But which is which? You have no way to know except by experimenting; and you have to remember. Knowledge has to reside in the head. Bad.
Actually, the buttons overlay images when you mouseover them. Still not the best, but when you go over a button, it looks like the close button, etc.
Note that a lot of the UI crappiness in DP3 got resolved for DP4. I suspect that the red/green/yellow button stuff will hit the scrap can, too, if Apple keeps on hearing bad press over it.
And one other point about the "Knowledge in the Head vs. Knowledge in the world" slogan. It is indeed often better to put knowledge in the world, if you have a place to put it. A big problem with the icon interfaces that deteriorated into those gibberific toolbars you see in Word is that there was just no place to put everything, but somebody did it anyway. In other words, everything you put in the interface takes room away from something else. Putting the whole world out there, if you have to scan it all (serially) is just about as bad as if you'd put nothing there.
Of course, the window controls in Mac OS X are totally unforced errors; let's hope that Apple wakes up.
Re:A cautionary tale of Web design
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 2
Sites that I visit irregularly (dejanews, cinemark, etc.) seem to be less usable each time I visit, and the phenomenon seems to be directly linked to commercialization: the pot of gold (search link, local schedule, whatever) is crowded in among the ads, links to other sites they want you to visit, and the general clutter that comes from attempting to be a universal portal. Further, deep links directly to the pot of gold are increasingly impossible, since they don't want you to miss all the ads and stuff.
Indeed.
But for dejanews, there is a simple answer. Just try typing:
and you get through 90% of the crap. It is left as an exercise for the reader to discover other options you can tack onto that URL to customize your web experience even more.:-)
I mean, would YOU buy a AGP called "The Savory Truffle"?
Hmm, I think you mean Savoy Truffle.
And, hell yes, I would. I mean they would have a way cool tune for the commercial, and they could re-write the words:
Cool TNT, or a nice Matrox part? My game of Quake is a finely tuned art. 3dfx, I've heard is really good news... But you'd have to have them all pulled out to get the Savoy Truffle(tm)!
I learned my Perl OO from perltoot and the O'Reilly Advanced Perl Programming book. Does this book provide much more than that?
Well, you could check out sample chapters on the Manning web-site. I also got my perl OO from the sources you mention, but I was impressed with the Conway samples and would buy the book in a minute on impulse if I could find a local bookstore that stocked it.
But I guess a large part of my enthusiasm is driven by the fact that this is a book by Damian Conway, the man, the myth, the crazed hacker, the co-author of "C++ Re-syntaxed", the author of the Coy module, and so on. Seriously, I figure I'd give the guy like $10 if I ever met him in person, so why not just buy all his books and let him have the royalties instead?
Huh? This is getting rather off-topic, but please explain to me how putting everything in one big mess will make things easier? People don't store all of their documents in one file folder; why should they have to use one file folder on the computer?
Well, I don't know what the original poster had in mind, but I would point out that the opposite of hierarchy isn't necessarily anarchy. I've recently wondered whether it wouldn't be better to arrange (at least a view of) the filesystem along a relational model.
Of course, that might not be an easier sell to a novice unless you did it right.
I'll agree with you about the Holiday season, but I think I'll have to disagree on the academic year thing. As most schools start in the Fall, I would expect them do to their major purchasing/installing right at the end of the school year (May/June) to give them the summer to get product and install it. (That's how it works for the schools I've been involved with, at least).
Well, okay, but a move from July to January is then just as bad from the "upgrade the OS over the summer" front. Meanwhile, I was talking more about student purchases than departmental ones. Department/institutional purchases usually work around site-licensed software (i.e., Microsoft), and so the release date is also less relevant. But students are the ones who purchase the games and other products that come from smaller developers. Students are also the new "front line" of advocacy. Missing the student purchase window could be a pretty bad thing.
As much as I'm drooling, however, from the angle of Apple's future, this delay is probably a very good thing. Rushing out the release before the OS (or the apps for it) are ready gives the press opportunities to slam it into the ground. The longer developers have to polish it, the better it will be when the wrappers come off. The more apps developers support it (with Carbon or Cocoa apps), the better the package feels to the end user.
There is some truth in what you say: stable is certainly a very noble goal. But the problem with the revised release schedule timing is that Mac OS X now misses two key purchasing deadlines.
The first key deadline is the start of the academic school year, when Apple has traditionally run specials and tried to get new and returning students to buy that Mac. Now those Macs won't be running Mac OS X.
The second key deadline is the Christmas shopping season, which is also over before January 1. I do expect Apple to ship a ton of Macs for next Christmas. (My guess is that the next rev of the iMac will come with a DVD ROM/CD-RW drive that will cure the "no floppy, no back-up" problem.) But now none of those Macs will be running Mac OS X, either.
Now, the reason why this is a problem is that if those Macs were shipping with OS X, then people would be asking for and buying the new applications that were written for the Cocoa environment. But if they've just shelled out for the Mac and the available, probably Classic apps, I'm not sure they'll upgrade very quickly to Mac OS X or Mac OS X apps. And if I were a smaller Mac OS X developer, that would make me feel pretty skittish.
And, if I were a hardware buyer not totally sold on the Mac anyway, I'd probably have less incentive to buy one rather than some random Win2K box. I'm not sure that shipping late is a move that Apple can really afford right now.
But now moot, since they just released the sucker.:-) Seriously, I just spaced out on the release candidate versions. The real point, of course, was that PostgreSQL really, truly has foreign keys.
Well, except for partial matches. I'm sure that's a bummer for somebody out there, but not me...
I laugh out loud when I hear of yet another wonder theory in the field of economics, remember Hedge Funds? The great way to make a profit guarenteed.... didn't work did it?
It didn't? There have been some well-publicized failures, but the last I checked there was no indication that Hedge Funds as a whole were losers.
But it should be pointed out that Hedge Funds were based on economic theory that actually suggested not that you could always make a profit, but that you could neutralize certain kinds of risks. This thinking starts with the assumption that prices contain all the information we have about the prices of securities, and that in general arbitrage should (therefore) be impossible, since if there were any inconsistencies between the prices of certain securities, the market would quickly suck them dry.
As it turns out, there are some short-lived inconsistancies to exploit, and that's where Hedge Funds try to make their money. The problems arise when you try to leverage your ability to make these kind of gains (use borrowed money to make the investments needed), and when you depend on a lack of outside manipulation of the underlying values. The latter is where some of the biggest disasters have happened: some non-market force has intervened to set or keep a particular price, invalidating your expectation that two securities would inevitably come to be worth the same thing within a given temporal interval. Things take longer than "they should have", somebody calls a loan or two, and boom.
But the amazing thing about Hedge funds is that they don't depend (theoretically) on the long-run perfomance of anything, so that they should do okay in any setting. Except settings where a non-market force can irresistably keep a price differential open.
You've taken the futile tack of arguing with an ideologue. You must understand that he will ignore anything that doesn't fit into his world view. In other words, you'd be better off talking to wall.
Or talking to an anonymous coward, even.:-)
But, seriously, the real reason I responded to this was not because the author was an idealogue, but because he was acting like a total pinhead, which is a little bit different. Idealogues are even interesting at times, while pinheads are not.
10th time in a row: Mysql has arbitrary string lock. If you want lock on a record than do an application level lock on a string with a generated record name.
Bingo. In your own words, you are describing a record lock implemented at the application level. Meaning: you've got to work your own code if you want to hack around the lack of record level locking.
Ah, I think I've had an insight.
It might be the case that some people don't appreciate the difference between declarative programming, where you just state the desired result, and procedural programming, where you have to do much more of the work yourself.
The whole relational model of databases, as described by people like Chris Date, is a nice fit for declarative programming. In reality, things are not so nice, and they involve some very ugly things like the dark corners of SQL. BUT you should never have to go in and try to figure out how to do stuff like row-locking.
This is not only because you might well screw it up, but because your problem involves coming up with an appropriate design for your database, not worrying about how little fiddly things actually get implemented. Yeah, that's an ideal, and it doesn't get reached very often, but you don't go out and design a system that's going to require a bunch of non-declarative code just to get things up to speed.
Go ahead and implement your own row-locks or transaction logs. Nobody is stopping you. But don't go claiming that your need to hack doesn't expose a weakness in the system.
I have news for you: "performance" usually means "speed". As in "fast", which is usually measured by "benchmarks", which do fulfill all the requirements for a "test". One of these benchmarks, in which PostgreSQL loses pitifully to MySQL is here.
Glad you mentioned this stuff. There are many problems here.
On some of the comparisons listed, the benchmarked versions of PostgreSQL are very old, dating back to 6.3.
On the first comparison listed, the version of Postgresql is less old (but not the newest), while the version of MySQL is an alpha version.
Some of the tests where there is a big difference between the two products are testing precisely things where MySQL's lack of ACIDity would bite you hardest if anything went wrong (like deleting big or many entries, updating stuff...you get the picture.)
Some of the tests that show the smallest differences (or advantages for PostgreSQL) are the things that MySQL proponents claim are more important anyway: many kinds of selects. In particular, look at "select_join".
So, what do you really think these prove? Not much in my book. OK, here's one: if you take a database that doesn't do transactions and compare it with one that does, then certain transaction-related tests are going to favor the former. Wow. Like that's big news.
Basically, they're doing Ars Digita stuff using PostgreSQL (and possibly Interbase, soon). They get queries back like "Hey, why don't you use MySQL?". And they've got answers.
It seems like Dude's biggest gripe is that MySQL is claiming to be an RDBMS when it's not, but I've never found the documentation on the MySQL web site to be particularly misleading and always thought that they are quite open about the areas that MySQL is lacking.
I think other people have found the MySQL side of the story less than completely frank. A big reason for this is their infamous benchmark collection, where they compare apples and oranges. (To drag this metaphor out a bit, they also seem to suggest that since their apples are sweeter than most oranges that it's okay that they are a poor source of vitamin C since most foods are a poor source of vitamin C...)
Guess what? Neither does PostgreSQL (you can use triggers, but that's a pain). A bit of a PITA, but a well-written app can keep the integrity OK though.
This is true for PostgreSQL versions 6.5.x and below.
Postgresql 7.0 (which is now up to Beta 5, will have support for foreign keys, and more goodies.
If your definition of "critical" doesnt require transactions and all the fancy stuff, but does require very good performance, then MySQL is great. If your do require full ACID, then you'll just have to pay the price of one of the bigger players.
Well, as the article referenced by this thread suggests, some of "the fancy stuff" missing in MySQL includes real triggers and things that would actually speed up many MySQL web apps.
More importantly, you don't have to buy Oracle to get ACID; just get PostgreSQL instead. Open-source, and with a pH value only a fraction of a unit away from pure ACIDity.
Moderators: this post is only redundant if you assume that people have read the article; that's all I'll say.
Corporatism now is funding politics, which is new, and gets more powerful by the day.
(The emphasis in the above quote is mine.)
In a perfect world, people read what they have written, and build on their previous message. If this "jonkatz" is actually the author of the article that is the subject of this thread, I would invite him to look back at his article.
Specifically, look back at the first paragraphs, where an 1890s era definition of corporatism is given. One of the defining features of the concept is...guess what? Becoming an essential unit of political participation. And, believe me, this included a lot of money dedicated to the purposes of political persuasion.
So, what's new? Certainly not the funding angle. And it's not the whole manufacture of consent angle. Guess you'll have to try again. Or not.
Remember that things like tables were first seen as proprietary extensions before they were ever blessed by the W3C.
Wrong. Work on the table specification for HTML started in 1993, a year before Netscape was founded. Netscape wasn't even one of the first 3 browsers to implement tables. However, Netscape was the first to not follow the proposal, and invent something much poorer.
Hmm...you've got a point there. Thanks for whacking me upside the head.:-\
I now can't remember whether or not Mosaic had tables; Emacs-w3 did, but I'm not sure when. I'm presuming Arena did, although I never did use Arena very much.
In my (limited) defense, though, I did say "blessed" by the W3C. Do correct me if I'm wrong, (please! I want to remember this stuff right!) but tables weren't in the HTML2.0 spec (which was RFC 1866). Whatever else you have to say good or bad about the HTML+ (later HTML3) spec, it ended up being canned. Worse, it languished for what seemed like forever at the time, and that's where I remember the floodgates opening up wide.
No, that doesn't excuse the crappiness that Netscape unleashed; I do now remember how much it pissed me off. Thanks for the memories.:-/
Oh yes: you're completely right about "center" and what I remember as the Great Alignment War. Dunno where my brain was when I wrote the post you were responding to...
Gosh, now I wonder what kind of certain source would generate PostScript that was so broken that a simple filter would be unable to do a 2-up transformation on it.
'Broken'? You are missing the point. PostScript is intended as a programming language for telling the printer where to put ink on the page; if it does that then it is not 'broken'. A tool which formats PS files as 2up might make certain assumptions about the format of the file, but if those assumptions turn out to be wrong then the tool is broken, not the PS file.
Baloney. On at least two counts.
Postscript was designed as a page description language that was purposely abstracted away from the act of putting ink or toner (or photons) on the "page". The appropriate use of postscript should allow a wide range of transformations on the graphics or pages so described; this is the whole beauty of the concept. Why on earth would you bother describing fonts as outlines if you weren't going to do interesting transformations on them?
The second issue here is that Adobe has, for several years, documented a standard for the overall structure of Postscript documents that allows utuilities like psnup to do all kinds of cool and useful things with postscript files. But to get the goodies, you have to follow the (fairly trivial) guidelines. (In brief: you have to have BoundingBoxes specified and use the special %%Page* comments correctly.) Postscript produced by many companies works great with things like psutils. But not Microsoft. And this isn't anything new; this crap has been going down for years. I'm willing to accept the possibility that it's just a stupid bug that nobody in Redmond wants to fix. But just because they don't fix it doesn't mean it ain't broken.
To make an analogy: suppose you ran the PostScript through a 'grep' program, which dumped core because it couldn't handle lines longer than 80 characters.
Uh, and your point? Really, I must be missing something interesting about your world. In my world, if a program dumps core, the program is broken. Really, there's no grey zone here. Crashing == Broken. No matter what you think the proper role of PostScript is.
That is something I've never understood. The only reason Netscape could ruin the web with the proprietary tags was because so-called web developers embraced the proprietary tags and used them all over.
If you didn't like the proprietary tags, why did you use them?
Well, I think there are two answers here. The first answer is that some of the proprietary tags were disgustingly useful where appropriate. Remember that things like tables were first seen as proprietary extensions before they were ever blessed by the W3C. And there were a few other things like "center" that looked easier to use than waiting for somebody (anybody!) to come up with decent style sheets. (No, it wasn't a new technology, but I would claim that general style sheets are hard for on-the-CRT display formats.)
The second part of the answer was that it wasn't the specialized tags so much that ruined things (ignoring "blink" and "font" for the moment) but the real dorkiness of relying on parsing quirks in html to get layout effects. You know, bulletless list elements to get indents and such.
Tools that take PostScript as input tend to be fairly fragile if they're trying to do anything beyond just rendering the document. "2up" converters often fail on PostScript generated from certain sources.
Gosh, now I wonder what kind of certain source would generate PostScript that was so broken that a simple filter would be unable to do a 2-up transformation on it. Could it be the same outfit that can't make it's word processor use the same format in consecutive versions? The same outfit that gave us the gratuitously extended character set known as Windows-1252? The same company that was a guiding force in W3C stylesheet discusssions and then tried to patent the use of stylesheets? The same people who now claim to be on the XML bandwagon except that they fall off every half-mile when their stuff still doesn't parse as anything?
Some information is also stored in the HTML file in XML complient tags to help the source app to provide it with further information about the original source document -- to make it appear seamless.
Well, except if the Byte article is accurate about the fact that the "XML islands" aren't really quite XML either.:-(
FrontPage strips these XML tags out of the HTML files and breaks round-tripping.
Good God.
This is so absurd, it...it has to be an accident. I mean, why in the world would FrontPage want to screw around with comments of any kind? Please tell me that it doesn't screw over script tags within comments, for example.
I mean, that's almost as lame as patenting style sheets out from under the W3C, right?
Not to mention work going on with wxWindows, which really rocks, especially combined with Python.
Not a rocking web site, however. And it was weird that I know other languages besides Python have wxWindows bindings, but they go unmentioned. I really agree that having multiple groups working on competing projects is a good thing. There are different sets of assumptions which lead to different solutions. Prime examples: how cross platform? Relatively stand alone or part of a larger desktop environment? Run natively or in a browser?
What you say is true, although I think there are pieces of the solution that should tend to be constant. In particular, I suspect that anybody who goes and and tries to put together a truly monolithic solution to any problem is asking to get waxed. And any group that tries to implement Yet Another File Format (YAFF) without learning the lessons taught by NetCDF or XML or anything that has been worked out rather carefully deserves to die horribly. And if you don't expose APIs carefully to allow people to use whatever language they like to implement stuff, you've missed an opportunity, too.
As far as the javascript part is concerned, well, it's not my favorite language, but it could bring in a significant new developer base that already exists in many corporate IT departments.
Perhaps, but the thing that galls me most about javascript is that most of its dorkiest features have been known to be dorky for some time. It's not the lack of features that really annoy me about software, it's the lack of learning. That said, javascript (to my surprise, I must admit) does have some fairly nice features, and javascript 2 promises to be a significant improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that a lot of the UI crappiness in DP3 got resolved for DP4. I suspect that the red/green/yellow button stuff will hit the scrap can, too, if Apple keeps on hearing bad press over it.
And one other point about the "Knowledge in the Head vs. Knowledge in the world" slogan. It is indeed often better to put knowledge in the world, if you have a place to put it. A big problem with the icon interfaces that deteriorated into those gibberific toolbars you see in Word is that there was just no place to put everything, but somebody did it anyway. In other words, everything you put in the interface takes room away from something else. Putting the whole world out there, if you have to scan it all (serially) is just about as bad as if you'd put nothing there.
Of course, the window controls in Mac OS X are totally unforced errors; let's hope that Apple wakes up.
Indeed.
But for dejanews, there is a simple answer. Just try typing:
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/[]/
and you get through 90% of the crap. It is left as an exercise for the reader to discover other options you can tack onto that URL to customize your web experience even more. :-)
Hmm, I think you mean Savoy Truffle.
And, hell yes, I would. I mean they would have a way cool tune for the commercial, and they could re-write the words:
Cool TNT, or a nice Matrox part?
My game of Quake is a finely tuned art.
3dfx, I've heard is really good news...
But you'd have to have them all pulled out to get the Savoy Truffle(tm)!
Well, you could check out sample chapters on the Manning web-site. I also got my perl OO from the sources you mention, but I was impressed with the Conway samples and would buy the book in a minute on impulse if I could find a local bookstore that stocked it.
But I guess a large part of my enthusiasm is driven by the fact that this is a book by Damian Conway, the man, the myth, the crazed hacker, the co-author of "C++ Re-syntaxed", the author of the Coy module, and so on. Seriously, I figure I'd give the guy like $10 if I ever met him in person, so why not just buy all his books and let him have the royalties instead?
Well, I don't know what the original poster had in mind, but I would point out that the opposite of hierarchy isn't necessarily anarchy. I've recently wondered whether it wouldn't be better to arrange (at least a view of) the filesystem along a relational model.
Of course, that might not be an easier sell to a novice unless you did it right.
Well, okay, but a move from July to January is then just as bad from the "upgrade the OS over the summer" front. Meanwhile, I was talking more about student purchases than departmental ones. Department/institutional purchases usually work around site-licensed software (i.e., Microsoft), and so the release date is also less relevant. But students are the ones who purchase the games and other products that come from smaller developers. Students are also the new "front line" of advocacy. Missing the student purchase window could be a pretty bad thing.
There is some truth in what you say: stable is certainly a very noble goal. But the problem with the revised release schedule timing is that Mac OS X now misses two key purchasing deadlines.
The first key deadline is the start of the academic school year, when Apple has traditionally run specials and tried to get new and returning students to buy that Mac. Now those Macs won't be running Mac OS X.
The second key deadline is the Christmas shopping season, which is also over before January 1. I do expect Apple to ship a ton of Macs for next Christmas. (My guess is that the next rev of the iMac will come with a DVD ROM/CD-RW drive that will cure the "no floppy, no back-up" problem.) But now none of those Macs will be running Mac OS X, either.
Now, the reason why this is a problem is that if those Macs were shipping with OS X, then people would be asking for and buying the new applications that were written for the Cocoa environment. But if they've just shelled out for the Mac and the available, probably Classic apps, I'm not sure they'll upgrade very quickly to Mac OS X or Mac OS X apps. And if I were a smaller Mac OS X developer, that would make me feel pretty skittish.
And, if I were a hardware buyer not totally sold on the Mac anyway, I'd probably have less incentive to buy one rather than some random Win2K box. I'm not sure that shipping late is a move that Apple can really afford right now.
Uh, freedom from all security holes and buffer overflows? :-)
But now moot, since they just released the sucker. :-) Seriously, I just spaced out on the release candidate versions. The real point, of course, was that PostgreSQL really, truly has foreign keys.
Well, except for partial matches. I'm sure that's a bummer for somebody out there, but not me...
It didn't? There have been some well-publicized failures, but the last I checked there was no indication that Hedge Funds as a whole were losers.
But it should be pointed out that Hedge Funds were based on economic theory that actually suggested not that you could always make a profit, but that you could neutralize certain kinds of risks. This thinking starts with the assumption that prices contain all the information we have about the prices of securities, and that in general arbitrage should (therefore) be impossible, since if there were any inconsistencies between the prices of certain securities, the market would quickly suck them dry.
As it turns out, there are some short-lived inconsistancies to exploit, and that's where Hedge Funds try to make their money. The problems arise when you try to leverage your ability to make these kind of gains (use borrowed money to make the investments needed), and when you depend on a lack of outside manipulation of the underlying values. The latter is where some of the biggest disasters have happened: some non-market force has intervened to set or keep a particular price, invalidating your expectation that two securities would inevitably come to be worth the same thing within a given temporal interval. Things take longer than "they should have", somebody calls a loan or two, and boom.
But the amazing thing about Hedge funds is that they don't depend (theoretically) on the long-run perfomance of anything, so that they should do okay in any setting. Except settings where a non-market force can irresistably keep a price differential open.
Or talking to an anonymous coward, even. :-)
But, seriously, the real reason I responded to this was not because the author was an idealogue, but because he was acting like a total pinhead, which is a little bit different. Idealogues are even interesting at times, while pinheads are not.
Ah, I think I've had an insight.
It might be the case that some people don't appreciate the difference between declarative programming, where you just state the desired result, and procedural programming, where you have to do much more of the work yourself.
The whole relational model of databases, as described by people like Chris Date, is a nice fit for declarative programming. In reality, things are not so nice, and they involve some very ugly things like the dark corners of SQL. BUT you should never have to go in and try to figure out how to do stuff like row-locking.
This is not only because you might well screw it up, but because your problem involves coming up with an appropriate design for your database, not worrying about how little fiddly things actually get implemented. Yeah, that's an ideal, and it doesn't get reached very often, but you don't go out and design a system that's going to require a bunch of non-declarative code just to get things up to speed.
Go ahead and implement your own row-locks or transaction logs. Nobody is stopping you. But don't go claiming that your need to hack doesn't expose a weakness in the system.
Glad you mentioned this stuff. There are many problems here.
So, what do you really think these prove? Not much in my book. OK, here's one: if you take a database that doesn't do transactions and compare it with one that does, then certain transaction-related tests are going to favor the former. Wow. Like that's big news.
I think you would be more convincing if you took a closer look at the target article of this thread.
Basically, they're doing Ars Digita stuff using PostgreSQL (and possibly Interbase, soon). They get queries back like "Hey, why don't you use MySQL?". And they've got answers.
I think other people have found the MySQL side of the story less than completely frank. A big reason for this is their infamous benchmark collection, where they compare apples and oranges. (To drag this metaphor out a bit, they also seem to suggest that since their apples are sweeter than most oranges that it's okay that they are a poor source of vitamin C since most foods are a poor source of vitamin C...)
This is true for PostgreSQL versions 6.5.x and below.
Postgresql 7.0 (which is now up to Beta 5, will have support for foreign keys, and more goodies.
Well, as the article referenced by this thread suggests, some of "the fancy stuff" missing in MySQL includes real triggers and things that would actually speed up many MySQL web apps.
More importantly, you don't have to buy Oracle to get ACID; just get PostgreSQL instead. Open-source, and with a pH value only a fraction of a unit away from pure ACIDity.
Moderators: this post is only redundant if you assume that people have read the article; that's all I'll say.
(The emphasis in the above quote is mine.)
In a perfect world, people read what they have written, and build on their previous message. If this "jonkatz" is actually the author of the article that is the subject of this thread, I would invite him to look back at his article.
Specifically, look back at the first paragraphs, where an 1890s era definition of corporatism is given. One of the defining features of the concept is...guess what? Becoming an essential unit of political participation. And, believe me, this included a lot of money dedicated to the purposes of political persuasion.
So, what's new? Certainly not the funding angle. And it's not the whole manufacture of consent angle. Guess you'll have to try again. Or not.
Wrong. Work on the table specification for HTML started in 1993, a year before Netscape was founded. Netscape wasn't even one of the first 3 browsers to implement tables. However, Netscape was the first to not follow the proposal, and invent something much poorer.
Hmm...you've got a point there. Thanks for whacking me upside the head. :-\
I now can't remember whether or not Mosaic had tables; Emacs-w3 did, but I'm not sure when. I'm presuming Arena did, although I never did use Arena very much.
In my (limited) defense, though, I did say "blessed" by the W3C. Do correct me if I'm wrong, (please! I want to remember this stuff right!) but tables weren't in the HTML2.0 spec (which was RFC 1866). Whatever else you have to say good or bad about the HTML+ (later HTML3) spec, it ended up being canned. Worse, it languished for what seemed like forever at the time, and that's where I remember the floodgates opening up wide.
No, that doesn't excuse the crappiness that Netscape unleashed; I do now remember how much it pissed me off. Thanks for the memories. :-/
Oh yes: you're completely right about "center" and what I remember as the Great Alignment War. Dunno where my brain was when I wrote the post you were responding to...
Baloney. On at least two counts.
Postscript was designed as a page description language that was purposely abstracted away from the act of putting ink or toner (or photons) on the "page". The appropriate use of postscript should allow a wide range of transformations on the graphics or pages so described; this is the whole beauty of the concept. Why on earth would you bother describing fonts as outlines if you weren't going to do interesting transformations on them?
The second issue here is that Adobe has, for several years, documented a standard for the overall structure of Postscript documents that allows utuilities like psnup to do all kinds of cool and useful things with postscript files. But to get the goodies, you have to follow the (fairly trivial) guidelines. (In brief: you have to have BoundingBoxes specified and use the special %%Page* comments correctly.) Postscript produced by many companies works great with things like psutils. But not Microsoft. And this isn't anything new; this crap has been going down for years. I'm willing to accept the possibility that it's just a stupid bug that nobody in Redmond wants to fix. But just because they don't fix it doesn't mean it ain't broken.
Uh, and your point? Really, I must be missing something interesting about your world. In my world, if a program dumps core, the program is broken. Really, there's no grey zone here. Crashing == Broken. No matter what you think the proper role of PostScript is.
Well, I think there are two answers here. The first answer is that some of the proprietary tags were disgustingly useful where appropriate. Remember that things like tables were first seen as proprietary extensions before they were ever blessed by the W3C. And there were a few other things like "center" that looked easier to use than waiting for somebody (anybody!) to come up with decent style sheets. (No, it wasn't a new technology, but I would claim that general style sheets are hard for on-the-CRT display formats.)
The second part of the answer was that it wasn't the specialized tags so much that ruined things (ignoring "blink" and "font" for the moment) but the real dorkiness of relying on parsing quirks in html to get layout effects. You know, bulletless list elements to get indents and such.
Hmm...I think you're right. There's even an O'Reilly book about this if memory serves.
So I guess it must be really be Microsoft, then. :-)
Gosh, now I wonder what kind of certain source would generate PostScript that was so broken that a simple filter would be unable to do a 2-up transformation on it. Could it be the same outfit that can't make it's word processor use the same format in consecutive versions? The same outfit that gave us the gratuitously extended character set known as Windows-1252? The same company that was a guiding force in W3C stylesheet discusssions and then tried to patent the use of stylesheets? The same people who now claim to be on the XML bandwagon except that they fall off every half-mile when their stuff still doesn't parse as anything?
Could it be... SATAN?
Well, except if the Byte article is accurate about the fact that the "XML islands" aren't really quite XML either. :-(
Good God.
This is so absurd, it...it has to be an accident. I mean, why in the world would FrontPage want to screw around with comments of any kind? Please tell me that it doesn't screw over script tags within comments, for example.
I mean, that's almost as lame as patenting style sheets out from under the W3C, right?