RMS argues that the goals of open source development ought to be freedom rather than popularity. Yet popularity serves a very real purpose in that it attracts money and interest in free software. To that end, proprietary software that makes GNU/Linux more usable to the masses is a good thing in that it makes the system more palatable to end users who have specific needs. RMS is a great torch bearer for altruistic geeks, but actual paid jobs developing free software do not automatically spring up from the rhetoric.
I don't care how much you hate profit and business, they get things done.
No, none of them are perfect, but all the current browsers running Gecko, KHTML, or Opera engines are far far superior to IE 6, where things are broken in the most basic ways.
I'm hoping and praying that Microsoft decides to play nice and implement CSS 1, 2, 3 and XHTML correctly in IE 7, because if they go the proprietary route in an attempt to dominate the web it's going to make web development a really shitty job, just when things were starting to look up too.
Re:XForms are teh suck
on
XForms Essentials
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well let's take a look at what technologies IE supports reasonably well.
HTML 4, spec first published Dec. 18, 1997 CSS 1, spec first published Dec. 17, 1996 CSS 2, spec first published May 12, 1998
So they range from 5.5 to 7 years old.
Also, I find it offensive to hear someone say that IE handles standards as well as any other browser. Maybe as well as any browser available at the time IE 5 was released, and it has progressed very little on it's way to version 6. Please see this for a small sampling.
Look that's great if you're informed. My point is just that I've had so many headaches trying to get my work done on Windows that I switched to OS X, and guess what... no problems. Yes it's anecdotal, but it's not blather.
Yes, something I do DOES cause system degradation (on Win 2000, dunno about XP), it's called installing software. Sometimes I need an FTP an SSH client. How do I know what is safe to install on a PC? The answer is, you just have to know what has spyware in it, or run some anti-spyware software however that works. Sure on a Mac, an installer could ask for the admin password and install spyware, but it hasn't happened to me yet. Plus I need less software to begin with (ssh and ftp built in), and I haven't run into any problems with the few things I have installed.
And what does a 25% increase in speed have to do with doing work? I am not a system administrator, so my work does not involve setting up boxes for efficiency. I run a 400mhz G4 and have no need for higher performance. I'm a web designer and developer. I need Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL, as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. I don't work in a tech department either, so I need to communicate with the other employees running MS Office and Visio. I could be asked to drop any kind of new media on the site at any time, so I need the ability to install software and figure stuff out quick. So sadly 'knowing about gentoo' doesn't really do much for me. I keep a PC around to test in Internet Explorer and it works great because I don't have to install any software on it.
So you're saying there's no middle ground... either you need security and run Gentoo or you need to do some real work and then take your pick?
In the real world where a person may need to run various applications and perform unforeseen tasks, security is still a consideration. I myself run OS X because (among other reasons) I don't like having system performance degrade over time, or worry about opening emails. Is having my system hacked the end of the world? No, but I'll take the better odds any day.
So basically adaptive computing is just about managing IT resources. What differentiates it is that HP apparently doesn't have a vested interest in any specific technology (year right). They charge you for the privilege of having them tell you how to manage your IT department. I suppose if you can't find good people than it would be worth it, but in this economy?
No, a blog is a web log. Meaning a website with frequent chronological updates. Most blogs are indeed personal websites, but I wouldn't say that most personal websites are blogs. On the flip side, there are many business or professional blogs that are most certainly not personal.
I know you're bitter about popular culture, but you shouldn't assume all terminology lacks substance just because you don't like the way it's been written about by people you deem inferior. Hell, there's probably a blog out there that would actually interest you if you wanted to find it.
There's no conflict of interest, it's merely greater interest. Conflict of interest would be if SCO's lawyers owned IBM stock. Even so, it would probably be up to SCO to fire them.
Of course we don't have the responsibility to accept advertising. Install whatever you want, but you don't strike me as the kind of person that likes censorship, and that is a very real danger when an antivirus software starts stripping code out of HTML heuristically. Certainly you don't want to miss out on some important content just because it happened to have some similar properties to an advertisement...
What is so bad about banner advertisements anyway? They're so common I see right through them... all I need is a pop-up blocker and ads don't bother me a bit. Your idealistic rant against commercialism on the Internet is quaint but sadly out of touch with reality. Are you really claiming that the pursuit of profit has never led to any good Internet content? Face it, advertising and successful communications media are symbiotic because advertisers put money into quality content production. To claim that all (or even most) good content comes from altruistic and disinterested private parties is utterly nonsensical.
Microsoft is not evil because it makes money, it's evil because it makes money by squashing innovation and manipulating the market using its monopoly powers. Apple makes money by providing something that people find useful.
The idea that all software should be free is just silly. It's commercial software that has given us computers average people can use. Why? Because the profit motive forces companies to at least think about what most people want. Linux hackers only need worry about what they themselves want.
Bah, i am sick of everyone proclaiming that determinism is the only 'logical' conclusion of the universe that can be sustained. I think the evidence is woefully inadequate to make such a sweeping generalization. Just because there are general physical laws that tend to predict things doesn't mean there's no room for free will.
You are skirting the issue by saying that the appearance of free will is rendered by an inability to introspect. If free will is true, then necessarily a decision can not be predetermined no matter how high an intelligence is brought to bear.
When you say "quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo" you are doing nothing more than dismissing that which you do not understand. To say, "The magic is not in any quantum mechanical phenomena inside the neurons, but in the standard physics arrangement of them," about something as inscrutable as the nature of consciousness is ridiculous.
There is no evidence whatsoever of where consciousness comes from. It could be a biochemical reaction or it could something outside our realm of physical perception and measurement. It may be totally unknowable. Regardless, science does not progress by people running around proclaiming absolute truths about the universe. It advances by questioning beliefs and taking all observations into consideration.
For myself, there is one huge huge hole in determinism... consciousness itself. If everything is pre-determined, why are we conscious? Can't life evolve according to instinct without this consciousness? To those who would say introspection is not objective, I say there is no objectivity. You are still subject to the rules of your consciousness and brain whether or not you choose to acknowledge their validity. As a sentient species we can not afford to dismiss the inscrutable. This religious devotion to Newtonian physics makes me a little sick to my stomach, open your minds people.
How naive are you? The G5 isn't just about speed, it's about how cool you are. Spending $4000 on a G5 easily makes you more than 15 times cooler than your PC, even (especially?) if you only plan to play your extensive MP3 collection on it.
Look, I understand needing to use table-based layouts to make sure something looks good in Netscape 4. Heck, I still have a couple sites that are still run that way. I have spent 7 years of my life dedicated to understanding the quirks and idiosyncrasies of table-based designs and 3 years pursuing more modern techniques. Maybe you have forgotten, but laying things out with tables takes a lot of know-how of the quirks of table implementation. The simplest of which is the dreaded blank line caused in Netscape when there is a space between an image and the closing TD tag. I can't tell you how many hours I spent on that one back in 1995. And what about if you use colspans with widths? Better not do it in the first row... And countless other little details that come up when you start trying to achieve liquid (or even just vertically stretching) layouts. Sure, the basic concepts of table-based designs seem remarkably compatible and easy to apply, but in reality you end up relying on a lot of behaviour that is not really documented anywhere and may very well break horribly in future browsers.
Standards aren't a silver bullet, but at least you have some basis for how you can expect things to work. Maybe you still have to go back and tweak things, but future browsers are unlikely to be any WORSE than current generation browsers.
Now you say I don't care about old browser users, but that's not true. I am simply weighing out options. My web site has been consistently under 1% Netscape 4 for the last year (and it was designed with tables, so it looks fine), by contrast, W3schools statistics say 10% of people have Javascript turned off. By not using Javascript, I am making a much bigger impact to my audience size than making sure things look the same in NS4. It's not that I don't care about NS4, it's that I want to give a better experience to the other 99% of my users. And the fact that my pages are 50% lighter is of benefit to everyone. NS4 users get all my content, one block after another. Sure it doesn't look the same, but it downloads fast and all the content is accessible, so in a way I'm guaranteeing access to the absolute lowest common denominator. If their computers are really so slow that they can't upgrade then they probably appreciate the speed at which my pages load.
Also, one other side note about my particular methodology. I have designed a PHP/Apache templating system that runs by means of a simple include at the top of each file and is configured by meta tags in the HEAD element (it also inherits these configurations so it's trivial to configure on a sitewide or directory-wide basis). It's designed to be able to have various versions of the same template that can be used based on arbitrary criteria. For instance, I use it to generate printer-friendly versions of pages without any extra work (other than the initial alternate template creation). If I really needed graphical layout in Netscape 4 it would be quite easy to slap together a table-based version of the template, and parse out my divs into the appropriate places. The well-formedness and good semantics that I achieve by keeping my HTML as pure as possible make this both efficient and relatively easy even without a complicated parser.
One final note: I understand that you have to do what you have to do. Keep in mind, however, that it's not all or nothing. At this time you can easily move most of your font properties into CSS relatively painlessly and clean up tons of FONT tags. With up to 99.9% of browsers supporting the basic CSS-1 font controls (Anything 4+), I can't think of any reason not to. Four years ago I was still using tables for the same reasons as you, but CSS-1 for font styling seemed like a no-brainer even then. Now I just can't bring myself to create an OKAY site that looks 100% in 99.9% of browsers instead of creating a GREAT site that looks 100% in 99.0% of browsers but is full accessible in the rest.
First of all, those sites you mentioned are anything but shining examples of using the 'latest web standards.' Not only do they not validate, but they aren't even attempting to follow Zeldman's philosophy at all. Your close-minded self-righteousness only reveals your lack of knowledge about the web standards movement. Zeldman is no idealist; he is not espousing 'the latest web standards'. He specifically talks about using web standards to solve real world problems. Using his approach you can create sites that look great in IE 5, 5.5, 6, IE Mac 5, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 6, 7, Konqueror and Safari while degrading to be perfectly accessible in Netscape 4-, IE 4-, Lynx, etc.
Now, depending on your audience, you may have to make sure the Netscape 4 version looks visually impressive, but don't think for one second that building your site using tables, bgcolor attributes, and font tags will be done without sacrifice. In web design there is ALWAYS sacrifice, it's just a question of what. If you build a web site using Zeldman's method you sacrifice:
Complex layout in browsers v4 and under.
Certain techniques that were refined during the era of the v3 and v4 browsers for pixel precise layouts.
Now if you resort to tables and font tags and the rest you are sacrificing:
Size - pages quickly become bloated with nested tables, redundant font tags and unnecessary images.
Legibility - Everything is nested in table after table with no clear meaning to different tags.
Forward-compatibility - You are betting on browser makers continuing to support non-standardized metrics that arose by coincidence.
Accessibility - You don't need standards to support accessibility, but the two really go hand in hand. Using HTML tags as they were intended improves accessibility for non-standard user agents. Adding alt attributes, summaries, skip navigation links and more advanced techniques that are possible with standards make your site infinitely more usable for a blind person.
Degradability - If your tag soup doesn't work in a browser you likely get something messy. If a browser doesn't support a standards-based page then maybe you lose the text formatting, but the information is still there.
Development time - sure standards are hard to use if you've spent 10 years perfecting image slicing and table nesting, but table-based layouts are much more difficult to modify, update, output from server-side scripts, screen-scrape, or otherwise mess with in typical ways that web designers/developers are often asked to do.
Your excuses for dismissing standards are all red herrings. No matter how you develop, you are going to have to test your pages in all your target browsers anyway. However, using standards gives you a better chance with untested and future browser releases. Of course they are far from perfect, but resorting to outdated techniques doesn't improve the situation, regardless of how comfortable you might be with it.
Great post, thanks for saving me the time. It's amazing how the hype of OOP has caused so many programmers to just believe that it's 'better' without any kind of understanding of what OOP really provides. Now it's to the point that people are ready to blindly replace RDBMSs with Object-Oriented Databases without stopping to think why RDBMSs have been such a great tool to begin with.
Citing incompatibility due to SQL variations is the biggest red herring I've ever seen. Designing a relational database to store company data has always been a much more straightforward process than desiging a system of classes. The importance of keeping your data clean and flexible can not be overestimated. If you have good data you can build unlimited apps on top of it without running into the kind of brick walls that rigid object structures can impose. Sure even normalized databases sometimes make tradeoffs based on how they will be used, but you aren't cutting off possibilities at anywhere near the rate you are the minute you try to cram your data into a class tree.
Actually, you are oh so wrong! Just because he explained it in a scientific way doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to business problems. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to hack together some new function for my existing databases that had never occurred even occurred to me. If you have yourself a fully normalized relational database, then unexpected data needs tend to be a snap because you can query for whatever you need. Object-oriented programming makes a lot of sense for certain types of problems, but the added organization you get by putting your code and your data into rigid structures makes it very easy to do what you plan for, and painfully difficult to do a large number of things you didn't plan for.
Even though you might find the flexibility of a relational model confusing and more difficult to work with than objects, the benefits are undeniable in academia or in business.
He makes a big effort to communicate that he is not critiquing java itself but what he infers from the circumstances around its development and rise to popularity.
While it's easy to interpret his observation that Java is backed by people he doesn't like as an irrational knee-jerk reaction. But I would argue that knowing how certain people make decisions gives you a valid reason to doubt their wisdom. It may not be 100% even-handed, but who is? We all use our past experience to help us make future decisions, and in the realm of programming languages I would be inclined to care more about the opinions of programmers than large organizations whose only knowledge comes from sales people.
No, but read his article. He doesn't think everything else sucks. In particular he thinks Perl, C and Python are great. His arguments aren't based in any kind of technical preference but rather his experience with how political factors affect language design. In the end he doesn't even claim that Java sucks, just that he is in no hurry to learn it based on the fact that it is built by a huge corporation in committee-fashion and the department of defense loves it:)
To get even more excessively nerdy on you... in that case should we even be using the word random at all? I suppose that goes to the heart of the debate over determinism, but since the word random is widely known and used, I say we might as well keep it on as meaning: something we can not reliably predict with current methods.
Though labeling a book 'for dummies' will encourage a lot of people to purchase it who are scared of the other titles, you will inevitably get a backlash from people who are confident of their ability to understand and want a hardcore learning tool/reference. I don't think any self-respecting geek should be expected to give these books a chance, nor do I think they offer anything that can't be had elsewhere. Not that I think they're bad books per se, just that I would never buy one.
When will the government learn that forward thinking foreign policy is an infinitely more efficient means of increasing security than technological card-house building. As much as I like the idea of more government tech jobs, I can't help but worry about our national security in the era of us-vs-them foreign policy.
"There have been hearings, year in and year out, and consumers have not complained about anything that is going on in this bill," [EFF's] Schultz said. "The only people complaining are the content industry folks.
Did this quote confuse anybody else? Presumably they mean the content industry folks are the only ones complaining about things the bill is meant to address. Even interpretted that way, however, it really doesn't add much to the discussion. Of course the industry is the only one that cares about its profits, everyone else is getting free music and movies. The real issue is that this law is just more legal bloat that is meant to scare people more than to plug any loopholes.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS argues that the goals of open source development ought to be freedom rather than popularity. Yet popularity serves a very real purpose in that it attracts money and interest in free software. To that end, proprietary software that makes GNU/Linux more usable to the masses is a good thing in that it makes the system more palatable to end users who have specific needs. RMS is a great torch bearer for altruistic geeks, but actual paid jobs developing free software do not automatically spring up from the rhetoric.
I don't care how much you hate profit and business, they get things done.
No, none of them are perfect, but all the current browsers running Gecko, KHTML, or Opera engines are far far superior to IE 6, where things are broken in the most basic ways.
I'm hoping and praying that Microsoft decides to play nice and implement CSS 1, 2, 3 and XHTML correctly in IE 7, because if they go the proprietary route in an attempt to dominate the web it's going to make web development a really shitty job, just when things were starting to look up too.
Well let's take a look at what technologies IE supports reasonably well.
HTML 4, spec first published Dec. 18, 1997
CSS 1, spec first published Dec. 17, 1996
CSS 2, spec first published May 12, 1998
So they range from 5.5 to 7 years old.
Also, I find it offensive to hear someone say that IE handles standards as well as any other browser. Maybe as well as any browser available at the time IE 5 was released, and it has progressed very little on it's way to version 6. Please see this for a small sampling.
Say what you will, but it's a lot better than fan fiction.
Look that's great if you're informed. My point is just that I've had so many headaches trying to get my work done on Windows that I switched to OS X, and guess what... no problems. Yes it's anecdotal, but it's not blather.
Yes, something I do DOES cause system degradation (on Win 2000, dunno about XP), it's called installing software. Sometimes I need an FTP an SSH client. How do I know what is safe to install on a PC? The answer is, you just have to know what has spyware in it, or run some anti-spyware software however that works. Sure on a Mac, an installer could ask for the admin password and install spyware, but it hasn't happened to me yet. Plus I need less software to begin with (ssh and ftp built in), and I haven't run into any problems with the few things I have installed.
And what does a 25% increase in speed have to do with doing work? I am not a system administrator, so my work does not involve setting up boxes for efficiency. I run a 400mhz G4 and have no need for higher performance. I'm a web designer and developer. I need Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL, as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. I don't work in a tech department either, so I need to communicate with the other employees running MS Office and Visio. I could be asked to drop any kind of new media on the site at any time, so I need the ability to install software and figure stuff out quick. So sadly 'knowing about gentoo' doesn't really do much for me. I keep a PC around to test in Internet Explorer and it works great because I don't have to install any software on it.
So you're saying there's no middle ground... either you need security and run Gentoo or you need to do some real work and then take your pick?
In the real world where a person may need to run various applications and perform unforeseen tasks, security is still a consideration. I myself run OS X because (among other reasons) I don't like having system performance degrade over time, or worry about opening emails. Is having my system hacked the end of the world? No, but I'll take the better odds any day.
So basically adaptive computing is just about managing IT resources. What differentiates it is that HP apparently doesn't have a vested interest in any specific technology (year right). They charge you for the privilege of having them tell you how to manage your IT department. I suppose if you can't find good people than it would be worth it, but in this economy?
No, a blog is a web log. Meaning a website with frequent chronological updates. Most blogs are indeed personal websites, but I wouldn't say that most personal websites are blogs. On the flip side, there are many business or professional blogs that are most certainly not personal.
I know you're bitter about popular culture, but you shouldn't assume all terminology lacks substance just because you don't like the way it's been written about by people you deem inferior. Hell, there's probably a blog out there that would actually interest you if you wanted to find it.
There's no conflict of interest, it's merely greater interest. Conflict of interest would be if SCO's lawyers owned IBM stock. Even so, it would probably be up to SCO to fire them.
Of course we don't have the responsibility to accept advertising. Install whatever you want, but you don't strike me as the kind of person that likes censorship, and that is a very real danger when an antivirus software starts stripping code out of HTML heuristically. Certainly you don't want to miss out on some important content just because it happened to have some similar properties to an advertisement...
What is so bad about banner advertisements anyway? They're so common I see right through them... all I need is a pop-up blocker and ads don't bother me a bit. Your idealistic rant against commercialism on the Internet is quaint but sadly out of touch with reality. Are you really claiming that the pursuit of profit has never led to any good Internet content? Face it, advertising and successful communications media are symbiotic because advertisers put money into quality content production. To claim that all (or even most) good content comes from altruistic and disinterested private parties is utterly nonsensical.
If they aren't collaborating with a law school to make this a more multi-dimensional project then this doesn't really strike me as a great idea.
Microsoft is not evil because it makes money, it's evil because it makes money by squashing innovation and manipulating the market using its monopoly powers. Apple makes money by providing something that people find useful.
The idea that all software should be free is just silly. It's commercial software that has given us computers average people can use. Why? Because the profit motive forces companies to at least think about what most people want. Linux hackers only need worry about what they themselves want.
Bah, i am sick of everyone proclaiming that determinism is the only 'logical' conclusion of the universe that can be sustained. I think the evidence is woefully inadequate to make such a sweeping generalization. Just because there are general physical laws that tend to predict things doesn't mean there's no room for free will.
You are skirting the issue by saying that the appearance of free will is rendered by an inability to introspect. If free will is true, then necessarily a decision can not be predetermined no matter how high an intelligence is brought to bear.
When you say "quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo" you are doing nothing more than dismissing that which you do not understand. To say, "The magic is not in any quantum mechanical phenomena inside the neurons, but in the standard physics arrangement of them," about something as inscrutable as the nature of consciousness is ridiculous.
There is no evidence whatsoever of where consciousness comes from. It could be a biochemical reaction or it could something outside our realm of physical perception and measurement. It may be totally unknowable. Regardless, science does not progress by people running around proclaiming absolute truths about the universe. It advances by questioning beliefs and taking all observations into consideration.
For myself, there is one huge huge hole in determinism... consciousness itself. If everything is pre-determined, why are we conscious? Can't life evolve according to instinct without this consciousness? To those who would say introspection is not objective, I say there is no objectivity. You are still subject to the rules of your consciousness and brain whether or not you choose to acknowledge their validity. As a sentient species we can not afford to dismiss the inscrutable. This religious devotion to Newtonian physics makes me a little sick to my stomach, open your minds people.
How naive are you? The G5 isn't just about speed, it's about how cool you are. Spending $4000 on a G5 easily makes you more than 15 times cooler than your PC, even (especially?) if you only plan to play your extensive MP3 collection on it.
Look, I understand needing to use table-based layouts to make sure something looks good in Netscape 4. Heck, I still have a couple sites that are still run that way. I have spent 7 years of my life dedicated to understanding the quirks and idiosyncrasies of table-based designs and 3 years pursuing more modern techniques. Maybe you have forgotten, but laying things out with tables takes a lot of know-how of the quirks of table implementation. The simplest of which is the dreaded blank line caused in Netscape when there is a space between an image and the closing TD tag. I can't tell you how many hours I spent on that one back in 1995. And what about if you use colspans with widths? Better not do it in the first row... And countless other little details that come up when you start trying to achieve liquid (or even just vertically stretching) layouts. Sure, the basic concepts of table-based designs seem remarkably compatible and easy to apply, but in reality you end up relying on a lot of behaviour that is not really documented anywhere and may very well break horribly in future browsers.
Standards aren't a silver bullet, but at least you have some basis for how you can expect things to work. Maybe you still have to go back and tweak things, but future browsers are unlikely to be any WORSE than current generation browsers.
Now you say I don't care about old browser users, but that's not true. I am simply weighing out options. My web site has been consistently under 1% Netscape 4 for the last year (and it was designed with tables, so it looks fine), by contrast, W3schools statistics say 10% of people have Javascript turned off. By not using Javascript, I am making a much bigger impact to my audience size than making sure things look the same in NS4. It's not that I don't care about NS4, it's that I want to give a better experience to the other 99% of my users. And the fact that my pages are 50% lighter is of benefit to everyone. NS4 users get all my content, one block after another. Sure it doesn't look the same, but it downloads fast and all the content is accessible, so in a way I'm guaranteeing access to the absolute lowest common denominator. If their computers are really so slow that they can't upgrade then they probably appreciate the speed at which my pages load.
Also, one other side note about my particular methodology. I have designed a PHP/Apache templating system that runs by means of a simple include at the top of each file and is configured by meta tags in the HEAD element (it also inherits these configurations so it's trivial to configure on a sitewide or directory-wide basis). It's designed to be able to have various versions of the same template that can be used based on arbitrary criteria. For instance, I use it to generate printer-friendly versions of pages without any extra work (other than the initial alternate template creation). If I really needed graphical layout in Netscape 4 it would be quite easy to slap together a table-based version of the template, and parse out my divs into the appropriate places. The well-formedness and good semantics that I achieve by keeping my HTML as pure as possible make this both efficient and relatively easy even without a complicated parser.
One final note: I understand that you have to do what you have to do. Keep in mind, however, that it's not all or nothing. At this time you can easily move most of your font properties into CSS relatively painlessly and clean up tons of FONT tags. With up to 99.9% of browsers supporting the basic CSS-1 font controls (Anything 4+), I can't think of any reason not to. Four years ago I was still using tables for the same reasons as you, but CSS-1 for font styling seemed like a no-brainer even then. Now I just can't bring myself to create an OKAY site that looks 100% in 99.9% of browsers instead of creating a GREAT site that looks 100% in 99.0% of browsers but is full accessible in the rest.
Now, depending on your audience, you may have to make sure the Netscape 4 version looks visually impressive, but don't think for one second that building your site using tables, bgcolor attributes, and font tags will be done without sacrifice. In web design there is ALWAYS sacrifice, it's just a question of what. If you build a web site using Zeldman's method you sacrifice:
- Complex layout in browsers v4 and under.
- Certain techniques that were refined during the era of the v3 and v4 browsers for pixel precise layouts.
Now if you resort to tables and font tags and the rest you are sacrificing:- Size - pages quickly become bloated with nested tables, redundant font tags and unnecessary images.
- Legibility - Everything is nested in table after table with no clear meaning to different tags.
- Forward-compatibility - You are betting on browser makers continuing to support non-standardized metrics that arose by coincidence.
- Accessibility - You don't need standards to support accessibility, but the two really go hand in hand. Using HTML tags as they were intended improves accessibility for non-standard user agents. Adding alt attributes, summaries, skip navigation links and more advanced techniques that are possible with standards make your site infinitely more usable for a blind person.
- Degradability - If your tag soup doesn't work in a browser you likely get something messy. If a browser doesn't support a standards-based page then maybe you lose the text formatting, but the information is still there.
- Development time - sure standards are hard to use if you've spent 10 years perfecting image slicing and table nesting, but table-based layouts are much more difficult to modify, update, output from server-side scripts, screen-scrape, or otherwise mess with in typical ways that web designers/developers are often asked to do.
Your excuses for dismissing standards are all red herrings. No matter how you develop, you are going to have to test your pages in all your target browsers anyway. However, using standards gives you a better chance with untested and future browser releases. Of course they are far from perfect, but resorting to outdated techniques doesn't improve the situation, regardless of how comfortable you might be with it.Great post, thanks for saving me the time. It's amazing how the hype of OOP has caused so many programmers to just believe that it's 'better' without any kind of understanding of what OOP really provides. Now it's to the point that people are ready to blindly replace RDBMSs with Object-Oriented Databases without stopping to think why RDBMSs have been such a great tool to begin with.
Citing incompatibility due to SQL variations is the biggest red herring I've ever seen. Designing a relational database to store company data has always been a much more straightforward process than desiging a system of classes. The importance of keeping your data clean and flexible can not be overestimated. If you have good data you can build unlimited apps on top of it without running into the kind of brick walls that rigid object structures can impose. Sure even normalized databases sometimes make tradeoffs based on how they will be used, but you aren't cutting off possibilities at anywhere near the rate you are the minute you try to cram your data into a class tree.
Actually, you are oh so wrong! Just because he explained it in a scientific way doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to business problems. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to hack together some new function for my existing databases that had never occurred even occurred to me. If you have yourself a fully normalized relational database, then unexpected data needs tend to be a snap because you can query for whatever you need. Object-oriented programming makes a lot of sense for certain types of problems, but the added organization you get by putting your code and your data into rigid structures makes it very easy to do what you plan for, and painfully difficult to do a large number of things you didn't plan for.
Even though you might find the flexibility of a relational model confusing and more difficult to work with than objects, the benefits are undeniable in academia or in business.
He makes a big effort to communicate that he is not critiquing java itself but what he infers from the circumstances around its development and rise to popularity.
While it's easy to interpret his observation that Java is backed by people he doesn't like as an irrational knee-jerk reaction. But I would argue that knowing how certain people make decisions gives you a valid reason to doubt their wisdom. It may not be 100% even-handed, but who is? We all use our past experience to help us make future decisions, and in the realm of programming languages I would be inclined to care more about the opinions of programmers than large organizations whose only knowledge comes from sales people.
No, but read his article. He doesn't think everything else sucks. In particular he thinks Perl, C and Python are great. His arguments aren't based in any kind of technical preference but rather his experience with how political factors affect language design. In the end he doesn't even claim that Java sucks, just that he is in no hurry to learn it based on the fact that it is built by a huge corporation in committee-fashion and the department of defense loves it :)
To get even more excessively nerdy on you... in that case should we even be using the word random at all? I suppose that goes to the heart of the debate over determinism, but since the word random is widely known and used, I say we might as well keep it on as meaning: something we can not reliably predict with current methods.
Though labeling a book 'for dummies' will encourage a lot of people to purchase it who are scared of the other titles, you will inevitably get a backlash from people who are confident of their ability to understand and want a hardcore learning tool/reference. I don't think any self-respecting geek should be expected to give these books a chance, nor do I think they offer anything that can't be had elsewhere. Not that I think they're bad books per se, just that I would never buy one.
When will the government learn that forward thinking foreign policy is an infinitely more efficient means of increasing security than technological card-house building.
As much as I like the idea of more government tech jobs, I can't help but worry about our national security in the era of us-vs-them foreign policy.
Did this quote confuse anybody else? Presumably they mean the content industry folks are the only ones complaining about things the bill is meant to address. Even interpretted that way, however, it really doesn't add much to the discussion. Of course the industry is the only one that cares about its profits, everyone else is getting free music and movies. The real issue is that this law is just more legal bloat that is meant to scare people more than to plug any loopholes.