Not to mention how absurd it is to assume that developers know about or understand the special needs of people. We are devlopers, not therapists or doctors.
What do you think the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are for?
The W3C should also consider the cost of bandwidth. By fully compling with their recs, each html page will increase in size from 25 to 50%.
Please back that up. The trend is towards less bandwidth usage, not more. Take a look at the recent redesigns by many high-profile sites - they are all reporting a major decrease in bandwidth usage.
I'm not familiar with Goldfarb's conjecture, but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately. Unless you are arguing that the same presentation is always suitable for everyone, or that you can easily convert one presentation into another, I don't see what your point is.
Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I,
All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.
or from P instead of BR-BR?
Series of <br> elements should render as a single linebreak in conformant user-agents. Do you think that whitespace has no effect on the readability of a document?
The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.
Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.
Actually, normal HTML is perfectly accessible to most people, including people with visual difficulties. It's when you start ignoring the specifications or adding extras like Javascript, CSS and Flash that you have the potential to screw up.
So, a better analogy would be to draw the distinction between saying the latest Britney Spears song is a CD, and the latest Britney Spears song is available on CD. Yes, the vast majority of people might buy the CD, but that doesn't mean it isn't available in other formats, like DVD-Audio.
I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual...
Of course, automated tools cannot accurately test for compliance with WCAG, Section 508, or similar accessibility requirements, merely check a few things and give pointers to the bits it cannot check.
I've found that the Accessibility Valet does a very good job, much better than Bobby used to (I haven't tried Bobby in a while though).
I hate it when people get pedantic and trot this little line of reasoning out. You're technically correct if you're a lawyer, but if you tell most people that file sharing is copyright infringement, not stealing, then since they don't understand what copyright infringement is, they will assume it's ok.
Why do you think so? Why would anyone have a discussion clarifying the two crimes and somehow leave with the impression that one is not a crime? It's like blaming somebody who explains the difference between theft and breaking and entering in case people somehow get the impression that it's legal to break into your house.
I think you do this so you can justify getting copies of music without paying for it.
"I think that people clarify the difference between theft and breaking and entering so that you can justify breaking into my house". See how silly that sounds? It's a straw man argument.
If you felt that filesharing was wrong, you would probably try to discourage people from engaging in it, not go around trying to obfuscate the issue.
But it is you that is obfuscating the issue. The issue is copyright infringement, not theft. Trying to solve the problem of copyright infringement by treating it like theft is misguided as they are fundamentally different.
Otherwise, why would you be trotting out a pedantic, misleading argument
It's not pedantic, since they are fundamentally different and treating them the same way is stupid. It's not misleading, since he's being completely accurate.
Explain what copyright infringment is and why it's bad without using any concept of stealing or theft.
Copyright infringement is the offense of creating a copy of an original work without being, or having permission from, the copyright holder, who is usually the creator of said work.
It is bad, because doing so undermines an incentive to create original works, the ability to control the scarcity of said works. This ability is usually taken advantage of to make money.
That incentive was put in place by the government to promote the creation of original works, to give more works to the public. Obviously, the incentive must be removed at some point to give the work back to the public, so copyright only applies for a limited time. If copyright infringement were not a crime, less original works would be created, and so the public would be worse off.
Remember though, the whole purpose is to give the public more original works. As the public receive less and less benefit from this, don't be surprised to find that they care less and less about the "deal" with creators.
Now, I don't support the **AA's anymore because I can't see how to have copyright and computers
What? Copyright is completely compatible with the existence of computers. Copyright only became necessary when copying something became easy. Perhaps you meant that you don't see how the **AAs can enforce their copyrights, but I still don't see how that means that you shouldn't support them.
nd I think people like you will keep stealing no matter what they do, short of taking away computers. So, I expect people like you will eventually get real computers restricted to a small population of "trusted" people, while the rest of the population has to settle with "content boxes"
You are accusing him of copyright infringement because he dared point out that theft and copyright infringement are fundamentally different crimes? And you are going on to accuse him (and people like him) of the downfall of computers? Think it through.
If you support filesharing, you support Microsoft adding whatever they want from Linux into Windows while keeping Windows proprietary. It'
If Broadcom was distributing the modified compiler as part of an SDK to third-party developers using the chip, then Broadcom would have to release their changes.
Yes, but only to the third party developers, they have no obligation to release the source to the world. Ask one of those third party developers to get you a copy.
No, it includes a subset of SMIL. SMIL is more than just an animation format.
SVG Tiny is just a vector graphics format, but full SVG has animation and scripting, just like Flash.
Well animation isn't exactly a novel thing for a graphics format, which just leaves scripting. SVG is obviously scriptable, as it is accessible via the DOM, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that this puts it on the same level as Flash.
In case of an emergency onboard an aircraft I will literally bet my life on the instincts of a human being over the computational prowess of machine.
What makes you think humans have any instinct that would be useful when something goes wrong while strapped inside a flying tin can? We haven't exactly had hundreds of thousands of years to develop that instinct, have we?
I think that if a site requires the referring page to come from one its own domain and you spoof that somehow to make a deep link
That makes no sense. The Referer header is under the control of the user, not the website with the originating link on. A person who deep-links to another site can't make his visitors send "fraudulent" requests in this way.
If a site requires it and you use a proxy that strips it off, then you will simply be denied access. That's the proxie's fault for purposefully thwarting the HTTP standard, so I have no sympathy for them.
There is no requirement in the HTTP RFC that clients must provide that header, in fact it explicitly states that it should be easily disabled by end-users. See section 15 of RFC 2616 for details:
We suggest, though do not require, that a convenient toggle interface be provided for the user to enable or disable the sending of From and Referer information.
Swf is a binary format, that doesn't mean it is compressed.
Well I was just generally talking about the difference between markup-based formats like SVG as opposed to more compact binary formats. I'm not intimately familiar with the Flash format, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't compressed in some form.
In fact, swf also has a compress option since v6
So, yes, many Flash files will be compressed already.
Svg is much much bigger than swf (I've written an swf to svg converter so I'm not just making this up).
I'm not disputing that. I'm saying that the transfer size will be equivelant.
Also, be sure to include all referenced items, like bitmaps, in your svg count. Swf often stores those smaller too, as it can do things like jpg alphas rather than png, and store one jpgTable for multiple images.
You do realise JPEG is compressed? And that shared data between images is just an optimization to reduce the size (i.e. even more compression)?
Sound can be mp3. etc. etc.
MP3 is also compressed.
The main point is that you are going to get way better compression ratios with SVG compared with Flash, and so transfer size is going to be about the same.
Some proxies remove the HTTP_REFERER header or change it to something else (ever seen those XXX_REFERER removed by SoftwareXYZ in your logs?).
As far as I am aware, no software spoofs the Referer header by changing it to another URI. So simply block the people whose referring URI begins with 'http://' and does not come from your domain. Log the ones you block, and whenever any new ones come up, send an email to the webmaster. If a new "privacy enhancer" or whatever appears that does spoof the referrer with a false URI, simply exempt those from your checks.
Remember, you aren't aiming to catch everybody who may possibly come from elsewhere, you are just making it unlikely anyone will deep-link to you.
In addition, caches (built into your browser or proxy) in general might get confused by different content that comes with the same URL because it depends upon the HTTP_REFERER header.
Not if you send a Vary header. Anything that gets confused by multiple objects available at the same URI when a Vary header is present is deeply broken, and will break in lots of different ways on lots of different sites.
Flash comes prepackaged with Internet Explorer. It's also used on many websites, so the chances of a user already having it installed is very high. But the argument was that users are resistant to switching browsers, not that installing a plugin for your existing browser is hard (it is, but not anywhere near as hard).
Mere "viewing" of SVG with a plugin misses most of its theoretical utility - SVG elements could/should be a seamless part of a larger XML document, programmable via the DOM and javascript.
Remember the original question:
Exactly what advantage is there that an IE user would recognize?
End users don't care about theoretical DOM/javascriptness. It's all gobbledegook to them. They care when they get to a website that tells them they can't view what they want to until they install a plugin. And most of the time, they care enough to surf elsewhere.
Yes, this is an example of where Flash is used as part of the content, rather than part of the infrastructure. The huge backlash against Flash is due in part to people using Flash to do navbars and so on.
People hate Flash for many reasons. The one that stands out for me is that it just doesn't work right. I'm used to tabbing through links on a page. I'm used to middle-clicking to open in a new window. I'm used to right-clicking and getting a useful set of options. I'm used to my browser remaining quiet, instead of blaring out music over the top of whatever I am already listening to.
There are a hundred different ways in which it doesn't work right. Flash just doesn't fit well with the web. It's a good format for presentation, or for HSR-style sites, but for everyday interaction with the web, it's terrible. However, many web developers haven't actually realised this, and litter the web with monstrosities that give Flash a bad name.
I think of Flash as being in the same boat as Java applets. In certain circumstances, they can be the best tool for the job. But using them as part of a website's infrastructure, as opposed to merely being something that is on a website, is virtually always a mistake.
I think that SWF has a major advantage over SVG, which is file size
A common technique in web development is to serve things in a compressed format. Virtually all browsers support this by transparently decompressing the files after they are recieved. This is part of HTTP (content-encoding).
Binary, already-compressed file formats don't benefit from this, but XML-based formats benefit a great deal. In practice, there won't be much difference in size between SVG and Flash, for the vast majority of people.
Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.
I don't know why everybody has latched onto SVG == open Flash. SVG is just vector graphics. SMIL is closer to Flash in terms of functionality.
I do, however, pray thay SVG isn't included into standard mozilla (or any other browser) until it's reached maturity (which its page indicates it's pretty far from). I spend too much of my time working around the half-assed CSS implementations of older netscape and IE browsers, and I don't want another decade of worrying about which part of the SVG standard was implemented buggily (sp?) by which version of which browser.
Amen. I don't hold out much hope for this though, doesn't Mozilla already include support for CSS 3 selectors, even though that specification hasn't been finished yet? CSS 3 properties, I have no problem with, as they properly hide them with a -moz- prefix, but you just can't do this with selectors, and the Mozilla developers seem to have just ignored this problem.
"But there aren't any pages using SVG that I want to see."
"Flash is good enough for me."
"I don't know how to / want to figure out how to install Mozilla."
"All my favourites/passwords/auto form-fillins are in Internet Explorer."
"Mozilla looks weird compared with all the other programs on my computer."
"My employers have already standardized on Internet Explorer."
"I have to use Internet Explorer to run some.hta programs that I rely on." (or substitute any proprietary technology supported by Internet Explorer).
"My bank's website doesn't say that I can use Mozilla with it, but they do say I can use Internet Explorer with it."
"Internet Explorer is already installed on my computer."
I'm a web developer too, and I hate having to deal with Internet Explorer too, but end-user inertia isn't something to dismiss as "people being stupid". You have to give them a reason to care enough to put effort into switching browsers.
Thing is, users don't decide if it's good enough. We (the developers [and our employers]) are the ones that determine if it is good enough. If we use features that IE doesn't support in our websites, IE is not good enough.
What dream world are you living in? A surfer visits your site, and it breaks. He goes to a competitor's site and it doesn't break. He goes to a dozen other sites, and it still doesn't break. Who is he going to blame - Microsoft, for screwing up some acronym he's never even heard of, or the single website that doesn't work for him?
Now, multiply that by the number of visitors coming to your website who use Internet Explorer. Virtually all of them will just think that you have a broken website. Will your boss/client/bank manager really care if your code is technically correct?
Yes, I know that it's excruciatingly painful to have to deal with such a backwards browser every day, but you can't just decide to ignore a browser with that kind of market share.
Lets be realistic, installing another browser is not exactly rocket science, is it?
Both rocket science and installing a new browser are out of reach for the average end-user, both in terms of actually doing it, and in terms of motivation. Sure, if they wanted to sit down and spend an evening figuring it out, they could probably do it, but you have to convince them that there's something in it for them.
Why do people continually insist that a web browser be constantly updated with new "features" to prove it's any good?
Because without incentives, users won't upgrade. Without lots of users upgrading, we are stuck with the status quo, which is near dominance for Internet Explorer, which has terrible support for standards. This terrible support causes a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of problems. Moaning about those problems will not make users upgrade. Features will.
Mozilla currently depends on AOL for funding, and now that MS has settled, AOL might simply drop Mozilla in favor of Netscape.
You mean in favour of Internet Explorer, right?
Next to RS232, HTTP is the most abused standard protocol in computing.
The only widespread violation of HTTP I can think of off the top of my head is when Internet Explorer ignores the MIME-type provided by a server. The big problems on the web are the bad HTML and CSS implementations.
Well, no not really. SVG is an XML vector graphics format. You can embed vector graphics in Flash presentations, but there's a lot more to it than that.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are for?
Please back that up. The trend is towards less bandwidth usage, not more. Take a look at the recent redesigns by many high-profile sites - they are all reporting a major decrease in bandwidth usage.
I'm not familiar with Goldfarb's conjecture, but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately. Unless you are arguing that the same presentation is always suitable for everyone, or that you can easily convert one presentation into another, I don't see what your point is.
All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.
Series of <br> elements should render as a single linebreak in conformant user-agents. Do you think that whitespace has no effect on the readability of a document?
Actually, normal HTML is perfectly accessible to most people, including people with visual difficulties. It's when you start ignoring the specifications or adding extras like Javascript, CSS and Flash that you have the potential to screw up.
So, a better analogy would be to draw the distinction between saying the latest Britney Spears song is a CD, and the latest Britney Spears song is available on CD. Yes, the vast majority of people might buy the CD, but that doesn't mean it isn't available in other formats, like DVD-Audio.
Ever heard of braille?
Of course, automated tools cannot accurately test for compliance with WCAG, Section 508, or similar accessibility requirements, merely check a few things and give pointers to the bits it cannot check.
I've found that the Accessibility Valet does a very good job, much better than Bobby used to (I haven't tried Bobby in a while though).
Why do you think so? Why would anyone have a discussion clarifying the two crimes and somehow leave with the impression that one is not a crime? It's like blaming somebody who explains the difference between theft and breaking and entering in case people somehow get the impression that it's legal to break into your house.
"I think that people clarify the difference between theft and breaking and entering so that you can justify breaking into my house". See how silly that sounds? It's a straw man argument.
But it is you that is obfuscating the issue. The issue is copyright infringement, not theft. Trying to solve the problem of copyright infringement by treating it like theft is misguided as they are fundamentally different.
It's not pedantic, since they are fundamentally different and treating them the same way is stupid. It's not misleading, since he's being completely accurate.
Copyright infringement is the offense of creating a copy of an original work without being, or having permission from, the copyright holder, who is usually the creator of said work.
It is bad, because doing so undermines an incentive to create original works, the ability to control the scarcity of said works. This ability is usually taken advantage of to make money.
That incentive was put in place by the government to promote the creation of original works, to give more works to the public. Obviously, the incentive must be removed at some point to give the work back to the public, so copyright only applies for a limited time. If copyright infringement were not a crime, less original works would be created, and so the public would be worse off.
Remember though, the whole purpose is to give the public more original works. As the public receive less and less benefit from this, don't be surprised to find that they care less and less about the "deal" with creators.
What? Copyright is completely compatible with the existence of computers. Copyright only became necessary when copying something became easy. Perhaps you meant that you don't see how the **AAs can enforce their copyrights, but I still don't see how that means that you shouldn't support them.
You are accusing him of copyright infringement because he dared point out that theft and copyright infringement are fundamentally different crimes? And you are going on to accuse him (and people like him) of the downfall of computers? Think it through.
Yes, but only to the third party developers, they have no obligation to release the source to the world. Ask one of those third party developers to get you a copy.
I know. GIF does animations too, but that doesn't make it a Flash killer.
You can stream MP3s and videos through it?
No, it includes a subset of SMIL. SMIL is more than just an animation format.
Well animation isn't exactly a novel thing for a graphics format, which just leaves scripting. SVG is obviously scriptable, as it is accessible via the DOM, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that this puts it on the same level as Flash.
What makes you think humans have any instinct that would be useful when something goes wrong while strapped inside a flying tin can? We haven't exactly had hundreds of thousands of years to develop that instinct, have we?
That makes no sense. The Referer header is under the control of the user, not the website with the originating link on. A person who deep-links to another site can't make his visitors send "fraudulent" requests in this way.
There is no requirement in the HTTP RFC that clients must provide that header, in fact it explicitly states that it should be easily disabled by end-users. See section 15 of RFC 2616 for details:
Well I was just generally talking about the difference between markup-based formats like SVG as opposed to more compact binary formats. I'm not intimately familiar with the Flash format, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't compressed in some form.
So, yes, many Flash files will be compressed already.
I'm not disputing that. I'm saying that the transfer size will be equivelant.
You do realise JPEG is compressed? And that shared data between images is just an optimization to reduce the size (i.e. even more compression)?
MP3 is also compressed.
The main point is that you are going to get way better compression ratios with SVG compared with Flash, and so transfer size is going to be about the same.
As far as I am aware, no software spoofs the Referer header by changing it to another URI. So simply block the people whose referring URI begins with 'http://' and does not come from your domain. Log the ones you block, and whenever any new ones come up, send an email to the webmaster. If a new "privacy enhancer" or whatever appears that does spoof the referrer with a false URI, simply exempt those from your checks.
Remember, you aren't aiming to catch everybody who may possibly come from elsewhere, you are just making it unlikely anyone will deep-link to you.
Not if you send a Vary header. Anything that gets confused by multiple objects available at the same URI when a Vary header is present is deeply broken, and will break in lots of different ways on lots of different sites.
Flash comes prepackaged with Internet Explorer. It's also used on many websites, so the chances of a user already having it installed is very high. But the argument was that users are resistant to switching browsers, not that installing a plugin for your existing browser is hard (it is, but not anywhere near as hard).
Remember the original question:
End users don't care about theoretical DOM/javascriptness. It's all gobbledegook to them. They care when they get to a website that tells them they can't view what they want to until they install a plugin. And most of the time, they care enough to surf elsewhere.
Yes, this is an example of where Flash is used as part of the content, rather than part of the infrastructure. The huge backlash against Flash is due in part to people using Flash to do navbars and so on.
People hate Flash for many reasons. The one that stands out for me is that it just doesn't work right. I'm used to tabbing through links on a page. I'm used to middle-clicking to open in a new window. I'm used to right-clicking and getting a useful set of options. I'm used to my browser remaining quiet, instead of blaring out music over the top of whatever I am already listening to.
There are a hundred different ways in which it doesn't work right. Flash just doesn't fit well with the web. It's a good format for presentation, or for HSR-style sites, but for everyday interaction with the web, it's terrible. However, many web developers haven't actually realised this, and litter the web with monstrosities that give Flash a bad name.
I think of Flash as being in the same boat as Java applets. In certain circumstances, they can be the best tool for the job. But using them as part of a website's infrastructure, as opposed to merely being something that is on a website, is virtually always a mistake.
A common technique in web development is to serve things in a compressed format. Virtually all browsers support this by transparently decompressing the files after they are recieved. This is part of HTTP (content-encoding).
Binary, already-compressed file formats don't benefit from this, but XML-based formats benefit a great deal. In practice, there won't be much difference in size between SVG and Flash, for the vast majority of people.
I don't know why everybody has latched onto SVG == open Flash. SVG is just vector graphics. SMIL is closer to Flash in terms of functionality.
Amen. I don't hold out much hope for this though, doesn't Mozilla already include support for CSS 3 selectors, even though that specification hasn't been finished yet? CSS 3 properties, I have no problem with, as they properly hide them with a -moz- prefix, but you just can't do this with selectors, and the Mozilla developers seem to have just ignored this problem.
Because:
I'm a web developer too, and I hate having to deal with Internet Explorer too, but end-user inertia isn't something to dismiss as "people being stupid". You have to give them a reason to care enough to put effort into switching browsers.
Its far easier to make a call to a command line image manipulation software than to call a library and do all the work yourself.
Not particularly. For instance, with PHP:
What dream world are you living in? A surfer visits your site, and it breaks. He goes to a competitor's site and it doesn't break. He goes to a dozen other sites, and it still doesn't break. Who is he going to blame - Microsoft, for screwing up some acronym he's never even heard of, or the single website that doesn't work for him?
Now, multiply that by the number of visitors coming to your website who use Internet Explorer. Virtually all of them will just think that you have a broken website. Will your boss/client/bank manager really care if your code is technically correct?
Yes, I know that it's excruciatingly painful to have to deal with such a backwards browser every day, but you can't just decide to ignore a browser with that kind of market share.
Both rocket science and installing a new browser are out of reach for the average end-user, both in terms of actually doing it, and in terms of motivation. Sure, if they wanted to sit down and spend an evening figuring it out, they could probably do it, but you have to convince them that there's something in it for them.
Because without incentives, users won't upgrade. Without lots of users upgrading, we are stuck with the status quo, which is near dominance for Internet Explorer, which has terrible support for standards. This terrible support causes a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of problems. Moaning about those problems will not make users upgrade. Features will.
You mean in favour of Internet Explorer, right?
The only widespread violation of HTTP I can think of off the top of my head is when Internet Explorer ignores the MIME-type provided by a server. The big problems on the web are the bad HTML and CSS implementations.
Well, no not really. SVG is an XML vector graphics format. You can embed vector graphics in Flash presentations, but there's a lot more to it than that.