This is obviously a flame, and I know I'm going to lose what meager karma points I have with this, but I'm going to say it anyways.
You all know very well that there are reasons why you have to put up with this.
All of these are technologies that you can turn off in your web browser, whatever the web browser may be.
C'mon, even if you don't want to turn on Javascript, you can even *shock horror* get a different browser that doesn't implement this stuff, or wasn't considered when they did the popunders! Gosh darn!
Frankly, as far as I'm concerened all of your having to put up with these ad issues is a direct result of your choices.
I do have sympathy for those who don't know better. My grandmother doesn't even know what Javascript is; I can't talk to her about deactivating things like that. And because of those people I still don't think all that highly of companies that pull this crap.
But, geez, people, we're all geeks here. You ought to know better. Right? Shouldn't you try dropping your bloat^H^H^H^H^Hmodern browser setup for once instead of bitching all the time and whining about how "this bothers me oh so much" and so on?
(to moderators: My apologies. It's just that in one particular circle on IRC I'm the local Web Expert and I get a *ton* of back-of-hand-nailed-to-forehead whining about this stuff, and so I'm kind of a loose cannon on the subject.:) )
Reccomending *WinCE*? Have you ever even used a WinCE device? They're horrific. It's a remarkably poor attempt to shoehorn the Win32 API into a different form factor. And considering that said API was designed for desktop personal computers and NOT PDAs, even your original complaint isn't addressed by WinCE.
I very seriously doubt that Linux-based PDAs will do much better. The only things I see going for them are the geek populatity factor ("Dude! It runs Linux!" "DUDE!") and the free software base. Because of those too advantages, I could see these things managing to survive due to folks creating some Real killer software for the thing so that it could accomidate the user base that uses PalmOS devices for the applications but would love it to have as much hack value as their workstation.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for any PDA company, but I'm a long time PalmOS fan. Now if only they'd GPL their OS... *hope*:) )
Bah, the Great Library sucked. Get Michelangelo's Chapel and Women's Sufferage (girl power! Yippie.:) ), switch to Democracy, put some cities on Capitalization and buy the world.:)
(Hey, it's what we do here in.us and it seems to be working...:) )
Remember all those PHBs who keep zipping and rezipping and rezipping their files?
Get a Win32 GUI on this thing and toss that to them... I'm sure they'll love it. Compresses their files just as much as they want, and with only ONE step! >:D
*Exactly* the same, that might be legally twitchy, since they could concievably have copyright on that specific ISO. (IANAL). But putting the GPLed code up on your server? Certainly.
HOWEVER, this is the tricky part. You now have to pay for the bandwidth that would be taken up when hundreds of thousands of people start downloading off of your alternative site as opposed to the official LibraNet site.
For that reason, I think Libranet's charging this makes perfectly good sense. They may not make much money off of this venture, but it's a remarkably clued-in one IMHO.
I'm sorry, this pisses me off every time I see it.
CSS is NOT an "extension". The "font" element is an extension. CSS is a planned STANDARD from the Consortium, finalized in 1996. "font" was acknowledged in HTML 3.2 to keep the W3C from being judged irrelevant. (Don't believe that? Then explain how it is that the W3C stopped producing standards and started doing "Reccomendations" before the release of 3.2?)
If you'd bothered to check facts you would have seen that CSS is Not something that should hurt content. In fact, CSS was specifically designed to preserve the availablity of content, by removing the "font" element (which caused various problems with accessibility and internationalization) and seperating How A Page Looks from How A Page Is Structured. This is a Good Thing. This is how HTML is supposed to work - it's a Markup and a Structure language, not a presentation language. CSS's design was such that a browser could see Content and ignore Presentation if it so chose, while those browsers that wanted Presentation could easily take the rules in the CSS stylesheet and use them, and everyone's happy.
There is ONE, repeat, ONE, only ONE, and in case that didn't get through ONLY ONE reason why CSS hasn't blown the "font" element and all the "body" element's added attributes (color, bgcolor, link, and the like) to the bit bucket where they belong, and that is Netscape 4.x. By effectively just lazily reusing the code for "font" and the "body" attributes (don't tell me it's not true, the evidence is very clear; just see how inheritance of stylesheet properties work on NS4) and then tossing all responsibility to the Mozilla project which has taken near to two and a half years to fix things, Netscape has effectively trashed close to any hope of CSS acceptance. In doing this, Netscape has taken the principal advantage of using CSS - the wider acceptability and compatibility - and trashed it to hell in favor of their own invented elements that turn HTML into a disgusting mess.
I will be so happy when people finally get a clue about this...
disclaimer: I am NOT a Microsoft supporter. IE has made several mistakes too. When browsing I typically use Opera, and I plan on using Mozilla once it's in beta phase. But those pale in comparision to how seriously Netscape 4.x has destroyed this chance at fixing things.
Nah, there'll be three distributions. Debian, the commercial one, and Slackware.:)
(Even tho I'm a Debian supporter myself, my older sister (a sysadmin), her fiancee' (a well-informed Windows user) and my younger older sister (an electrical engineer who doesn't really know software at all) all run or are working on running Slack, so...:) )
PocketC, the C 'compiler' for PalmOS, is missing a few functions (or so I'm told) so it's really more Yet Another C Dialect. (But then again, I'm not a C guru...). There's two or three Java VMs out there for the Palm, all very large (70+ kb), one or two apps for each, and all of them are incompatible with one another, so Java isn't all that popular. I don't know about the Basic apps tho...
Oh, and a small quibble - Palmgear does not have much in the way of Free Software per se. Plenty of freeware and shareware, but those aren't the same thing. Free Software in the Palm world is Extremely limited at the moment - one has to realize that people tend to associate any announcement of any app as a final release in the Palm world, so if you announce an app under development and post your work in progress (as is common in free software), you quickly become infamous as being dangerous whether or not you gave a disclaimer or not. (zdoc immediately springs to mind)
Personally, if and/or when I get rid of my Visor (for the uninformed: PalmOS) for any given "something else", it had better be able to keep up with the thing's battery life, on mundane (read: AA, AAA) batteries. If there's one thing that I can't keep up with, it's remembering to drop the damn PDA in a cradle for it to recharge; I keep it in my purse so I won't forget it.
Windows CE/Windows Powered/Pocket PC/etc. is therefore out of the question, as are most Linux-based PDA setups...
What I'd love to see someday would be what folks could do with the Hurd in this area. I wonder if Mach can handle a PDA-type system...
Question: Did you actually run the pages in DreamWeaver through a HTML validator? W3C (it's World Wide Web Consortium. The 3 comes before the C. Which by the way really does wonders for your rant:) ) helpfully provides one at http://validator.w3.org.
Observation: Pixel-perfect rendering is impossible. If that is your object, get out of web design now. Really. I mean it. Now and forever, or at least until you get the clue that with the high amount of diversity in web browsers, individual computers, hardware types, individual parts themselves, and however people have configured their browsers, there is ZERO, repeat, ZERO chance of everyone experiencing the same thing, and attempting to force otherwise is a dangerous and destructive mistake.
There are file and data formats for "pixel-perfect" (or as close as is possible on a computer) representations. HTML is NOT one of them, no matter what you may have heard before.
(Sorry for the counterrant, btw. The nice telco wannabe I once interned for knew me to be a webgeek and I got very frustrated after repeated calls on how X rendering of the company logo wasn't "the exact same color" and asking me to help "fix" this, so I've become an old and bitter bitch before the age of 21.)
(1) Standards compliance is for weenies. I don't give a shit about standards compliance as long as my browser works with the sites I visit. Standards compliance issues seem largely an excuse for the anti-Microsoft camp to bitch about IE when they've run out of meaningful reasons. In the words of a local talk radio program, "A non factor."
Yes, sorry, we forgot that the blind, the disabled, the folks who don't use Windows or MacOS, the PDA users needing a quick bit of info on the road and basically anyone who has a dislike of the Microsoft Internet Explorer product for one reason or another doesn't deserve the Web.
Yes, some people use Standards Compliance as a generic This Is A Problem cry. But that doesn't make it a nonissue.
In the past, I had to keep up on patching default Mandrake Linux 7.0 installs just to make sure that I didn't get owned by a wu-ftpd site-exec kiddie.
Yes, but that's Mandrake. There's several other distributions that are Much more security-concious (I think the current canonical example is Debian, but don't take me seriously on that as that could start a flame war:) )
Mandrake's primary intended audience is those who don't want to bother poking around with their computers - which, while valid, often means that the details get missed.
(Disclaimer: IANAS (for S == Sysadmin) but I pretend to know what it's like to be one on/.)
Well, you have to understand - most of their techsupport calls are going to be made by Total Newbies, so they can prob'ly get away with it.
I can just see it now...
U: Your program crashed.
TS: What application would that be, sir?
U: Chillisoft.
TS: No, I need to know the application name, sir.
U: Chillisoft [something or rather]
TS: Okay, what distribution of Linux are you using?
U: KDE.
TS: Sir, I need to know your Linux distribution.
U: [exasperated] KDE!
TS: [supressing moans of pain] Sir, what version of Linux are you using?
U: Red Hat.
TS: What version of Red Hat?
U: KDE.
TS: [developing nervous twitch] What is the version number of Red Hat that you have?
U: 2001.
TS:...Sir, Red Hat does not have a version 2001.
U: [getting irate] DON'T YOU #$#! TELL ME WHAT I AM AND WHAT I'VE GOT! It's Red Hat 2000 KDE.
TS: [slight moan of pain audible] Okay, what error message did you get?
U: Don't you give me that technical jargon crap.
TS: [scream of horror, drops phone]
U: Why the #$#@! haven't you fixed it yet? Tell me your name! And I want to speak to your supervisor!
Stupidity can occur in both directions, you know.:)
He's referring to popularity and customer familiarity, not braindamage. At least, that's what I hope he means:)
If he does end up foisting a braindamaged distro, well, then, we can Just Say No(tm). I mean, this is the realm of Free Software; it's our perogative to choose, ja/nein?
The standards matter and the principles of good English matter because without a set standard for this sort of thing, communication breaks down rather hopelessly.
Considering, tho, that "email" seems to be the accepted usage (someone above commented that it was what was used by those who thought it a proper word already) I think by trying to foist the hyphen into their writings that Wired is doing more to harm their supposed cause rather than help it.
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You all know very well that there are reasons why you have to put up with this.
All of these are technologies that you can turn off in your web browser, whatever the web browser may be.
C'mon, even if you don't want to turn on Javascript, you can even *shock horror* get a different browser that doesn't implement this stuff, or wasn't considered when they did the popunders! Gosh darn!
Frankly, as far as I'm concerened all of your having to put up with these ad issues is a direct result of your choices.
I do have sympathy for those who don't know better. My grandmother doesn't even know what Javascript is; I can't talk to her about deactivating things like that. And because of those people I still don't think all that highly of companies that pull this crap.
But, geez, people, we're all geeks here. You ought to know better. Right? Shouldn't you try dropping your bloat^H^H^H^H^Hmodern browser setup for once instead of bitching all the time and whining about how "this bothers me oh so much" and so on?
(to moderators: My apologies. It's just that in one particular circle on IRC I'm the local Web Expert and I get a *ton* of back-of-hand-nailed-to-forehead whining about this stuff, and so I'm kind of a loose cannon on the subject. :) )
I don't want to but my job requirements and MS give me no choice!
Poor attempt at a troll, hon.
--Jo Hunter
Oh well. I guess they'd rather be pigs or fishes or something.
--Jo Hunter
Build a better search engine and the world will beat a path to your website?'
--Jo Hunter
I doubt he could have predicted those at all - especially the transistor; that one was so impressive it got the inventors a Nobel Prize.
--Jo Hunter
I very seriously doubt that Linux-based PDAs will do much better. The only things I see going for them are the geek populatity factor ("Dude! It runs Linux!" "DUDE!") and the free software base. Because of those too advantages, I could see these things managing to survive due to folks creating some Real killer software for the thing so that it could accomidate the user base that uses PalmOS devices for the applications but would love it to have as much hack value as their workstation.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for any PDA company, but I'm a long time PalmOS fan. Now if only they'd GPL their OS... *hope* :) )
--Jo Hunter
The specs say that there's seven pushbuttons, but looking at the pictures I can't see them.
(I ask because I like to read on my Visor and I don't want to have to do this with a stylus...)
--Jo Hunter
(Hey, it's what we do here in .us and it seems to be working... :) )
--Jo Hunter
Get a Win32 GUI on this thing and toss that to them... I'm sure they'll love it. Compresses their files just as much as they want, and with only ONE step! >:D
--Jo Hunter
I would certainly try, if the means were available and I had the money available.
Donations to Debian, the ACLU, the EFF, etc. are all on my purchase list as soon as I get enough disposable income.
--Jo Hunter
HOWEVER, this is the tricky part. You now have to pay for the bandwidth that would be taken up when hundreds of thousands of people start downloading off of your alternative site as opposed to the official LibraNet site.
For that reason, I think Libranet's charging this makes perfectly good sense. They may not make much money off of this venture, but it's a remarkably clued-in one IMHO.
--Jo Hunter
CSS is NOT an "extension". The "font" element is an extension. CSS is a planned STANDARD from the Consortium, finalized in 1996. "font" was acknowledged in HTML 3.2 to keep the W3C from being judged irrelevant. (Don't believe that? Then explain how it is that the W3C stopped producing standards and started doing "Reccomendations" before the release of 3.2?)
If you'd bothered to check facts you would have seen that CSS is Not something that should hurt content. In fact, CSS was specifically designed to preserve the availablity of content, by removing the "font" element (which caused various problems with accessibility and internationalization) and seperating How A Page Looks from How A Page Is Structured. This is a Good Thing. This is how HTML is supposed to work - it's a Markup and a Structure language, not a presentation language. CSS's design was such that a browser could see Content and ignore Presentation if it so chose, while those browsers that wanted Presentation could easily take the rules in the CSS stylesheet and use them, and everyone's happy.
There is ONE, repeat, ONE, only ONE, and in case that didn't get through ONLY ONE reason why CSS hasn't blown the "font" element and all the "body" element's added attributes (color, bgcolor, link, and the like) to the bit bucket where they belong, and that is Netscape 4.x. By effectively just lazily reusing the code for "font" and the "body" attributes (don't tell me it's not true, the evidence is very clear; just see how inheritance of stylesheet properties work on NS4) and then tossing all responsibility to the Mozilla project which has taken near to two and a half years to fix things, Netscape has effectively trashed close to any hope of CSS acceptance. In doing this, Netscape has taken the principal advantage of using CSS - the wider acceptability and compatibility - and trashed it to hell in favor of their own invented elements that turn HTML into a disgusting mess.
I will be so happy when people finally get a clue about this...
disclaimer: I am NOT a Microsoft supporter. IE has made several mistakes too. When browsing I typically use Opera, and I plan on using Mozilla once it's in beta phase. But those pale in comparision to how seriously Netscape 4.x has destroyed this chance at fixing things.
--Jo Hunter
(Even tho I'm a Debian supporter myself, my older sister (a sysadmin), her fiancee' (a well-informed Windows user) and my younger older sister (an electrical engineer who doesn't really know software at all) all run or are working on running Slack, so... :) )
--Jo Hunter
Oh, and a small quibble - Palmgear does not have much in the way of Free Software per se. Plenty of freeware and shareware, but those aren't the same thing. Free Software in the Palm world is Extremely limited at the moment - one has to realize that people tend to associate any announcement of any app as a final release in the Palm world, so if you announce an app under development and post your work in progress (as is common in free software), you quickly become infamous as being dangerous whether or not you gave a disclaimer or not. (zdoc immediately springs to mind)
--Jo Hunter
Windows CE/Windows Powered/Pocket PC/etc. is therefore out of the question, as are most Linux-based PDA setups...
What I'd love to see someday would be what folks could do with the Hurd in this area. I wonder if Mach can handle a PDA-type system...
--Jo Hunter
Did you actually run the pages in DreamWeaver through a HTML validator? W3C (it's World Wide Web Consortium. The 3 comes before the C. Which by the way really does wonders for your rant
Observation:
Pixel-perfect rendering is impossible. If that is your object, get out of web design now. Really. I mean it. Now and forever, or at least until you get the clue that with the high amount of diversity in web browsers, individual computers, hardware types, individual parts themselves, and however people have configured their browsers, there is ZERO, repeat, ZERO chance of everyone experiencing the same thing, and attempting to force otherwise is a dangerous and destructive mistake.
There are file and data formats for "pixel-perfect" (or as close as is possible on a computer) representations. HTML is NOT one of them, no matter what you may have heard before.
(Sorry for the counterrant, btw. The nice telco wannabe I once interned for knew me to be a webgeek and I got very frustrated after repeated calls on how X rendering of the company logo wasn't "the exact same color" and asking me to help "fix" this, so I've become an old and bitter bitch before the age of 21.)
--Jo Hunter
Yes, sorry, we forgot that the blind, the disabled, the folks who don't use Windows or MacOS, the PDA users needing a quick bit of info on the road and basically anyone who has a dislike of the Microsoft Internet Explorer product for one reason or another doesn't deserve the Web.
Yes, some people use Standards Compliance as a generic This Is A Problem cry. But that doesn't make it a nonissue.
--Jo Hunter
Yes, but that's Mandrake. There's several other distributions that are Much more security-concious (I think the current canonical example is Debian, but don't take me seriously on that as that could start a flame war :) )
Mandrake's primary intended audience is those who don't want to bother poking around with their computers - which, while valid, often means that the details get missed.
(Disclaimer: IANAS (for S == Sysadmin) but I pretend to know what it's like to be one on /.)
--Jo Hunter
(Please note that we are not talking reality here, we're talking legality. Subtle yet important difference :) )
--Jo Hunter
I can just see it now...
U: Your program crashed. ...Sir, Red Hat does not have a version 2001.
TS: What application would that be, sir?
U: Chillisoft.
TS: No, I need to know the application name, sir.
U: Chillisoft [something or rather]
TS: Okay, what distribution of Linux are you using?
U: KDE.
TS: Sir, I need to know your Linux distribution.
U: [exasperated] KDE!
TS: [supressing moans of pain] Sir, what version of Linux are you using?
U: Red Hat.
TS: What version of Red Hat?
U: KDE.
TS: [developing nervous twitch] What is the version number of Red Hat that you have?
U: 2001.
TS:
U: [getting irate] DON'T YOU #$#! TELL ME WHAT I AM AND WHAT I'VE GOT! It's Red Hat 2000 KDE.
TS: [slight moan of pain audible] Okay, what error message did you get?
U: Don't you give me that technical jargon crap.
TS: [scream of horror, drops phone]
U: Why the #$#@! haven't you fixed it yet? Tell me your name! And I want to speak to your supervisor!
Stupidity can occur in both directions, you know. :)
--Jo Hunter
If he does end up foisting a braindamaged distro, well, then, we can Just Say No(tm). I mean, this is the realm of Free Software; it's our perogative to choose, ja/nein?
--Jo Hunter
Considering, tho, that "email" seems to be the accepted usage (someone above commented that it was what was used by those who thought it a proper word already) I think by trying to foist the hyphen into their writings that Wired is doing more to harm their supposed cause rather than help it.
--Jo Hunter