I can open up an.swf in notepad and see the source?
I can inline flash elements in my (x)html page?
I'm allowed to write my own viewer for it?
BTW... Konqueror has good support for non-animated/non-scripted SVG already. Soon, it will fix those flaws as well. Webkit has about the same level of support, and there's a committment to make SVG a first-class image format for pages. Opera's support is stellar, including the animation/scripting parts. And Firefox isn't too shabby either.
As far as I know, that's all 4 major web browsers, and all those others that are based on their engines. I doubt SVG is going anywhere, except up. Die flash, die.
You have the correct answer; let market forces work. When giving greater access to the disabled is cheap, companies will do it
As a student of human nature, I can say with some certainty that even when it is absolutely free (or for that matter, slightly cheaper than not), they may decide to not give greater access. Ignorance, petty indifference, or mistaken understanding of the bottom line... there are any number of reasons.
Market forces don't guarantee anything other than efficiency. Blind people don't deserve to be the grease on the cogs of economic progress. And if that means you have to pay a little bit for it (and me too, of course), so be it.
The worst part of this is, almost no one in this thread understands how simple it would be. A competent web designer (and this almost universally means someone who doesn't use frontpage/dreamweaver) just needs to be able to do the markup semantically. No matter how flashy or fancy your site is, it can be done right, looking and acting exactly how you expect it to.
You have to program extra code, but not too much extra code, or the screen readers will be reading "spacer" "spacer" "spacer" for three hours. You need to have noscript, and noembed tags in everything, and offer an alternate text version of your site that needs to be up to date and relevant.
No extra code. No "spacer spacer spacer...". No noscripts, no noembeds. No alternate versions of your site.
This is what CSS is for. Semantic design. Lists are lists, links are links, headlines are headlines. Only use <img> when the image is actual content and not decoration (which means it probably belongs in a background-image somewhere). Do that, and the number of images that you have to provide an alt attribute for drops dramatically.
As for keeping text out of your images... how can you not? What do you do when the boss says he wants a spanish language version of the site? Are you going to wait for the graphic artists to redo everything?
As for embed... please tell me you use the <object> tag for christ's sake.
Where does it stop? Do they need to supply deaf/blind people with special tactile screens?
I'm not blind, so I can't say for certain, but...
I suspect blind people would be happy if they just designed the site correctly so that the important text wasn't embedded in flash, or in images, or in fucked up layout tables, or in tag attributes that it doesn't belong in. Maybe a few actual <label>s instead of <span>s.
Finally, I can do mostly sane CSS. Still, there's so much more to ask for...
Ditch VML for SVG. MNG support.:before/:after pseudo selectors and the content property! Border-radius, box and text shadows! And put some fucking -ie- prefixes on the proprietary stuff, for god's sake.
You'll be able to include SVG inline with the page, instead of using object tags. You'll be able to use XForms in the thing. It forces you to write valid markup, or won't display it... this means little errors don't creep into the thing, and you won't be wondering 4 months later why some style is offkilter.
Search engines like Google will (eventually) be able to parse it in ways that will never be possible in html, meaning people trying to find your page will find it more easily.
In other words, there are few good reasons not to switch. You can even use transitional, if iframes are a must.
They already forced some websites to change broken things. I think they could have run a s/filter/-ie-filter/ on the css while they were in there.
Duh.
Besides which, it may be moot, if they push this to everyone regardless of whether they want it or not. There won't be any backwardity to be compatible with, or not enough to matter.
They're just lame hacks, trying to shore things up long enough for M$ to infect another market.
Then answer me this. Why didn't you include a -ie- prefix on filter and the other proprietary microsoft crap? A programming-illiterate monkey could have managed that in 10 minutes with find/replace.
Really, why? It would be an easy thing, a quick thing, and something that makes everything so much better.
Yeh, and yet when someone points out that there are third party vendors who provide that enterprise level support, you freak out with "will they be around 5 years from now?".
In other words, there is no satisfying you, nothing would make you want to use it unless microsoft themselves produced the damn thing. Welcome to the trailing edge, where you sit around with everything that is perfectly safe. Your competitors will be using superior technology. Do your bosses know this?
If I roll my own and it freaks out, who do I blame? My MSI? Or something funky being done by Mozilla?
This right here proves it. You don't know the answer to this? It's simple. You figure out if it's your MSI or if it's Mozilla. Whichever it is, you blame that. Or do you mean "how do I cover my ass, because that's all that is important" ? If it is Mozilla though, it won't "freak out" until it's in the middle of the application running. Which it will, as much as I love it, apps crash, moz included. So your paranoid freakout episode will end up being an app crash, which happens all the time for word and excel, and IE especially. Do you think Mozilla is suddenly going to somehow start crashing even half as much as those, *no matter how badly* you fuck up the MSI?
Better to use the program that's based off of. Would mean you could process a few hundred images at a time, in batch mode at the command line. Forget what the name of it is, but it's on sourceforge, and the name of it (with credits) are in the dialog.
You're an IT director, and you don't know that to fix/support an MSI (and not the underlying program) doesn't require programming skills, but rather general sysadmin skills?
Just what type of support do you think the MSI itself would need? If you mean support for the application itself, the Moz foundation is going to be around for a long, long time. I suppose management always has reasons for making up shit like this, sort of like how 90 yr olds have reasons for driving at 5mph on the freeway... given that they wreck and kill people just as much, would you rather your company be the family sedan driven at a snail's pace, of the Ferrari rip-roaring down the autobahn?
Really. Why did you get hired, when you're only capable of managing IT like grandpa drives the oldsmobile?
it's the only way to render arbitrary text in an arbitrary size on the user's machine in a specific font they don't have, which, as a graphic desinger, I want to do a LOT of the time
Are you sure about that?
I've been playingaroundalotwith SVG, doing things that could only be done in flash or java before now. Maybe you should try it.
Microsoft have had more than ample time, people, and resources to produce a rendering engine on-par with Gecko and its peers. But that's not going to be the case. Only one reason for that.
Wrong. They haven't had more. They've had INSANELY MORE time, people and resources. What's it been? 5 years now since the last major update? They're sitting on a warchest of $40 billion... and while they can't spend that on the browser alone, even a tiny chunk of it amounts to tens or hundreds of millions, numbers neither of us would be shocked if we learned this was how much was spent on IE7. And people? I mean, fuck. The IE7 team is hundreds in size, just at a guess. They can't compete with a bunch of hobbyist developers, or a tiny team of norwegians? Apple whipped out a kickass browser in what was probably less than a year.
If Microsoft were the entire US military infrastructure, they just got routed by hooting and gibbering feces-covered cavemen, throwing rocks and small animal skulls. And by using the plural "cavemen", I mean exactly 2 of them.
It makes no fucking sense. I don't expect anything great out of them. Lord knows I don't, not now. It makes DOS 2.1 look good, in comparison.
I needed popups for my webapp, or so I thought. Legit stuff, couldn't really fit it into the main page, didn't want the distraction either.
But you shouldn't be opening windows, it's damned rude.
I've finally settled on doing something like what lightbox does for pictures. It opens the "popup" on the same page, overlayed on top of what is already there. Sort of a modal dialog box. It looks slick, it's not anywhere near as annoying, and it's closable... you can go back to the main page, and nothing is added, not permanently.
It does indeed. I only ever used the fedex one at work, we'd ship out dsl modems that way. It was convenient. That is, until I wrote a greasemonkey script that URLified the numbers on the webapp. A month after that, I lost my job for writing such a greasemonkey script.
Lies. There are at least several hundred search extensions. Up to and including tracking number extensions for Fedex and UPS. You can install any and all that you want.
Were I google, I'd be petitioning Firefox to include MSN search, just so people can see how pathetic it is. It's not like it would ever be used.
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I can open up an .swf in notepad and see the source?
I can inline flash elements in my (x)html page?
I'm allowed to write my own viewer for it?
BTW... Konqueror has good support for non-animated/non-scripted SVG already. Soon, it will fix those flaws as well. Webkit has about the same level of support, and there's a committment to make SVG a first-class image format for pages. Opera's support is stellar, including the animation/scripting parts. And Firefox isn't too shabby either.
As far as I know, that's all 4 major web browsers, and all those others that are based on their engines. I doubt SVG is going anywhere, except up. Die flash, die.
... meaning Microsoft figures out a way to run proprietary code on it.
What, like writing a program and distributing it as a binary-only for-pay title?
It's only GPL if you use someone else's code. Why in the fucking hell are we still hearing stupid shit like this in 2006?
You have the correct answer; let market forces work. When giving greater access to the disabled is cheap, companies will do it
As a student of human nature, I can say with some certainty that even when it is absolutely free (or for that matter, slightly cheaper than not), they may decide to not give greater access. Ignorance, petty indifference, or mistaken understanding of the bottom line... there are any number of reasons.
Market forces don't guarantee anything other than efficiency. Blind people don't deserve to be the grease on the cogs of economic progress. And if that means you have to pay a little bit for it (and me too, of course), so be it.
The worst part of this is, almost no one in this thread understands how simple it would be. A competent web designer (and this almost universally means someone who doesn't use frontpage/dreamweaver) just needs to be able to do the markup semantically. No matter how flashy or fancy your site is, it can be done right, looking and acting exactly how you expect it to.
You have to program extra code, but not too much extra code, or the screen readers will be reading "spacer" "spacer" "spacer" for three hours. You need to have noscript, and noembed tags in everything, and offer an alternate text version of your site that needs to be up to date and relevant.
No extra code. No "spacer spacer spacer...". No noscripts, no noembeds. No alternate versions of your site.
This is what CSS is for. Semantic design. Lists are lists, links are links, headlines are headlines. Only use <img> when the image is actual content and not decoration (which means it probably belongs in a background-image somewhere). Do that, and the number of images that you have to provide an alt attribute for drops dramatically.
As for keeping text out of your images... how can you not? What do you do when the boss says he wants a spanish language version of the site? Are you going to wait for the graphic artists to redo everything?
As for embed... please tell me you use the <object> tag for christ's sake.
Where does it stop? Do they need to supply deaf/blind people with special tactile screens?
I'm not blind, so I can't say for certain, but...
I suspect blind people would be happy if they just designed the site correctly so that the important text wasn't embedded in flash, or in images, or in fucked up layout tables, or in tag attributes that it doesn't belong in. Maybe a few actual <label>s instead of <span>s.
Get ye backe to hulver.com, ye heathen husiite!
Die, older versions of IE, die!
:before/:after pseudo selectors and the content property!
Finally, I can do mostly sane CSS. Still, there's so much more to ask for...
Ditch VML for SVG.
MNG support.
Border-radius, box and text shadows!
And put some fucking -ie- prefixes on the proprietary stuff, for god's sake.
Figures.
And let me guess, it doesn't bitch about <iframe> ?
The tag.
You'll be able to include SVG inline with the page, instead of using object tags. You'll be able to use XForms in the thing. It forces you to write valid markup, or won't display it... this means little errors don't creep into the thing, and you won't be wondering 4 months later why some style is offkilter.
Search engines like Google will (eventually) be able to parse it in ways that will never be possible in html, meaning people trying to find your page will find it more easily.
In other words, there are few good reasons not to switch. You can even use transitional, if iframes are a must.
They already forced some websites to change broken things. I think they could have run a s/filter/-ie-filter/ on the css while they were in there.
Duh.
Besides which, it may be moot, if they push this to everyone regardless of whether they want it or not. There won't be any backwardity to be compatible with, or not enough to matter.
They're just lame hacks, trying to shore things up long enough for M$ to infect another market.
Then answer me this. Why didn't you include a -ie- prefix on filter and the other proprietary microsoft crap? A programming-illiterate monkey could have managed that in 10 minutes with find/replace.
Really, why? It would be an easy thing, a quick thing, and something that makes everything so much better.
Yes, because M$ staffs a free tollfree IE hotline to support this stuff. *lmao*
There may or may not be good reasons to OEM firefox onto the machines, but this isn't one of them.
Yeh, and yet when someone points out that there are third party vendors who provide that enterprise level support, you freak out with "will they be around 5 years from now?".
In other words, there is no satisfying you, nothing would make you want to use it unless microsoft themselves produced the damn thing. Welcome to the trailing edge, where you sit around with everything that is perfectly safe. Your competitors will be using superior technology. Do your bosses know this?
If I roll my own and it freaks out, who do I blame? My MSI? Or something funky being done by Mozilla?
This right here proves it. You don't know the answer to this? It's simple. You figure out if it's your MSI or if it's Mozilla. Whichever it is, you blame that. Or do you mean "how do I cover my ass, because that's all that is important" ? If it is Mozilla though, it won't "freak out" until it's in the middle of the application running. Which it will, as much as I love it, apps crash, moz included. So your paranoid freakout episode will end up being an app crash, which happens all the time for word and excel, and IE especially. Do you think Mozilla is suddenly going to somehow start crashing even half as much as those, *no matter how badly* you fuck up the MSI?
Better to use the program that's based off of. Would mean you could process a few hundred images at a time, in batch mode at the command line. Forget what the name of it is, but it's on sourceforge, and the name of it (with credits) are in the dialog.
They do have VML in it... it wouldn't be impossible for them to use this as the basis for SVG. But I just don't see it happening.
You're an IT director, and you don't know that to fix/support an MSI (and not the underlying program) doesn't require programming skills, but rather general sysadmin skills?
Just what type of support do you think the MSI itself would need? If you mean support for the application itself, the Moz foundation is going to be around for a long, long time. I suppose management always has reasons for making up shit like this, sort of like how 90 yr olds have reasons for driving at 5mph on the freeway... given that they wreck and kill people just as much, would you rather your company be the family sedan driven at a snail's pace, of the Ferrari rip-roaring down the autobahn?
Really. Why did you get hired, when you're only capable of managing IT like grandpa drives the oldsmobile?
Though you really shouldn't, XHTML served to Konq looks damn good anyway. Does it even have a quirks mode or what?
(I serve application/xml+html if their HTTP_ACCEPT lists it... mostly so IEdiots can see something other than a download prompt.)
Shouldn't that be document.getElementById("parent").insertBefore(sib ling,document.createElement("blah")) ?
And if you use the firefox extension, I think it does validation after all your scripting, too. Kinda neat.
it's the only way to render arbitrary text in an arbitrary size on the user's machine in a specific font they don't have, which, as a graphic desinger, I want to do a LOT of the time
Are you sure about that?
I've been playing around alot with SVG, doing things that could only be done in flash or java before now. Maybe you should try it.
Now, if you ask me--and obviously you did, right
Actually, I did, once upon a time.
Microsoft have had more than ample time, people, and resources to produce a rendering engine on-par with Gecko and its peers. But that's not going to be the case. Only one reason for that.
Wrong. They haven't had more. They've had INSANELY MORE time, people and resources. What's it been? 5 years now since the last major update? They're sitting on a warchest of $40 billion... and while they can't spend that on the browser alone, even a tiny chunk of it amounts to tens or hundreds of millions, numbers neither of us would be shocked if we learned this was how much was spent on IE7. And people? I mean, fuck. The IE7 team is hundreds in size, just at a guess. They can't compete with a bunch of hobbyist developers, or a tiny team of norwegians? Apple whipped out a kickass browser in what was probably less than a year.
If Microsoft were the entire US military infrastructure, they just got routed by hooting and gibbering feces-covered cavemen, throwing rocks and small animal skulls. And by using the plural "cavemen", I mean exactly 2 of them.
It makes no fucking sense. I don't expect anything great out of them. Lord knows I don't, not now. It makes DOS 2.1 look good, in comparison.
I needed popups for my webapp, or so I thought. Legit stuff, couldn't really fit it into the main page, didn't want the distraction either.
But you shouldn't be opening windows, it's damned rude.
I've finally settled on doing something like what lightbox does for pictures. It opens the "popup" on the same page, overlayed on top of what is already there. Sort of a modal dialog box. It looks slick, it's not anywhere near as annoying, and it's closable... you can go back to the main page, and nothing is added, not permanently.
Popups need to die.
I thought I already won that contest.
It does indeed. I only ever used the fedex one at work, we'd ship out dsl modems that way. It was convenient. That is, until I wrote a greasemonkey script that URLified the numbers on the webapp. A month after that, I lost my job for writing such a greasemonkey script.
Lies. There are at least several hundred search extensions. Up to and including tracking number extensions for Fedex and UPS. You can install any and all that you want.
Were I google, I'd be petitioning Firefox to include MSN search, just so people can see how pathetic it is. It's not like it would ever be used.