Easily. The box model thing actually *made more sense*, plus it was documented from the start, the workarounds became known fairly quickly, and they really don't require much more mental effort than the extra arithmetic that's necessitated by the broken w3c concept in the first place.
By contrast, say, the blocks that just straight-out entirely vanish from the page when you do something rather mundane like absolutely positioning or float them are much worse. These bugs are now somewhat understood and there's workarounds, but the workarounds took years of hit-and-miss testing and experimentation to suss out, and they still fail for some common cases... and they've changed somewhat (but not gone away!) in IE7.
... and it was to cede the browser field entirely, and leave the web client development up to the organizations who've put years into getting it right.
This option actually really makes sense if having a working web client for your customers is actually what you care about. It would be trivial for them to use Gecko as a rendering engine for IE, it would save them a significant chunk of resources, and they could happily go about making serious progress in the realm of web "middleware" as they have with the.NET platform.
But nope. They still have to write their own, even though there's no evidence they actually even know how. And the only explanations that really makes sense are either sheer ego, or that it doesn't fit with a genuine strategy... which is basically another way of saying they still fully intend to screw with the standards.
2) You can pass it as a HTML header, so if you want just add it to your apache config, and all pages on your website will be rendered in IE8 cleanly (this is the option I intend to take).
I can see the appeal, but having documents behave/render differently based on server environment is really gonna screw with some people's heads. The HTTP header idea seems worse to me than the meta tag idea.
There's a lot more heinous sins on their bug resumé than failing to follow in an area where the w3c pretty much messed up.
Seeing as how it is the de-facto standard, it's good that they're putting at least some effort into making it better.
I don't buy it yet. IE7 was a lukewarm set of improvements that essentially introduced Yet Another Browser that wasn't trustworthy, so there's little evidence MS actually cares about anything other than *seeming* like they're doing product development at this point.
to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?
The meta tag is pretty flexible, you can improvise with them quite a bit and still stay in the realm of standards, and I suspect that's what they'll do.
However, that said, I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold prediction:
IE8 *Will Not* be standards compliant.
I'll be somewhat surprised if it turns out to genuinely pass the ACID2 test. I think it's highly likely that they don't mean the same thing you and I would mean when they make this claim. I think it's even somewhat likely that even if the browser *does* pass it, it does so because they've coded it specifically to do so, not to actually meet the broad case of standards applications. Both kinds of behavior are in character with classic Microsoft behavior, and it's not at all clear why anyone would expect them to change.
But most of all, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were at least honestly *trying* to advance towards compliance with IE7, the progress made was pretty pitiful. They even *introduced* new bugs, for example, new cases of disappearances for absolutely positioned elements inside of relatively positioned ones.
The other browser makers have intentionally spent years recruiting, hiring, and fostering the progress of developers who cared about getting it right. Microsoft has made its entire career off of barely credible half-assed software implementations for the specific purpose of vendor lock-in. It's almost certain that as an organization, they don't even know how to do it right.
Every user I educate is a win for me. And for everybody else, in the end.
Normally I see this sort of thing as tilting at windmills, frustrating for me and often ineffective.
However:
(a) working with MS's rather deliberate IE incompatibilities has frustrating enough I don't care (b) Firefox offers readily graspable advantages in terms of ease of use, featureset, and security (c) There's a straightforward case to be made that continuing to use IE costs everyone money -- web development for everyone (including YOUR organization) could be cheaper or faster if developers didn't have to worry about IE's flaws, and Microsoft really has no incentive to fix them other than as a kind of "take me back, I've changed" token that's pretty much parallel to the kinds of gifts and promises that flow from an abusive spouse when their partner decides to leave.
It's straightforward. Firefox is the better product. Using IE costs everyone money. I think it's a winning message. I'll be continuing to provide IE inclusive development when I need to, but I'm not going to be shy about explaining the costs to clients.
Yes. Let them add hacks like . Don't make the standards compliant people have to add.
The box model is actually one of the few cases where Microsoft did it right in the first place, and the w3c did it wrong. Conceiving padding as something that's not internal to a given block is highly non-intuitive and annoying, it actually makes certain things impossible. Want precisely proportional columns, but fixed-width padding? You could do it with a sane box model with no additional markup, but with the w3model, you'll need another div.
I say this as someone who has a burning hatred for the IE product management team -- I'm normally a bleeding-heart compassionate type, but for the thousands of hours of my life they've stolen from not only me but every web developer in the world who has to work around the intentional weaknesses in their product, I'd happily smile as they were methodically flayed in a lemon juice bath between bouts of being shat upon by elephants. But they might deserve an ever so small moment of reprieve from their prolonged suffering for intelligently bucking the weak w3 choice.
You think all those 'advanced countries' would have learned by now that government is the *problem* not the *solution*.
It's a pithy little position, but as a generalization, it doesn't stand up to examination. Government always *presents* problems (like most of real life) and sometimes it can even be a problem, of course, but it all depends on the quality of your government, which, here, is dependent on the quality of citizenship.
Of course, as long as we elect people who claim government is roundly ineffective, we're going to have a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that's going to appeal to people who are more interested in being right than in actually solving problems.
Engineering is still something of a professional occupation, but the economic rewards available to lawyers, doctors, accountants, and management (hell, even real estate as an occupation) are much greater.
So let's sum up here: interest science and engineering often means lower social status and being mocked/stereotyped, plus these fields are highly competitive and intellectually demanding, but there's decreasing job security and economic rewards relative to other professions.
Greenspun's got it right. The question isn't why we have decreasing interest in technical careers, the question is what would make someone interested in pursuing one, especially in the current climate.
If one is entry level in a field where a degree is now required, (such as IT), one is entitled to entry level pay and benefits, regardless of what one's parents generation received when they entered the field with its requirements at that time. If one thinks one is underpaid, one has the option of obtaining employment elsewhere. If all employers are underpaying, then one has misjudged one's market value.
Conversely, employers having trouble retaining staff may well be underestimating their employees market value, and almost certainly made a utility misjudgment somewhere.
It's certainly possible to misjudge one's market value -- there's a good deal of misinformation out there, most accidental, some quite possibly purposeful, however, by those attempting to manipulate labor supply.
But consider this: entry level lawyers don't get paid what joe call center gets paid for his entry-level job. IT is, ostensibly anyway, a skilled and specialized field. There may not be arcane magic to every aspect of it, but experience and training count. Someone has to bear the cost for that training, and if employers want people who know their stuff and stick around, they'd best be prepared to pony up for it rather than trying to externalize that cost.
No, IT isn't as hard as a law degree, but it's not janitorial work either. And I have heard, with my own ears, management complaining about how hard it is to find workers who accept "entry level" -- sub $30k -- and wonder why there's such turnover among those employees they do manage to land. This while rewarding new management talent (with questionable record of delivering, other than being able to keep labor costs down) $20k raises.
The labor pool in IT, if it's actually shrinking at all, is shrinking for a reason and will continue to do so -- until it's opened to a pool of workers who consider prevailing compensation rewarding, or until the prevailing compensation rises.
Or, more cynically, until someone manages to convince enough people that IT is in fact such a rewarding occupation that they'll sink enough resources into training that they're in little position to do much else.
Similarly, not every router vendor is going to have a super-bad-ass internal network.
Why?
I mean, I can see this with some other examples. But if you're a router vendor, there's no reason you shouldn't have a finely-tuned hummin'n'thrummin internal network: your product is all about that, the talent you need to hire to in order to produce those routers is going to have to know how, and it's a good opportunity to real-world test your products.
But then again, Oracle probably does have some employees using Excel as a database.:)
Re:There is no tyranny of Microsoft Word
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
There have been many excellent "alternatives" to Microsoft Word ever since it debuted on the Macintosh in 1985.
This is true, but it seems pretty solid to say the trend has been been consolidation towards Word/Office from the early 90s through just a few years ago. Sure, some people held onto Word Perfect, Nisus Writer was a great tool for its time, but for a long time, it seemed like everything else was simply existing in a fairly narrow niche.
I'm not convinced that time is over yet, but with growing awareness of OpenOffice as a free alternative, with Apple's recent efforts, and with increased use of the internet and the fame of some of the apps mentioned in this article, I think a very basic fact that was lost for a long time to most non-savvy users is starting to gain a wider footing: there's more than one way (and one piece of software) to compose text on a computer.
We'll know for certain on the day that Microsoft makes features that prominently like Scrivener and WriteRoom.:)
If they're going to go out for that, I'd hope they'd also include one of the whole-airplane parachutes people were talking about a few years ago. Seems to me like your typical accidental in-flight failure is much more common than a missile attack.
Now that Facebook is open to anyone, the debate goes to the lowest common denominator
I'm sure it doesn't help that the demographic is wide open, but there's unfortunately very few forums anywhere I've seen that don't tend that way. You have to start with a critical mass of well-informed, thoughtful people who have a minimum of axes to grind... and even then, you'll see outbreaks of simplistic thinking, petty attacks, and trolling. College students are a half-decent bet, but since a good number of them are still basically adolescents, it's no guarantee.
In particular, though, I think Facebook has a specific problem that's bigger than the open demographic: the UI and culture both seem to encourage lots of little soundbite/bumper sticker expressions. Substantial and nuanced stuff just doesn't emerge in that circumstance, for some of the same reasons it doesn't emerge in political advertising or nightly news coverage.
Obama's entire qualifications are 1) he's not GWB, and 2) he's not Hillary.
Even if you parse some particular meanings of (1) and (2) -- that he's likely to be considerably more thoughtful and effective than the current president, and he doesn't have a 16 years of culture war political baggage which Clinton has -- this doesn't seem like an apt summary to me.
Once you get past those admittedly great points in his favor, all you have left is an utterly conventional politician.
If nothing else, one reason people are already attracted to him is that his politicking is already notably different:
Again, suck it up and just promise to follow the rules of the community, and we might actually start to respect you a bit more.
Like hell.
*I* will never respect them. It's painfully obvious they've had the resources to do this for years, and for years they chose to treat the entire process with blatant contempt. It probably has cost me literally thousands of hours of my life to deal with their shit and I'm angry enough about it that I doubt I'd be above literally torturing their product managers if I had the chance. Put together the collective web dev time they've wasted with their little games, and you probably have hundreds of human lifetimes washed down the drain. They are on the same moral level of spammers, and that's the amount of respect they deserve.
And they'd do it *again* in a second if they thought it would earn them an advantage. They don't give a flying fig newton for you, for standards, for progress, for anything other than their own marketshare and control. The depth of contempt they deserve hasn't begun to be plumbed even here on slashdot.
ACID test? Great. This is essentially the abusive spouse buying roses for the woman who's just about finally fed up and ready to leave. Promises of good behavior while the fallout from IE 6 and 7 will be lingering for years to come.
Yes. And it's marked as fixed. Firefox 3 will finally have this. You can check out the beta if you want.
I'm glad the fix is written, and if the GP's point was about Mozilla being as guilty of deviation from standards as IE, I find it a poor one, but I'm not at all reassured by the idea that the bug is "marked" as fixed and will eventually gradually filter out into the world via FF3, especially after overlooking it for so long. In general, the Gecko team has far better record at supporting standards, which is why it's particularly maddening to see something so useful and basic apparently completely overlooked for so long by people who should know better.
The criticism about that particular bug may not be apt as a generalizable example, but it is as a reminder that no project is perfect and complacency isn't an appropriate attitude for even the best of browsers.
No, it's not pedantry. This isn't merely a case of wrong terminology, it's a sign that a developer is looking at something in a completely upside-down way.
You'll have to expound at length on what the correct philosophy a person who uses that terminology is missing, then, because I don't see it. My experience suggests the terminology is a poor test of whether a dev is doing so as an imprecise shorthand for CSS positioning or because they haven't realized that one can do CSS-positioned layout on elements other than divs. In fact, my experience suggests there are *very* few devs in that latter category.
And to be a little pedantic myself, it's also technically wrong to suggest that the div tag has no layout value... any block-level element does, even if it's not much.
No, they aren't. They are absolutely useless for layout.
I wouldn't go that far... there are times when positioned/floated divs are more convenient/more powerful than a table-based layout.
That said, if the sentiment driving that statement is utter frustration with the bitter taste of the CSS-positioning kool-aid, I understand perfectly. It was absolutely the wrong idea to try and get rid of tables as a layout tool, and the fact that it's been taken up as a mantra is a problem.
For some reason, I resisted the idea that Microsoft's browser incompatibilities were malevolent and intentional.
The kicker for me, though, was seeing people implement Javascript layers that addressed the inconsistencies. In their spare time. For free. It completely demolished the idea that any kind of technical difficulty was in the way. It's been almost four years since Dean Edwards released the IE7 js layer and since then, Microsoft hasn't even managed to roll that much support into their product.
Personally, I put whoever's in charge of Microsoft's IE product development team on the same moral level as spammers. Much in the same way spammers end up wasting your time and gumming a fantastic common resource, Microsoft's product wastes the time of thousands of web devs and holds the web back.
I honestly don't think that anyone's gone far enough in expressing the level of contempt they've earned.
CSS 101 is learning to float left and right. If you're trying to create three physical columns, you're doing it wrong. You need to create three divs, float two of them to either side, and your center will resize correctly. Easy, peasy.:-)
Unless you want resizable columns with a background color that spans the height of the page or viewport (whichever is larger). Then you have some interesting problems. Or, say you don't want a size spanning the page or viewport, but simple two columns that track each other's height. Divs as faux columns are inadequate under CSS 2.
There's also the matter of getting the columns to really, truly contain stuff that's inside of them. Yes, you can get this to happen vertically by adding an additional clearing div down at the bottom. Bit of a pain (and sometimes it interferes with other things inside the column and occasionally even on the page), but not a big deal. Horizontally.... if you want the content to stretch the column you have a problem.
And then there's the actual real world quirks.
Don't get me wrong. I think that floats are great layout tools and CSS positioning isn't anything I want to give up. I do, however, think that it was completely wrongheaded to try and throw out tables as a layout tool. There's a lot you can do without them, but they lend themselves well to enough situations (and often end up being less fragile and/or easier to understand than their positioned div counterparts) that they or some mechanism like them should have been retained with approval.
Setting font properties at the body doesn't cascade for all elements that result in a font onscreen. Try it.
body, body td {
font-family: MyFavoredFont, sans-serif; }
Works for me for most everyday cases. There are some other occasional cases (form elements come to mind) but it's not frequent enough to cross my own annoyance threshold. YMMV.
There are some things that do drive me crazy, for what it's worth:
The official box model. I hate to say it, but MS got this one right: padding should be *inside* the element, and should therefore be included in the width of the element. The w3c model where you can have an element with 100px width but with 20px padding the element actually spans 140px from border to border is just crazy.
Faux columns. I tried, I really tried them for years. I learned to make them work, and I sometimes for the sake of self-flagellation or when I'm still hit by a trace of the kool-aid remaining in my system still try to make them work. I've also learned to hate them, though. Tables aren't always a better tool for each layout problem, but there's times they damn straight are and discarding them in favor of a world of floats was a mistake. Things might work if there was such a thing as a non-broken height specifier. But there's not.
No such thing as autocontain without "clear." Such a basic concept would save a lot of otherwise useless additional divs. It would also help coders get around a few tricky cases fairly easily.
Vertical alignment sucks in CSS. Yes, it's possible in certain circumstances. Yes, it still sucks even when it works.
Multiple background images would have been a great idea. This alone would make rounded corners on a box of arbitrary width and height (as well as other effects) trivial. If you want 'em now, though, you've got to wrap multiple container elements behind your background.
List styling. No such thing as arbitrary characters for bullets is just the start.
I could go on.... but that's not the point. Most of these things I've mentioned (and some of the things you've mentioned) could be fixed by incremental means rather than scrapping CSS for something else. This isn't to say that something else might not be a better idea. I just can't tell what that something else actually might be from your comments.
The iPhone is the same thing all over again, but replacing "portable music player" with "smartphone." It is the first cell phone with Web and e-mail, an organizer, a music player, SMS, and a few apps that is actually usable for the average Joe.
More than that: it's a smoother experience even for many people who *are* capable of navigating other smartphones. I haven't bought in yet for a few reasons (don't want to drop the $ on it yet, still thinking of trying something with real 3g instead), but the basic experience of doing all those things is an order of magnitude more compelling as the nearest alternative I've tried.
The average joe isn't the only person who's interested in the kind of experience Apple has to offer with their products.
what should we do if we actually did find life out there? And the sensible answer is: hide. Seriously, the chance that contact with space aliens will bring us benifits is tiny. If they have the ability to visit us, then the far more likely scenario is that they will exploit/conquer us
If the idea of increasing fuel efficiency and reducing environmental impact brings about wild speculation of socialist, new-world-order plots, what chance do we have of convincing anybody to reduce EM emissions to avoid space aliens?
At least, unless we find some.
Perhaps some way of "querying" the document?
on
Learning jQuery
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· Score: 2, Informative
I feel that DOM should be tossed and replaced with a relational equivalent
You mean some sort of method of accessing it via flexible symbolic queries describing attributes and relationships between nodes? One that retrieved arrays of matching results?
Slashdot Mirror
Easily. The box model thing actually *made more sense*, plus it was documented from the start, the workarounds became known fairly quickly, and they really don't require much more mental effort than the extra arithmetic that's necessitated by the broken w3c concept in the first place.
By contrast, say, the blocks that just straight-out entirely vanish from the page when you do something rather mundane like absolutely positioning or float them are much worse. These bugs are now somewhat understood and there's workarounds, but the workarounds took years of hit-and-miss testing and experimentation to suss out, and they still fail for some common cases... and they've changed somewhat (but not gone away!) in IE7.
Much worse.
... and it was to cede the browser field entirely, and leave the web client development up to the organizations who've put years into getting it right.
.NET platform.
This option actually really makes sense if having a working web client for your customers is actually what you care about. It would be trivial for them to use Gecko as a rendering engine for IE, it would save them a significant chunk of resources, and they could happily go about making serious progress in the realm of web "middleware" as they have with the
But nope. They still have to write their own, even though there's no evidence they actually even know how. And the only explanations that really makes sense are either sheer ego, or that it doesn't fit with a genuine strategy... which is basically another way of saying they still fully intend to screw with the standards.
2) You can pass it as a HTML header, so if you want just add it to your apache config, and all pages on your website will be rendered in IE8 cleanly (this is the option I intend to take).
I can see the appeal, but having documents behave/render differently based on server environment is really gonna screw with some people's heads. The HTTP header idea seems worse to me than the meta tag idea.
Everything from their faulty implementation of the box model
Their box model was actually more sensible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug#Support_for_Internet_Explorer.27s_box_model
There's a lot more heinous sins on their bug resumé than failing to follow in an area where the w3c pretty much messed up.
Seeing as how it is the de-facto standard, it's good that they're putting at least some effort into making it better.
I don't buy it yet. IE7 was a lukewarm set of improvements that essentially introduced Yet Another Browser that wasn't trustworthy, so there's little evidence MS actually cares about anything other than *seeming* like they're doing product development at this point.
to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?
The meta tag is pretty flexible, you can improvise with them quite a bit and still stay in the realm of standards, and I suspect that's what they'll do.
However, that said, I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold prediction:
IE8 *Will Not* be standards compliant.
I'll be somewhat surprised if it turns out to genuinely pass the ACID2 test. I think it's highly likely that they don't mean the same thing you and I would mean when they make this claim. I think it's even somewhat likely that even if the browser *does* pass it, it does so because they've coded it specifically to do so, not to actually meet the broad case of standards applications. Both kinds of behavior are in character with classic Microsoft behavior, and it's not at all clear why anyone would expect them to change.
But most of all, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were at least honestly *trying* to advance towards compliance with IE7, the progress made was pretty pitiful. They even *introduced* new bugs, for example, new cases of disappearances for absolutely positioned elements inside of relatively positioned ones.
The other browser makers have intentionally spent years recruiting, hiring, and fostering the progress of developers who cared about getting it right. Microsoft has made its entire career off of barely credible half-assed software implementations for the specific purpose of vendor lock-in. It's almost certain that as an organization, they don't even know how to do it right.
Yeah.
Every user I educate is a win for me.
And for everybody else, in the end.
Normally I see this sort of thing as tilting at windmills, frustrating for me and often ineffective.
However:
(a) working with MS's rather deliberate IE incompatibilities has frustrating enough I don't care
(b) Firefox offers readily graspable advantages in terms of ease of use, featureset, and security
(c) There's a straightforward case to be made that continuing to use IE costs everyone money -- web development for everyone (including YOUR organization) could be cheaper or faster if developers didn't have to worry about IE's flaws, and Microsoft really has no incentive to fix them other than as a kind of "take me back, I've changed" token that's pretty much parallel to the kinds of gifts and promises that flow from an abusive spouse when their partner decides to leave.
It's straightforward. Firefox is the better product. Using IE costs everyone money. I think it's a winning message. I'll be continuing to provide IE inclusive development when I need to, but I'm not going to be shy about explaining the costs to clients.
Yes. Let them add hacks like . Don't make the standards compliant people have to add .
The box model is actually one of the few cases where Microsoft did it right in the first place, and the w3c did it wrong. Conceiving padding as something that's not internal to a given block is highly non-intuitive and annoying, it actually makes certain things impossible. Want precisely proportional columns, but fixed-width padding? You could do it with a sane box model with no additional markup, but with the w3model, you'll need another div.
I say this as someone who has a burning hatred for the IE product management team -- I'm normally a bleeding-heart compassionate type, but for the thousands of hours of my life they've stolen from not only me but every web developer in the world who has to work around the intentional weaknesses in their product, I'd happily smile as they were methodically flayed in a lemon juice bath between bouts of being shat upon by elephants. But they might deserve an ever so small moment of reprieve from their prolonged suffering for intelligently bucking the weak w3 choice.
You think all those 'advanced countries' would have learned by now that government is the *problem* not the *solution*.
It's a pithy little position, but as a generalization, it doesn't stand up to examination. Government always *presents* problems (like most of real life) and sometimes it can even be a problem, of course, but it all depends on the quality of your government, which, here, is dependent on the quality of citizenship.
Of course, as long as we elect people who claim government is roundly ineffective, we're going to have a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that's going to appeal to people who are more interested in being right than in actually solving problems.
Engineering is still something of a professional occupation, but the economic rewards available to lawyers, doctors, accountants, and management (hell, even real estate as an occupation) are much greater.
Science? Much worse: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
So let's sum up here: interest science and engineering often means lower social status and being mocked/stereotyped, plus these fields are highly competitive and intellectually demanding, but there's decreasing job security and economic rewards relative to other professions.
Greenspun's got it right. The question isn't why we have decreasing interest in technical careers, the question is what would make someone interested in pursuing one, especially in the current climate.
If one is entry level in a field where a degree is now required, (such as IT), one is entitled to entry level pay and benefits, regardless of what one's parents generation received when they entered the field with its requirements at that time. If one thinks one is underpaid, one has the option of obtaining employment elsewhere. If all employers are underpaying, then one has misjudged one's market value.
Conversely, employers having trouble retaining staff may well be underestimating their employees market value, and almost certainly made a utility misjudgment somewhere.
It's certainly possible to misjudge one's market value -- there's a good deal of misinformation out there, most accidental, some quite possibly purposeful, however, by those attempting to manipulate labor supply.
But consider this: entry level lawyers don't get paid what joe call center gets paid for his entry-level job. IT is, ostensibly anyway, a skilled and specialized field. There may not be arcane magic to every aspect of it, but experience and training count. Someone has to bear the cost for that training, and if employers want people who know their stuff and stick around, they'd best be prepared to pony up for it rather than trying to externalize that cost.
No, IT isn't as hard as a law degree, but it's not janitorial work either. And I have heard, with my own ears, management complaining about how hard it is to find workers who accept "entry level" -- sub $30k -- and wonder why there's such turnover among those employees they do manage to land. This while rewarding new management talent (with questionable record of delivering, other than being able to keep labor costs down) $20k raises.
The labor pool in IT, if it's actually shrinking at all, is shrinking for a reason and will continue to do so -- until it's opened to a pool of workers who consider prevailing compensation rewarding, or until the prevailing compensation rises.
Or, more cynically, until someone manages to convince enough people that IT is in fact such a rewarding occupation that they'll sink enough resources into training that they're in little position to do much else.
Similarly, not every router vendor is going to have a super-bad-ass internal network.
:)
Why?
I mean, I can see this with some other examples. But if you're a router vendor, there's no reason you shouldn't have a finely-tuned hummin'n'thrummin internal network: your product is all about that, the talent you need to hire to in order to produce those routers is going to have to know how, and it's a good opportunity to real-world test your products.
But then again, Oracle probably does have some employees using Excel as a database.
There have been many excellent "alternatives" to Microsoft Word ever since it debuted on the Macintosh in 1985.
:)
This is true, but it seems pretty solid to say the trend has been been consolidation towards Word/Office from the early 90s through just a few years ago. Sure, some people held onto Word Perfect, Nisus Writer was a great tool for its time, but for a long time, it seemed like everything else was simply existing in a fairly narrow niche.
I'm not convinced that time is over yet, but with growing awareness of OpenOffice as a free alternative, with Apple's recent efforts, and with increased use of the internet and the fame of some of the apps mentioned in this article, I think a very basic fact that was lost for a long time to most non-savvy users is starting to gain a wider footing: there's more than one way (and one piece of software) to compose text on a computer.
We'll know for certain on the day that Microsoft makes features that prominently like Scrivener and WriteRoom.
If they're going to go out for that, I'd hope they'd also include one of the whole-airplane parachutes people were talking about a few years ago. Seems to me like your typical accidental in-flight failure is much more common than a missile attack.
Now that Facebook is open to anyone, the debate goes to the lowest common denominator
I'm sure it doesn't help that the demographic is wide open, but there's unfortunately very few forums anywhere I've seen that don't tend that way. You have to start with a critical mass of well-informed, thoughtful people who have a minimum of axes to grind... and even then, you'll see outbreaks of simplistic thinking, petty attacks, and trolling. College students are a half-decent bet, but since a good number of them are still basically adolescents, it's no guarantee.
In particular, though, I think Facebook has a specific problem that's bigger than the open demographic: the UI and culture both seem to encourage lots of little soundbite/bumper sticker expressions. Substantial and nuanced stuff just doesn't emerge in that circumstance, for some of the same reasons it doesn't emerge in political advertising or nightly news coverage.
Obama's entire qualifications are 1) he's not GWB, and 2) he's not Hillary.
Even if you parse some particular meanings of (1) and (2) -- that he's likely to be considerably more thoughtful and effective than the current president, and he doesn't have a 16 years of culture war political baggage which Clinton has -- this doesn't seem like an apt summary to me.
Once you get past those admittedly great points in his favor, all you have left is an utterly conventional politician.
If nothing else, one reason people are already attracted to him is that his politicking is already notably different:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama
But there are some indications his positions, say, on a number of technical issues are hardly Washington DC business as usual:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/26/qa-with-senator-barack-obama-on-key-technology-issues/
Again, suck it up and just promise to follow the rules of the community, and we might actually start to respect you a bit more.
Like hell.
*I* will never respect them. It's painfully obvious they've had the resources to do this for years, and for years they chose to treat the entire process with blatant contempt. It probably has cost me literally thousands of hours of my life to deal with their shit and I'm angry enough about it that I doubt I'd be above literally torturing their product managers if I had the chance. Put together the collective web dev time they've wasted with their little games, and you probably have hundreds of human lifetimes washed down the drain. They are on the same moral level of spammers, and that's the amount of respect they deserve.
And they'd do it *again* in a second if they thought it would earn them an advantage. They don't give a flying fig newton for you, for standards, for progress, for anything other than their own marketshare and control. The depth of contempt they deserve hasn't begun to be plumbed even here on slashdot.
ACID test? Great. This is essentially the abusive spouse buying roses for the woman who's just about finally fed up and ready to leave. Promises of good behavior while the fallout from IE 6 and 7 will be lingering for years to come.
Respect. Yeah.
Yes. And it's marked as fixed. Firefox 3 will finally have this. You can check out the beta if you want.
I'm glad the fix is written, and if the GP's point was about Mozilla being as guilty of deviation from standards as IE, I find it a poor one, but I'm not at all reassured by the idea that the bug is "marked" as fixed and will eventually gradually filter out into the world via FF3, especially after overlooking it for so long. In general, the Gecko team has far better record at supporting standards, which is why it's particularly maddening to see something so useful and basic apparently completely overlooked for so long by people who should know better.
The criticism about that particular bug may not be apt as a generalizable example, but it is as a reminder that no project is perfect and complacency isn't an appropriate attitude for even the best of browsers.
No, it's not pedantry. This isn't merely a case of wrong terminology, it's a sign that a developer is looking at something in a completely upside-down way.
You'll have to expound at length on what the correct philosophy a person who uses that terminology is missing, then, because I don't see it. My experience suggests the terminology is a poor test of whether a dev is doing so as an imprecise shorthand for CSS positioning or because they haven't realized that one can do CSS-positioned layout on elements other than divs. In fact, my experience suggests there are *very* few devs in that latter category.
And to be a little pedantic myself, it's also technically wrong to suggest that the div tag has no layout value... any block-level element does, even if it's not much.
No, they aren't. They are absolutely useless for layout.
I wouldn't go that far... there are times when positioned/floated divs are more convenient/more powerful than a table-based layout.
That said, if the sentiment driving that statement is utter frustration with the bitter taste of the CSS-positioning kool-aid, I understand perfectly. It was absolutely the wrong idea to try and get rid of tables as a layout tool, and the fact that it's been taken up as a mantra is a problem.
For some reason, I resisted the idea that Microsoft's browser incompatibilities were malevolent and intentional.
The kicker for me, though, was seeing people implement Javascript layers that addressed the inconsistencies. In their spare time. For free. It completely demolished the idea that any kind of technical difficulty was in the way. It's been almost four years since Dean Edwards released the IE7 js layer and since then, Microsoft hasn't even managed to roll that much support into their product.
Personally, I put whoever's in charge of Microsoft's IE product development team on the same moral level as spammers. Much in the same way spammers end up wasting your time and gumming a fantastic common resource, Microsoft's product wastes the time of thousands of web devs and holds the web back.
I honestly don't think that anyone's gone far enough in expressing the level of contempt they've earned.
CSS 101 is learning to float left and right. If you're trying to create three physical columns, you're doing it wrong. You need to create three divs, float two of them to either side, and your center will resize correctly. Easy, peasy. :-)
Unless you want resizable columns with a background color that spans the height of the page or viewport (whichever is larger). Then you have some interesting problems. Or, say you don't want a size spanning the page or viewport, but simple two columns that track each other's height. Divs as faux columns are inadequate under CSS 2.
There's also the matter of getting the columns to really, truly contain stuff that's inside of them. Yes, you can get this to happen vertically by adding an additional clearing div down at the bottom. Bit of a pain (and sometimes it interferes with other things inside the column and occasionally even on the page), but not a big deal. Horizontally.... if you want the content to stretch the column you have a problem.
And then there's the actual real world quirks.
Don't get me wrong. I think that floats are great layout tools and CSS positioning isn't anything I want to give up. I do, however, think that it was completely wrongheaded to try and throw out tables as a layout tool. There's a lot you can do without them, but they lend themselves well to enough situations (and often end up being less fragile and/or easier to understand than their positioned div counterparts) that they or some mechanism like them should have been retained with approval.
Setting font properties at the body doesn't cascade for all elements that result in a font onscreen. Try it.
body, body td {
font-family: MyFavoredFont, sans-serif;
}
Works for me for most everyday cases. There are some other occasional cases (form elements come to mind) but it's not frequent enough to cross my own annoyance threshold. YMMV.
There are some things that do drive me crazy, for what it's worth:
The official box model. I hate to say it, but MS got this one right: padding should be *inside* the element, and should therefore be included in the width of the element. The w3c model where you can have an element with 100px width but with 20px padding the element actually spans 140px from border to border is just crazy.
Faux columns. I tried, I really tried them for years. I learned to make them work, and I sometimes for the sake of self-flagellation or when I'm still hit by a trace of the kool-aid remaining in my system still try to make them work. I've also learned to hate them, though. Tables aren't always a better tool for each layout problem, but there's times they damn straight are and discarding them in favor of a world of floats was a mistake. Things might work if there was such a thing as a non-broken height specifier. But there's not.
No such thing as autocontain without "clear." Such a basic concept would save a lot of otherwise useless additional divs. It would also help coders get around a few tricky cases fairly easily.
Vertical alignment sucks in CSS. Yes, it's possible in certain circumstances. Yes, it still sucks even when it works.
Multiple background images would have been a great idea. This alone would make rounded corners on a box of arbitrary width and height (as well as other effects) trivial. If you want 'em now, though, you've got to wrap multiple container elements behind your background.
List styling. No such thing as arbitrary characters for bullets is just the start.
I could go on.... but that's not the point. Most of these things I've mentioned (and some of the things you've mentioned) could be fixed by incremental means rather than scrapping CSS for something else. This isn't to say that something else might not be a better idea. I just can't tell what that something else actually might be from your comments.
The iPhone is the same thing all over again, but replacing "portable music player" with "smartphone." It is the first cell phone with Web and e-mail, an organizer, a music player, SMS, and a few apps that is actually usable for the average Joe.
More than that: it's a smoother experience even for many people who *are* capable of navigating other smartphones. I haven't bought in yet for a few reasons (don't want to drop the $ on it yet, still thinking of trying something with real 3g instead), but the basic experience of doing all those things is an order of magnitude more compelling as the nearest alternative I've tried.
The average joe isn't the only person who's interested in the kind of experience Apple has to offer with their products.
what should we do if we actually did find life out there? And the sensible answer is: hide. Seriously, the chance that contact with space aliens will bring us benifits is tiny. If they have the ability to visit us, then the far more likely scenario is that they will exploit/conquer us
If the idea of increasing fuel efficiency and reducing environmental impact brings about wild speculation of socialist, new-world-order plots, what chance do we have of convincing anybody to reduce EM emissions to avoid space aliens?
At least, unless we find some.
I feel that DOM should be tossed and replaced with a relational equivalent
;)
You mean some sort of method of accessing it via flexible symbolic queries describing attributes and relationships between nodes? One that retrieved arrays of matching results?
If only someone had invented such a thing.
(To be fair, most of the other libraries have something similar as well.)