This is in fact a huge problem for font designers.
It's even easier for font pirates than that. They just take a file and swap formats a few times. They can strip the copyright information, tweak a curve or two, et voila, it's a "new font."
Those discs you can buy that advertise "10000 free fonts!" are generally filled with shareware fonts ganked from the internet, slightly modified (if at all), stripped of their original information, and resold. I spent the $9.99 on one once, on a lark, and gosh was I (un) surprised to find all 20 of the fonts I designed on the disc, under different names. And that's technically legal.
It is not uncommon for typefaces to "knock off" other type faces - that is to say borrow a lot of ideas and make a nearly-identical typeface - although the practice is frowned upon in the industry.
I used to design shareware fonts as a way of generating beer money in college. Some were decent. A lot were flat-out crappy. To this day, nearly 15 years later, I STILL see the downright crappy fonts used in high-profile places - TV ads, action figure packaging, porn sites...
"Cheap/free" seems to be a very powerful motivator for a lot of designers.
(One of them is ludicrously popular. And yet I can count the number of people that paid the shareware fees for it on one hand.)
I tend to consider Nielsen on the draconian edge of the usability debate. He's very "usability over any sort of aesthetics" and he advocates that as loudly as he can. It's pretty annoying in a vacuum......of course, he's not really in a vacuum. You've still got folks on the other side who advocate these incredibly complicated, sometimes pretty but usually entirely baffling overdesigned websites. Curt Cloninger used to be the posterboy for that sort of thing, although I don't know if he still is.
(And let's face it, there are still FAR too many people out there who've been stuck in the 1997 bubble-era philosophies of design. I work with people every day who consider themselves "professional web designers" who haven't updated their html skills since 1998, think flash-based splash screens are a *great* new innovation, and so forth. With armies of people like that developing the web, somebody's gotta speak up, even if it's a bloviating dutchman.)
As usual, reality is somewhere in the middle, but if you've got one extreme, it's probably good there's another to balance things out. Nielsen's website may be a lot of pro-JN cheerleading, but of course he wants to self-promote - he's not doing this out of altruism, he wants people to hire Nielsen-Norman.
Me, I like Jeff Zeldman's stuff, especially http://www.alistapart.com/. He can get a lttle preachy and, god help us, nostalgically whiny sometimes, but he manages to make clean, attractive, usable designs most of the time.
I never said that they were. All of my music purchases come from those who are not.
Nor was I intimating that you had said that. I just see that a lot in these threads and it seemed as good a place as any to mention it.
Maybe not "specifically accurate," but colloquially, those non-RIAA labels are generally reffered to as independant or "indie", since they operate without RIAA support, and the RIAA members are referred to (in polite company, at least) as "industry."
Indies are quite often referred to as "industry" as well - perhaps not by you and your friends, but all the indie labels I've worked with do consider themselves part of the "music industry" and will refer to themselves as such. Similarly, not every consumer is so discriminating.
There are even a few "indies" which are RIAA members. Largish indies, yes, but they're labels that are quite outside the realm of the Big 3/4 and sell significantly less than a Sony "niche" label.
It's dependent on the artist, label, and contract. My band's contract spells out explicitly what percent of what format we get after a CD, mp3, iTMS, etc sale. The label pays to produce and distrib the CD and get it on the digital sites and in stores, and after those basic costs are recouped we pretty much split the remaining profits.
Not all contracts are like that, though. Some give advances, some older contrtacts are still in effect from the days long before digital media, etc.
Usually, the artist isn't paid *directly* by the sales outlet, although that can happen.
Of course there *are* well-selling (well, a few thousand copies, which on the indie scene is pretty excellent) albums made with just Reason and an SM58, but they're the anomaly.
I've invested a lot of my money into my home studio, and even though it's a ton cheaper than it used to be, quality does come at a premium. I've spent as much on bass traps for the room acoustics as I did on a PC. And those are not the kinds of things likely to get cheaper as computers become more powerful...
A point of note: While the RIAA *is* formed of entities that put out CDs, not all entities that put out CDs are members of the RIAA (or other similar lobbying groups).
There's a tendency in these debates to use "RIAA" and "Music Industry" interchangably, and that's not specifically accurate. True, the RIAA is the loudest voice, but they are not the end-all-and-be-all of the label system. In fact, the bulk of labels are not RIAA members (although RIAA members account for the bulk of CDs produced and sold).
It's something to keep in mind when you're "sticking it to the Man" - "The Man" in question may not have anything to do with the draconian policies of the RIAA and could be some guy running a label out of his garage.
Well, neither I nor my label are members of the RIAA, and we're none too fond of AllOfMp3.com either - we've not seen a dime in artist royalties, we can't even get hold of them, our Russian distributors and promoters can't get a response from them...
It's made even better by the fact that, for quite a while, AllOfMp3.com was *selling* stuff that we were giving away *for free*. Yeah, why download free mp3's when you can pay a shady russian organization $.50 for it?
So in short, I think AllOfmp3.com is bad for not paying artist royalties too. And yet, I'm not affiliated with the RIAA (or BPI or anyone else for that matter) in any way. My gosh, how could that be?
Hmm...maybe because AllOfmp3.com screws people regardless of their affiliations?
The MPA has been cracking down and suing people who put lyrics online, put music online, distribute photocopies, etc etc for a long, long time. It's what they do.
They aren't as pig-headed as the RIAA, though. They're slightly smarter, and have had various legitimate online distribution vectors for nearly a decade now. Admittedly, they're not perfect - a few distribs use entirely proprietary document formats, others are slow with new releases because the engraving software is nonstandard and everything needs to be re-entered, etc etc, but they do exist and you can buy sheet music on a per-song, cheap basis. It's not a big market like digital music, so it never gets as much press. But it's there and for most pedagogical, home performance, or coverband needs they're pretty comprehensive sites.
This is all pretty much outside the label system. Some labels do have publishing arms, but they're not all-inclusive. You can sell a record through Sony but publish independently.
Additionally, if you've got lyrics or words or tabs on your website site - contact the artist, the artist's management, or the publisher. Quite often the actual copyright holder will say "yeah, sure, that's cool" - most bands don't really care about garage bands covering their music - they make a lot more from the mechanical and performance royalties when someone does than they ever do from the sheet music - why bother with a few hundred bucks from the sheet music when a single indie-band cover on 1000 CDs will get you $70 right there? For a lot of publishers it's just not cost effective to go through the trouble of printing up 1000 books of sheet.
However, I bet the primary targets of lawsuits and C&D's will be places that put up the sheet music to the big earners - "White Christmas", for example - earners for their copyright holders which make comparatively less from new recording sales and performance royalties. "Classics" like the Beatles (or god help us "Stairway to Heaven"), for which every beginning guitar student seems to buy a fake book, are big moneymakers and are more likely to be under illegal-online-violation scrutiny than someone posting the tabs to Black Flag's "TV Party."
That's right. The lyrics are in the song and a trained ear can get them off the stupid song unless the singing is so bad or trampled by "background noise" that lyrics become the only way to figure out exactly what was said.
I believe it was Leifr Erickson, Erik The Red's son, who gets the credit for being the first european in the continental US. He founded a prosperous, albiet short-lived, colony in Labrador. IIRC Erik is credited with finding and colonizing Greenland.
There's a big statue of Leif outside the Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik, and they named the international airport in Keflavik after him. THe vikings/Icelanders really seem to dig him.
Sadly, there's no good marketing one-liner, and that's been one of MS's biggest hurdles in trying to sell this stuff. It's more nebulous than saying "what is Java?".NET as a development platform is a web-friendly, object-oriented dvelopment environment..NET also got tagged onto every server they produced, many of which were not written in.NET or written to work explicitly with.NET (ContentManagementServer.NET was written in classic ASP).
This is where a lot of the confusion sets in. You've got non-.NET products shipping as server.NET, a set of frameworks for development called.NET, and a few languages and technologies that got colloquially labeled ".NET" (ASP.NET gets used interchangably with.NET a lot outside Redmond).
Because basic science doesn't look as cool on film. Lotsa people have tried to have accurate space physics on a TV show or film, and it usually looks kinda weird (especially with people who are supposedly weightless).
It's a copout answer, I know, but back in the first Rolling Stone interview with GL, way back in 1977, he even talks about it. He put sound in space, he had the spaceships move like planes, all that jazz just because it looked neat. He said the only real scifi movie needed was 2001.
He's kinda got a point. SW isn't hard scifi, it's essentially a storm-the-castle fantasy just set in space.
Every time XHTML/CSS comes up in a forum like this, there's a lot of railing about how it just complicates thing when HTML does the job just fine.
Well, see, that's just it. HTML doesn't so much do the job just fine. Yes, XHTML and CSS is a bit more complex than basic HTML, but it's not that bad and a good editor makes short work of remembering the syntax. HTML can make a web page very easily. But it can't make a *good* web page easily. The number of hoops one has to jump through to make an old-style HTML page degrade gracefully into accessible browsers, or even look roughly similar between browsers - has led to pages filled with the single-pixel-gif-trick and tables-nested-within-tables -- you get pages where the majority of the markup and even some of the page content has nothing to do with what the page is actually about.
XHTML is a good thing in the same way that strongly-typed languages are - if you don't keep track of everything correctly, it's not going to work at all. Your tags have to make sense - and if they do, you're no longer relying on the hope that whoever wrote the browser took your specifc exception into account. Heck, just adding the XHTML doctype convinces IE6 to play nice with a lot of standards it previously ignored, which is in itself a small triumph
Good-old HTML isn't going away, so those of you decrying the death of the democratic internet can stop worrying. Where XHTML/CSS is really handy isn't for the guy making a Buffy Fansite, it's for the organizations that need to create and maintain complex or wide-impacting web presences, or for the people developing web-based applications. XHTML helps make short work of accesibility issues, it leads to smaller pages (esp since stylesheets cache) so bandwidth is conserved, it abstracts the presentation layer (allowing designers to design and programmers to program without each getting in the other's way - a huge problem with a lot of web applications), the code is pretty easy to read (if you do it right, XHTML content makes logical structural sense and isn't cluttered with tags to move that paragraph to the left 25 pixels etc). What it comes down to is more efficient maintenance and wider support, which saves anyone trying to do a large implementation a lot of time and money.
(and really, XHTML isn't *that* hard. It's at least consistant, unlike a lot of the HTML tags bunged on after version 1...but that's a different argument)
My label makes about $60 a year, after paying for manufacturing, promotion and royalties for our small stable of artists.
All our stuff ended up on jetgroove, and now allofmp3. Incluidng stuf that was released free to the public on our artists and label sites.
You think we can afford to hire a russian lawyer? No. You think Allofmp3 is taking advantage of the fact that the majority of the artists they sell can't get access to or don't have access to russian lawyers? Hell yes. That's why they set up in Russia.
Basically, a little artist like me is getting screwed because these guys found a way to skirt the system. I've called in as many favors as I could from my russian connections, so far none of them has found a lawyer who's even willing to do business with these guys, and the one who pretended to be a lawyer never got his calls returned (and he's in Moscow).
CDs in russia don't cost that much because 90% of them are bootlegs. A legit import CD costs about $30US.
I know, I'm trying to sell CDs in russia. I make about $1 a CD on CDs after mastering, mfg, promotion, etc. Yet they still cost a fortune after import, and they're immediately bootlegged and sold for a few rubles.
Ugh. ONe of the things that bugged me most about B5 - which I ordinarily liked - was this tendency of JMS to drop characters in who seemed like extras from a RenFest. We had Marcus the Ranger with his clipped british accent, cape and fighting staff, Byron the gothy telepath, and then Galen, the Technomage. The Minbari themselves were only pointy-ears away from being the wise and mystical elven elders.
Huzzah! Turkey legs and mead for all my men!
Anytime you get the word "mage" into someone's primary character description it starts to feel like D&D fan fiction. Saving throw versus gamer cliches!
Maybe if they get a different actor to portray Galen in a less...LARPy kind of way, it'll be okay.
Okay, you may have some points, but my point is this:
HTML is not easy. Not if you want it to work. Hence the proliferation of monobrowser sites, sites that are broken in many ways, and the annoying excess of marquee tags out there.
I've worked with a number of really big companies, with lots of people who have to develop content for the web. The vast majority of them do not bother to wrap their brains around HTML at all, choosing instead to hit "save as HTML" in Word or...ugh...frontpage.
When it comes right down to it, things are going to stay that way. People are going to use editors far more often than they're going to use vi for their markup (unless, of course, they're a/.'er). Stylesheets as a design concept are no big deal to the average user - Word's supported them for ages. If the editor supports XHTML and CSS natively, then this is a step forward to having non-broken websites all around. Websites that I can properly browse from my phone. Websites that comply with section508, so my incredibly nearsighted cousin can see them. As it stands with current HTML these things are quite doable, but not always intrinsically obvious to an average user (or even apparrent). A move to XHTML and CSS may not democratize markup the way HTML was supposed to (and, in my opinion, failed miserably), but it will democratize browsing, which is a far larger audience.
XHTML and CSS are much, much easier to learn than the giagntic mess of nonstandard, browser-incompatible, downright screwy tags that encompass the current state of HTML. Maybe HTML was once intended as a great democratzier of the internet, but it's a misapprehension to think that back in the day everyone was writing and grasping HTML - the people who were early-adopters of the web and were coding their home pages were the technical people anyway. Few average-guys-on-the-street were setting up elaborate page designs unless their job called for it. Even then, most people relied heavily on editors and templates. The proliferation of bad Frontpage-designed websites is a testament to that.
The internet has changed and old-fashioned HTML - and the idea of one person coding it all for themselves - isn't really up to the task anymore.
Let's face it, most "non-technical" people stopped coding HTML by hand when the spec for "table" came out. Those that continued gave us interminable headaches with tags that wouldn't validate, but occasionally IE or NS would consider "good enough" and try to fix, or little end-run hacks that would do one specific formatting thing in IE4 that would break horribly in every other browser.
There's less of a need these days anyway for a non-IT-or-related-industry person to deal with the deep mechanics of markup. Much of the great democratization of the net has come from services - forums, blogs, and yes even slashdot, not from my next door neighbor coding a personal home page. Even in industry, the "web designer" is becoming a rarity in the post-dotcom economy. NOw it's either more comprehensive media designers who apply their skill to the web, "regular" employees who develop content, or developers and admins who code HTML as front-ends to applications and services. Few people have the specific job of just making web pages anymore.
For those of us who do have to deal with the nuts and bolts of markup, the XHTML/CSS combo is a godsend. Code is more legible, information hierarchies make sense (in some ways, a lot of it hearkens back to the early days when everything was h1, h2, h3...), if doen right you only need to make one set of pages that can be easily made to work cross-browser...what's not to love?
And really, it's not hard to learn. Oh, sure, CSS has a lot of detail to it, but how often is someone going to have to know what the CSS2 spec is for alpha-masking? Standards things like "font-family" and "background-color" are pretty easy to remember, and are certainly easier to deal with than those bloody font tags and 900 conflicting html attributes.
Slashdot Mirror
This is in fact a huge problem for font designers.
It's even easier for font pirates than that. They just take a file and swap formats a few times. They can strip the copyright information, tweak a curve or two, et voila, it's a "new font."
Those discs you can buy that advertise "10000 free fonts!" are generally filled with shareware fonts ganked from the internet, slightly modified (if at all), stripped of their original information, and resold. I spent the $9.99 on one once, on a lark, and gosh was I (un) surprised to find all 20 of the fonts I designed on the disc, under different names. And that's technically legal.
It is not uncommon for typefaces to "knock off" other type faces - that is to say borrow a lot of ideas and make a nearly-identical typeface - although the practice is frowned upon in the industry.
That's never stopped people.
I used to design shareware fonts as a way of generating beer money in college. Some were decent. A lot were flat-out crappy. To this day, nearly 15 years later, I STILL see the downright crappy fonts used in high-profile places - TV ads, action figure packaging, porn sites...
"Cheap/free" seems to be a very powerful motivator for a lot of designers.
(One of them is ludicrously popular. And yet I can count the number of people that paid the shareware fees for it on one hand.)
I tend to consider Nielsen on the draconian edge of the usability debate. He's very "usability over any sort of aesthetics" and he advocates that as loudly as he can. It's pretty annoying in a vacuum... ...of course, he's not really in a vacuum. You've still got folks on the other side who advocate these incredibly complicated, sometimes pretty but usually entirely baffling overdesigned websites. Curt Cloninger used to be the posterboy for that sort of thing, although I don't know if he still is.
(And let's face it, there are still FAR too many people out there who've been stuck in the 1997 bubble-era philosophies of design. I work with people every day who consider themselves "professional web designers" who haven't updated their html skills since 1998, think flash-based splash screens are a *great* new innovation, and so forth. With armies of people like that developing the web, somebody's gotta speak up, even if it's a bloviating dutchman.)
As usual, reality is somewhere in the middle, but if you've got one extreme, it's probably good there's another to balance things out. Nielsen's website may be a lot of pro-JN cheerleading, but of course he wants to self-promote - he's not doing this out of altruism, he wants people to hire Nielsen-Norman.
Me, I like Jeff Zeldman's stuff, especially http://www.alistapart.com/. He can get a lttle preachy and, god help us, nostalgically whiny sometimes, but he manages to make clean, attractive, usable designs most of the time.
I never said that they were. All of my music purchases come from those who are not.
Nor was I intimating that you had said that. I just see that a lot in these threads and it seemed as good a place as any to mention it.
Maybe not "specifically accurate," but colloquially, those non-RIAA labels are generally reffered to as independant or "indie", since they operate without RIAA support, and the RIAA members are referred to (in polite company, at least) as "industry."
Indies are quite often referred to as "industry" as well - perhaps not by you and your friends, but all the indie labels I've worked with do consider themselves part of the "music industry" and will refer to themselves as such. Similarly, not every consumer is so discriminating.
There are even a few "indies" which are RIAA members. Largish indies, yes, but they're labels that are quite outside the realm of the Big 3/4 and sell significantly less than a Sony "niche" label.
It's dependent on the artist, label, and contract. My band's contract spells out explicitly what percent of what format we get after a CD, mp3, iTMS, etc sale. The label pays to produce and distrib the CD and get it on the digital sites and in stores, and after those basic costs are recouped we pretty much split the remaining profits.
Not all contracts are like that, though. Some give advances, some older contrtacts are still in effect from the days long before digital media, etc.
Usually, the artist isn't paid *directly* by the sales outlet, although that can happen.
Of course there *are* well-selling (well, a few thousand copies, which on the indie scene is pretty excellent) albums made with just Reason and an SM58, but they're the anomaly.
I've invested a lot of my money into my home studio, and even though it's a ton cheaper than it used to be, quality does come at a premium. I've spent as much on bass traps for the room acoustics as I did on a PC. And those are not the kinds of things likely to get cheaper as computers become more powerful...
A point of note: While the RIAA *is* formed of entities that put out CDs, not all entities that put out CDs are members of the RIAA (or other similar lobbying groups).
There's a tendency in these debates to use "RIAA" and "Music Industry" interchangably, and that's not specifically accurate. True, the RIAA is the loudest voice, but they are not the end-all-and-be-all of the label system. In fact, the bulk of labels are not RIAA members (although RIAA members account for the bulk of CDs produced and sold).
It's something to keep in mind when you're "sticking it to the Man" - "The Man" in question may not have anything to do with the draconian policies of the RIAA and could be some guy running a label out of his garage.
Well, neither I nor my label are members of the RIAA, and we're none too fond of AllOfMp3.com either - we've not seen a dime in artist royalties, we can't even get hold of them, our Russian distributors and promoters can't get a response from them...
It's made even better by the fact that, for quite a while, AllOfMp3.com was *selling* stuff that we were giving away *for free*. Yeah, why download free mp3's when you can pay a shady russian organization $.50 for it?
So in short, I think AllOfmp3.com is bad for not paying artist royalties too. And yet, I'm not affiliated with the RIAA (or BPI or anyone else for that matter) in any way. My gosh, how could that be?
Hmm...maybe because AllOfmp3.com screws people regardless of their affiliations?
Well, aside from that whole "alleged russian mafia orchestrating massive identity thefts" thing.
Oh and the "screws indie artists bigtime" thing too.
No, not for 10 years.
That was one of the stipulations of the contract that got the movie made - no television series until the rights revert.
The MPA has been cracking down and suing people who put lyrics online, put music online, distribute photocopies, etc etc for a long, long time. It's what they do.
They aren't as pig-headed as the RIAA, though. They're slightly smarter, and have had various legitimate online distribution vectors for nearly a decade now. Admittedly, they're not perfect - a few distribs use entirely proprietary document formats, others are slow with new releases because the engraving software is nonstandard and everything needs to be re-entered, etc etc, but they do exist and you can buy sheet music on a per-song, cheap basis. It's not a big market like digital music, so it never gets as much press. But it's there and for most pedagogical, home performance, or coverband needs they're pretty comprehensive sites.
This is all pretty much outside the label system. Some labels do have publishing arms, but they're not all-inclusive. You can sell a record through Sony but publish independently.
Additionally, if you've got lyrics or words or tabs on your website site - contact the artist, the artist's management, or the publisher. Quite often the actual copyright holder will say "yeah, sure, that's cool" - most bands don't really care about garage bands covering their music - they make a lot more from the mechanical and performance royalties when someone does than they ever do from the sheet music - why bother with a few hundred bucks from the sheet music when a single indie-band cover on 1000 CDs will get you $70 right there? For a lot of publishers it's just not cost effective to go through the trouble of printing up 1000 books of sheet.
However, I bet the primary targets of lawsuits and C&D's will be places that put up the sheet music to the big earners - "White Christmas", for example - earners for their copyright holders which make comparatively less from new recording sales and performance royalties. "Classics" like the Beatles (or god help us "Stairway to Heaven"), for which every beginning guitar student seems to buy a fake book, are big moneymakers and are more likely to be under illegal-online-violation scrutiny than someone posting the tabs to Black Flag's "TV Party."
Yeah, I did that too. Atlantic, RCA and Beggars were more than happy to oblige. They even let me put up tablature and scans of the album covers.
Such places already exist - one I know of is musicnotes.com.
Being a native english speaker, I've had to look up the lyrics so I could sing those turkish, russian, and panjabi songs.
No, I'm not kidding.
That's right. The lyrics are in the song and a trained ear can get them off the stupid song unless the singing is so bad or trampled by "background noise" that lyrics become the only way to figure out exactly what was said.
Two words: Louie Louie.
I believe it was Leifr Erickson, Erik The Red's son, who gets the credit for being the first european in the continental US. He founded a prosperous, albiet short-lived, colony in Labrador. IIRC Erik is credited with finding and colonizing Greenland.
There's a big statue of Leif outside the Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik, and they named the international airport in Keflavik after him. THe vikings/Icelanders really seem to dig him.
Sadly, there's no good marketing one-liner, and that's been one of MS's biggest hurdles in trying to sell this stuff. It's more nebulous than saying "what is Java?" .NET as a development platform is a web-friendly, object-oriented dvelopment environment. .NET also got tagged onto every server they produced, many of which were not written in .NET or written to work explicitly with .NET (ContentManagementServer.NET was written in classic ASP).
.NET, and a few languages and technologies that got colloquially labeled ".NET" (ASP.NET gets used interchangably with .NET a lot outside Redmond).
This is where a lot of the confusion sets in. You've got non-.NET products shipping as server.NET, a set of frameworks for development called
It was pretty terrible marketing.
Because basic science doesn't look as cool on film. Lotsa people have tried to have accurate space physics on a TV show or film, and it usually looks kinda weird (especially with people who are supposedly weightless).
It's a copout answer, I know, but back in the first Rolling Stone interview with GL, way back in 1977, he even talks about it. He put sound in space, he had the spaceships move like planes, all that jazz just because it looked neat. He said the only real scifi movie needed was 2001.
He's kinda got a point. SW isn't hard scifi, it's essentially a storm-the-castle fantasy just set in space.
Every time XHTML/CSS comes up in a forum like this, there's a lot of railing about how it just complicates thing when HTML does the job just fine.
Well, see, that's just it. HTML doesn't so much do the job just fine. Yes, XHTML and CSS is a bit more complex than basic HTML, but it's not that bad and a good editor makes short work of remembering the syntax. HTML can make a web page very easily. But it can't make a *good* web page easily. The number of hoops one has to jump through to make an old-style HTML page degrade gracefully into accessible browsers, or even look roughly similar between browsers - has led to pages filled with the single-pixel-gif-trick and tables-nested-within-tables -- you get pages where the majority of the markup and even some of the page content has nothing to do with what the page is actually about.
XHTML is a good thing in the same way that strongly-typed languages are - if you don't keep track of everything correctly, it's not going to work at all. Your tags have to make sense - and if they do, you're no longer relying on the hope that whoever wrote the browser took your specifc exception into account. Heck, just adding the XHTML doctype convinces IE6 to play nice with a lot of standards it previously ignored, which is in itself a small triumph
Good-old HTML isn't going away, so those of you decrying the death of the democratic internet can stop worrying. Where XHTML/CSS is really handy isn't for the guy making a Buffy Fansite, it's for the organizations that need to create and maintain complex or wide-impacting web presences, or for the people developing web-based applications. XHTML helps make short work of accesibility issues, it leads to smaller pages (esp since stylesheets cache) so bandwidth is conserved, it abstracts the presentation layer (allowing designers to design and programmers to program without each getting in the other's way - a huge problem with a lot of web applications), the code is pretty easy to read (if you do it right, XHTML content makes logical structural sense and isn't cluttered with tags to move that paragraph to the left 25 pixels etc). What it comes down to is more efficient maintenance and wider support, which saves anyone trying to do a large implementation a lot of time and money.
(and really, XHTML isn't *that* hard. It's at least consistant, unlike a lot of the HTML tags bunged on after version 1...but that's a different argument)
You want excess...take a look at ARP. They spent...$9m developing the Avatar and sold $2m worth of instruments. Ouch.
My label makes about $60 a year, after paying for manufacturing, promotion and royalties for our small stable of artists.
All our stuff ended up on jetgroove, and now allofmp3. Incluidng stuf that was released free to the public on our artists and label sites.
You think we can afford to hire a russian lawyer? No. You think Allofmp3 is taking advantage of the fact that the majority of the artists they sell can't get access to or don't have access to russian lawyers? Hell yes. That's why they set up in Russia.
Basically, a little artist like me is getting screwed because these guys found a way to skirt the system. I've called in as many favors as I could from my russian connections, so far none of them has found a lawyer who's even willing to do business with these guys, and the one who pretended to be a lawyer never got his calls returned (and he's in Moscow).
You tell me why these guys are such great heroes.
CDs in russia don't cost that much because 90% of them are bootlegs. A legit import CD costs about $30US.
I know, I'm trying to sell CDs in russia. I make about $1 a CD on CDs after mastering, mfg, promotion, etc. Yet they still cost a fortune after import, and they're immediately bootlegged and sold for a few rubles.
Ugh. ONe of the things that bugged me most about B5 - which I ordinarily liked - was this tendency of JMS to drop characters in who seemed like extras from a RenFest. We had Marcus the Ranger with his clipped british accent, cape and fighting staff, Byron the gothy telepath, and then Galen, the Technomage. The Minbari themselves were only pointy-ears away from being the wise and mystical elven elders.
Huzzah! Turkey legs and mead for all my men!
Anytime you get the word "mage" into someone's primary character description it starts to feel like D&D fan fiction. Saving throw versus gamer cliches!
Maybe if they get a different actor to portray Galen in a less...LARPy kind of way, it'll be okay.
Okay, you may have some points, but my point is this:
/.'er). Stylesheets as a design concept are no big deal to the average user - Word's supported them for ages. If the editor supports XHTML and CSS natively, then this is a step forward to having non-broken websites all around. Websites that I can properly browse from my phone. Websites that comply with section508, so my incredibly nearsighted cousin can see them. As it stands with current HTML these things are quite doable, but not always intrinsically obvious to an average user (or even apparrent). A move to XHTML and CSS may not democratize markup the way HTML was supposed to (and, in my opinion, failed miserably), but it will democratize browsing, which is a far larger audience.
HTML is not easy. Not if you want it to work. Hence the proliferation of monobrowser sites, sites that are broken in many ways, and the annoying excess of marquee tags out there.
I've worked with a number of really big companies, with lots of people who have to develop content for the web. The vast majority of them do not bother to wrap their brains around HTML at all, choosing instead to hit "save as HTML" in Word or...ugh...frontpage.
When it comes right down to it, things are going to stay that way. People are going to use editors far more often than they're going to use vi for their markup (unless, of course, they're a
XHTML and CSS are much, much easier to learn than the giagntic mess of nonstandard, browser-incompatible, downright screwy tags that encompass the current state of HTML. Maybe HTML was once intended as a great democratzier of the internet, but it's a misapprehension to think that back in the day everyone was writing and grasping HTML - the people who were early-adopters of the web and were coding their home pages were the technical people anyway. Few average-guys-on-the-street were setting up elaborate page designs unless their job called for it. Even then, most people relied heavily on editors and templates. The proliferation of bad Frontpage-designed websites is a testament to that.
The internet has changed and old-fashioned HTML - and the idea of one person coding it all for themselves - isn't really up to the task anymore.
Let's face it, most "non-technical" people stopped coding HTML by hand when the spec for "table" came out. Those that continued gave us interminable headaches with tags that wouldn't validate, but occasionally IE or NS would consider "good enough" and try to fix, or little end-run hacks that would do one specific formatting thing in IE4 that would break horribly in every other browser.
There's less of a need these days anyway for a non-IT-or-related-industry person to deal with the deep mechanics of markup. Much of the great democratization of the net has come from services - forums, blogs, and yes even slashdot, not from my next door neighbor coding a personal home page. Even in industry, the "web designer" is becoming a rarity in the post-dotcom economy. NOw it's either more comprehensive media designers who apply their skill to the web, "regular" employees who develop content, or developers and admins who code HTML as front-ends to applications and services. Few people have the specific job of just making web pages anymore.
For those of us who do have to deal with the nuts and bolts of markup, the XHTML/CSS combo is a godsend. Code is more legible, information hierarchies make sense (in some ways, a lot of it hearkens back to the early days when everything was h1, h2, h3...), if doen right you only need to make one set of pages that can be easily made to work cross-browser...what's not to love?
And really, it's not hard to learn. Oh, sure, CSS has a lot of detail to it, but how often is someone going to have to know what the CSS2 spec is for alpha-masking? Standards things like "font-family" and "background-color" are pretty easy to remember, and are certainly easier to deal with than those bloody font tags and 900 conflicting html attributes.