I have long wondered why web interfaces aren't much good. The technologies are there; Java applets, Flash, Python could do it, JavaScript could with a few extensions, XUL, heck, even C, compiled on the fly. All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why? Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step?
Because the only ones who could, the W3C, have abandoned HTML. They want you to move to XHTML(2), XFORMS and SVG. Therefore they are no longer in the business of extending regular HTML.
David Baron in his blog commented about the disinterest of the W3C with regards to supporting the existing API set.
HTML does not have the necessary elements to do rich ui's well. There is no widespread client-side web technology that does have what it takes (flash and java come close, but have single-supplier, standardisation, integration and accessibility issues). Like you point out, with just a few HTML extensions the web could become dramatically more useful for rich UI's, but the W3C has shown zero interest in doing that.
And then ofcourse there is the problem of 90 percent of the client space running a browser which has not seen development this millenium. But with HTA's you could conceivably figure out some kind of extension that does work in IE too. If there was some kind of unified push to make regular HTML and the existing web technology "good enough", it could succeed.
Amen. I have vivid memories of typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory (and that was WITH pwd in my prompt). It took an entire week to duplicate the work lost.
Combining the rm command and lack of sleep is like combining a loaded gun and your forehead. You can only do it so often before you destroy something valuable.
I've never had a pleasant experience with any type of software raid... Not striping, mirroring, anything. It always craps out. Hardware is the way to go.
Exactly how does it crap out? I'm running a debian-based software raid-1 mirroring setup that has been up for over two years. In case the raid setup somehow gets nuked, I can boot off a single drive and pretend it's not raid.
The main trick you needed to know about when I first set it up was that if you ran the 2.2 kernel, you could not run journalled filesystems, because then you'd get filesystem problems creeping in. Maybe that's what happened to you?
I must admit though, it wasn't easy to set up. For convenience today I'd probably go with hardware raid too, given how affordable it is.
It's only a pII/233 but it's still acceptable in performance. I used it as a desktop machine for a while, until the monitor went to the great electron beam beyond. Now it's a fileserver.
That's not my recollection of things. I remember there being a hardcore netscape userbase representing about 30 or 40 percent of the web user population who only switched when netscape completely lost it and pushed out one horribly shoddy product after another. Once netscape was no longer cool, people switched, me included.
You're all cheering the US government on when they publicly broadcast their decision to do absolutely nothing about spam. Do you all love spam that much?
The FTC's position is that you can not trace email messages back to their source, which is absolute bull. You can't track them all back, but you can track enough back to go after spammers. If it really was impossible to trace communications on the internet, the dmca would be unenforceable, worm writers would never get caught, and there would be no internet branch of echelon.
Now, the spam bill sucked. We knew it wasn't going to improve the situation, but that they're not even going to try something that was intentionally made as weak as possible shows that the FTC is on the side of the spammers. So pooh to them.
Remember, although a lot of spam gets sent from china, most spammers are US citizens. They ARE within the reaches of US law. All that's needed is for congress to grow a pair.
I suspect the difference is that Amazon.com just ships around pre-made physical goods, whereas iTunes Music Store offers digital downloading. It's essentially a completely new form of commerce.
I really honestly do not see the difference between buying a cd on amazon and having it delivered by truck, and buying a cd on itunes and having it delivered by internet. It's just a distribution scheme. That round piece of metal-coated plastic you're buying when you buy a physical cd does not represent the actual product, since if you create a copy of it and destroy the original, you still legally own a license to play that music.
Like it or not, but most laws (especialy copyright) are comming together under one law for all member states.
That's true, but we're not talking about copyright law, we're talking about copyright owners. Each country has its own governing body for managing copyright assets under the law. In the EU, copyright law is supposed to be paneuropean (though the EU Copyright Directive slipped in a number of DMCA-style things which are slowing adoption), but copyright ownership is still a country by country situation.
People don't like changing their e-mail address, any more than they like changing their phone number
Here's a tip for those people: get your own domain name. Costs you about 10 bucks a year. The better domain name companies (like my personal favorite gandi.net) provide included email and web forwarding. That way you can keep the same email address for the rest of your life even when you switch mailboxes.
Also, if you rent dns service, you can finetune your mail forwarding to have different email addresses on the same domain leading to different mailboxes. And if you've got an always-on internet connection you can make your domain forward to your home box through free dynamic ip services, like from dyndns.org, so that you could for example run your own jabber server, or have an ssh login permanently available where ever you are to access stuff on your home machine (which coupled with quickly downloaded sftp clients like winscp allows you to copy files over quickly and easily regardless of location).
The difference is that there is one copyright authority governing the entire US, and there is one copyright authority for every country in the EU, so supposedly you have to negotiate 25 different deals for every EU member country. The EU is not a country, it's a trade union.
On the other hand, I'm curious about something: amazon can sell music cd's across europe, why can't apple sell music files across europe? Does amazon have some kind of special deal to allow them to sell copyrighted materials in every country? Or is the internet again being treated like the bastard stepdaughter of the copyright world?
Anyway, Firefox cannot beat IE off the top rank. It's simply becaues IE comes with Windows, and no smallwited user would know that there's alternatives, at all.
There are different classes of users though. I'm curious to see browser marketshare among online store users. I know anecdotally that the people that run alternative browsers tend to shop online more.
And as we all know, IE is a lousy browser for browsing porn. Porn drives the internet. I switched one "average joe" to mozilla just because of its porn browsing capabilities. Really. I'm not kidding. He thanked me because browsing porn was so much easier. They really should advocate firefox with the slogan "Firefox. Because you need porn."
check out this: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
There are a few things that make me consider that less relevant:
- IE users load up google.com more often, distorting the statistics. The alternative browsers tend to have built-in google search which bypasses the main google page. Google toolbar share among IE users is not that big, and even those who do run it often still go to google.com when they want to do a search.
- A sizeable part of the alternative browser user market uses an IE user agent string. I don't know how google's detection of browsers works, but given how lightweight their tracking must be, I seriously doubt they do anything more than collect UA strings.
- IE once had a 4 percent marketshare with netscape a 90+ percent marketshare too. This is history repeating itself with the roles reversed. Just go take a look at early IE history. People generally first considered it a joke, then they took it seriously but said "everybody runs netscape". Then eventually MS convinced enough businesses to switch over, and it reached a critical treshold where the networking effect of IE users caused people to switch in droves. Mozilla-based browsers, being naturally superior to IE featurewise, could do the same thing, especially given that they have a vastly better security track record, and MS has admitted they won't release a rearchitected more secure version of IE in years.
Currently we're already at the "yeah, firefox is great, but everybody runs IE" stage. Very few people are still trying to claim that IE is the better browser. It's just inertia that keeps IE in place. Inertia is powerful, but it doesn't last forever.
The problem is most people think installing a new hard drive is complicated, even if it's actaully easier (and safer) than using a circular hand saw to cut a 2x4.
I think it's because people think they know how a hand saw works, but they think they don't know how a hard-drive's connection to a pc works. Ofcourse, they don't know the actual mechanics of either, but it's the perception that makes the difference.
You're saying that you can't do anti-aliased fonts on GTK1? I don't know where you got that idea at all. GTK 1.2 works just fine with xft.
GTK1 uses a hack to enable anti-aliasing. This produced a range of problems, including some widgets not getting some of that AA goodness.
Besides that, I'm not a fan of antialiased fonts. I don't see any improvement. The fonts are different for sure, but I don't find them to look any better (with the exception of just a few fonts that do look lowsy, but there are bad-looking AA fonts as well).
That shouldn't be the case.
First of all you must use manually hinted fonts. Either bitstream vera, or the microsoft core web fonts. None of the other fonts you'll typically find on a linux system "cut it" AA-wise. You can research manual hinting if you want to know why that is. Personally I use MS Verdana and MS Courier New for everything. Given that you're a dillo user I expect you'll prefer the Free vera fonts.
If you are using the right fonts, and you're still having that problem, then why that is depends on what kind of display tech you're using.
If you're using some kind of CRT system, then your pixel resolution must not exceed the physical resolution of the screen (pixels must still be separate square entities on the screen, rather than all blurring together). If your pixel resolution exceeds the physical resolution of the screen, AA just makes everything more fuzzy.
If you're using an LCD display, you have to configure it to use subpixel AA, since the decrease in "crispness" caused by regular AA is too much for some people. Subpixel AA, if configured correctly, triples the horizontal resolution for font display, and so does not negatively impact crispness.
And what is it about GTK2 that makes programs like Abiword work any better than GTK1? Remember now, Abiword was GTK1 not long ago, so practically everything it does now, it did before the switch to GTK2.
What changed is that a lot of stuff that used to be up to the application was moved into GTK. That creates a more unified look and feel, and leaves a more cohesive impression on the average user. GTK1 apps all looked and felt too different. Ofcourse, some apps, like the ones you listed, enjoy having a different L&F, so they have little reason to switch. They also have little marketshare. I don't believe those things to be unrelated. You've got to go along to get along.
I don't like bloat. I'm sure a great many others don't as well. I certainly remember the uproar from a large number of users on the Dillo mailing list when someone suggested switching to GTK2... If you think users don't care, you live in a very small world.
But let's be honest here, if you're running dillo you're definitely not an average user.
The average user does not care about GTK1 vs GTK2, they just want stuff to work, and for everything to fit together. GTK2 is definitely better in that respect.
Example of when slow isn't really slow: browser page painting.
A browser can make a choice, either it starts drawing data as soon as it flows in over the wire, which means it will have to redraw it later as missing parts of the page are filled in. Or it can wait until all the data has arrived, and then draw it once.
The first approach takes longer than the second, but the first "seems" faster to the user, because he is seeing progress. Mozilla used to start drawing considerably later than IE, and so people believed IE was faster than Mozilla, while in reality in a lot of cases it wasn't. Incidentally, that is the reason for progress bars, to make time go faster.
Speed is a trade-off between responsiveness and throughput. You have to take both into account to get a true measure of the speed of a system. Although it is true that on the desktop responsiveness is highly preferred.
It's the same when you enter the country, the government can just refuse you entry for no reason at all.
That's not completely true. If you claim political asylum rights they have to prove you're not in danger because of your political views in your homeland before being able to send you back.
I don't see why business has to be about money and nothing else.
Well, corporations, when founded, sign a charter with the public (the government) outlining what they will aim to do. Theoretically corporations could be disbanded if they did not abide by rules in the charter. However, in practice, no corporation ever gets disbanded for shady business practices, no matter how bad they are for the public, and lots of corporations don't even get fined for screwing people over.
Ofcourse, the entire problem is that corporations got the courts to say they are equal citizens over a century ago. The flaw in that is that corporations don't die, ever, so they can keep gathering power and resources as long as they want, making them inherently superior to humans. Because of that over time you've seen corporate power grow. The only way to avoid corporations dominating the people is by giving them less rights than you give humans, and it will require a huge populist movement to roll back that decision.
However, if you recall I was replying to your assertion that what I wanted (an application building environment that enables distributed applications without resorting to C++ and Java) already existed in the form of Mozilla. I disagreed with you, and said (since you asked me to expand on it) that XForms was quite different to this platform, and in fact much more powerful.
That wasn't actually what I was arguing, though I see how my lack of coherence caused you to interpret what I said that way. I actually agreed from the outset that the current mozilla was inadequate, but there are two ways to solve that. Extending the existing html-based platform (mozilla, what WHATWG is doing), or moving to an entirely new xml-based one (some xhtml/xforms implementation). I was asking for reasons why the second was better than the first. I admit my original post was worded poorly and didn't really get that across.
Although ofcourse, mozilla will eventually support xforms too, so it's more a matter of going directly to xforms or having a stop-over at some intermediate html extension that does part of what xforms does. That's what my reply to your reply was mostly about. I can understand the arguments behind both, but personally I prefer gradual change if possible, so I'm still for an intermediate step.
Your new discussion about whether people's readiness to adopt something is a criteria for its use is, with respect, completely illogical.
Willingness to adopt doesn't matter to you with regards to how likely something is to be used widely? Somehow I doubt that that is what you're really saying.
Your assertion that SVG is marginal will receive a very big shake-up in the next year, since mobile phones will shortly be including a version of it.
I don't believe mobile phones matter, since they run different software from desktops. Having svg ubiquitous on mobile phones won't mean a thing with regards to desktop support.
Now, it's true that mobile support will legitimise SVG (in as far as being a W3C recommendation doesn't do that already), but it will still be marginal on the desktop.
As an aside, the W3C website really isn't clear enough on how all the technologies fit together when building a real website. There should be a big "how it all fits together" link on the main page.
there is a good reason Stereo types exist - the behavior exists.
Behavior is something you learn. You can teach a white boy to act exactly like what you think the stereotype of a black person is.
Blacks, gays and jews have one thing in common: they've always been ostracized in western civilization (for various reasons), and because they weren't allowed to integrate, they embraced the only culture they were accepted in, their own, and became/remained different. And then they have been blamed for being different and poorly integrated.
You use abnormal behavior as the excuse for segregation, but segregation causes abnormal behavior. That's not helpful.
Intelligence is defined by consensus anyway. An intelligent ape is still not intelligent by human standards. Intelligence is relative to the surroundings. That's why the IQ test uses a baseline of 100 for the "average person". By comparing a computer to an average human, you can see if the computer has average human intelligence.
I've always considered intelligence the ability to deduct valid conclusions from source data. That's something a computer should be able to do. It's why we can build chess machines that beat the world champion. Just because people understand exactly how the machine works doesn't make it non-intelligent, since it's proven that it is intelligent enough in the field of chess. What if you build a machine that is intelligent enough in all fields that could possibly be expected to come up in normal conversation? Wouldn't that be "humanlike" intelligence?
Guesses on when a machine is going to pass the turing test? Current chatbots apparently can convince up to a quarter of people they're human. That's not bad.
I've always been of the persuasion that human "intelligent" reasoning is nothing more than logic applied to a set of weighted premises. A computer should be able to do that, given the right logic and the right set of premises.
It's not just bandwidth. Even sites with tons of bandwidth can go down easily if they're dynamic. If you're going to get slashdotted, your site should be entirely static, with no images/movies/plugins loading from the main page, and if you must have images or movies, wrap them all up in a torrent and host them that way.
You'd have to somehow present all the files on the server as one big file, possibly with different areas of the superfile assigned to the different files, so you could make changes and still have them reflected. People would download the first block of the superfile, see what block they needed next, and request that from the network, with other blocks depending on availability being loaded in the background.
I doubt you could do it as a modification of bittorrent though. Bittorrent does not tolerate any changes to something you're hosting on a torrent stream. Any solution would have to contain the ability to compare checksums for some peer hosting a block with that of the tracker, and see if the block was updated.
Well, firstly it's obvious that HTML is not an application building language, so I assume you mean HTML plus a very large dose of script.
No, I meant html with extensions that are largely backwards compatible instead of the "clean break" that xhtml2+xforms tries to make.
Because it *doesn't* rely on script to get some big things done! Instead it has a large number of back-end features that are available via simple mark-up.
You need to validate a document before submitting? Easy in XForms - just add a schema to the model - not so easy in Mozilla, Opera or IE! You want to create dependencies between nodes in a DOM tree? Perhaps you want an event if node A goes higher than node B, or you want node C to be the sum of all node Ds. Easy in XForms - more spaghetti in Mozilla, Opera and IE.
How about preventing submission if some required value is missing. Easy peasy in XForms. Yet more script in M, O and IE, and which needs to be updated and maintained for every new required value you want to check.
I read up on xforms a bit, because I have to admit that even though I'm well-versed in html4 and css2, xhtml(2) and xforms are pretty much unknown to me.
And that is the big problem. What you're proposing is a switch to an entirely new language, somewhat resembling the old one, but really very different. That would require a large amount of retraining on the part of web designers, and web designers HATE to change the way they build websites (just look at how some people are still using the font tag).
Also, unless I'm mistaken about this, xhtml2+xforms has little to no support on current client platforms. Gradual changes to html always had a reasonable chance of getting implemented in browsers, but for an example of how the web community reacts to radical change, just look at the CSS and SVG experience. CSS1 isn't even fully supported on current browsers, despite being almost a decade old, and SVG is fringe at best, despite having been out for years. How exactly do you propose to get xforms onto the client in any reasonable timeframe? Especially when mozilla and opera have given a clear signal they think it's too far too fast and want a more gradual change in the form of what this WHATWG group is doing, and they pretty much set the standard for all browsers except IE (which is the least likely to get support for any new non-MS technology).
> Html has momentum, xforms doesn't.
XHTML 2.0 includes XForms.
What I meant with momentum was developer mindshare and platform support. XHTML2 is a reasonable step up from XHTML1, but who, apart from some bloggers and some techological advocates, writes their site in XHTML1? The baseline is still HTML4+CSS1 (and lots of sites, like slashdot, are even still HTML3.2 and no css). It will be years more until people are ready for XHTML2. And even then it will have to offer clear immediate and undeniable benefits over previous generations of html (just look at the resistance to css, which did provide a clear benefit). For that it will require ubiquitous platform support. So just like CSS it's going to have the chicken and egg problem. Webdesigners won't use it until it has wide support (and so there will be little user pressure on browsers to "get it right"), and browser makers will say they have better things to do than supporting a language nobody uses.
I'm all for advocating an eventual move to XHTML2/XFORMS, but you've got to look at how to realistically get there. Making the jump in one step is just not going to happen imho. That's why I think this WHATWG effort is more realistic in what it could achieve in a reasonable timeframe.
HTML is accessible almost by nature, but there are certainly things that the developer has to be cognizant of there as well to truly fit that goal.
I'd say more than a few things. I haven't looked into making flash accessible, but making a truly accessible html site requires a fair amount of planning and effort.
Slashdot Mirror
I have long wondered why web interfaces aren't much good. The technologies are there; Java applets, Flash, Python could do it, JavaScript could with a few extensions, XUL, heck, even C, compiled on the fly. All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why? Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step?
Because the only ones who could, the W3C, have abandoned HTML. They want you to move to XHTML(2), XFORMS and SVG. Therefore they are no longer in the business of extending regular HTML.
David Baron in his blog commented about the disinterest of the W3C with regards to supporting the existing API set.
HTML does not have the necessary elements to do rich ui's well. There is no widespread client-side web technology that does have what it takes (flash and java come close, but have single-supplier, standardisation, integration and accessibility issues). Like you point out, with just a few HTML extensions the web could become dramatically more useful for rich UI's, but the W3C has shown zero interest in doing that.
And then ofcourse there is the problem of 90 percent of the client space running a browser which has not seen development this millenium. But with HTA's you could conceivably figure out some kind of extension that does work in IE too. If there was some kind of unified push to make regular HTML and the existing web technology "good enough", it could succeed.
DO NOT RELY ON RAID TO PROTECT YOUR DATA.
Amen. I have vivid memories of typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory (and that was WITH pwd in my prompt). It took an entire week to duplicate the work lost.
Combining the rm command and lack of sleep is like combining a loaded gun and your forehead. You can only do it so often before you destroy something valuable.
I've never had a pleasant experience with any type of software raid... Not striping, mirroring, anything. It always craps out. Hardware is the way to go.
Exactly how does it crap out? I'm running a debian-based software raid-1 mirroring setup that has been up for over two years. In case the raid setup somehow gets nuked, I can boot off a single drive and pretend it's not raid.
The main trick you needed to know about when I first set it up was that if you ran the 2.2 kernel, you could not run journalled filesystems, because then you'd get filesystem problems creeping in. Maybe that's what happened to you?
I must admit though, it wasn't easy to set up. For convenience today I'd probably go with hardware raid too, given how affordable it is.
It's only a pII/233 but it's still acceptable in performance. I used it as a desktop machine for a while, until the monitor went to the great electron beam beyond. Now it's a fileserver.
That's not my recollection of things. I remember there being a hardcore netscape userbase representing about 30 or 40 percent of the web user population who only switched when netscape completely lost it and pushed out one horribly shoddy product after another. Once netscape was no longer cool, people switched, me included.
You're all cheering the US government on when they publicly broadcast their decision to do absolutely nothing about spam. Do you all love spam that much?
The FTC's position is that you can not trace email messages back to their source, which is absolute bull. You can't track them all back, but you can track enough back to go after spammers. If it really was impossible to trace communications on the internet, the dmca would be unenforceable, worm writers would never get caught, and there would be no internet branch of echelon.
Now, the spam bill sucked. We knew it wasn't going to improve the situation, but that they're not even going to try something that was intentionally made as weak as possible shows that the FTC is on the side of the spammers. So pooh to them.
Remember, although a lot of spam gets sent from china, most spammers are US citizens. They ARE within the reaches of US law. All that's needed is for congress to grow a pair.
Amazon has a different shop for every country.
You can't get anything delivered to a different country.
Not true. Amazon.co.uk sells to all countries in the EU. Amazon.com even sells music cd's to EU countries, but the price is prohibitively expensive.
I suspect the difference is that Amazon.com just ships around pre-made physical goods, whereas iTunes Music Store offers digital downloading. It's essentially a completely new form of commerce.
I really honestly do not see the difference between buying a cd on amazon and having it delivered by truck, and buying a cd on itunes and having it delivered by internet. It's just a distribution scheme. That round piece of metal-coated plastic you're buying when you buy a physical cd does not represent the actual product, since if you create a copy of it and destroy the original, you still legally own a license to play that music.
Like it or not, but most laws (especialy copyright) are comming together under one law for all member states.
That's true, but we're not talking about copyright law, we're talking about copyright owners. Each country has its own governing body for managing copyright assets under the law. In the EU, copyright law is supposed to be paneuropean (though the EU Copyright Directive slipped in a number of DMCA-style things which are slowing adoption), but copyright ownership is still a country by country situation.
People don't like changing their e-mail address, any more than they like changing their phone number
Here's a tip for those people: get your own domain name. Costs you about 10 bucks a year. The better domain name companies (like my personal favorite gandi.net) provide included email and web forwarding. That way you can keep the same email address for the rest of your life even when you switch mailboxes.
Also, if you rent dns service, you can finetune your mail forwarding to have different email addresses on the same domain leading to different mailboxes. And if you've got an always-on internet connection you can make your domain forward to your home box through free dynamic ip services, like from dyndns.org, so that you could for example run your own jabber server, or have an ssh login permanently available where ever you are to access stuff on your home machine (which coupled with quickly downloaded sftp clients like winscp allows you to copy files over quickly and easily regardless of location).
The difference is that there is one copyright authority governing the entire US, and there is one copyright authority for every country in the EU, so supposedly you have to negotiate 25 different deals for every EU member country. The EU is not a country, it's a trade union.
On the other hand, I'm curious about something: amazon can sell music cd's across europe, why can't apple sell music files across europe? Does amazon have some kind of special deal to allow them to sell copyrighted materials in every country? Or is the internet again being treated like the bastard stepdaughter of the copyright world?
Anyway, Firefox cannot beat IE off the top rank. It's simply becaues IE comes with Windows, and no smallwited user would know that there's alternatives, at all.
There are different classes of users though. I'm curious to see browser marketshare among online store users. I know anecdotally that the people that run alternative browsers tend to shop online more.
And as we all know, IE is a lousy browser for browsing porn. Porn drives the internet. I switched one "average joe" to mozilla just because of its porn browsing capabilities. Really. I'm not kidding. He thanked me because browsing porn was so much easier. They really should advocate firefox with the slogan "Firefox. Because you need porn."
check out this: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
There are a few things that make me consider that less relevant:
- IE users load up google.com more often, distorting the statistics. The alternative browsers tend to have built-in google search which bypasses the main google page. Google toolbar share among IE users is not that big, and even those who do run it often still go to google.com when they want to do a search.
- A sizeable part of the alternative browser user market uses an IE user agent string. I don't know how google's detection of browsers works, but given how lightweight their tracking must be, I seriously doubt they do anything more than collect UA strings.
- IE once had a 4 percent marketshare with netscape a 90+ percent marketshare too. This is history repeating itself with the roles reversed. Just go take a look at early IE history. People generally first considered it a joke, then they took it seriously but said "everybody runs netscape". Then eventually MS convinced enough businesses to switch over, and it reached a critical treshold where the networking effect of IE users caused people to switch in droves. Mozilla-based browsers, being naturally superior to IE featurewise, could do the same thing, especially given that they have a vastly better security track record, and MS has admitted they won't release a rearchitected more secure version of IE in years.
Currently we're already at the "yeah, firefox is great, but everybody runs IE" stage. Very few people are still trying to claim that IE is the better browser. It's just inertia that keeps IE in place. Inertia is powerful, but it doesn't last forever.
The problem is most people think installing a new hard drive is complicated, even if it's actaully easier (and safer) than using a circular hand saw to cut a 2x4.
I think it's because people think they know how a hand saw works, but they think they don't know how a hard-drive's connection to a pc works. Ofcourse, they don't know the actual mechanics of either, but it's the perception that makes the difference.
You're saying that you can't do anti-aliased fonts on GTK1? I don't know where you got that idea at all. GTK 1.2 works just fine with xft.
GTK1 uses a hack to enable anti-aliasing. This produced a range of problems, including some widgets not getting some of that AA goodness.
Besides that, I'm not a fan of antialiased fonts. I don't see any improvement. The fonts are different for sure, but I don't find them to look any better (with the exception of just a few fonts that do look lowsy, but there are bad-looking AA fonts as well).
That shouldn't be the case.
First of all you must use manually hinted fonts. Either bitstream vera, or the microsoft core web fonts. None of the other fonts you'll typically find on a linux system "cut it" AA-wise. You can research manual hinting if you want to know why that is. Personally I use MS Verdana and MS Courier New for everything. Given that you're a dillo user I expect you'll prefer the Free vera fonts.
If you are using the right fonts, and you're still having that problem, then why that is depends on what kind of display tech you're using.
If you're using some kind of CRT system, then your pixel resolution must not exceed the physical resolution of the screen (pixels must still be separate square entities on the screen, rather than all blurring together). If your pixel resolution exceeds the physical resolution of the screen, AA just makes everything more fuzzy.
If you're using an LCD display, you have to configure it to use subpixel AA, since the decrease in "crispness" caused by regular AA is too much for some people. Subpixel AA, if configured correctly, triples the horizontal resolution for font display, and so does not negatively impact crispness.
And what is it about GTK2 that makes programs like Abiword work any better than GTK1? Remember now, Abiword was GTK1 not long ago, so practically everything it does now, it did before the switch to GTK2.
What changed is that a lot of stuff that used to be up to the application was moved into GTK. That creates a more unified look and feel, and leaves a more cohesive impression on the average user. GTK1 apps all looked and felt too different. Ofcourse, some apps, like the ones you listed, enjoy having a different L&F, so they have little reason to switch. They also have little marketshare. I don't believe those things to be unrelated. You've got to go along to get along.
I don't like bloat. I'm sure a great many others don't as well. I certainly remember the uproar from a large number of users on the Dillo mailing list when someone suggested switching to GTK2... If you think users don't care, you live in a very small world.
But let's be honest here, if you're running dillo you're definitely not an average user.
The average user does not care about GTK1 vs GTK2, they just want stuff to work, and for everything to fit together. GTK2 is definitely better in that respect.
If it appears slow, why isn't it slow?
Example of when slow isn't really slow: browser page painting.
A browser can make a choice, either it starts drawing data as soon as it flows in over the wire, which means it will have to redraw it later as missing parts of the page are filled in. Or it can wait until all the data has arrived, and then draw it once.
The first approach takes longer than the second, but the first "seems" faster to the user, because he is seeing progress. Mozilla used to start drawing considerably later than IE, and so people believed IE was faster than Mozilla, while in reality in a lot of cases it wasn't. Incidentally, that is the reason for progress bars, to make time go faster.
Speed is a trade-off between responsiveness and throughput. You have to take both into account to get a true measure of the speed of a system. Although it is true that on the desktop responsiveness is highly preferred.
It's the same when you enter the country, the government can just refuse you entry for no reason at all.
That's not completely true. If you claim political asylum rights they have to prove you're not in danger because of your political views in your homeland before being able to send you back.
I don't see why business has to be about money and nothing else.
Well, corporations, when founded, sign a charter with the public (the government) outlining what they will aim to do. Theoretically corporations could be disbanded if they did not abide by rules in the charter. However, in practice, no corporation ever gets disbanded for shady business practices, no matter how bad they are for the public, and lots of corporations don't even get fined for screwing people over.
Ofcourse, the entire problem is that corporations got the courts to say they are equal citizens over a century ago. The flaw in that is that corporations don't die, ever, so they can keep gathering power and resources as long as they want, making them inherently superior to humans. Because of that over time you've seen corporate power grow. The only way to avoid corporations dominating the people is by giving them less rights than you give humans, and it will require a huge populist movement to roll back that decision.
However, if you recall I was replying to your assertion that what I wanted (an application building environment that enables distributed applications without resorting to C++ and Java) already existed in the form of Mozilla. I disagreed with you, and said (since you asked me to expand on it) that XForms was quite different to this platform, and in fact much more powerful.
That wasn't actually what I was arguing, though I see how my lack of coherence caused you to interpret what I said that way. I actually agreed from the outset that the current mozilla was inadequate, but there are two ways to solve that. Extending the existing html-based platform (mozilla, what WHATWG is doing), or moving to an entirely new xml-based one (some xhtml/xforms implementation). I was asking for reasons why the second was better than the first. I admit my original post was worded poorly and didn't really get that across.
Although ofcourse, mozilla will eventually support xforms too, so it's more a matter of going directly to xforms or having a stop-over at some intermediate html extension that does part of what xforms does. That's what my reply to your reply was mostly about. I can understand the arguments behind both, but personally I prefer gradual change if possible, so I'm still for an intermediate step.
Your new discussion about whether people's readiness to adopt something is a criteria for its use is, with respect, completely illogical.
Willingness to adopt doesn't matter to you with regards to how likely something is to be used widely? Somehow I doubt that that is what you're really saying.
Your assertion that SVG is marginal will receive a very big shake-up in the next year, since mobile phones will shortly be including a version of it.
I don't believe mobile phones matter, since they run different software from desktops. Having svg ubiquitous on mobile phones won't mean a thing with regards to desktop support.
Now, it's true that mobile support will legitimise SVG (in as far as being a W3C recommendation doesn't do that already), but it will still be marginal on the desktop.
As an aside, the W3C website really isn't clear enough on how all the technologies fit together when building a real website. There should be a big "how it all fits together" link on the main page.
there is a good reason Stereo types exist - the behavior exists.
Behavior is something you learn. You can teach a white boy to act exactly like what you think the stereotype of a black person is.
Blacks, gays and jews have one thing in common: they've always been ostracized in western civilization (for various reasons), and because they weren't allowed to integrate, they embraced the only culture they were accepted in, their own, and became/remained different. And then they have been blamed for being different and poorly integrated.
You use abnormal behavior as the excuse for segregation, but segregation causes abnormal behavior. That's not helpful.
Intelligence is defined by consensus anyway. An intelligent ape is still not intelligent by human standards. Intelligence is relative to the surroundings. That's why the IQ test uses a baseline of 100 for the "average person". By comparing a computer to an average human, you can see if the computer has average human intelligence.
I've always considered intelligence the ability to deduct valid conclusions from source data. That's something a computer should be able to do. It's why we can build chess machines that beat the world champion. Just because people understand exactly how the machine works doesn't make it non-intelligent, since it's proven that it is intelligent enough in the field of chess. What if you build a machine that is intelligent enough in all fields that could possibly be expected to come up in normal conversation? Wouldn't that be "humanlike" intelligence?
Guesses on when a machine is going to pass the turing test? Current chatbots apparently can convince up to a quarter of people they're human. That's not bad.
I've always been of the persuasion that human "intelligent" reasoning is nothing more than logic applied to a set of weighted premises. A computer should be able to do that, given the right logic and the right set of premises.
It's not just bandwidth. Even sites with tons of bandwidth can go down easily if they're dynamic. If you're going to get slashdotted, your site should be entirely static, with no images/movies/plugins loading from the main page, and if you must have images or movies, wrap them all up in a torrent and host them that way.
You'd have to somehow present all the files on the server as one big file, possibly with different areas of the superfile assigned to the different files, so you could make changes and still have them reflected. People would download the first block of the superfile, see what block they needed next, and request that from the network, with other blocks depending on availability being loaded in the background.
I doubt you could do it as a modification of bittorrent though. Bittorrent does not tolerate any changes to something you're hosting on a torrent stream. Any solution would have to contain the ability to compare checksums for some peer hosting a block with that of the tracker, and see if the block was updated.
Well, firstly it's obvious that HTML is not an application building language, so I assume you mean HTML plus a very large dose of script.
No, I meant html with extensions that are largely backwards compatible instead of the "clean break" that xhtml2+xforms tries to make.
Because it *doesn't* rely on script to get some big things done! Instead it has a large number of back-end features that are available via simple mark-up.
You need to validate a document before submitting? Easy in XForms - just add a schema to the model - not so easy in Mozilla, Opera or IE! You want to create dependencies between nodes in a DOM tree? Perhaps you want an event if node A goes higher than node B, or you want node C to be the sum of all node Ds. Easy in XForms - more spaghetti in Mozilla, Opera and IE.
How about preventing submission if some required value is missing. Easy peasy in XForms. Yet more script in M, O and IE, and which needs to be updated and maintained for every new required value you want to check.
I read up on xforms a bit, because I have to admit that even though I'm well-versed in html4 and css2, xhtml(2) and xforms are pretty much unknown to me.
And that is the big problem. What you're proposing is a switch to an entirely new language, somewhat resembling the old one, but really very different. That would require a large amount of retraining on the part of web designers, and web designers HATE to change the way they build websites (just look at how some people are still using the font tag).
Also, unless I'm mistaken about this, xhtml2+xforms has little to no support on current client platforms. Gradual changes to html always had a reasonable chance of getting implemented in browsers, but for an example of how the web community reacts to radical change, just look at the CSS and SVG experience. CSS1 isn't even fully supported on current browsers, despite being almost a decade old, and SVG is fringe at best, despite having been out for years. How exactly do you propose to get xforms onto the client in any reasonable timeframe? Especially when mozilla and opera have given a clear signal they think it's too far too fast and want a more gradual change in the form of what this WHATWG group is doing, and they pretty much set the standard for all browsers except IE (which is the least likely to get support for any new non-MS technology).
> Html has momentum, xforms doesn't.
XHTML 2.0 includes XForms.
What I meant with momentum was developer mindshare and platform support. XHTML2 is a reasonable step up from XHTML1, but who, apart from some bloggers and some techological advocates, writes their site in XHTML1? The baseline is still HTML4+CSS1 (and lots of sites, like slashdot, are even still HTML3.2 and no css). It will be years more until people are ready for XHTML2. And even then it will have to offer clear immediate and undeniable benefits over previous generations of html (just look at the resistance to css, which did provide a clear benefit). For that it will require ubiquitous platform support. So just like CSS it's going to have the chicken and egg problem. Webdesigners won't use it until it has wide support (and so there will be little user pressure on browsers to "get it right"), and browser makers will say they have better things to do than supporting a language nobody uses.
I'm all for advocating an eventual move to XHTML2/XFORMS, but you've got to look at how to realistically get there. Making the jump in one step is just not going to happen imho. That's why I think this WHATWG effort is more realistic in what it could achieve in a reasonable timeframe.
HTML is accessible almost by nature, but there are certainly things that the developer has to be cognizant of there as well to truly fit that goal.
I'd say more than a few things. I haven't looked into making flash accessible, but making a truly accessible html site requires a fair amount of planning and effort.