As far as pages looking the same, I don't feel like repeating myself.
In other words, the original poster is right about things looking the same; that's not, never has been, and never should be a design goal of HTML; if that's what you're after you've fundamentally misunderstood the language you're working with and the Web. And if you have a client who demands pixel-perfect identical rendering across all browsers, he needs to be given a reality check; part of the job of any good web designer is doing this gently. Use terms your client will understand. For example:
Client: What do you mean? I want it to look the same! *pouts*
Designer: Well, I can do that, but the resulting page will take five and a half hours to download on a 56k modem, which is still what the vast majority of your customers are using. That means they'll get fed up with your site and never come back, so you'll lose their business. Also, it'll raise your bandwidth costs 600% because of all the bloated workarounds we'll have to include. On the other hand, I could design a page that's light, fast, and degrades gracefully for the small number of your users who are using non-compliant browsers. Which would you prefer?
No, you misunderstood my question. Different browsers do things differently, but that in itself does not necessitate different versions of each page. What I asked you to do was list for me specific problems you've found which cannot be solved by any other method. Got any?
If it can't be written in plain text then it's probally not something I really need to read.
Bah. I have no monitor, only a light that flashes on (one) and off (zero), and I mentally decode ASCII characters from watching it blink. Why would I want to muddy up my browsing experience with all this flashy, new-fangled text? Maybe soon I'll move up to reading Unicode from my little light (XML is taking off, after all), but if it requires me to view text it's relaly just not worth my time.
one would think that since they want people coming to this page and accessing it regularly they would make it easier for them to get here.
One would also expect a company that's made as much money as Microsoft to have some business sense, but they don't. One would think that when a company has multiple separate divisions doing different things, it would be a bad idea to make any one of them utterly dependent on another; that way if any one division goes down, the others stay in business without much of a hit.
But then we're dealing with a company that's had a monopoly for so long they've managed to forget how real businesses work . . .
When I write an html page and a user views it in IE or Mozilla, or Konqueror, or whatever, they should see the exact same thing.
Then you're working with the wrong language. Try PDF or a print-layout language where you can specify everything down to the size of the paper; what you want will never be and should never be possible in HTML.
What are you having trouble with? It's ludicrously easy to get usability in all browsers if you code to accepted standards for HTML, CSS, and accessibility. List some specific things you want to do that you absolutely must serve different versions of a page for.
Not sure that's justified; Drew McLellan came up with it, after all. In general, though, ALA is a great site for Web design info; they dont' update as often as they used to, but the articles are always worth reading.
Re:OT: how do you correctly embed flash
on
DTD vs. XML Schema
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Is there a correct way to put flash on a page and pass validator.w3c.org for valid HTML 4.01?
Yup. Even in XHTML. Check out this article on A List Apart for a useful method.
I didn't intend to claim 20 was a specific rule the Court had laid out. Read it as "it's OK to grant perpetual copyright so long as you do it [arbitrary but reasonably small number] years at a time".
20, being the number involved in the SBCTEA, was the first such number which occurred to me.
you'd be ignoring how in 20 years the dissents' balancing arguments become that much more persuasive
No. In 20 years the "balancing arguments" wont' be any more persuasive, because coopyright holders will have an additional 20 years worth of profits with which to grease the wheels of politics and justice.
What is needed is a different argument; for example, many content producers argue that without a ludicrously long term of copyright, they can't properly reap the benefits of creation or recoup their costs. Suggest to a true "small-government" legislator or two (or ten, and keep in mind that they don't get the kind of Hollywood funding other COngressmen do) that maybe a busines plan which requires a 95-year government-mandated monopoly to turn a profit isn't something federal law needs to be subsidizing; "the market" should be allowed ot weed out bad ideas like that one.
Exactly. And in 20 years, the next extension won't be unconstitutional, nor the one after that, nor the one after that, nor the one after that...
In other words, the Court basically just said "Hey, you're free to grant eternal copyright as long as you do it 20 years at a time." This has been their position in the past, but they reiterated it here. And as long as copyrights generate money, the people receiving that money will lobby for and receive extensions. Hence, these works will never enter the public domain.
Just what will it take to please you whinny ungrateful open sourcers?
Actually, I'm surprised we haven't heard from the KDE team; after all, Apple is distributing a desktop which doesn't have Konq, KMail, and KOffice as the default applications, and probably even removed the "About KDE" box -- those were mortal sins last time I checked, and I fully expect Mosfet and others to publish ringing denunciations of how Apple has broken KDE.
Actually, I have. It'd be a nice tool if I were in charge of a large network and had to update a bunch of machines. As it is, I'm responsible for two Linux boxes that I own and administer myself. Manual updating isn't that much of a pain; installing Debian is.
Red Hat or any RPM-based distro could never make it that easy; if they did they'd be boycotted for taking away the knee-jerk "Oh it's simple, you just apt-get foo" or "Oh it's simple, you just emerge foo" response from the Debian and gentoo zealots. I mean come on, in some threads that's half the comments on Slashdot; you don't want to wreak that kind of havoc, my friend.
Of course, I like manually installing RPMs; it's really not that much of a hassle for me, and it means I always know exactly what's being installed and why. If there were an automated system, it'd probably just display a progress bar saying "Satisfying Dependencies" and not tell me anything useful, which would be annoying.
Those damned hippie leeches. I put a 600-foot-tall statue of Keynes in the middle of a public square, intending to charge $100 a head to view it. But those friggin' hippies went and told people where it was! My whole business plan was based on nobody finding that out! Now how am I supposed to recoup the cost of building that statue?
Selling access to it would be bad business...at first. The proper way, if you're going to do that, is to keep the patent or copyright, but allow rampant infringement and piracy. Only when everyone is dependent on you and your technology and you have a de facto monopoly do you start enforcing terms. Of course, that's supposed to be illegal with patents under the doctrine of laches, but with other forms of IP such as copyright it's perfectly OK. Heck, Microsoft did it...
The house analogy is quite flawed; why not try another? You have a big couch. You want to move that big couch. You call up your friends and say "I'll give a case of beer to whoever helps me move the couch". First guy who shows up can't move it on his own; then two more show up, and the four of you can't quite get it. Then one more comes and when he starts lifting as well, the couch gets moved. You give the beer to the last guy who showed up, and no one else.
Sound fair? It's how intellectual "property", if it really were property, would have to work. Good thing it's not. The idea of intellectual "property" just doesn't jive, for a variety of reasons:
The "creation" involved is not creation ex nihilo; all authors and composers draw on previous work for inspiration and source material. Granting an exclusive property right to the last one to contribute to what is essentially historically a group effort is akin to only giving the beer to the last guy who helped lift; it makes the system morally unjust.
If copyright were a property right it would be unable to expire; as you pointed out, owning something now means you'll own it 96 years from now. Yet this would cause copyright to quickly be in violation of many property-rights theories. For example, John Locke says that an appropriation of property to oneself is just if and only if one leaves "enough and as good for others". But if copyright is a property right and thus perpetual, we would very quickly run out of things left for others; as previously mentioned, "creation" of property in this sense involves drawing upon the work of others, and to do so would be illegal. There might be the occasional truly new idea, but copyright would fast reach a point where we were not leaving "enough and as good".
The notion of copyright as property grants an exclusive property right in something which is non-exclusive. In the case of physical property, the right makes sense because physical items can generally only be possessed by one person at a time and the stability of society demands that some form of ownership be instituted in order to prevent constant strife over such possession; this principle is the basis of several major theories of property (e.g., Thomas Hobbes' and David Hume's). However, with something which can be possessed non-exclusively, applying such a rule makes little sense; if all can enjoy and benefit from possession of a thing simltaneously with no strife and no harm, would it not be an evil to deny such enjoyment and possession?
And that's just the tip of the iceberg; I've been researching the philosophy of copyright for a damned long time and while there are certainly some fuzzy areas, I can sy with absolute certainty that copyright cannot be "property" in the sense in which you have used the term.
You don't seem to like XUL. In your original post you praised this new thing for ditching XUL. Yet in the article you linked to, we find the following:
Communicator utilizes the Gecko engine and XUL user interface language found in Mozilla, but it was developed entirely in-house and is not open source, according to AOL.
Internet standards published by the W3C are meant for everybody in the world to adhere to and use; that's the point of having Internet standards. Now, what good are those standards if some people can't adhere to them because the standard requires the use of royalty-encumbered patented concepts? If you want everybody in the world to adopt your idea as a standard, you have to give them access to it...
The Opera 7 betas have wonderful CSS support. That means IE, Moz, and Opera will all be relatively compatible - enough so that you can probably make the move to proper layout with CSS (heck, you could probably do it now; most of the bugs I know of in IE have to do with weird float behavior that doesn't happen too often). And if you really have encyclopedic knowledge of every single CSS 2 selector and property and use all of them in a single page (the only reason which would support the "doesn't support full spec" copout), then I applaud your gall and lament that you have no life.
Some of these I can see agreement with, but others are just plain stupid..
How about the search engine gripe? I'm sorry, but until a search engine can accept "that place that the nice youg man down at the store was talking about yesterday", then it's going to be useless to the elderly. Perhaps some flexibility in forgiving spelling mistakes is desired (a la Google), but lack of it should not be considered a mistake.
The font-size gripe. Jakob, I know you're a klutz when it comes to Web design, and that you know jack about it, but please don't try to pass off your ignorance on others. Internet Explorer doesn't let you resize text set in pixels. Every other browser with a text resize function does. Thus, this is a problem with INTERNET EXPLORER, not with setting font-size in pixels, don't you think? Why not use some of the clout of Jakob Nielsen, world-famous usability guru, to get on Microsoft's ass about that and make them fix it?
"Blocks of Text" - Hmm. You see, Jakob, some people use their websites as places to showcase their writing. I know you have a hard time grasping this concept, but some of us are here for the fun of it. That means that sometimes you'll come across a page that's intended to be read, rather than skimmed over for a quick summary of the important points. My $0.02: if you've graduated high school and can't handle a long paragraph now and then, it's YOUR problem.
Long URLs - Well, if it weren't for the fact that virtually all "long" URLs are also URLs that no user on earth is ever going to need to manually type, I'd agree with this. But when I want to post a comment here on/., for example, I don't clear the address bar and type "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48804&cid=0&p id=0&startat=&threshold=2&mode=thread&commentsort= 0&op=Reply. Instead, I hit the "Reply" button (or link, as the case may be). Most "long" URLs are the result of variables being passed to scripts via GET, which means they were produced by a form. If you know anyone who'd rather try to manually fill form variables into the URL than just filling the form itself, let me know and I'll beat some sense into them.
Now I'm going to go do something silly to regain my sense of childlike innocence at the world. When I come back, Nielsen better be gone.
I have just one problem with your predictions concerning Qt/KDE: it doesn't have good apps. I'm not trying to start a flamewar, I'm not trying to bash KDE, I'm just stating a simple fact.
Compare KDE/Qt apps to their GTK/toolkit neutral competitors and often there's no competition: Mozilla is a better browser than Konqueror (I've often wondered why the Konq team is still reinventing the wheel; GNOME noticed there was a beautiful, easily-embedded rendering engine available and we got Galeon. Konq could embed Gecko and advance by huge leaps and bounds). Evolution is a better PIM/e-mail program than anything in KDE. OpenOffice beats KOffice on so many levels it's not even funny (how about "actually works with MS file formats" for starters?). There may be some flashy, shiny, GUI IDEs available, but that doesn't make good apps by itself.
Sure, KDE is pretty. Sure, Qt is nice to work with. Sure, the development tools are great. But the KDE team isn't accomplishing anything with them. That's why big companies that use *nix desktops go with GNOME. That's why Red Hat set Mozilla, Evolution, and OpenOffice as defaults in Psyche. And that's what KDE's developers need to realize and deal with if they want to compete seriously for desktop market share in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, the original poster is right about things looking the same; that's not, never has been, and never should be a design goal of HTML; if that's what you're after you've fundamentally misunderstood the language you're working with and the Web. And if you have a client who demands pixel-perfect identical rendering across all browsers, he needs to be given a reality check; part of the job of any good web designer is doing this gently. Use terms your client will understand. For example:
Client: What do you mean? I want it to look the same! *pouts*
Designer: Well, I can do that, but the resulting page will take five and a half hours to download on a 56k modem, which is still what the vast majority of your customers are using. That means they'll get fed up with your site and never come back, so you'll lose their business. Also, it'll raise your bandwidth costs 600% because of all the bloated workarounds we'll have to include. On the other hand, I could design a page that's light, fast, and degrades gracefully for the small number of your users who are using non-compliant browsers. Which would you prefer?
No, you misunderstood my question. Different browsers do things differently, but that in itself does not necessitate different versions of each page. What I asked you to do was list for me specific problems you've found which cannot be solved by any other method. Got any?
Bah. I have no monitor, only a light that flashes on (one) and off (zero), and I mentally decode ASCII characters from watching it blink. Why would I want to muddy up my browsing experience with all this flashy, new-fangled text? Maybe soon I'll move up to reading Unicode from my little light (XML is taking off, after all), but if it requires me to view text it's relaly just not worth my time.
One would also expect a company that's made as much money as Microsoft to have some business sense, but they don't. One would think that when a company has multiple separate divisions doing different things, it would be a bad idea to make any one of them utterly dependent on another; that way if any one division goes down, the others stay in business without much of a hit.
But then we're dealing with a company that's had a monopoly for so long they've managed to forget how real businesses work . . .
Then you're working with the wrong language. Try PDF or a print-layout language where you can specify everything down to the size of the paper; what you want will never be and should never be possible in HTML.
What are you having trouble with? It's ludicrously easy to get usability in all browsers if you code to accepted standards for HTML, CSS, and accessibility. List some specific things you want to do that you absolutely must serve different versions of a page for.
As opposed to something sensible like having "Microsoft" or "MSN" or both appear in the name of every application?
Not sure that's justified; Drew McLellan came up with it, after all. In general, though, ALA is a great site for Web design info; they dont' update as often as they used to, but the articles are always worth reading.
Yup. Even in XHTML. Check out this article on A List Apart for a useful method.
Below is a contract which I offer to you, in .00000000001pt font:
Please follow the instructions as printed above to accept or decline. Thank you for your time.
20, being the number involved in the SBCTEA, was the first such number which occurred to me.
No. In 20 years the "balancing arguments" wont' be any more persuasive, because coopyright holders will have an additional 20 years worth of profits with which to grease the wheels of politics and justice.
What is needed is a different argument; for example, many content producers argue that without a ludicrously long term of copyright, they can't properly reap the benefits of creation or recoup their costs. Suggest to a true "small-government" legislator or two (or ten, and keep in mind that they don't get the kind of Hollywood funding other COngressmen do) that maybe a busines plan which requires a 95-year government-mandated monopoly to turn a profit isn't something federal law needs to be subsidizing; "the market" should be allowed ot weed out bad ideas like that one.
In other words, the Court basically just said "Hey, you're free to grant eternal copyright as long as you do it 20 years at a time." This has been their position in the past, but they reiterated it here. And as long as copyrights generate money, the people receiving that money will lobby for and receive extensions. Hence, these works will never enter the public domain.
Actually, I'm surprised we haven't heard from the KDE team; after all, Apple is distributing a desktop which doesn't have Konq, KMail, and KOffice as the default applications, and probably even removed the "About KDE" box -- those were mortal sins last time I checked, and I fully expect Mosfet and others to publish ringing denunciations of how Apple has broken KDE.
Actually, I have. It'd be a nice tool if I were in charge of a large network and had to update a bunch of machines. As it is, I'm responsible for two Linux boxes that I own and administer myself. Manual updating isn't that much of a pain; installing Debian is.
Of course, I like manually installing RPMs; it's really not that much of a hassle for me, and it means I always know exactly what's being installed and why. If there were an automated system, it'd probably just display a progress bar saying "Satisfying Dependencies" and not tell me anything useful, which would be annoying.
Those damned hippie leeches. I put a 600-foot-tall statue of Keynes in the middle of a public square, intending to charge $100 a head to view it. But those friggin' hippies went and told people where it was! My whole business plan was based on nobody finding that out! Now how am I supposed to recoup the cost of building that statue?
Selling access to it would be bad business...at first. The proper way, if you're going to do that, is to keep the patent or copyright, but allow rampant infringement and piracy. Only when everyone is dependent on you and your technology and you have a de facto monopoly do you start enforcing terms. Of course, that's supposed to be illegal with patents under the doctrine of laches, but with other forms of IP such as copyright it's perfectly OK. Heck, Microsoft did it...
Sound fair? It's how intellectual "property", if it really were property, would have to work. Good thing it's not. The idea of intellectual "property" just doesn't jive, for a variety of reasons:
- The "creation" involved is not creation ex nihilo; all authors and composers draw on previous work for inspiration and source material. Granting an exclusive property right to the last one to contribute to what is essentially historically a group effort is akin to only giving the beer to the last guy who helped lift; it makes the system morally unjust.
- If copyright were a property right it would be unable to expire; as you pointed out, owning something now means you'll own it 96 years from now. Yet this would cause copyright to quickly be in violation of many property-rights theories. For example, John Locke says that an appropriation of property to oneself is just if and only if one leaves "enough and as good for others". But if copyright is a property right and thus perpetual, we would very quickly run out of things left for others; as previously mentioned, "creation" of property in this sense involves drawing upon the work of others, and to do so would be illegal. There might be the occasional truly new idea, but copyright would fast reach a point where we were not leaving "enough and as good".
- The notion of copyright as property grants an exclusive property right in something which is non-exclusive. In the case of physical property, the right makes sense because physical items can generally only be possessed by one person at a time and the stability of society demands that some form of ownership be instituted in order to prevent constant strife over such possession; this principle is the basis of several major theories of property (e.g., Thomas Hobbes' and David Hume's). However, with something which can be possessed non-exclusively, applying such a rule makes little sense; if all can enjoy and benefit from possession of a thing simltaneously with no strife and no harm, would it not be an evil to deny such enjoyment and possession?
And that's just the tip of the iceberg; I've been researching the philosophy of copyright for a damned long time and while there are certainly some fuzzy areas, I can sy with absolute certainty that copyright cannot be "property" in the sense in which you have used the term.Internet standards published by the W3C are meant for everybody in the world to adhere to and use; that's the point of having Internet standards. Now, what good are those standards if some people can't adhere to them because the standard requires the use of royalty-encumbered patented concepts? If you want everybody in the world to adopt your idea as a standard, you have to give them access to it...
The Opera 7 betas have wonderful CSS support. That means IE, Moz, and Opera will all be relatively compatible - enough so that you can probably make the move to proper layout with CSS (heck, you could probably do it now; most of the bugs I know of in IE have to do with weird float behavior that doesn't happen too often). And if you really have encyclopedic knowledge of every single CSS 2 selector and property and use all of them in a single page (the only reason which would support the "doesn't support full spec" copout), then I applaud your gall and lament that you have no life.
How about the search engine gripe? I'm sorry, but until a search engine can accept "that place that the nice youg man down at the store was talking about yesterday", then it's going to be useless to the elderly. Perhaps some flexibility in forgiving spelling mistakes is desired (a la Google), but lack of it should not be considered a mistake.
The font-size gripe. Jakob, I know you're a klutz when it comes to Web design, and that you know jack about it, but please don't try to pass off your ignorance on others. Internet Explorer doesn't let you resize text set in pixels. Every other browser with a text resize function does. Thus, this is a problem with INTERNET EXPLORER, not with setting font-size in pixels, don't you think? Why not use some of the clout of Jakob Nielsen, world-famous usability guru, to get on Microsoft's ass about that and make them fix it?
"Blocks of Text" - Hmm. You see, Jakob, some people use their websites as places to showcase their writing. I know you have a hard time grasping this concept, but some of us are here for the fun of it. That means that sometimes you'll come across a page that's intended to be read, rather than skimmed over for a quick summary of the important points. My $0.02: if you've graduated high school and can't handle a long paragraph now and then, it's YOUR problem.
Long URLs - Well, if it weren't for the fact that virtually all "long" URLs are also URLs that no user on earth is ever going to need to manually type, I'd agree with this. But when I want to post a comment here on /., for example, I don't clear the address bar and type "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48804&cid=0&p id=0&startat=&threshold=2&mode=thread&commentsort= 0&op=Reply. Instead, I hit the "Reply" button (or link, as the case may be). Most "long" URLs are the result of variables being passed to scripts via GET, which means they were produced by a form. If you know anyone who'd rather try to manually fill form variables into the URL than just filling the form itself, let me know and I'll beat some sense into them.
Now I'm going to go do something silly to regain my sense of childlike innocence at the world. When I come back, Nielsen better be gone.
That's a heck of a hosting plan ya got there...I had to refuse four cookies just to look at some pictures...
Compare KDE/Qt apps to their GTK/toolkit neutral competitors and often there's no competition: Mozilla is a better browser than Konqueror (I've often wondered why the Konq team is still reinventing the wheel; GNOME noticed there was a beautiful, easily-embedded rendering engine available and we got Galeon. Konq could embed Gecko and advance by huge leaps and bounds). Evolution is a better PIM/e-mail program than anything in KDE. OpenOffice beats KOffice on so many levels it's not even funny (how about "actually works with MS file formats" for starters?). There may be some flashy, shiny, GUI IDEs available, but that doesn't make good apps by itself.
Sure, KDE is pretty. Sure, Qt is nice to work with. Sure, the development tools are great. But the KDE team isn't accomplishing anything with them. That's why big companies that use *nix desktops go with GNOME. That's why Red Hat set Mozilla, Evolution, and OpenOffice as defaults in Psyche. And that's what KDE's developers need to realize and deal with if they want to compete seriously for desktop market share in the future.