How much of the HTML5 spec, still 5 years away, is already in production use today?
It's not a matter of forseeing, it's a matter of getting the specs out in a timely manner compared to implementations. Otherwise you'll lead to the fragmentation battles that plagued CSS. The box model is a great example. The spec wasn't clear, Moz and MS implemented different solutions, and the next version of the spec settled on the Moz solution, pissing off MS.
Right now vendors are implementing the preliminary specs, and there is inconstancy. W3C waiting for 2014 is basically them saying "We'll let the market sort it out and then stamp our approval on the defacto winner". If you're going to follow that approach, what's the point of the standards body to begin with?
As a counter-anecdote, when I moved and updated my card addresses, it took me several months to remember to punch in my new zip code at the gas station pumps. When I used my old zip code, the transaction was consistently blocked.
You're confusing copyrights with patents. They are operate very differently; the distinction is not simply legal jargon or an academic argument. Even though both are lumped together under the term "intellectual property", they are not interchangeable
You missed my point. If you want to do the same thing with your sites that you taught your grandparents to do 10 years ago, you still can. The rest of the world, including your grandparents, have moved on.
Websites aren't novelties anymore, they're everyday things. You don't gain any tech prestige or bragging rights by simply having or building one. Because of this commoditization, people expect substantially MORE from sites than they did 10 years ago. People want to be able to make (and manage) comments, easily share, block spam, embed shared videos from YouTube, automate syndication from RSS feeds. These are not simple tasks, and were all but impossible 10 years ago with the skills you taught your grandparents.
If you want the same quality and functionality of sites from 10 years ago, go ahead. The rest of the world wants more, and they want it easier.
If you want more adoption, focus HTML on what actually is important - layout that's understandable to the masses.
I'm pretty confident that HTML is the most widely adopted layout language ever judging by the proliferation of applications and devices that can parse and generate it. Needing "more adoption" is not a problem for it.
Or would you, as a user, prefer to deal with purchasing licenses for every computer you want to install a particular codec onto? I doubt you would want this burden, so why suggest that Linux distributions should bare it?
That's a licensing issue. Not a browser vs. OS issue. By pushing codec support to the browser, then the browser makers have to license every codec. Someone still has to deal with the licensing.
From a technical level, its' better for the OS to handle codecs because the OS should handle the various low-level hardware APIs, accelerations, splitters, and everything else that goes into decoding the media. Right now, Google has to implement the decoding each time on every OS they support. Safari has to implement the decoding on each OS they support. Firefox, Opera, etc... You end up with #ofOS times #ofBrowser different implementations of EACH major codec. Hand that shit off to the OS, that's what it exists for. The OS is probably already implementing most of those codecs anyways for local media players.
Example.com at least isn't a change in that scenario because it used to resolve to a specific server. Now that it resolves with a redirect, I don't see much difference at the DNS layer.
I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much. Is that better? I'd argue, no.
You still can. Not that much has changed. In fact, HTML+CSS now is easier IMHO than 10 years ago and I've been doing this since '95. The real issue you're getting to is that people want much more out of their websites than they did 10 years ago and that requires more skillsets. A Geocities page just doesn't cut it anymore since now people are more familiar with what's possible and have raised their expectations.
What you couldn't do 10 years ago, and can do today, is teach your grandparents how to rollout a Wordpress site and change the theme to whatever they'd like. They'd be up and posting with something that looks nice and is legible, showing off the latest video of your cousins in less time than it would have taken you to explain <head> vs. <body> and how to find and fix a code typo 10 years ago.
The same can be said for Mozilla. By implementing a feature like the header, they can choose how they want to provide this kind of improvement to users. On the other hand, if they wait around for the FCC to force a decision, they might get locked into a method that Microsoft developed (with licensing costs of course), a method large ISPs like AT&T or TimeWarner prefer (ISP provided advertising like television), or something completely out of the blue that will get held up in court proceedings for decades.
Being first out of the gate on this lets Mozilla set the bar that everyone else has to match or beat, and gives them strong leverage if mandatory solutions start being discussed.
No the Constitution itself would not be wrong, but the portrayal of the US Constitution as science would be wrong.
You're arguing semantics, and as I mentioned, in this specific situation using "wrong" is acceptable because ID is pretending to be science, when it is not.
I agree that direct political influence is and probably should be weak, and that people grasp at whatever justification available to support their pre-existing opinions.
Religious authority can hurt political discussion, but organizational authority does have importance and influence regardless of source. It may not have merit but it cannot be simply ignored.
Hence my examples. I won't solicit the opinion of Westfield's CEO on net neutrality, but if he makes a statement about it, I would pay attention because that would indicate policy or actions the company may be guided into taking. That position and those actions may or may not align with what I would like, and if they've chose to act on them, I'd like to know what that means for my efforts.
I can't choose to ignore it when a major entity takes an interest in something important to me just because I think they're unqualified in that arena. Many people thought Bush Jr. was unqualified to be President, but he ended up there. If you dismissively ignored him or his core voter group, you made a big mistake.
Find out what official positions are before lumping in what you think they are. The Catholic church does not encourage homophobia. Unlike many churches, it does not try to claim homosexuality is a choice or that it doesn't exist. The Catholic church acknowledges that people are, and can be gay, and that in and of itself is not inherently wrong.
The Catholic church does consider the act of homosexual sex to be wrong, because its dogma teaches that A) any sex outside of marriage is wrong, B) marriage is for both love AND procreation (it cannot be for simply one of the two reasons), and therefore C) homosexual marriage is wrong because it inherently excludes procreation.
You are absolute correct in your point that reinforcing bigotry with religious arguments is wrong when your religion preaches tolerance and acceptance (turn the other cheek). Some Christian churches (especially fundamentalist ones) hold to a simple, individual literal interpretation of the Bible (in the translation of their choosing). The Catholic church, on the other hand, does not exclude non-biblical sources in its dogma, and relies heavily on centuries of tradition paired with centuries of theological analysis, discussion, and debate.
I'd be interested to see who (as individuals) you come up with that both accept Genesis as allegorical AND also quote the Bible as literal truth to back up homophobic agendas. When you group half the planet's population under one lump group of "Christianity" you're bound to get some differences in opinion that make a collective stereotype self-conflicting. Just look at the common stereotype of/. readership for simpler and more personalized example.
I'm not disagreeing with you in principal, just re-affirming that official Catholic catechism is that Genesis is not literal truth. Catholics, if they follow Catholic dogma, should not be taking it literally, therefore have no religion-based reason for adopting I.D.
The key distinction between I.D. and the Catholic position, is that Catholic dogma accepts evolution and the big bang, discovered/extrapolated through science, as being parts of God's process, perhaps his tools, perhaps only a portion of God's intent. However, I.D. is purely a non-scientific attack on science itself, with the intent of making a Genesis-literal creation belief more palatable.
I don't agree that I.D. is considered blasphemous, because it's not religion, and on the thin surface, it's portrayed as not being about God. It's a far more insidious a tactic than simply being religious preaching. It's an attack on the credibility and underpinnings of the scientific method itself, and that isn't blasphemy.
What would be considered blasphemous to Catholicism would be any argument that explicitly denies the existence of God, or the other fundamental beliefs of the Catholic Church.
The beauty of true science, is that while it doesn't prove existence of God, it also cannot disprove the existence of God. Catholic teaching embraces this, and it becomes a non-issue. I.D. proponents are attempting to exploit this scientific/theological distinction to introduce doubt about science and discredit what they consider blasphemous.
In this case "wrong" is applicable because I.D. supporters are attempting to portray I.D. as science, and establish a perception of equivalent validity to big bang/evolutionary theories, but without any support beyond "the accepted scientific theories have some holes" and playing up semantic differences in the definition of "theory". As people have brought up many times in this discussion, ID is not a valid scientific theory (or even hypothesis) because it is inherently untestable, unverifiable, and unable to be disproven.
I'd say that official stances from an organization that has approximately 1/5th of the world's population as members certainly matters. Just because you are dismissive of the organization or disagree with their message them doesn't change that. Pretending otherwise is the exact same failed juvenile mentality that led America to ignore Communist China up until Nixon.
The difference in the Council of Bishops vs. some random person, is that Bishops are an established position of leadership and authority within the organization. You may not care of the random guy from the shopping mall has to say about an issue, but you might care more about what the general manager of the mall might say, and you certainly would care what the Board of Directors of Westfield Shopping Centers Inc. might say, because it reflects where the organization as a whole might be headed or might be directing their efforts.
Dismissively ignoring their statements simply because you don't like who they are and what you think they stand for is short-sided and naieve.
Actually the official position of the Catholic Church is that the Big Bang and evolution are the best models currently available to describe the universe that God created, and the process of how we came into being. There is no conflict between evolution and Catholic teaching, and the Big Bang was originally put forward by a priest, but dismissed by much of the rest of the scientific community as being too much like a "God did it" theory.
ID isn't blasphemous to Catholics because it's limiting God. ID is just wrong because A) it isn't science. B) it assumes taking the BIble literally. Catholics theologians are fully aware of how the Bible has changed, is sometimes self-contradictory, and has been reinterpreted over the centuries, and so taking a specific translation and treating it as word-for-word literal truth is a simplistic and juvenile approach.
Exactly. At this point, BB's user base is primarily repeat customers, mostly those with corporate contracts and systems already in place. They aren't getting new users switching from other devices. Rather, it's the opposite. Much Android and iOS growth has come at the expense of BB and WinCE market share.
It's frustrating that only the OS-provided solutions (Safari and IE) are doing this right by handing it off to the OS. The notion that your browser needs to reimplement everything, including video rendering, is what leads to the bloatware we have today. The whole point of having an OS is to have a common framework and API layer that all applications hosted on it can access. Instead, Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all re-developing their own video rendering, for each platform they exist on, AND each one needs to write its own video-card accelerator layers for each platform it exists on.
In the example you just made, I can see that the benefit is that you don't need another layer (PHP, stored queries, etc) to stitch the thread back together. The data structure inherently "knows" how the thread of posts are assembled.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
So much of a disaster that both Chrome and Safari both added similar functionality? Sometimes the/. rhetoric is incredibly narrow-minded.
You can't even use it in the US on other CDMA networks (like Sprint), so it's not very likely you'll be able to find a compatible CDMA network overseas.
Also the similar thing happened when the GIF format patent became a problem. It got dropped from a lot of programs where they didn't want to have to pay for a licence.
That's a bit of a false analogy. I am sure that if you tallied up the combined total user base of *ALL* the programs that actually dropped GIF support over the issue, it wouldn't even come close to the size of Photoshop's install base, let alone all the other *major* pieces of software that didn't drop GIF support (Windows, MacOS, IE, Netscape, list continues ad naseum.....)
The GIF patent issue and the "burn GIF day" affected an incredibly tiny (and surprisingly vocal) minority of people and any comparisons to the Chrome situation are only marginally useful. The user numbers and market penetration Chrome has are many orders of magnitude larger than the entire GIF situation, and Chrome is only one of the many major players in this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
How much of the HTML5 spec, still 5 years away, is already in production use today?
It's not a matter of forseeing, it's a matter of getting the specs out in a timely manner compared to implementations. Otherwise you'll lead to the fragmentation battles that plagued CSS. The box model is a great example. The spec wasn't clear, Moz and MS implemented different solutions, and the next version of the spec settled on the Moz solution, pissing off MS.
Right now vendors are implementing the preliminary specs, and there is inconstancy. W3C waiting for 2014 is basically them saying "We'll let the market sort it out and then stamp our approval on the defacto winner". If you're going to follow that approach, what's the point of the standards body to begin with?
As a counter-anecdote, when I moved and updated my card addresses, it took me several months to remember to punch in my new zip code at the gas station pumps. When I used my old zip code, the transaction was consistently blocked.
You're confusing copyrights with patents. They are operate very differently; the distinction is not simply legal jargon or an academic argument. Even though both are lumped together under the term "intellectual property", they are not interchangeable
You missed my point. If you want to do the same thing with your sites that you taught your grandparents to do 10 years ago, you still can. The rest of the world, including your grandparents, have moved on.
Websites aren't novelties anymore, they're everyday things. You don't gain any tech prestige or bragging rights by simply having or building one. Because of this commoditization, people expect substantially MORE from sites than they did 10 years ago. People want to be able to make (and manage) comments, easily share, block spam, embed shared videos from YouTube, automate syndication from RSS feeds. These are not simple tasks, and were all but impossible 10 years ago with the skills you taught your grandparents.
If you want the same quality and functionality of sites from 10 years ago, go ahead. The rest of the world wants more, and they want it easier.
I'm pretty confident that HTML is the most widely adopted layout language ever judging by the proliferation of applications and devices that can parse and generate it. Needing "more adoption" is not a problem for it.
That's a licensing issue. Not a browser vs. OS issue. By pushing codec support to the browser, then the browser makers have to license every codec. Someone still has to deal with the licensing.
From a technical level, its' better for the OS to handle codecs because the OS should handle the various low-level hardware APIs, accelerations, splitters, and everything else that goes into decoding the media. Right now, Google has to implement the decoding each time on every OS they support. Safari has to implement the decoding on each OS they support. Firefox, Opera, etc... You end up with #ofOS times #ofBrowser different implementations of EACH major codec. Hand that shit off to the OS, that's what it exists for. The OS is probably already implementing most of those codecs anyways for local media players.
Example.com at least isn't a change in that scenario because it used to resolve to a specific server. Now that it resolves with a redirect, I don't see much difference at the DNS layer.
Is anything under 1Mbps even useful information? 768Kbps isn't even allowed to be called "broadband" anymore.
You still can. Not that much has changed. In fact, HTML+CSS now is easier IMHO than 10 years ago and I've been doing this since '95. The real issue you're getting to is that people want much more out of their websites than they did 10 years ago and that requires more skillsets. A Geocities page just doesn't cut it anymore since now people are more familiar with what's possible and have raised their expectations.
What you couldn't do 10 years ago, and can do today, is teach your grandparents how to rollout a Wordpress site and change the theme to whatever they'd like. They'd be up and posting with something that looks nice and is legible, showing off the latest video of your cousins in less time than it would have taken you to explain <head> vs. <body> and how to find and fix a code typo 10 years ago.
The same can be said for Mozilla. By implementing a feature like the header, they can choose how they want to provide this kind of improvement to users. On the other hand, if they wait around for the FCC to force a decision, they might get locked into a method that Microsoft developed (with licensing costs of course), a method large ISPs like AT&T or TimeWarner prefer (ISP provided advertising like television), or something completely out of the blue that will get held up in court proceedings for decades.
Being first out of the gate on this lets Mozilla set the bar that everyone else has to match or beat, and gives them strong leverage if mandatory solutions start being discussed.
No the Constitution itself would not be wrong, but the portrayal of the US Constitution as science would be wrong.
You're arguing semantics, and as I mentioned, in this specific situation using "wrong" is acceptable because ID is pretending to be science, when it is not.
I agree that direct political influence is and probably should be weak, and that people grasp at whatever justification available to support their pre-existing opinions.
Religious authority can hurt political discussion, but organizational authority does have importance and influence regardless of source. It may not have merit but it cannot be simply ignored.
Hence my examples. I won't solicit the opinion of Westfield's CEO on net neutrality, but if he makes a statement about it, I would pay attention because that would indicate policy or actions the company may be guided into taking. That position and those actions may or may not align with what I would like, and if they've chose to act on them, I'd like to know what that means for my efforts.
I can't choose to ignore it when a major entity takes an interest in something important to me just because I think they're unqualified in that arena. Many people thought Bush Jr. was unqualified to be President, but he ended up there. If you dismissively ignored him or his core voter group, you made a big mistake.
Find out what official positions are before lumping in what you think they are. The Catholic church does not encourage homophobia. Unlike many churches, it does not try to claim homosexuality is a choice or that it doesn't exist. The Catholic church acknowledges that people are, and can be gay, and that in and of itself is not inherently wrong.
The Catholic church does consider the act of homosexual sex to be wrong, because its dogma teaches that A) any sex outside of marriage is wrong, B) marriage is for both love AND procreation (it cannot be for simply one of the two reasons), and therefore C) homosexual marriage is wrong because it inherently excludes procreation.
You are absolute correct in your point that reinforcing bigotry with religious arguments is wrong when your religion preaches tolerance and acceptance (turn the other cheek). Some Christian churches (especially fundamentalist ones) hold to a simple, individual literal interpretation of the Bible (in the translation of their choosing). The Catholic church, on the other hand, does not exclude non-biblical sources in its dogma, and relies heavily on centuries of tradition paired with centuries of theological analysis, discussion, and debate.
I'd be interested to see who (as individuals) you come up with that both accept Genesis as allegorical AND also quote the Bible as literal truth to back up homophobic agendas. When you group half the planet's population under one lump group of "Christianity" you're bound to get some differences in opinion that make a collective stereotype self-conflicting. Just look at the common stereotype of /. readership for simpler and more personalized example.
I'm not disagreeing with you in principal, just re-affirming that official Catholic catechism is that Genesis is not literal truth. Catholics, if they follow Catholic dogma, should not be taking it literally, therefore have no religion-based reason for adopting I.D.
The key distinction between I.D. and the Catholic position, is that Catholic dogma accepts evolution and the big bang, discovered/extrapolated through science, as being parts of God's process, perhaps his tools, perhaps only a portion of God's intent. However, I.D. is purely a non-scientific attack on science itself, with the intent of making a Genesis-literal creation belief more palatable.
I don't agree that I.D. is considered blasphemous, because it's not religion, and on the thin surface, it's portrayed as not being about God. It's a far more insidious a tactic than simply being religious preaching. It's an attack on the credibility and underpinnings of the scientific method itself, and that isn't blasphemy.
What would be considered blasphemous to Catholicism would be any argument that explicitly denies the existence of God, or the other fundamental beliefs of the Catholic Church.
The beauty of true science, is that while it doesn't prove existence of God, it also cannot disprove the existence of God. Catholic teaching embraces this, and it becomes a non-issue. I.D. proponents are attempting to exploit this scientific/theological distinction to introduce doubt about science and discredit what they consider blasphemous.
In this case "wrong" is applicable because I.D. supporters are attempting to portray I.D. as science, and establish a perception of equivalent validity to big bang/evolutionary theories, but without any support beyond "the accepted scientific theories have some holes" and playing up semantic differences in the definition of "theory". As people have brought up many times in this discussion, ID is not a valid scientific theory (or even hypothesis) because it is inherently untestable, unverifiable, and unable to be disproven.
I'd say that official stances from an organization that has approximately 1/5th of the world's population as members certainly matters. Just because you are dismissive of the organization or disagree with their message them doesn't change that. Pretending otherwise is the exact same failed juvenile mentality that led America to ignore Communist China up until Nixon.
The difference in the Council of Bishops vs. some random person, is that Bishops are an established position of leadership and authority within the organization. You may not care of the random guy from the shopping mall has to say about an issue, but you might care more about what the general manager of the mall might say, and you certainly would care what the Board of Directors of Westfield Shopping Centers Inc. might say, because it reflects where the organization as a whole might be headed or might be directing their efforts.
Dismissively ignoring their statements simply because you don't like who they are and what you think they stand for is short-sided and naieve.
Actually the official position of the Catholic Church is that the Big Bang and evolution are the best models currently available to describe the universe that God created, and the process of how we came into being. There is no conflict between evolution and Catholic teaching, and the Big Bang was originally put forward by a priest, but dismissed by much of the rest of the scientific community as being too much like a "God did it" theory.
ID isn't blasphemous to Catholics because it's limiting God. ID is just wrong because A) it isn't science. B) it assumes taking the BIble literally. Catholics theologians are fully aware of how the Bible has changed, is sometimes self-contradictory, and has been reinterpreted over the centuries, and so taking a specific translation and treating it as word-for-word literal truth is a simplistic and juvenile approach.
Exactly. At this point, BB's user base is primarily repeat customers, mostly those with corporate contracts and systems already in place. They aren't getting new users switching from other devices. Rather, it's the opposite. Much Android and iOS growth has come at the expense of BB and WinCE market share.
It's frustrating that only the OS-provided solutions (Safari and IE) are doing this right by handing it off to the OS. The notion that your browser needs to reimplement everything, including video rendering, is what leads to the bloatware we have today. The whole point of having an OS is to have a common framework and API layer that all applications hosted on it can access. Instead, Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all re-developing their own video rendering, for each platform they exist on, AND each one needs to write its own video-card accelerator layers for each platform it exists on.
In the example you just made, I can see that the benefit is that you don't need another layer (PHP, stored queries, etc) to stitch the thread back together. The data structure inherently "knows" how the thread of posts are assembled.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
So much of a disaster that both Chrome and Safari both added similar functionality? Sometimes the /. rhetoric is incredibly narrow-minded.
Probably not... but if he had gotten the post in a few hours earlier, I might have made the trip across town to see it in action.
Replace "If any even mild terrorist action..." with "WHEN any even mild terrorist action..." and you are 100% spot-on correct.
You can't even use it in the US on other CDMA networks (like Sprint), so it's not very likely you'll be able to find a compatible CDMA network overseas.
Once LTE is rolled out, AND there's an LTE iPhone.
Also the similar thing happened when the GIF format patent became a problem. It got dropped from a lot of programs where they didn't want to have to pay for a licence.
That's a bit of a false analogy. I am sure that if you tallied up the combined total user base of *ALL* the programs that actually dropped GIF support over the issue, it wouldn't even come close to the size of Photoshop's install base, let alone all the other *major* pieces of software that didn't drop GIF support (Windows, MacOS, IE, Netscape, list continues ad naseum.....)
The GIF patent issue and the "burn GIF day" affected an incredibly tiny (and surprisingly vocal) minority of people and any comparisons to the Chrome situation are only marginally useful. The user numbers and market penetration Chrome has are many orders of magnitude larger than the entire GIF situation, and Chrome is only one of the many major players in this issue.