Dood, FreeHand is not at all web-centric. It's gone (far) downhill since ~ v7, but its roots are as firmly planted in print publishing as Illustrator's and I've produced dozens of EPS, PDF and PS files for various printers using FreeHand. Heck, circa Flash 4/5 and FreeHand 8/9 you had to export FreeHand drawings as Illustrator files to get them into Flash at all -- hardly what one would expect from 'a companion for Flash'.
Back in the day, FreeHand was at least competitive with -- and in several respects, superior to -- Illustrator. FreeHand still does multi-page documents (Illustrator doesn't as Adobe wants you to buy InDesign for that), offered better text formatting for largeish blocks of text (or did through Illustrator CS1) and has a much better trace tool, among other things. Its lens fills were pretty spiffy when they were introduced (v8?) too -- Illustrator had to wait another rev before getting transparency.
Of course, MM let Illustrator catch up with -- and surpass -- FreeHand while they futzed about with Flash, and that new UI (sparkle? spackle? dazzle? drizzle? whatever it's called...) is abominable. FreeHand has long since lost its place in my toolbox. But it's not a 'companion to Flash'.
"Why would Adobe want to continue working on the svg side of things when they can reproduce a more widely integrated technology of flash?"
Which is implemented as a -- wait for it -- plugin.
I suspect Adobe will abandon SVG, but because they (now) control the Flash format where SVG is an open standard. Using Flash -- the more widely-distributed technology anyway -- will give them more control over the direction of the format.
I never said that a more tech-savvy audience would be more likely to choose IE over FF. I said the more tech-savvy audience was less representative of the web audience in general than the 'free counter' stats, which are themselves suspect at best.
The point is that without more information about the W3Schools audience, we don't have any idea what their stats mean.
For example, elsewhere in the thread someone noted that the downturn coincides with summer break at schools. Perhaps in the summer the W3Schools audience has relatively more professional developers as the students are off at summer jobs, the beach, etc. Those professionals may work predominantly at large organisations where they have no choice in which browser they use as the organisations they work for have largely standardised on IE. So it might be that Firefox dropped because students who have a choice in which browser they use visit W3Schools less in the summer, where professionals who are forced to use IE visit year-round.
Or it might mean nothing of the sort. Without more information, we don't know.
Besides, there's still TheCounter's data, which appears to come from a larger (though still quite possibly unrepresentative) sample.
Bottom line: this is a non-story getting play during a slow news week, nothing more.
They show a 2-point increase in share for FF, passing IE 5.x for the first time, while IE6 continues its very slow decline.
Web site stats services are (probably) indicative of broad trends in the overall web audience, but little more. All we can tell from this is that Mozilla-based browsers are probably close to 10% of the 'general' audience and growing slowly, IE 5 is probably less than that and shrinking somewhat, and IE 6 usage is roughly static.
W3Schools is (if anything) a worse indicator of general-audience share than the stats services since it is a smaller sample and is heavily skewed towards the tech-savvy.
Designing a web site with Photoshop is like trying to mow the lawn with a hedge trimmer.
Bollacks. I know plenty of extremely talented (and some extremely high-profile) deisigners who use P'shop for web work. I know very few who use Fireworks.
P'shop works fine for web work. Better than fine, even. The only place it falls down is with PNGs.
Fireworks does fine too, though it's not as adroit an artistic tool nor with photos. It does a fine job on PNGs tho.
I will concede your point on Freehand, though. Illustrator is a better product from an user interface point of view, though it lacks some of Freehand's great features like contour gradients and the awesome variable stroke pen tool.
Illustrator has comparable features to both of those widgets, though I forget now what they're called offhand (have been using both since the 5.5 days and rarely crack a manual anymore).
The two are roughly comprarable feature-wise; FreeHand is a bit more broadly useful (multi-page documents, more extensive text tools, etc.) but Illustrator is a more powerful tool for, well, illustration.:-)
It's really just stability (I've not had so much trouble with Illustrator CS myself) and UI (MX 2004 is a nightmare) that let FreeHand down.
That said, I hope Adobe does kill Freehand. It sucks hardcore. I hate it with a passion, and with good reason--it's UI hasn't been updated in a hideously long time, it is unusable, and probably the WORST of the MM products out there.
Except the UI WAS updated recently -- for MX 2004, in fact. And miraculously enough, it's worse now than ever.
It's the W3C standard, and it's more useful to me that all browsers adhere to the standard than that they use a more intuitive/pragmatic box model, but it's unfortunate that the W3C did it the way they did rather than Microsoft's way nonetheless.
It isn't Opera doing the test -- I know; I'm on the dev list for it.
Some Opera employees are helping a lot, but it's WaSP's test.
Some IE folks may end up lending a hand, too. And I'd love to get some Moz folks, and Dave Hyatt (or anyone else at Apple or the KHTML project) to pitch in as well.
I've moaned early and often about the W3C box model, but I disagree regarding your definition of 'width'. It's one area I think MS implemented in a more intuitive way than the W3C: width = content width + padding + borders (margin is added to the width). Conceptually, that's about right: the 'margin' is an offset, not part of the element itself. Practically speaking, it's about right too: the one bit that tends to be set in different units than the rest (the border) is contained in the width declaration, so you don't have problems like having to leave a few percentages of the parent width blank and hope the borders will fit in there. In practice, I find margins tend to be set in the same units as content width (be they ems, pixels, percentage or whatever) so they're much easier to accommodate with a little simple arithmetic.
A couple of Opera people ARE doing a lot of the work on the test, but the current dev version exposes Opera bugs as well (I'm on the dev list and have seen it).
I can't speak for either the WaSP as a group or the other folks involved in the test, but I can assure you I have no interest in contributing to something that's just an Opera PR stunt. This is intended to reveal weaknesses in ALL browsers. The challenge to MS is a result of their inaction/indifference since IE6 (itself rather half-hearted in terms of improved standards support, save for the 'fixed' box model), not because they're the only ones not getting the standards right.
The post is misleading (there's a first;-). Opera isn't developing the test, the Web Standards Project is. I know -- I'm on the dev list for it.
There *are* a couple of Opera folks working on the test, but the current dev version of the test also exposes some bugs in their browsers (and in Firefox).
I can't speak for either the WaSP as a whole or all the folks working on the Acid2 Test, but personally I'd welcome input from MS folks as well. The more weaknesses the test exposes in all browsers, the better AFAIC.
So does Firefox, and the current development version of the Acid2 Test exposes at least some of them (I'm on the dev list for the test and have seen it).
Nothing like overstatement to answer overstatement, yes?
Microsoft added some things that are getting implemented by other browsers, but very often they're being implemented for compatibility with IE-only sites, not because they were such good ideas. The document.all collection, for example.
Other things are truly useful (offsetFoo -- Height, Width, etc. -- for example), and others are convenience features that don't really do much that couldn't be accomplished via W3C-recommendation-compliant methods like.innerHTML*.
Still others were on a par with the worst of Netscapes excesses (marquee anyone?).
There are also plenty of areas where Microsoft went off on their own path and nobody followed (conditional comments, behaviors, CSS expressions) or abused the W3C recommendations with incompatible and/or incomplete implementations (e.g. the object tag, esp. their, ah, 'interesting' use of the codebase attribute).
* Maybe not the best example, as at least some tests indicate that in most all browsers that support it.innerHTML is much faster in terms of rendering time than the corresponding W3C DOM methods.
As I recall, both tables *and* frames were Netscape extensions. And don't forget the all-singing, all-dancing layer and ilayer tags (ugh). And then there's applet, embed, non-tag stuff like the layers collection, JSSS (JavaScript Style Sheets), even JavaScript (nee LiveScript) itself.
You could maybe count the img tag too, which was implemented Andreeson while everyone else was haggling over details of the much more useful object tag.
Netscape did a lot to push the web forward, but they made a hella mess while doing so. Historically, Microsoft was much more standards-friendly. Heck, the authors of the first Acid Test refused to even test Navigator/Communicator 4.x because its CSS support was so gawdawful poor the list of things that needed fixing was virtually indistinguishable from 'everything'.
Read again. Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 will be celebrating its 8th birthday in June. Netscape Communicator 4.5 will be 7 this year, but that was little more than a maintenance release to squash some of the worst bugs.
Netscape 6 and 7 were based on the Mozilla Suite, a completely different browser.
Once GIMP people implement 48bit color and color management, they'll have a potential to take away a large portion of Adobe clientele - web designers and photographers (i.e. people in no way related to prepress and CMYK).
Photographers, maybe. Web designers, no. Not those with any typographic sensibility whatever. The GIMP's type rendering is appalling, and until some sort of font embedding solution is widely available for web pages text images are going to be a significant part of web design.
Giving the UI a few whacks with the usability stick wouldn't hurt, either.
Even though we all love iTunes and the Apple music store most of us still have 90% pirated MP3s,
You maybe. I'm no fan of iTunes myself, and the vast majority of my MP3s were ripped from discs I own, with a smattering of others downloaded directly from the artists themselves.
Even if it were not, copyright is not just about whether or not you're allowed to distribute songs: it's also about whether or not you're allowed to own them.
Nonsense. Copyright is just exactly that: the right to copy.
As for the transaction itself, one might make a coherent argument that it ought to be legal but I suspect that you'd have a hard time getting any U.S. court to buy it.
I'll say this for them: they've completely killed the myth that OSS has less-polished, uglier UIs than commercial alternatives: that is one bumofugly browser.
A common reason people make this statement is because they wish to eliminate the burden of divying up property. Deciding whose claim is the superior, dealing with the shouting and screaming between different greedy parties, and trying to help those who have none.
One common objection, but not the only one. Another common objection is that dividing it up creates artificial scarcity, as with intellectual property.
Ownership, at its root, is the ability to exclude others. In the case of land, it means being able to tell other people to, for example, keep their damned shantytown off it so you can build your factory (or whatever). In the case of ideas, it means preventing people from making use of the idea (e.g. by performing the song or producing the good which is the subject of the idea).
Where things get sticky is when you bother to question what approach to dividing up a particular resource maximizes the good for an entire society -- not just this or that group of stakeholders, but all of a society. This problem is especially acute where nonrival goods are concerned.
Nonrival goods are those such that use by one person doesn't diminish the value that can be derived by another; e.g. my listening to a song doesn't diminish your ability to derive enjoyment from listening to it as well.
With rival goods, like land, the ability to exclude, whether via private ownership or collective regulation, can increase the total value to society by enabling uses that would be impossible without such exclusion (e.g., building a factory or farming). These uses generate enough value to more than offset the value lost by preventing the remainder of society from making other uses of the land. The 'tragedy of the commons' also applies here (its application is left as an exercise for the reader).
In the case of nonrival goods, however, private ownership can actually diminish overall good to society. Because one person's use of a good does not diminish the ability of another to use the good, exclusion doesn't enable the creation of any value. It only limits the ability of other people to derive value from the good, thereby reducing the value dervided by society as a whole.
With intellectual property, society has accepted a lowered overal value from any particular idea in exchange for creating an incentive for talented individuals to create more of the good in question -- ideas. Balancing the amount of value lost because some cannot enjoy the idea (e.g. by creating a derivative work) with the amount of additional value generated by encouraging additional production of the good is a tricky business and one not particularly amenable to simple market solutions. This is true not least because the cost to society of excluding persons from the idea (in lost derivative ideas as well as the simple enjoyment of the idea by additional persons) can easily outstrip the value derived by exclusivity. Because the value derived from unrestricted use of the good is not well-captured by any one person nor by any group of persons, you have little incentive to truly maximize value and so the market (and consequently ownership) doesn't work so well on its own.
first off, when you only have to pay money for something, it can be done. Somehow. If you want it badly enough, you can get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Dood, FreeHand is not at all web-centric. It's gone (far) downhill since ~ v7, but its roots are as firmly planted in print publishing as Illustrator's and I've produced dozens of EPS, PDF and PS files for various printers using FreeHand. Heck, circa Flash 4/5 and FreeHand 8/9 you had to export FreeHand drawings as Illustrator files to get them into Flash at all -- hardly what one would expect from 'a companion for Flash'.
Back in the day, FreeHand was at least competitive with -- and in several respects, superior to -- Illustrator. FreeHand still does multi-page documents (Illustrator doesn't as Adobe wants you to buy InDesign for that), offered better text formatting for largeish blocks of text (or did through Illustrator CS1) and has a much better trace tool, among other things. Its lens fills were pretty spiffy when they were introduced (v8?) too -- Illustrator had to wait another rev before getting transparency.
Of course, MM let Illustrator catch up with -- and surpass -- FreeHand while they futzed about with Flash, and that new UI (sparkle? spackle? dazzle? drizzle? whatever it's called...) is abominable. FreeHand has long since lost its place in my toolbox. But it's not a 'companion to Flash'.
I suspect Adobe will abandon SVG, but because they (now) control the Flash format where SVG is an open standard. Using Flash -- the more widely-distributed technology anyway -- will give them more control over the direction of the format.
I never said that a more tech-savvy audience would be more likely to choose IE over FF. I said the more tech-savvy audience was less representative of the web audience in general than the 'free counter' stats, which are themselves suspect at best.
The point is that without more information about the W3Schools audience, we don't have any idea what their stats mean.
For example, elsewhere in the thread someone noted that the downturn coincides with summer break at schools. Perhaps in the summer the W3Schools audience has relatively more professional developers as the students are off at summer jobs, the beach, etc. Those professionals may work predominantly at large organisations where they have no choice in which browser they use as the organisations they work for have largely standardised on IE. So it might be that Firefox dropped because students who have a choice in which browser they use visit W3Schools less in the summer, where professionals who are forced to use IE visit year-round.
Or it might mean nothing of the sort. Without more information, we don't know.
Besides, there's still TheCounter's data, which appears to come from a larger (though still quite possibly unrepresentative) sample.
Bottom line: this is a non-story getting play during a slow news week, nothing more.
Actually, it probably is a blip. TheCounter.com for June and July.
They show a 2-point increase in share for FF, passing IE 5.x for the first time, while IE6 continues its very slow decline.
Web site stats services are (probably) indicative of broad trends in the overall web audience, but little more. All we can tell from this is that Mozilla-based browsers are probably close to 10% of the 'general' audience and growing slowly, IE 5 is probably less than that and shrinking somewhat, and IE 6 usage is roughly static.
W3Schools is (if anything) a worse indicator of general-audience share than the stats services since it is a smaller sample and is heavily skewed towards the tech-savvy.
Mmm. Interesting. Next you'll be telling me Microsoft 'might' have released IE for free to kill Netscape, too...
P'shop works fine for web work. Better than fine, even. The only place it falls down is with PNGs.
Fireworks does fine too, though it's not as adroit an artistic tool nor with photos. It does a fine job on PNGs tho.
Illustrator has comparable features to both of those widgets, though I forget now what they're called offhand (have been using both since the 5.5 days and rarely crack a manual anymore).
The two are roughly comprarable feature-wise; FreeHand is a bit more broadly useful (multi-page documents, more extensive text tools, etc.) but Illustrator is a more powerful tool for, well, illustration.
It's really just stability (I've not had so much trouble with Illustrator CS myself) and UI (MX 2004 is a nightmare) that let FreeHand down.
*weeble*
Ya, that's the problem w/the W3C model.
:-)
It's the W3C standard, and it's more useful to me that all browsers adhere to the standard than that they use a more intuitive/pragmatic box model, but it's unfortunate that the W3C did it the way they did rather than Microsoft's way nonetheless.
Gawd...the irony of me saying that.
The Acid2 Challenge
It isn't Opera doing the test -- I know; I'm on the dev list for it.
Some Opera employees are helping a lot, but it's WaSP's test.
Some IE folks may end up lending a hand, too. And I'd love to get some Moz folks, and Dave Hyatt (or anyone else at Apple or the KHTML project) to pitch in as well.
Microsoft Wins Patent on Web Standard
I've moaned early and often about the W3C box model, but I disagree regarding your definition of 'width'. It's one area I think MS implemented in a more intuitive way than the W3C: width = content width + padding + borders (margin is added to the width). Conceptually, that's about right: the 'margin' is an offset, not part of the element itself. Practically speaking, it's about right too: the one bit that tends to be set in different units than the rest (the border) is contained in the width declaration, so you don't have problems like having to leave a few percentages of the parent width blank and hope the borders will fit in there. In practice, I find margins tend to be set in the same units as content width (be they ems, pixels, percentage or whatever) so they're much easier to accommodate with a little simple arithmetic.
It's sponsored by the Web Standards Project, just as the original Acid Test was.
A couple of Opera people ARE doing a lot of the work on the test, but the current dev version exposes Opera bugs as well (I'm on the dev list and have seen it).
I can't speak for either the WaSP as a group or the other folks involved in the test, but I can assure you I have no interest in contributing to something that's just an Opera PR stunt. This is intended to reveal weaknesses in ALL browsers. The challenge to MS is a result of their inaction/indifference since IE6 (itself rather half-hearted in terms of improved standards support, save for the 'fixed' box model), not because they're the only ones not getting the standards right.
The post is misleading (there's a first ;-). Opera isn't developing the test, the Web Standards Project is. I know -- I'm on the dev list for it.
There *are* a couple of Opera folks working on the test, but the current dev version of the test also exposes some bugs in their browsers (and in Firefox).
I can't speak for either the WaSP as a whole or all the folks working on the Acid2 Test, but personally I'd welcome input from MS folks as well. The more weaknesses the test exposes in all browsers, the better AFAIC.
So does Firefox, and the current development version of the Acid2 Test exposes at least some of them (I'm on the dev list for the test and have seen it).
And I was posting before morning coffee. Call it even. :-)
Nothing like overstatement to answer overstatement, yes?
.innerHTML*.
.innerHTML is much faster in terms of rendering time than the corresponding W3C DOM methods.
Microsoft added some things that are getting implemented by other browsers, but very often they're being implemented for compatibility with IE-only sites, not because they were such good ideas. The document.all collection, for example.
Other things are truly useful (offsetFoo -- Height, Width, etc. -- for example), and others are convenience features that don't really do much that couldn't be accomplished via W3C-recommendation-compliant methods like
Still others were on a par with the worst of Netscapes excesses (marquee anyone?).
There are also plenty of areas where Microsoft went off on their own path and nobody followed (conditional comments, behaviors, CSS expressions) or abused the W3C recommendations with incompatible and/or incomplete implementations (e.g. the object tag, esp. their, ah, 'interesting' use of the codebase attribute).
* Maybe not the best example, as at least some tests indicate that in most all browsers that support it
As I recall, both tables *and* frames were Netscape extensions. And don't forget the all-singing, all-dancing layer and ilayer tags (ugh). And then there's applet, embed, non-tag stuff like the layers collection, JSSS (JavaScript Style Sheets), even JavaScript (nee LiveScript) itself.
You could maybe count the img tag too, which was implemented Andreeson while everyone else was haggling over details of the much more useful object tag.
Netscape did a lot to push the web forward, but they made a hella mess while doing so. Historically, Microsoft was much more standards-friendly. Heck, the authors of the first Acid Test refused to even test Navigator/Communicator 4.x because its CSS support was so gawdawful poor the list of things that needed fixing was virtually indistinguishable from 'everything'.
Ya, I read the thread. And you replied to a message about companies demanding support for Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x.
Get a grip.
Read again. Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 will be celebrating its 8th birthday in June. Netscape Communicator 4.5 will be 7 this year, but that was little more than a maintenance release to squash some of the worst bugs.
Netscape 6 and 7 were based on the Mozilla Suite, a completely different browser.
You maybe. I'm no fan of iTunes myself, and the vast majority of my MP3s were ripped from discs I own, with a smattering of others downloaded directly from the artists themselves.
Nonsense. Copyright is just exactly that: the right to copy.
As for the transaction itself, one might make a coherent argument that it ought to be legal but I suspect that you'd have a hard time getting any U.S. court to buy it.
For lots of other things, it's really, really great (I'm using it to write this post).
US$ 499
I'll say this for them: they've completely killed the myth that OSS has less-polished, uglier UIs than commercial alternatives: that is one bumofugly browser.
*shudder*
Ownership, at its root, is the ability to exclude others. In the case of land, it means being able to tell other people to, for example, keep their damned shantytown off it so you can build your factory (or whatever). In the case of ideas, it means preventing people from making use of the idea (e.g. by performing the song or producing the good which is the subject of the idea).
Where things get sticky is when you bother to question what approach to dividing up a particular resource maximizes the good for an entire society -- not just this or that group of stakeholders, but all of a society. This problem is especially acute where nonrival goods are concerned.
Nonrival goods are those such that use by one person doesn't diminish the value that can be derived by another; e.g. my listening to a song doesn't diminish your ability to derive enjoyment from listening to it as well.
With rival goods, like land, the ability to exclude, whether via private ownership or collective regulation, can increase the total value to society by enabling uses that would be impossible without such exclusion (e.g., building a factory or farming). These uses generate enough value to more than offset the value lost by preventing the remainder of society from making other uses of the land. The 'tragedy of the commons' also applies here (its application is left as an exercise for the reader).
In the case of nonrival goods, however, private ownership can actually diminish overall good to society. Because one person's use of a good does not diminish the ability of another to use the good, exclusion doesn't enable the creation of any value. It only limits the ability of other people to derive value from the good, thereby reducing the value dervided by society as a whole.
With intellectual property, society has accepted a lowered overal value from any particular idea in exchange for creating an incentive for talented individuals to create more of the good in question -- ideas. Balancing the amount of value lost because some cannot enjoy the idea (e.g. by creating a derivative work) with the amount of additional value generated by encouraging additional production of the good is a tricky business and one not particularly amenable to simple market solutions. This is true not least because the cost to society of excluding persons from the idea (in lost derivative ideas as well as the simple enjoyment of the idea by additional persons) can easily outstrip the value derived by exclusivity. Because the value derived from unrestricted use of the good is not well-captured by any one person nor by any group of persons, you have little incentive to truly maximize value and so the market (and consequently ownership) doesn't work so well on its own.
Amazing what a bit of hand-waving can solve, eh?