The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that consumers could "time shift" TV programs on VCRs to view later.
IANAL, BIHALD (But I Have A Law Degree)
This ruling establishes a defence if a copyright holder ever sues you for "time-shifting". However if a copyright holder implements a technology that prevents you from time-shifting, this ruling does not help you.
This is also true for "fair use", which can be used as a defence if a copyright holder tries to sue you, but cannot be invoked as a right.
At stake in this war, says Eisner, who's the acknowledged leader of the Content Faction, is "the future of the American entertainment industry, the future of American consumers, the future of America's balance of international trade."
Well I'm not American, and I don't give a fuck about "the future of the American entertainment industry". And IIRC, the vast majority of the world is not American either.
And many of these non-Americans are bound to want to keep producing general-purpose computers, with all their limitless functionality intact. So if America does goes the restricted "entertainment device" route we'll have a two tier world - the restricted, controlled, entertainment-centric American world, and the unrestricted computer world that at least some of the rest of the world will produce.
And these two tiers will surely collapse under pressure from Americans who want to get all those freedoms that the rest of the world has. To prevent this would require an enormously expensive law enforcement regime equivalent to the East German stasi or the American War on Drugs. Which I guess is already in place...
Let's treat internet infrastructure as infrastructure (aka roads) and have the govt lay the lines.
After that, let private ISP's bid to operate the lines (i.e. maintenance, routers, cacheing, etc.) and make money on service not bandwidth.
This is an excellent setup, and it could have happened in my country (Australia), but didn't. Instead of a group of baby bells owning the infrastructure we had a govt monopoly (Telstra) owning the infrastructure.
A few years ago it was decided that competition and privatisation was the way to go, and so we now have a couple of competitors who are duplicating some of the infrastructure (a waste), and yet none of them have come close to breaking open Telstra's monopoly on the local loop.
Monopolies make sense for large scale infrastructure, and if you're gonna have monopoly you need to have govt ownership. But the services provided over the infrastructure don't need to be a monopoly or to be owned by the govt. For the services you want a whole bunch of companies competing in an open market.
Re:Could we see the list of website sins?
on
Homepage Usability
·
· Score: 1
Teeny, Tiny Fonts
The fact that so many web designers specify tiny fonts for their pages indicates that they think the default font size specified in their browser is too large.
The answer is obvious - web designers should learn how to reduce the default font size in their browser, and not force their choice on everybody else's browser.
PLEASE use different colors for visited and unvisited links. This is helpful for forgetful people like me who accidentally click on the same link twice.
Excellent advice. I would add that using images instead of text for links is just as bad as there is typically no way to determine which links you have already clicked on.
Menus full of buttons? Ugh, give me text links so I can see which ones I've clicked, and so I can resize them or colour them according to my preferences.
IE6 is a step *backwards* in compliance, with it's fscked-up CSS box model.
Actually the box model in IE5 was broken, and it has now been fixed in IE6. The fact that you got it the wrong way around just shows how easy it is for a Microsoft bug to be converted to "a standard" in people's minds, and for the "correct" behaviour to be seen as the bug.
But small screens work quite well for reading Japanese text. For a start, Japanese is very compact, taking up considerably less space than English. It also has no spaces between words, so text can run right up to the screen edge without concerns about breaking words. These two things make reading Japanese on small screens quite comfortable.
There's a bunch of other factors explaining why this sort of thing is in Japan, but not elsewhere. More people access the internet via cell-phones in Japan than via computers, cos not many people have computers in Japan, but everybody has cell-phones. And dial-up internet access is expensive due to local-call costs.
Getting a landline in Japan has a big upfront cost - 70,000 yen, which is about US$650. Many people never bother getting a landline and just get a keitai instead.
Local calls on landlines cost 10 yen for every 3 minutes, and the local call area is very small. Another reason to go with the keitai instead of bothering with a landline.
Keitais are cheap. Mine cost me 1 yen. It's not a particularly old or out of date model. It has a large colour screen, email, web access, and all the features. However if you want a keitai with a built in digital camera that you can use to send pictures to other users, then that will cost a bit.
The service contract for a keitai is usually one year. At the end of that year most people buy a new keitai. Why not if it only costs 1 yen? You can even get all your stored data transferred to your new phone.
...was in Australia in 1989, but the people doing on-call support were getting paid $5/hour for the time they were on call.
This was approx 20-40% of their daily pay rate. They thought it was a pretty good deal as they only received about one call a week, mostly during the day on the weekend.
I'd definitely demand an hourly rate instead of (or in addition to) payment per call/site visit. The thing about being on-call is that even when you're not taking calls you have to be ready to take calls. This means you should be compensated for the whole time you are on-call, not just the time you actually spend solving somebody's problem.
In short, spiders, proxies and caches make it impossible to be accurate in measuring traffic. But everyone else is affected the same way. So your relative stats are relevent-- they just aren't hit-for-hit accurate.
Actually everybody is not affected the same way. If your site specifically targets, say, AOL users, your traffic will be relatively lower due to AOL's aggressive caching. Similarly, different countries have different caching practices, and so audiences that come disproportionately from a particular country may be under (or over) counted.
If you think hard you can probably come up with a few more instances where caching practices vary for particular demographic categories, thus rendering web stats unreliable even for comparison purposes with other sites/pages.
To use your example: After the house is down, you walk through and notice that the doorknobs are not made of solid gold like you wanted. Can you go to the architect and say, "Well, that should have been included."? Of course not. Doorknobs are expected; solid gold ones are not.
ALT text isn't a gold doorknob, it is THE doorknob, at least for some people. ALT text can be used by people to decide whether to view the graphics, and so its absence effectively bars access to a major part of the site. ALT text is not just for blind people, its also for people who use graphical browsers who don't load images (perhaps because they're at the end of a slow link and are paying for access per minute), and for those using non-graphical browsers. Sensibly written ALT text allows those people to think "Hmm, I think I'll take a look at that picture", while not having to load all the other ones.
The sensible thing for SOCOG would have been to include in their contract that the site validate to either the HTML 4.01 strict or transitional DTDs. This would have ensured ALT text, plus a whole host of other benefits.
Its so easy to verify compliance with this requirement - just run the site through a validator! Any smart organisation making a contract with a web design company should make this a requirement.
Microsoft and Netscape browsers make up 97.4% of the hits (nearly 6.5 million so far this month). The stats tell me the browser versions too.
If the site is unfriendly to users of other browsers they won't return to it. Your statistics may be telling you that your site is driving away users of other browsers, not that those users don't exist.
AND, browser diversity is increasing, despite reports of IE's domination. Here in Japan it is very common for people to use their cellphones to access the web. My site works great in cellphones, and in the big bloated desktop browsers. Its easier to achieve this than it is to write browser detection scripts and incorporating a bunch of features that force users into using a particular user agent.
If you don't want to be left behind by the increasing diversity of user-agents then you'd better stop worrying about IE and NN, and start thinking about standards and universal accessability.
There is a cost involved in making buildings and businesses handicapped accessible.
And on the web that situation is reversed - it is more costly to exclude the handicapped, and cheaper to accomodate them.
Its cheap and easy to make a site accessible to any browser, even a speaking browser. This is what HTML was designed for - its a feature! Yet most shopping sites spend a lot of time and money incorporating browser detection and a bunch of other tactics in order to fight the general accessability that HTML has built-in. Its just ignorance, and a mind-set that demands that the look of the site be under the control of the designer rather than the user.
TV broadcasters in Australia pay a broadcast license fee, and there is very little competition - only three commercial channels. These broadcasters make big profits and are very nervous about anybody muscling in on their turf.
But heres the clincher - these broadcasters (in particular Kerry Packer who owns the nine network, as well as the bulk of the magazines in Australia) have a great deal of control over how the government of the day is portrayed in the media.
Add in Rupert Murdoch (originally an Australian, but now a US citizen) who has ambitions in the area of Australian broadcasting/datacasting etc, and in addition owns the bulk of newspapers in Australia. Between them, Kerry and Rupert have the power to bring down the govt, and so the govt is extremely reluctant to make any decision that will piss them off.
Currently, the ruling party (a conservative coalition) are the Packer party. They appear in his magazines and on his TV stations, and generally get good coverage from them. The opposition (Labor) are the Murdoch party, and the Murdoch press often gives the conservatives a hard time, even though the Murdoch press is generally conservative and anti-Labor.
The current controversy over data-casting, and the debates over what data-casting can and cannot be are simply about the conservatives choosing to support their man Kerry Packer instead of Rupert Murdoch. Much as I dislike Rupert Murdoch I hope he prevails this time.
P.S. Americans may know Rupert Murdoch as the owner of the Fox network, and like, half the world.
"Now, Mr.Smith, I see it that ten years ago you were in the habit of buying at least a pack of condoms a week and a lot of alcohol. That leads me to question your moral standards and the suitability for this position. By the way, around that time you bought several bongs -- can you explain to me what a bong is and what do you use it for?"
Thank you for your question Mr. Jones. By way of reply, I'd like to raise some issues that pertain to your "character". Can you explain to me the following incidents from your own personal history?
Your ex-wife's claims that your constant violence towards her broke up your marriage
The time the police found you drunk and unconscious in a public park, and when you came to you abused them before urinating in your pants
The as yet unproven allegations from your neighbour that you "interfered" with his seven year old son.
Your recent conviction as an email spammer for sending millions of unsolicited messages to people in an attempt to sell them the same email address database that you used.
If everybody had access to everything about everybody, it would take something pretty shocking to prejudice you against another person. Who hasn't got some sort of skeleton in their closet?
And of course I include govts and corporations in "everybody".
I fail to see how the loss of somebody else's privacy compensates you for the loss of your own.
The fact that I am not an exhibitionist does not imply that I am a voyer.
In today's society the loss of your privacy feels bad. But I don't think its inherently bad. The real evil is an imbalance in privacy. It sucks when others have more than you do. If everybody had none (and by everybody I include govts and corporations), then you wouldn't miss privacy. In fact it might even seem absurd.
Who would care what you were getting up to in your bedroom (or simply in your mind), when everybody else was open for scrutiny. Your little life would be lost in the noise. And not only that, imagine the power it would give you! You'd know all the details you want about the company's you buy from, the govts you vote for, and the people you associate with. I'd say thats real empowerment.
The current imbalance in privacy is what allows corporations to exploit you, govts to oppress you, and creates the conditions under which markets fail. I say we should blow it all open.
Presumably deja users will figure this out after reading two or three messages.
You and I may have figured this out, but I bet that the vast bulk of people will take quite a while to figure this out, if they indeed ever do. Newbies vastly outnumber the experienced on the web, and that won't change for a while.
And if you hate trying to use the Deja search interface, with its cluttered screen full of links and ads, there are alternatives. See my alternative front end for Deja, which is based on Jeremy Nixon's.
These have gotta be even easier to use than Napster, so the RIAA won't see any great benefit from buying off Napster.
I really like Daily Phat, cos of the way it gives you three different methods of obtaining the music you're searching for. Firstly its an Amazon referrer, so you get links to the CD on Amazon. Then you get the gnutella search results. Lastly you get the emusic results (for sale MP3s, usually about a $1 a track). Its a neat way of deflecting all the "aiding piracy" criticism.
A plague wipes out half the earths population. I come up with a cure. However, I don't believe you _personally_ deserve the cure. I do, however, give it out for free to everybody else.
Do I have that right?
If you're a drug company you do.
Hey if you want to get started on the ethics of drug companies, who do stuff like raise the price of drugs whenever a particular epidemic occurs, then/. is not really the place. But its an industry where private enterprise, laissez faire governments, and the forces of demand and supply lead to some very bad outcomes.
Kinda like the software industry, except that instead of the outcome being reduced innovation and the hegemony of Microsoft, you get a whole bunch of people dying due to a company's profit maximising price setting.
Both html browsers and word processors were originally intended to format documents dynamically and squish them into shape using some fairly general parameters of window/page size, font, etc. The problem is that people are now turning around and trying to use both as detailed page description formats that place each letter or object precisely on the screen. Given the underlying assumptions of the renderer, it shouldn't be surprising that this doesn't work right. If you really want to fix the words onto the page, use a desktop publishing program or convert to PDF.
There's a big difference between DOC and HTML that you're missing. With HTML the output medium is unknown - you don't know the user's browser, the browser's font and colour settings, the user's stylesheet, the user's colour depth, the user's screen resolution, the size of the user's browser window etc etc.
With a DOC file the output medium is known, and it basically comes down to the page size. Its fixed - it doesn't change for each user - and therefore it should be pretty easy to render. In my experience DOC file converters (for WordPerfect etc) work pretty well, except where the documents contains fancy features like Word's "frames" or "text boxes".
But hey, the world would be better off if people created structured documents instead of the hodge podge of formatting that is encouraged by Word.
The only result will be to kill IE - I don't see any good being done to anyone at all.
I disagree. We could have a slashdot story on abandonware - only this time it would be about how to encourage MS to open the source to their abandonware (i.e., IE). There'd be thousands of comments and Andover will make a bit of money. Great outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
It would also drastically reduce your CONSTITUTIONALLY guananteed use of "fair use."
You have no guaranteed use, or right, of fair use. You misunderstand the law if you think otherwise.
Fair use is a defense, not a right.
Fair use is a defense, not a right.
This means that the courts have stated that fair use of copyrighted material is legal. The RIAA/MPAA/etc can't sic the law on you for making fair use.
But if you are prevented from making fair use of copyrighted material by the RIAA/MPAA/etc, then you have no legal case at all!
Just because something is "legal" doesn't mean that you have a "right" to it. For example, owning $10 billion and a 500 Lear jets is legal.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that consumers could "time shift" TV programs on VCRs to view later.
IANAL, BIHALD (But I Have A Law Degree)
This ruling establishes a defence if a copyright holder ever sues you for "time-shifting". However if a copyright holder implements a technology that prevents you from time-shifting, this ruling does not help you.
This is also true for "fair use", which can be used as a defence if a copyright holder tries to sue you, but cannot be invoked as a right.
At stake in this war, says Eisner, who's the acknowledged leader of the Content Faction, is "the future of the American entertainment industry, the future of American consumers, the future of America's balance of international trade."
Well I'm not American, and I don't give a fuck about "the future of the American entertainment industry". And IIRC, the vast majority of the world is not American either.
And many of these non-Americans are bound to want to keep producing general-purpose computers, with all their limitless functionality intact. So if America does goes the restricted "entertainment device" route we'll have a two tier world - the restricted, controlled, entertainment-centric American world, and the unrestricted computer world that at least some of the rest of the world will produce.
And these two tiers will surely collapse under pressure from Americans who want to get all those freedoms that the rest of the world has. To prevent this would require an enormously expensive law enforcement regime equivalent to the East German stasi or the American War on Drugs. Which I guess is already in place...
Let's treat internet infrastructure as infrastructure (aka roads) and have the govt lay the lines.
After that, let private ISP's bid to operate the lines (i.e. maintenance, routers, cacheing, etc.) and make money on service not bandwidth.
This is an excellent setup, and it could have happened in my country (Australia), but didn't. Instead of a group of baby bells owning the infrastructure we had a govt monopoly (Telstra) owning the infrastructure.
A few years ago it was decided that competition and privatisation was the way to go, and so we now have a couple of competitors who are duplicating some of the infrastructure (a waste), and yet none of them have come close to breaking open Telstra's monopoly on the local loop.
Monopolies make sense for large scale infrastructure, and if you're gonna have monopoly you need to have govt ownership. But the services provided over the infrastructure don't need to be a monopoly or to be owned by the govt. For the services you want a whole bunch of companies competing in an open market.
Teeny, Tiny Fonts
The fact that so many web designers specify tiny fonts for their pages indicates that they think the default font size specified in their browser is too large.
The answer is obvious - web designers should learn how to reduce the default font size in their browser, and not force their choice on everybody else's browser.
PLEASE use different colors for visited and unvisited links. This is helpful for forgetful people like me who accidentally click on the same link twice.
Excellent advice. I would add that using images instead of text for links is just as bad as there is typically no way to determine which links you have already clicked on.
Menus full of buttons? Ugh, give me text links so I can see which ones I've clicked, and so I can resize them or colour them according to my preferences.
IE6 is a step *backwards* in compliance, with it's fscked-up CSS box model.
Actually the box model in IE5 was broken, and it has now been fixed in IE6. The fact that you got it the wrong way around just shows how easy it is for a Microsoft bug to be converted to "a standard" in people's minds, and for the "correct" behaviour to be seen as the bug.
But small screens work quite well for reading Japanese text. For a start, Japanese is very compact, taking up considerably less space than English. It also has no spaces between words, so text can run right up to the screen edge without concerns about breaking words. These two things make reading Japanese on small screens quite comfortable.
There's a bunch of other factors explaining why this sort of thing is in Japan, but not elsewhere. More people access the internet via cell-phones in Japan than via computers, cos not many people have computers in Japan, but everybody has cell-phones. And dial-up internet access is expensive due to local-call costs.
Some more reasons:
While you're teaching us how to advocate, you could start by recognising that "lose" has only one "o". "Loose" is the opposite of "tight", not "win".
We wouldn't want our message ignored because it appears to come from a bunch of illiterates.
...was in Australia in 1989, but the people doing on-call support were getting paid $5/hour for the time they were on call.
This was approx 20-40% of their daily pay rate. They thought it was a pretty good deal as they only received about one call a week, mostly during the day on the weekend.
I'd definitely demand an hourly rate instead of (or in addition to) payment per call/site visit. The thing about being on-call is that even when you're not taking calls you have to be ready to take calls. This means you should be compensated for the whole time you are on-call, not just the time you actually spend solving somebody's problem.
In short, spiders, proxies and caches make it impossible to be accurate in measuring traffic. But everyone else is affected the same way. So your relative stats are relevent-- they just aren't hit-for-hit accurate.
Actually everybody is not affected the same way. If your site specifically targets, say, AOL users, your traffic will be relatively lower due to AOL's aggressive caching. Similarly, different countries have different caching practices, and so audiences that come disproportionately from a particular country may be under (or over) counted.
If you think hard you can probably come up with a few more instances where caching practices vary for particular demographic categories, thus rendering web stats unreliable even for comparison purposes with other sites/pages.
To use your example: After the house is down, you walk through and notice that the doorknobs are not made of solid gold like you wanted. Can you go to the architect and say, "Well, that should have been included."? Of course not. Doorknobs are expected; solid gold ones are not.
ALT text isn't a gold doorknob, it is THE doorknob, at least for some people. ALT text can be used by people to decide whether to view the graphics, and so its absence effectively bars access to a major part of the site. ALT text is not just for blind people, its also for people who use graphical browsers who don't load images (perhaps because they're at the end of a slow link and are paying for access per minute), and for those using non-graphical browsers. Sensibly written ALT text allows those people to think "Hmm, I think I'll take a look at that picture", while not having to load all the other ones.
The sensible thing for SOCOG would have been to include in their contract that the site validate to either the HTML 4.01 strict or transitional DTDs. This would have ensured ALT text, plus a whole host of other benefits.
Its so easy to verify compliance with this requirement - just run the site through a validator! Any smart organisation making a contract with a web design company should make this a requirement.
Microsoft and Netscape browsers make up 97.4% of the hits (nearly 6.5 million so far this month). The stats tell me the browser versions too.
If the site is unfriendly to users of other browsers they won't return to it. Your statistics may be telling you that your site is driving away users of other browsers, not that those users don't exist.
AND, browser diversity is increasing, despite reports of IE's domination. Here in Japan it is very common for people to use their cellphones to access the web. My site works great in cellphones, and in the big bloated desktop browsers. Its easier to achieve this than it is to write browser detection scripts and incorporating a bunch of features that force users into using a particular user agent.
If you don't want to be left behind by the increasing diversity of user-agents then you'd better stop worrying about IE and NN, and start thinking about standards and universal accessability.
There is a cost involved in making buildings and businesses handicapped accessible.
And on the web that situation is reversed - it is more costly to exclude the handicapped, and cheaper to accomodate them.
Its cheap and easy to make a site accessible to any browser, even a speaking browser. This is what HTML was designed for - its a feature! Yet most shopping sites spend a lot of time and money incorporating browser detection and a bunch of other tactics in order to fight the general accessability that HTML has built-in. Its just ignorance, and a mind-set that demands that the look of the site be under the control of the designer rather than the user.
TV broadcasters in Australia pay a broadcast license fee, and there is very little competition - only three commercial channels. These broadcasters make big profits and are very nervous about anybody muscling in on their turf.
But heres the clincher - these broadcasters (in particular Kerry Packer who owns the nine network, as well as the bulk of the magazines in Australia) have a great deal of control over how the government of the day is portrayed in the media.
Add in Rupert Murdoch (originally an Australian, but now a US citizen) who has ambitions in the area of Australian broadcasting/datacasting etc, and in addition owns the bulk of newspapers in Australia. Between them, Kerry and Rupert have the power to bring down the govt, and so the govt is extremely reluctant to make any decision that will piss them off.
Currently, the ruling party (a conservative coalition) are the Packer party. They appear in his magazines and on his TV stations, and generally get good coverage from them. The opposition (Labor) are the Murdoch party, and the Murdoch press often gives the conservatives a hard time, even though the Murdoch press is generally conservative and anti-Labor.
The current controversy over data-casting, and the debates over what data-casting can and cannot be are simply about the conservatives choosing to support their man Kerry Packer instead of Rupert Murdoch. Much as I dislike Rupert Murdoch I hope he prevails this time.
P.S. Americans may know Rupert Murdoch as the owner of the Fox network, and like, half the world.
"Now, Mr.Smith, I see it that ten years ago you were in the habit of buying at least a pack of condoms a week and a lot of alcohol. That leads me to question your moral standards and the suitability for this position. By the way, around that time you bought several bongs -- can you explain to me what a bong is and what do you use it for?"
Thank you for your question Mr. Jones. By way of reply, I'd like to raise some issues that pertain to your "character". Can you explain to me the following incidents from your own personal history?
If everybody had access to everything about everybody, it would take something pretty shocking to prejudice you against another person. Who hasn't got some sort of skeleton in their closet?
And of course I include govts and corporations in "everybody".
I fail to see how the loss of somebody else's privacy compensates you for the loss of your own.
The fact that I am not an exhibitionist does not imply that I am a voyer.
In today's society the loss of your privacy feels bad. But I don't think its inherently bad. The real evil is an imbalance in privacy. It sucks when others have more than you do. If everybody had none (and by everybody I include govts and corporations), then you wouldn't miss privacy. In fact it might even seem absurd.
Who would care what you were getting up to in your bedroom (or simply in your mind), when everybody else was open for scrutiny. Your little life would be lost in the noise. And not only that, imagine the power it would give you! You'd know all the details you want about the company's you buy from, the govts you vote for, and the people you associate with. I'd say thats real empowerment.
The current imbalance in privacy is what allows corporations to exploit you, govts to oppress you, and creates the conditions under which markets fail. I say we should blow it all open.
Presumably deja users will figure this out after reading two or three messages.
You and I may have figured this out, but I bet that the vast bulk of people will take quite a while to figure this out, if they indeed ever do. Newbies vastly outnumber the experienced on the web, and that won't change for a while.
And if you hate trying to use the Deja search interface, with its cluttered screen full of links and ads, there are alternatives. See my alternative front end for Deja, which is based on Jeremy Nixon's.
Don't feel bad - but be careful being self-righteous.
You think you're so smart for seeing through "Patricia", but my first thought upon reading Lita's post was that Lita and Patricia are the same person.
Now that's some serious trolling
Gnute is not the only web front end to Gnutella. See also
Daily Phat, and
Surfy
These have gotta be even easier to use than Napster, so the RIAA won't see any great benefit from buying off Napster.
I really like Daily Phat, cos of the way it gives you three different methods of obtaining the music you're searching for. Firstly its an Amazon referrer, so you get links to the CD on Amazon. Then you get the gnutella search results. Lastly you get the emusic results (for sale MP3s, usually about a $1 a track). Its a neat way of deflecting all the "aiding piracy" criticism.
A plague wipes out half the earths population. I come up with a cure. However, I don't believe you _personally_ deserve the cure. I do, however, give it out for free to everybody else.
Do I have that right?
If you're a drug company you do.
Hey if you want to get started on the ethics of drug companies, who do stuff like raise the price of drugs whenever a particular epidemic occurs, then /. is not really the place. But its an industry where private enterprise, laissez faire governments, and the forces of demand and supply lead to some very bad outcomes.
Kinda like the software industry, except that instead of the outcome being reduced innovation and the hegemony of Microsoft, you get a whole bunch of people dying due to a company's profit maximising price setting.
Both html browsers and word processors were originally intended to format documents dynamically and squish them into shape using some fairly general parameters of window/page size, font, etc. The problem is that people are now turning around and trying to use both as detailed page description formats that place each letter or object precisely on the screen. Given the underlying assumptions of the renderer, it shouldn't be surprising that this doesn't work right. If you really want to fix the words onto the page, use a desktop publishing program or convert to PDF.
There's a big difference between DOC and HTML that you're missing. With HTML the output medium is unknown - you don't know the user's browser, the browser's font and colour settings, the user's stylesheet, the user's colour depth, the user's screen resolution, the size of the user's browser window etc etc.
With a DOC file the output medium is known, and it basically comes down to the page size. Its fixed - it doesn't change for each user - and therefore it should be pretty easy to render. In my experience DOC file converters (for WordPerfect etc) work pretty well, except where the documents contains fancy features like Word's "frames" or "text boxes".
But hey, the world would be better off if people created structured documents instead of the hodge podge of formatting that is encouraged by Word.
The only result will be to kill IE - I don't see any good being done to anyone at all.
I disagree. We could have a slashdot story on abandonware - only this time it would be about how to encourage MS to open the source to their abandonware (i.e., IE). There'd be thousands of comments and Andover will make a bit of money. Great outcome.