Wouldn't it be nice if Frontpage or Mozilla Composer would allow a plain HTML page to be saved and linked along side one with javascript, flash, and other advanced web designs?
The problem there is that the editor has no way to know what your fallbacks are going to be. Let's simplify it by looking at images. Images are supposed to contain an ALT attribute with text to display if the image cannot be displayed (broken link, text-only browser, images disabled, whatever). But the editor can't reliably come up with useful text to put there. It could make a guess based on the filename, but IMG0437.JPG isn't particularly informative.
Same problem with frames, Flash, JavaScript, etc. The editor doesn't know what to substitute unless you tell it. "This page requires Frames" or "Please download Flash" are about all that can be determined programmatically.
Plus it's better in the long run if you can pack your alternative content into the same HTML document. That way there's only one location to worry about -- and one file to keep current -- and you don't need extra logic to redirect visitors based on the featureset of each browser at the moment you last checked them.
Ironically, in the world I live in, web applications that can also take advantage of client-side logic when available are much easier to use than those that can't.
And, like the best satire, it raises good points. Careless use of AJAX does indeed have many of the problems raised, so careful planning and graceful degradation are -- as always -- the key to producing a usable site.
(At least now I know why I didn't see the headline come through on the mailing list. If I had, it woud have been one of the 25% of Jakob Nielsen articles that I actually read.)
That's the kind of combination an idiot would have on his luggage!
Sounds like a classic Star Trek episode
on
Why We Fight
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The story in the summary reminds me of "Conscience of the King" -- a ruthless dictator killed half a colony's population during a famine so there would be enough food for the other half. (The story took place years later, after the ex-dictator had gone into hiding. Kirk and another Enterprise crewman had grown up on that colony, and recognized him in -- of all places -- an acting troupe.)
Not only that, but I imagine many of them are playing music they bought legally -- on their own time -- either in round plastic form or from iTMS, on their home computer.
Many high-security workplaces (think defense contractors) already don't allow USB sticks. They store lots of data and they're easy to hide: just slip one in your pocket.
In the case of Wikipedia, there's a feed of recent edits, and users can set up a watchlist of articles for which they want notification. Unless a page is locked against vandalism, the edit goes live immediately, but if someone's watching, sees the change, and knows that it's bogus, it can be reverted quickly.
It is, of course, statistically possible for an article to have nobody watching it and for the change to get missed by people watching the generic "recent changes" list -- or for it to get spotted, but only by someone who lacks the knowledge to recognize the changes as erroneous.
It's not just people in charge who'll be able to create articles -- it's anyone who's registered. As others have pointed out, that only takes a few seconds.
To make a/. comparison, they're just not letting ACs start threads.
Doesn't really matter. The main issue for playability is whether the gamer has to switch media in mid-game. The capacity -- and for that matter, the physical shape -- of the media isn't an issue except for dictating the number of chunks the game has to be split into.
Everything else being equal*, a 9GB game on one DVD is more convenient than a 1GB game on two CDs.
*In other words, assuming the additional 8GB doesn't impede gameplay itself.
The fact is, there are less people who actually know about something, then those who think they know something.
And there's the challenge of the Internet. If everyone knew what they didn't know as well as what they knew, we wouldn't have so many people spouting off nonsense online.
Or, to put it more intelligibly, if everyone could draw a line between what they do and don't know, and not get the two mixed up. (Of course, one hopes that over time this line would shift as one gained experience, but that might be asking too much.)
As I recall, it was a common practice during the Renaissance for a painter to place the likeness of his patron into paintings of otherwise fictional settings.
The main difference is that the patron was generally a wealthy individual whose face was used as a model, rather than a business whose logo would appear within the setting.
What I find interesting about this study is that it suggests that product placement -- putting brand names into situations where you would expect them to be in the context of the game world -- is effective. Movies and TV have been doing this for years. Remember how every cell phone in The Matrix was Nokia, or the extreme close-up on the Dr. Pepper can when Peter Parker was practicing web shooting in Spider-Man? (And those are relatively recent.)
By immersing the ads into the gameplay, rather than flashing an advertisement on the side of the screen, the ads simply become part of the atmosphere rather than a punch-the-monkey level annoyance.
I'd still prefer fewer advertisements in things I'm already paying for -- commercials in movie theaters, previews on DVDs, etc. -- but integrated ads aren't nearly as bad as some of the alternatives.
Wait, you're telling me that Dallas, Falcom Crest, and Dynasty were launched with 10-year story arcs already sketched out?
And I'll admit I may be misremembering, but isn't a telenovela generally either intended to run for one season, or at least designed one season at a time (like Buffy)?
I've been re-watching B5 with friends who haven't seen it before, and it's been interesting watching their reactions to, say, G'kar over time. The intertwining destinies of Londo and G'kar form one of the best arcs in the show.
Not the same thing at all. B5 was designed as a 5-year story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was designed to end after 5 years, which is why instead of a sixth season, they did a couple of stand-alone TV movies and a spinoff.
Details changed, things got moved around, the first half of season 5 was mainly filler because those stoies got moved up to the end of season 4 -- but it was about the journey from point A in the first episode to point B in the last, and all the points along the way.
The soap opera model is designed to keep going indefinitely. You're not working toward an ultimate destination, you're working from what you have in place to see where you can go next. Even if you have things in mind to resolve one long-term story, you always have another one to launch to keep things going.
JMS has always likened B5 to writing a serialized novel for television. The soap opera model is more like standard super-hero comic books*. You might have a complicated, multi-year X-Men story, but you don't expect it to tell the entire story of the X-Men wrap it up with an epilogue and end the series when you're done.
* I'm not saying this to disparage soap operas or comics, and I'm well aware of comics like Preacher or Sandman that use the other storytelling model.
The Prisoner. Admittedly, it's only 17 episodes, and it's British, and if you really want to get technical, it was intended as a 7(?)-issue miniseries and the network talked them into doing a full series, but it had a beginning, middle and end planned out from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that about not learning history?
... ?
I can't remember. Could someone repeat it for us
Hey, some of us passed it the first time!
Where are the Cheetos?
The problem there is that the editor has no way to know what your fallbacks are going to be. Let's simplify it by looking at images. Images are supposed to contain an ALT attribute with text to display if the image cannot be displayed (broken link, text-only browser, images disabled, whatever). But the editor can't reliably come up with useful text to put there. It could make a guess based on the filename, but IMG0437.JPG isn't particularly informative.
Same problem with frames, Flash, JavaScript, etc. The editor doesn't know what to substitute unless you tell it. "This page requires Frames" or "Please download Flash" are about all that can be determined programmatically.
Plus it's better in the long run if you can pack your alternative content into the same HTML document. That way there's only one location to worry about -- and one file to keep current -- and you don't need extra logic to redirect visitors based on the featureset of each browser at the moment you last checked them.
Funny you should say that, since the article basically took a real Jakob Nielson article and replaced the word "frames" with "AJAX."
Yep. There's a reason that the use of frames has dropped dramatically on the web over the past 5 years or so.
Ironically, in the world I live in, web applications that can also take advantage of client-side logic when available are much easier to use than those that can't.
And, like the best satire, it raises good points. Careless use of AJAX does indeed have many of the problems raised, so careful planning and graceful degradation are -- as always -- the key to producing a usable site.
(At least now I know why I didn't see the headline come through on the mailing list. If I had, it woud have been one of the 25% of Jakob Nielsen articles that I actually read.)
Hey, thanks for giving me the idea. I tried it on my walk to and from lunch today, and succeeded in spotting Venus four times over a 45-minute period!
Remember, he only gets one. If he's used it up, or if the victims gang up on him...
Your USB drive doesn't happen to look like a gold watch, does it?
12345?
That's the kind of combination an idiot would have on his luggage!
The story in the summary reminds me of "Conscience of the King" -- a ruthless dictator killed half a colony's population during a famine so there would be enough food for the other half. (The story took place years later, after the ex-dictator had gone into hiding. Kirk and another Enterprise crewman had grown up on that colony, and recognized him in -- of all places -- an acting troupe.)
Not only that, but I imagine many of them are playing music they bought legally -- on their own time -- either in round plastic form or from iTMS, on their home computer.
Many high-security workplaces (think defense contractors) already don't allow USB sticks. They store lots of data and they're easy to hide: just slip one in your pocket.
In the case of Wikipedia, there's a feed of recent edits, and users can set up a watchlist of articles for which they want notification. Unless a page is locked against vandalism, the edit goes live immediately, but if someone's watching, sees the change, and knows that it's bogus, it can be reverted quickly.
It is, of course, statistically possible for an article to have nobody watching it and for the change to get missed by people watching the generic "recent changes" list -- or for it to get spotted, but only by someone who lacks the knowledge to recognize the changes as erroneous.
The parent post has been moderated as -1, Didn't Read Summary.
Unfortunately, this is an imaginary mod, so it won't actually change the post's score.
It's not just people in charge who'll be able to create articles -- it's anyone who's registered. As others have pointed out, that only takes a few seconds.
/. comparison, they're just not letting ACs start threads.
To make a
Doesn't really matter. The main issue for playability is whether the gamer has to switch media in mid-game. The capacity -- and for that matter, the physical shape -- of the media isn't an issue except for dictating the number of chunks the game has to be split into.
Everything else being equal*, a 9GB game on one DVD is more convenient than a 1GB game on two CDs.
*In other words, assuming the additional 8GB doesn't impede gameplay itself.
The fact is, there are less people who actually know about something, then those who think they know something.
And there's the challenge of the Internet. If everyone knew what they didn't know as well as what they knew, we wouldn't have so many people spouting off nonsense online.
Or, to put it more intelligibly, if everyone could draw a line between what they do and don't know, and not get the two mixed up. (Of course, one hopes that over time this line would shift as one gained experience, but that might be asking too much.)
As I recall, it was a common practice during the Renaissance for a painter to place the likeness of his patron into paintings of otherwise fictional settings.
The main difference is that the patron was generally a wealthy individual whose face was used as a model, rather than a business whose logo would appear within the setting.
So I guess the answer is "yes."
What I find interesting about this study is that it suggests that product placement -- putting brand names into situations where you would expect them to be in the context of the game world -- is effective. Movies and TV have been doing this for years. Remember how every cell phone in The Matrix was Nokia, or the extreme close-up on the Dr. Pepper can when Peter Parker was practicing web shooting in Spider-Man? (And those are relatively recent.)
By immersing the ads into the gameplay, rather than flashing an advertisement on the side of the screen, the ads simply become part of the atmosphere rather than a punch-the-monkey level annoyance.
I'd still prefer fewer advertisements in things I'm already paying for -- commercials in movie theaters, previews on DVDs, etc. -- but integrated ads aren't nearly as bad as some of the alternatives.
Wait, you're telling me that Dallas, Falcom Crest, and Dynasty were launched with 10-year story arcs already sketched out?
And I'll admit I may be misremembering, but isn't a telenovela generally either intended to run for one season, or at least designed one season at a time (like Buffy)?
I've been re-watching B5 with friends who haven't seen it before, and it's been interesting watching their reactions to, say, G'kar over time. The intertwining destinies of Londo and G'kar form one of the best arcs in the show.
Not the same thing at all. B5 was designed as a 5-year story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was designed to end after 5 years, which is why instead of a sixth season, they did a couple of stand-alone TV movies and a spinoff.
Details changed, things got moved around, the first half of season 5 was mainly filler because those stoies got moved up to the end of season 4 -- but it was about the journey from point A in the first episode to point B in the last, and all the points along the way.
The soap opera model is designed to keep going indefinitely. You're not working toward an ultimate destination, you're working from what you have in place to see where you can go next. Even if you have things in mind to resolve one long-term story, you always have another one to launch to keep things going.
JMS has always likened B5 to writing a serialized novel for television. The soap opera model is more like standard super-hero comic books*. You might have a complicated, multi-year X-Men story, but you don't expect it to tell the entire story of the X-Men wrap it up with an epilogue and end the series when you're done.
* I'm not saying this to disparage soap operas or comics, and I'm well aware of comics like Preacher or Sandman that use the other storytelling model.
The Prisoner. Admittedly, it's only 17 episodes, and it's British, and if you really want to get technical, it was intended as a 7(?)-issue miniseries and the network talked them into doing a full series, but it had a beginning, middle and end planned out from the start.