Jon Katz writes two articles on how eBay is pioneering the sale of virtual property, basing his work on some Merc Center piece.
If Jon knew anything about technology, he would have realized that meaningful virtual property has been bought and sold for years:
Internet domains
What's more virtual than a combination of letters and numbers like wallstreet.com or altavista.com, two simple records in a database that were sold for huge sums of money?
Katz seems to think that the purchase of Ultima characters is some kind of turning point, as if the world wasn't full of geeks who spend money on geekish pursuits. I look forward to his next piece on how the purchase of Star Wars Episode I toys illuminates the growth of personal spiritualism in America.
The real virtual property issues are in the namespace. I enjoyed Katz's efforts to give disenfranchised geeks a voice after Littleton, but these pieces on virtual property show why Katz is the last person in the world who should be commenting on technology.
The guy doesn't use it, doesn't understand it, and never will.
It requires not only the Fed sites to become "access-enabled" but allows anyone doing business with the government from the largest company in the US selling billions to them or the smallest company selling a $.02 pen to the government.
These companies are choosing to do business with the government. If they don't want to be subject to the government's standards for how they should create their Web sites, they can choose to find another client.
If a company benefits from selling to a client as big as Uncle Sam, it is not unreasonable for the client to make some demands of that company. Happens all the time in business-to-business transactions.
This kind of "pocketbook" government is a great tool. Any company that considers the regulations to be too restricting is free not to sell to Uncle Sam.
This idea is complete bs. It's just going to create added work for authors and violates freedom of the press. You have the right to publish whatever you want and the government shouldn't tell you what format you need to use.
This does not remove anyone's rights to create Web sites that Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are unable to use.
It only affects federal government sites and the sites of companies that want to do business with the federal government.
Anyone who wants to ignore the guidelines is free to not feed at the federal trough.
The issue isn't just about using an ALT tag with your images. The use of tables as a layout device, specific font faces, specific font sizes, and colors for links and text makes an HTML page much more difficult for a differently abled person to use.
The original version of HTML was much more usable by a visually impaired person than today's HTML as implemented by Netscape and Microsoft. The biggest problem is that the Web has become a much more visual medium, and the graphics designers cared a lot more about the look of a page than the geeks who launched HTML. Those high-energy physicists who were among the Web's first users were focused on the information that was presented, not how it looked.
Cascading Style Sheets are the way to rescue the Web for people who need different access to it. CSS separates the appearance of a site from the information offered by the site.
I'm glad the feds are doing this, because the browser companies and leading Web designers are paying almost no attention to accessibility issues.
Besides, accessible HTML is generally much better written and more standard HTML, too. All Web users could benefit from more of that.
The new version of FrontPage 2000 is actually pretty good at many aspects of HTML creation. It reads in existing sites without screwing up the formatting and creates more compliant HTML than past versions of the software. It also has an editor for dealing directly with the HTML.
One thing it still likes to do is drop in a lot of <-- Comment --> stuff that only is there to help FrontPage later when the page is edited again. If you use FrontPage themes, you can double or even triple the size of an HTML document because of these comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of individuals own domain names.
Jon Katz writes two articles on how eBay is pioneering the sale of virtual property, basing his work on some Merc Center piece.
If Jon knew anything about technology, he would have realized that meaningful virtual property has been bought and sold for years:
Internet domains
What's more virtual than a combination of letters and numbers like wallstreet.com or altavista.com, two simple records in a database that were sold for huge sums of money?
Katz seems to think that the purchase of Ultima characters is some kind of turning point, as if the world wasn't full of geeks who spend money on geekish pursuits. I look forward to his next piece on how the purchase of Star Wars Episode I toys illuminates the growth of personal spiritualism in America.
The real virtual property issues are in the namespace. I enjoyed Katz's efforts to give disenfranchised geeks a voice after Littleton, but these pieces on virtual property show why Katz is the last person in the world who should be commenting on technology.
The guy doesn't use it, doesn't understand it, and never will.
It requires not only the Fed sites to become "access-enabled" but allows anyone doing business with the government from the largest company in the US selling billions to them or the smallest company selling a $.02 pen to the government.
These companies are choosing to do business with the government. If they don't want to be subject to the government's standards for how they should create their Web sites, they can choose to find another client.
If a company benefits from selling to a client as big as Uncle Sam, it is not unreasonable for the client to make some demands of that company. Happens all the time in business-to-business transactions.
This kind of "pocketbook" government is a great tool. Any company that considers the regulations to be too restricting is free not to sell to Uncle Sam.
This idea is complete bs. It's just going to create added work for authors and violates freedom of the press. You have the right to publish whatever you want and the government shouldn't tell you what format you need to use.
This does not remove anyone's rights to create Web sites that Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are unable to use.
It only affects federal government sites and the sites of companies that want to do business with the federal government.
Anyone who wants to ignore the guidelines is free to not feed at the federal trough.
The issue isn't just about using an ALT tag with your images. The use of tables as a layout device, specific font faces, specific font sizes, and colors for links and text makes an HTML page much more difficult for a differently abled person to use.
The original version of HTML was much more usable by a visually impaired person than today's HTML as implemented by Netscape and Microsoft. The biggest problem is that the Web has become a much more visual medium, and the graphics designers cared a lot more about the look of a page than the geeks who launched HTML. Those high-energy physicists who were among the Web's first users were focused on the information that was presented, not how it looked.
Cascading Style Sheets are the way to rescue the Web for people who need different access to it. CSS separates the appearance of a site from the information offered by the site.
I'm glad the feds are doing this, because the browser companies and leading Web designers are paying almost no attention to accessibility issues.
Besides, accessible HTML is generally much better written and more standard HTML, too. All Web users could benefit from more of that.
The new version of FrontPage 2000 is actually pretty good at many aspects of HTML creation. It reads in existing sites without screwing up the formatting and creates more compliant HTML than past versions of the software. It also has an editor for dealing directly with the HTML.
One thing it still likes to do is drop in a lot of <-- Comment --> stuff that only is there to help FrontPage later when the page is edited again. If you use FrontPage themes, you can double or even triple the size of an HTML document because of these comments.