and he absolutely loves it and the ability to have all his photos on it. So it's not that it was a bad product, it's that it was at the wrong price point. Current iPods have the same features the iPod Photo did, and I'm betting people love the ability to have their photos on it and flip through them.
I think people will really love the larger color screen in the new Video iPod for their photos, if nothing else. And I notice from the comments that a lot of people seem to be keen on buying the TV series, so any prediction that it will be a flop is likely to be a bit overblown.
However, I do expect the Nano to remain number 1 because it's so cute.
D
I think the elegant simplicity had a lot to do with it, too. I suspect people are sick of portable devices so complex the average person has no clue what features exist, let alone how to use them.
I played with a Treo and a Blackberry and the Blackberry has much more that feel of elegant simplicity than the Treo. True, the Treo does more, but I walked out of the store feeling that the Blackberry was the better choice. (I use a Sidekick II which I like even more, but again, it's closer to the ideal of elegant simplicity to it than the Treo).
Incidentally, this means Palm's apparent move towards Windows CE (or whatever it's called this week) is even more misguided, since Windows on a phone is the absolute opposite of elegance or simplicity. I tried a WinCE phone about a year ago and recoiled in utter horror when exposed to the UI. Perhaps they are better now, but I have a tough time believing it.
D
When was the last time a non-geek friend of yours made a backup of his personal hard drive?
Thought so.
D
Most of these services are free, and I don't see advertising revenue being shared; it's small enough as it is.
However, the FOAF standard currently exposed by some tribe.net profiles might help with this.
D
I probably used it at about the same time that tape was created, since I graduated high school in 1980 and had a summer job dabbling with one of them.
They did some very cool things, yes, but at least the ones I used were dog-slow because of all the overhead associated with the windowing system and the like.
I hate to say it, but I remember actually preferring the PDP-10. Primitive compared to the Lispm but it was less overwhelmingly complex and actually had an easier time keeping up with my typing.
D
Another problem is that people committing this kind of fraud are unlikely to have assets beyond a computer, a rented apartment and maybe a cable modem, iPod and cheap sportscar.
So a $500,000 judgement against them is probably worthless, since bankruptcy law generally allows you to keep what you have that's worth less than a few thousand dollars.
D
I wonder why Apple gets complaints like this when my T-Mobile Sidekick has exactly the same problem, and nobody seems to think twice about it, probably because if you put ANY LCD device in a pocket, it's going to get scratched.
I'm sure if I had a Treo or a Blackberry, and I put it in my pocket, it would do the exact same thing as the Sidekick. Since there are no cases I know of that actually allow you to operate the Sidekick while it's protected inside, this seems like it's likely to be more of a problem with a Sidekick than an iPod.
My iPod 40gb from a generation ago has the same problem, incidentally. But again, since I expect it to get scratched in my pocket, it doesn't bother me. I have retired it from pocket service and now use it in conjunction with my stereo, but that's because I don't like walking around with earbuds, missing the world. It's great with my stereo and I'm very pleased with it regardless.
D
There was, however, plenty of warning for the hurricane, and no warning at all for 9/11 (at least not to Rudy).
Since the issues that have come up concerning the hurricane are mainly about what the Mayor and Governor could have done and what they did not, criticising them as being incompetent is entirely valid. They could have done things they did not, and it would not have cost significant amounts to do them.
D
New Orleans is/was a city, so I don't see how your argument makes a lot of sense.
It was competence (Rudy) vs incompetence (the New Orleans mayor), not urban versus rural.
I've lived in both a major metro area and a rural area, and I suspect that the sheer cheapness of rural areas is more cost-effective. The cost of building a high-rise building is higher per capita than single family homes until land becomes extraordinarily expensive.
Also, rural areas have very little crime and so they require far less in the way of police protection, which makes life a lot less expensive.
However, I'd rather live in an urban area. It's more fun. Although I might consider a beachfront house in a rural area if I could find it cheap. But I think I'd have to leave the US to do that.
D
The only flaw in the device is T-Mobile's service, which is, well, variable.
When I lived in Los Angeles, it was extremely flaky.
Here in Pittsburgh, surprisingly, it actually works better. Strange. But there are still places where Verizon service is far superior.
Another problem is the lack of support for JavaScript, I suppose, but the only mobile phone I know that has it is the Blackberry, and its support is so slow it had might as well not exist.
D
I think a lot of the time people make things over-complex because they feel they're elegant or beautiful. All I want to do is have a section of a page with HTML that I will swap for another block of HTML. In that case, using XML with all its complexity is just plain dumb. It happens that this is just a block of HTML and the only real action performed with it is to save or not to save changes, which of course requires contact with the server.
I'm not doing a network monitoring tool, I'm not doing a dynamic stock quote display tool. Those things might benefit from a client program that actually understands what it's being told. My much simpler application does not.
The reason I've been a bit strident and critical of the other methodology in this thread is that I think there are a lot of people who need simpler solutions than are often given, but it's much easier to find articles on a solution that's over-complex for 98% of all jobs. All too often, overcomplex solutions end up in the development horror you mentioned you had earlier with Netscape 4, although of course much of the problem was that Netscape 4 is just not suited for the task.
I think we've reached agreement, then, that for what I'm doing, my solution is probably the best. I appreciate the time you've taken in responding to my various messages.
Many thanks.
D
I used to think exactly as you did. But we're not in the good old days of Netscape 4 anymore. In all modern browsers, we can, in fact, reliably change data within our web pages using the document.innerHTML property. I don't think there's any reason now not to use that to limit the amount of data we have to send, and give our users a better experience.
The approach shown in the link I was sent as one of the first replies to my message looks pretty good and I'm going to be trying it over the next few days. If you (or anyone else) wants to drop me a line, I will share my experiences.
D
I can just add the total to the one text field I'm sending. You'll always want it, so it will be right there. I wasn't thinking about that because my real application is not a shopping cart, and does not require ANY manipulation done to the data once it's in the browser. It just has to be slotted in the right place. I think the right place for manipulation is the /server/, not the browser.
I'm not planning on creating something complex that needs to understand the data pushed to it. I'm trying to avoid that, you see. Remember, the other nice fellow who responded on this thread had huge, huge problems and created something with hideous complexity. I want to create something with wonderful simplicity.
I'm investigating the solution proposed to me in one of my responses right now.
D
You know, I'm not sure if I've explained my idea very clearly since it's the simplest and least bandwidth intensive method I can think of.
6 26407
:-(.
This post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163110&cid=13
is my latest effort to perhaps be a little clearer.
here's IBM's sample XML:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cart generated="1123969988414" total="$171.95">
<item code="hat001">
<name>Hat</name>
<quantity>2</quantity>
</item>
<item code="cha001">
<name>Chair</name>
<quantity>1</quantity>
</item>
<item code="dog001">
<name>Dog</name>
<quantity>1</quantity>
</item>
</cart>
Here's the HTML I would send back to the browser from my server side code:
2 Hat, 1 Chair, 1 Dog
That's many fewer characters than the XML.
Now, it's true that if I loaded the entire catalogue into my browser, then it would be faster to put in an xml version of everything and be totally responsive once the catalogue was loaded. But then I wouldn't have to communicate with the server except for the final confirmation of the transaction. Unfortunately that kind of thing would be so slow to load (assuming a reasonably big catalogue) and so I doubt customers would prefer it. Also, cross-browser testing would be a throbbing migraine
Thoughts?
D
What I want to do, essentially, is to change HTML within a page to whatever's generated by a server-side script. For example, let's say my application was a shopping cart.
I want to replace the former value of the span called cart containing cart contents with, say, "Cart contents: Foo $53.95, Bar $25.75, Baz $32.95"
So all I want is for my server-side script to output Cart contents: Foo $53.95, Bar $25.75, Baz $32.95 to the client, and have my client take that string and set cart's innerHTML property to it.
I don't see the advantage of telling the server to give me the XML representation of that, sending it to the client, and having the client parse it and eventually come up with a innerHTML property for cart of Cart contents: Foo $53.95, Bar $25.75, Baz $32.95
Because I'm a curious guy who wants to be open-minded, please tell me the advantage of the latter. It strikes me as about ten times more complex, and thus far more likely to run into memory leaks and other icky things than my idea. In addition, it's far more likely to run into compatibility problems on the client side, which are horrible to diagnose in my experience.
Many thanks.
D
What I'm really trying to do is keep as much on the server as possible and minimize the use of JavaScript, which in my experience is a hideous swamp of incompatibilities. My mantra is to put as little on the client side as humanly possible.
Among other things, this makes the mobile phone version easy. Instead of having AJAX refresh a table cell, I'll have it go to the server and pull the exact same HTML code I would have had in the cell.
That sounds a lot easier to me than building two systems, one of which uses XML to talk to a "rich client" and the other which uses straight HTML for mobile phones.
D
Let's pretend things worked the way I thought.
... </td>
/* send the request from ajax */ /* tell it to call receive_data when it gets something */ /* Call whenever data is received from the server */ /* make ajax request */
... right?
I would send a request and get a response from the server, as a character string.
I could then do something like
(html)
<span id = "willchange">This will change</span>
<td onclick = "changeit();">
(js)
function changeit()
{
}
function receive_data(data_from_server)
{
document.all.willchange.innerHTML = data_from_server;
}
That seems a lot simpler than all this parsing, no? All I need to do is make the request, get the HTML back from the request and substitute it in the right spot. It should be dead easy
Many thanks.
D
Okay, let me try to understand this. I'm putting together a brand spanking new web application that would greatly benefit from this technology. But to me, simplicity is the cardinal rule. Why do something in 50 steps, translating data from one langugage to another, when you can just keep it in one?
I have over a decade of experience writing programs that spit out HTML. Why not have my Perl scripts spit out garden variety HTML which can then be substituted appropriately on the page?
It seems to me that would be simple, clean and functional. And it might be a simple matter of saying my content type is text/html instead of application/xml.
Why put the burden on JavaScript on the client, when I already know how to do it on the server? In terms of server processor time, it's just as easy to spit out HTML directly than it is to spit out XML and translate it to HTML on the other side.
And if it is easy to do this, I'd appreciate a link to a tutorial.
Many thanks for your time and ideas.
D
Okay, I enjoyed your example.
That being said, it would be nice if the music industry charged less for the download version because they are giving you less. In your example, this is the case. SuperWidget is $10 direct and $30 at the store.
Right now, with Steve Jobs' $0.99 pricing, an album costs about a third less for download than it does at retail. Of course the retail markup is about that third, so minus the fairly trivial physical costs, the price you're paying Steve is about the same price you'd be paying the label.
Regardless of whether you really, really, really want the CD case etc, or whether you don't care, it's a nice gesture to pay less to get less.
I know I would buy many fewer songs on iTunes without the uniform pricing, so I think in the end the labels' desire for higher prices is highly self-destructive.
D
Wow, Acronym Soup. No wonder I always hated Windows :-).
Is this still true of the modern Office, which I thought was developed by an entirely different group, especially for the Mac?
I know they did something like what you describe at one point, and that created Office Version 6 for the Mac, one of the most disasterous releases for any program.
D