What's wrong with just compressing the XML as it is with an open and easy-to-implement algorithm like gzip or bzip2?
Nothing except it's too easy:-)
Tim is quite right, anyway. If you believe your "documents" need compressed XML, you probably shouldn't be using XML in the first place, because they're probably not documents, just data, and we already have ways of transmitting compressed data.
If I were world dictator, I'd keep the programmers well away from XML until they can demonstrate they have grokked the fullness of markup.
I watched it as well. I can't comment on the scientific accuracy, not being a climatologist, but it was a compellingly presented case against pollution of all forms.
If we believe that pollution is destroying the planet (one way or another) then our politicians, factory owners, and fuel magnates should be tied to their chairs and forced to watch it, as they have been insisting for decades that it's OK to pollute.
"Bills"? What bills fer fuxsake? Everywhere else in the world, kids cellphones are on a "pay as you go" basis, where you buy prepaid credit in any corner store. It's impossible for anyone under 18 and not in full-time employment to get a monthly-bill phone, for blindingly obvious reasons.
Only complete and utter congential cretins like the US telcos would think of giving monthly billable credit to kids. Hardly surprising that the economy is falling to pieces along with the social structure:-)
Will the last person to leave the USA please turn out the lights?
It's not the bias I mind -- as it comes from an IBM site you expect an IBM bias -- but the illiteracy of the writing.
I don't know who "W.W. Warner freelance author" is, but I certainly wouldn't hire him for a professional writing engagement. The whole thing reads like a mid-level 3rd year CS student essay. Not the kind of article you expect IBM to put their name to.
>What are your reasons for running the old standby suite over the Firefox/Thunderbird combo? >[...]I for one regularly need use Mozilla Composer to correct ugly ass webpages
Absolutely. The biggest disappointment of FireFox is that they dropped the editor. BIG mistake. I have dozens of users who keep Moz there because of the editor, where FF just drops them on the floor.
>Just because I could add it back in...
I'm not a programmer, so I've no idea how to do this, or even if it's possible. FF will remain incomplete as a browser until the editor is included.
This can't be said enough: file formats are what determine whether and how easily data is portable, or whether the user is just stuck. ... The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.
Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die:-)
The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...
Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone?:-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).
Tabbed accounts would be cool. I'm downloading it as I write, so I haven't seen it yet, but The One Thing missing last time was a Redirect feature (like Evolution's Redirect, or Elm's "B" button) which lets me forward mail to the right person without making it look like I sent it -- it preserves the original From and Sender and Reply-To so that the recipient can work as if the mail was originally sent to them.
This is utterly essential for anyone working in support, as you constantly get mail which needs to be handled by someone else, but when you send it to them, you don't want them hitting Reply and having the reply come back to you (as it will with Forward) -- you want it to reply to the original sender by default. Until then I'm stuck with sucky old Evolution...
(I did suggest this feature for Moz on bugzilla once: four years later they're still arguing about it because I used the Elm "b" [bounce] key as an example and some prat hijacked the discussion into thinking I was proposing Moz should act as a spam auto-bouncer -- sheesh:-)
Traffic lights in the UK have had rubber-strip switch sensors embedded in the roadway before intersections since the 1950s. They have disappeared from sight but I believe they were replaced by a magnetically-sensitive buried strips at some stage in the 70s or 80s.
Almost. It wasn't letting companies onto the network that fouled it up (nor indeed letting untrained individuals on), but letting companies take over control of the key infrastructure. Participation pro bono publico is fine, but letting for-profit entities decide what happens is a recipe for disaster.
If Canter and Siegel had been punished properly for their crime (been barred for ever from a connection) we wouldn't be in the position we are now. If upstream and backbone sites actually enforced non-spam, non-open-relay, etc rules, we'd be closer to a fully functioning network.
My good friend and colleague Dr Jennings was wont to say "the network is too important to be left to the networkers" -- and I still say he was wrong, dead wrong. The network is too important to be taken out of the hands of the networkers.
And what's all this crap about back 10 to 20 years "before we had an information network"? Excuse me, but 20 years ago I was happily using BITNET, the X.25 networks, and the IP networks (hell, UUCP too if it comes to that). Slow, primitive, but it sure looked like an information network to me.
Maybe the good doctor is confusing the Internet with the Web?
Yes, any format of choice, blah blah blah. But what I want is:
Oggs
Classical music (everything from 1200-1800 would suit me fine:-)
Max two tracks per album, downloadable. I probably want to listen to them several times, from several different recordings, to be sure I'm buying the right CD.
Option to buy CD there and then. I'm not interested in downloading whole CDs 'cos I want the sleeve notes as well as the jewel case and the pretty picture on the front, plus the chance that the CD will last longer than the next 3 years
No restriction on operating system and no DRM. If you really insist, I don't mind if the downloads self-delete from my hard disk after a day or so: they'll have served their purpose and I'll have bought the CD
That is, just like going into a classical music store: listen to what you want, several versions, make comparisons, talk to a few people, then buy.
The point is, WP and DTP systems can now claim to have WYSIRWYG (What You See Is Really What You Get), whereas up to now the average display resolution has been so crummy that WYSIWYG has been a bit of a joke. Although you'd need a full-page monitor to see it...
no one who uses a computer in this country is intelligent enough to actually know what a Dialer is.
There is an element of truth in this: obviously enough people who got caught by pr0n dialers to complain to Telecom. But this reaction is merely a case of protecting people from themselves -- it won't hurt the pr0n merchants, who will always find another way.
There are some people who would prefer the Internet to auto-cull itself. Those users who were careless or unknowledgeable enough to get scammed will panic and stop using it.
And then of course there are those people who actually see pr0n dialers as a valuable service resource:-)
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. [Spike Milligan]
If you feel compelled to add machine-learning, provide an easily-accessible way to turn it OFF, for those who don't want it.
But before you even consider this, you need to fix the bugs in the current release. Two of the most glaring are the misalignment of the navigation icons when you activate a new theme, and the ghastly quality of the printout. Try printing the first sheet of the/. home page on A4, and you'll see that it gets reduced to A5, and then gets sliced off at the right-hand edge.
Currently NO (repeat NO) browsers -- including FF, I'm sorry to say -- print acceptably under RH9/KDE (or anywhere else I've tried). They all slice off the right edge because they are all set to assume Letter, and refuse to narrow themselves to A4 properly. They all get the font size wrong, usually using the screen size setting and assuming the user wants the same point/pixel size in print, or using some imaginary internal value and printing invisibly small or grotesquely large. I *know* it's hard, given the abysmal quality of HTML most sites use, but if you can render it on the screen, why the fsck can't you render the same goddamn thing on paper? The preview doesn't even match the printout!
Without this fixed, you can forget being a competitor for anything.
OK, rant over. I'm really impressed with the rest: it's a LOT better than I had imagined. A few extras would be seriously useful:
1. An UP button is absolutely ESSENTIAL.
2. Enlarge/reduce functions for the button-bar would be nice for new users.
3. Ability to zap the URL displayed in order to paste another, and a button to click to make it go there.
4. Much more powerful right-click menu needed, including ability to direct opening link to a new tab, save the linked target to disk, copy link URL for pasting elsewhere, etc etc.
5. DON'T put up that silly dialog about closing tabs when you quit. Just save the state and re-open them all when it's restarted, and make it configurable to defect this without prompting.
See Konqueror for all these. Konq has problems and bugs too, but it has by far and away the most useful and usable interface of any browser.
Other poster are right about bloat. Keep it lean, but make it more useful. I don't want this "rich browsing experience" that the Flash- peddling marketing suits blather about, but I *do* want more than the rather sparse default. There is a risk that the new user will take one look and say "Good grief, is that all it is?" and never poke around to see the benefits. Make it nice and comfortable for the new user, otherwise you'll never get converts, but make it usefully usable for the professional, who is often the one who gets to tell new users about how good it is.
BTW congratulations on getting it to do XML and XSLT so fast. This is really excellent.
When a user single-clicks a link, the link should open in the current window
No, no, no. Allow the creator to determine this. There are far too many pages which need the user to refer to something in the previous page, so you do want to force a new tab/window because most users don't know about middle-click, and anyway they cannot divine what the next page (the linked page) is going to require them to do.
I agree middle-click should force a new tab/window. I know there are some misguided authors around, but don't use that as an excuse to deny the guided ones some latitude in design.
Whichever way around, opening a new tab should colorise the tab or ping the bell or something so that the user knows a new tab has been opened. And when a new window is opened, it must never be the identical size and position of the old one, overlaying it so that the user is unaware that it's a new window. It must be shifted, or realigned, or smaller, or something.
Yes, of course users shouldn't be so dumb as not to know what's going on, but they are, and designers keep being pressurised by the marketing suits to try to fool the users, so cut the users some slack.
...dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen
Between the hours of 9 and 5 (or whatever) at at the company's expense.
The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers.
If the company wants to contact you by a method you don't have, they must make it available.
What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?
Similar. Most employers are moving towards this model. While there are plenty of unemployed IT support staff, this will only get worse.
Next thing's to work on finding an employer that isn't run by such cheap bastards.
Difficult. The reason business is profitable is that the people who run it know how to cut costs. If there is ever a shortage of IT support staff, they'll start providing home connections, blackberries, cellphones, etc again.
Spilling Coke[tm] on a keyboard is nearly as bad. My daughter was 2 at the time, and knocked a glass of the foul brew all over my little Sharp PC-100 (early pocket computer: all 8Kb of BASIC:-)
That machine had tiny keys, but I'd seen what Coke can do to teeth, so I carefully undid it and took every single one of those suckers out, and the membranes, and the PCBs, and the PSU, and unscrewed all the ports from the casing, and washed or wiped everything and dried it and put it back together and it worked!
I use [...] whatever else is appropriate to get the job done. I only wish more of my peers could understand this
Damn right. They said "use Java", which doesn't necessarily mean "write programs in Java".
I use applications written in Java daily, some of them very heavily (Tomcat, Cocoon, Saxon, etc). I don't use them because they're written in Java: I use them because they are tools for the job I do. They could be written in COBOL for all I care.
The pro-Java lobby need to give up this attitude that people use Java applications primarily because they're written in Java. They don't. They use them because they coincidentally happen to do a task that needs doing.
C programmers used to have the same attitude (probably still do, although no-one I know admits to writing C still:-). When the latest whizz-kid successor to Java somes along, this will all change too.
-- Any language which starts by defining its main routine to be void must be brain-dead.
Now you have to learn the juggling act between Gestapo-like police who abuse their powers, and civic-guard style police who are there to protect the public, not attack them.
Welcome to the Real World[tm], America. You've been living in a 19th century Wild West territory for the last 100 years, where a man has freedom to shoot anyone he wishes, and where the government can disobey the law with impunity, enjoying freedoms other countries traded for some approximation to civilisation a long time ago.
Sure, it would be nice not to have to identify oneself on demand, but if you want that sort of society, you're going to have to go back to the Wild West to find it.
I don't mind identifying myself to an authority I can trust not to screw it up. I'm not yet convinced that all police forces fit this description.
On the other hand, I'd settle for a Linux browser that printed in something other than Times and didn't require all contiguous memory to execute in. Moz is The Right Way To Go[tm] but not until they sort these behavioural and performance problems.
One goal, certainly, but the primary goal of the joint stock limited liability company (US: corporation) is to stay in business. In their greed for ever greater short-term profits, regardless of the morality, stockholders are prone to forgetting that if the company goes out of business, they lose not only their investment but any future chance of profits.
Morality is a separate issue: Microsoft and most other businesses whose customer base is the general public regard the users as sheep to be herded and force-fed, and there are many who will agree with them. Most of the sheep are unaware that there is a problem.
If the users are sheep enough to buy into this approach when there is an alternative, that's their problem. Our problem is ensuring that there is an alternative.
Multimode editing in GUI editors would be fine, but that's not the issue.
Dual-mode editors à la vi went out with the Ark. Imagine if you had to press i in Word before you could type text, and had to press Esc before you could do anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing except it's too easy :-)
Tim is quite right, anyway. If you believe your "documents" need compressed XML, you probably shouldn't be using XML in the first place, because they're probably not documents, just data, and we already have ways of transmitting compressed data.
If I were world dictator, I'd keep the programmers well away from XML until they can demonstrate they have grokked the fullness of markup.
If we believe that pollution is destroying the planet (one way or another) then our politicians, factory owners, and fuel magnates should be tied to their chairs and forced to watch it, as they have been insisting for decades that it's OK to pollute.
Only complete and utter congential cretins like the US telcos would think of giving monthly billable credit to kids. Hardly surprising that the economy is falling to pieces along with the social structure :-)
Will the last person to leave the USA please turn out the lights?
I don't know who "W.W. Warner freelance author" is, but I certainly wouldn't hire him for a professional writing engagement. The whole thing reads like a mid-level 3rd year CS student essay. Not the kind of article you expect IBM to put their name to.
>[...]I for one regularly need use Mozilla Composer to correct ugly ass webpages
Absolutely. The biggest disappointment of FireFox is that they dropped the editor. BIG mistake. I have dozens of users who keep Moz there because of the editor, where FF just drops them on the floor.
>Just because I could add it back in...
I'm not a programmer, so I've no idea how to do this, or even if it's possible. FF will remain incomplete as a browser until the editor is included.
...
The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.
Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die :-)
The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...
Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone? :-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).
You should care that it's XML...
This is utterly essential for anyone working in support, as you constantly get mail which needs to be handled by someone else, but when you send it to them, you don't want them hitting Reply and having the reply come back to you (as it will with Forward) -- you want it to reply to the original sender by default. Until then I'm stuck with sucky old Evolution...
(I did suggest this feature for Moz on bugzilla once: four years later they're still arguing about it because I used the Elm "b" [bounce] key as an example and some prat hijacked the discussion into thinking I was proposing Moz should act as a spam auto-bouncer -- sheesh :-)
Traffic lights in the UK have had rubber-strip switch sensors embedded in the roadway before intersections since the 1950s. They have disappeared from sight but I believe they were replaced by a magnetically-sensitive buried strips at some stage in the 70s or 80s.
If Canter and Siegel had been punished properly for their crime (been barred for ever from a connection) we wouldn't be in the position we are now. If upstream and backbone sites actually enforced non-spam, non-open-relay, etc rules, we'd be closer to a fully functioning network.
My good friend and colleague Dr Jennings was wont to say "the network is too important to be left to the networkers" -- and I still say he was wrong, dead wrong. The network is too important to be taken out of the hands of the networkers.
And what's all this crap about back 10 to 20 years "before we had an information network"? Excuse me, but 20 years ago I was happily using BITNET, the X.25 networks, and the IP networks (hell, UUCP too if it comes to that). Slow, primitive, but it sure looked like an information network to me.
Maybe the good doctor is confusing the Internet with the Web?
- Oggs
- Classical music (everything from 1200-1800 would suit me fine
:-)
- Max two tracks per album, downloadable. I probably want to listen to them several times, from several different recordings, to be sure I'm buying the right CD.
- Option to buy CD there and then. I'm not interested in downloading whole CDs 'cos I want the sleeve notes as well as the jewel case and the pretty picture on the front, plus the chance that the CD will last longer than the next 3 years
- No restriction on operating system and no DRM. If you really insist, I don't mind if the downloads self-delete from my hard disk after a day or so: they'll have served their purpose and I'll have bought the CD
That is, just like going into a classical music store: listen to what you want, several versions, make comparisons, talk to a few people, then buy.Oh look, some pigs just flew past...
The point is, WP and DTP systems can now claim to have WYSIRWYG (What You See Is Really What You Get), whereas up to now the average display resolution has been so crummy that WYSIWYG has been a bit of a joke. Although you'd need a full-page monitor to see it...
There is an element of truth in this: obviously enough people who got caught by pr0n dialers to complain to Telecom. But this reaction is merely a case of protecting people from themselves -- it won't hurt the pr0n merchants, who will always find another way.
There are some people who would prefer the Internet to auto-cull itself. Those users who were careless or unknowledgeable enough to get scammed will panic and stop using it.
And then of course there are those people who actually see pr0n dialers as a valuable service resource :-)
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. [Spike Milligan]
I believe it was Beta Starchild who commented that the paperless office would arrive about the same time as the paperless toilet.
Which means never, of course.
What it says. Martha explained it to me a few days ago...
And *please* let me import Konqueror bookmarks :-)
If you feel compelled to add machine-learning, provide an easily-accessible way to turn it OFF, for those who don't want it.
/. home page on A4, and you'll see that it gets reduced to A5, and then gets sliced off at the right-hand edge.
But before you even consider this, you need to fix the bugs in the current release. Two of the most glaring are the misalignment of the navigation icons when you activate a new theme, and the ghastly quality of the printout. Try printing the first sheet of the
Currently NO (repeat NO) browsers -- including FF, I'm sorry to say -- print acceptably under RH9/KDE (or anywhere else I've tried). They all slice off the right edge because they are all set to assume Letter, and refuse to narrow themselves to A4 properly. They all get the font size wrong, usually using the screen size setting and assuming the user wants the same point/pixel size in print, or using some imaginary internal value and printing invisibly small or grotesquely large. I
*know* it's hard, given the abysmal quality of HTML most sites use,
but if you can render it on the screen, why the fsck can't you render the same goddamn thing on paper? The preview doesn't even match the printout!
Without this fixed, you can forget being a competitor for anything.
OK, rant over. I'm really impressed with the rest: it's a LOT better than I had imagined. A few extras would be seriously useful:
1. An UP button is absolutely ESSENTIAL.
2. Enlarge/reduce functions for the button-bar would be nice for new users.
3. Ability to zap the URL displayed in order to paste another, and a button to click to make it go there.
4. Much more powerful right-click menu needed, including ability to direct opening link to a new tab, save the linked target to disk, copy link URL for pasting elsewhere, etc etc.
5. DON'T put up that silly dialog about closing tabs when you quit. Just save the state and re-open them all when it's restarted, and make it configurable to defect this without prompting.
See Konqueror for all these. Konq has problems and bugs too, but it has by far and away the most useful and usable interface of any browser.
Other poster are right about bloat. Keep it lean, but make it more useful. I don't want this "rich browsing experience" that the Flash- peddling marketing suits blather about, but I *do* want more than the rather sparse default. There is a risk that the new user will take one look and say "Good grief, is that all it is?" and never poke around to see the benefits. Make it nice and comfortable for the new user, otherwise you'll never get converts, but make it usefully usable for the professional, who is often the one who gets to tell new users about how good it is.
BTW congratulations on getting it to do XML and XSLT so fast. This is really excellent.
No, no, no. Allow the creator to determine this. There are far too many pages which need the user to refer to something in the previous page, so you do want to force a new tab/window because most users don't know about middle-click, and anyway they cannot divine what the next page (the linked page) is going to require them to do.
I agree middle-click should force a new tab/window. I know there are some misguided authors around, but don't use that as an excuse to deny the guided ones some latitude in design.
Whichever way around, opening a new tab should colorise the tab or ping the bell or something so that the user knows a new tab has been opened. And when a new window is opened, it must never be the identical size and position of the old one, overlaying it so that the user is unaware that it's a new window. It must be shifted, or realigned, or smaller, or something.
Yes, of course users shouldn't be so dumb as not to know what's going on, but they are, and designers keep being pressurised by the marketing suits to try to fool the users, so cut the users some slack.
Between the hours of 9 and 5 (or whatever) at at the company's expense.
The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers.
If the company wants to contact you by a method you don't have, they must make it available.
What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?
Similar. Most employers are moving towards this model. While there are plenty of unemployed IT support staff, this will only get worse.
Next thing's to work on finding an employer that isn't run by such cheap bastards.
Difficult. The reason business is profitable is that the people who run it know how to cut costs. If there is ever a shortage of IT support staff, they'll start providing home connections, blackberries, cellphones, etc again.
That machine had tiny keys, but I'd seen what Coke can do to teeth, so I carefully undid it and took every single one of those suckers out, and the membranes, and the PCBs, and the PSU, and unscrewed all the ports from the casing, and washed or wiped everything and dried it and put it back together and it worked!
Damn right. They said "use Java", which doesn't necessarily mean "write programs in Java".
I use applications written in Java daily, some of them very heavily (Tomcat, Cocoon, Saxon, etc). I don't use them because they're written in Java: I use them because they are tools for the job I do. They could be written in COBOL for all I care.
The pro-Java lobby need to give up this attitude that people use Java applications primarily because they're written in Java. They don't. They use them because they coincidentally happen to do a task that needs doing.
C programmers used to have the same attitude (probably still do, although no-one I know admits to writing C still :-). When the latest whizz-kid successor to Java somes along, this will all change too.
--
Any language which starts by defining its main routine to be void must be brain-dead.
Now you have to learn the juggling act between Gestapo-like police who abuse their powers, and civic-guard style police who are there to protect the public, not attack them.
Welcome to the Real World[tm], America. You've been living in a 19th century Wild West territory for the last 100 years, where a man has freedom to shoot anyone he wishes, and where the government can disobey the law with impunity, enjoying freedoms other countries traded for some approximation to civilisation a long time ago.
Sure, it would be nice not to have to identify oneself on demand, but if you want that sort of society, you're going to have to go back to the Wild West to find it.
I don't mind identifying myself to an authority I can trust not to screw it up. I'm not yet convinced that all police forces fit this description.
No, but it's nice if it does.
On the other hand, I'd settle for a Linux browser that printed in something other than Times and didn't require all contiguous memory to execute in. Moz is The Right Way To Go[tm] but not until they sort these behavioural and performance problems.
One goal, certainly, but the primary goal of the joint stock limited liability company (US: corporation) is to stay in business. In their greed for ever greater short-term profits, regardless of the morality, stockholders are prone to forgetting that if the company goes out of business, they lose not only their investment but any future chance of profits.
Morality is a separate issue: Microsoft and most other businesses whose customer base is the general public regard the users as sheep to be herded and force-fed, and there are many who will agree with them. Most of the sheep are unaware that there is a problem.
If the users are sheep enough to buy into this approach when there is an alternative, that's their problem. Our problem is ensuring that there is an alternative.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Multimode editing in GUI editors would be fine, but that's not the issue.
Dual-mode editors à la vi went out with the Ark. Imagine if you had to press i in Word before you could type text, and had to press Esc before you could do anything else.