I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things. I already created the database schema, wrote all the SQL to get the information I want, have a lot of HTML written for the general template, and was looking at abandoning much of it for controllers, models, automagic foreign key relationships, automagic methods popping out of thin air.. I wanted more control I guess.
So... you basically wrote the application (minus the controller), and then started thinking about using a different platform? Is it any surprise that you didn't want to switch over to Rails (disclaimer: I'm not a Rails guy. In fact, I work for the competition)?
So I've done most of the site in PHP instead. Direct, to the point, fast enough (though I'm thinking about a rewrite in C for a pure CGI/FastCGI binary), a minimum of automagic hand-holding - just start each page with sanity checking, authorization, the SQL the page needs and nothing more, and then format the output. No wondering how many hundred methods have been created that I don't know about, what happens when a record is deleted/updated (I'll let the database handle null/ignore/cascade thankyou) or whatever else Rails is doing behind my back.
OK. It's not like somebody's holding a gun to your head and saying you have to use a framework. Personally, I see a lot of use cases where a framework makes development a lot simpler and easier to manage, because so much of the tedious overhead of web-app development has already been done for you. Think of the framework in terms of an operating system you're programming for: rather than writing all your own device drivers, routines for drawing stuff on the screen, accepting keyboard/mouse input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. And with a framework, rather than write database drivers, routines for accepting and routing input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. Using a web framework is no different, really, than using any other shared library.
As for all the cruft you complain about, when was the last time you used every single bit of functionality provided by a shared library you linked a C application against? Or is it only bad to draw in automagical functions you won't use when the application isn't being compiled?;)
The question though is what is wrong with offering both well-chosen defaults to hit the ground running with AND advanced configuration options for those who like to twiddle? Oh, and please don't take any of this wrong. Most of us who question the direction Gnome has taken do so because we'd like to see Linux focus on a unified desktop that fills the needs of all users.
In a way, you've answered your own question: you can't please all of the people all of the time. And, FWIW, GNOME does offer plenty of advanced configuration options, but critics tend to gloss over them by saying GConf shouldn't count because it reminds them too much of the Windows registry.
Actually that is the first thing I want to do. I know the keys I want to use to accomplish tasks, the style I want my widgets to look like, what colors and fonts are the most pleasing to my eyes, and which mouse cursors are the easiest for me to see. A control center that allows me to quickly set these preferences is a very handy thing to have indeed.
And this is the point where I step back and say that's great... for you and KDE. But not everyone wants or needs that, and plenty of people prefer something that just lets them hit the ground running with well-chosen default settings. And for those people (and I'm one of them), there's GNOME. I find that, on average, there are exactly two things I need to do to GNOME to make it suit me perfectly:
Add a few application launchers to the panel.
Change the theme (including wallpaper and fonts).
And that's it. Since that's all I ever need, I stick with GNOME and get things done (plus, well, the GTK/GNOME-based applications tend to be more useful, but that's a whole different discussion). If you want to spend hours configuring everything to your heart's content, then stick with KDE or, better, switch to Enlightenment. I used it day in, day out for years, and got it exactly how I wanted it, but when I realized I could get an environment in GNOME that was just as useful with about thirty seconds of configuration, I switched.
IANAL, etc., but the defense is called "laches", and this is my layman's understanding of it.
There are two things you have to demonstrate in order to use the laches defense:
There was an unreasonable delay between the time the patent holder found out about your infringment and the time he or she filed suit against you.
This delay caused "material prejudice or injury" to you.
So, to take an example, suppose that you're getting into the business of manufacturing widgets, and Acme Corp. sees your press releases and realizes you're infringing on their widget patent. Rather than take immediate action, they sit back and wait and, after you've been up and running for a while, they file a patent-infringement lawsuit and seek an injunction to stop you from making any more widgets until the suit is settled. At this point, you can meet both conditions of the laches defense: Acme Corp. delayed unreasonably in taking action, because they knew you were infringing long ago, and as a result you've suffered material injury -- had they acted sooner, you would either have licensed the patent, or found a way to make widgets that didn't infringe, and your business wouldn't be in deep trouble right now.
At this point, the patent is still valid and you will have to pay royalties on any widgets you make in the future (so this isn't really analogous to the situation with trademarks), but Acme Corp. can't demand back royalties for the widgets you made in the past.
So, basically, the doctrine of laches tries to make situations like this fair to everyone (you'll actually see it called "the equitable doctrine of laches" in a lot of places); it's fair to the patent holder, because they get royalties going forward, but it's fair to you because you're not held responsible for the damages incurred by their delay.
Mostly bugs in alignment of elements it seems. The site I'm working on now is having a lot of issues with it and I've had similar issues on other sites I've done.
Have you looked around here and here to find out whether the issues you're seeing have explanations or workarounds?
If Opera 9 has decent CSS support I might agree. Opera 8's CSS support was pretty crappy. Not compatible with Firefox and Safari or IE which just sort of left it as a thorn in my side that wasn't really worth the effort of fixing.
Care to give specific examples?
Never have figured out if there is a hack around Opera responds to for selecting an Opera only stylesheet. Anyone know?
Not that I'm aware of. There are hacks for older versions of Opera, but I've not seen any for 8.0, 8.5 or the 9.0 previews.
For a small amount of pissy HTML/CSS coding, go crazy with jEdit and Bluefish. Until I can find something that gives me the flexibility that Dreamweaver does, why would I change? Same with Photoshop. I need these tools to do my job. I'm not going out of my way to use sub standard options and have to dick around all day just to prove some point the corporate world.
For a "small amount" of "pissy" coding? I make my living coding in Bluefish and Emacs, and nothing else; no WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor comes anywhere near close to the clean, clear, semantic code I can produce by hand, so to me Dreamweaver and its ilk are seriously sub-standard options.
If my job involved browsing the web and checking email all day, I'd be all Ubuntu'd up. But it doesn't so I'm not.
I've been on Ubuntu for just shy of a year, and on various flavors of Linux exclusively for over five years now. I've yet to run into something I need to do, either for work or for entertainment, that I need any other OS for.
The argument about Google just complying to local law in China the same way as it does in France is complete nonsense. Because law in a dictatorship denying human rights to its citizen has no value whatsoever, while law in a democracy respecting human rights is legitimate, even if sometimes different human rights (e.g. freedom of speech vs. right to privacy) must be weighed against each other.
China censors certain political groups on the grounds that they pose a danger to the security, safety and freedom of the Chinese people.
France and germany censor certain political groups on the grounds that they pose a danger to the security, safety and freedom of the French and German people.
There are reasons to justify Google's involvement in China, but nothing would make it a "brave" one.
What they did is to cave in to the Chinese govt.'s pressure and although that has positive aspects, like still being accessible for chinese people, the censorship still exist and that cannot be called as a brave decision.
First of all, the United States, France and Germany all have laws which require Google to censor its results, and Google does censor them -- in the US, results which receive DMCA complaints have to go, and in France and Germany links about Nazis get the boot. One of the costs of doing business is following the laws of the country you're operating in, and for Google to have a presence in China they have to comply with Chinese censorship laws. Just like they already comply with American, French and German censorship laws. The question, then, is how to follow the law while doing as little as possible to help those laws which are perceived as evil.
Now, here's somthing to consider: previously, if a Chinese citizen did a search on, say, "Tiananmen", they'd just get back whatever the Chinese government wants them to see, with results the government doesn't like removed. The average Chinese person would never know that anything fishy was going on. But now if that same Chinese citizen does the same search at the Chinese Google, they get the same result set, plus a little something extra: a message at the bottom of the page which says, in Chinese, "due to local law, regulation or policy one or more results were removed from this page". And every single Google China page links to the main google.com, which doesn't censor results.
This is the same policy that people applauded Google for with the DMCA -- they removed the complained-about results, but added a message saying they'd been removed, and made sure you could get to information about why it was removed. With China, they remove the results Beijing doesn't want, but add a message saying they've been removed. And they make sure you know how to get to their main search page which doesn't censor anything.
To me this is an elegant compromise with more than a hint of subversiveness in it, and I think it's easily the most moral solution to the entire problem. So I do wish people would actually take the time to research what happened and get the facts before they get up on their high horses about Google being evil.
oh, as far as the average user can see, they haven't done anything but build a very simple website that describes webforms 2, which is already implemented in modern browsers.
But at the same time, their target audience isn't "average users", who would probably be just as turned off by the W3C's site (which currently advertises Candidate Recommendation status for "Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition 1.0"). Their target audience, basically, is people who are going to come to read the spec drafts and sign up for the mailing list, because that's where the action happens.
And WF2 hasn't been implemented. Some browsers have partial or experimental implementations, but nobody's got anythign approaching a full implementation yet and the spec isn't finalized.
Talk about stagnating.. their website hasn't seen an update in almost a year, now.
Cheap shot. Their spec proposals are under constant discussion and revision, with an active mailing list. The "ping" attribute was proposed in October 2005, for example.
I will no longer support that or any future version of Firefox unless this is removed completely and a privacy statement is issued where they pledge to protect the users security and privacy. I will not allow my systems to be upgraded and will not recommend my company consider it. I will actively work against them.
Whoa, there cowboy. Come down off your high horse for a second so I can bludgeon you with facts:
The "ping" attribute is on the standardization track of an independent industry standards body.
The reasoning behind it is that this is something that's already done by pretty much anybody anywhere who serves advertising or does user research, and that standardizing in this form has a few advantages:
It does away with the need to obfuscate link targets by pointing to redirect scripts which do tracking -- instead of linking to Yahoo by going through "redirect.php?site=242353987", you can have the link's href attribute be Yahoo and add a "ping" attribute to hit your tracker.
It does away with the need, in many cases, to use JavaScript and/or cookies for link-tracking purposes.
It's semantically much cleaner.
It allows users to easily see links which will ping a tracker, either by having the browser automatically identify them or by user stylesheets which highlight links with a "ping" attribute.
My question is where did this idea come from? Is it in an HTML standard somewhere? If not, they shouldn't have bothered putting it in IMHO. How can I tell my friends that Firefox aims to be more standards compliant if the Mozilla team is putting in proprietary HTML features?
It's being debated for standardization by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, a collaboration of developers and browser makers who think the W3C has basically stagnated and stopped paying attention to real-world problems, and so are working on building consensus for the standardized, interoperable implementation of new features and technologies. And keep in mind that even at the W3C a new feature in a spec can't be officially standardized until there are implementations in the wild, and in the past new features have often been standardized after being implemented independently by browser makers.
But I agree: WhatWG can come up with all nice new proposals, what a webbrowser should implement are the W3C standards, not their own or those of a third party.
There are a couple things wrong with your statement here:
First, the purpose of web standards is not to hand the power to bless things to one organization, but rather to ensure that new technologies and features are implemented and used in a clear, interoperable fashion by browser developers and web designers. So if the people on both ends of the web (the companies and groups which build the browsers, and the designers and developers who build web sites) can get together and agree on a standard way to implement and use a new feature, why not let them do it instead of complaining that it hasn't been blessed by some grand high muck-a-muck at the W3C?
Second, the W3C's authority exists only through consensus. If they lose the consensus of the big players in the web industry, they lose their authority. This is what's already partially begun to happen; the W3C is currently working on XHTML 2.0, which has some major issues:
Nobody knows when it'll be finalized.
Once it's finalized, nobody knows when, or if, it will ever be implemented in browsers. I've seen estimates that it may be a decade or more before XHTML 2.0 can be used for mainstream development.
It's almost universally despised by people who are familiar with the current draft of the spec.
Because of this, the W3C is in serious danger of losing its consensus and its relevance, which means it's also in serious danger of losing its authority. The WHATWG was founded, basically, with the idea of ending the stagnation of web technology (the last standardized version of an HTML language was published six years ago, and the last standardized version of CSS was published eight years ago) and implementing features that will make web design and development easier all around (think things like expanded form controls, additional useful DOM properties and methods, etc.), and so far it's not doing too bad a job of that.
Think of the distinction like this:
The W3C has become more concerned with theory -- in an ideal world, what would be the purest and most academically-pleasing way to do a thing?
The WHATWG is more concerned with practice -- what problems are there for browser makers and web designers, and what ideas are there for solving them?
The first thing they should consider is "where in the W3C specs is the behavior of this element specified"? If it ain't in any of 'em, it don't belong in the browser engine.
This is currently being debated for standardization by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, a consortium of developers and companies which formed in response to the perceived stagnation of the W3C. Many of its members are well-known developers and companies, and a number of them are or have been W3C members or parts of W3C working groups as well.
And, oddly enough, a recurring point in the mailing-list discussion of the "ping" attribute has been that it won't meet the needs of a lot of advertisers and tracking programs.
Do me a favour! You are suggesting that Bill Gates, the guy who built a technology company that changed the entire planet and based on the success attained a personal fortune that is larger than the GDP of many countries is someone who is "fascinated by technology but doesnt know what to do with it!"
Well, yeah. The only piece of software he ever actually wrote was an implementation of BASIC. His first big product, MS-DOS, was purchased outright from the company that developed it. Windows was just a graphical shell for DOS. Windows NT was done by a guy they hired away from Digital. And so on and so forth.
So, yeah. Gates may be a heck of a businessman, but I wouldn't put him in the geek category by the "knows what to do with it" definition.
Re:Just a question...
on
Web 3.0
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· Score: 3, Informative
Who is this Jeffrey Zeldman?
He's well known among web designers who work with modern web standards, for a couple of reasons:
A List Apart, the site that article is on, has long been considered one of the better publications for the web-design industry, and he's the one who started it.
His article To Hell With Bad Browsers back in 2001 is seen by many as having really kicked off the move to modern standards-based web design and development.
Since then he's been involved in a number of high-profile redesigns and a lot of web-standards advocacy, and is now considered one of the "gurus" of web standards.
Also RSS is really important to Web 2.0, even though it's been around for 10 years and still has glaring flaws that remain unaddressed since that time. (How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)
The longer the lines of text are, the more space you need inbetween each line in order to maintain the same level of readability. Long lines make it difficult to find the next line when you finish a line unless there is a good deal of space inbetween. This is the same reason newspapers break up text into columns. Imagine a newspaper with 18" long lines.
But, at the same time, 80-character width is far below the line length which would be optimal for this particular use of the text. And, in combination with the word wrapping performed by web browsers, causes line breaks to appear in unexpected places and results in overly ragged edges, which do just as much to limit readability as overly long lines of text.
The best choice for displaying this text would have been a fluid-width column with a sensible maximum line length specified in ems (something that's easy to do) and no hard line breaks inserted into the license text -- that way, the text would have wrapped naturally at line lengths which facilitate easy reading.
Because it's designed to be read in a text terminal
But when the text is being displayed in a web page which supports word wrapping, why shouldn't the text be allowed to flow appropriately? There is such a thing as adapting content to the medium in which it will be displayed, you know.
When a license's terms involve a possibly ambiguous situation, it's often helpful to know the intent of the licensor, which is why you see language in the draft like "Each of its provisions shall be interpreted in light of this specific declaration of the licensor's intent."
I've used contracts before which took this tack as well; saying something like "this clause shall be interpreted by all parties in light of this stated intent" adds one more layer of safety in case a provision unexpectedly turns out to be ambiguous.
What is it with Macheads and BMWs? I have seen this analogy for 20 years now, and it is ALWAYS BMW.
What is it with assumptions? I don't own a Mac and never have. I just think it's pretty clear that their target market and, say, Dell's target market are pretty different. BMW was simply the first "luxury" auto manufacturer that came to mind, which is probably due to their efforts at branding.
Do not forget that Apple DOES have a $500 computer, a perfectly legitimate working one that is actually of surprisingly good quality. I've heard nothing but great things about the MacMini, and from personal experience, it's a fine computer (I talked my folks into getting one, and they love it).
But at the same time, the attractiveness isn't "it's a $500 computer". The attractiveness is "it's a Mac". It's all about the preception of the Apple brand.
I don't think it's fair to call Apple the "expensive computer company" anymore.
I didn't say "expensive computer company". I said "luxury computer company".
1.5% of the computer market of course. And when iPod is a big moneyspinner for apple it is still not the core, of their business. Most profit they make is still coming from MAC's and software with them.
So they have 1.5% of the market for their biggest selling product. Doesnt sound so good 72 billion now does it.
No, you seem to have misinterpreted the "which market" question. To illuminate this a bit, let's try it with a different industry: imagine if an analyst published an article saying about BMW, saying "their outlook is dire; they control only a tiny fraction of the automobile market, and are taking few steps to expand their market share". You'd look at that analyst like he was crazy, because you'd realize immediately that BMW's target market is a restricted subset of automobile owners -- they market themselves to affluent customers who want something that's perceived to be a superior product and who are willing to pay a premium to get it.
Apple occupies an analogous place in the computer market; they're sort of a "luxury computer manufacturer", and their advertising is similar to that of luxury-car companies, focusing on design, amenities and uniqueness rather than on price point. So it makes little sense to talk about Apple's market share in terms of the total PC market; instead, any measure of their success or failure must be taken in the premium niche they vie for.
Well, I did not really forget it, I ignored it. Mainly to avoid the "there are lots of frameworks, all of which suck" discussion. From what I see Turbogears currently gets the most attention and is the closest in terms of "packaging" (including screencasts, PR etc.) to RoR, so I picked it for comparison.
Django's in an odd situation, PR-wise. If you sit down and look at who's active in the communities, Django probably has the highest-profile people (in terms of names that'd be recognized by web developers or Python programmers) of any Python framework. And it easily has the largest installed base of any of the new generation of Python frameworks -- there are already Django-based commercial CMS products on the market, even. And when the "Snakes and Rubies" conference was held to talk about web frameworks, it was Rails and Django, not Rails and TurboGears. Somehow, Django is taking over the world without anyone noticing.
Slashdot Mirror
So... you basically wrote the application (minus the controller), and then started thinking about using a different platform? Is it any surprise that you didn't want to switch over to Rails (disclaimer: I'm not a Rails guy. In fact, I work for the competition)?
OK. It's not like somebody's holding a gun to your head and saying you have to use a framework. Personally, I see a lot of use cases where a framework makes development a lot simpler and easier to manage, because so much of the tedious overhead of web-app development has already been done for you. Think of the framework in terms of an operating system you're programming for: rather than writing all your own device drivers, routines for drawing stuff on the screen, accepting keyboard/mouse input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. And with a framework, rather than write database drivers, routines for accepting and routing input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. Using a web framework is no different, really, than using any other shared library.
As for all the cruft you complain about, when was the last time you used every single bit of functionality provided by a shared library you linked a C application against? Or is it only bad to draw in automagical functions you won't use when the application isn't being compiled? ;)
In a way, you've answered your own question: you can't please all of the people all of the time. And, FWIW, GNOME does offer plenty of advanced configuration options, but critics tend to gloss over them by saying GConf shouldn't count because it reminds them too much of the Windows registry.
And this is the point where I step back and say that's great... for you and KDE. But not everyone wants or needs that, and plenty of people prefer something that just lets them hit the ground running with well-chosen default settings. And for those people (and I'm one of them), there's GNOME. I find that, on average, there are exactly two things I need to do to GNOME to make it suit me perfectly:
And that's it. Since that's all I ever need, I stick with GNOME and get things done (plus, well, the GTK/GNOME-based applications tend to be more useful, but that's a whole different discussion). If you want to spend hours configuring everything to your heart's content, then stick with KDE or, better, switch to Enlightenment. I used it day in, day out for years, and got it exactly how I wanted it, but when I realized I could get an environment in GNOME that was just as useful with about thirty seconds of configuration, I switched.
IANAL, etc., but the defense is called "laches", and this is my layman's understanding of it.
There are two things you have to demonstrate in order to use the laches defense:
So, to take an example, suppose that you're getting into the business of manufacturing widgets, and Acme Corp. sees your press releases and realizes you're infringing on their widget patent. Rather than take immediate action, they sit back and wait and, after you've been up and running for a while, they file a patent-infringement lawsuit and seek an injunction to stop you from making any more widgets until the suit is settled. At this point, you can meet both conditions of the laches defense: Acme Corp. delayed unreasonably in taking action, because they knew you were infringing long ago, and as a result you've suffered material injury -- had they acted sooner, you would either have licensed the patent, or found a way to make widgets that didn't infringe, and your business wouldn't be in deep trouble right now.
At this point, the patent is still valid and you will have to pay royalties on any widgets you make in the future (so this isn't really analogous to the situation with trademarks), but Acme Corp. can't demand back royalties for the widgets you made in the past.
So, basically, the doctrine of laches tries to make situations like this fair to everyone (you'll actually see it called "the equitable doctrine of laches" in a lot of places); it's fair to the patent holder, because they get royalties going forward, but it's fair to you because you're not held responsible for the damages incurred by their delay.
Have you looked around here and here to find out whether the issues you're seeing have explanations or workarounds?
Care to give specific examples?
Not that I'm aware of. There are hacks for older versions of Opera, but I've not seen any for 8.0, 8.5 or the 9.0 previews.
For a "small amount" of "pissy" coding? I make my living coding in Bluefish and Emacs, and nothing else; no WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor comes anywhere near close to the clean, clear, semantic code I can produce by hand, so to me Dreamweaver and its ilk are seriously sub-standard options.
I've been on Ubuntu for just shy of a year, and on various flavors of Linux exclusively for over five years now. I've yet to run into something I need to do, either for work or for entertainment, that I need any other OS for.
China censors certain political groups on the grounds that they pose a danger to the security, safety and freedom of the Chinese people.
France and germany censor certain political groups on the grounds that they pose a danger to the security, safety and freedom of the French and German people.
Is one wrong and the other not?
First of all, the United States, France and Germany all have laws which require Google to censor its results, and Google does censor them -- in the US, results which receive DMCA complaints have to go, and in France and Germany links about Nazis get the boot. One of the costs of doing business is following the laws of the country you're operating in, and for Google to have a presence in China they have to comply with Chinese censorship laws. Just like they already comply with American, French and German censorship laws. The question, then, is how to follow the law while doing as little as possible to help those laws which are perceived as evil.
Now, here's somthing to consider: previously, if a Chinese citizen did a search on, say, "Tiananmen", they'd just get back whatever the Chinese government wants them to see, with results the government doesn't like removed. The average Chinese person would never know that anything fishy was going on. But now if that same Chinese citizen does the same search at the Chinese Google, they get the same result set, plus a little something extra: a message at the bottom of the page which says, in Chinese, "due to local law, regulation or policy one or more results were removed from this page". And every single Google China page links to the main google.com, which doesn't censor results.
This is the same policy that people applauded Google for with the DMCA -- they removed the complained-about results, but added a message saying they'd been removed, and made sure you could get to information about why it was removed. With China, they remove the results Beijing doesn't want, but add a message saying they've been removed. And they make sure you know how to get to their main search page which doesn't censor anything.
To me this is an elegant compromise with more than a hint of subversiveness in it, and I think it's easily the most moral solution to the entire problem. So I do wish people would actually take the time to research what happened and get the facts before they get up on their high horses about Google being evil.
But at the same time, their target audience isn't "average users", who would probably be just as turned off by the W3C's site (which currently advertises Candidate Recommendation status for "Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition 1.0"). Their target audience, basically, is people who are going to come to read the spec drafts and sign up for the mailing list, because that's where the action happens.
And WF2 hasn't been implemented. Some browsers have partial or experimental implementations, but nobody's got anythign approaching a full implementation yet and the spec isn't finalized.
Cheap shot. Their spec proposals are under constant discussion and revision, with an active mailing list. The "ping" attribute was proposed in October 2005, for example.
Whoa, there cowboy. Come down off your high horse for a second so I can bludgeon you with facts:
It's being debated for standardization by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, a collaboration of developers and browser makers who think the W3C has basically stagnated and stopped paying attention to real-world problems, and so are working on building consensus for the standardized, interoperable implementation of new features and technologies. And keep in mind that even at the W3C a new feature in a spec can't be officially standardized until there are implementations in the wild, and in the past new features have often been standardized after being implemented independently by browser makers.
There are a couple things wrong with your statement here:
First, the purpose of web standards is not to hand the power to bless things to one organization, but rather to ensure that new technologies and features are implemented and used in a clear, interoperable fashion by browser developers and web designers. So if the people on both ends of the web (the companies and groups which build the browsers, and the designers and developers who build web sites) can get together and agree on a standard way to implement and use a new feature, why not let them do it instead of complaining that it hasn't been blessed by some grand high muck-a-muck at the W3C?
Second, the W3C's authority exists only through consensus. If they lose the consensus of the big players in the web industry, they lose their authority. This is what's already partially begun to happen; the W3C is currently working on XHTML 2.0, which has some major issues:
Because of this, the W3C is in serious danger of losing its consensus and its relevance, which means it's also in serious danger of losing its authority. The WHATWG was founded, basically, with the idea of ending the stagnation of web technology (the last standardized version of an HTML language was published six years ago, and the last standardized version of CSS was published eight years ago) and implementing features that will make web design and development easier all around (think things like expanded form controls, additional useful DOM properties and methods, etc.), and so far it's not doing too bad a job of that.
Think of the distinction like this:
This is currently being debated for standardization by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, a consortium of developers and companies which formed in response to the perceived stagnation of the W3C. Many of its members are well-known developers and companies, and a number of them are or have been W3C members or parts of W3C working groups as well.
And, oddly enough, a recurring point in the mailing-list discussion of the "ping" attribute has been that it won't meet the needs of a lot of advertisers and tracking programs.
Well, yeah. The only piece of software he ever actually wrote was an implementation of BASIC. His first big product, MS-DOS, was purchased outright from the company that developed it. Windows was just a graphical shell for DOS. Windows NT was done by a guy they hired away from Digital. And so on and so forth.
So, yeah. Gates may be a heck of a businessman, but I wouldn't put him in the geek category by the "knows what to do with it" definition.
He's well known among web designers who work with modern web standards, for a couple of reasons:
Try Atom.
But, at the same time, 80-character width is far below the line length which would be optimal for this particular use of the text. And, in combination with the word wrapping performed by web browsers, causes line breaks to appear in unexpected places and results in overly ragged edges, which do just as much to limit readability as overly long lines of text.
The best choice for displaying this text would have been a fluid-width column with a sensible maximum line length specified in ems (something that's easy to do) and no hard line breaks inserted into the license text -- that way, the text would have wrapped naturally at line lengths which facilitate easy reading.
But when the text is being displayed in a web page which supports word wrapping, why shouldn't the text be allowed to flow appropriately? There is such a thing as adapting content to the medium in which it will be displayed, you know.
When a license's terms involve a possibly ambiguous situation, it's often helpful to know the intent of the licensor, which is why you see language in the draft like "Each of its provisions shall be interpreted in light of this specific declaration of the licensor's intent."
I've used contracts before which took this tack as well; saying something like "this clause shall be interpreted by all parties in light of this stated intent" adds one more layer of safety in case a provision unexpectedly turns out to be ambiguous.
What is it with assumptions? I don't own a Mac and never have. I just think it's pretty clear that their target market and, say, Dell's target market are pretty different. BMW was simply the first "luxury" auto manufacturer that came to mind, which is probably due to their efforts at branding.
But at the same time, the attractiveness isn't "it's a $500 computer". The attractiveness is "it's a Mac". It's all about the preception of the Apple brand.
I didn't say "expensive computer company". I said "luxury computer company".
No, you seem to have misinterpreted the "which market" question. To illuminate this a bit, let's try it with a different industry: imagine if an analyst published an article saying about BMW, saying "their outlook is dire; they control only a tiny fraction of the automobile market, and are taking few steps to expand their market share". You'd look at that analyst like he was crazy, because you'd realize immediately that BMW's target market is a restricted subset of automobile owners -- they market themselves to affluent customers who want something that's perceived to be a superior product and who are willing to pay a premium to get it.
Apple occupies an analogous place in the computer market; they're sort of a "luxury computer manufacturer", and their advertising is similar to that of luxury-car companies, focusing on design, amenities and uniqueness rather than on price point. So it makes little sense to talk about Apple's market share in terms of the total PC market; instead, any measure of their success or failure must be taken in the premium niche they vie for.
Django's in an odd situation, PR-wise. If you sit down and look at who's active in the communities, Django probably has the highest-profile people (in terms of names that'd be recognized by web developers or Python programmers) of any Python framework. And it easily has the largest installed base of any of the new generation of Python frameworks -- there are already Django-based commercial CMS products on the market, even. And when the "Snakes and Rubies" conference was held to talk about web frameworks, it was Rails and Django, not Rails and TurboGears. Somehow, Django is taking over the world without anyone noticing.
I blame the lack of a screencast.