No matter if they download apps to the thin client, or if they try to run on images remotely, there's just no way for them to meet the same kind of performance metrics until they work themselves up into a true thick client, and then what was the point anyway?
To be fair, you can get pretty far if you're basing yourself off of the flash 9 engine. It has native (fast) support for various blending modes and filters (including a convolution filter). Even if you have to fallback to pixel processing in actionscript, it shouldn't do too bad, since the ActionScript 3 engine is comparable to Java performance-wise. Not native code, but not bad. I can pretty much guarantee that adobe's web-based photoshop lite will be based on flash 9.
I think flash-based clients will do quite nicely in the space where picasa and consorts live. So, to dismiss them outright seems sort of silly. Why should users have to install anything if the image editor that fits their needs will run just as well in a browser?
Why do people always talk about this as if it matters in the slightest? I can just picture legions of Mac users sitting at their desks, staring at their computers and thinking how 'beautiful' they look..
When your computer is in your living room, and you're spending money on furniture that all looks stylish and soothing to the eye, there is nothing that spoils that worse than a dell box right in the middle of that.
The desktop version of OS X is comparable to a linux distro when it comes to serving abilities. It includes apache, an ftp server, an ssh server, samba file sharing and remote desktop support. All of which you can enable or disable by checking a single checkbox in the sharing preferences pane (much easier than anything I've ever seen on any other OS), or on the command-line (if need be, across ssh).
No, the problem is that most Slashdotters - indeed, most "enthusiasts" - want a machine Apple refuses to sell: a single processor box without an integrated LCD, a replacable video card (plus another vacant x16 slot, even with only x8 signalling) and room for two 3.5" hard disks.
You can hook up the additional drives via USB, which does in fact cover almost all real-world uses (except serious video editing, which you will not do on a machine that is less than 2000 usd), and makes migrating the drives to a new box MUCH easier.
As for an upgradeable video card, the only way I see that making sense is if you're a serious gamer, in which case the mac is indeed the wrong box for you. Most slashdotters however are occasional gamers, and even though most of them would appreciate an upgradeable video card, most of them won't upgrade it. I used to home-build my PC's for the very same reason you mention. I had extra drive bays and an upgradeable video card, and eventually I concluded that I never actually made use of the expandability.
I suspect the vast majority of slashdotters, like myself, won't expand their box (except perhaps RAM) until they buy another one, and in that case the mac makes perfect sense. Which is why I own a mini, and am planning to buy an imac.
The problem is that recycling a computer is EXPENSIVE. Shipping an old computer, specially with CRT monitors costs a lot of money. Also, people don't want to take these old clunkers off you, so you end up collecting more and more pentium II 200mhz toasters which you then have to find some way to get rid off. It's not a profitable business. Now of course people will chime in, why doesn't the gov recycle them for plastics etc? Well recycling printers/monitors is really hard to do. It's very expensive and not worth a computer charities time on the whole, if they don't want to go under from the associated cost.
Simple solution: require all hardware vendors to take back and recycle or properly dispose the products they sell. They will automatically start designing for ease of recycling instead of low cost. The cost of disposal will end up part of the original sale price, and the problem will solve itself.
In almost every question of pollution the simplest and most appropriate solution is "the polluter pays for the cleanup". It's just common sense.
Incidentally, this is the path the EU and Japan are following, with the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive in the EU, and the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources in Japan.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
X is a bad compromise, which made sense at the time, but doesn't anymore. X didn't standardize anything but how you draw to the screen. This means that X-based apps don't agree with each other on menu shortcuts, menu placement, widget look, widget behavior, drag-and-drop, copy/paste, and everything else that makes a desktop functional. Over the years there have become de facto standards for these, but X will always be handicapped by its lack of inherent standardization of functionality for which there must be a standard in order to reach a usable desktop.
Leaving the choice up to the user for all of these things has in practice proven an effort in futility. I spent years tinkering with linux boxes to get them to work right, and spent about 4 hours doing the same with a mac. And you know what? The mac is more consistent and usable than my linux system ever was.
X's only remaining strong-suit is its networkability, but that has many performance flaws. The one admirable aspect of it is the ability to run applications on one machine and view their output on another. That's the one feature the mac still needs. All the rest I'd prefer it do without, because, well, X just sucks, by design.
I would look at AAC. If you have 192 kbps MP3 now, 192 kbps AAC won't take up more space and potentially sound better. And if 192 is already over some threshold where you can't discern the difference, then you could bump things down a bit to save space.
192 kbps AAC is overkill for most uses, for me at least. There are few CD's that I can hear the difference on when encoded to 128 kbps AAC, generally classical music. Bumping the bitrate to 160 kbps AAC makes everything sound as good as the CD.
When 50% of the computer science majors can get out of school and pay off their debt within 5 years, THAT will be sufficient.
But why should they be in debt in the first place? A full-time student in my country doesn't pay more than 500 euro per year for pretty much anything they'd want to study. If they can't even afford that, they pay less (some pay pretty much nothing). Capability of learning a skill or trade has nothing to do with financial solvency, so it's pointless to have an education system that couples the two. Better to have everyone pay into an education system at their level of ability, and have everyone take out of it based on their need and inherent abilities.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays.
The same way they keep you from running up and down the plane mid-flight shouting "we're all gonna die!".
Besides, it's not even necessarily the passengers who rile up things. A few years ago I was on a plane waiting for take-off where the stewardess figured that the best solution to calm pre-take-off nerves would be to put on the radio through the cabin speakers. Much to her surprise, the song playing at that very moment was "killing me softly", and you can all have a guess which words came out of the speakers first...
I love being able to use Flash, but for accessability to low-speed dialup, 64bit linux (I still havent heard of Flash player working in that), and screen-readers (for the blind, etc) you would have to practically redo the site in standard html
Not true. Flash 6 and newer can integrate with screen readers or be made self-voicing (in which case a screen reader is unnecessary), and it is generally quite possible to build accessibility into flash applications. Also, in my experience a web app redesigned from HTML to flash decreases in bandwidth needed. You can get a very complicated web app with thousands or even tens of thousands of lines of code in a flash movie that's less than 100 KB because of how efficient the format is compared to HTML and javascript (bytecode-compiled).
The basic problem with flash bloat is that most flash designers are just that, designers. They're not developers, so they don't really know the tool they're using or how to use it effectively. An example of efficient flash built by developers is google finance's charting. It loads fast, it is powerful and it isn't intrusive.
But for me the ability to sort through goods is the #1 priority. Yes I like to have a pretty site to look at but if I cannot find what I am looking for with a few simple queries then I am gone.
Same here. I get massively irritated by the dumb designs of web stores like amazon and itunes when it comes to searching through music. For example, most music web stores let you search by genre, but only have the most generic genres, and won't let you combine them. If I happen to like instrumental electronic post-modern rock music, then I should be able to search for just that, and not have to trawl through the thousands of products in the rock genre. They've generally tried to offset this lack of categorization and metadata by using recommendation systems based on past purchases, but these rarely recommend something I might actually want, filling the web store with even more useless litter that distracts me from getting to the products I might want to buy.
In short: web stores suck pretty badly, and they're not improving. But I doubt the page load time has much to do with it. Pageloads are only an issue because it takes you dozens of pageloads to get the product you want (unless you know it by name), instead of the 3 or 4 that it would take in a well-designed system.
Cdbaby.com is an example of a web store done well. The pages are simple, and the basic metadata and search system is powerful and detailed enough that I can get to something I like in half a dozen clicks or less. But there aren't many web stores like that.
Now that this research is in, I predict that all website designers will realize the futility of flashy designs and instead remake their sites to be more like Craigslist or Google. I'm predicting an end to Flash and Javascript.
It's amusing that google gets hailed for being a beacon of simplistic web design while most of what they build nowadays are extremely complicated ajax or flash web applications. Just about the only thing that is "light weight" is google's homepage, and that only in classic mode, because the new customized homepage gets heavy real fast.
Secondly, flash and javascript, when used appropriately, make web applications faster because they decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and increase responsiveness. For example, I replaced a web application that used generated bitmaps in simple HTML pages to show vector drawings with one that uses javascript, flash and generated SVG files to do the same, and the amount of data transmitted dropped by a factor 10, as well as the entire application being much more responsive.
Flash and javascript are both a lot more powerful as technologies than HTML with server roundtrips. Because of that they get misused more often. But don't blame the hammer for making it easy to bash your skull in with it.
I have come to think of any Dvorak story posted by Slashdot as meta-flamebait. They know it is just going to cause the comments to degenerate into a total circus of hatred.
They're not just flamebait, they're flamebait on purpose. The purpose of the dvorak flamebait articles is generating clicks on the articles in question, and generating the ad revenue linked with those clicks. This has even been admitted by dvorak (or one of the dvoraks, since it's likely to just be a name they assign to writers), and this admission of guilt has appeared on slashdot.
The key thing to learn about this is to never, ever, browse to a dvorak article, because that is exactly what they want you to do.
I can't really say any use in a program that's half web based and half desktop based. Except perhaps to use a browser component to access web pages from within the application. Any other information can be handled by a proprietary networking app/server and you get orders of magnitude better performance.
The performance gains to be had by building a proprietary application server are easily offset by the opportunity costs of having to release later because you didn't use standard web protocols. What we're seeing is a gradual migrating to XML-based languages running on the internet. Sure, XML is not the most efficient way to encode anything, but it is good enough, and it doesn't require you to reinvent the wheel.
Reliability; Using all web apps or a web based OS would be ridiculous. What happens when your DS3 circuit goes down at your company? Yeah sure we already rely on the internet for job related things and internet downtime does kill productivity, but it doesn't render your computer useless, you can still write code, do accounting stuff or whatever it is that you do.
Actually, in a lot of situations you can't. My company makes windows applications that require a live database connection to work because they're used for things like booking reservations, announcing visitors, and all kinds of things you can't do unless you are connected to the intranet. Since some three years we also develop a line of web apps that do the same thing, running on a PHP backend, connecting to the same database. What we've seen is that some customers move over entirely to the web app, even though it is slower, because the interface is simpler, and install, configuration and updating is more easily centralized. They only use the windows apps to initially configure the system.
For a lot of intranet apps the network must be up. Once your app depends on the network it makes a lot of sense to turn it into a web app.
Adobe will never go up against Microsoft, Google or others in developing their own "web convergence" applications (word processors, calendars, whatever). Adobe is in the business of enabling communication.
They won't make word processors and calendars because there's little profit to be had in that unless you can couple it with a context-sensitive ad network (like google's), which adobe doesn't have. But they are most definitely going head to head with microsoft.
Adobe is readying a flash-based platform for desktop app development that will compete with.net currently code-named Apollo. They intend to distribute a runtime like the.net runtime, that will provide a platform for running apps that are a mixture of HTML, javascript, flash and actionscript, with API's to access the local system's capabilities but still platform independent. They're even integrating a KHTML-based browser engine so you can integrate web content directly into your apollo app (and apply all of flash's graphical effects to it).
I also expect them to bundle this with the pdf reader, so that everyone will have it installed.
Many of the memory leaks are actually caused by extensions. And there are a LOT of poorly-written leaking extensions out there (in fact, switching from the SessionSaver extension to the built-in session saver in FF2 brought about a very noticeable change).
Javascript has a concept known as closures. These are function objects that preserve the scope at the time of their creation, meaning they preserve a reference to the variables that were in the scope, keeping them from being garbage collected. It's quite possible to design extensions accidentally so that you are constantly creating closures that inherit the scope of an earlier closure, and add to it, thereby seeming to leak memory, where you're actually seeing behavior that is by-design. Since extensions don't get unloaded at all (unlike site-based javascript), it's quite possible that a lot of them "leak" memory because of misunderstandings by the authors of how closures work.
IE6 is even worse with closures. It leaks memory consistently when you have circular references across closures and DOM nodes at the time of unloading a page. Supposedly this issue is fixed in IE7, but I haven't checked for myself.
My experience with relative stability of firefox and safari on OS X is that it is entirely related to what plugins are installed in either (which aren't necessarily the same). I had consistent crashes in firefox for a while due to a misinstalled windows media plugin, while safari was stable.
Firefox hasn't crashed on me in about two months of daily use. I used to shut down 1.5 about once a week to trim the memory usage. We'll see how 2.0 fares.
Just because a XHTML document is structurally standards-compliant doesn't mean it's semantically standards-compliant. I can nest everything in DIVs if I wanted to.
And even if you didn't, what semantic value gets encoded into XHTML that is really useful anyway? For automated TOC and index production I can see it being useful. But for actually extracting any of the useful data of a document I can't see it helping much if it is XHTML.
One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
I think believing XHTML would improve on things is a bit naive. Having a page that is nothing but divs and spans is not an improvement over having a bunch of nested tables. And, yes, that would be the reality of an XHTML web.
I'm not a believer in the semantic web. As I understand it, the project is about designing a set of web languages so people can encode all semantic value in a way that allows computers to understand it. The idea is to iteratively improve these languages until we can encode semantic value in a way that is as meaningful to a computer as it is a to a human, and that is standardized so that all tools can make use of the same body of knowledge, thereby sharing that knowledge. This idea seems patently misguided. The only sensible way to make computers understand meaning is through automated learning. There is too much knowledge in the world for us to have to hold their hands. As long as we're forced to encode meaning, we won't be able to rely on computers to understand us in all real-life situations, meaning that anything that is truly mission critical won't be able to make use of this brave new world. In short, I don't expect the semantic web to produce anything that couldn't have been produced more easily without it.
So, all you so called "developers" and "designers", keep on churning out your HTML 4.01 Transitional pages (or let Dreamweaver do it for you) with bloated table layouts. You'll keep contributing to the problem.
The web is one of the few places where people still "hand-code" their layouts, mostly because the web platform is so horribly deficient that hand-coding is actually sometimes the most efficient way to go about things. Every other environment does design via drag-and-drop and click-and-drag. You can't really blame designers for not thinking hand-coding HTML and CSS is a good use of their time (typing HTML and CSS has nothing to do with design), and preferring dreamweaver instead, just like I couldn't blame my architect for preferring autocad to hand-coding DXF files.
XHTML and CSS encourage the separation of content and presentation. HTML embraces, no, relies on, embedded presentation.
I am all for separating presentation and content, but seriously, would you really consider CSS fit for the job of presentation? Sure, you can place a few pretty colors here and there, and laying out documents is easy enough to figure out, but have you actually tried to use it to do the layout of a web application that tries to emulate a desktop metaphor, with resizeable windows and fluid layouts (especially vertically fluid layouts)? I have, and do, all day at work, and let me tell you: it sucks for that job. I compare it to the layouting tools of modern RAD environments (like, say, java swing's layout managers), and find it wanting, very wanting.
I keep wondering how it could be that CSS is so poorly suited to doing what is one of the key tasks involved with the business side of the web: layout of web applications.
And I can't really blame people who keep using tables for layout because they can't figure out how to do the layouts they need to in CSS, especially with IE6 being so piss-poor at CSS positioning.
And it has unbelievably poor support for CSS. It won't even do tables. Not even in IE 7...
Make sure your page loads in standards mode instead of quirks mode by defining an appropriate doctype. If you don't have a doctype, or have an incorrect doctype, it will behave like IE 5 for backwards compatibility reasons.
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No matter if they download apps to the thin client, or if they try to run on images remotely, there's just no way for them to meet the same kind of performance metrics until they work themselves up into a true thick client, and then what was the point anyway?
To be fair, you can get pretty far if you're basing yourself off of the flash 9 engine. It has native (fast) support for various blending modes and filters (including a convolution filter). Even if you have to fallback to pixel processing in actionscript, it shouldn't do too bad, since the ActionScript 3 engine is comparable to Java performance-wise. Not native code, but not bad. I can pretty much guarantee that adobe's web-based photoshop lite will be based on flash 9.
I think flash-based clients will do quite nicely in the space where picasa and consorts live. So, to dismiss them outright seems sort of silly. Why should users have to install anything if the image editor that fits their needs will run just as well in a browser?
You've actually heard someone say that OSX is a waste of money compared to windows, and then proceed to dump the mac for that reason?
OS X is considerably cheaper than Windows Vista in the EU (don't know about the US), and it does more.
Why do people always talk about this as if it matters in the slightest? I can just picture legions of Mac users sitting at their desks, staring at their computers and thinking how 'beautiful' they look..
When your computer is in your living room, and you're spending money on furniture that all looks stylish and soothing to the eye, there is nothing that spoils that worse than a dell box right in the middle of that.
The desktop version of OS X is comparable to a linux distro when it comes to serving abilities. It includes apache, an ftp server, an ssh server, samba file sharing and remote desktop support. All of which you can enable or disable by checking a single checkbox in the sharing preferences pane (much easier than anything I've ever seen on any other OS), or on the command-line (if need be, across ssh).
No, the problem is that most Slashdotters - indeed, most "enthusiasts" - want a machine Apple refuses to sell: a single processor box without an integrated LCD, a replacable video card (plus another vacant x16 slot, even with only x8 signalling) and room for two 3.5" hard disks.
You can hook up the additional drives via USB, which does in fact cover almost all real-world uses (except serious video editing, which you will not do on a machine that is less than 2000 usd), and makes migrating the drives to a new box MUCH easier.
As for an upgradeable video card, the only way I see that making sense is if you're a serious gamer, in which case the mac is indeed the wrong box for you. Most slashdotters however are occasional gamers, and even though most of them would appreciate an upgradeable video card, most of them won't upgrade it. I used to home-build my PC's for the very same reason you mention. I had extra drive bays and an upgradeable video card, and eventually I concluded that I never actually made use of the expandability.
I suspect the vast majority of slashdotters, like myself, won't expand their box (except perhaps RAM) until they buy another one, and in that case the mac makes perfect sense. Which is why I own a mini, and am planning to buy an imac.
The problem is that recycling a computer is EXPENSIVE. Shipping an old computer, specially with CRT monitors costs a lot of money. Also, people don't want to take these old clunkers off you, so you end up collecting more and more pentium II 200mhz toasters which you then have to find some way to get rid off. It's not a profitable business. Now of course people will chime in, why doesn't the gov recycle them for plastics etc? Well recycling printers/monitors is really hard to do. It's very expensive and not worth a computer charities time on the whole, if they don't want to go under from the associated cost.
Simple solution: require all hardware vendors to take back and recycle or properly dispose the products they sell. They will automatically start designing for ease of recycling instead of low cost. The cost of disposal will end up part of the original sale price, and the problem will solve itself.
In almost every question of pollution the simplest and most appropriate solution is "the polluter pays for the cleanup". It's just common sense.
Incidentally, this is the path the EU and Japan are following, with the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive in the EU, and the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources in Japan.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
X is a bad compromise, which made sense at the time, but doesn't anymore. X didn't standardize anything but how you draw to the screen. This means that X-based apps don't agree with each other on menu shortcuts, menu placement, widget look, widget behavior, drag-and-drop, copy/paste, and everything else that makes a desktop functional. Over the years there have become de facto standards for these, but X will always be handicapped by its lack of inherent standardization of functionality for which there must be a standard in order to reach a usable desktop.
Leaving the choice up to the user for all of these things has in practice proven an effort in futility. I spent years tinkering with linux boxes to get them to work right, and spent about 4 hours doing the same with a mac. And you know what? The mac is more consistent and usable than my linux system ever was.
X's only remaining strong-suit is its networkability, but that has many performance flaws. The one admirable aspect of it is the ability to run applications on one machine and view their output on another. That's the one feature the mac still needs. All the rest I'd prefer it do without, because, well, X just sucks, by design.
I would look at AAC. If you have 192 kbps MP3 now, 192 kbps AAC won't take up more space and potentially sound better. And if 192 is already over some threshold where you can't discern the difference, then you could bump things down a bit to save space.
192 kbps AAC is overkill for most uses, for me at least. There are few CD's that I can hear the difference on when encoded to 128 kbps AAC, generally classical music. Bumping the bitrate to 160 kbps AAC makes everything sound as good as the CD.
When 50% of the computer science majors can get out of school and pay off their debt within 5 years, THAT will be sufficient.
But why should they be in debt in the first place? A full-time student in my country doesn't pay more than 500 euro per year for pretty much anything they'd want to study. If they can't even afford that, they pay less (some pay pretty much nothing). Capability of learning a skill or trade has nothing to do with financial solvency, so it's pointless to have an education system that couples the two. Better to have everyone pay into an education system at their level of ability, and have everyone take out of it based on their need and inherent abilities.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays.
The same way they keep you from running up and down the plane mid-flight shouting "we're all gonna die!".
Besides, it's not even necessarily the passengers who rile up things. A few years ago I was on a plane waiting for take-off where the stewardess figured that the best solution to calm pre-take-off nerves would be to put on the radio through the cabin speakers. Much to her surprise, the song playing at that very moment was "killing me softly", and you can all have a guess which words came out of the speakers first...
I love being able to use Flash, but for accessability to low-speed dialup, 64bit linux (I still havent heard of Flash player working in that), and screen-readers (for the blind, etc) you would have to practically redo the site in standard html
Not true. Flash 6 and newer can integrate with screen readers or be made self-voicing (in which case a screen reader is unnecessary), and it is generally quite possible to build accessibility into flash applications. Also, in my experience a web app redesigned from HTML to flash decreases in bandwidth needed. You can get a very complicated web app with thousands or even tens of thousands of lines of code in a flash movie that's less than 100 KB because of how efficient the format is compared to HTML and javascript (bytecode-compiled).
The basic problem with flash bloat is that most flash designers are just that, designers. They're not developers, so they don't really know the tool they're using or how to use it effectively. An example of efficient flash built by developers is google finance's charting. It loads fast, it is powerful and it isn't intrusive.
But for me the ability to sort through goods is the #1 priority. Yes I like to have a pretty site to look at but if I cannot find what I am looking for with a few simple queries then I am gone.
Same here. I get massively irritated by the dumb designs of web stores like amazon and itunes when it comes to searching through music. For example, most music web stores let you search by genre, but only have the most generic genres, and won't let you combine them. If I happen to like instrumental electronic post-modern rock music, then I should be able to search for just that, and not have to trawl through the thousands of products in the rock genre. They've generally tried to offset this lack of categorization and metadata by using recommendation systems based on past purchases, but these rarely recommend something I might actually want, filling the web store with even more useless litter that distracts me from getting to the products I might want to buy.
In short: web stores suck pretty badly, and they're not improving. But I doubt the page load time has much to do with it. Pageloads are only an issue because it takes you dozens of pageloads to get the product you want (unless you know it by name), instead of the 3 or 4 that it would take in a well-designed system.
Cdbaby.com is an example of a web store done well. The pages are simple, and the basic metadata and search system is powerful and detailed enough that I can get to something I like in half a dozen clicks or less. But there aren't many web stores like that.
Now that this research is in, I predict that all website designers will realize the futility of flashy designs and instead remake their sites to be more like Craigslist or Google. I'm predicting an end to Flash and Javascript.
It's amusing that google gets hailed for being a beacon of simplistic web design while most of what they build nowadays are extremely complicated ajax or flash web applications. Just about the only thing that is "light weight" is google's homepage, and that only in classic mode, because the new customized homepage gets heavy real fast.
Secondly, flash and javascript, when used appropriately, make web applications faster because they decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and increase responsiveness. For example, I replaced a web application that used generated bitmaps in simple HTML pages to show vector drawings with one that uses javascript, flash and generated SVG files to do the same, and the amount of data transmitted dropped by a factor 10, as well as the entire application being much more responsive.
Flash and javascript are both a lot more powerful as technologies than HTML with server roundtrips. Because of that they get misused more often. But don't blame the hammer for making it easy to bash your skull in with it.
I have come to think of any Dvorak story posted by Slashdot as meta-flamebait. They know it is just going to cause the comments to degenerate into a total circus of hatred.
They're not just flamebait, they're flamebait on purpose. The purpose of the dvorak flamebait articles is generating clicks on the articles in question, and generating the ad revenue linked with those clicks. This has even been admitted by dvorak (or one of the dvoraks, since it's likely to just be a name they assign to writers), and this admission of guilt has appeared on slashdot.
The key thing to learn about this is to never, ever, browse to a dvorak article, because that is exactly what they want you to do.
I can't really say any use in a program that's half web based and half desktop based. Except perhaps to use a browser component to access web pages from within the application. Any other information can be handled by a proprietary networking app/server and you get orders of magnitude better performance.
The performance gains to be had by building a proprietary application server are easily offset by the opportunity costs of having to release later because you didn't use standard web protocols. What we're seeing is a gradual migrating to XML-based languages running on the internet. Sure, XML is not the most efficient way to encode anything, but it is good enough, and it doesn't require you to reinvent the wheel.
Reliability; Using all web apps or a web based OS would be ridiculous. What happens when your DS3 circuit goes down at your company? Yeah sure we already rely on the internet for job related things and internet downtime does kill productivity, but it doesn't render your computer useless, you can still write code, do accounting stuff or whatever it is that you do.
Actually, in a lot of situations you can't. My company makes windows applications that require a live database connection to work because they're used for things like booking reservations, announcing visitors, and all kinds of things you can't do unless you are connected to the intranet. Since some three years we also develop a line of web apps that do the same thing, running on a PHP backend, connecting to the same database. What we've seen is that some customers move over entirely to the web app, even though it is slower, because the interface is simpler, and install, configuration and updating is more easily centralized. They only use the windows apps to initially configure the system.
For a lot of intranet apps the network must be up. Once your app depends on the network it makes a lot of sense to turn it into a web app.
Now I read the article. OK. Mea culpa. It's all in there.
Adobe will never go up against Microsoft, Google or others in developing their own "web convergence" applications (word processors, calendars, whatever). Adobe is in the business of enabling communication.
.net currently code-named Apollo. They intend to distribute a runtime like the .net runtime, that will provide a platform for running apps that are a mixture of HTML, javascript, flash and actionscript, with API's to access the local system's capabilities but still platform independent. They're even integrating a KHTML-based browser engine so you can integrate web content directly into your apollo app (and apply all of flash's graphical effects to it).
They won't make word processors and calendars because there's little profit to be had in that unless you can couple it with a context-sensitive ad network (like google's), which adobe doesn't have. But they are most definitely going head to head with microsoft.
Adobe is readying a flash-based platform for desktop app development that will compete with
I also expect them to bundle this with the pdf reader, so that everyone will have it installed.
Many of the memory leaks are actually caused by extensions. And there are a LOT of poorly-written leaking extensions out there (in fact, switching from the SessionSaver extension to the built-in session saver in FF2 brought about a very noticeable change).
Javascript has a concept known as closures. These are function objects that preserve the scope at the time of their creation, meaning they preserve a reference to the variables that were in the scope, keeping them from being garbage collected. It's quite possible to design extensions accidentally so that you are constantly creating closures that inherit the scope of an earlier closure, and add to it, thereby seeming to leak memory, where you're actually seeing behavior that is by-design. Since extensions don't get unloaded at all (unlike site-based javascript), it's quite possible that a lot of them "leak" memory because of misunderstandings by the authors of how closures work.
IE6 is even worse with closures. It leaks memory consistently when you have circular references across closures and DOM nodes at the time of unloading a page. Supposedly this issue is fixed in IE7, but I haven't checked for myself.
My experience with relative stability of firefox and safari on OS X is that it is entirely related to what plugins are installed in either (which aren't necessarily the same). I had consistent crashes in firefox for a while due to a misinstalled windows media plugin, while safari was stable.
Firefox hasn't crashed on me in about two months of daily use. I used to shut down 1.5 about once a week to trim the memory usage. We'll see how 2.0 fares.
Just because a XHTML document is structurally standards-compliant doesn't mean it's semantically standards-compliant. I can nest everything in DIVs if I wanted to.
And even if you didn't, what semantic value gets encoded into XHTML that is really useful anyway? For automated TOC and index production I can see it being useful. But for actually extracting any of the useful data of a document I can't see it helping much if it is XHTML.
One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
I think believing XHTML would improve on things is a bit naive. Having a page that is nothing but divs and spans is not an improvement over having a bunch of nested tables. And, yes, that would be the reality of an XHTML web.
I'm not a believer in the semantic web. As I understand it, the project is about designing a set of web languages so people can encode all semantic value in a way that allows computers to understand it. The idea is to iteratively improve these languages until we can encode semantic value in a way that is as meaningful to a computer as it is a to a human, and that is standardized so that all tools can make use of the same body of knowledge, thereby sharing that knowledge. This idea seems patently misguided. The only sensible way to make computers understand meaning is through automated learning. There is too much knowledge in the world for us to have to hold their hands. As long as we're forced to encode meaning, we won't be able to rely on computers to understand us in all real-life situations, meaning that anything that is truly mission critical won't be able to make use of this brave new world. In short, I don't expect the semantic web to produce anything that couldn't have been produced more easily without it.
So, all you so called "developers" and "designers", keep on churning out your HTML 4.01 Transitional pages (or let Dreamweaver do it for you) with bloated table layouts. You'll keep contributing to the problem.
The web is one of the few places where people still "hand-code" their layouts, mostly because the web platform is so horribly deficient that hand-coding is actually sometimes the most efficient way to go about things. Every other environment does design via drag-and-drop and click-and-drag. You can't really blame designers for not thinking hand-coding HTML and CSS is a good use of their time (typing HTML and CSS has nothing to do with design), and preferring dreamweaver instead, just like I couldn't blame my architect for preferring autocad to hand-coding DXF files.
XHTML and CSS encourage the separation of content and presentation. HTML embraces, no, relies on, embedded presentation.
I am all for separating presentation and content, but seriously, would you really consider CSS fit for the job of presentation? Sure, you can place a few pretty colors here and there, and laying out documents is easy enough to figure out, but have you actually tried to use it to do the layout of a web application that tries to emulate a desktop metaphor, with resizeable windows and fluid layouts (especially vertically fluid layouts)? I have, and do, all day at work, and let me tell you: it sucks for that job. I compare it to the layouting tools of modern RAD environments (like, say, java swing's layout managers), and find it wanting, very wanting.
I keep wondering how it could be that CSS is so poorly suited to doing what is one of the key tasks involved with the business side of the web: layout of web applications.
And I can't really blame people who keep using tables for layout because they can't figure out how to do the layouts they need to in CSS, especially with IE6 being so piss-poor at CSS positioning.
And it has unbelievably poor support for CSS. It won't even do tables. Not even in IE 7...
Make sure your page loads in standards mode instead of quirks mode by defining an appropriate doctype. If you don't have a doctype, or have an incorrect doctype, it will behave like IE 5 for backwards compatibility reasons.