Almost all css sites I have used have been really slow when scrolling (this was on Opera and Mozilla, I don't know about IE). With a different div for each comment I imagine this might be fscking slow, although I should point out I'm a programmer not a web developer.
Uh, you realise, of course, that table layout is actually significantly more complex computationally than the CSS box model, and most tables based layouts use a LOT more tables than CSS sites use divs.
I imagine the CSS sites you are talking about use fixed positioning in some way; either for menus (e.g. W3's Style Pages), or some fixed background (e.g. css/edge) -- these techniques can be slow, especially on lesser machines with anemic graphics cards. That it uses CSS is irrelevent, it's just much more complex to blit bits of a page (and maybe apply some transparency to others, while redrawing yet others) than it is to move a basic superbitmap around.
stylesheets are implemented differently in different browsers, and the implementations are bound to be more dynamic than tables. The bugs for tables have been worked out why do it again for css.
Because it's better. It has significant payoffs at all levels, in terms of making websites more accessable, more maintainable, more flexible, and less disgusting to look under the hood at.
As a programmer, I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference good design and a good language can make to your work. Once upon a time C++ was (and to some extent still is) plagued with crappy compilers with different behaviors and incompatabilities. If C worked and the issues about it well known, why bother with C++? Or any other language?
Isn't slashcode opensource? Why don't you go in and fix it yourself if it bothers you?
I don't use SlashCode. I don't particularly like SlashCode. Therefore I do not develop for SlashCode. Unless someone asks me nicely, of course.
I've accomplished this sort of thing on my own at http://thirtyfour.org - the website is entirely readable without any extraneous formatting whatsoever. Content should be seperate from design
Funny, I didn't see much in the way of design there at all -- in fact, you've abused certain tags, like blockquote, to achieve presentational aims -- exactly the opposite of what you seem to be aiming for, unless you want to argue that your blog is a load of quotations of yourself. So, where are your <cite>s?:P
Now, my turn: http://www.aagh.net/ -- see how I provide a load of <link>s at the top for UA's to make use of, how the navbar is a marked up nested list, despite not looking much like one in CSS capable clients. Note the content is divided liberally with divs which, once stripped, leave you with a perfectly readable and well structured XHTML document. Note the print stylesheet, so if you want to print a page, you don't get a useless navbar printed with the content. Also note that it's not finished, but you get my point:)
It's very easy to make a page which validates perfectly but which uses completely pathetic markup making it less accessable than even a tables based tag soup design like SlashDot.
Concider:
<div class="heading">This is my document heading</div> <div class="para">And this is my body text. It's <span class="bold">valid</span> and <span class="bold">well-formed</span>, but the markup is a joke -- just imagine trying to read it if the stylesheet doesn't load!</div> <div class="para">And sadly, this sort of "div-soup" design accounts for a significant proportion of CSS-based designs. Some even used spans instead; of div's, resulting in a page that, without CSS, is one long line of text!</div>
This is the HTML equivilent of writing a C application and putting absolutely everything in main(). Sure, it'll compile, but do you want to be the one to maintain it?
For God's sake, the question titles are bigger than the headline!
Yes, because it's basically an entire standalone XHTML documented copied and pasted into the site (probably one of the most retarded things I've seen SlashDot do).
All those headings are <h1>'s, which SlashDot should be using for the site logo (with images off, in lynx, screenreaders, etc, it'll be rendered as a main heading), with a <h2> for the headlines, and so those questions should be <h3>.
If SlashDot used these more semantic tags, and Roblimo was smart enough to transform the document properly (h1 -> h3, and rip off the HTML pre/postamble), it'd look great, and the stylesheet SlashDot should be using to provide all this style would make it fit in perfectly.
Quick example of the sort of markup SlashDot uses, compared with what it should be using:
Don't forget to brandelf it too, if said sick-linux-binary happens to have a broken elf header which says it's a Solaris binary or whatever, i.e:
brandelf -t Linux sick-linux-binary
Since while FreeBSD will use the elf header to make things like Linux emulation work, Linux just ignores it, meaning a lot of tools like to produce incorrect headers. Tsk:)
Wouldn't this be useless to anybody that builds from source?
Even worse, if you use, say, FreeBSD, and you build from some cvs tag other than RELENG_4_7_RELEASE or so (I use RELENG_4), chances are you've got quite a few small deltas dotted around the system -- something like this would need to track md5 changes of not just releases, but of the -STABLE branch (at every commit) to be useful to me -- and you've still got the security branches (RELENG_4_[1-7]) to worry about.
It's hard, even without getting into handling the various differences compiling can introduce -- compilation date timestamps, alternate build options, etc.
There's 2 episodes with definite airdates left, one of which is the (reportedly not very good) unaired pilot episode.
Yes, 1x00 was pretty poor. Shame they didn't write it off and reshoot something stronger -- I'm sure if it had been shown as the pilot it would have damaged further ratings pretty badly:/
Of course, it might have been better without the crappy VCD format I saw it in;)
(And yes, I'm currently downloading 1x09 -- we don't get Fox in the UK)
Of course they do. OK, so they might have to keep it in a jar most of the time, but just you try fitting the entire law in your head while still leaving room for stuff like souls!
It's like being a geek while still fitting in all those pesky social skills -- it's just not practical.
IE is absolutely useless... no selective cookie blocking
You can tell IE to ask before setting cookies, reject third or first party cookies, require P3P policies before accepting cookies, and set this on a per-site basis.
You can have a really great storyline and yet make a really bad story -- no matter the genre -- by having a crappy set of characters and a crappy universe on which it all rests. You end up with something akin to a beautiful Oak tree, sitting on an exposed landfill and painted with green and red pokadots. No matter how awe inspiring the tree is, you're not going to want to plant it in your back garden.
A bad universe, sure, you can probably get past that (after all, said Oak tree could be transplanted into a nice green field), but characters are what drive the story, and without them there's really nothing to write about.
He's written ~4,000 pages on the Confederation universe. Now he's moved it out of the galaxy, writing more could make it cluttered and end up with it going stale:)
Hopefully we'll see more from him in the same vein, though. At the moment he seems to be concentrating on strong standalone books. Although it would be nice to get another decent series from him, that'll take ages. Bah:)
Re:Oh, someone explain to me
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 2
The 700Kbps trailers don't seem to be available atm because their links are for "javascript:void(0)".
They probably use onclick. The *cough* webmaster *cough* probably isn't aware you can do onclick="dostuff();return false;" to stop the href being activated, and so uses the braindead javascript:void(0) method to avoid an error being raised when you click on it.
The 700kbps one worked fine here, for small values of fine; I had to use ASFRecorder just to get something I could play without the video stopping dead after 3 seconds. Streaming sucks.
u r abbreviating pointlessly
on
Equilibrium
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· Score: 1
Give up that capability of our language, and you make English an extinct language.
Bet that as it may, I too find the use of "you" => "u", "to" => "2" etc highly annoying and counterintuitive.
For the sake of you typing one, or maybe *gasp*, two extra letters, you're both massively reducing your credibility ("He types like an AOL luser, why should I listen to him?") and significantly impacting readability (I certainly don't see these abbreviations enough for them to be automatic; I have to think about them when I see them -- it may even make me subvocalise, and that *sucks*)
*shrug*, use them if you like, just don't expect me to read your comments, or reply to your mail, or mod you up, or take you seriously.
Re:Trailer
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Can I have my "no 5 funny posts" filter
Er, yes?
Preferences -> Reason Modifier -> Funny
Set to -2 or so, and Funny mods will never get above +3.
I get 20-30 a day. I've long since stopped bothering hiding my email address -- maybe 2 get through every week, and I can handle hitting Shift-S to move them to Mail/SPAM-Unfiltered.
When SpamAssassin 2.5X arrives with it's baynesien filter I'll shove them through it. Hopefully it'll push the sucess rate high enough so that when I'm getting 200/day I won't be getting 20 missed a week:)
Is there a setting in preferences to filter out duplicates?
Could do.
Instead of editors (*cough*) just adding "yeah, it's a dupe" at the end of the article, they could set a "Dupe" flag on the story; you set your prefs to remove them, and you're sorted. Of course, there would be a short period where it would be displayed, but it's either that, some dupe detection on submit, or less incompetence.
In an even nastier 'prefetch' example would come CGIs which keep state in cookies or on the server
This is why GET isn't supposed to change state -- that's what POST is for:)
Still, I'm not keen on the idea of Mozilla fetching rel="next". For another example of why, let's take the PHP manual. It's written in DocBook, who's HTML output mode includes all these lovely <link>'s -- but you probably only go through the PHP manual like that once; after that it becomes a reference, and you're jumping to specific pages to look stuff up; you're probably not interested in the rel="next" pointing to the next function or extension.
Your hit on the index page will result in another hit on the Preface. Your hit on Array functions will result in another hit on array_change_key_case, and your hit on array_multisort will result in another hit on array_pad.
That's 3 hits you wanted and 3 you didn't want, despite it using rel="next" very sensibly.
.. Firefly is the most promising sci-f[ai] series I've seen since Babylon 5.
It's less cheesy than Farscape, less predictable than SG-1, more interesting than any series of Star Trek ever, and infinately less lame than the hugely pathetic Andromeda.
Like B5 it has a Universe I want to see more of, it has interesting characters it's actually bothering to develop, the dialogue isn't totally predictable, it's not depending on unlikely (and suspiciously human-like) aliens, it's got an interesting looking story arc, and despite being odd at first, it has a really nice style that works suprisingly well.
And now they're preparing to axe it before it's even past introducing itself. I personally blame that lame "Earth got used up" speech at the start -- I'm sure it has nothing to do with Fox being mindless rating chasers, or the average TV viewer being barely capable of watching TV and drooling at the same time.
*grumble*, we don't even get Fox over here; I've only seen ffly as VCD, SVCD and XviD. Bah.
In Mozilla and Opera, I block unrequested popups and use user CSS to eliminate most banners. JavaScript is enabled, although I reject third party cookies.
Their example just sat there in both. No access denied, no loading images, nothing.
Ironically, in MSIE, with no banner or popup blocking (and I *saw* the test popup it launched), and no reported blocked cookies, I got an access denied message after about 5 seconds.
I'm really impressed by this, uh, "technology". Seriously -- they've come up with something this poor, and actually manage to sell it to people! I wish I could do that, although hopefully with something less lame;)
So content-providers can decide all by themselves if they want to pre-serve the content
No they can't. rel="next" does not suggest it should be prefetched or it's likely to be where the user will go next, merely that that's the next document in a series.
SlashDot uses them -- look at the document nav bar in Moz/Opera, you'll see Next/Previous, which go to the next/previous story. Unless you have a habit of reading every article, Moz will pointlessly prefetch the next story up, and you'll happily ignore it. Users who used to (e.g.) read every other story now actually end up fetching every story anyway.
rel="prefetch" is fine, rel="next" makes me nervous. I don't want content providers to stop using rel="next" because of the deranged behavior of some clients:P
Arguable. Since Opera 7's release, most of the standards-based problems I've encountered have been with Mozilla (and IE, heh), not Opera.
I think they're about on par, although both have advantages in different areas -- Mozilla with MathML, Opera with superior CSS 2. Mozilla with DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger, Opera with full page zoom (not just text zoom) and more powerful control over style. Mozilla with the highly flexible but sluggish and convention defying XUL, Opera with the fast and effecient native UI's.
It's swings and roundabouts -- I prefer Opera's UI, and I'm prepared to pay the small amount it costs (despite being highly stingy) to remove the banner.
What I originally liked about it no longer seems to be there -- it's turned into a pointless puppet show, dragging along huge amounts of baggage from previous episodes and stringing it together with bad jokes and storylines which completely fail to advance the overall plot or fill out the increasingly two dimensional characters.
In it's current state, I won't miss it. I just hope they'll be able to properly close the story arc and not just leave everything dangling for a new series that'll never come.
I hated (some) of the keybindings in mutt -- luckily it's pretty trivial to rebind them.
I now control 90% of all my mutt usage from the cursor keys. Right goes into a mbox, then into a mail, then into a list of the parts of a mail, then into individual parts which weren't displayed inline. Left goes in the other direction, and up/down do what you'd expect.
Numpad '0' (bound to next unread message), PageUp/Dn and 'r' make up most of the other 10%:)
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, you realise, of course, that table layout is actually significantly more complex computationally than the CSS box model, and most tables based layouts use a LOT more tables than CSS sites use divs.
I imagine the CSS sites you are talking about use fixed positioning in some way; either for menus (e.g. W3's Style Pages), or some fixed background (e.g. css/edge) -- these techniques can be slow, especially on lesser machines with anemic graphics cards. That it uses CSS is irrelevent, it's just much more complex to blit bits of a page (and maybe apply some transparency to others, while redrawing yet others) than it is to move a basic superbitmap around.
Because it's better. It has significant payoffs at all levels, in terms of making websites more accessable, more maintainable, more flexible, and less disgusting to look under the hood at.
As a programmer, I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference good design and a good language can make to your work. Once upon a time C++ was (and to some extent still is) plagued with crappy compilers with different behaviors and incompatabilities. If C worked and the issues about it well known, why bother with C++? Or any other language?
I don't use SlashCode. I don't particularly like SlashCode. Therefore I do not develop for SlashCode. Unless someone asks me nicely, of course.
Funny, I didn't see much in the way of design there at all -- in fact, you've abused certain tags, like blockquote, to achieve presentational aims -- exactly the opposite of what you seem to be aiming for, unless you want to argue that your blog is a load of quotations of yourself. So, where are your <cite>s?
Now, my turn: http://www.aagh.net/ -- see how I provide a load of <link>s at the top for UA's to make use of, how the navbar is a marked up nested list, despite not looking much like one in CSS capable clients. Note the content is divided liberally with divs which, once stripped, leave you with a perfectly readable and well structured XHTML document. Note the print stylesheet, so if you want to print a page, you don't get a useless navbar printed with the content. Also note that it's not finished, but you get my point
Concider:This is the HTML equivilent of writing a C application and putting absolutely everything in main(). Sure, it'll compile, but do you want to be the one to maintain it?
Yes, because it's basically an entire standalone XHTML documented copied and pasted into the site (probably one of the most retarded things I've seen SlashDot do).
All those headings are <h1>'s, which SlashDot should be using for the site logo (with images off, in lynx, screenreaders, etc, it'll be rendered as a main heading), with a <h2> for the headlines, and so those questions should be <h3>.
If SlashDot used these more semantic tags, and Roblimo was smart enough to transform the document properly (h1 -> h3, and rip off the HTML pre/postamble), it'd look great, and the stylesheet SlashDot should be using to provide all this style would make it fit in perfectly.
Quick example of the sort of markup SlashDot uses, compared with what it should be using:
Here's the headline to this story:
<table WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0"><tr><td
VALIGN="TOP" BGCOLOR="#006666"><img
SRC="//images.slashdot.or
FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE="4" COLOR="#FFFFFF"><b>Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</b></font></td>
</tr></table>
Compare with what it *would* be in a design using CSS:
<h2>Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</h2>
Plus about 6 lines of CSS which you only load once, and much of which could be shared among other similar looking elements.
Much too elegent for SlashDot though. After all, if it doesn't look great in Netscape 4 it's not worth doing!
Don't forget to brandelf it too, if said sick-linux-binary happens to have a broken elf header which says it's a Solaris binary or whatever, i.e:Since while FreeBSD will use the elf header to make things like Linux emulation work, Linux just ignores it, meaning a lot of tools like to produce incorrect headers. Tsk
Even worse, if you use, say, FreeBSD, and you build from some cvs tag other than RELENG_4_7_RELEASE or so (I use RELENG_4), chances are you've got quite a few small deltas dotted around the system -- something like this would need to track md5 changes of not just releases, but of the -STABLE branch (at every commit) to be useful to me -- and you've still got the security branches (RELENG_4_[1-7]) to worry about.
It's hard, even without getting into handling the various differences compiling can introduce -- compilation date timestamps, alternate build options, etc.
Yes, 1x00 was pretty poor. Shame they didn't write it off and reshoot something stronger -- I'm sure if it had been shown as the pilot it would have damaged further ratings pretty badly
Of course, it might have been better without the crappy VCD format I saw it in
(And yes, I'm currently downloading 1x09 -- we don't get Fox in the UK)
Of course they do. OK, so they might have to keep it in a jar most of the time, but just you try fitting the entire law in your head while still leaving room for stuff like souls!
It's like being a geek while still fitting in all those pesky social skills -- it's just not practical.
You can tell IE to ask before setting cookies, reject third or first party cookies, require P3P policies before accepting cookies, and set this on a per-site basis.
Not quite "absolutely useless".
No.
You can have a really great storyline and yet make a really bad story -- no matter the genre -- by having a crappy set of characters and a crappy universe on which it all rests. You end up with something akin to a beautiful Oak tree, sitting on an exposed landfill and painted with green and red pokadots. No matter how awe inspiring the tree is, you're not going to want to plant it in your back garden.
A bad universe, sure, you can probably get past that (after all, said Oak tree could be transplanted into a nice green field), but characters are what drive the story, and without them there's really nothing to write about.
He's written ~4,000 pages on the Confederation universe. Now he's moved it out of the galaxy, writing more could make it cluttered and end up with it going stale :)
:)
Hopefully we'll see more from him in the same vein, though. At the moment he seems to be concentrating on strong standalone books. Although it would be nice to get another decent series from him, that'll take ages. Bah
They probably use onclick. The *cough* webmaster *cough* probably isn't aware you can do onclick="dostuff();return false;" to stop the href being activated, and so uses the braindead javascript:void(0) method to avoid an error being raised when you click on it.
The 700kbps one worked fine here, for small values of fine; I had to use ASFRecorder just to get something I could play without the video stopping dead after 3 seconds. Streaming sucks.
Bet that as it may, I too find the use of "you" => "u", "to" => "2" etc highly annoying and counterintuitive.
For the sake of you typing one, or maybe *gasp*, two extra letters, you're both massively reducing your credibility ("He types like an AOL luser, why should I listen to him?") and significantly impacting readability (I certainly don't see these abbreviations enough for them to be automatic; I have to think about them when I see them -- it may even make me subvocalise, and that *sucks*)
*shrug*, use them if you like, just don't expect me to read your comments, or reply to your mail, or mod you up, or take you seriously.
Er, yes?
Preferences -> Reason Modifier -> Funny
Set to -2 or so, and Funny mods will never get above +3.
I get 20-30 a day. I've long since stopped bothering hiding my email address -- maybe 2 get through every week, and I can handle hitting Shift-S to move them to Mail/SPAM-Unfiltered.
:)
When SpamAssassin 2.5X arrives with it's baynesien filter I'll shove them through it. Hopefully it'll push the sucess rate high enough so that when I'm getting 200/day I won't be getting 20 missed a week
Could do.
Instead of editors (*cough*) just adding "yeah, it's a dupe" at the end of the article, they could set a "Dupe" flag on the story; you set your prefs to remove them, and you're sorted. Of course, there would be a short period where it would be displayed, but it's either that, some dupe detection on submit, or less incompetence.
This is why GET isn't supposed to change state -- that's what POST is for
Still, I'm not keen on the idea of Mozilla fetching rel="next". For another example of why, let's take the PHP manual. It's written in DocBook, who's HTML output mode includes all these lovely <link>'s -- but you probably only go through the PHP manual like that once; after that it becomes a reference, and you're jumping to specific pages to look stuff up; you're probably not interested in the rel="next" pointing to the next function or extension.
Your hit on the index page will result in another hit on the Preface. Your hit on Array functions will result in another hit on array_change_key_case, and your hit on array_multisort will result in another hit on array_pad.
That's 3 hits you wanted and 3 you didn't want, despite it using rel="next" very sensibly.
.. Firefly is the most promising sci-f[ai] series I've seen since Babylon 5.
It's less cheesy than Farscape, less predictable than SG-1, more interesting than any series of Star Trek ever, and infinately less lame than the hugely pathetic Andromeda.
Like B5 it has a Universe I want to see more of, it has interesting characters it's actually bothering to develop, the dialogue isn't totally predictable, it's not depending on unlikely (and suspiciously human-like) aliens, it's got an interesting looking story arc, and despite being odd at first, it has a really nice style that works suprisingly well.
And now they're preparing to axe it before it's even past introducing itself. I personally blame that lame "Earth got used up" speech at the start -- I'm sure it has nothing to do with Fox being mindless rating chasers, or the average TV viewer being barely capable of watching TV and drooling at the same time.
*grumble*, we don't even get Fox over here; I've only seen ffly as VCD, SVCD and XviD. Bah.
In Mozilla and Opera, I block unrequested popups and use user CSS to eliminate most banners. JavaScript is enabled, although I reject third party cookies.
;)
Their example just sat there in both. No access denied, no loading images, nothing.
Ironically, in MSIE, with no banner or popup blocking (and I *saw* the test popup it launched), and no reported blocked cookies, I got an access denied message after about 5 seconds.
I'm really impressed by this, uh, "technology". Seriously -- they've come up with something this poor, and actually manage to sell it to people! I wish I could do that, although hopefully with something less lame
No they can't. rel="next" does not suggest it should be prefetched or it's likely to be where the user will go next, merely that that's the next document in a series.
SlashDot uses them -- look at the document nav bar in Moz/Opera, you'll see Next/Previous, which go to the next/previous story. Unless you have a habit of reading every article, Moz will pointlessly prefetch the next story up, and you'll happily ignore it. Users who used to (e.g.) read every other story now actually end up fetching every story anyway.
rel="prefetch" is fine, rel="next" makes me nervous. I don't want content providers to stop using rel="next" because of the deranged behavior of some clients
Arguable. Since Opera 7's release, most of the standards-based problems I've encountered have been with Mozilla (and IE, heh), not Opera.
I think they're about on par, although both have advantages in different areas -- Mozilla with MathML, Opera with superior CSS 2. Mozilla with DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger, Opera with full page zoom (not just text zoom) and more powerful control over style. Mozilla with the highly flexible but sluggish and convention defying XUL, Opera with the fast and effecient native UI's.
It's swings and roundabouts -- I prefer Opera's UI, and I'm prepared to pay the small amount it costs (despite being highly stingy) to remove the banner.
What I originally liked about it no longer seems to be there -- it's turned into a pointless puppet show, dragging along huge amounts of baggage from previous episodes and stringing it together with bad jokes and storylines which completely fail to advance the overall plot or fill out the increasingly two dimensional characters.
In it's current state, I won't miss it. I just hope they'll be able to properly close the story arc and not just leave everything dangling for a new series that'll never come.
Can we get a shot of threads? Be interesting to see how it compares with mutt (and no, that's not the default index format or colour scheme)
I hated (some) of the keybindings in mutt -- luckily it's pretty trivial to rebind them.
:)
I now control 90% of all my mutt usage from the cursor keys. Right goes into a mbox, then into a mail, then into a list of the parts of a mail, then into individual parts which weren't displayed inline. Left goes in the other direction, and up/down do what you'd expect.
Numpad '0' (bound to next unread message), PageUp/Dn and 'r' make up most of the other 10%