FWIW, you might be thinking of IR35. This was basically there to close a tax loophole, but the fix was badly implemented (whether deliberately or through incompetence is left as an exercise for the reader) such that it pretty much screwed legitimate private contractors in various fields as well, IT being one of the more obvious ones. A whole load of people who used to work on contract turned permanent when it came in. It's not a show-stopper, but it does make private work less appealing on the financial side.
Thanks for the extra thoughts. Unfortunately as I'm in the UK, not all of it will apply to me personally, though I'm sure it will be of interest to others thinking similarly in the US as well.
The thing that concerns me the most right now is that even though I work in a relatively high-tech city, and could find many potentially interesting jobs as a full-time employee, there's definitely a trend here for the companies to want in-house staff only: many of their web sites' job pages explicitly state that they aren't looking for contractors or some similar restriction. The kind of contract employment agencies you mentioned sound like a good way to start out, but I'm not sure we have many around right now (or maybe we do, but I just don't know where to find them).
Anyway, thanks again for the comments. I'll keep your suggestions in mind as I look for good opportunities to go freelance.
I don't work for free even as a full-time employee.:-)
But I have a lot of sympathy for your views. The only reason I haven't already gone the contractor/consultant route is hesitation about getting the first few safe jobs on the books. Everyone who's been there seems to advise doing this before giving up the day job, but it seems quite difficult to know where to start until you've got the time from giving up the day job to invest in client-hunting.:-(
IME, if your point is reasonable, you will not be the only one.
A while ago, my (formerly small and privately owned) employer was bought out by a much larger corporation. One of the first things they did was try to change everyone's contract to their national standard boilerplate. Unfortunately, that boilerplate included clauses that affect life outside work. They required permission to get any additional paid work, even things like playing semi-pro musical gigs at your local bar for beer money, or tutoring a few kids for some extra cash. They claimed IP rights to everything you ever did, regardless of any connection to the employment. You get the idea.
I think they thought I was just a lone whinger when I objected to these terms, which were a far cry from our previous, reasonably balanced contracts. They were wrong. In fact, a substantial proportion of the staff stood by me, either because they felt strongly about some or all of my points themselves once I'd drawn attention to them, or simply because they thought I was being reasonable and were showing solidarity with fellow staff. I can't remember how many people got fired during the whole exercise, but let's just say they were all in HR and the offending contractual areas were changed back.
Now, if your point is unreasonable and you really are just being selfish given the job you signed up for, no-one will back you up. You'll have to put up or get out, and I doubt your employer will care because they'll find someone more reasonable to replace you. But if all you're asking is for a fair deal, you might be surprised about how many of your colleagues will stand with you when it comes to crunch time.
Obviously a McDonald's burger flipper couldn't say this stuff if it applied to them, they would be replaced too easily.
A McDonald's burger flipper probably gets paid an hourly rate, and I bet they expect more pay if they work more hours. It's ironic that in "better" jobs like those in IT, a culture has developed among a certain type of employer that "It's a salaried position" is an acceptable euphemism for "We own your soul, 24/7".
As others have noted, the correct solution to this problem is for all the good people to collectively turn around and tell the over-demanding employers where to go. A competitive employment market works both ways, and good IT people are always worth far more to a business than their relative salary suggests. Except in the hardest of times (and usually only for a short while even then) these people will easily be able to find work with a more reasonable employer if they choose to look for it. Even the abusive employers know that, they just rely on people not bothering to look.
If the 80% marketshare of a totally inferior product
See, before you even start, you've already stated as a fact that IE is inferior. To me, despite the fact that I have used alternative browsers for a while now, IE has some compelling objective advantages too and I use it at work.
For one, while the typical Slashdot-reading geek hates ActiveX with a passion, it's still the basis for numerous corporate intranet features all over the planet. The Firefox crowd can whinge about security all they like, but most people will consider a browser that doesn't do something at all to be inferior to one that does something useful but may have security flaws if the person setting up the system isn't careful. (I do wonder how many people on Slashdot who complain about ActiveX actually know anything about why it's potentially dangerous, and how many just parrot the line because "everyone else does".)
For another thing, IE never wiped out all my carefully configured options and preferences during a Microsoft update. The same cannot be said for Firefox, which downloaded and installed an update to an add-on that promptly forgot every customisation I'd ever made to the options for Firefox itself and most of the add-ons I use. That is a show-stopping bug that completely undermines the entire add-on model in FF. Ironically, given the subject of this discussion, I've been considering installing Opera instead.
If Microsoft would have kept to standards and then got an 80% marketshare, in a honest competition with the rest of the market, it would be a totally different story.
You're young, aren't you? At least, I assume you must be, or you'd remember the serious browser wars from a few years ago, when there were no real standards to speak of. IE established itself as the dominant browser before most people had even heard of the W3C, and long before all the web standards advocates starting harping on about how terrible IE is because it doesn't follow the standards.
Standards, in the formal written document sense, are supposed to document the standard, in the sense of what the industry actually does, so others can work in a compatible way. If the W3C wrote standards (actually, the W3C themselves don't use that word much, apparently preferring the more neutral-sounding "recommendations") that don't reflect what the browser with more than half the market share actually did at the time, is the browser at fault or is the "standard"? It's not as though the way IE does things like the box model is a mystery; it's just a different (and in that case, arguably more logical) approach, which could have been documented in the standard just as easily.
None of this is specific to Microsoft and web browsers, but in any case, as I said before, how is it Microsoft's problem if the losers in the industry (according to the market) chose to go their own way, and now find they aren't friends with the biggest boy in the playground? Why should the law bail them out for making a bad business decision? No-one forced the Firefox developers to be really stubborn about following only W3C specs and not providing a compatibility mode for the way the web actually worked at the time they joined the game. No-one forced Opera to keep the product expensive in a market where their competitors were available for free, and thus inevitably to limit their market share to something very small for a long time. If the market supported these alternatives more, then the W3C recommendations would be more important, and market forces would compel Microsoft to follow them if it wanted IE to remain competitive, without any help from the courts.
There are issues with Microsoft's monopoly abuse. I certainly don't condone their behaviour in that respect. But forcing them to unbundle IE in a meaningful way is one thing; telling them what they may and may not do with their own product in a free market because of the way it hurts competitors who the market currently co
It's also a way to point out to the uninformed masses that Opera is the only browser for Windows right now that passes the Acid2 test.
And apart from a relatively small number of people who develop web sites, no-one cares, because many of the technicalities in Acid2 are more about what your browser does with bad data it should never get in the first place from a well-designed web site. However, many people care that right now IE displays, say, their bank's web site properly while $SOME_ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER does not.
I would be very disturbed if the standards element of the lawsuit (assuming the summary given is accurate) gets anywhere. That would imply that the recommendation of a group of unelected people in a self-appointed standards body can legally compel an organisation with 80+% market share to change anything about how its wildly successful product works to benefit inferior (according to the market) competitors. What legal or ethical basis is there for such compulsion?
Challenging potential monopoly abuse and market distortion is reasonable. Complaining about a successful business not choosing to follow the recommendations of anyone much less successful's document for anything is a very dangerous path to tread.
I'm sure Google's lawyers will see it the same way. <evil grin>
Does anyone know what the situation is with ISPs, common carrier status, etc. in Canada? This sort of abuse seems so vulnerable to legal action on so many different bases that I'm surprised they'd even try it, but maybe their lawyers are more careful about testing the water than their PR people.
I don't dispute that Nokia are presumably doing this out of enlightened self-interest.
But those "certain realities about the install base" you mentioned are rather significant, too. Like many other people here, you are implicitly assuming that putting some specific format into HTML5 would somehow guarantee that all major browsers, including IE, would support it. You need only look at the CSS support across browsers to see that this is not necessarily so, and that most people continue to use IE and most web developers therefore continue to support it even though it's a royal PITA.
Ultimately, a "standard" that isn't followed by the guy with most of the market share is just a talking point for the guys who lost. If you want to make a relevant HTML5 standard that will actually get adopted and thus prove useful to web developers and the web-browsing public within a useful time frame, you stay well away from the kind of divisive politics that this discussion brings out.
I'm sorry, but I have a number of problems with your argument.
Firstly, I don't accept the premise that it is the job of an HTML standard to specify what supplementary formats may be used on web sites. The web is, by its nature, multi-format, and HTTP can cope quite happily with encoding many different file types to match. That is why content-type exists. HTML is merely one format, and its remit is describing the content and structure of a web page and, depending on your philosophy, perhaps some basic presentation. De facto standards have worked fine for supplementary things like graphics formats so far, and I see no practical reason the market can't decide in the same way on one or perhaps a small number of common video formats to use. It's not as though web browsers can only support one common format, or as though you can't download a file in an unsupported format and play it using an independent media player installed locally.
Secondly, I'm afraid you vastly overestimate the importance of Firefox. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you have 80–90% of the market share, you define the standard for all practical purposes. Right now, that means that Microsoft has all the power and anyone aiming to run a commercial enterprise based on supplying video or audio over the web is going to prioritise supporting IE over anything else. Those who believe in open standards and OSS may not like this, but that's the reality today and there's no use denying it.
There seems to be a bizarre delusion throughout this Slashdot discussion that putting something like Ogg into HTML5 somehow guarantees that in a couple of years all the major browsers will have Ogg support. The reality, I suspect, is rather different. If the HTML5 standard goes with some specific standard like Ogg and Microsoft decides not to support it as a result, we'll just be in the same boat we've been in with CSS for years: on paper, and in numerous browsers with small user bases, it seems great, but no-one providing content can rely on it because the biggest spender in town isn't paying up, so ultimately it's just a waste of time. If a big player like Nokia has a commercial interest in avoiding Ogg becoming more widely used, they could no doubt make some commercial deal with Microsoft to "overlook" certain provisions in the HTML5 spec just as easily as lobbying to get Ogg removed from the spec itself.
I'm sure no-one who's been working on the HTML side of the HTML5 spec wants to see their work thrown away, so their decision not to get involved in what is frankly a political mess is unsurprising. If the problems with proprietary formats become significant further down the line, the web world is a big one and will no doubt take care of them, just as the popularity of PNG has been increasing at GIF's expense for some time.
And if you look carefully... They aren't recommended by HTML. In fact, as far as I can see, the only mention of them in any W3C Recommendation for any flavour of HTML is as an example of what might be identified by an <img> tag.
This is as it should be. I have no problem with HTML providing generic elements to include graphics, multi-media content and such. But we have extensible mechanisms, such as content-type, to indicate which specific formats are used when files are supplied as a result of these generic elements. There is simply no need for a mark-up language like HTML to be involving itself in anything other than mark-up.
Now, play fair. If YouTube choose to supply their content using a format for which they have to pay some sort of royalty, that is their decision, which they will presumably take on a commercial basis. They are perfectly at liberty to supply their content in an alternative, legally unencumbered format — such as Ogg — if they wish. And yet they do not choose to do so. That tells us a lot.
Please note that while what's supported by the browsers of YouTube users is clearly a factor here, there is no particular reason to believe that mandating otherwise in the HTML5 spec would improve this situation. Many a web spec has died by proposing commercially/politically stupid things that no-one cared about. The result isn't everyone following the spec, it's everyone ignoring the spec.
Closed source solutions like Flash aren't solutions at all. Flash isn't even a video format. It's an animated vector format that's been used as a hack to deliver raster video. It's far from the ideal solution; the only reason it was ever used is because it is relatively widespread. "Relatively." There's still a good number of us who are left out in the cold.
Really? What proportion of people who browse the web do you think use Firefox on Linux? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%?
Your argument is like saying that because not everyone has access to high speed broadband, we shouldn't provide any material in a format that needs the bandwidth... except that in most cases, those who don't have it don't have a choice, whereas I expect you do and you actively chose to use a system with a limited user base in the full knowledge that it is non-standard and has some limitations.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think the current situation is ideal, and I appreciate that there are benefits to open standards. But from a pragmatic perspective, the way to solve a problem like yours is not to try and get more than you deserve from another standard and use it as leverage. That just makes you look selfish, and fights one dubious process with another corrupt one.
By being half-assed and not specifying a standard for a widely used aspect of the web browsing experience, what is in effect happening is a de-facto endorsement of all of those pet proprietary formats at the expense of clarity and allowing the various companies to rape the public with a million of buggy plug-ins, each with its own flavour of the week. The very anathema of a "standard".
Have you quite finished? Geez, it's a wonder multimedia-based services like YouTube even work on... just about every browser on the planet.
The Web-using public has proven itself quite capable of adopting new technologies that serve their purposes, and working on the basis of popular de facto standards. If any proprietary technology ceases to serve the needs of the Web-browsing public, that technology will most likely be replaced in fairly short order by another that does serve the public need. This sort of thing has been happening since the dawn of browsers and the old IE vs. Netscape browser wars.
There are advantages to having a truly open standard, but for something that evolves as fast as the Web, we've seen time and again that de facto standards that are technically sensible and practically useful are way more valuable than any formal document produced by a standards body. This whole discussion sounds a lot like people who like a relatively unpopular format bitching because they were hoping their preference would be forced on the rest of the world based on politics rather than technical merit, and they lost the argument.
A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics and that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML would be the best way for the new web.
I think I might agree with you, but I'm not sure exactly what you're proposing.
At present, you can already provide XHTML for your basic web page structure, and supplement it with other XML dialects such as SVG and MathML if necessary. Technically, this should be a moderately powerful combination, but it's awkward to use because everything is so ludicrously over-specified and browser support is feeble, so it's stuck in the vicious circle of many good technologies with insufficient user bases. (I once tried to get a web site I was working on to generate some simple SVG charts as part of an XHTML page, rather than dumping report data in purely tabular form using HTML. I gave up after several days of effort, because I just couldn't get it to work reliably in even one browser.)
It seems to me that what's missing from the modern web is more in the presentation layer than the content mark-up. CSS is hopelessly underpowered compared to the fluid layout equivalent of a page description language like PDF or PostScript. There are things like XSL:FO, but again, the installed base and marketing push is so tiny that I doubt that will get anywhere on the mainstream web. The result is lots of nasty, hacky HTML that breaks in many less-known browsers but supports enough of the big names to work for most of the particular site's visitors. Anything more clever just gets done in Flash.
Now, get a big player like Microsoft or Adobe to introduce a serious "fluid page description language" that could cope with the nature of web browsing and supported easy, powerful layout constructs and things like animation, multimedia and basics like vector graphics and fonts reasonably, and I think you'd have a winner. But realistically, if it doesn't have the commercial backing of a big player like that (and I'm sorry, but if your software isn't on the majority of browsing desktops you don't count), it's hard to see something like this catching on any time soon.
I'm sorry, but how is it a loss for the public to remove any reference to specific media formats from a specification that should by its nature be format independent? Ogg had no more business being in an HTML spec than WMV, RA, or some Flash-based video player.
For what it's worth, pretty much everyone reported in the UK press seems to like this idea. All the major political parties are behind it. The relevant parts of the energy industry are behind it, of course. But the environmental lobby are behind it, too, and there have been very few dissenting voices generally.
Basically, we have a lot of untapped, renewable resources in this area, and doing it off-shore both increases the yields and reduces the eyesore and wastage of land (a relatively scarce resource in our country already, before you even start considering issues of aesthetics).
The only real downsides noted so far seem to be concerns about hurting off-shore wildlife, but even those were more in the nature of "please be careful" than "this will be a disaster".
When you compile C the assembly code looks like the C code. You can do it yourself at least as well as gcc, usually better.
That is exceedingly unlikely. It might have been true a decade or two ago, but modern advances in both compiler optimisations and processor design mean those days are long gone. The odds of anyone but a genuinely expert assembly language programmer generating assembly that outperforms a good optimising C compiler are pretty slim these days (unless the compiler in question has an unusually bad flaw in a certain area of its code generator, of course).
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Don't worry, I won't take it personally.:-)
Of course, the reason those things don't affect me very much is that I only use them once in a blue moon when I'm writing some low-level library function. Everything else is built with more powerful types that handle their own memory management, just as you get by default in scripting languages.
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I'm sure there are thousands of C, C++, and maybe even Java developers than can accomplish anything I can do in 20 lines of Perl with 15 lines of their own code. But in most cases, it would be damn difficult to read.
I doubt it's even true. Languages like C++ and Java are good for very different things than languages like Perl and Python. I suspect it's unlikely that a typical concise, 20-line Perl script could be written in 20 remotely sensible lines of C++, just as it's unlikely than a typical 1M LOC long-term project that can be structured effectively in C++ could be written at all in Perl. In either case, the lesser language simply isn't the right tool for that particular job.
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Yep, you're absolutely right: generic language wars are generally fairly pointless exercises.
I do think there's a place for objective discussion of the relative merits of languages in different contexts. After all, as you say, we want to choose the best tool for the job. Learning about the experiences of others who have used the tools you're choosing between might help to make a good choice, though of course unless you're planning to write the same program they did, it's not the be-all and end-all.
What I don't like is factually incorrect statements or misleading commentary. These just introduce bias into the picture, and that's the last thing you need if you're trying to evaluate several possible language choices. That's why I dislike all the C++ memory management bashing and equating it with C.
Is the fact that dynamic datastructures (lists, hashes) are native, so programmers don't have to worry about mundane memory address and pointer nonsense.
I guess you haven't used STL.
Assuming you're referring to the container classes in the C++ standard library, those are nothing close to having first class data structures and good language support for them. You can't write literals using them, for a start. Even what they do do is clumsier than in languages with built-in support, e.g., Perl's neat sort keys %hash, Python's yield facility and for loop, Haskell's pattern matching for list processing, and many similar ideas in these and many other languages.
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Sorry, my bad.;-)
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Before anyone else points it out, I realised that my final sentence in the parent post reads as though I think dynamic typing is necessary for a high-level language. I don't think this is so in general, but in the context of scripting languages, I think it's one of the key features that lets you write higher level code more easily. In a statically typed language, some sort of type inference serves a similar role, keeping the code generic and cutting out unnecessary boilerplate code.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, you might be thinking of IR35. This was basically there to close a tax loophole, but the fix was badly implemented (whether deliberately or through incompetence is left as an exercise for the reader) such that it pretty much screwed legitimate private contractors in various fields as well, IT being one of the more obvious ones. A whole load of people who used to work on contract turned permanent when it came in. It's not a show-stopper, but it does make private work less appealing on the financial side.
Thanks for the extra thoughts. Unfortunately as I'm in the UK, not all of it will apply to me personally, though I'm sure it will be of interest to others thinking similarly in the US as well.
The thing that concerns me the most right now is that even though I work in a relatively high-tech city, and could find many potentially interesting jobs as a full-time employee, there's definitely a trend here for the companies to want in-house staff only: many of their web sites' job pages explicitly state that they aren't looking for contractors or some similar restriction. The kind of contract employment agencies you mentioned sound like a good way to start out, but I'm not sure we have many around right now (or maybe we do, but I just don't know where to find them).
Anyway, thanks again for the comments. I'll keep your suggestions in mind as I look for good opportunities to go freelance.
I don't work for free even as a full-time employee. :-)
But I have a lot of sympathy for your views. The only reason I haven't already gone the contractor/consultant route is hesitation about getting the first few safe jobs on the books. Everyone who's been there seems to advise doing this before giving up the day job, but it seems quite difficult to know where to start until you've got the time from giving up the day job to invest in client-hunting. :-(
Yes, but if you are the only one...
IME, if your point is reasonable, you will not be the only one.
A while ago, my (formerly small and privately owned) employer was bought out by a much larger corporation. One of the first things they did was try to change everyone's contract to their national standard boilerplate. Unfortunately, that boilerplate included clauses that affect life outside work. They required permission to get any additional paid work, even things like playing semi-pro musical gigs at your local bar for beer money, or tutoring a few kids for some extra cash. They claimed IP rights to everything you ever did, regardless of any connection to the employment. You get the idea.
I think they thought I was just a lone whinger when I objected to these terms, which were a far cry from our previous, reasonably balanced contracts. They were wrong. In fact, a substantial proportion of the staff stood by me, either because they felt strongly about some or all of my points themselves once I'd drawn attention to them, or simply because they thought I was being reasonable and were showing solidarity with fellow staff. I can't remember how many people got fired during the whole exercise, but let's just say they were all in HR and the offending contractual areas were changed back.
Now, if your point is unreasonable and you really are just being selfish given the job you signed up for, no-one will back you up. You'll have to put up or get out, and I doubt your employer will care because they'll find someone more reasonable to replace you. But if all you're asking is for a fair deal, you might be surprised about how many of your colleagues will stand with you when it comes to crunch time.
Obviously a McDonald's burger flipper couldn't say this stuff if it applied to them, they would be replaced too easily.
A McDonald's burger flipper probably gets paid an hourly rate, and I bet they expect more pay if they work more hours. It's ironic that in "better" jobs like those in IT, a culture has developed among a certain type of employer that "It's a salaried position" is an acceptable euphemism for "We own your soul, 24/7".
As others have noted, the correct solution to this problem is for all the good people to collectively turn around and tell the over-demanding employers where to go. A competitive employment market works both ways, and good IT people are always worth far more to a business than their relative salary suggests. Except in the hardest of times (and usually only for a short while even then) these people will easily be able to find work with a more reasonable employer if they choose to look for it. Even the abusive employers know that, they just rely on people not bothering to look.
If the 80% marketshare of a totally inferior product
See, before you even start, you've already stated as a fact that IE is inferior. To me, despite the fact that I have used alternative browsers for a while now, IE has some compelling objective advantages too and I use it at work.
For one, while the typical Slashdot-reading geek hates ActiveX with a passion, it's still the basis for numerous corporate intranet features all over the planet. The Firefox crowd can whinge about security all they like, but most people will consider a browser that doesn't do something at all to be inferior to one that does something useful but may have security flaws if the person setting up the system isn't careful. (I do wonder how many people on Slashdot who complain about ActiveX actually know anything about why it's potentially dangerous, and how many just parrot the line because "everyone else does".)
For another thing, IE never wiped out all my carefully configured options and preferences during a Microsoft update. The same cannot be said for Firefox, which downloaded and installed an update to an add-on that promptly forgot every customisation I'd ever made to the options for Firefox itself and most of the add-ons I use. That is a show-stopping bug that completely undermines the entire add-on model in FF. Ironically, given the subject of this discussion, I've been considering installing Opera instead.
If Microsoft would have kept to standards and then got an 80% marketshare, in a honest competition with the rest of the market, it would be a totally different story.
You're young, aren't you? At least, I assume you must be, or you'd remember the serious browser wars from a few years ago, when there were no real standards to speak of. IE established itself as the dominant browser before most people had even heard of the W3C, and long before all the web standards advocates starting harping on about how terrible IE is because it doesn't follow the standards.
Standards, in the formal written document sense, are supposed to document the standard, in the sense of what the industry actually does, so others can work in a compatible way. If the W3C wrote standards (actually, the W3C themselves don't use that word much, apparently preferring the more neutral-sounding "recommendations") that don't reflect what the browser with more than half the market share actually did at the time, is the browser at fault or is the "standard"? It's not as though the way IE does things like the box model is a mystery; it's just a different (and in that case, arguably more logical) approach, which could have been documented in the standard just as easily.
None of this is specific to Microsoft and web browsers, but in any case, as I said before, how is it Microsoft's problem if the losers in the industry (according to the market) chose to go their own way, and now find they aren't friends with the biggest boy in the playground? Why should the law bail them out for making a bad business decision? No-one forced the Firefox developers to be really stubborn about following only W3C specs and not providing a compatibility mode for the way the web actually worked at the time they joined the game. No-one forced Opera to keep the product expensive in a market where their competitors were available for free, and thus inevitably to limit their market share to something very small for a long time. If the market supported these alternatives more, then the W3C recommendations would be more important, and market forces would compel Microsoft to follow them if it wanted IE to remain competitive, without any help from the courts.
There are issues with Microsoft's monopoly abuse. I certainly don't condone their behaviour in that respect. But forcing them to unbundle IE in a meaningful way is one thing; telling them what they may and may not do with their own product in a free market because of the way it hurts competitors who the market currently co
It's also a way to point out to the uninformed masses that Opera is the only browser for Windows right now that passes the Acid2 test.
And apart from a relatively small number of people who develop web sites, no-one cares, because many of the technicalities in Acid2 are more about what your browser does with bad data it should never get in the first place from a well-designed web site. However, many people care that right now IE displays, say, their bank's web site properly while $SOME_ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER does not.
I would be very disturbed if the standards element of the lawsuit (assuming the summary given is accurate) gets anywhere. That would imply that the recommendation of a group of unelected people in a self-appointed standards body can legally compel an organisation with 80+% market share to change anything about how its wildly successful product works to benefit inferior (according to the market) competitors. What legal or ethical basis is there for such compulsion?
Challenging potential monopoly abuse and market distortion is reasonable. Complaining about a successful business not choosing to follow the recommendations of anyone much less successful's document for anything is a very dangerous path to tread.
Ah-ha! Now I understand what people mean about an "American sense of humour". :-)
I'm sure Google's lawyers will see it the same way. <evil grin>
Does anyone know what the situation is with ISPs, common carrier status, etc. in Canada? This sort of abuse seems so vulnerable to legal action on so many different bases that I'm surprised they'd even try it, but maybe their lawyers are more careful about testing the water than their PR people.
I don't dispute that Nokia are presumably doing this out of enlightened self-interest.
But those "certain realities about the install base" you mentioned are rather significant, too. Like many other people here, you are implicitly assuming that putting some specific format into HTML5 would somehow guarantee that all major browsers, including IE, would support it. You need only look at the CSS support across browsers to see that this is not necessarily so, and that most people continue to use IE and most web developers therefore continue to support it even though it's a royal PITA.
Ultimately, a "standard" that isn't followed by the guy with most of the market share is just a talking point for the guys who lost. If you want to make a relevant HTML5 standard that will actually get adopted and thus prove useful to web developers and the web-browsing public within a useful time frame, you stay well away from the kind of divisive politics that this discussion brings out.
I'm sorry, but I have a number of problems with your argument.
Firstly, I don't accept the premise that it is the job of an HTML standard to specify what supplementary formats may be used on web sites. The web is, by its nature, multi-format, and HTTP can cope quite happily with encoding many different file types to match. That is why content-type exists. HTML is merely one format, and its remit is describing the content and structure of a web page and, depending on your philosophy, perhaps some basic presentation. De facto standards have worked fine for supplementary things like graphics formats so far, and I see no practical reason the market can't decide in the same way on one or perhaps a small number of common video formats to use. It's not as though web browsers can only support one common format, or as though you can't download a file in an unsupported format and play it using an independent media player installed locally.
Secondly, I'm afraid you vastly overestimate the importance of Firefox. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you have 80–90% of the market share, you define the standard for all practical purposes. Right now, that means that Microsoft has all the power and anyone aiming to run a commercial enterprise based on supplying video or audio over the web is going to prioritise supporting IE over anything else. Those who believe in open standards and OSS may not like this, but that's the reality today and there's no use denying it.
There seems to be a bizarre delusion throughout this Slashdot discussion that putting something like Ogg into HTML5 somehow guarantees that in a couple of years all the major browsers will have Ogg support. The reality, I suspect, is rather different. If the HTML5 standard goes with some specific standard like Ogg and Microsoft decides not to support it as a result, we'll just be in the same boat we've been in with CSS for years: on paper, and in numerous browsers with small user bases, it seems great, but no-one providing content can rely on it because the biggest spender in town isn't paying up, so ultimately it's just a waste of time. If a big player like Nokia has a commercial interest in avoiding Ogg becoming more widely used, they could no doubt make some commercial deal with Microsoft to "overlook" certain provisions in the HTML5 spec just as easily as lobbying to get Ogg removed from the spec itself.
I'm sure no-one who's been working on the HTML side of the HTML5 spec wants to see their work thrown away, so their decision not to get involved in what is frankly a political mess is unsurprising. If the problems with proprietary formats become significant further down the line, the web world is a big one and will no doubt take care of them, just as the popularity of PNG has been increasing at GIF's expense for some time.
And if you look carefully... They aren't recommended by HTML. In fact, as far as I can see, the only mention of them in any W3C Recommendation for any flavour of HTML is as an example of what might be identified by an <img> tag.
This is as it should be. I have no problem with HTML providing generic elements to include graphics, multi-media content and such. But we have extensible mechanisms, such as content-type, to indicate which specific formats are used when files are supplied as a result of these generic elements. There is simply no need for a mark-up language like HTML to be involving itself in anything other than mark-up.
Now, play fair. If YouTube choose to supply their content using a format for which they have to pay some sort of royalty, that is their decision, which they will presumably take on a commercial basis. They are perfectly at liberty to supply their content in an alternative, legally unencumbered format — such as Ogg — if they wish. And yet they do not choose to do so. That tells us a lot.
Please note that while what's supported by the browsers of YouTube users is clearly a factor here, there is no particular reason to believe that mandating otherwise in the HTML5 spec would improve this situation. Many a web spec has died by proposing commercially/politically stupid things that no-one cared about. The result isn't everyone following the spec, it's everyone ignoring the spec.
Closed source solutions like Flash aren't solutions at all. Flash isn't even a video format. It's an animated vector format that's been used as a hack to deliver raster video. It's far from the ideal solution; the only reason it was ever used is because it is relatively widespread. "Relatively." There's still a good number of us who are left out in the cold.
Really? What proportion of people who browse the web do you think use Firefox on Linux? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%?
Your argument is like saying that because not everyone has access to high speed broadband, we shouldn't provide any material in a format that needs the bandwidth... except that in most cases, those who don't have it don't have a choice, whereas I expect you do and you actively chose to use a system with a limited user base in the full knowledge that it is non-standard and has some limitations.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think the current situation is ideal, and I appreciate that there are benefits to open standards. But from a pragmatic perspective, the way to solve a problem like yours is not to try and get more than you deserve from another standard and use it as leverage. That just makes you look selfish, and fights one dubious process with another corrupt one.
By being half-assed and not specifying a standard for a widely used aspect of the web browsing experience, what is in effect happening is a de-facto endorsement of all of those pet proprietary formats at the expense of clarity and allowing the various companies to rape the public with a million of buggy plug-ins, each with its own flavour of the week. The very anathema of a "standard".
Have you quite finished? Geez, it's a wonder multimedia-based services like YouTube even work on... just about every browser on the planet.
The Web-using public has proven itself quite capable of adopting new technologies that serve their purposes, and working on the basis of popular de facto standards. If any proprietary technology ceases to serve the needs of the Web-browsing public, that technology will most likely be replaced in fairly short order by another that does serve the public need. This sort of thing has been happening since the dawn of browsers and the old IE vs. Netscape browser wars.
There are advantages to having a truly open standard, but for something that evolves as fast as the Web, we've seen time and again that de facto standards that are technically sensible and practically useful are way more valuable than any formal document produced by a standards body. This whole discussion sounds a lot like people who like a relatively unpopular format bitching because they were hoping their preference would be forced on the rest of the world based on politics rather than technical merit, and they lost the argument.
A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics and that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML would be the best way for the new web.
I think I might agree with you, but I'm not sure exactly what you're proposing.
At present, you can already provide XHTML for your basic web page structure, and supplement it with other XML dialects such as SVG and MathML if necessary. Technically, this should be a moderately powerful combination, but it's awkward to use because everything is so ludicrously over-specified and browser support is feeble, so it's stuck in the vicious circle of many good technologies with insufficient user bases. (I once tried to get a web site I was working on to generate some simple SVG charts as part of an XHTML page, rather than dumping report data in purely tabular form using HTML. I gave up after several days of effort, because I just couldn't get it to work reliably in even one browser.)
It seems to me that what's missing from the modern web is more in the presentation layer than the content mark-up. CSS is hopelessly underpowered compared to the fluid layout equivalent of a page description language like PDF or PostScript. There are things like XSL:FO, but again, the installed base and marketing push is so tiny that I doubt that will get anywhere on the mainstream web. The result is lots of nasty, hacky HTML that breaks in many less-known browsers but supports enough of the big names to work for most of the particular site's visitors. Anything more clever just gets done in Flash.
Now, get a big player like Microsoft or Adobe to introduce a serious "fluid page description language" that could cope with the nature of web browsing and supported easy, powerful layout constructs and things like animation, multimedia and basics like vector graphics and fonts reasonably, and I think you'd have a winner. But realistically, if it doesn't have the commercial backing of a big player like that (and I'm sorry, but if your software isn't on the majority of browsing desktops you don't count), it's hard to see something like this catching on any time soon.
I'm sorry, but how is it a loss for the public to remove any reference to specific media formats from a specification that should by its nature be format independent? Ogg had no more business being in an HTML spec than WMV, RA, or some Flash-based video player.
For what it's worth, pretty much everyone reported in the UK press seems to like this idea. All the major political parties are behind it. The relevant parts of the energy industry are behind it, of course. But the environmental lobby are behind it, too, and there have been very few dissenting voices generally.
Basically, we have a lot of untapped, renewable resources in this area, and doing it off-shore both increases the yields and reduces the eyesore and wastage of land (a relatively scarce resource in our country already, before you even start considering issues of aesthetics).
The only real downsides noted so far seem to be concerns about hurting off-shore wildlife, but even those were more in the nature of "please be careful" than "this will be a disaster".
When you compile C the assembly code looks like the C code. You can do it yourself at least as well as gcc, usually better.
That is exceedingly unlikely. It might have been true a decade or two ago, but modern advances in both compiler optimisations and processor design mean those days are long gone. The odds of anyone but a genuinely expert assembly language programmer generating assembly that outperforms a good optimising C compiler are pretty slim these days (unless the compiler in question has an unusually bad flaw in a certain area of its code generator, of course).
Don't worry, I won't take it personally. :-)
Of course, the reason those things don't affect me very much is that I only use them once in a blue moon when I'm writing some low-level library function. Everything else is built with more powerful types that handle their own memory management, just as you get by default in scripting languages.
I'm sure there are thousands of C, C++, and maybe even Java developers than can accomplish anything I can do in 20 lines of Perl with 15 lines of their own code. But in most cases, it would be damn difficult to read.
I doubt it's even true. Languages like C++ and Java are good for very different things than languages like Perl and Python. I suspect it's unlikely that a typical concise, 20-line Perl script could be written in 20 remotely sensible lines of C++, just as it's unlikely than a typical 1M LOC long-term project that can be structured effectively in C++ could be written at all in Perl. In either case, the lesser language simply isn't the right tool for that particular job.
Yep, you're absolutely right: generic language wars are generally fairly pointless exercises.
I do think there's a place for objective discussion of the relative merits of languages in different contexts. After all, as you say, we want to choose the best tool for the job. Learning about the experiences of others who have used the tools you're choosing between might help to make a good choice, though of course unless you're planning to write the same program they did, it's not the be-all and end-all.
What I don't like is factually incorrect statements or misleading commentary. These just introduce bias into the picture, and that's the last thing you need if you're trying to evaluate several possible language choices. That's why I dislike all the C++ memory management bashing and equating it with C.
Is the fact that dynamic datastructures (lists, hashes) are native, so programmers don't have to worry about mundane memory address and pointer nonsense.
I guess you haven't used STL.
Assuming you're referring to the container classes in the C++ standard library, those are nothing close to having first class data structures and good language support for them. You can't write literals using them, for a start. Even what they do do is clumsier than in languages with built-in support, e.g., Perl's neat sort keys %hash, Python's yield facility and for loop, Haskell's pattern matching for list processing, and many similar ideas in these and many other languages.
Sorry, my bad. ;-)
Before anyone else points it out, I realised that my final sentence in the parent post reads as though I think dynamic typing is necessary for a high-level language. I don't think this is so in general, but in the context of scripting languages, I think it's one of the key features that lets you write higher level code more easily. In a statically typed language, some sort of type inference serves a similar role, keeping the code generic and cutting out unnecessary boilerplate code.