So if my small business was owning a couple of retail buildings I can ignore the ADA?
As long as you aren't providing a public accommodation in your office, you can have a completely inaccessible office. You can run your small business out of your spare bedroom up a flight of narrow, rickety stairs and nobody will care, but the buildings themselves will have all sorts of requirements since they are public accommodations.
Thanks for the reference, my memory must be working on pre-1993 levels as far as limits, but of course between the numerous tax credits and "readily achievable" loopholes, no small business should be looking at a significant expense relative to their size in meeting the requirements.
Also, note that accessibility is only required for all sizes of businesses if it provides a public accommodation, which is a very different bogeyman than saying anyone with a business has to implement all sorts of crazy requirements. If you provide a public accommodation, you've already got to comply with loads of requirements on construction and layout.
Forget flash sites, have you ever tried implementing a Captcha system that was usable by the blind?
Sure. "The capital of Texas is Austin. What state has it's capital located in Austin?"
If the person types in "Texas", they're human and can read/hear English. Obviously you use multiple questions and vary the order of things. Plugins for logic and multiple choice text tests are available on every major web publishing system I'm aware of.
The w3c has several alternatives for captchas on their site, there's nothing magical about captchas that a web site would collapse without them.
You may as well ask "how do I make a staircase accessible to poeple in wheelchairs?" You build a ramp.
Nothing whatsoever. ADA doesn't apply to small business -- MOST regulations of this kind don't apply to small businesses. If Henry's Landscaping has 200 employees and a 25 million dollar headquarters, then yes he will get in trouble under the ADA if his physical location is not accessible. If he's running it out of his garage with 2 other guys, he can put wheelchair barricades up and run a siren to scare away blind people.
So ya, I'm sure the expense is minimal for large companies, but you've got to think about the small businesses too.
Something that is frequently unknown whever laws applying to businesses are discussed is that the vast majority of regulations do not apply to small businesses. Accessibility, equal opportunity employment, etc are all bogeymen dragged out by people as keeping small business down, but they simply don't apply until you reach a certain size (100 employees seems to be a common minimum).
If you have a small business with three employees, you can laugh at people in wheelchairs and refuse to hire black people all you like. The only exception would be if you were trying to sell to the government, in which case they might require you to observe those regulations as a condition of the contract. And if you have a business open to the public, there are other regulations usually requiring accessibility and non-discrimination for customers.
So this ruling won't mean anything to small businesses, and once you have 100 employees you should be turning over at least a few million a year, in which both your construction of wheelchair ramps and accessible website should fit.
they complain about an inherently visual medium not being accessable enough
How is the web an inherently visual medium? It's based entirely on textual data, with support for graphics bolted on to make it prettier. The important things at the Target website are lists of store locations, operating hours, phone numbers, and that's what they were sued over. You don't need a picture to tell someone the address of your store. You don't need a picture to tell someone which brands of irons you carry and how much each model costs. You *should* add pictures of items to increase sales, since people generally like to see what they're buying, but blind people accept that limitation.
This is, quite frankly, a perfectly sensible ruling and something web developers have been warning companies about for nearly a decade. This is not some crazy fringe group out to cause trouble, this is a problem we've all known about for years and years but too many people ignored because it was cheaper or easier to cross your fingers than follow sound advice (although ironically enough, a well-designed (and therefore accessible) site will be cheaper and easier in the long run because of easier maintenance and adaptability).
I've already seen that message (someone else posted it), and they're not talking about what I'm talking about in regards to shadows. They're talking about the lack of a straightforward "drop shadow" tool or effect in Inkscape, but it's easy to fake a drop shadow as they say. But I wasn't commenting on drop shadows, I was commenting on the projected shadows they did poorly, which require imagining how the shape will transform when projected through space (or using a full 3D app to render).
I wasn't complaining, I was commenting. I don't use Gnome on a daily basis, I don't follow the Tango guidelines for my own work, so it makes no difference whatsoever to me if they fix the problems or not. I have a generally positive hope for OSS projects, so I'm glad to comment in my field of expertise when the opportunity arises on Slashdot. Since many OSS developers hang out here, hopefully they learn something and can compete better with commercial systems. I like learning about the developer side of things, so I figure the good developers like learning about the UI and graphics side. There's no way to know unless I post, and I've had lots of great conversations on here over the years.
I'm sharing my views on a discussion board where people discuss things. If nobody from Tango read this, other people form other UI teams will. And pointing out professional details to non-professionals can make them understand where all that time goes, why just knowing which buttons to click in Photoshop is not enough. While I like educating people about what I do for a living and giving feedback on people's work, I don't see it as my responsibility to hunt down everyone doing it incorrectly and give them a personal seminar for free or fix their stuff pro bono.
It's funny, when programmers comment on slashdot and say "Have you seen the code in this app? It's got all sorts of redundant nested loops and inelegant layount, real spaghetti code, no wonder they have trouble getting it to work!", people take it for what its worth. There's no expectation that by making a comment they should just shut up and fix the whole app themselves, or ignore slashdot altogether and privately share their criticism with the app developers in private.
They aren't talking about what I'm talking about there -- there is no spec fo shadows in the Tango docs, and they are saying they left it out because inkscape doesn't support drop shadows yet. But drop shadows (flat shadows), as they say, are easy to fake and use workarounds. I'm talking about cast shadows projected in 3 dimensions. You'd need a full 3D rendering engine to do them computationally -- you pretty much have to do them by eye and just imagining what shadow shape the object would create.
because people are talking about it here? And I read slashdot and like to comment on things?
Do you tend to complain about the poor service of a restaurant on the bulletin boards in your laundry room as well?
If the bulletin board in my laundry room was read by thousands of people who worked in restaurants, yeah, that would be a pretty good place to comment on solvable problems in their industry.
Tango is not just an icon set, it's (theoretically) a whole set of guidelines for interface design, including icons.
I wouldn't waste time critiquing an icon set, but if Gnome really is planning on following these guidelines and the Tango crew really intend for them to be comprehensive and used by all the major open source interface developers, it would be a good idea for their flagship example to be as professional as possible. The lousy shadows were literally the first thing I noticed when I opened the page.
In any case, it's just an icon! It's not even 3D. At 128x128 it's not going to matter that much. I think you're just being pedantic.
I'm sure the Tango folks will be thrilled to learn you really don't care about any of their work. They built a whole group, an extensive web site and extensive guidelines along with the hundreds of icons in the set, I should think they care about the work they're doing and want it to be more than just "good enough". If they want to produce results that are comparable to professional software, then they have to hold themselves to the same pedantic standard that professionals do. It's like building a house and not having the corners be square -- one of the subtle differences that separates most $100k homes from most $500k homes. The average person doesn't consciously notice all the little fit and finish details as they walk throught the house, but they do recognize that there is a difference in quality.
Your professional help would be greatly appreciated if you feel inclined.
These comments are my professional help, I charge for this stuff in real life. Shadows have shapes that relate to the shape of the object. A sphere, a file folder, and a box don't all produce the same shadow shape when illuminated. Shadows are darker at the center and where they meet the object, and then lose density and definition as they reach the outside edges. You can make a pretty good flat shadow by just shading two sides of an icon, but if you want to do a projected floor shadow then you have to represent the silhouette of the object as transformed through space.
Doing a bad floor shadow is more work for worse results than doing a flat shadow. So my professional advice would be that if they are low on time, they should just do flat shadows, but if they want to spend the time, they should think more about how to achieve good projected shadows.
I remember years ago when Gnome was the eye-candy window manager all the kids were showing off. In looking through the screenshots, the most surprising thing is to see that nobody involved with the Tango interface has ever seen what an actual shadow looks like.
If you want to do flat shadows, cool, do them, they're easy and effective. If you want to do three-dimensional shadows, cool, they look even better but take a bit more work. But don't drop the same blurry ellipse at the bottom of every object and think that you're making a three-dimensional shadow, you just make everything look like it's standing on a blurry gray oval, and users really do recognize the less professional look, consciously or not.
what I need is to have a per-site setup (eg xml file) that get's used (automagically) for that site so it's not possible to edit in non-xhtml stuff or use relative URLs instead of absolute, or whatever.
That is basically what Contribute is, in a nutshell. Your skilled, HTML-savvy, technical user sets up the site, sets regions as editable (many small editable regions are better than one big region for obvious reasons), and sets parameters and security, and then Contribute logs in as a client and lets users edit without having to know what they're doing. It's pretty much what Frontpage promised a decade ago, but it actually works and doesn't create horrible code.
You can still get multiple tags due to users selecting things in a lousy manner, but by setting up CSS and styles within the program, you can successfully train most of them to just click in the paragraph and apply a style, which behaves as it should.
What is it with you people and using incredibly bad assumptions to support blinkered arguments ? Why does every shred of thought, rationality and intelligence fly out the window as soon as the suggestion is made that maybe - just maybe - not everyone is the same ?
Because you're the only person talking about "everyone being the same", in some misguided belief that successful terrorists are statistics rather than rational individuals carrying out a plan.
Profiling people based on behaviors and patterns that are indicators of terrorist activity is useful, because successful terrorists have to engage in preparation that can be detected. Profiling people based on religion, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, etc, is not useful, because those things (or at least the evidence of those things) can all be picked and chosen specifically to defeat the profile, which ultimately hurts security due to people believing it is effective when it is not.
Suggesting that a young single woman flying out of Sweden with a round-the-world ticket is equally as likely to hijack/destroy the plane as a group of young single "middle eastern" men with one-way tickets flyng out of Saudi Arabia, is letting your idealistic bleeding-heart-leftist-stupidity get in the way of common sense.
No, you're letting your own shortsightedness miss the lessons of history. Terrorists don't have to win any sort of statistical battle, so it doesn't matter who is most likely or least likely to be a terrorist, it only matters who IS a terrorist. And terrorists have shown historically that they will find and use specifically those people who can circumvent the profiling methods you think are so useful.
They don't have to find a million white Swedish pregnant women to join their cult, they only have to find one. It doesn't matter if there were a million young arab men willing to do the mission and only one white girl -- she's the one who will be successful. Just look at the IRA, they made a game out of circumventing attempts at profiling and were quite successful at it. Similar examples can be found in Iraq, Vietnam, WWII, etc, etc.
Be sure to keep your nightlight on, the world is a scary place.
Then Tucker can go to another bank for financing, or private investors. There will always be someone willing to invest in a sound business.
Indeed, and there's always a bigger business with more money that is able to compete for those investors. Say Tucker finds another bank (which he did, several times), then Ford calls up that bank and says "Hey, we'll be happy to bring you a $billion in auto loans through our nationwide dealership system if you dump this Tucker character." It's far more profitable for the bank to go with Ford. Ford doesn't have to get every bank on earth, just the first 2 or 3 that Tucker goes to, so that his other investors realize he's fighting an uphill battle and pull thier own money out. This isn't some theoretical situation, it happens quite often (though not usually as blatantly as it did with Tucker). Claims that it "couldn't work" in a free market are hogwash -- it does work, and has worked, as long as financially significant companies are willing to play hardball.
Bribing is just another way of lowering your price. Threaten? Physical violence is obviously illegal, not sure what other ways of threatening they could use to prevent dealers from buying from Tucker. Also, what prevents Tucker from selling directly to his customers? As for stringing along dealers with lucrative contracts and then not following through, that's called fraud, and is illegal even in an libertarian society.
Bribing is temporary, they don't have to do it any longer than it takes to drive Tucker out of business. It's the same as dumping, financially. The end result is that the market is subverted by those with enough capital to bribe when necessary.
I wasn't talking about threatening with physical violence, I was talking about financial threats -- if Ford threatens to call your bank and say they're "worried about your finanical situation", or they threaten to slow down your supply, or threaten to give an exclusive contract to your competitor, those things will all cost you more than you can plan to make by selling the Tucker car.
It certainly is not fraud to drag out a negotiation, or to promise a fantastic contract at some point in the future and then claim business has changed and we don't really need an exclusive dealer in this area any more. I'm curious how you picture contracts working in a libertarian society, because most libertarians think they are self-enforcing on a market level, but you seem to be calling for legal action to regulate contracts. Once you start that, it's not too far to regulation in general as the courts argue terminology and the legislature or some other regulating body is called upon to define terms in a universal way so that cointracts are clear.
You underestimate the intelligence of customers. Only a small minority would fall for such an ad campaign. Also, did you consider the added cost to the old manufacturer? It could very well be cheaper to compete by improving the car and/or lowering prices than to spend money on a massive ad campaign.
That particular campaign, perhaps, but I think you underestimate the power of advertising. Many libertarians (and other smart people) seem to think that advertising is something that only works on "other people", but it's a pretty productive industry. People spend $billions of dollars every year on bottled water that comes right out of the same municipal water supply they get for pennies on the gallon. For only a few thousand dollars, Bush's campaign managed to convince the people of North Caroline that John McCain had a black baby. Advertising is an effective force multiplier, and it doesn't require people to be gullible or stupid, it just has to be a good campaign.
Yes, it *could* be cheaper in the short term to compete head-on, but then they'd be competing. Once you're competing, you're acknowledging that the other guy has a comparable product. It's more effective in the long term to have his
In this hypothetical one-ISP-to-rule-them-all scenario, why couldn't someone start a new company that competed with this monster ISP?
Well, first, they would have to run lines from every house in the country to every other house in the country...
I admit, sometimes I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I see sweet young kids who believe so fervently in libertarianism. It must be what it was like to hang out in coffee shops in 1920, when everyone thought Communism was the One Perfect System that would solve all the world's problems.
Free market systems are not just some crazy theoretical thing that has never been tried -- every time a state weakened, and when commerce first began happening internationally, the free market happened. It was rarely utopian, and far more frequently resulted in collusion, intimidation, bribery, and even the raising of private armies outside the reach of governmental intrusion.
Why should the automobile companies produce a better car to compete with Tucker when they can just call up his bankers and threaten to pull their (more profitable) business unless they drop Tucker? Why should they make better cars when they can just threaten or bribe every dealer he lines up with cancelled existing contracts or more lucrative new ones (they don't actually have to come through with the lucrative contracts, just keep them stringing along long enough for Tucker to go bankrupt). Why should they improve safety in their own vehicles when they can just start an advertising campaign alleging that Tucker's safety systems are evidence that his car is less safe? Why would they compete on price or quality when they can just call the steel mill and rubber importer where he gets his raw materials and threaten to cut off their millions in revenue unless they stop selling to Tucker?
There's no magic wand you can wave over the economy to make it "perfect". Different industries and places require different systems. Industries with large infrastructure requirements like telecom, roads, power and water, are simply inefficient to handle in a competitive manner (at least before the infrastructure is mature). You can't have 12 water mains connected to your house and 43 telephone lines being run down every city street. But once telecom is wireless, as the cellular industry is, you can have a much more free-for-all competition, because it isn't a problem for companies to go in and out of businesss. And that's exactly how we did it, because it's what made sense for the situation.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
Well yeah. You're right it does create clean code just like any editor that can be used as a text editor.
DW will create 100% perfectly clean code using only the design view if you use it correctly (ie, use the tag selector) and set up the coding preferences to how you want them.
The thing that gets me is that designers that want to make minor edits in design view mess my clean pages up in seconds without realising what they're doing. There's no "we're adding swathes of unnecessary code is that ok yes//no" warning.
There are yes/no confirmations before DW changes any existing code. They can be turned off in the preferences (as can many aspects of the rewriting/reformatting) but they are there. The key part of your post is "without realising what they're doing" -- don't blame the tool because the people using it haven't bothered to learn how to use it properly. If inexperienced editors (such as secretaries) need to be able to do things, set up editable regions and put the new users on Contribute, that way they can be pretty much locked off from code that is over their heads. Of course, now it's usually easier for such users to update the site through a database interface and never have to touch the code.
I will agree that DW has a bad habit of displaying 100% good code strangely in design view sometimes. I'm not sure where the limitation is there -- the web developer extensions for many browsers now support highlighting DIVs and such, so hopefully the DW team will incorporate those browser techniquies rather than whatever hacking they've been doing to the rendering engines.
Dreamweaver does not emit 'clean' code. It's still more cluttered and not as logically presented as hand-written code.
DW creates perfectly clean code, as long as you learn how to use it correctly. It's a professional tool, not a point-and-click application (or rather, it will create functional code if you treat it as a point-and-click, but you'll be producing messier code than you should).
In my near decade of using DW (and homesite and BBedit and notepad and emacs and vi and pico and nano and nvu and Notetab and frontpage and Zend Studio and Coldfusion studio, etc), I've rarely seen the program generate inherently bad/messy code, but I've seen plenty of users who don't know how to operate it correctly blame the program for their bad/messy code. I'd say 90% of bad DW HTML comes from users working in design view and not using the tag selector at the bottom of the document window. The program can fix a lot of overlapping/nesting tag issues automatically, but people making bad manual selections before applying attributes and then complaining that the code has too many tags is pretty asinine. Dreamweaver is not psychic, it can't know what selection you *meant* if you don't make it properly, and it gives you several tools to make them properly.
You can, of course just use it in code view as an HTML text editor with code completion, an extensive built-in code reference and library, and reusable objects. The it's totally up to you how cluttered and logical the code is. You can also customize the HTML/XML/JS that operates the whole program so that it uses your particular coding style, your particular line break methods, and your particular syntax choices, etc. There's nothing code-related in the program that can't be changed to your particular style. You may as well complain that emacs doesn't come out of the box with your particular coding style set by default.
Even if you buy a new one every year (which I'm sure few of us do), it's worth practically nothing.
Well, $20 is $20. If it works, you'll get at least that much on eBay. heck, I've sold no-frills phones that were 3-4 years old for $50 on ebay.
Smartphones, the ones most likley to carry sensitive data, cost hundreds of dollars new, so selling one that is several years old can still get you $100-300 depending on popularity of the model -- particularly since service providers frequently update models with useless features (or cripple them more, as any Verizon customer has experienced) and raise the price, so people looking for replacements often turn to the used market just to get a decent phone that works.
Yeah...because they were so financially stable before 1980.
He might have pushed them into crisis 5-10 years faster than they would have on their own, but considering we're still paying off his debt 25+ years later (and will be for another 50), I think we would have been better off not increasing the debt and just letting the Soviet Union collapse in 1993.
Yes, and it is purely a coincidence that the value of the dollar continues to drop against foreign currencies.
I'm sure it will have no consequences for your lifestyle when the trillions of dollars in foreign investments that keep the US economy propped get invested in Euros and Yen. Of course when that happens, you'll probably be one of the people saying "how could anyone have seen it coming?"
Slashdot Mirror
So if my small business was owning a couple of retail buildings I can ignore the ADA?
As long as you aren't providing a public accommodation in your office, you can have a completely inaccessible office. You can run your small business out of your spare bedroom up a flight of narrow, rickety stairs and nobody will care, but the buildings themselves will have all sorts of requirements since they are public accommodations.
Thanks for the reference, my memory must be working on pre-1993 levels as far as limits, but of course between the numerous tax credits and "readily achievable" loopholes, no small business should be looking at a significant expense relative to their size in meeting the requirements.
Also, note that accessibility is only required for all sizes of businesses if it provides a public accommodation, which is a very different bogeyman than saying anyone with a business has to implement all sorts of crazy requirements. If you provide a public accommodation, you've already got to comply with loads of requirements on construction and layout.
Forget flash sites, have you ever tried implementing a Captcha system that was usable by the blind?
Sure. "The capital of Texas is Austin. What state has it's capital located in Austin?"
If the person types in "Texas", they're human and can read/hear English. Obviously you use multiple questions and vary the order of things. Plugins for logic and multiple choice text tests are available on every major web publishing system I'm aware of.
The w3c has several alternatives for captchas on their site, there's nothing magical about captchas that a web site would collapse without them.
You may as well ask "how do I make a staircase accessible to poeple in wheelchairs?" You build a ramp.
Nothing whatsoever. ADA doesn't apply to small business -- MOST regulations of this kind don't apply to small businesses. If Henry's Landscaping has 200 employees and a 25 million dollar headquarters, then yes he will get in trouble under the ADA if his physical location is not accessible. If he's running it out of his garage with 2 other guys, he can put wheelchair barricades up and run a siren to scare away blind people.
So ya, I'm sure the expense is minimal for large companies, but you've got to think about the small businesses too.
Something that is frequently unknown whever laws applying to businesses are discussed is that the vast majority of regulations do not apply to small businesses. Accessibility, equal opportunity employment, etc are all bogeymen dragged out by people as keeping small business down, but they simply don't apply until you reach a certain size (100 employees seems to be a common minimum).
If you have a small business with three employees, you can laugh at people in wheelchairs and refuse to hire black people all you like. The only exception would be if you were trying to sell to the government, in which case they might require you to observe those regulations as a condition of the contract. And if you have a business open to the public, there are other regulations usually requiring accessibility and non-discrimination for customers.
So this ruling won't mean anything to small businesses, and once you have 100 employees you should be turning over at least a few million a year, in which both your construction of wheelchair ramps and accessible website should fit.
they complain about an inherently visual medium not being accessable enough
How is the web an inherently visual medium? It's based entirely on textual data, with support for graphics bolted on to make it prettier. The important things at the Target website are lists of store locations, operating hours, phone numbers, and that's what they were sued over. You don't need a picture to tell someone the address of your store. You don't need a picture to tell someone which brands of irons you carry and how much each model costs. You *should* add pictures of items to increase sales, since people generally like to see what they're buying, but blind people accept that limitation.
This is, quite frankly, a perfectly sensible ruling and something web developers have been warning companies about for nearly a decade. This is not some crazy fringe group out to cause trouble, this is a problem we've all known about for years and years but too many people ignored because it was cheaper or easier to cross your fingers than follow sound advice (although ironically enough, a well-designed (and therefore accessible) site will be cheaper and easier in the long run because of easier maintenance and adaptability).
I've already seen that message (someone else posted it), and they're not talking about what I'm talking about in regards to shadows. They're talking about the lack of a straightforward "drop shadow" tool or effect in Inkscape, but it's easy to fake a drop shadow as they say. But I wasn't commenting on drop shadows, I was commenting on the projected shadows they did poorly, which require imagining how the shape will transform when projected through space (or using a full 3D app to render).
I wasn't complaining, I was commenting. I don't use Gnome on a daily basis, I don't follow the Tango guidelines for my own work, so it makes no difference whatsoever to me if they fix the problems or not. I have a generally positive hope for OSS projects, so I'm glad to comment in my field of expertise when the opportunity arises on Slashdot. Since many OSS developers hang out here, hopefully they learn something and can compete better with commercial systems. I like learning about the developer side of things, so I figure the good developers like learning about the UI and graphics side. There's no way to know unless I post, and I've had lots of great conversations on here over the years.
I'm sharing my views on a discussion board where people discuss things. If nobody from Tango read this, other people form other UI teams will. And pointing out professional details to non-professionals can make them understand where all that time goes, why just knowing which buttons to click in Photoshop is not enough. While I like educating people about what I do for a living and giving feedback on people's work, I don't see it as my responsibility to hunt down everyone doing it incorrectly and give them a personal seminar for free or fix their stuff pro bono.
It's funny, when programmers comment on slashdot and say "Have you seen the code in this app? It's got all sorts of redundant nested loops and inelegant layount, real spaghetti code, no wonder they have trouble getting it to work!", people take it for what its worth. There's no expectation that by making a comment they should just shut up and fix the whole app themselves, or ignore slashdot altogether and privately share their criticism with the app developers in private.
They aren't talking about what I'm talking about there -- there is no spec fo shadows in the Tango docs, and they are saying they left it out because inkscape doesn't support drop shadows yet. But drop shadows (flat shadows), as they say, are easy to fake and use workarounds. I'm talking about cast shadows projected in 3 dimensions. You'd need a full 3D rendering engine to do them computationally -- you pretty much have to do them by eye and just imagining what shadow shape the object would create.
Why are you making the comments on Slashdot then?
because people are talking about it here? And I read slashdot and like to comment on things?
Do you tend to complain about the poor service of a restaurant on the bulletin boards in your laundry room as well?
If the bulletin board in my laundry room was read by thousands of people who worked in restaurants, yeah, that would be a pretty good place to comment on solvable problems in their industry.
Tango is not just an icon set, it's (theoretically) a whole set of guidelines for interface design, including icons.
I wouldn't waste time critiquing an icon set, but if Gnome really is planning on following these guidelines and the Tango crew really intend for them to be comprehensive and used by all the major open source interface developers, it would be a good idea for their flagship example to be as professional as possible. The lousy shadows were literally the first thing I noticed when I opened the page.
In any case, it's just an icon! It's not even 3D. At 128x128 it's not going to matter that much. I think you're just being pedantic.
I'm sure the Tango folks will be thrilled to learn you really don't care about any of their work. They built a whole group, an extensive web site and extensive guidelines along with the hundreds of icons in the set, I should think they care about the work they're doing and want it to be more than just "good enough". If they want to produce results that are comparable to professional software, then they have to hold themselves to the same pedantic standard that professionals do. It's like building a house and not having the corners be square -- one of the subtle differences that separates most $100k homes from most $500k homes. The average person doesn't consciously notice all the little fit and finish details as they walk throught the house, but they do recognize that there is a difference in quality.
Your professional help would be greatly appreciated if you feel inclined.
These comments are my professional help, I charge for this stuff in real life. Shadows have shapes that relate to the shape of the object. A sphere, a file folder, and a box don't all produce the same shadow shape when illuminated. Shadows are darker at the center and where they meet the object, and then lose density and definition as they reach the outside edges. You can make a pretty good flat shadow by just shading two sides of an icon, but if you want to do a projected floor shadow then you have to represent the silhouette of the object as transformed through space.
Doing a bad floor shadow is more work for worse results than doing a flat shadow. So my professional advice would be that if they are low on time, they should just do flat shadows, but if they want to spend the time, they should think more about how to achieve good projected shadows.
I remember years ago when Gnome was the eye-candy window manager all the kids were showing off. In looking through the screenshots, the most surprising thing is to see that nobody involved with the Tango interface has ever seen what an actual shadow looks like.
If you want to do flat shadows, cool, do them, they're easy and effective. If you want to do three-dimensional shadows, cool, they look even better but take a bit more work. But don't drop the same blurry ellipse at the bottom of every object and think that you're making a three-dimensional shadow, you just make everything look like it's standing on a blurry gray oval, and users really do recognize the less professional look, consciously or not.
what I need is to have a per-site setup (eg xml file) that get's used (automagically) for that site so it's not possible to edit in non-xhtml stuff or use relative URLs instead of absolute, or whatever.
That is basically what Contribute is, in a nutshell. Your skilled, HTML-savvy, technical user sets up the site, sets regions as editable (many small editable regions are better than one big region for obvious reasons), and sets parameters and security, and then Contribute logs in as a client and lets users edit without having to know what they're doing. It's pretty much what Frontpage promised a decade ago, but it actually works and doesn't create horrible code.
You can still get multiple tags due to users selecting things in a lousy manner, but by setting up CSS and styles within the program, you can successfully train most of them to just click in the paragraph and apply a style, which behaves as it should.
True.
No, wait...damn, is this multiple choice or essay?
What is it with you people and using incredibly bad assumptions to support blinkered arguments ? Why does every shred of thought, rationality and intelligence fly out the window as soon as the suggestion is made that maybe - just maybe - not everyone is the same ?
Because you're the only person talking about "everyone being the same", in some misguided belief that successful terrorists are statistics rather than rational individuals carrying out a plan.
Profiling people based on behaviors and patterns that are indicators of terrorist activity is useful, because successful terrorists have to engage in preparation that can be detected. Profiling people based on religion, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, etc, is not useful, because those things (or at least the evidence of those things) can all be picked and chosen specifically to defeat the profile, which ultimately hurts security due to people believing it is effective when it is not.
Suggesting that a young single woman flying out of Sweden with a round-the-world ticket is equally as likely to hijack/destroy the plane as a group of young single "middle eastern" men with one-way tickets flyng out of Saudi Arabia, is letting your idealistic bleeding-heart-leftist-stupidity get in the way of common sense.
No, you're letting your own shortsightedness miss the lessons of history. Terrorists don't have to win any sort of statistical battle, so it doesn't matter who is most likely or least likely to be a terrorist, it only matters who IS a terrorist. And terrorists have shown historically that they will find and use specifically those people who can circumvent the profiling methods you think are so useful.
They don't have to find a million white Swedish pregnant women to join their cult, they only have to find one. It doesn't matter if there were a million young arab men willing to do the mission and only one white girl -- she's the one who will be successful. Just look at the IRA, they made a game out of circumventing attempts at profiling and were quite successful at it. Similar examples can be found in Iraq, Vietnam, WWII, etc, etc.
Be sure to keep your nightlight on, the world is a scary place.
Last I checked, lawyers generally have fuck-all authority to prohibit your use of hardware that you own, genius.
exactly, which is why his claims of Apple "leaning on him" not to use Apple hardware for the disclosure are such obvious bullshit.
Apple claims they've never heard from this guy and don't know what the hell he's talking about.
Obviously, somebody's lying, and right now there isn't a lot of evidence pointing at Apple.
Indeed, and there's always a bigger business with more money that is able to compete for those investors. Say Tucker finds another bank (which he did, several times), then Ford calls up that bank and says "Hey, we'll be happy to bring you a $billion in auto loans through our nationwide dealership system if you dump this Tucker character." It's far more profitable for the bank to go with Ford. Ford doesn't have to get every bank on earth, just the first 2 or 3 that Tucker goes to, so that his other investors realize he's fighting an uphill battle and pull thier own money out. This isn't some theoretical situation, it happens quite often (though not usually as blatantly as it did with Tucker). Claims that it "couldn't work" in a free market are hogwash -- it does work, and has worked, as long as financially significant companies are willing to play hardball.
Bribing is temporary, they don't have to do it any longer than it takes to drive Tucker out of business. It's the same as dumping, financially. The end result is that the market is subverted by those with enough capital to bribe when necessary.
I wasn't talking about threatening with physical violence, I was talking about financial threats -- if Ford threatens to call your bank and say they're "worried about your finanical situation", or they threaten to slow down your supply, or threaten to give an exclusive contract to your competitor, those things will all cost you more than you can plan to make by selling the Tucker car.
It certainly is not fraud to drag out a negotiation, or to promise a fantastic contract at some point in the future and then claim business has changed and we don't really need an exclusive dealer in this area any more. I'm curious how you picture contracts working in a libertarian society, because most libertarians think they are self-enforcing on a market level, but you seem to be calling for legal action to regulate contracts. Once you start that, it's not too far to regulation in general as the courts argue terminology and the legislature or some other regulating body is called upon to define terms in a universal way so that cointracts are clear.
That particular campaign, perhaps, but I think you underestimate the power of advertising. Many libertarians (and other smart people) seem to think that advertising is something that only works on "other people", but it's a pretty productive industry. People spend $billions of dollars every year on bottled water that comes right out of the same municipal water supply they get for pennies on the gallon. For only a few thousand dollars, Bush's campaign managed to convince the people of North Caroline that John McCain had a black baby. Advertising is an effective force multiplier, and it doesn't require people to be gullible or stupid, it just has to be a good campaign.
Yes, it *could* be cheaper in the short term to compete head-on, but then they'd be competing. Once you're competing, you're acknowledging that the other guy has a comparable product. It's more effective in the long term to have his
In this hypothetical one-ISP-to-rule-them-all scenario, why couldn't someone start a new company that competed with this monster ISP?
Well, first, they would have to run lines from every house in the country to every other house in the country...
I admit, sometimes I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I see sweet young kids who believe so fervently in libertarianism. It must be what it was like to hang out in coffee shops in 1920, when everyone thought Communism was the One Perfect System that would solve all the world's problems.
Free market systems are not just some crazy theoretical thing that has never been tried -- every time a state weakened, and when commerce first began happening internationally, the free market happened. It was rarely utopian, and far more frequently resulted in collusion, intimidation, bribery, and even the raising of private armies outside the reach of governmental intrusion.
Why should the automobile companies produce a better car to compete with Tucker when they can just call up his bankers and threaten to pull their (more profitable) business unless they drop Tucker? Why should they make better cars when they can just threaten or bribe every dealer he lines up with cancelled existing contracts or more lucrative new ones (they don't actually have to come through with the lucrative contracts, just keep them stringing along long enough for Tucker to go bankrupt). Why should they improve safety in their own vehicles when they can just start an advertising campaign alleging that Tucker's safety systems are evidence that his car is less safe? Why would they compete on price or quality when they can just call the steel mill and rubber importer where he gets his raw materials and threaten to cut off their millions in revenue unless they stop selling to Tucker?
There's no magic wand you can wave over the economy to make it "perfect". Different industries and places require different systems. Industries with large infrastructure requirements like telecom, roads, power and water, are simply inefficient to handle in a competitive manner (at least before the infrastructure is mature). You can't have 12 water mains connected to your house and 43 telephone lines being run down every city street. But once telecom is wireless, as the cellular industry is, you can have a much more free-for-all competition, because it isn't a problem for companies to go in and out of businesss. And that's exactly how we did it, because it's what made sense for the situation.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
Well yeah. You're right it does create clean code just like any editor that can be used as a text editor.
DW will create 100% perfectly clean code using only the design view if you use it correctly (ie, use the tag selector) and set up the coding preferences to how you want them.
The thing that gets me is that designers that want to make minor edits in design view mess my clean pages up in seconds without realising what they're doing. There's no "we're adding swathes of unnecessary code is that ok yes//no" warning.
There are yes/no confirmations before DW changes any existing code. They can be turned off in the preferences (as can many aspects of the rewriting/reformatting) but they are there. The key part of your post is "without realising what they're doing" -- don't blame the tool because the people using it haven't bothered to learn how to use it properly. If inexperienced editors (such as secretaries) need to be able to do things, set up editable regions and put the new users on Contribute, that way they can be pretty much locked off from code that is over their heads. Of course, now it's usually easier for such users to update the site through a database interface and never have to touch the code.
I will agree that DW has a bad habit of displaying 100% good code strangely in design view sometimes. I'm not sure where the limitation is there -- the web developer extensions for many browsers now support highlighting DIVs and such, so hopefully the DW team will incorporate those browser techniquies rather than whatever hacking they've been doing to the rendering engines.
Dreamweaver does not emit 'clean' code. It's still more cluttered and not as logically presented as hand-written code.
DW creates perfectly clean code, as long as you learn how to use it correctly. It's a professional tool, not a point-and-click application (or rather, it will create functional code if you treat it as a point-and-click, but you'll be producing messier code than you should).
In my near decade of using DW (and homesite and BBedit and notepad and emacs and vi and pico and nano and nvu and Notetab and frontpage and Zend Studio and Coldfusion studio, etc), I've rarely seen the program generate inherently bad/messy code, but I've seen plenty of users who don't know how to operate it correctly blame the program for their bad/messy code. I'd say 90% of bad DW HTML comes from users working in design view and not using the tag selector at the bottom of the document window. The program can fix a lot of overlapping/nesting tag issues automatically, but people making bad manual selections before applying attributes and then complaining that the code has too many tags is pretty asinine. Dreamweaver is not psychic, it can't know what selection you *meant* if you don't make it properly, and it gives you several tools to make them properly.
You can, of course just use it in code view as an HTML text editor with code completion, an extensive built-in code reference and library, and reusable objects. The it's totally up to you how cluttered and logical the code is. You can also customize the HTML/XML/JS that operates the whole program so that it uses your particular coding style, your particular line break methods, and your particular syntax choices, etc. There's nothing code-related in the program that can't be changed to your particular style. You may as well complain that emacs doesn't come out of the box with your particular coding style set by default.
Even if you buy a new one every year (which I'm sure few of us do), it's worth practically nothing.
Well, $20 is $20. If it works, you'll get at least that much on eBay. heck, I've sold no-frills phones that were 3-4 years old for $50 on ebay.
Smartphones, the ones most likley to carry sensitive data, cost hundreds of dollars new, so selling one that is several years old can still get you $100-300 depending on popularity of the model -- particularly since service providers frequently update models with useless features (or cripple them more, as any Verizon customer has experienced) and raise the price, so people looking for replacements often turn to the used market just to get a decent phone that works.
Reagan defeated the Soviet Union
Yeah...because they were so financially stable before 1980.
He might have pushed them into crisis 5-10 years faster than they would have on their own, but considering we're still paying off his debt 25+ years later (and will be for another 50), I think we would have been better off not increasing the debt and just letting the Soviet Union collapse in 1993.
Yes, and it is purely a coincidence that the value of the dollar continues to drop against foreign currencies.
I'm sure it will have no consequences for your lifestyle when the trillions of dollars in foreign investments that keep the US economy propped get invested in Euros and Yen. Of course when that happens, you'll probably be one of the people saying "how could anyone have seen it coming?"