I haven't actually used Photoshop Elements, but my understanding is that it doesn't support layers, has weak support for text, and comes with a pretty limited set of filters.
Layers are there, with all the layer blending options from PS6, the text support is the same as PS6 (for better or worse...), and it comes with a large variety of filters.
The show-stopper for me was the absence of guides. I often need to take Photoshop files made by other folks and "cut them up" into various components for use in HTML pages and/or Flash components. Without guides, that's a major PITA.
The common idea is that PSElements must be useful for the web, because it lacks things that are critical for print work - CMYK support among others. But, it also lacks features that many web pros consider critical. I'm not certain who, really, would find it useful.
I can't think of any other platform (except for the Amiga) where the zealots actually became so much of a problem, people actually went out of their way to keep from being associated with them. "I use Linux, but I'm not one of those loonies..."
I can. I use a Mac... but I'm not one of those loonies.
Hasn't the idea of making money by giving away software and charging for services failed for almost every company that's tried it?
Every idea has failed for almost every company that's tried it. That's the nature of a startup - most of them fail.
What the burst of last year's "bubble" has refuted is the idea that Free and/or Open software can somehow guarantee the success of a startup that uses it.
Using anything other than averages and estimates would require detailed logging of a user's every online "move," in order to distinguish between downloading and other behavior. You can imagine how well *that* would fly.
Yeah, and just imagine the money that would made from all the downloading of the estimated 600 (in the first day alone) Slashdot articles in 'Your Rights Online' if this ever came to fruition:)
My Good Goddess, it's a conspiracy! Never mind what the patent says - it's all a secret plot by CmdrTaco to drive up banner revenue!
So will all computers on the internet need a coin slot?
Not quite - but close. If this patent stands, it will be the end of flat-rate access plans. Someone will do a study that shows that X% of a home user's traffic is downloads - and that number will be used to figure a royalty payment based on your bandwidth use.
Think about it - how else could enforcing this patent work? Using anything other than averages and estimates would require detailed logging of a user's every online "move," in order to distinguish between downloading and other behavior. You can imagine how well *that* would fly.
Shockwave is not ActiveX. It's supported by the Flash plugin that works in Netscape, Mozilla and Konqueror.
Nope. The Flash plugin for Linux only plays Flash. The Shockwave plugin, available for Windows, Mac, and others, plays both Shockwave and Flash content.
Editors, please check your facts before posting.
Pot, kettle...
(Flash support can be excused as support for legacy plugin API designed by Netscape).
Support for a media type has nothing to do with the API used between the browser and plugin supporting it. The Flash plugin for Netscape for Linux, for example, uses Netscape's plugin API, not ActiveX.
For example, Mozilla doesn't support favicon.ico,
Is this a troll?
Favicon.ico is a file that IE looks for on the web server whenever a page is bookmarked. It has nothing whatsoever to do with plugins.
I'll be the first to give this guy a nod for a cool hack, and the first to recognize that sometimes hacking ain't really about practicality.
But I'm wondering... of what practical use is this, when OS/X is already pre-installed? If you just want UNIX, it's already there... and if you're a you-better-put-a-capital-F-on-it-mister Free Software advocate, you probably won't buy into Apple's mostly-proprietary hardware anyway.
In the past year, my bank (BankBoston) became Fleet, my phone company (Bell Atlantic) became Verizon
Haven't been in Boston long, have you?:-)
BankBoston used to be BayBank, and Hell Atlantic used to be NyNex. And my electric and gas companies have changed too, but I forget the details right now.
Maybe it's something about the weather here... it's always changing too.
Yes, it's like intercepting your local TV station's signal and inserting advertisements for your company, and then broadcasting it to the rest of the city. I'm pretty sure that is illegal.
What you're describing would certainly be illegal, but what you're describing is nothing like smart tags.
If you want to compare them to the TV world, Smart Tags are closer in nature to the brightness, contrast, and tint controls - they allow a user to alter the presentation of a signal (page) they've received to suit their own needs.
This is not copyright or trademark violation, nor is it evil - in fact, it's exactly what TBL had in mind! HTML was specifically designed to be presentation-agnostic. If you can't deal with that, you shouldn't be using HTML - you should be using something that's layout-oriented instead, such as PDF or Flash.
You choose the format in which to publish your content. If you choose blindly, without understanding the limitations and advantages of the different formats available to you, then shame on you, not Microsoft.
Smart Tags are a way for an outside agency to modify my pages on the fly, in ways I do not approve of.
No, Smart Tags are a way for the end user to use your pages in ways you have not anticipated. Whether or not you approve of this is irrelevant - if you don't like it, don't use HTML, use something with well-defined display characteristics instead, such as PDF or Flash.
Why should I, or any author, surrender that control?
What makes you think you have that kind of control? Go read the HTML specification (any version) at the W3C, and please point out the part that requires a specific rendering for each element. Show me the part that says "a user agent must not deviate from these display requirements."
Microsoft is attempting wrest control of the content, layout, and linkage of a page away from the creator of a page.
How can MS take away something the page creator didn't have to begin with?
In terms of sheer adrenalin, the scenes that did it for me were all in Robotron. Seeing fifty Brains all launch their cruise missiles at you, or fifty tanks launching their bouncing fireballs, or even a few hundred grunts just following you around... yikes!
Not having read the robot novels, I would hope they at least explored the grey areas where these laws broke down.
I have read most (if not all) of the robot novels and short stories. Exploring the grey areas where the laws broke down was one of Asimov's favorite plot devices.
In particular, many of the early short stories, available in various collections such as "I, Robot" and "Robot Dreams," revolved around two troubleshooter characters. In every story featuring those two, their mission was to figure out, in the context of the Three Laws, why a malfunctioning robot was acting the way it was.
No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
I was completely with you up to this point...:-)
There's actually no need to deliver separate content for phones at all, whether it's WAP or a "light" version of your HTML pages.
Without all the font and table nonsense that older browsers require to get a decent looking page out of them, an HTML page is already very, very lightweight. With the media-specific style sheets in CSS2, there will be no need to deliver custom pages for each browser; simply define a style sheet for each device or media type you wish to support, and you're done.
Maintaining two or three versions of each page on your site doesn't seem too heinous when your site is a few dozen, or even a few score pages. Try maintaining a site that's >1800 pages that way some time - and then update over half the pages on a weekly basis. You'll find out, as I have, that the custom-page-for-every-browser approach simply doesn't scale well.
It's certainly possible - I did it for nearly two years, with the capable help of BBEdit and MacPerl. But it would have been much simpler, and cut the page count in half, if I could have counted on decent browser support for CSS.
My choice is that they aren't going to be using them on any of my sites, period.
And how, precisely, do you intend to stop them? Are you going to visit each and every user's home, making sure they use a browser you like, and have turned off anything that interferes with your Holy Vision????
Wow. You really need to get over yourself... You're not that important or that powerful.
HTML itself explicitly authorizes display consistent with its commands,
That's where you're wrong. HTML elements (not commands) do nothing more than categorize and structure the data contained within them. This is a paragraph, that is a heading, etc. (There are a <b>few</b> <i>deprecated</i> exceptions to this...)
HTML does not and can not "authorize display consistent with its commands," because the HTML definition says nothing whatsoever about how each category of text must be displayed. If you mark your text as a first-level heading with <h1>...</h1>, for example, a user agent may choose to render it larger than "normal" text (by far the most common rendering, admittedly), in a different color, or not to render it differently at all.
Even when using CSS, the fact that styles are not commands but suggestions is explicitly recognized by the relevant standards. One need read no further than section 1, "Basic concepts" in the CSS spec to see this:
HTML authors need to write style sheets only if they want to suggest a specific style for their documents. Each User Agent (UA, often a "web browser" or "web client") will have a default style sheet that presents documents in a reasonable -- but arguably mundane -- manner. Appendix A contains a sample style sheet to present HTML documents as suggested in the HTML 2.0 specification [3].
There are a million perfectly valid reasons you may need the level of control you're describing, HTML is simply not the tool for the job. You should be using PDF, or maybe Flash instead.
There will be no possibility of garanteeing that the links that a visitor to your page has available on what they might surmise is your page are the ones that you, the author, actually placed there.
There never has been that possibility. Get over it.
No, it serves as a suggestion. As I said in another thread, you have no control over the users' browser, and never have. Get over it.
Presentations of the page must vary within those bounds, other wise a derivitive work is created.
So, you're saying that JunkBusters et al should be illegal, then? What about the ad-blocking function in OmniWeb - which is pretty damned handy. Lynx has got to go, too - it certainly isn't displaying your page to "spec."
What, you use JavaScript on your page? Well, better not allow the user to turn that off, either, or the page might be a bit out of "spec" when they see it. Can't have that, now can we?
Better throw out that greyscale monitor, there, buddy. I designed this page in color, dammit, and that's how you better look at it!
What, you wrote that in English? Now we have to outlaw Babelfish too. Can't have your page displayed in French if that isn't how you wrote it, now can we?
Go write "I have no control over other people's browsers" on the blackboard until you get it.
I said: If you want to complain about something, complain about the fact that "Smart Links" are all hard-coded to point to MS properties, and the fact that the user cannot change that
Edit an XML document? Yeah, right. I can do that. I'm assuming that you can do that. Joe Sixpaque can't do that. As far as he's concerned, if it ain't got a Wizard, it can't be done.
Having said that... yes, I should have said "the average user cannot change that." Mea Culpa.
Slashdot Mirror
Layers are there, with all the layer blending options from PS6, the text support is the same as PS6 (for better or worse...), and it comes with a large variety of filters.
The show-stopper for me was the absence of guides. I often need to take Photoshop files made by other folks and "cut them up" into various components for use in HTML pages and/or Flash components. Without guides, that's a major PITA.
The common idea is that PSElements must be useful for the web, because it lacks things that are critical for print work - CMYK support among others. But, it also lacks features that many web pros consider critical. I'm not certain who, really, would find it useful.
isn't an official president saying that what mp3.com did was illigal.
Well, of course the president wouldn't say that. Duh.
I have yet to see a single sysadmin tweak the source of a Linux or BSD kernel
Sorry, your logic doesn't hold up. I've never personally seen or driven a Ferrari Testarossa - should I claim, then, that they don't exist?
I can't think of any other platform (except for the Amiga) where the zealots actually became so much of a problem, people actually went out of their way to keep from being associated with them. "I use Linux, but I'm not one of those loonies..."
I can. I use a Mac... but I'm not one of those loonies.
Hasn't the idea of making money by giving away software and charging for services failed for almost every company that's tried it?
Every idea has failed for almost every company that's tried it. That's the nature of a startup - most of them fail.
What the burst of last year's "bubble" has refuted is the idea that Free and/or Open software can somehow guarantee the success of a startup that uses it.
iMac: $799.00
OS/X: $129.00
Sendmail: Free
Uncensored email: Priceless.
My Good Goddess, it's a conspiracy! Never mind what the patent says - it's all a secret plot by CmdrTaco to drive up banner revenue!
So will all computers on the internet need a coin slot?
Not quite - but close. If this patent stands, it will be the end of flat-rate access plans. Someone will do a study that shows that X% of a home user's traffic is downloads - and that number will be used to figure a royalty payment based on your bandwidth use.
Think about it - how else could enforcing this patent work? Using anything other than averages and estimates would require detailed logging of a user's every online "move," in order to distinguish between downloading and other behavior. You can imagine how well *that* would fly.
Remember, you read it here first!
I don't think .org websites should ever be for-profit businesses as that is not how that domain was intended to be used.
.org domain is intended to be a catch-all for domains that don't qualify for any other TLD.
That's a very popular misconception. The
Shockwave is not ActiveX. It's supported by the Flash plugin that works in Netscape, Mozilla and Konqueror.
Nope. The Flash plugin for Linux only plays Flash. The Shockwave plugin, available for Windows, Mac, and others, plays both Shockwave and Flash content.
Editors, please check your facts before posting.
Pot, kettle...
(Flash support can be excused as support for legacy plugin API designed by Netscape).
Support for a media type has nothing to do with the API used between the browser and plugin supporting it. The Flash plugin for Netscape for Linux, for example, uses Netscape's plugin API, not ActiveX.
For example, Mozilla doesn't support favicon.ico,
Is this a troll?
Favicon.ico is a file that IE looks for on the web server whenever a page is bookmarked. It has nothing whatsoever to do with plugins.
I'll be the first to give this guy a nod for a cool hack, and the first to recognize that sometimes hacking ain't really about practicality.
But I'm wondering... of what practical use is this, when OS/X is already pre-installed? If you just want UNIX, it's already there... and if you're a you-better-put-a-capital-F-on-it-mister Free Software advocate, you probably won't buy into Apple's mostly-proprietary hardware anyway.
In the past year, my bank (BankBoston) became Fleet, my phone company (Bell Atlantic) became Verizon
:-)
Haven't been in Boston long, have you?
BankBoston used to be BayBank, and Hell Atlantic used to be NyNex. And my electric and gas companies have changed too, but I forget the details right now.
Maybe it's something about the weather here... it's always changing too.
Yes, it's like intercepting your local TV station's signal and inserting advertisements for your company, and then broadcasting it to the rest of the city. I'm pretty sure that is illegal.
What you're describing would certainly be illegal, but what you're describing is nothing like smart tags.
If you want to compare them to the TV world, Smart Tags are closer in nature to the brightness, contrast, and tint controls - they allow a user to alter the presentation of a signal (page) they've received to suit their own needs.
This is not copyright or trademark violation, nor is it evil - in fact, it's exactly what TBL had in mind! HTML was specifically designed to be presentation-agnostic. If you can't deal with that, you shouldn't be using HTML - you should be using something that's layout-oriented instead, such as PDF or Flash.
You choose the format in which to publish your content. If you choose blindly, without understanding the limitations and advantages of the different formats available to you, then shame on you, not Microsoft.
Smart Tags are a way for an outside agency to modify my pages on the fly, in ways I do not approve of.
No, Smart Tags are a way for the end user to use your pages in ways you have not anticipated. Whether or not you approve of this is irrelevant - if you don't like it, don't use HTML, use something with well-defined display characteristics instead, such as PDF or Flash.
Why should I, or any author, surrender that control?
What makes you think you have that kind of control? Go read the HTML specification (any version) at the W3C, and please point out the part that requires a specific rendering for each element. Show me the part that says "a user agent must not deviate from these display requirements."
Microsoft is attempting wrest control of the content, layout, and linkage of a page away from the creator of a page. How can MS take away something the page creator didn't have to begin with?
like telling the people who wrote the AOL client that they should start developing a new operating system. I think it's pronounced Mozilla.
In terms of sheer adrenalin, the scenes that did it for me were all in Robotron. Seeing fifty Brains all launch their cruise missiles at you, or fifty tanks launching their bouncing fireballs, or even a few hundred grunts just following you around... yikes!
Not having read the robot novels, I would hope they at least explored the grey areas where these laws broke down.
I have read most (if not all) of the robot novels and short stories. Exploring the grey areas where the laws broke down was one of Asimov's favorite plot devices.
In particular, many of the early short stories, available in various collections such as "I, Robot" and "Robot Dreams," revolved around two troubleshooter characters. In every story featuring those two, their mission was to figure out, in the context of the Three Laws, why a malfunctioning robot was acting the way it was.
No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
:-)
I was completely with you up to this point...
There's actually no need to deliver separate content for phones at all, whether it's WAP or a "light" version of your HTML pages.
Without all the font and table nonsense that older browsers require to get a decent looking page out of them, an HTML page is already very, very lightweight. With the media-specific style sheets in CSS2, there will be no need to deliver custom pages for each browser; simply define a style sheet for each device or media type you wish to support, and you're done.
Maintaining two or three versions of each page on your site doesn't seem too heinous when your site is a few dozen, or even a few score pages. Try maintaining a site that's >1800 pages that way some time - and then update over half the pages on a weekly basis. You'll find out, as I have, that the custom-page-for-every-browser approach simply doesn't scale well.
It's certainly possible - I did it for nearly two years, with the capable help of BBEdit and MacPerl. But it would have been much simpler, and cut the page count in half, if I could have counted on decent browser support for CSS.
My choice is that they aren't going to be using them on any of my sites, period.
And how, precisely, do you intend to stop them? Are you going to visit each and every user's home, making sure they use a browser you like, and have turned off anything that interferes with your Holy Vision????
Wow. You really need to get over yourself... You're not that important or that powerful.
That's where you're wrong. HTML elements (not commands) do nothing more than categorize and structure the data contained within them. This is a paragraph, that is a heading, etc. (There are a <b>few</b> <i>deprecated</i> exceptions to this...)
HTML does not and can not "authorize display consistent with its commands," because the HTML definition says nothing whatsoever about how each category of text must be displayed. If you mark your text as a first-level heading with <h1>...</h1>, for example, a user agent may choose to render it larger than "normal" text (by far the most common rendering, admittedly), in a different color, or not to render it differently at all.
Even when using CSS, the fact that styles are not commands but suggestions is explicitly recognized by the relevant standards. One need read no further than section 1, "Basic concepts" in the CSS spec to see this: There are a million perfectly valid reasons you may need the level of control you're describing, HTML is simply not the tool for the job. You should be using PDF, or maybe Flash instead.
Cool! Does anyone know what number RFC is for the smart tag server protocol?
It's in the same RFC that defines the protocol for JunkBusters.
There will be no possibility of garanteeing that the links that a visitor to your page has available on what they might surmise is your page are the ones that you, the author, actually placed there.
There never has been that possibility. Get over it.
the web page design serves as a specification.
No, it serves as a suggestion. As I said in another thread, you have no control over the users' browser, and never have. Get over it.
Presentations of the page must vary within those bounds, other wise a derivitive work is created.
So, you're saying that JunkBusters et al should be illegal, then? What about the ad-blocking function in OmniWeb - which is pretty damned handy. Lynx has got to go, too - it certainly isn't displaying your page to "spec."
What, you use JavaScript on your page? Well, better not allow the user to turn that off, either, or the page might be a bit out of "spec" when they see it. Can't have that, now can we?
Better throw out that greyscale monitor, there, buddy. I designed this page in color, dammit, and that's how you better look at it!
What, you wrote that in English? Now we have to outlaw Babelfish too. Can't have your page displayed in French if that isn't how you wrote it, now can we?
Go write "I have no control over other people's browsers" on the blackboard until you get it.
Then get over it.
I said:
...feel free to edit {driveletter}\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Smart Tag\Lists\msdnodc.xml
If you want to complain about something, complain about the fact that "Smart Links" are all hard-coded to point to MS properties, and the fact that the user cannot change that
TomV replied:
Edit an XML document? Yeah, right. I can do that. I'm assuming that you can do that. Joe Sixpaque can't do that. As far as he's concerned, if it ain't got a Wizard, it can't be done.
Having said that... yes, I should have said "the average user cannot change that." Mea Culpa.