Of course they have narrow interests. They're businessmen.
And PDF is a standard, but it's not pretty or fast loading a PDF into a browser. It's hardly a great solution.
Anyway, the people using HTML for "layout" work aren't extending the language themselves, are they? They're using the tools they already have - which Netscape gave them.
As for arguing selfishness away - we do live in a capitalist world, you know. I'm not arguing it away (well, I don't really know what that phrase means) I'm just pointing out that it exists. You seem to want to subjugate it, universally, for all business users. The reason I called you naive is because it ain't gonna happen.
You can't just shut your eyes and pretend the business world isn't selfish. It is, and like it or not, this simple fact is shaping the future of HTML far more than a bunch of ivory-tower engineers at the W3C ever could. That's my only point. It's you who seem to be interpreting this as an attempt to justify their behavior. When you're simply observing the world, justifications are meaningless. You don't call a tiger "evil" for eating a man. That's what tigers do.
Knowing games programmers as I do, Abrash probably quit NLP because he couldn't hack it. I mean, there's plenty of optimization Gods out there, but only one Noam Chomsky.
PS2 and Dreamcast developers don't use much Middleware, actually. There's a lot available, but it's selling poorly. And it performs badly compared to a custom solution (well, what did you expect?) A 700MHz X-Box might be able to take the straing of running Direct3D but a sub-300MHz console certainly can't. Wasted cycles are a luxury only PC & X-Box developers have.
Abrash's experiences in the PC games industry are not typical. The PC games industry at large generally doesn't bother to optimize code. That's why you're still getting 5,000 polygon scenes on machines which can theoretically push 50,000 polygons per frame. Direct3D doesn't help.
If you like code structure, and if you think design is important, don't go into the games industry. 99% of programmers in this industry are unreconstructed C hackers who avoid using "switch" if a bunch of "if" statements will do.
What he fails to remember is that most games don't need a 700 MHz processor at all. Modern PC games companies are the worst at optimizing. You couldn't make a PS2 game without spending some months optimizing code, but most PC games are just spaghetti C with a few C++ classes thrown in and no fast algorithms in sight.
That's why they need 700 MHz processors. If the games programmers did their jobs properly users would be fine with a 200 MHz chip.
I also think that it's pretty easy to work at Microsoft, then Id, then Microsoft again - always on ultracool projects, always optimizing assembly code - and think the games industry is wonderful.
If he worked at any other games houses he wouldn't last five minutes with that "I'm so happy happy happy" attitude. I'm talking about the kind of place where they restructure your code (badly) without telling you, write everything in spaghetti and expect you to interface to it, and where they use raw-pipelined RISC processors instead of the programmer's dream that is the superscalar x86.
The games industry sucks. That's my outlook, from my position deep within it. I'm getting out ASAP. But... if I had Abrash's cushy jobs, I think I'd be pretty happy too.
It's like Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat Cake".
Sending the envelopes back empty is for wusses. You should take everything they sent you (which generally weighs more than the prepaid envelope allows), stuff it all in, add a couple of sheets of neutron-star material, and post *that* back. The excess postage for prepaid envelopes is monstrous.
Let's focus on this "who has time to wait" issue. These people working on internet time don't expect the rest of the world to cater to their demands. If the rest of the world did cater to their demands then HTML would be left alone as an interesting legacy format for documents, and there would be a format which expressed layout properly. But since the rest of the world doesn't, they use the tools they have available - namely, HTML and Dreamweaver.
It seems to me that this attitude of "why should we cater to these people" is what's causing the problem. That, plus the fact Netscape said "hell, we'll cater for these people by extending HTML ourselves. Badly".
But really, it sounds like you're saying that the world should slow down to let technology (and the W3C) catch up to them. It's as if you raise technology to the highest level, above the people who want to use it.
HTML is a tool. Tools work for people - not the other way around.
You're confusing theory with reality. That's why I alledge naivety. Telling me what HTML stands for reinforces my position, it doesn't weaken it. Read my post again and try to discern the point I'm making.
I would agree that a document format which was designed for the task would be better, but who has time to wait for a suitable standard and suitable browser implementations? No-one. That's why HTML is evolving into a WYSIWYH format. If it wasn't, why would it have e.g. pixel positioning for everything? Think about it.
Your argument about hammers and screwdrivers is fine, but if the screwdriver didn't exist you wouldn't laugh so hard at someone using a different tool to do the job. Or, maybe you would - you'd say "no, you can't use screws until someone invents a screwdriver". And the rest of the world would be laughing at you.
History is full of people finding new uses for existing tools. Indeed, the screwdriver was invented for removing nails - the screw came later. But history clearly isn't your strong point, unless we're talking about the history of how HTML got invented - which is long past.
You're probably right, but the problem is that IE has conflicting motives in this respect.
On the one hand, it wants to be robust. It wants to render any site, no matter how bad the HTML. It needs to forgive little errors. If a browser says "cannot render site" the user will blame the browser, and not the site. This is the root cause, no doubt, of many perceived Netscape problems ("but it works in IE!!!")
On the other hand, it wants to discourage bad HTML because if it doesn't it'll have to deal with the problem into indefinite versions.
I agree with you, but I've written HTML parsers myself and there's enough lousy HTML out there that you have to deal with it somehow.
Yeah, but the rules of English typesetting have evolved over centuries to make the easiest-to-read (least ambiguous) and most aesthetically-pleasing form of communication possible.
I'm not saying this won't evolve further, but you can't just throw those rules away because you find them difficult to comprehend with logic. Many of then have nothing to do with logic anyway.
Donald Knuth understands this better than most.
Anyway, thanks to the world's penchant for broadening the definition of words which already have a perfectly good, specific meaning, it's getting harder and harder to communicate unambigously. I blame the idiot sound-bite peddlars who want to use shocking words, and in the process dilute their meaning.
Your first sentence summarizes my position nicely. I don't need to know about UI design to say a UI feels horrid, just as I don't need to know about architecture to say a building is ugly. [I have *used* KDE and Gnome in the past, incidentally, I just don't use them daily.]
I wasn't entirely serious about picking up behavior from Slashdot;)
Neither you, nor the W3C, decides what HTML's "purpose" is. That's decided daily by everyone involved in editing actual real-world websites. And the purpose of HTML is, more and more, to do WYSIWYG publishing. Your ideals of what HTML is "supposed to be" do not match reality. Update your model. And get over it.
We're already well on the way towards this ideal. It's not that "the standards-compliant Web will die". It's that Microsoft are setting the standards. The Web no longer runs on published open standards, and it hasn't for a long time. Internet time moves too fast for a body like W3C to control web technology. It was fine in 1992 when hardly anyone was using the internet for commerce, but now we're seeing an explosion of potential applications and the world isn't going to sit around while W3C debates the protocols they will use.
I consider this a good thing. It's easy to reverse-engineer Microsoft's standards from their web browser, so they don't even need to publish them. IE is the dominant browser - like it or not. And anyone who's ever edited a website knows what a purple bitch it is making a site look good on both Netscape and Microsoft. Soon, no-one will bother, and Netscape will be playing catch-up with Microsoft.
A W3C-standards-compliant browser is just an engineer's wet dream - it doesn't mean anything in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Which version?
You have neighbors don't you? ;) A feigned heart-attack can work wonders in such a situation ;)
And PDF is a standard, but it's not pretty or fast loading a PDF into a browser. It's hardly a great solution.
Anyway, the people using HTML for "layout" work aren't extending the language themselves, are they? They're using the tools they already have - which Netscape gave them.
As for arguing selfishness away - we do live in a capitalist world, you know. I'm not arguing it away (well, I don't really know what that phrase means) I'm just pointing out that it exists. You seem to want to subjugate it, universally, for all business users. The reason I called you naive is because it ain't gonna happen.
You can't just shut your eyes and pretend the business world isn't selfish. It is, and like it or not, this simple fact is shaping the future of HTML far more than a bunch of ivory-tower engineers at the W3C ever could. That's my only point. It's you who seem to be interpreting this as an attempt to justify their behavior. When you're simply observing the world, justifications are meaningless. You don't call a tiger "evil" for eating a man. That's what tigers do.
I said "ressurect" a 30-year old OS. And it was 1989.
Didn't the ad say you could look at *any* website? That's false advertising.
Knowing games programmers as I do, Abrash probably quit NLP because he couldn't hack it. I mean, there's plenty of optimization Gods out there, but only one Noam Chomsky.
PS2 and Dreamcast developers don't use much Middleware, actually. There's a lot available, but it's selling poorly. And it performs badly compared to a custom solution (well, what did you expect?) A 700MHz X-Box might be able to take the straing of running Direct3D but a sub-300MHz console certainly can't. Wasted cycles are a luxury only PC & X-Box developers have.
Abrash's experiences in the PC games industry are not typical. The PC games industry at large generally doesn't bother to optimize code. That's why you're still getting 5,000 polygon scenes on machines which can theoretically push 50,000 polygons per frame. Direct3D doesn't help.
If you like code structure, and if you think design is important, don't go into the games industry. 99% of programmers in this industry are unreconstructed C hackers who avoid using "switch" if a bunch of "if" statements will do.
That's why they need 700 MHz processors. If the games programmers did their jobs properly users would be fine with a 200 MHz chip.
If you had Abrash's cushy little jobs you'd probabaly be as happy as he is.
Gloves? Tarps? The obvious solution was to get a WalMart employee to carry it to the car for you ;)
I also think that it's pretty easy to work at Microsoft, then Id, then Microsoft again - always on ultracool projects, always optimizing assembly code - and think the games industry is wonderful.
If he worked at any other games houses he wouldn't last five minutes with that "I'm so happy happy happy" attitude. I'm talking about the kind of place where they restructure your code (badly) without telling you, write everything in spaghetti and expect you to interface to it, and where they use raw-pipelined RISC processors instead of the programmer's dream that is the superscalar x86.
The games industry sucks. That's my outlook, from my position deep within it. I'm getting out ASAP. But ... if I had Abrash's cushy jobs, I think I'd be pretty happy too.
It's like Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat Cake".
History lesson: Abrash did not work on DOOM.
Sending the envelopes back empty is for wusses. You should take everything they sent you (which generally weighs more than the prepaid envelope allows), stuff it all in, add a couple of sheets of neutron-star material, and post *that* back. The excess postage for prepaid envelopes is monstrous.
And do you mean "voluntarily" in the sense of "If you want to keep your job you have to 'volutarily' sign this piece of paper"? Yeah, right.
Oh, you're too kind ;)
Let's focus on this "who has time to wait" issue. These people working on internet time don't expect the rest of the world to cater to their demands. If the rest of the world did cater to their demands then HTML would be left alone as an interesting legacy format for documents, and there would be a format which expressed layout properly. But since the rest of the world doesn't, they use the tools they have available - namely, HTML and Dreamweaver.
It seems to me that this attitude of "why should we cater to these people" is what's causing the problem. That, plus the fact Netscape said "hell, we'll cater for these people by extending HTML ourselves. Badly".
But really, it sounds like you're saying that the world should slow down to let technology (and the W3C) catch up to them. It's as if you raise technology to the highest level, above the people who want to use it.
HTML is a tool. Tools work for people - not the other way around.
I would agree that a document format which was designed for the task would be better, but who has time to wait for a suitable standard and suitable browser implementations? No-one. That's why HTML is evolving into a WYSIWYH format. If it wasn't, why would it have e.g. pixel positioning for everything? Think about it.
Your argument about hammers and screwdrivers is fine, but if the screwdriver didn't exist you wouldn't laugh so hard at someone using a different tool to do the job. Or, maybe you would - you'd say "no, you can't use screws until someone invents a screwdriver". And the rest of the world would be laughing at you.
History is full of people finding new uses for existing tools. Indeed, the screwdriver was invented for removing nails - the screw came later. But history clearly isn't your strong point, unless we're talking about the history of how HTML got invented - which is long past.
Oh, and as for your last comment, fuck you too.
On the one hand, it wants to be robust. It wants to render any site, no matter how bad the HTML. It needs to forgive little errors. If a browser says "cannot render site" the user will blame the browser, and not the site. This is the root cause, no doubt, of many perceived Netscape problems ("but it works in IE!!!")
On the other hand, it wants to discourage bad HTML because if it doesn't it'll have to deal with the problem into indefinite versions.
I agree with you, but I've written HTML parsers myself and there's enough lousy HTML out there that you have to deal with it somehow.
It's almost a chicken-and-egg situation.
I'm not saying this won't evolve further, but you can't just throw those rules away because you find them difficult to comprehend with logic. Many of then have nothing to do with logic anyway.
Donald Knuth understands this better than most.
Anyway, thanks to the world's penchant for broadening the definition of words which already have a perfectly good, specific meaning, it's getting harder and harder to communicate unambigously. I blame the idiot sound-bite peddlars who want to use shocking words, and in the process dilute their meaning.
I wasn't entirely serious about picking up behavior from Slashdot ;)
Other than that, I found it difficult to understand what your comment actually meant.
Neither you, nor the W3C, decides what HTML's "purpose" is. That's decided daily by everyone involved in editing actual real-world websites. And the purpose of HTML is, more and more, to do WYSIWYG publishing. Your ideals of what HTML is "supposed to be" do not match reality. Update your model. And get over it.
I consider this a good thing. It's easy to reverse-engineer Microsoft's standards from their web browser, so they don't even need to publish them. IE is the dominant browser - like it or not. And anyone who's ever edited a website knows what a purple bitch it is making a site look good on both Netscape and Microsoft. Soon, no-one will bother, and Netscape will be playing catch-up with Microsoft.
A W3C-standards-compliant browser is just an engineer's wet dream - it doesn't mean anything in the real world.
Stem cells refers to any cell which produces dissimilar daughter cells. The human body is full of stem cells.