its the first time the graphical web is begin used as more than a browser page.
Umm... what about Dashboard widgets in Mac OS X tiger? They also are built out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (in that case, using Safari's WebKit rather than Opera's engine). In fact, the main differences seem to be that they use a different config file and the zipped bundles use a different structure.
There's been some discussion on the Opera forums as to compatibility, and last I looked the running theory was that it should be really simple to convert most widgets between Dashboard format and Opera format.
What is new is that this is (AFAIK) the first platform of its type that works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Dashboard is Mac-only, Konfabulator is Windows/Mac (and I beleive it's possible to write Windows-only or Mac-only Konfabulator -- excuse me, Yahoo Widgets). But you can write an Opera widget and run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Add in the fact that Opera's big in the mobile market, and you've got a very wide non-web platform availble using web technologies.
If Opera 9 has decent CSS support I might agree. Opera 8's CSS support was pretty crappy.
No offense... but WTF have you been smoking?
Opera 8 had pretty damn good CSS support. Well ahead of IE (but then what isn't these days) and comparable to Firefox and Safari. The problem is that no rendering engine today supports the *entire* spec, and each engine supports a slightly different subset.
To make up some numbers, Gecko 1.8 and Opera 8 might each support 90% of CSS2 specs, plus 5% of CSS3, but the subset of CSS2 covered by both browsers might be 85%, and the shared subset of CSS3 might be 2%.
Position Is Everything and How To Create have some nice examples showing errors or gaps in various browsers' support. There are techniques Opera gets right that Gecko doesn't alongside techniques that Gecko gets right that Opera doesn't.
They seem to be very similar to Mac OS X's widgets -- HTML/CSS/JavaScript -- with a few differences. Namely the config file is a differnt format, and while Dashboard widgets are put in a widgetname.wdgt folder and then zipped, Opera widgets are put in a zip file that's renamed as widgetname.wdgt.
In theory, as long as you're not doing anything Mac-specific, you could write one widget and use a Makefile or script to automatically create both Opera and Dashboard versions.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware.
Not anymore, as of version 8.5 (last September).
And even when it was, at least it was benign adware like Eudora in sponsored mode, not nasty adware that brought up a zillion pop-ups behind your back, inserted extra links into web pages, and surreptitiously installed more pop-up generators.
Granted, the ad bar was #*@!$ annoying, but it was hardly in the same class as, say, Gator/Claria/whatever.
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 1
Funny thing: Netscape was free for educational and (IIRC) government use. Given that so many of the people on the internet at the time were college students, that's a large market segment that they didn't lose because they weren't worried about it in the first place.
The market they lost was the business market. Companies that bout 10, 30, 100 copies to put on their employees' desks. That, and ISPs looking to provide a browsr for their users. Back then you couldn't take a brand-new computer and download a browser -- you had to have some way to get that browser. Usually ISPs would send their new customers a couple of floppy disks with the basics -- a web browser, an email program, and maybe an FTP client.
IIRC AOL had their own built-in browser, then replaced it with an IE shell. At the time they bought Netscape, it was already on 4.0.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually the Linux version has finally become a nice browser.
It seems to take Opera a few versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. Opera for Linux debuted at version 5, and was -- well, the only reason I paid for it (I was already a paying customer on Windows) was that I wanted to encourage them to keep going in the Linux market. Fortunately that strategy seems to have worked, as Opera 8 is excellent on both Windows and Linux.
I don't remember when they started the Mac version, but it's taken a while to catch up in stability. I think I tried it around version 6 and it was terrible at the time, but the last time I tried it, it was much better. With luck Opera 9 will be the version whre it finally catches up.
Lately they've been doing simultaneous releases on Windows, Linux and Mac. (I haven't been keeping track of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc, so I'm not sure about those.) The last major delay I recall was 8.0, where they held onto the Mac version for a few weeks, probably for polishing.
Re:Firefox:A tripartite golden braid
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 3, Funny
this is/., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!
Ask not what you think of your country. Ask what your country thinks of you!
They loved the Big Bang; it's a singular creation event of absolutely enormous glory and power.
That's something I've never understood about Christian sects that despise the concept of the Big Bang. Yeah, it doesn't fit with young-Earth creationism, but it's extremely compatible with the concept of a Creator.
I wish more people understood that "Theory X does not require the existence of God" is different from "Theory X rejects the existence of God." Plenty of religious scientists are capable of making this distinction. Plenty of religious laymen* don't seem to be.
Funny, the comment I read only talked about determining a party's economic policy. It didn't say anything about a "real" scientist's political leanings and/or voting record.
Heck, considering the number of scientists dependant on government grants, you might expect them to vote Republican on the basis that someone spending like drunken cowboys is more likely to fund them.
You've helped demonstrate the parent post's point, though, which is that it's too easy to filter things through preconceptions instead of seeing what's actually there.
But do MDI and SDI really exist in the same way on the Mac as they do on Windows? Having a single menu bar at the top of the screen makes a big difference.
Photoshop on a Mac and a maximized Photoshop on Windows work almost exactly the same, as far as the user is concerned. The only difference is that on Windows you get a flat background behind everything, whle on Mac OS you can see the desktop in the background.
Sure, if you've got other apps open, you can mix-n-match, but for the base case of one app open with multiple docs, it's nearly identical.
Those of us who manage free high-volume mailing lists will be removing aol addresses from those list
Why? According to TFA they aren't going to charge you to send them mail, they're going to charge you to be on their enhanced whitelist.
Let's look at this with an airport metaphor: They're charging people to get in the VIP line. (Or, more precisely, they're letting someone else charge to do the background checks and put you on the VIP list.) If you don't pay, you stand in the normal line, with the normal security measures. You'll still make your flight, as long as you're not carrying a nail file.
OK, maybe the airport metaphor wasn't the best choice...
That's what he means by "fuzzy." Coming up with a hash that will catch *mostly*-identical mails (and, one hopes, not pick up too many false positives). Razor/Cloudmark does things this way, and has a fairly goot detection rate even though spammers have beentrying to use hash-busters to defeat it for at least 4 years.
Back then, Microsoft was not going to just let anyone who could pony up the cash get their mail sent through to subscribers. And now, AOL isn't going to just let senders pay to get through to AOL recipients.
In both that case and this one, the mail provider is turning to a third-party accreditation service. That means Goodmail (or in the previous case, Bonded Sender), does its own checking on the senders -- and yes, charges a fee. But in neither case is it a pay-to-spam scheme, and in neither case is it a matter where *not* paying will guarantee that you get dropped in the bit bucket.
You really have to wonder whether they would've decided to update their apps sooner. Though given that Intel Macs for developers have been available for at least 6 months, maybe they weren't far enough along on the transition at the time of the merger.
If I had mod points today......well, I would've disqualified myself already by posting in the thread, but if I had mod points *and* hadn't posted, you'd be getting modded up.
A few months ago, the IE team asked web developers to switch from using CSS hacks (which depend on additional bugs which may not get fixed at the same time as the ones you're working around) to using Conditional Comments, which let you target specific versions of IE using intended functionality rather than bug side effects.
This still requires effort on the part of web developers, but they at least tried to get the ball rolling back in October.
It can also be mitigated by checking for capabilities rather than browsers. For example, look for a DOM function, and if you don't find it, look for the IE function, instead of the other way around. It's the way they recommended handling AJAX when they announced the native (i.e. non-ActiveX) implementation of XMLHTTPRequest.
if (has standard function) {
do standards-based stuff for Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7, etc.
}
else if (has IE function) {
do IE-specific stuff
}
else {
do fallback stuff for primitive browsers
}
From looking at my own sites, half the bugs have been the result of CSS hacks I'd forgotten about, and the other half have been attributed to a particular bug in the new beta/preview/whatever: Horizontal padding is applied incorrectly on absolutely positioned elements, causing the text to overflow the right edge of the box. I put together a testcase and reproted it on the IE blog, where I found that at least 2 other people had reported the same bug.
It's basic web accessibility: any link that goes to something other than another web page -- an email, a video clip, an archive... or a PDF -- should be labeled or should at least be obvious from the text of the link itself. Remeber, Acrobat Reader takes time to load.
All it takes is adding something like "[PDF]" right after the link.
My god, that blog has changed since the last time I looked at it!
I don't recall there being any ads at all back in... November? October? I think he was a week or two in at the time, and I definitely remember the "A Wife's perspective" entry. Maybe an AdWords box. Though I suppose I could have had a stricter AdBlock config on that computer.
But an ad banner below each headline on the category archives? Three sets of Google Adwords on the individual posts? Plus the other sidebar ads? That seems a bit excessive.
I understand using ads to offset hosting costs, and I understand using ads to make some money... but there's a point at which it stops being a blog and starts being a bunch of banners with a little content.
Slashdot Mirror
its the first time the graphical web is begin used as more than a browser page.
Umm... what about Dashboard widgets in Mac OS X tiger? They also are built out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (in that case, using Safari's WebKit rather than Opera's engine). In fact, the main differences seem to be that they use a different config file and the zipped bundles use a different structure.
There's been some discussion on the Opera forums as to compatibility, and last I looked the running theory was that it should be really simple to convert most widgets between Dashboard format and Opera format.
What is new is that this is (AFAIK) the first platform of its type that works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Dashboard is Mac-only, Konfabulator is Windows/Mac (and I beleive it's possible to write Windows-only or Mac-only Konfabulator -- excuse me, Yahoo Widgets). But you can write an Opera widget and run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Add in the fact that Opera's big in the mobile market, and you've got a very wide non-web platform availble using web technologies.
If Opera 9 has decent CSS support I might agree. Opera 8's CSS support was pretty crappy.
No offense... but WTF have you been smoking?
Opera 8 had pretty damn good CSS support. Well ahead of IE (but then what isn't these days) and comparable to Firefox and Safari. The problem is that no rendering engine today supports the *entire* spec, and each engine supports a slightly different subset.
To make up some numbers, Gecko 1.8 and Opera 8 might each support 90% of CSS2 specs, plus 5% of CSS3, but the subset of CSS2 covered by both browsers might be 85%, and the shared subset of CSS3 might be 2%.
Position Is Everything and How To Create have some nice examples showing errors or gaps in various browsers' support. There are techniques Opera gets right that Gecko doesn't alongside techniques that Gecko gets right that Opera doesn't.
They seem to be very similar to Mac OS X's widgets -- HTML/CSS/JavaScript -- with a few differences. Namely the config file is a differnt format, and while Dashboard widgets are put in a widgetname.wdgt folder and then zipped, Opera widgets are put in a zip file that's renamed as widgetname.wdgt.
In theory, as long as you're not doing anything Mac-specific, you could write one widget and use a Makefile or script to automatically create both Opera and Dashboard versions.
Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware.
Not anymore, as of version 8.5 (last September).
And even when it was, at least it was benign adware like Eudora in sponsored mode, not nasty adware that brought up a zillion pop-ups behind your back, inserted extra links into web pages, and surreptitiously installed more pop-up generators.
Granted, the ad bar was #*@!$ annoying, but it was hardly in the same class as, say, Gator/Claria/whatever.
Funny thing: Netscape was free for educational and (IIRC) government use. Given that so many of the people on the internet at the time were college students, that's a large market segment that they didn't lose because they weren't worried about it in the first place.
The market they lost was the business market. Companies that bout 10, 30, 100 copies to put on their employees' desks. That, and ISPs looking to provide a browsr for their users. Back then you couldn't take a brand-new computer and download a browser -- you had to have some way to get that browser. Usually ISPs would send their new customers a couple of floppy disks with the basics -- a web browser, an email program, and maybe an FTP client.
IIRC AOL had their own built-in browser, then replaced it with an IE shell. At the time they bought Netscape, it was already on 4.0.
Actually the Linux version has finally become a nice browser.
It seems to take Opera a few versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. Opera for Linux debuted at version 5, and was -- well, the only reason I paid for it (I was already a paying customer on Windows) was that I wanted to encourage them to keep going in the Linux market. Fortunately that strategy seems to have worked, as Opera 8 is excellent on both Windows and Linux.
I don't remember when they started the Mac version, but it's taken a while to catch up in stability. I think I tried it around version 6 and it was terrible at the time, but the last time I tried it, it was much better. With luck Opera 9 will be the version whre it finally catches up.
Lately they've been doing simultaneous releases on Windows, Linux and Mac. (I haven't been keeping track of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc, so I'm not sure about those.) The last major delay I recall was 8.0, where they held onto the Mac version for a few weeks, probably for polishing.
this is /., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!
Ask not what you think of your country.
Ask what your country thinks of you!
Nah, they vote. They just tend to vote for Kang or Kodos, like everyone else.
They loved the Big Bang; it's a singular creation event of absolutely enormous glory and power.
That's something I've never understood about Christian sects that despise the concept of the Big Bang. Yeah, it doesn't fit with young-Earth creationism, but it's extremely compatible with the concept of a Creator.
I wish more people understood that "Theory X does not require the existence of God" is different from "Theory X rejects the existence of God." Plenty of religious scientists are capable of making this distinction. Plenty of religious laymen* don't seem to be.
*I'm entirely aware of the irony in this phrase.
Funny, the comment I read only talked about determining a party's economic policy. It didn't say anything about a "real" scientist's political leanings and/or voting record.
Heck, considering the number of scientists dependant on government grants, you might expect them to vote Republican on the basis that someone spending like drunken cowboys is more likely to fund them.
You've helped demonstrate the parent post's point, though, which is that it's too easy to filter things through preconceptions instead of seeing what's actually there.
But do MDI and SDI really exist in the same way on the Mac as they do on Windows? Having a single menu bar at the top of the screen makes a big difference.
Photoshop on a Mac and a maximized Photoshop on Windows work almost exactly the same, as far as the user is concerned. The only difference is that on Windows you get a flat background behind everything, whle on Mac OS you can see the desktop in the background.
Sure, if you've got other apps open, you can mix-n-match, but for the base case of one app open with multiple docs, it's nearly identical.
Strangely, I've never heard anyone claim that GIMP *was* sufficient for graphics arts in the printing industry. I take it your experience differs?
Those of us who manage free high-volume mailing lists will be removing aol addresses from those list
Why? According to TFA they aren't going to charge you to send them mail, they're going to charge you to be on their enhanced whitelist.
Let's look at this with an airport metaphor: They're charging people to get in the VIP line. (Or, more precisely, they're letting someone else charge to do the background checks and put you on the VIP list.) If you don't pay, you stand in the normal line, with the normal security measures. You'll still make your flight, as long as you're not carrying a nail file.
OK, maybe the airport metaphor wasn't the best choice...
That's what he means by "fuzzy." Coming up with a hash that will catch *mostly*-identical mails (and, one hopes, not pick up too many false positives). Razor/Cloudmark does things this way, and has a fairly goot detection rate even though spammers have beentrying to use hash-busters to defeat it for at least 4 years.
What's so +2 Insightful about demonstrating that you haven't read the article?
It's very much like the article Microsoft Will Sell Whitelist Services For Hotmail from 2004, and just as misleading. Only the names and headlines have changed.
Back then, Microsoft was not going to just let anyone who could pony up the cash get their mail sent through to subscribers. And now, AOL isn't going to just let senders pay to get through to AOL recipients.
In both that case and this one, the mail provider is turning to a third-party accreditation service. That means Goodmail (or in the previous case, Bonded Sender), does its own checking on the senders -- and yes, charges a fee. But in neither case is it a pay-to-spam scheme, and in neither case is it a matter where *not* paying will guarantee that you get dropped in the bit bucket.
What Would Macromedia Have Done?
You really have to wonder whether they would've decided to update their apps sooner. Though given that Intel Macs for developers have been available for at least 6 months, maybe they weren't far enough along on the transition at the time of the merger.
If I had mod points today... ...well, I would've disqualified myself already by posting in the thread, but if I had mod points *and* hadn't posted, you'd be getting modded up.
A few months ago, the IE team asked web developers to switch from using CSS hacks (which depend on additional bugs which may not get fixed at the same time as the ones you're working around) to using Conditional Comments, which let you target specific versions of IE using intended functionality rather than bug side effects.
This still requires effort on the part of web developers, but they at least tried to get the ball rolling back in October.
It can also be mitigated by checking for capabilities rather than browsers. For example, look for a DOM function, and if you don't find it, look for the IE function, instead of the other way around. It's the way they recommended handling AJAX when they announced the native (i.e. non-ActiveX) implementation of XMLHTTPRequest.
if (has standard function) {
do standards-based stuff for Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7, etc.
}
else if (has IE function) {
do IE-specific stuff
}
else {
do fallback stuff for primitive browsers
}
From looking at my own sites, half the bugs have been the result of CSS hacks I'd forgotten about, and the other half have been attributed to a particular bug in the new beta/preview/whatever: Horizontal padding is applied incorrectly on absolutely positioned elements, causing the text to overflow the right edge of the box. I put together a testcase and reproted it on the IE blog, where I found that at least 2 other people had reported the same bug.
It's basic web accessibility: any link that goes to something other than another web page -- an email, a video clip, an archive... or a PDF -- should be labeled or should at least be obvious from the text of the link itself. Remeber, Acrobat Reader takes time to load.
All it takes is adding something like "[PDF]" right after the link.
My god, that blog has changed since the last time I looked at it!
I don't recall there being any ads at all back in... November? October? I think he was a week or two in at the time, and I definitely remember the "A Wife's perspective" entry. Maybe an AdWords box. Though I suppose I could have had a stricter AdBlock config on that computer.
But an ad banner below each headline on the category archives? Three sets of Google Adwords on the individual posts? Plus the other sidebar ads? That seems a bit excessive.
I understand using ads to offset hosting costs, and I understand using ads to make some money... but there's a point at which it stops being a blog and starts being a bunch of banners with a little content.
D'oh! Forgot the link in the last post:
Rummy Caption Contest
You *will* use Preview.... You *will* use Preview...
You are getting sleepy... sleepy...
I guess I can kind of see how it's different, as we aren't removing the top ten feet from all of mars
Not to mention the fact that meteorites do strike the planet from time to time...