Is it possible to disable these plain text certificates?
I just looked through Firefox and IE and don't see any clearly marked as "Plain Text". The only one that looks slightly funky is "NO LIABILITY ACCEPTED, (c)97 VeriSign, Inc."; "VeriSign Time Stamping Service Root"
Mac Performas used to ship with such an interface, because (get this) Apple found that the Mac Finder was too hard for new users.
Basically it was a full screen shell with two tabs - one with buttons for all your applications, and the other with a list of all your documents. (maybe someone can remind me what this thing was called.)
It also used to be common to use a "boot menu" on corporate DOS systems - when you turned the computer on it prompted you (1) WordPerfect (2) 1-2-3 (3) ccMail and so on.
> Technical merit of the format had nothing to do with it.
Well, the Flash plugin is far less than 1MB, which is certainly a technical consideration. Furthermore, the client software is quite lightweight and ran well even on Pentium machines. None of that is true for Adobe SVG at least.
Your points about Flash versus SVG certainly hold some truth, but that only reinforces that SVG will co-exist with Flash, not replace it.
Why AutoZone? 90% of SCO's current customer base are Retail Point-Of-Sale users.
By suing one of their own former Retail customers, they're basically trying to scare their current customer base to stay on SCO UNIX until this is resovled some how (or get them to pay for "Linux Licences" if they are serious about converting). This buys SCO a few more quarters of revenue before all the rats flee the sinking ship.
This makes a lot more sense than suing a bank or an insurance company or someone else that doesn't give a crap about SCO. Retail users can not afford to be SCO's enemy in the short term.
Completing SVG support would allow Mozilla to fend off Microsoft's C#-based XAML interface language that is expected to be included in the next version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn)
Yes, I agree that's inane, but I'm not the one saying it.
Give up trying to be a "platform". Not gonna happen
Yup. Trying to take on Microsoft and Sun and Macromedia in the development tools market is a doomed plan from the start. I would have hoped this "rule the world" attitude would have died along with Netscape.
(Note I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with SVG etc... just that positioning Mozilla as a competitor to.NET or Java is stupid and has been utterly unsuccessful so far. There's always going to be strong market for HTML and XML-based content and that's what a webbrowser should focus on.)
"Help for WordPerfect" was sort of a hack. Microsoft probably would have rather supported a mode that accepted WordPerfect commands directly, but at that time Lotus was suing people for copying their key commands.
By the time that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't copyright "look'n'feel", Word/Excel had gained so much marketshare that the keyboard issue wasn't important anymroe.
My informal survey of WordPerfect in Law Offices over the last few years --
+ Two ran version 6.x for Windows (complete with Novell logo) + One ran version 5.1 for DOS (older attorney) + One ran version 8
None of them were remotely using anything near a current version of the product. They might have been loyal users, but they sure weren't keeping the company afloat.
But you're right that the move to Word was basically driven by "cooperative collaboration". I heard of one case where a firm was trying to get lucrative tech customers in the late 90s, and was literally laughed at for using WordPerfect.
You know, there really is no such thing as "negligable and insignificant" ownership. I'm tired of Gnome people hyping up the Canopy connection as well, but I'm equally tired of KDE people trying to brush it under the rug as inmaterial.
If you watch how Microsoft operates, they rarely buy up 51% of company and take total control. Rather they "invest" for a 5% ownership and a seat on the board, but only to ensure the strategic changes they want are implemented. You really have to ask yourself why a venture/vulture outfit like Canopy has invested in TrollTech -- it's not just for giggles.
At the very least one can assume that Canopy/SCO is gaining significant market intelligence about who is building cross-platform applications and how many -- which can be very valuable information to the right people. That means if you buy QT, you can be sure that Ralph Yarro knows your name.
There's also the question of WHY TrollTech priced their toolkit at a traditionally expensive "UNIX" level, rather than @ the $300 or so you'd expect for a "PC" dev tool. If anything that fits into SCO's vision of UNIX as an expensive exotic OS rather than the commodity model pushed by Linux vendors.
(Just some thoughts -- I'm totally neutral in the Gnome/KDE flamewar.)
The transition from 16->32-bit was grotesquely mismanaged in PC world. Intel sat back while their largest customer (IBM) released an OS that was obsolete on arrival (OS/2). And then they sat back and watched MS bleed the life out of all sorts of half-assed hacks. In those days Intel was much more of a traditional "IC" company -- release the datasheet, sit back and wait.
Using the 32-bit transition as guide for How To Do It is retarded. While it's true that Intel is following AMD, blaming them for lining up Microsoft and Dell before making an announcement is a little obtuse. Rather than waiting 15 years for the 64-bit transition to complete, it should be over in 3.
IE 5.0 actually. There's nobody left who "needs" document.all, just like nobody codes DHTML for Netscape 4 anymore.
By using document.getElementById() the author is pretty much saying he/she gives a damn about standards compliance
Incorrect assumption. One can copy getElementById() scripts right off msdn.microsoft.com that use all sorts of funky IE-only stuff.
you can't rely on the DOM tree to look the same in different web browsers
Yeah, but how many scripts actually "walk" the DOM tree? Most of the library code I've seen just get an element and then hides/shows/positions it. Maybe there's scripts that do fundementally different things with the same HTML document in different browsers, but I haven't seen them.
I don't suppose we'll ever come to an agreement on this subject other than to agree to disagree
Not really -- I just started working with a bunch of JS that our design guy found somewhere, so I'm starting to see your point about the amount of totally barfy javascript out there.
However, the fact remains that Mozilla adoption has been going very s-l-o-w-l-y, and the lack of an easy migration path for webdevs is big part of that. Now that the line in the sand has been drawn, and Mozilla code is being written, you're probably correct that it's too late to add document.all support.
I think it's kinda of a half-empty/half-full thing too. You listen to Mozilla guys and they moan and groan about how standards incompliant IE is, but without Microsoft's early support for the W3C DOM, we probably wouldn't have a standard worth complaining about.
(1) Using "document.all" to infer if the user is using IE or a "standards compliant browser" (by which you mean Mozilla, specifically) is a horribly broken way of doing things. Given all the different browsers that do support document.all, I doubt this works for anything but the most trivial cases where the DOM will be rendered nearly identically in every browser.
Any script of significant complexity that is not browser-independent will need to use User Agent sniffing. A good example that bit me a few months ago is tableRow.style.display = "block". Which is apparently HTML4/CSS1 compliant, but Mozilla uses "table-row" from CSS2. Impossible to support without coding to specific browsers.
(2) My background is working with intranet and vertical market codemonkeys -- these folks generally are targeting specific browsers (meaning IE/Windows) and they do not code browser checks if they can avoid it. Nowdays they do use document.getElementById() (the news that document.all is legacy has gotten out even in the MS world), but that wasn't true a few years ago.
Given that the Mozilla and IE DOMs are nearly identical (ignoring IE exentions that nobody ever uses), getElementById() code written for IE generally runs 95% perfectly on Mozilla, in my experience. document.all code would do the same, if given a chance.
Now, it sounds like you are coming from the HTML guy's perspective, where these's all these crusty libraries that do things like rollovers and so on. I guess that some of these might have completely different codepaths for IE, Netscape 4, and Mozilla. But from what I've seen, they generally assume an similar DOM and just sniff for document.all to get the correct lookup-method.
You bring up IE's bugs and malformed DOM and so on, but realistically it's a pretty rare problem, and any page which relies on that stuff is not going to work in Mozilla at all unless it is fixed. So, that's a non-argument as far as I'm concerned. (A worse problem are pages designed to IE5's broken CSS model.)
I guess I'm not in any position to say what would break if Mozilla supported document.all, but I can say that tons of stuff would start working.
Back in the day, I knew several people that were totally into the original UT, but played with software rendering on real lowspec machines that you could never play Quake 3 on.
It would be nice to have a game again that you could actually play on the dull dells on the office LAN.
Unlike sucky layers, the IE DOM was based on W3C -- not all document.all code would work on Mozilla, but probably 80-90% of would work unmodified. And that would make Mozilla Users happy.
Current IE developers use document.getElementById() and then don't bother testing in Mozilla/Opera/Safari/etc, so this problem is not unique to document.all.
Yes, document.all is horribly maldesigned, but it actually predates document.getElementById(). And bad design has never stopped anyone when we are talking about web browser features.
I'm arguing wrt legacy code bases, by the way. There's a ton of if (document.all).... code out there and because it's not 1999 anymore there's not tons of web developers sitting around to fix this stuff.
This is actually a wise decision -- I worked for a company that developed some very fancy DHTML for IE 4.0, only to find out that it didn't work at all in IE 5.0. There's also some totally undocumented stuff like "window.elementName" that works *sometimes* in IE, but not all the time.
I've also seen a bunch of "layers" code for Netscape 4 that of course had to be trashed when Mozilla came out.
Standards are of course the best way to move forward, but they are not the universal panacea that everyone here is making them out to be. First of all, there's 10,000,000,000 web sites and intranet apps out there, and they aren't all going to be W3C compliant overnight. Second, not every browser supports every standard -- You could write a 100% standards-compliant site that works in IE but not Mozilla, for example. But if Mozilla support is a requirement, you're going to have to make it work in Mozilla (or Safari or whatever).
Nobody would have started using IE if it didn't incorporate all the non-standard quirks of old versions of Netscape.
First of all, let's be clear -- Mozilla accepts all sorts of non-standard stuff. However, they don't accept non-standard stuff when it was invented by Microsoft, rather than Netscape.
If Mozilla were to make a couple minor tweaks, they could easily be compatible with the majority of "non-standard" IE sites. However, they decided they were not going to be compatible with IE when they had a 50% marketshare, and apparenlty that's the decision they'll stick with even with a 1% marketshare. Their choice, but Mozilla Advocates shouldn't not be suprised because adoption is very slow.
(This is ignoring all the sites that don't want to work in Mozilla and actively sniff browser strings. That's basically a marketshare issue.)
The key difference between Microsoft and IBM/Apple/Digital Research/Lotus/Everyone Else is that Microsoft priced stuff cheap and marketed their products for maximum adoption. Everyone else was trying to fatten their bottom line.
You could argue that others were willing to bring the PC Revolution to the masses, but Microsoft was certainly the most agressive and successful at doing so.
It's just like Henry Ford -- he wasn't the first to use assembly line and mass marketing techniques, but he was most successful at doing so, and thus his name is in the history books.
I have a Model 100 here -- it's fairly well constructed, but it's still a hunk of consumer plastic. I'm pretty sure I could destroy it by throwing on the floor a few times.
Maybe you are talking about some industrial model that I'm not aware of.
Nah, I'm not against anyone trying to win -- only the guys that take uniforms and then spaz out 30 seconds later and loose them -- or run right back towards your team and die in a hail of friendly fire.
I have noticed that even the Coverts that know what they are doing rarely spot mines though.
It's also a personal frustration of mine -- I hate joining a random server and having half my teammates being useless n00bs who are making no attempt to complete (or even learn) the objectives. It is a kick-ass game, so if you are willing to put some time into it, go for it.
Also, if you are new to ET, don't bother being a sniper or stealing people's pants. Most of the time, that's really no help at all.
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Is it possible to disable these plain text certificates?
I just looked through Firefox and IE and don't see any clearly marked as "Plain Text". The only one that looks slightly funky is "NO LIABILITY ACCEPTED, (c)97 VeriSign, Inc."; "VeriSign Time Stamping Service Root"
Mac Performas used to ship with such an interface, because (get this) Apple found that the Mac Finder was too hard for new users.
Basically it was a full screen shell with two tabs - one with buttons for all your applications, and the other with a list of all your documents. (maybe someone can remind me what this thing was called.)
It also used to be common to use a "boot menu" on corporate DOS systems - when you turned the computer on it prompted you (1) WordPerfect (2) 1-2-3 (3) ccMail and so on.
> Technical merit of the format had nothing to do with it.
Well, the Flash plugin is far less than 1MB, which is certainly a technical consideration. Furthermore, the client software is quite lightweight and ran well even on Pentium machines. None of that is true for Adobe SVG at least.
Your points about Flash versus SVG certainly hold some truth, but that only reinforces that SVG will co-exist with Flash, not replace it.
Would binaries compiled for UnixWare work with the Linux kernel?
Yes. Lookup "iBCS" or "Linux-ABI". Many of the howtos for this feature suggest copying shared libs from a SCO box.
Why AutoZone? 90% of SCO's current customer base are Retail Point-Of-Sale users.
By suing one of their own former Retail customers, they're basically trying to scare their current customer base to stay on SCO UNIX until this is resovled some how (or get them to pay for "Linux Licences" if they are serious about converting). This buys SCO a few more quarters of revenue before all the rats flee the sinking ship.
This makes a lot more sense than suing a bank or an insurance company or someone else that doesn't give a crap about SCO. Retail users can not afford to be SCO's enemy in the short term.
Yes, I agree that's inane, but I'm not the one saying it.
Give up trying to be a "platform". Not gonna happen
... just that positioning Mozilla as a competitor to .NET or Java is stupid and has been utterly unsuccessful so far. There's always going to be strong market for HTML and XML-based content and that's what a webbrowser should focus on.)
Yup. Trying to take on Microsoft and Sun and Macromedia in the development tools market is a doomed plan from the start. I would have hoped this "rule the world" attitude would have died along with Netscape.
(Note I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with SVG etc
"Help for WordPerfect" was sort of a hack. Microsoft probably would have rather supported a mode that accepted WordPerfect commands directly, but at that time Lotus was suing people for copying their key commands.
By the time that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't copyright "look'n'feel", Word/Excel had gained so much marketshare that the keyboard issue wasn't important anymroe.
My informal survey of WordPerfect in Law Offices over the last few years --
+ Two ran version 6.x for Windows (complete with Novell logo)
+ One ran version 5.1 for DOS (older attorney)
+ One ran version 8
None of them were remotely using anything near a current version of the product. They might have been loyal users, but they sure weren't keeping the company afloat.
But you're right that the move to Word was basically driven by "cooperative collaboration". I heard of one case where a firm was trying to get lucrative tech customers in the late 90s, and was literally laughed at for using WordPerfect.
You know, there really is no such thing as "negligable and insignificant" ownership. I'm tired of Gnome people hyping up the Canopy connection as well, but I'm equally tired of KDE people trying to brush it under the rug as inmaterial.
If you watch how Microsoft operates, they rarely buy up 51% of company and take total control. Rather they "invest" for a 5% ownership and a seat on the board, but only to ensure the strategic changes they want are implemented. You really have to ask yourself why a venture/vulture outfit like Canopy has invested in TrollTech -- it's not just for giggles.
At the very least one can assume that Canopy/SCO is gaining significant market intelligence about who is building cross-platform applications and how many -- which can be very valuable information to the right people. That means if you buy QT, you can be sure that Ralph Yarro knows your name.
There's also the question of WHY TrollTech priced their toolkit at a traditionally expensive "UNIX" level, rather than @ the $300 or so you'd expect for a "PC" dev tool. If anything that fits into SCO's vision of UNIX as an expensive exotic OS rather than the commodity model pushed by Linux vendors.
(Just some thoughts -- I'm totally neutral in the Gnome/KDE flamewar.)
The transition from 16->32-bit was grotesquely mismanaged in PC world. Intel sat back while their largest customer (IBM) released an OS that was obsolete on arrival (OS/2). And then they sat back and watched MS bleed the life out of all sorts of half-assed hacks. In those days Intel was much more of a traditional "IC" company -- release the datasheet, sit back and wait.
Using the 32-bit transition as guide for How To Do It is retarded. While it's true that Intel is following AMD, blaming them for lining up Microsoft and Dell before making an announcement is a little obtuse. Rather than waiting 15 years for the 64-bit transition to complete, it should be over in 3.
getElementById() was first supported in IE6
IE 5.0 actually. There's nobody left who "needs" document.all, just like nobody codes DHTML for Netscape 4 anymore.
By using document.getElementById() the author is pretty much saying he/she gives a damn about standards compliance
Incorrect assumption. One can copy getElementById() scripts right off msdn.microsoft.com that use all sorts of funky IE-only stuff.
you can't rely on the DOM tree to look the same in different web browsers
Yeah, but how many scripts actually "walk" the DOM tree? Most of the library code I've seen just get an element and then hides/shows/positions it. Maybe there's scripts that do fundementally different things with the same HTML document in different browsers, but I haven't seen them.
I don't suppose we'll ever come to an agreement on this subject other than to agree to disagree
Not really -- I just started working with a bunch of JS that our design guy found somewhere, so I'm starting to see your point about the amount of totally barfy javascript out there.
However, the fact remains that Mozilla adoption has been going very s-l-o-w-l-y, and the lack of an easy migration path for webdevs is big part of that. Now that the line in the sand has been drawn, and Mozilla code is being written, you're probably correct that it's too late to add document.all support.
I think it's kinda of a half-empty/half-full thing too. You listen to Mozilla guys and they moan and groan about how standards incompliant IE is, but without Microsoft's early support for the W3C DOM, we probably wouldn't have a standard worth complaining about.
Late reply, with a couple points.
(1) Using "document.all" to infer if the user is using IE or a "standards compliant browser" (by which you mean Mozilla, specifically) is a horribly broken way of doing things. Given all the different browsers that do support document.all, I doubt this works for anything but the most trivial cases where the DOM will be rendered nearly identically in every browser.
Any script of significant complexity that is not browser-independent will need to use User Agent sniffing. A good example that bit me a few months ago is tableRow.style.display = "block". Which is apparently HTML4/CSS1 compliant, but Mozilla uses "table-row" from CSS2. Impossible to support without coding to specific browsers.
(2) My background is working with intranet and vertical market codemonkeys -- these folks generally are targeting specific browsers (meaning IE/Windows) and they do not code browser checks if they can avoid it. Nowdays they do use document.getElementById() (the news that document.all is legacy has gotten out even in the MS world), but that wasn't true a few years ago.
Given that the Mozilla and IE DOMs are nearly identical (ignoring IE exentions that nobody ever uses), getElementById() code written for IE generally runs 95% perfectly on Mozilla, in my experience. document.all code would do the same, if given a chance.
Now, it sounds like you are coming from the HTML guy's perspective, where these's all these crusty libraries that do things like rollovers and so on. I guess that some of these might have completely different codepaths for IE, Netscape 4, and Mozilla. But from what I've seen, they generally assume an similar DOM and just sniff for document.all to get the correct lookup-method.
You bring up IE's bugs and malformed DOM and so on, but realistically it's a pretty rare problem, and any page which relies on that stuff is not going to work in Mozilla at all unless it is fixed. So, that's a non-argument as far as I'm concerned. (A worse problem are pages designed to IE5's broken CSS model.)
I guess I'm not in any position to say what would break if Mozilla supported document.all, but I can say that tons of stuff would start working.
Back in the day, I knew several people that were totally into the original UT, but played with software rendering on real lowspec machines that you could never play Quake 3 on.
It would be nice to have a game again that you could actually play on the dull dells on the office LAN.
Unlike sucky layers, the IE DOM was based on W3C -- not all document.all code would work on Mozilla, but probably 80-90% of would work unmodified. And that would make Mozilla Users happy.
Current IE developers use document.getElementById() and then don't bother testing in Mozilla/Opera/Safari/etc, so this problem is not unique to document.all.
It's more alive than the Commodore 64.
Good to hear, that was one of the things on my Mozilla Should Support This short list.
Yes, document.all is horribly maldesigned, but it actually predates document.getElementById(). And bad design has never stopped anyone when we are talking about web browser features.
.... code out there and because it's not 1999 anymore there's not tons of web developers sitting around to fix this stuff.
I'm arguing wrt legacy code bases, by the way. There's a ton of if (document.all)
This is actually a wise decision -- I worked for a company that developed some very fancy DHTML for IE 4.0, only to find out that it didn't work at all in IE 5.0. There's also some totally undocumented stuff like "window.elementName" that works *sometimes* in IE, but not all the time.
I've also seen a bunch of "layers" code for Netscape 4 that of course had to be trashed when Mozilla came out.
Standards are of course the best way to move forward, but they are not the universal panacea that everyone here is making them out to be. First of all, there's 10,000,000,000 web sites and intranet apps out there, and they aren't all going to be W3C compliant overnight. Second, not every browser supports every standard -- You could write a 100% standards-compliant site that works in IE but not Mozilla, for example. But if Mozilla support is a requirement, you're going to have to make it work in Mozilla (or Safari or whatever).
Sounds like BS to me. How would supporting document.all (for example) "break" a W3C standard or break standards-based rendering?
I've also seen too many Bugzilla tickets where the Mozilla dev makes it clear that IE compat is not wanted to believe you.
Nobody would have started using IE if it didn't incorporate all the non-standard quirks of old versions of Netscape.
First of all, let's be clear -- Mozilla accepts all sorts of non-standard stuff. However, they don't accept non-standard stuff when it was invented by Microsoft, rather than Netscape.
If Mozilla were to make a couple minor tweaks, they could easily be compatible with the majority of "non-standard" IE sites. However, they decided they were not going to be compatible with IE when they had a 50% marketshare, and apparenlty that's the decision they'll stick with even with a 1% marketshare. Their choice, but Mozilla Advocates shouldn't not be suprised because adoption is very slow.
(This is ignoring all the sites that don't want to work in Mozilla and actively sniff browser strings. That's basically a marketshare issue.)
The key difference between Microsoft and IBM/Apple/Digital Research/Lotus/Everyone Else is that Microsoft priced stuff cheap and marketed their products for maximum adoption. Everyone else was trying to fatten their bottom line.
You could argue that others were willing to bring the PC Revolution to the masses, but Microsoft was certainly the most agressive and successful at doing so.
It's just like Henry Ford -- he wasn't the first to use assembly line and mass marketing techniques, but he was most successful at doing so, and thus his name is in the history books.
I have a Model 100 here -- it's fairly well constructed, but it's still a hunk of consumer plastic. I'm pretty sure I could destroy it by throwing on the floor a few times.
Maybe you are talking about some industrial model that I'm not aware of.
Nah, I'm not against anyone trying to win -- only the guys that take uniforms and then spaz out 30 seconds later and loose them -- or run right back towards your team and die in a hail of friendly fire.
I have noticed that even the Coverts that know what they are doing rarely spot mines though.
It's also a personal frustration of mine -- I hate joining a random server and having half my teammates being useless n00bs who are making no attempt to complete (or even learn) the objectives. It is a kick-ass game, so if you are willing to put some time into it, go for it.
Also, if you are new to ET, don't bother being a sniper or stealing people's pants. Most of the time, that's really no help at all.