Actually, accessible sites are possible today, on all major browsers. You don't even need HTML 4.0 or CSS, though those technologies fit in nicely.
You do have to give up the notion that HTML is a typographic markup language, and you also have to accept that the User, not the Author, is in control of the presentation.
The W3C's Web Accessability Initiative gives some very easy to follow guidelines on designing accessible content. It's a well done initiative, and even prioritizes what things to take on first.
My apologies for the poor formatting of my previous post. Despite the fact that I used valid/. HTML formatting tags, despite the fact that I did use Preview (several times), and despite the fact that I submitted my post with "HTML Formatted" selected, my post had all formatting stripped:/
Now, excuse me as I test Extrans and see if I get any better results.
My question is, in terms of "navigability", would the Doom Desktop Environment be a quicker, easier, space to navigate? That is, is it easier to walk over to the web room from the desktop publishing area, or to hit ALT-TAB? Well, since Quake, the concept of teleports is a natural tool (to Quake gamers at least) you use to get somewhere fast. Pressing Alt-Tab could either a) teleport you to the room with the application that is next in the focus list or b) pop up a bunch of teleporters, each labeled with the particular app and you just walk through the teleport of your choice. I believe this would be a very natural analog to Enlightenment's focus list or MS Window's Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab. Indulge me as I take this a bit further. With the advent of "see through" portals in the latest incarnations of First Person Shooters, you could also provide a means to manipulate windows through the portal. So, just as I can drag and drop a window from one virtual desktop to another, I could shoot my grappling hook through a portal, yanking a window back into my current room, and optionally drop it through another portal. This may sound silly, but after hours and hours of playing Quake, I can imagine myself using mechanisms like this and eventually being able to work and navigate productively in a 3D environment. It is also my opinion that flat, 2D windows will always have a place in 3D virtual environments. In meatspace it is convienient to be able to shuffle off a pad of paper to some other area of my desk, but when I have the pad of paper in my "foreground", I tend to position it and my head in such a way that I'm looking at it head on. In a 3D environment, I anticipate that any 2D window I'm actively using will be oriented as to be flat. Additionally, I imagine much usefull overlap between applications with 2D and 3D interfaces as there currently is between CLI and GUI apps. Sometimes it might just be more efficient to type 'ps' followed by 'kill pid' than to hunt down a rogue process and shoot it to death with my phaser. Conversely, I might prefer the metaphor of shooting a monster with my phaser "set to stun" for 'kill -20' and "set to kill" for 'kill -9', especially if I don't understand the concept of PIDs and signals. The moral of the story is, 3D virtual environments offer some unique opertunities for innovation in user interfaces. IMO, First Person games are indirectly leading the way by providing concrete usability data on (successful) 3D virtual environments.
I'm not sure if our society has dumbed down so much as the television viewing audience might have dumbed down. I for one have stopped watching television. I tend to get my entertainment and information from the Web, with a dash of NPR and the local public radio carrier while I drive to and from work. If ever I do watch television, it's because I want to zone and get some popcorn for the brain. I'm more inclined to believe that people that are looking for challenging content find it elsewhere, not that there are fewer people in society seeking challenging topics.
Is one set in the war torn, starship fighting, massive combat alternate future portrayed in the final episode of Next Generation. Most of the best STNG episodes involved somebody's ass getting kicked in a big way. Written well, it wouldn't have to be that far from Gene's vision of the future. Conflicts happen.
Here's the scenario. Just pretend for a moment that/. is evil:
I start my browser and load up http://www.slashdot.org/, upon which I receive the default front page, and a banner from DoubleClick. Both/. and DoubleClick can only assume I'm a new user. Also,/. generates a unique sessionID that it will track in the URL. All DoubleClick URLs contain this sessionID.
I have previously personalized slashdot. To get to my personalized settings, I log in.
Upon a successful login,/. binds my stored user information to my session. I am no longer anonymous with regards to/., and all my history in the current session that was previously anonymous can be related as part of my official permanent history.
Slashdot (which is evil, remember), starts generating DoubleClick banners containing my userID in addition to my sessionID (actually, this has only to be done once per session per login). Double Click associates Tool-Man@slashdot.org with their permanent record for Tim Taylor. Double Click now binds their user information to my session, and likewise associates this session's worth of activity to my permananent DoubleClick record. I am no longer anonymous with regards to DoubleClick.
Note: in the above scheme, cookies are entirely uneccessary. All that is needed is for/. and DoubleClick to conspire to share session and user information. It's reasonable to assume that any site offering DoubleClick banners has no qualms about doing this. Sessions can be tracked simply with URLs. Cookies make it easier for DoubleClick to tell when I hop to another site, but if I typically frequent sites that I have personalized, and thus sign in, then they have all the info they need. Blocking cookies reduces but doesn't eliminate the tracking.
Expiring cookies per session preserves your anonymity only if you never reveal identifying information during that session.
The best way to prevent this abuse is to block all HTTP requests to banner servers. That way,/. would have to simply share it's data with DoubleClick in more conventional ways. Of course, that would have to be stated in the/. privacy policy.
> At the end of the day, Katz, you are in no position to understand the minds of Christians or geeks since you are clearly neither.
Myself, I have been both. I'm still a geek, no longer a Christian. In many ways, Jon's right on the money. Unfortunately, his careless writing style doesn't do his ideas justice.
Yes, of course there are good, free thinking Christians, just as there are good, free thinking Hindus, Jews, Atheists, et al. However, they are either the silent majority or the silent minority, either way, they are silent. The politically active, campaign fundraising, "Homosexuality can be fixed" ad running Christians, aka the Religious Right, is worthy of all of Jon's scorn. And, to a lesser extent, the "Good" Christians are worhty of some scorn for letting the Religious Right be their spokesperson (excuse the anthropomorphism).
I know for a fact that there are exceptions, but it's been my experience that the majority of the visible Christians are intollerant, herd mentallity individuals that like having the answers given to them by someone else.
Here are some obstacles to wearable computing by the masses
Footprint (wearprint). The size of wearables are still prohibitive. Disclaimer: this statement is a massively erroneous generalization. As most people on wear-hard@haven.org will tell you, the size of your wearable greatly depends on your needs. Are you building a walking workstation or just a custom PDA? Can you get by with CLI or need a graphic window system? Do you need a visual display at all? Nevertheless, I'd say most usefull wearables would still result in prohibitively large (or prohibitively expensive to make small) systems. Prediction: wearables will catch on when they're as inobtrusive as a Sony Discman and a pair of Gargoyle sunglasses.
Network. Computers in the future need to be connected (or able to connect) to the Net. Wearables pose some problems. Bandwidth. Need for a wireless infrastructure capable of supporting mobile devices. Fortunately, this nicely intersects with less-fringe technologies like laptops, PDAs and automotive computers
Interface. Well, until traditional software and Web site developers start building with Accesability in mind, then you must have either a very custom software environment or a visual display and run a graphical windowing system. Input is another difficult matter. One of the most popular input devices is the Twiddler, a hand held chording keyboard. However, in some circumstances, keyboard input is innapropriate. Speech recognition requires a powerfull CPU. Gesture based input is still an area of reasearch. Brain or nerve input is still Science Fiction. Prediction: non-standard computing I/O will be only be practical when more mainstream networked devices with limited display capabilities abound, i.e. networked Palm Pilots or automobile PCs will drive things like non-visual accessibility and software supportive of speech recognition, etc..
Mass Production. Wearables are very custom designed systems and often need to be built custom to the individual to be usefull.
Diamond Age is one of my faves
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 2
Not that playing favorites with an author's books is a particularly productive exercise, but Diamond Age was one of my favorites. Aside from Stephenson's writing style, Cryptonomicon was an entirely different novel. Also a book which I enjoyed immensely.
I believe the order in which you read Stephenson's work is imporant. Starting with Snow Crash, I read them in the order in which they were released (haven't read Zodiak so I don't know what that does to my theory):
Snow Crash
Diamond Age
Cryptonomicon
I at least recommend reading his earlier works before attempting Cryptonomicon. They will give you a taste of his writing style, which he takes to the max in Crypto, and I can imagine might be a turn off for the uninitiated.
As far as this review, I disagree with all but one of the complaints. The ending is too abrupt, but then again, that seems to be a trait of Stephenson's work.
Aside from the "moral" of the story, I also enjoyed Stephenson's great capacity to produce metaphors. Diamond Age is dominated by metaphors. Whereas the reviewer found them boring, I actually enjoyed them. I kept imagining what it would have been like to have that Book when I was a kid. It reminded how receiving a TI 99/4a computer as a child really started me on a different path from my peers. Anyhow, I liked the stories within the story...but then I also liked the movie Hackers so what do I know?
Children's voices followed by tent shaking, blue slime, and bundles of sticks tied with flannel containing body parts "come with the territory"? Where the hell are you camping...
I guess it depends on whether we're going for a survey of important documents (think executive summary) or an in depth catalog of every minutae that shaped the Internet, directly or indirectly.
This probably hinges on who the intended audience is. If it's for ourselves (geeks), then anything but the deep catalog will probably bore us. If it's for everyone else (non-geeks). Then anything more comprehensive than a survey of the topic will be overwhelming. I'm not implying that non-geeks are stupid, but who else but a geek would care about each individual Internet protocol? Perhaps we should do both.
For a survey level collection of important Internet documents, I'd suggest that RFC1 [ 1] is the single most important RFC, simply because it started it all. RFC2555 [ 2], a.k.a. "30 years of RFCs" would be a usefull citation for giving context to RFC1.
For in an in depth catalog, covering all relevant RFCs, the large majority (if not all) of the the work has already been done. You simply need to link to, or include the index of RFCs that form the Internet standards, RFC2500 [ 3].
True, LotusXSL is slow. The documentation even says the focus was on completeness and stability. Funny, that's how Apache started...but I'll leave that alone. There's other XSL processors available. But taken as a whole, XSL is very, very bleeding edge. So what is an early adopter to do?
Unless your pages are changing constantly, use a caching mechanism. If your site is very static, only generated dynamically occasionally, then spider your site. Otherwise, reverse proxies like SQUID do nicely
Let's say your pages do change every second, or your pages are personalized to such a degree (like slashboxes) that only just in time creation works. You could:
Write XSL transformations that almost completely transform the document to HTML, leaving a handfull of XML tags that must be tranformed at the last minute. Expand those last minute tags with XSL or something homegrown. This would work nicely with my personalized slashdot page. The content of my article list and my slashboxes changes, but the location and ordering of my slashboxes changes infrequently.
skip XSL entirely. XML parsers are more mature than XSL processors. IBM's xml4j API has hooks for inserting your own element handlers. You would be coding the tranformation instead of writing in a tranformation language, but it would be fast
My preference is to use XSL, or more acurately, XSL:T or XTL or whatever the part of XSL that just deals with tranformations. However, the more important part is getting your content represented as XML. That's the most important. Here, this person said it better than I can:
When you sit down to implement an XML system the last thing you think about is CSS, XSL, or the DOM. The first thing you think about is the needs of the data. If you have any volume of textual data, you will probably not get another opportunity to re-encode all of it until CSS and XSL are historical artifacts, Microsoft is a division of Red Hat, and the Web has more users than the telephone.
So you *must* concentrate on the needs of the data. You must make richly semantic markup that captures the structure of the data. And you must have human authors start to add this semantic markup to the data as soon as possible. You must minimize the cost of this markup effort. --Paul Prescod on the xml-dev mailing list
Is this a troll? Be realistic. The Java language and the Java VM specs are both available. Anyone can implement a clean room VM and core API and compete. A few people have. The Open Source community can decided at any time it doesn't want to pay Sun, IBM, Symantec, etc. for Java VMs and implement an OS alternative. That's what Kaffe is. The reality is, so far commercial entities have been able to implement complete, fast Java VMs and the Open Source community hasn't. I'm not trying to belittle the efforts of Kaffe. Just that OS projects usually have a long ramp up time before the Bazaar starts to take effect. The point is, Sun has presented no insurmountable barriers to developing an Open Source Java. I think there's been low interest in an OS Java because Sun, relative to the rest of the commercial industry, has acted in a manner cooperative with the OS industry.
Java Server Pages (JSP) has been recommended in a few posts. Although JSP has some good things going for it -- open specification vs. proprietary markup, easy integration with Java objects, Beans, standard and 3rd party Java APIs -- it also has some serious problems. The main problem is that JSP is a clone of ASP a 3(?) year old technology.
JSP, ASP, and Cold Fusion, they're all the same model. Your content is managed in files. Those same files also manage your code. I'm aware each platform has facilities for marshalling external objects. And I'll even pretend that everyone in your orginization is going to be good and code business rules in seperate objects. Even then, you're still mixing presentation with logic. Worse, you're managing content with files, unless you have a handfull of master, super dynamic templates that don't even dictate presentation. But then, you're implementing a content management engine that could be more easily written as a Java Servlet or your own app server.
There are some alternatives to using middle-webbish (ASP, JSP, CFML) for dynamic content:
A group at java.apache.org are working on the Server Pages Foundation Classes. One of the problems they address is the loose coupling between "templates" when you're developing a workflow that takes place accross many screens (like account creation, shopping cart, etc.).
Also at java.apache.org is Cocoon, a Java Servlet (or standalone Java app) that use XML and XTL (XSL:T) to serve pages where content is seperate from presentation.
More on the XML front -- which is, IMO, the current best approach to develop highly dynamic, content driven sites -- IBM Alphaworks has a lot of XML tools available. The two I've found the most usefull are xml4j and lotus XSL. The source is available for both, but I haven't reviewed the licenses. No matter, other OS XML projects -- like Cocoon --- are capable of utilizing the commercial APIs by defining their own API, then implementing wrappers around IBM's classes.
And there's many more...these are just the ones I know enough about to comment on. The reality is, middle webbish is proving insufficient. This has produced an area bubbling with ideas and new approaches to developing and managing dynamic Web sites.
ASP is 3 years old. It and it's clones have enabled the Web to grow, but those technologies are bursting at the seams. XML is new, perhaps too new, and it's debatable if XTL (XSL:T) will catch on. But one thing is certain to me: XML is where it's at.
Until recently, 3Com had been positioning the Palm Computing Platform as a competitor to both Wince and Personal Java. Naturally we should wonder about the (semi-)reversal of their position. I have a few thoughts:
1) it's a Pepsi/Coke world. That Wince is here to stay is a given. It's likely that the same is true for Personal Java. Not much room left for a "platform" that only works on one vendor's device.
2) adding a Java VM (potentially) increases the applications available for the Palm. You gain all those network effects by becoming another node. Of course, this requires the acceptance of things like Java set-top boxes, Embedded Java, and Jini. If these technologies do pan out, the value of owning any device capable of running those apps goes up. Bingo! Instantly (not quite), it's even cooler to own a Pilot.
3) perhaps this first iteration is geared mostly towards geeks. The unveiling at Java One would seem to indicate this. Besides, if I were a normal consumer, the relatively small number of Personal Java applications doesn't justify the resource consumption of the VM. That's sort of what letting us geeks have it is for. There's just no cool PDA that has people writing apps in Personal Java the way they do for the Palm and for Wince. That's what Spotless is supposed to provide.
Just my thoughts. Mostly this is a good move because I've holding out from buying a PDA for over a year until one was available with a Java VM. Now if I only new the pricetag...
Unfortunately, it became trendy for companies to start calling all their programmers at a certain level "Software Engineers" even if they had no formal training in Software Engineering.
Anyone should be allowed to code. But only someone with the training should let themselves be called a Software Engineer.
The Chairman and the Commissioners invite you to contact them via Email at the following addresses: Chairman William Kennard: wkennard@fcc.gov Commissioner Susan Ness: sness@fcc.gov Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth: hfurchtg@fcc.gov Commissioner Michael Powell: mpowell@fcc.gov Commissioner Gloria Tristani: gtristan@fcc.gov
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, accessible sites are possible today, on all major browsers. You don't even need HTML 4.0 or CSS, though those technologies fit in nicely.
You do have to give up the notion that HTML is a typographic markup language, and you also have to accept that the User, not the Author, is in control of the presentation.
The Web Accessibility Initiative is a great resource on designing accessible content.
Resources:
My apologies for the poor formatting of my previous post. Despite the fact that I used valid /. HTML formatting tags, despite the fact that I did use Preview (several times), and despite the fact that I submitted my post with "HTML Formatted" selected, my post had all formatting stripped :/
Now, excuse me as I test Extrans and see if I get any better results.
My question is, in terms of "navigability", would the Doom Desktop Environment be a quicker, easier, space to navigate? That is, is it easier to walk over to the web room from the desktop publishing area, or to hit ALT-TAB? Well, since Quake, the concept of teleports is a natural tool (to Quake gamers at least) you use to get somewhere fast. Pressing Alt-Tab could either a) teleport you to the room with the application that is next in the focus list or b) pop up a bunch of teleporters, each labeled with the particular app and you just walk through the teleport of your choice. I believe this would be a very natural analog to Enlightenment's focus list or MS Window's Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab. Indulge me as I take this a bit further. With the advent of "see through" portals in the latest incarnations of First Person Shooters, you could also provide a means to manipulate windows through the portal. So, just as I can drag and drop a window from one virtual desktop to another, I could shoot my grappling hook through a portal, yanking a window back into my current room, and optionally drop it through another portal. This may sound silly, but after hours and hours of playing Quake, I can imagine myself using mechanisms like this and eventually being able to work and navigate productively in a 3D environment. It is also my opinion that flat, 2D windows will always have a place in 3D virtual environments. In meatspace it is convienient to be able to shuffle off a pad of paper to some other area of my desk, but when I have the pad of paper in my "foreground", I tend to position it and my head in such a way that I'm looking at it head on. In a 3D environment, I anticipate that any 2D window I'm actively using will be oriented as to be flat. Additionally, I imagine much usefull overlap between applications with 2D and 3D interfaces as there currently is between CLI and GUI apps. Sometimes it might just be more efficient to type 'ps' followed by 'kill pid' than to hunt down a rogue process and shoot it to death with my phaser. Conversely, I might prefer the metaphor of shooting a monster with my phaser "set to stun" for 'kill -20' and "set to kill" for 'kill -9', especially if I don't understand the concept of PIDs and signals. The moral of the story is, 3D virtual environments offer some unique opertunities for innovation in user interfaces. IMO, First Person games are indirectly leading the way by providing concrete usability data on (successful) 3D virtual environments.
I'm not sure if our society has dumbed down so much as the television viewing audience might have dumbed down. I for one have stopped watching television. I tend to get my entertainment and information from the Web, with a dash of NPR and the local public radio carrier while I drive to and from work. If ever I do watch television, it's because I want to zone and get some popcorn for the brain. I'm more inclined to believe that people that are looking for challenging content find it elsewhere, not that there are fewer people in society seeking challenging topics.
Is one set in the war torn, starship fighting, massive combat alternate future portrayed in the final episode of Next Generation. Most of the best STNG episodes involved somebody's ass getting kicked in a big way. Written well, it wouldn't have to be that far from Gene's vision of the future. Conflicts happen.
Here's the scenario. Just pretend for a moment that /. is evil:
Note: in the above scheme, cookies are entirely uneccessary. All that is needed is for /. and DoubleClick to conspire to share session and user information. It's reasonable to assume that any site offering DoubleClick banners has no qualms about doing this. Sessions can be tracked simply with URLs. Cookies make it easier for DoubleClick to tell when I hop to another site, but if I typically frequent sites that I have personalized, and thus sign in, then they have all the info they need. Blocking cookies reduces but doesn't eliminate the tracking.
Expiring cookies per session preserves your anonymity only if you never reveal identifying information during that session.
The best way to prevent this abuse is to block all HTTP requests to banner servers. That way, /. would have to simply share it's data with DoubleClick in more conventional ways. Of course, that would have to be stated in the /. privacy policy.
Myself, I have been both. I'm still a geek, no longer a Christian. In many ways, Jon's right on the money. Unfortunately, his careless writing style doesn't do his ideas justice.
Yes, of course there are good, free thinking Christians, just as there are good, free thinking Hindus, Jews, Atheists, et al. However, they are either the silent majority or the silent minority, either way, they are silent. The politically active, campaign fundraising, "Homosexuality can be fixed" ad running Christians, aka the Religious Right, is worthy of all of Jon's scorn. And, to a lesser extent, the "Good" Christians are worhty of some scorn for letting the Religious Right be their spokesperson (excuse the anthropomorphism).
I know for a fact that there are exceptions, but it's been my experience that the majority of the visible Christians are intollerant, herd mentallity individuals that like having the answers given to them by someone else.
First, some Wearable computing links:
And now some opinons:
Here are some obstacles to wearable computing by the masses
Not that playing favorites with an author's books is a particularly productive exercise, but Diamond Age was one of my favorites. Aside from Stephenson's writing style, Cryptonomicon was an entirely different novel. Also a book which I enjoyed immensely.
I believe the order in which you read Stephenson's work is imporant. Starting with Snow Crash, I read them in the order in which they were released (haven't read Zodiak so I don't know what that does to my theory):
I at least recommend reading his earlier works before attempting Cryptonomicon. They will give you a taste of his writing style, which he takes to the max in Crypto, and I can imagine might be a turn off for the uninitiated.
As far as this review, I disagree with all but one of the complaints. The ending is too abrupt, but then again, that seems to be a trait of Stephenson's work.
Aside from the "moral" of the story, I also enjoyed Stephenson's great capacity to produce metaphors. Diamond Age is dominated by metaphors. Whereas the reviewer found them boring, I actually enjoyed them. I kept imagining what it would have been like to have that Book when I was a kid. It reminded how receiving a TI 99/4a computer as a child really started me on a different path from my peers. Anyhow, I liked the stories within the story...but then I also liked the movie Hackers so what do I know?
Children's voices followed by tent shaking, blue slime, and bundles of sticks tied with flannel containing body parts "come with the territory"? Where the hell are you camping...
I guess it depends on whether we're going for a survey of important documents (think executive summary) or an in depth catalog of every minutae that shaped the Internet, directly or indirectly.
This probably hinges on who the intended audience is. If it's for ourselves (geeks), then anything but the deep catalog will probably bore us. If it's for everyone else (non-geeks). Then anything more comprehensive than a survey of the topic will be overwhelming. I'm not implying that non-geeks are stupid, but who else but a geek would care about each individual Internet protocol? Perhaps we should do both.
For a survey level collection of important Internet documents, I'd suggest that RFC1 [ 1] is the single most important RFC, simply because it started it all. RFC2555 [ 2], a.k.a. "30 years of RFCs" would be a usefull citation for giving context to RFC1.
For in an in depth catalog, covering all relevant RFCs, the large majority (if not all) of the the work has already been done. You simply need to link to, or include the index of RFCs that form the Internet standards, RFC2500 [ 3].
Tim
[ 1] RFC 0001 Host Software
[ 2] RFC 2555 30 Years of RFCs
[ 3] RFC 2500 Internet Official Protocol Standards
True, LotusXSL is slow. The documentation even says the focus was on completeness and stability. Funny, that's how Apache started...but I'll leave that alone. There's other XSL processors available. But taken as a whole, XSL is very, very bleeding edge. So what is an early adopter to do?
Unless your pages are changing constantly, use a caching mechanism. If your site is very static, only generated dynamically occasionally, then spider your site. Otherwise, reverse proxies like SQUID do nicely
Let's say your pages do change every second, or your pages are personalized to such a degree (like slashboxes) that only just in time creation works. You could:
My preference is to use XSL, or more acurately, XSL:T or XTL or whatever the part of XSL that just deals with tranformations. However, the more important part is getting your content represented as XML. That's the most important. Here, this person said it better than I can:
Is this a troll? Be realistic. The Java language and the Java VM specs are both available. Anyone can implement a clean room VM and core API and compete. A few people have. The Open Source community can decided at any time it doesn't want to pay Sun, IBM, Symantec, etc. for Java VMs and implement an OS alternative. That's what Kaffe is. The reality is, so far commercial entities have been able to implement complete, fast Java VMs and the Open Source community hasn't. I'm not trying to belittle the efforts of Kaffe. Just that OS projects usually have a long ramp up time before the Bazaar starts to take effect. The point is, Sun has presented no insurmountable barriers to developing an Open Source Java. I think there's been low interest in an OS Java because Sun, relative to the rest of the commercial industry, has acted in a manner cooperative with the OS industry.
Java Server Pages (JSP) has been recommended in a few posts. Although JSP has some good things going for it -- open specification vs. proprietary markup, easy integration with Java objects, Beans, standard and 3rd party Java APIs -- it also has some serious problems. The main problem is that JSP is a clone of ASP a 3(?) year old technology.
JSP, ASP, and Cold Fusion, they're all the same model. Your content is managed in files. Those same files also manage your code. I'm aware each platform has facilities for marshalling external objects. And I'll even pretend that everyone in your orginization is going to be good and code business rules in seperate objects. Even then, you're still mixing presentation with logic. Worse, you're managing content with files, unless you have a handfull of master, super dynamic templates that don't even dictate presentation. But then, you're implementing a content management engine that could be more easily written as a Java Servlet or your own app server.
There are some alternatives to using middle-webbish (ASP, JSP, CFML) for dynamic content:
A group at java.apache.org are working on the Server Pages Foundation Classes. One of the problems they address is the loose coupling between "templates" when you're developing a workflow that takes place accross many screens (like account creation, shopping cart, etc.).
Also at java.apache.org is Cocoon, a Java Servlet (or standalone Java app) that use XML and XTL (XSL:T) to serve pages where content is seperate from presentation.
More on the XML front -- which is, IMO, the current best approach to develop highly dynamic, content driven sites -- IBM Alphaworks has a lot of XML tools available. The two I've found the most usefull are xml4j and lotus XSL. The source is available for both, but I haven't reviewed the licenses. No matter, other OS XML projects -- like Cocoon --- are capable of utilizing the commercial APIs by defining their own API, then implementing wrappers around IBM's classes.
And there's many more...these are just the ones I know enough about to comment on. The reality is, middle webbish is proving insufficient. This has produced an area bubbling with ideas and new approaches to developing and managing dynamic Web sites.
ASP is 3 years old. It and it's clones have enabled the Web to grow, but those technologies are bursting at the seams. XML is new, perhaps too new, and it's debatable if XTL (XSL:T) will catch on. But one thing is certain to me: XML is where it's at.
Until recently, 3Com had been positioning the Palm Computing Platform as a competitor to both Wince and Personal Java. Naturally we should wonder about the (semi-)reversal of their position. I have a few thoughts:
1) it's a Pepsi/Coke world. That Wince is here to stay is a given. It's likely that the same is true for Personal Java. Not much room left for a "platform" that only works on one vendor's device.
2) adding a Java VM (potentially) increases the applications available for the Palm. You gain all those network effects by becoming another node. Of course, this requires the acceptance of things like Java set-top boxes, Embedded Java, and Jini. If these technologies do pan out, the value of owning any device capable of running those apps goes up. Bingo! Instantly (not quite), it's even cooler to own a Pilot.
3) perhaps this first iteration is geared mostly towards geeks. The unveiling at Java One would seem to indicate this. Besides, if I were a normal consumer, the relatively small number of Personal Java applications doesn't justify the resource consumption of the VM. That's sort of what letting us geeks have it is for. There's just no cool PDA that has people writing apps in Personal Java the way they do for the Palm and for Wince. That's what Spotless is supposed to provide.
Just my thoughts. Mostly this is a good move because I've holding out from buying a PDA for over a year until one was available with a Java VM. Now if I only new the pricetag...
I wouldn't describe that as "works happily with Esound" though :)
Agreed.
Unfortunately, it became trendy for companies to start calling all their programmers at a certain level "Software Engineers" even if they had no formal training in Software Engineering.
Anyone should be allowed to code. But only someone with the training should let themselves be called a Software Engineer.
What's the state of accessibility in GNOME and KDE? Has any developer scratched this itch?
Web Accessibility Initiative by W3C
Accessibility by Web Design Group
best accessibility meme: gracefully degrading pages
You miss the point. The source is available, now anyone can write a driver for BeOS or whatever...maybe even you could do it yourself.
go read http://www.bigbrotherinside.com/ for the answers to your questions
From the FCC Web site:
The Chairman and the
Commissioners invite you to contact them via Email at the following addresses:
Chairman William Kennard: wkennard@fcc.gov
Commissioner Susan Ness: sness@fcc.gov
Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth: hfurchtg@fcc.gov
Commissioner Michael Powell: mpowell@fcc.gov
Commissioner Gloria Tristani: gtristan@fcc.gov
Duh...the flat rate for telecommunications is one of the prime reasons the Internet is such a success in the U.S.
Also, this threatens to further enlarge the gap between the technological haves from the havenots.
I wonder how much the bribe was...
it seems the site just got overwhelmed