this time with regards to search technology. Yeah, this is classic Gates behavior. Don't believe a word of it. He actually thinks he can do with the web the same thing he did with Windows... Won't work.
PHP-based applications can be great if designed by good programmers.
For proof, just look at some of the projects using PHP: Mantis Bug Tracker, PHPMyAdmin, MediaWiki (Wikipedia), several top discussion boards, Friendster, reportedly apps by Yahoo, and countless others.
These are HIGH-QUALITY web applications. Of course, great things can be done with other platforms, but it's nonsense to slam PHP because "it's so easy that non-programmers produce a lot of crap code with it". The proof that it's worthy is in the *best* apps that are produced, not the worst ones!
The Internet is clearly no longer the baby of the U.S. With the entire world using it, and depending on it, the rest of the world has a *moral right* to participate in its governance.
To deny this moral right is to declare some sort of American preeminence that doesn't exist. The U.S. is but a nation amongst nations now, and we need to back down from the imperialistic rhetoric. It's high-time to start being a good player in the world. And handing over the Internet would make a great beginning.
There's nothing to fear about "UN control" as there's nothing to fear about the UN. Again, only archconservatives hate the UN, and they hate it the same way they irrationally hate other things.
But if you want to consider the worst-case scenario, where the Internet does become "screwed up", how hard would it be for the U.S. or the U.S. plus a group of nations to cordon off its own Internet? Not hard at all.
So why are archconservatives wailing about this? They have no leg to stand on.
The Internet is a global technology and must be governed by a consortium of nations. All the arguments I've seen against doing this are bogus. Only archconservatives oppose changing the governance of the Internet.
This is a good idea, as the Internet should be a true global medium run by a consortium of nations, if not all nations (UN). There's no good rationale for the U.S. to control it. I think the real reason the U.S. government wants to control it is because they want the power to shut it down if it becomes too effective a political tool for American progressives.
if the U.S. can get rid of its anti-science President, and if the world can go through a real energy revolution of new alternatives coming online, then the possibilities are endless.
Microsoft seems to be just full of liars or people paid to lie. When capitalistic competition lowers to the point of lying to protect one's market, it makes the corporate world in general look like a stupid pile of puffery.
Just to play the Slashdot pendant - Hussein was required to *prove* the destruction of the WMDs he had in the early 90's, which he oddly refused to do. But the US had the right to invade for many seperate violations of the cease-fire agreement. Iraq was taking actions to violate the agreement (such as locking targeting RADAR on US planes in the no-fly zone) on a weekly basis for years.
BTW, even a 5-year-old knows the difference between lieing and being misinformed.
BUSHIT. ALL BUSHIT. The war was ILLEGAL, UNJUSTIFIED, IMMORAL, IGNOBLE. And all you have are Reich-wing talking points. Thankfully, Bush is going down -- too late, but better late than never.
By the way, it's interesting how a thread about PHP frameworks turned into a thread for Ruby-on-Rails zealotry. I won't knock Ruby, but if PHP is good enough for the Wikipedia, Yahoo! and Friendster, it's good enough for me. There's nothing wrong with wanting to become a guru in one language (that happens to be in the top five in popularity!) than becoming a jack of all trades.
Can you explain why PHP is worse than, for instance, Visual Basic, Fortran, or Cobol? If it's so obvious, it should be very easy to demonstrate.
It's not "worse". It's just that there's an inexplicable bias against PHP which has very little basis in reality. PHP is a great, powerful language that does what it does very well, despite its imperfections (and by the way, all programming languages have about the same degree of imperfections).
But this kind of cheating is standard practice, and follows an old presentation idiom that continues to makes sense to many. So what if W3C doesn't like it? Perhaps they should just change their minds on tables... and say they're for layout too... decriminalize the crimes, so to speak.:) After all, it's easy to make tables "semantic" anyway (by using CSS classes and structuring the tables semantically).
If that's your basis for avoiding CSS, then you must avoid table layouts and other presentational HTML too, for this criticism applies equally, if not more so, to that.
Please don't take offense, but many many designers will "call bullshit" on a remark like this. Tables reflect a very old presentation idiom that many are very well-accustomed to. It may often be "as complex" to do a layout with tables, but if it follows existing long-term experience, it's also a lot easier.
Hey, I won't flame you, but perhaps surprise you by shaking your hand (rhetorically).
I think the biggest question to ask when considering CSS for layout versus tables is: "Does the paying customer care?"
That said, I am definitely an advocate of using CSS for cross-site tag formatting to achieve a common look that's easily maintainable.
But using CSS for layout in place of tables, while worth exploring, and even implementing in cases where you end up with simpler resulting code (that actually works the same across all browsers), is really not worth doing for its own sake. I mean, if you can't get something to work with CSS, don't pull your hair out... just stick with tables and breathe easier.
The "CSS for layout" zealots seem to be as vehement in their dogma as the "OOP for all programming" zealots. Last time I checked, writing code in C, Perl and non-OO PHP is still quite popular. Objects are great for particular implementations, but for everything? Nope.
I would say ignore the zealots and do what your customers want. Also note that the visitors of sites who actually need the "semantic layout" are extremely rare--another tidbit the zealots won't admit.
Don't mistake me for an MS shill, but IE supports opacity as well: Use "filter: alpha(opacity=nn)" where nn is the percentage.
Also, "opacity: 0.nn" can be used for both Safari and Gecko. "-moz-opacity" can still of course be used for Gecko, but the "-moz-" prefix isn't necessary.
Thanks to you and iBod for bringing much-needed sanity to the "div vs. table" design debate! It's nice to see your pragmatic lucidity up against the "divs must be used everywhere" dogma.
I use tables more often than div's for one straightforward reason: It's easier for me to come back to my HTML code later and figure out what I've done! The "table" extends a longstanding idiom that's all but engraved into many of our minds, whereas nested div's is kind of like the object-oriented programming of the software development world: very useful in some instances, but a mess if applied everywhere.
Opera hits are 0.53% of the hits to my sites. So, as far as I'm concerned, Opera making any changes won't help. Opera does indeed include "opera" in the user-agent, even if pretending to be MSIE.
Solutions for the CS professional: Don't have kids--It's too unstable a career to support a family on. And, if you fall seriously ill, get the best care available, then declare bankruptcy (or, try hard to avoid serious illness in the first place by keeping physically fit). See, if the government provided base health care benefits, then we could *all* make healthy choices about our employment.
Firefox should focus on improving the bookmark manager, the preferences, and polishing up the UI, but not forget about the most important things, speed and stability that is.
I'll add fixing the display issues in Print Preview, which I'm amazed were there in v1.0 and have continued through 1.04 (I haven't downloaded 1.05 yet). And I agree, that bookmark manager needs a *lot* of work.
Please don't spread this meme anymore: "I'm powerless so there's no reason to even try." Boy, it's so untrue I can't even begin to tell you.
I'm not intentionally spreading a meme here, but rather making an honest statement, that *really*, many people are very overworked in this country, and the last thing they want to do when get home is do anything "serious"--I'm sure they would much rather "veg out" or spend time with the wife/kids.
That said, if anyone does have any time available, I am not one to discourage active citizenship! Especially in these times!
Instead of going after "meme-spreaders", perhaps it would be more productive to go after the forces that are screwing over American workers.
I was just making a roundabout point that the citizenry don't democratically control the actions of business. And even the so-called "dollar vote", while it can have a great effect when there's a popular target where the company's business mostly comes from consumers... is still generally a weak force.
If only the people could vote on revoking the charter of a corporation. Something like that might force companies, more or less, to do right.
There's no question that many Americans are so overworked that civic activism is not really feasible. Perhaps this was all planned by particular politicians? The work (or lack of work) of politicians has a lot more to do with how the economy works that I think most people realize.
Slashdot Mirror
The children will be entirely safe once freedom is entirely destroyed.
this time with regards to search technology. Yeah, this is classic Gates behavior. Don't believe a word of it. He actually thinks he can do with the web the same thing he did with Windows... Won't work.
Who believes this screwup and his FUD any more?
PHP-based applications can be great if designed by good programmers.
For proof, just look at some of the projects using PHP: Mantis Bug Tracker, PHPMyAdmin, MediaWiki (Wikipedia), several top discussion boards, Friendster, reportedly apps by Yahoo, and countless others.
These are HIGH-QUALITY web applications. Of course, great things can be done with other platforms, but it's nonsense to slam PHP because "it's so easy that non-programmers produce a lot of crap code with it". The proof that it's worthy is in the *best* apps that are produced, not the worst ones!
The Internet is clearly no longer the baby of the U.S. With the entire world using it, and depending on it, the rest of the world has a *moral right* to participate in its governance.
To deny this moral right is to declare some sort of American preeminence that doesn't exist. The U.S. is but a nation amongst nations now, and we need to back down from the imperialistic rhetoric. It's high-time to start being a good player in the world. And handing over the Internet would make a great beginning.
There's nothing to fear about "UN control" as there's nothing to fear about the UN. Again, only archconservatives hate the UN, and they hate it the same way they irrationally hate other things.
But if you want to consider the worst-case scenario, where the Internet does become "screwed up", how hard would it be for the U.S. or the U.S. plus a group of nations to cordon off its own Internet? Not hard at all.
So why are archconservatives wailing about this? They have no leg to stand on.
The Internet is a global technology and must be governed by a consortium of nations. All the arguments I've seen against doing this are bogus. Only archconservatives oppose changing the governance of the Internet.
This is a good idea, as the Internet should be a true global medium run by a consortium of nations, if not all nations (UN). There's no good rationale for the U.S. to control it. I think the real reason the U.S. government wants to control it is because they want the power to shut it down if it becomes too effective a political tool for American progressives.
if the U.S. can get rid of its anti-science President, and if the world can go through a real energy revolution of new alternatives coming online, then the possibilities are endless.
Microsoft seems to be just full of liars or people paid to lie. When capitalistic competition lowers to the point of lying to protect one's market, it makes the corporate world in general look like a stupid pile of puffery.
Just to play the Slashdot pendant - Hussein was required to *prove* the destruction of the WMDs he had in the early 90's, which he oddly refused to do. But the US had the right to invade for many seperate violations of the cease-fire agreement. Iraq was taking actions to violate the agreement (such as locking targeting RADAR on US planes in the no-fly zone) on a weekly basis for years.
BTW, even a 5-year-old knows the difference between lieing and being misinformed.
BUSHIT. ALL BUSHIT. The war was ILLEGAL, UNJUSTIFIED, IMMORAL, IGNOBLE. And all you have are Reich-wing talking points. Thankfully, Bush is going down -- too late, but better late than never.
List of PHP Frameworks
By the way, it's interesting how a thread about PHP frameworks turned into a thread for Ruby-on-Rails zealotry. I won't knock Ruby, but if PHP is good enough for the Wikipedia, Yahoo! and Friendster, it's good enough for me. There's nothing wrong with wanting to become a guru in one language (that happens to be in the top five in popularity!) than becoming a jack of all trades.
Can you explain why PHP is worse than, for instance, Visual Basic, Fortran, or Cobol? If it's so obvious, it should be very easy to demonstrate.
It's not "worse". It's just that there's an inexplicable bias against PHP which has very little basis in reality. PHP is a great, powerful language that does what it does very well, despite its imperfections (and by the way, all programming languages have about the same degree of imperfections).
I'm willing to bet the numbers of good designers using this hybrid approach *far* outnumber those doing pure CSS layout. You're both in good company.
But this kind of cheating is standard practice, and follows an old presentation idiom that continues to makes sense to many. So what if W3C doesn't like it? Perhaps they should just change their minds on tables... and say they're for layout too... decriminalize the crimes, so to speak. :) After all, it's easy to make tables "semantic" anyway (by using CSS classes and structuring the tables semantically).
If that's your basis for avoiding CSS, then you must avoid table layouts and other presentational HTML too, for this criticism applies equally, if not more so, to that.
Please don't take offense, but many many designers will "call bullshit" on a remark like this. Tables reflect a very old presentation idiom that many are very well-accustomed to. It may often be "as complex" to do a layout with tables, but if it follows existing long-term experience, it's also a lot easier.
Hey, I won't flame you, but perhaps surprise you by shaking your hand (rhetorically).
I think the biggest question to ask when considering CSS for layout versus tables is: "Does the paying customer care?"
That said, I am definitely an advocate of using CSS for cross-site tag formatting to achieve a common look that's easily maintainable.
But using CSS for layout in place of tables, while worth exploring, and even implementing in cases where you end up with simpler resulting code (that actually works the same across all browsers), is really not worth doing for its own sake. I mean, if you can't get something to work with CSS, don't pull your hair out... just stick with tables and breathe easier.
The "CSS for layout" zealots seem to be as vehement in their dogma as the "OOP for all programming" zealots. Last time I checked, writing code in C, Perl and non-OO PHP is still quite popular. Objects are great for particular implementations, but for everything? Nope.
I would say ignore the zealots and do what your customers want. Also note that the visitors of sites who actually need the "semantic layout" are extremely rare--another tidbit the zealots won't admit.
Don't mistake me for an MS shill, but IE supports opacity as well: Use "filter: alpha(opacity=nn)" where nn is the percentage.
Also, "opacity: 0.nn" can be used for both Safari and Gecko. "-moz-opacity" can still of course be used for Gecko, but the "-moz-" prefix isn't necessary.
Thanks to you and iBod for bringing much-needed sanity to the "div vs. table" design debate! It's nice to see your pragmatic lucidity up against the "divs must be used everywhere" dogma.
I use tables more often than div's for one straightforward reason: It's easier for me to come back to my HTML code later and figure out what I've done! The "table" extends a longstanding idiom that's all but engraved into many of our minds, whereas nested div's is kind of like the object-oriented programming of the software development world: very useful in some instances, but a mess if applied everywhere.
Opera hits are 0.53% of the hits to my sites. So, as far as I'm concerned, Opera making any changes won't help. Opera does indeed include "opera" in the user-agent, even if pretending to be MSIE.
Here's other stats for fun:
Solutions for the CS professional: Don't have kids--It's too unstable a career to support a family on. And, if you fall seriously ill, get the best care available, then declare bankruptcy (or, try hard to avoid serious illness in the first place by keeping physically fit). See, if the government provided base health care benefits, then we could *all* make healthy choices about our employment.
Firefox should focus on improving the bookmark manager, the preferences, and polishing up the UI, but not forget about the most important things, speed and stability that is.
I'll add fixing the display issues in Print Preview, which I'm amazed were there in v1.0 and have continued through 1.04 (I haven't downloaded 1.05 yet). And I agree, that bookmark manager needs a *lot* of work.
Please don't spread this meme anymore: "I'm powerless so there's no reason to even try." Boy, it's so untrue I can't even begin to tell you.
I'm not intentionally spreading a meme here, but rather making an honest statement, that *really*, many people are very overworked in this country, and the last thing they want to do when get home is do anything "serious"--I'm sure they would much rather "veg out" or spend time with the wife/kids.
That said, if anyone does have any time available, I am not one to discourage active citizenship! Especially in these times!
Instead of going after "meme-spreaders", perhaps it would be more productive to go after the forces that are screwing over American workers.
I don't disagree with what you're saying.
I was just making a roundabout point that the citizenry don't democratically control the actions of business. And even the so-called "dollar vote", while it can have a great effect when there's a popular target where the company's business mostly comes from consumers... is still generally a weak force.
If only the people could vote on revoking the charter of a corporation. Something like that might force companies, more or less, to do right.
There's no question that many Americans are so overworked that civic activism is not really feasible. Perhaps this was all planned by particular politicians? The work (or lack of work) of politicians has a lot more to do with how the economy works that I think most people realize.