Someone might have dug this code out of the trash, but the RTFA implies there is an official press release from Atari where they allow this code to be distributed. (No link? Unfortuantely Atari's corporate site is only in French.)
BTW, when the original Sunnyvale CA Atari folded, loads of amazing classic gaming crap was dug out of the garbage or found in abandon warehouses and so on.
I didn't even use the word "hard" in my post, and you entirely missed the point. So it doesn't surprise me that you are a proud professional HTML monkey.
I find this encouraging because it starts to make HTML actually "semantic" for real world web pages, as opposed to the physics paper approach of pretending everything is a heading, paragraph, or generic block (DIV).
> The ability to parse a web document using native XML methods is pointless?
In the general sense, yes. Web documents are nearly always served to web browsers, and every single web browser does a faster & better job of parsing HTML over XHTML.
As I mentioned, there certainly are cases when XML can be useful, but the usual situation of serving content to end users isn't one of them.
Yes, that sounds like a perfect application for XHTML.
I wish more people were arguing along your lines instead of simply claiming that it's Better(TM) [actually it slows down page loads considerably while offering no new features], or wishfully thinking it would eliminate their competition for jobs.
Agreed. XHTML was rather pointless. It didn't add any particularlly interesting features, made pages more difficult to author, and its claim that it made life easier for browser authors was belied by poor support and slow rendering. Making things more "XMLish" with closed tags and quoted attributes was a good idea, but in reality writing XML-conformant CSS/Javascript XML was a pain in the butt and usually not done.
I suppose XHTML might have been useful as part of a document management/transformation system, but it didn't seem to offer much to most web developers.
Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.
True that Word reformats documents for different printer targets. However in business environments, almost everyone is using an HP LaserJet, so practically for me this has never been a huge issue.
To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.
I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.
"Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.
Prior to Firefox, the Mozilla Seamonkey browser was usually just called "Mozilla". Not to be confused with the project itself or the old Netscape codename, Mozilla was an end-user product in it's own right and heavily promoted by Slashdotters.
True, but it was by the time anyone shipped a commercial product containing GNU. (I think they expired in the late 80s...there's a Stallman essay around about this.)
And certain unix features were never implemented because of things like the Unisys LZW patent.
Do you know of any commercial software that used WISE? Aside from whatever strategic considerations, my impression was that it was cancelled because it sucked and nobody used it. (Including MS internally.)
This is all fine for companies like Facebook and Google that are in the primary business of running IT, and wrote software that accomodates for the shitty hardware they use.
That's the key point. Google wrote their own highly-scalable clustering software, but traditionally IT pays out the nose for clustering and it's cheaper to put the money into hardware.
I don't see how Google/Facebook's requirements could be considered common in the slightest, but I suppose some ghetto sysadmin has dreams of running his enterprise off some loose Asus motherboards.
> long copyright such as the totally ridiculous life + 70 years
Maybe in the abstract sense. But the fact "Steamboat Willie" comes up in every Pirate Bay or RIAA thread is an obvious deflection from the issue at hand.
Probably what they do now. But in the old days, Slashdot suffered from a whole bunch of HTML-related exploits that would have just been impossible on a BBcode site.
The Osborne Effect may have been true during the late PPC era when Apple had a flat marketshare and grim upgrade prospects. But the average iPhone/MacBook customer doesn't follow the Apple rumormill and doesn't give a flip.
> Preloaded distro's eliminate 80% of the problems people complain about Linux,
O rly? The usual consensus is that the linux configuration loaded onto these netbooks was garbage. (In once case apparently a linux netbook shipped without a wifi driver.)
Now obviously OEMs have far more experience integrating XP, but netbooks conclusively disprove that preloading is where the consumer magic happens.
Now, if you want to say that XP subsequently provided a better user experience, feel free; the default OS provided with Asus, Acer, and MSI's linux netbooks were half-assed to say the least.
Because Win32 compatibility is an essential part of the user experience for most users.
Even if the buyers were completely oriented towards internet use, people are still comfortable with their mail clients, IM programs, want to be able to view MS Office attachments, and so on.
The first netbooks were largely adopted by geeks, who like Linux.
Only unintentionally. The software configuration of these things was aimed at the lowest tier user with nothing but a web browser and a MP3 player. They weren't designed to be geek-friendly in the slightest.
Oh yes, QuickTime and Windows Media are well known for their seeking [BUFFERING] ability, which was often disabled anyway.
Flash video certainly isn't perfect, but the quick loading time and ability to create your own UI killed the media player plugins in terms of user experience. (Unless you have some other explanation for why 99% of the sites that used those plugins have moved to Flash.)
Lol. More like they were slow-loading and designed to stick their logo and shitty "stereo component" UIs and other branding crap in the middle of your page design.
If the user-experience of any of these plugins was any good, one of them would have taken over and Flash video would have never gotten off the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone might have dug this code out of the trash, but the RTFA implies there is an official press release from Atari where they allow this code to be distributed. (No link? Unfortuantely Atari's corporate site is only in French.)
BTW, when the original Sunnyvale CA Atari folded, loads of amazing classic gaming crap was dug out of the garbage or found in abandon warehouses and so on.
I didn't even use the word "hard" in my post, and you entirely missed the point. So it doesn't surprise me that you are a proud professional HTML monkey.
> Examples of this include section and nav tags
I find this encouraging because it starts to make HTML actually "semantic" for real world web pages, as opposed to the physics paper approach of pretending everything is a heading, paragraph, or generic block (DIV).
> The ability to parse a web document using native XML methods is pointless?
In the general sense, yes. Web documents are nearly always served to web browsers, and every single web browser does a faster & better job of parsing HTML over XHTML.
As I mentioned, there certainly are cases when XML can be useful, but the usual situation of serving content to end users isn't one of them.
Yes, that sounds like a perfect application for XHTML.
I wish more people were arguing along your lines instead of simply claiming that it's Better(TM) [actually it slows down page loads considerably while offering no new features], or wishfully thinking it would eliminate their competition for jobs.
Agreed. XHTML was rather pointless. It didn't add any particularlly interesting features, made pages more difficult to author, and its claim that it made life easier for browser authors was belied by poor support and slow rendering. Making things more "XMLish" with closed tags and quoted attributes was a good idea, but in reality writing XML-conformant CSS/Javascript XML was a pain in the butt and usually not done.
I suppose XHTML might have been useful as part of a document management/transformation system, but it didn't seem to offer much to most web developers.
I'm certainly not using Word for programming or generating HTML ;p
Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.
True that Word reformats documents for different printer targets. However in business environments, almost everyone is using an HP LaserJet, so practically for me this has never been a huge issue.
Many certainly did. At one point, Win2K had about 15% of the installed base (per browser metrics), and virtually all of that was enterprise.
To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.
I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.
"Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.
Prior to Firefox, the Mozilla Seamonkey browser was usually just called "Mozilla". Not to be confused with the project itself or the old Netscape codename, Mozilla was an end-user product in it's own right and heavily promoted by Slashdotters.
True, but it was by the time anyone shipped a commercial product containing GNU. (I think they expired in the late 80s...there's a Stallman essay around about this.)
And certain unix features were never implemented because of things like the Unisys LZW patent.
Do you know of any commercial software that used WISE? Aside from whatever strategic considerations, my impression was that it was cancelled because it sucked and nobody used it. (Including MS internally.)
AT&T's unix-related patents expired decades ago
This is all fine for companies like Facebook and Google that are in the primary business of running IT, and wrote software that accomodates for the shitty hardware they use.
That's the key point. Google wrote their own highly-scalable clustering software, but traditionally IT pays out the nose for clustering and it's cheaper to put the money into hardware.
I don't see how Google/Facebook's requirements could be considered common in the slightest, but I suppose some ghetto sysadmin has dreams of running his enterprise off some loose Asus motherboards.
> long copyright such as the totally ridiculous life + 70 years
Maybe in the abstract sense. But the fact "Steamboat Willie" comes up in every Pirate Bay or RIAA thread is an obvious deflection from the issue at hand.
Probably what they do now. But in the old days, Slashdot suffered from a whole bunch of HTML-related exploits that would have just been impossible on a BBcode site.
Do the defaults on slashdot still require posters to manually type HTML codes for line breaks?
I always thought the misleading options on the posting form were a pretty funny newbie filter. Welcome to slashdot, RTFM.
The Osborne Effect may have been true during the late PPC era when Apple had a flat marketshare and grim upgrade prospects. But the average iPhone/MacBook customer doesn't follow the Apple rumormill and doesn't give a flip.
The obvious example -- Silicon Valley is nearly vintage 1970s suburbia with more chinese/indian food.
> Preloaded distro's eliminate 80% of the problems people complain about Linux,
O rly? The usual consensus is that the linux configuration loaded onto these netbooks was garbage. (In once case apparently a linux netbook shipped without a wifi driver.)
Now obviously OEMs have far more experience integrating XP, but netbooks conclusively disprove that preloading is where the consumer magic happens.
Now, if you want to say that XP subsequently provided a better user experience, feel free; the default OS provided with Asus, Acer, and MSI's linux netbooks were half-assed to say the least.
Because Win32 compatibility is an essential part of the user experience for most users.
Even if the buyers were completely oriented towards internet use, people are still comfortable with their mail clients, IM programs, want to be able to view MS Office attachments, and so on.
The first netbooks were largely adopted by geeks, who like Linux.
Only unintentionally. The software configuration of these things was aimed at the lowest tier user with nothing but a web browser and a MP3 player. They weren't designed to be geek-friendly in the slightest.
Oh yes, QuickTime and Windows Media are well known for their seeking [BUFFERING] ability, which was often disabled anyway.
Flash video certainly isn't perfect, but the quick loading time and ability to create your own UI killed the media player plugins in terms of user experience. (Unless you have some other explanation for why 99% of the sites that used those plugins have moved to Flash.)
> all of which had responsive, native controls
Lol. More like they were slow-loading and designed to stick their logo and shitty "stereo component" UIs and other branding crap in the middle of your page design.
If the user-experience of any of these plugins was any good, one of them would have taken over and Flash video would have never gotten off the ground.