Sneakemail is an online application that truely fights spam and lets you catch spam easily.
What do you mean by 'fights spam', I interpret that as action or actions that directly reduce the volume of spam on the Internet.
I don't see how Sneakemail reduces the volume of spam on the Internet. Yes, it allows an individual to reduce the exposure of his private email address to email harvesters by providing expendable email addresses. But does nothing to reduce the amount of spam attempting to be delivered.
Spam isn't just an inbox problem, it is a traffic-jam problem too - which is more serious and damaging.
As far as you know, how much traffic is generated by email sent to non-existing sneakmail addresses - those addresses that used to be in use but discarded? This traffic still uses up resources and network capacity from the start to the destination, until it gets dropped by your mail servers.
I do acknowledge Sneakemail provides a valuable service to individuals, but as a tool that actively "fights spam" it doesn't measure up.
Business don't see the support structure behind Open Source - without that support structure, there's no-one to lay the blame on when things go wrong (Software is always the root cause of problems from a manager's point of view). So, somehow, just having the option of turning around to IBM and give them a royal bollocking is worth the exorbitant price.
Our company has recently switched from using Netscape's IPlanet to IBM's HTTP server -- on the basis of IBM's product being much cheaper per CPU than IPlanet (and it comes with Websphere 4). Did we mention IBM's HTTP's server is basically a rebadged Apache? Yep. Did we say Apache was Open Source? Yep. "Can't use a free webserver to run a professional website."
A few months earlier we were using an out-of-date copy of JRun on the main webserver. Something didn't work. Called the support line - being a product that Allaire no longer supported, there was no valid support contract. So the co bought a few copies of the supported JRun 3.0 (hence buying a new support contract and licenses). The bug was found, in one of the JSP's - not the servlet engine itself. And we still have shrinkwrapped copies of JRun 3.0 gathering dust in the filing cabinet. And we still run JRun 2.3.2.
[Usenet email address munging] Any programmer could whip up a short bit of code in about 5 seconds that would strip that sort of primitive obfuscation out and return a real address...
I use a real proper email address on Usenet (as required by netiquette), but I'm only seeing three emails a week of spam (as compared to my normal email address of 10-16 spam a day).
I use domain names and user names with the word spam in them. So I duck under the "clever spammers". Its worked so far.
I think this may be due to your ignorance. You thought I meant trying to re-size the browser with JavaScript but I actually meant the user re-sizing the browser after the page has been rendered.
On the contrary. I have no need to resize my browser window since it is already set to the correct width for me. Any website that expects me to resize because of their requirements need to have another re-think.
A website should use up the space it is allowed. To ask for more, or do with less is a failure on the website, not my browser.
Would you like to give a proper example of a correct HTML page that doesn't work in NN4? (HTML being a markup language used to describe the logical structure of content [w3.org]).
most of the "web" things I do has nothing to do with sales.
well, since the top reasons for visiting sites are 1.) for information and 2.) to buy something, and you do neither, then you're not really part of mainstream web development.
you're a dying breed and you're just to stubborn to actually know it.
Yes, this thread has bourne that out, I take a lot of pride in doing a good job - which a lot of you designers don't.
I'm actually using NN4 so I can cut out all the useless junk you people keep inserting into pages - the flash, javascript, CSS - all useless when all I want is the info. Its a great web-filter, and only the useful sites get through.
don't cry when nobody gives a shit about fixing their site for your browser anymore.
I'll be jumping for joy at that point, since twits like you won't be inserting "javascript fixes" for _my_ benefit. Hurry up and start using standards compliant markup, use HTML for its correct purpose of describing the logical structure of the content, use CSS for styling and presentation. Quit this fixation that you know better on how to support Netscape 4, you don't know. You are supposed to be a web developer - start acting like one.
you have to juggle your definition of "User-friendly" with the amount of mouse clicks required for your target audience to complete their task
Uggh.. another insufficiently digested piece of usability engineering. I suppose your IE only menu is one of those badly written DHTML dynamic menus (since link lists are accessible and work in all browsers).
You've misunderstood the usability concept that's been laid out. The rule of "a page being within three mouse clicks away" is a heuristic based on user actions in the days before DHTML (well, hidden layering). The concept was, more accurately, that it shouldn't take more than three user actions to get to a specific page. Since clicking a mouse or entering a new URL were the only ways to change the content of a page, this naturally became dogmatisized into the "three click" rule.
Now in a DHTML light, an action is anything the user has to do to change what is presented on the screen (like clicking on a link, or making a precise mouse pointer movement that makes a hidden division visible). So the first action is to mouse over the word or icon that makes the menu appear. The screen changes as the menu appears, the user then has to stop to read the screen to see the changes that weren't visible before.
Now the user has to make another action, like moving the mouse pointer over a link that opens a sub-menu. That's now two actions.
The sub menu now appears, and the user has to stop again to read the new menu items that weren't visible before.
Now the user moves the mouse pointer and clicks a link that takes them through to a new page. That would be the third action.
So its taken three disparate actions to leave the current page. That's the equivalent to the ill-digested "three clicks away", and the simplest proof that DHTML menus are not more usable than a simple link list, since it now takes three clicks to exit a page instead of one.
Naturally I stopped at the statement "I can write a completely W3C compliant, validated site [w3.org] and have it be utterly useless in NS4."
The _problems_ you listed are all presentational and stylesheet in nature (apart silly resize one which isn't a problem at all), but yet you quote a URL to an HTML validator, but not the CSS validator. The ludicrity of that proposition prevented me from continuing since my sides were aching from the unintended humour. To the clueful its obvious that Netscape 4 has a problem with the CSS, not the HTML - I would expect an experienced web developer to know this.
Would you like to give a proper example of a correct HTML page that doesn't work in NN4? (HTML being a markup language used to describe the logical structure of content).
Netscape has some serious bugs and performance issues
Runs fine for me. Perhaps you need to uninstall all the trojans and spyware you've got running. Or get a real operating system.
It's really, really far behind. So much that even Netscape knows it.
I know Netscape 4 is five years old. Its got this great filter that can tell the difference between web authors that know what they are doing and the crap. I run it without Javascript and without CSS.
If you cannot present the information to me in a readable format (readable to MY eyes), then you are not much of a web developer, and your company is yet another of those that promise so much and deliver so little.
I'm the one with the credit card, you are the one that's trying to sell something. Don't you ever forget that, amazon.co.uk certainly don't.
There's no specification forcing browsers to implement CSS and DOM, so this "industry standard" you refer to is meaningless. CSS is an optional item that should _never_ be relied on to display content. It is an enhancement of a proper well formed HTML document.
The only thing you should ever rely on is that the user agent can render HTML and nothing else.
The idea that CSS and DOM is an industry standard that all browsers must follow is ludicrous and misinformed. It is merely a nice to have, not an absolute requirement.
So by adhering to a recommended HTML specification does give the author a higher degree of confidence that today's browsers and tommorrow's browsers will support this document.
Heck, Lynx is a standards compliant browser. CSS is not mandatory. Javascript is not mandatory. DOM is not mandatory. Lynx is a Web browser.
Ironically enough, if more websites could use standard compliant markup and the @import url to bring in their CSS layout suggestions rather than cluttering the HTML with cruft layout in tables, then Netscape 4 with a user-defined stylesheet would be an ideal tool to browse the web.
Its this unrealistic insistence of websites controlling the environment that creates the mess in Netscape 4. Give Netscape 4 the barebones clean and sleek HTML, and I'll have a completely useful browser.
In order to fix it for ns4, I often have to mangle the code to the point that it no longer displays correctly under any other browsers.
Its amazing considering that we are in the twenty first century, and supposedly cutting edge designers haven't figured out the basics of componentising the tools of their trade.
Have you never heard of the benefits of separating content from the presentation? Have you never heard of using templates to publish a website? Have you never heard of using automated tools to speed up the donkey-work?
You are supposed to be using a cutting edge medium, we're no longer in the middle ages, we do have tools to reduce problems down to manageable sizes.
Its your lack of understanding of the tools available that fails you as a good web developer. You've been caught out by the oldest trick in the book. Start modernising your design and development practices, all the tools you need are freely available.
. it's a lament from having to be up at 2 in the morning re-coding seperate versions of all your pages because some small market segment MIGHT be using a horrendously out of date browser.
If you are up at 2 in the morning of a going live date re-authoring pages for a browser that's been around for five years, then it points to your severe lack of skills and competance as a web developer. Netscape 4 didn't appear yesterday.
Did it occur to you any time before that Netscape 4 is not Internet Explorer? Or was it a case of not doing a competant job during the development cycle, and passing it off as a problem to the testing cycle.
You didn't cater for Netscape 4 from the start of the project, that's your problem. Don't blame your management fuckups on Netscape 4, your lack of resource and risk management is what's caused you to be working up till 2 in the morning. You had all the time in the world before hand to do the job right, but you neglected to do so.
The world does not owe you a favor for having a slow-ass computer, though. We're not about to sit idly by while your shitty 486 attempts to render our modern websites.
Nothing like elitism and prejudice for a rational argument. So much for the World Wide web being a world-wide accessible medium, apparently the concept of "world-wide" eludes you.
Which part of the world wide web specification are you referring to when you lay out the minimum specification of any user agent using it? You have a legitimate source of documentation on this?
It would be ironic if the purpose of your site was to sell new PC's and you kept out users of older PCs from browsing.
If you want to live in the past, why do you want everyone to suffer with you?
If you want to live in the future, why not use HTML for the purposes for which it was intended, describing document structure, and leave presentation suggestions to CSS. So what that Netscape 4 doesn't play along, hide the stylesheet and move along.
Try putting a border style on a href tag and watch it stop working.
So use @import url in your styles, and let me suggest a presentation for links in NN4.
Try resizing a netscape window that has absolutely positioned layers.
Why must I resize my window, why can't you use the space I've already allocated to you?
Try getting your background color on your layers to match the geometry of the div (or span or whatever other block element)
Use the @import url in your CSS style and let me deal with it in NN4 as I find best for me.
Try writting JavaScript for a browser that doesn't even come close to supporting W3C DOM specs
No problem, but then I know how to use Javascript
Try watching your browser completely choke up with a very large table
Large tables? Sounds like you are pushing out too much information per page to be useful to visitors anyway. Why not break it out into separate tables? (Of course, you'd never use a table for layout, right?)
The original poster suggested creating and maintining three codesbases for each site.
And there you have it, a web designer incapable of thinking in the real world. Unable to spot the obvious inefficiency.
Ever heard of templates? This has been done since the year dot. Quit re-inventing the wheel and start looking at every day solutions to every day problems.
Surely you can comprehend to useful collaboration of templates and databased content. Avoids the duplication immediately.
those who insist that text based editing is the way to go are either working on sites that aren't very "fashionable" or are insane enough to be able to keep nested tables, layers, ect all strait in their head
Or working with the proper tools already in place, like a templating system and a content management system, and a document management system, and a version control system.
Web authoring is more than just fiddling with Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Its a manufacturing process, and as such everything is broken down into components, as such, I hardly touch a complete html page any more, its all dynamic and managed by tools.
the last three companies I worked at, web logs would show that IE makes up for 95% of all viewers. Netscape is about 4.9%. Though I test on Netscape and IE on both Windows and Mac, is it really economically feasible to test on other browsers other than the two that make up for 99.9% of all visitors to most corporate websites?
*sarcasm*Well if you created the markup so that it only works in IE, then made those changes site wide, what you would find is that less and less non-IE browsers would use your site, thus completely vindicating your choice not to support non-IE browsers. */sarcasm*
They're just numbers that are pretty meaningless in trend analysis.
Its not economically feasible to test in every possible browser combination, but it is economically feasible to markup correctly to an available standard (or more precisely a documented recommendation), test in a variety of browsers, and let the browser manufacturers fix the problems they've created. With a bit of thought and common sense its easy enough to create fully accessible sites (except for web designers, who still think the wheel hasn't been invented yet)
Sure people want information from the web, but if they didn't want entertainment, how do you explain: OSDN visits a month: More than 5 million (Source, FAQ) AtomFilms unique visits a month: 18.7 Million
Yahoo: 18 million visitors a day Google: 25 million a day MSN: 16 million a day BBC: 4.8 million a day
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean by 'fights spam', I interpret that as action or actions that directly reduce the volume of spam on the Internet.
I don't see how Sneakemail reduces the volume of spam on the Internet. Yes, it allows an individual to reduce the exposure of his private email address to email harvesters by providing expendable email addresses. But does nothing to reduce the amount of spam attempting to be delivered.
Spam isn't just an inbox problem, it is a traffic-jam problem too - which is more serious and damaging.
As far as you know, how much traffic is generated by email sent to non-existing sneakmail addresses - those addresses that used to be in use but discarded? This traffic still uses up resources and network capacity from the start to the destination, until it gets dropped by your mail servers.
I do acknowledge Sneakemail provides a valuable service to individuals, but as a tool that actively "fights spam" it doesn't measure up.
CYA - Cover Your Ass. Its a blame-culture thing.
Business don't see the support structure behind Open Source - without that support structure, there's no-one to lay the blame on when things go wrong (Software is always the root cause of problems from a manager's point of view). So, somehow, just having the option of turning around to IBM and give them a royal bollocking is worth the exorbitant price.
Our company has recently switched from using Netscape's IPlanet to IBM's HTTP server -- on the basis of IBM's product being much cheaper per CPU than IPlanet (and it comes with Websphere 4). Did we mention IBM's HTTP's server is basically a rebadged Apache? Yep. Did we say Apache was Open Source? Yep. "Can't use a free webserver to run a professional website."
A few months earlier we were using an out-of-date copy of JRun on the main webserver. Something didn't work. Called the support line - being a product that Allaire no longer supported, there was no valid support contract. So the co bought a few copies of the supported JRun 3.0 (hence buying a new support contract and licenses). The bug was found, in one of the JSP's - not the servlet engine itself. And we still have shrinkwrapped copies of JRun 3.0 gathering dust in the filing cabinet. And we still run JRun 2.3.2.
How's that for logic!
I use domain names and user names with the word spam in them. So I duck under the "clever spammers". Its worked so far.
I take it contradicting yourself while correcting others is one of your endearing qualities :-)
A website should use up the space it is allowed. To ask for more, or do with less is a failure on the website, not my browser.
gif screencap
Looks fine an usable to me, nice work. Next.
I'm actually using NN4 so I can cut out all the useless junk you people keep inserting into pages - the flash, javascript, CSS - all useless when all I want is the info. Its a great web-filter, and only the useful sites get through. I'll be jumping for joy at that point, since twits like you won't be inserting "javascript fixes" for _my_ benefit. Hurry up and start using standards compliant markup, use HTML for its correct purpose of describing the logical structure of the content, use CSS for styling and presentation. Quit this fixation that you know better on how to support Netscape 4, you don't know. You are supposed to be a web developer - start acting like one.
Don't bother apologising, it wouldn't validate anyway.
You've misunderstood the usability concept that's been laid out. The rule of "a page being within three mouse clicks away" is a heuristic based on user actions in the days before DHTML (well, hidden layering). The concept was, more accurately, that it shouldn't take more than three user actions to get to a specific page. Since clicking a mouse or entering a new URL were the only ways to change the content of a page, this naturally became dogmatisized into the "three click" rule.
Now in a DHTML light, an action is anything the user has to do to change what is presented on the screen (like clicking on a link, or making a precise mouse pointer movement that makes a hidden division visible). So the first action is to mouse over the word or icon that makes the menu appear. The screen changes as the menu appears, the user then has to stop to read the screen to see the changes that weren't visible before.
Now the user has to make another action, like moving the mouse pointer over a link that opens a sub-menu. That's now two actions.
The sub menu now appears, and the user has to stop again to read the new menu items that weren't visible before.
Now the user moves the mouse pointer and clicks a link that takes them through to a new page. That would be the third action.
So its taken three disparate actions to leave the current page. That's the equivalent to the ill-digested "three clicks away", and the simplest proof that DHTML menus are not more usable than a simple link list, since it now takes three clicks to exit a page instead of one.
The _problems_ you listed are all presentational and stylesheet in nature (apart silly resize one which isn't a problem at all), but yet you quote a URL to an HTML validator, but not the CSS validator. The ludicrity of that proposition prevented me from continuing since my sides were aching from the unintended humour. To the clueful its obvious that Netscape 4 has a problem with the CSS, not the HTML - I would expect an experienced web developer to know this.
Would you like to give a proper example of a correct HTML page that doesn't work in NN4? (HTML being a markup language used to describe the logical structure of content).
If you cannot present the information to me in a readable format (readable to MY eyes), then you are not much of a web developer, and your company is yet another of those that promise so much and deliver so little.
I'm the one with the credit card, you are the one that's trying to sell something. Don't you ever forget that, amazon.co.uk certainly don't.
There's no specification forcing browsers to implement CSS and DOM, so this "industry standard" you refer to is meaningless. CSS is an optional item that should _never_ be relied on to display content. It is an enhancement of a proper well formed HTML document.
The only thing you should ever rely on is that the user agent can render HTML and nothing else.
The idea that CSS and DOM is an industry standard that all browsers must follow is ludicrous and misinformed. It is merely a nice to have, not an absolute requirement.
So by adhering to a recommended HTML specification does give the author a higher degree of confidence that today's browsers and tommorrow's browsers will support this document.
Heck, Lynx is a standards compliant browser. CSS is not mandatory. Javascript is not mandatory. DOM is not mandatory. Lynx is a Web browser.
<style type="text/css">
@import url(/path/style.css);
</style>
Or is your solution the proverbial triangular wheel, eliminating the extra bump from the square wheel implementation?
Ironically enough, if more websites could use standard compliant markup and the @import url to bring in their CSS layout suggestions rather than cluttering the HTML with cruft layout in tables, then Netscape 4 with a user-defined stylesheet would be an ideal tool to browse the web.
Its this unrealistic insistence of websites controlling the environment that creates the mess in Netscape 4. Give Netscape 4 the barebones clean and sleek HTML, and I'll have a completely useful browser.
Have you never heard of the benefits of separating content from the presentation? Have you never heard of using templates to publish a website? Have you never heard of using automated tools to speed up the donkey-work?
You are supposed to be using a cutting edge medium, we're no longer in the middle ages, we do have tools to reduce problems down to manageable sizes.
Its your lack of understanding of the tools available that fails you as a good web developer. You've been caught out by the oldest trick in the book. Start modernising your design and development practices, all the tools you need are freely available.
Did it occur to you any time before that Netscape 4 is not Internet Explorer? Or was it a case of not doing a competant job during the development cycle, and passing it off as a problem to the testing cycle.
You didn't cater for Netscape 4 from the start of the project, that's your problem. Don't blame your management fuckups on Netscape 4, your lack of resource and risk management is what's caused you to be working up till 2 in the morning. You had all the time in the world before hand to do the job right, but you neglected to do so.
Which part of the world wide web specification are you referring to when you lay out the minimum specification of any user agent using it? You have a legitimate source of documentation on this?
It would be ironic if the purpose of your site was to sell new PC's and you kept out users of older PCs from browsing.
Try putting a border style on a href tag and watch it stop working.
So use @import url in your styles, and let me suggest a presentation for links in NN4.
Try resizing a netscape window that has absolutely positioned layers.
Why must I resize my window, why can't you use the space I've already allocated to you?
Try getting your background color on your layers to match the geometry of the div (or span or whatever other block element)
Use the @import url in your CSS style and let me deal with it in NN4 as I find best for me.
Try writting JavaScript for a browser that doesn't even come close to supporting W3C DOM specs
No problem, but then I know how to use Javascript
Try watching your browser completely choke up with a very large table
Large tables? Sounds like you are pushing out too much information per page to be useful to visitors anyway. Why not break it out into separate tables? (Of course, you'd never use a table for layout, right?)
Ever heard of templates? This has been done since the year dot. Quit re-inventing the wheel and start looking at every day solutions to every day problems.
Surely you can comprehend to useful collaboration of templates and databased content. Avoids the duplication immediately.
The Internet was designed for Unix,
Windows was designed for the Internet.
Web authoring is more than just fiddling with Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Its a manufacturing process, and as such everything is broken down into components, as such, I hardly touch a complete html page any more, its all dynamic and managed by tools. *sarcasm*Well if you created the markup so that it only works in IE, then made those changes site wide, what you would find is that less and less non-IE browsers would use your site, thus completely vindicating your choice not to support non-IE browsers. */sarcasm*
They're just numbers that are pretty meaningless in trend analysis.
Its not economically feasible to test in every possible browser combination, but it is economically feasible to markup correctly to an available standard (or more precisely a documented recommendation), test in a variety of browsers, and let the browser manufacturers fix the problems they've created. With a bit of thought and common sense its easy enough to create fully accessible sites (except for web designers, who still think the wheel hasn't been invented yet)
Google: 25 million a day
MSN: 16 million a day
BBC: 4.8 million a day
Note: A DAY not a month