Honestly, I've been rather hoping for this for quite some time, as it would take away my primary reason to hate them. They'd have to do a hell of a lot of work to get to that point, though, because if they're going to compete soley on software quality they probably wouldn't make it nowadays; a lot of their latest stuff has really taken a nosedive.
(Now Microsoft as an Open Source developer... that would be damn impressive. Impossible, but impressive.:) )
It *is* trademarked, as a matter of fact; that's why you never see it anywhere else. And for good reason - it really is probably the most effective design, surprisingly enough. I don't know if they actually sued or otherwise harrassed Sony for their variant on that form factor, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Well, that's what you tend to get with Really Big Companies; when you start getting to that scale, having a Single Corporate Vision is just that much more difficult because of the number of people involved. The same sort of thing was occuring at Worldcom; it'd become a giant Frankenstein's monster - pretty darn big, but lumbering so slowly it couldn't really hurt people easily.
The middle finger doesn't know what the pointer finger's doing in companies like that.
Oh, that's nothing. They didn't even fix the line endings. Most of Slashdot uses Unix CR line endings, whereas the document that was sent uses CR+LF line endings (as seen in Windows). You can tell in an editor that shows the extra characters (I used Vim) when you look at the source for the page.
Opera has had a quick form fill-in capability since something like verison 3. There's a spot in its Preferences where you fill in personal information and other bits; once that's done, you just go to the form in question, right-click on it, and select that data from the menu.
[...] its not the open or closed source model that leads to more secure code, it is the project management methodology and the people on the projects who lead to more secure code.
This is true. However, one has to keep in mind that in the case of OSS, if an admin finds an error and knows how to fix it in the code, that fix can be quickly propogated to others. Or, in other words, instead of just a bug report with closed-source, open-source has the potential for a bug report and a patch. This can concievably give Free Software/Open Source a small edge, though not as great a one as many people want to believe.
The code most prone to errors in my opinion would be the code written by teams of one where virtually no review would be done. I believe you would find this type of development more often in an open source project but it could happen in either environment.
*cough* Um. What about all those oodles of small shareware and freeware programs and utilities people will put out, mostly for Windows? True, they're getting slowly supersceded by Free Software/Open Source, but they haven't abruptly ceased to exist.
Recent versions of Links (read: past 2.0) have a quasi-graphical mode in that they sort of simulate a textonly display with graphics, and then draw in images. It's cute, but it's also horridly annoying to use, especially since they took out most of the keyboard control stuff.
That, and of course, they have stated before they have little to no interest in CSS support and are sticking to HTML 3.2 and 4.0 Transitional. As a web developer and one interested in the future of the Web, I consider this attitude to be something beyond utterly unforgivable.
Ha! gtkhtml2 has more CSS and HTML breakage than Netscape 4 (I can't use in it; it'll pop up a GTK+ 2.0 color selector widget in place of my content), and gtkhtml1 can't support any standard past HTML 3.2 worth crap. MSIE is a better bet than either.
Konqueror isn't much better than MSIE, too. They've had a specific design goal to imitate MSIE's implementations of both DOM and CSS, and have done a good job of it. And 3.0 hasn't really put it any further ahead (last I checked it exploded when it came in contact with my page - and before you start to make an argument there, *yes*, the page in question is fully XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2 compliant).
Opera's Only failing is the DOM; it does CSS remarkably well. It's an extremely strong contender.
And don't even get me started on some of the ones omitted (OmniWeb, for example... and anyone still using XmHTML or GtkXmHTML should be beaten with a clue-by-four...).
(Disclaimer: I am very much FOR web standards and don't like to see them screwed over.)
Google News looks pretty nice. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it.
But they've got a meta refresh tag in there so that the page continually reloads, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for any site that does that, so I don't plan on making it a regular stop for me unless they take it off.
(Yes, I've already sent email to news-feedback about it)
How does a web developer achieve both Strict standards compliance and Netscape 4.x compliance?
The short answer is "you can't, you don't, and you shouldn't".
Oh, it's extraordinarily simple to keep content accessible. What's more difficult is maintaining the visual design, given the immense number of bugs in NS4. The former is what is supposed to matter on the Web; if you want a major visual experience, MSIE6 and Netscape 6+/Mozilla and Opera and Konqueror all support stylesheets. That covers just about every base, from Average Shmoe to Hardcore Geek to Not Exactly Bleeding Edge, et cetera.
The simple truth is that Netscape 4 does not support HTML 4.01. You cannot use HTML 4.01's design tools properly with Netscape 4 because of its bugs. Therefore, Netscape 4 cannot support the design. The same is true for Netscape 3, Netscape 2, MSIE 3, Mosaic, Mnemonic, Voyager, and a host of other such browsers. But if you write strictly to standards and accessibility guidelines, people using such browsers get enough to get by.
It's not necessary to go out of your way to snub Netscape 4. It's reasonably capable enough with basic HTML structural elements such that there's no need nor any point to doing so. However, it's extremely damaging to go out of your way to accomidate Netscape 4 as well.
Oh good god no. The last thing we need is another "transitional" doctype.
Of those who first encounter standards, nine-tenths of them look at 4.01 Transitional, get validation under it, say "Hey, I've got standards-compliance!", and walk away, regardless of how many tables and font tags are in the page.
For one thing, the heirarchal menus thing is probably referring to the element, which is really just good semantic markup for lists of links; it's along similar lines to
and . It's not a replacement for DHTML menus (boo! hiss!) or anything like that; effects like that would still be handled via (ECMA|Java)script or CSS.
For another, backwards compability has not been "dropped" in the sense that it's gone completely, total split with the past, et cetera. It's just no longer a priority. You can likely expect <br> and maybe the <hN> elements to dissapear entirely as things evolve (many are in favor of that last; many aren't) in addition to those that have already gone byebye. There's also debate about the sematic value of <strong> and either <abbr> or <acronym> (I can never remember which one folks want to get rid of) and whether or not they should stay.
There's also quite a bit of talk about how to handle titles for other elements. Some folks question why <name> is being used instead of <h> in the new navigation lists, for example.
And they're right about XLink, by the way. There's a new reccomendation being put together to try to address these issues, called HLink. You can find it at http://www.w3.org/TR/hlink/.
And just so I can put out these totally unsolicited opinion: XFrames absolutely rocks. Love it. Nurture it. And I've been waiting way too long for <img> to die; now let's just all hope that Microsoft fixes up all of their horrifyingly large bugs with <object> in time for this...:)
(Ah, one more note. Slashcode doesn't appear to allow the <code> element in comments. Indeed, the only semantic markup allowed in/. comments is <a>, <p>, <blockquote>, <em> and <strong> (and like I said earlier, that last is being challenged). This is, quite frankly, really, REALLY sad. Why hasn't/. gotten rid of all their legacy crap yet?)
And perhaps even more importantly, if interests still end up diverging a bit, that's okay. Children can't be exact clones of their parents - it'd be stifling to the world we live in. While that may sound obvious, it's important to keep that in mind. Pick your battles. Since they are your children, you're virtually guaranteed to eventually find some shared interests, and that can be a lot of fun for both sides.
(Quasi-case in point: Daddy "grew up" with DEC and loves VMS, uses Emacs as his editor du jour, and Win2k as his usual OS. I'm an embracer of the Unix Way, use vi exclusively, and stick to Debian GNU/Linux for my usual OS. But we still get along; we agree on Perl's supremacy, you see.:) )
And if the game was actually fairly well-designed, one's skill would be determined by one's ability to play, rather than one's ability to pay OSI money.
Seriously, though, I don't see how this is a problem; folks who have spent that time to gain levels have an understanding of what's involved, and have generally had to work hard to get there and therefore know what to do and what to avoid. A newbie wouldn't know. It's the same kind of difference between an experienced sysadmin and an MSCE.
We had the same thing with our Microtek E3 scanner; it'd only let you select one region at a time, but you could drag the same size region around, so we'd just put the pictures in the same corners each time and drag the region box to each corner for each job. Slightly less tedious.
I wasn't wanting to point out *why* my criterion are the way they are, but here's a quick summary:
1) I *like* having $XTERMs scattered everywhere. I use my $XTERMs as a Be-Anywhere-Doing-Anything type tool; ergo, concentrating them in one space would be counterproductive - hence, no tabbing. I'm odd that way.
2) Memory isn't cheap on a laptop. I hate desktop systems. I'm odd that way.
3) Excepting Opera (and it'll go the instant the Moz folks get their heads out of their asses about tabbing through links vs. tabbing through form elements), I want nothing at all to do with Qt. I just don't like it.ÂI more or less tolerate Opera only because I used it back in my Windows days and so am used to it already. I'm odd that way.
4) I tend to leave a lot of terminal windows open to preserve state that may or may not be important. I'm... well, you can prob'ly grok the pattern by now.
The suggestion for gnome-terminal --use-factory would probably be best (is Way cool; I never knew about that before), except that gnome-terminal's i18n is broken at the moment.:)
Such are my motivations for asking. Now You Know.:)
No, it doesn't. Note the "rxvt-sized" criterion. None of the apps listed there qualify. Most of them aren't $XTERMs at all, and I've tested all of the rest; they're all about xterm's size (in memory footprint) or larger.
Hardly. What they teach is bugwards-compatible crap.
"What is the correct HTML for adding a background color?" Answers offered: various permutations on "body" and "color" and "background". Real Answer: There isn't any. Colors are handled via CSS.
There will almost certainly be censorship of the material submitted. It's just that it'll occur when the satellite is retrieved by these future generations and read, rather than when it is put up.
That's why those browsers are called "outdated". There are more than a few browsers for that kind of niche market, and tearing your hair out over getting designs working in them is so not worth it as to be pitiable.
Now don't get me wrong; backwards compatibility is a Good Thing. But *forwards* compatibility is a lot more productive and a lot less work. There comes a point whereupon you have to tell people "your browser is massively outdated, so I'm sorry but you can't see the design."
And besides, those older browsers still get to see the content, even if they miss the design. If the only thing whatsoever to your site Is the design, then I question the value of your site in the first place.
That doesn't really say anything; I know of several web design firms that, while they habitually do very nice standards-compliant code, will do their own personal site in all the Latest And Greatest Glitz And Glamour, just to show that they are capable of doing it if need be.
Of course, whether or not Razorfish qualifies as one of these is beyond me; as I don't have Flash going, I can't look at their portfolio.:)
I always preferred using CSS2 selectors myself, such as, instead of "a.foo", do "* a.foo". Works just as well, and you can see the rules side by side for quicker debugging.
But this is kind of diverging from the topic a bit anyways.:)
What Bugzilla bugs? Keep in mind that if you reported bugs that basically demanded a return to the rendering model of yesteryear then they're likely to remain languishing for quite some time. Switching to standards-compliance requiures a little more than just slapping on a 4.01 Transitional doctype and praying.
You might try looking here: http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/standards.html
And as a small aside point, yes, you *can* choose to keep coding for MSIE; it's just that doing such is a very unwise course of action.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I've been rather hoping for this for quite some time, as it would take away my primary reason to hate them. They'd have to do a hell of a lot of work to get to that point, though, because if they're going to compete soley on software quality they probably wouldn't make it nowadays; a lot of their latest stuff has really taken a nosedive.
:) )
(Now Microsoft as an Open Source developer... that would be damn impressive. Impossible, but impressive.
It *is* trademarked, as a matter of fact; that's why you never see it anywhere else. And for good reason - it really is probably the most effective design, surprisingly enough. I don't know if they actually sued or otherwise harrassed Sony for their variant on that form factor, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Of course this has to be reported right on the day I start the Atkins Diet... :)
Well, that's what you tend to get with Really Big Companies; when you start getting to that scale, having a Single Corporate Vision is just that much more difficult because of the number of people involved. The same sort of thing was occuring at Worldcom; it'd become a giant Frankenstein's monster - pretty darn big, but lumbering so slowly it couldn't really hurt people easily.
The middle finger doesn't know what the pointer finger's doing in companies like that.
Oh, that's nothing. They didn't even fix the line endings. Most of Slashdot uses Unix CR line endings, whereas the document that was sent uses CR+LF line endings (as seen in Windows). You can tell in an editor that shows the extra characters (I used Vim) when you look at the source for the page.
Now that's pretty damn sad.
Opera has had a quick form fill-in capability since something like verison 3. There's a spot in its Preferences where you fill in personal information and other bits; once that's done, you just go to the form in question, right-click on it, and select that data from the menu.
[...] its not the open or closed source model that leads to more secure code, it is the project management methodology and the people on the projects who lead to more secure code.
This is true. However, one has to keep in mind that in the case of OSS, if an admin finds an error and knows how to fix it in the code, that fix can be quickly propogated to others. Or, in other words, instead of just a bug report with closed-source, open-source has the potential for a bug report and a patch. This can concievably give Free Software/Open Source a small edge, though not as great a one as many people want to believe.
The code most prone to errors in my opinion would be the code written by teams of one where virtually no review would be done. I believe you would find this type of development more often in an open source project but it could happen in either environment.
*cough* Um. What about all those oodles of small shareware and freeware programs and utilities people will put out, mostly for Windows? True, they're getting slowly supersceded by Free Software/Open Source, but they haven't abruptly ceased to exist.
Recent versions of Links (read: past 2.0) have a quasi-graphical mode in that they sort of simulate a textonly display with graphics, and then draw in images. It's cute, but it's also horridly annoying to use, especially since they took out most of the keyboard control stuff.
That, and of course, they have stated before they have little to no interest in CSS support and are sticking to HTML 3.2 and 4.0 Transitional. As a web developer and one interested in the future of the Web, I consider this attitude to be something beyond utterly unforgivable.
Ha! gtkhtml2 has more CSS and HTML breakage than Netscape 4 (I can't use in it; it'll pop up a GTK+ 2.0 color selector widget in place of my content), and gtkhtml1 can't support any standard past HTML 3.2 worth crap. MSIE is a better bet than either.
Konqueror isn't much better than MSIE, too. They've had a specific design goal to imitate MSIE's implementations of both DOM and CSS, and have done a good job of it. And 3.0 hasn't really put it any further ahead (last I checked it exploded when it came in contact with my page - and before you start to make an argument there, *yes*, the page in question is fully XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2 compliant).
Opera's Only failing is the DOM; it does CSS remarkably well. It's an extremely strong contender.
And don't even get me started on some of the ones omitted (OmniWeb, for example... and anyone still using XmHTML or GtkXmHTML should be beaten with a clue-by-four...).
(Disclaimer: I am very much FOR web standards and don't like to see them screwed over.)
Google News looks pretty nice. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it.
But they've got a meta refresh tag in there so that the page continually reloads, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for any site that does that, so I don't plan on making it a regular stop for me unless they take it off.
(Yes, I've already sent email to news-feedback about it)
How does a web developer achieve both Strict standards compliance and Netscape 4.x compliance?
The short answer is "you can't, you don't, and you shouldn't".
Oh, it's extraordinarily simple to keep content accessible. What's more difficult is maintaining the visual design, given the immense number of bugs in NS4. The former is what is supposed to matter on the Web; if you want a major visual experience, MSIE6 and Netscape 6+/Mozilla and Opera and Konqueror all support stylesheets. That covers just about every base, from Average Shmoe to Hardcore Geek to Not Exactly Bleeding Edge, et cetera.
The simple truth is that Netscape 4 does not support HTML 4.01. You cannot use HTML 4.01's design tools properly with Netscape 4 because of its bugs. Therefore, Netscape 4 cannot support the design. The same is true for Netscape 3, Netscape 2, MSIE 3, Mosaic, Mnemonic, Voyager, and a host of other such browsers. But if you write strictly to standards and accessibility guidelines, people using such browsers get enough to get by.
It's not necessary to go out of your way to snub Netscape 4. It's reasonably capable enough with basic HTML structural elements such that there's no need nor any point to doing so. However, it's extremely damaging to go out of your way to accomidate Netscape 4 as well.
Oh good god no. The last thing we need is another "transitional" doctype.
Of those who first encounter standards, nine-tenths of them look at 4.01 Transitional, get validation under it, say "Hey, I've got standards-compliance!", and walk away, regardless of how many tables and font tags are in the page.
and
. It's not a replacement for DHTML menus (boo! hiss!) or anything like that; effects like that would still be handled via (ECMA|Java)script or CSS.
:)
/. comments is <a>, <p>, <blockquote>, <em> and <strong> (and like I said earlier, that last is being challenged). This is, quite frankly, really, REALLY sad. Why hasn't /. gotten rid of all their legacy crap yet?)
For another, backwards compability has not been "dropped" in the sense that it's gone completely, total split with the past, et cetera. It's just no longer a priority. You can likely expect <br> and maybe the <hN> elements to dissapear entirely as things evolve (many are in favor of that last; many aren't) in addition to those that have already gone byebye. There's also debate about the sematic value of <strong> and either <abbr> or <acronym> (I can never remember which one folks want to get rid of) and whether or not they should stay.
There's also quite a bit of talk about how to handle titles for other elements. Some folks question why <name> is being used instead of <h> in the new navigation lists, for example.
And they're right about XLink, by the way. There's a new reccomendation being put together to try to address these issues, called HLink. You can find it at http://www.w3.org/TR/hlink/.
And just so I can put out these totally unsolicited opinion: XFrames absolutely rocks. Love it. Nurture it. And I've been waiting way too long for <img> to die; now let's just all hope that Microsoft fixes up all of their horrifyingly large bugs with <object> in time for this...
(Ah, one more note. Slashcode doesn't appear to allow the <code> element in comments. Indeed, the only semantic markup allowed in
And perhaps even more importantly, if interests still end up diverging a bit, that's okay. Children can't be exact clones of their parents - it'd be stifling to the world we live in. While that may sound obvious, it's important to keep that in mind. Pick your battles. Since they are your children, you're virtually guaranteed to eventually find some shared interests, and that can be a lot of fun for both sides.
:) )
(Quasi-case in point: Daddy "grew up" with DEC and loves VMS, uses Emacs as his editor du jour, and Win2k as his usual OS. I'm an embracer of the Unix Way, use vi exclusively, and stick to Debian GNU/Linux for my usual OS. But we still get along; we agree on Perl's supremacy, you see.
And if the game was actually fairly well-designed, one's skill would be determined by one's ability to play, rather than one's ability to pay OSI money.
Seriously, though, I don't see how this is a problem; folks who have spent that time to gain levels have an understanding of what's involved, and have generally had to work hard to get there and therefore know what to do and what to avoid. A newbie wouldn't know. It's the same kind of difference between an experienced sysadmin and an MSCE.
We had the same thing with our Microtek E3 scanner; it'd only let you select one region at a time, but you could drag the same size region around, so we'd just put the pictures in the same corners each time and drag the region box to each corner for each job. Slightly less tedious.
:)
Beyond that, all we had was paitence.
I wasn't wanting to point out *why* my criterion are the way they are, but here's a quick summary:
... well, you can prob'ly grok the pattern by now.
:)
:)
1) I *like* having $XTERMs scattered everywhere. I use my $XTERMs as a Be-Anywhere-Doing-Anything type tool; ergo, concentrating them in one space would be counterproductive - hence, no tabbing. I'm odd that way.
2) Memory isn't cheap on a laptop. I hate desktop systems. I'm odd that way.
3) Excepting Opera (and it'll go the instant the Moz folks get their heads out of their asses about tabbing through links vs. tabbing through form elements), I want nothing at all to do with Qt. I just don't like it.ÂI more or less tolerate Opera only because I used it back in my Windows days and so am used to it already. I'm odd that way.
4) I tend to leave a lot of terminal windows open to preserve state that may or may not be important. I'm
The suggestion for gnome-terminal --use-factory would probably be best (is Way cool; I never knew about that before), except that gnome-terminal's i18n is broken at the moment.
Such are my motivations for asking. Now You Know.
No, it doesn't. Note the "rxvt-sized" criterion. None of the apps listed there qualify. Most of them aren't $XTERMs at all, and I've tested all of the rest; they're all about xterm's size (in memory footprint) or larger.
:)
I'm not *that* dumb.
Hardly. What they teach is bugwards-compatible crap.
"What is the correct HTML for adding a background color?"
Answers offered: various permutations on "body" and "color" and "background".
Real Answer: There isn't any. Colors are handled via CSS.
There will almost certainly be censorship of the material submitted. It's just that it'll occur when the satellite is retrieved by these future generations and read, rather than when it is put up.
That's why those browsers are called "outdated". There are more than a few browsers for that kind of niche market, and tearing your hair out over getting designs working in them is so not worth it as to be pitiable.
Now don't get me wrong; backwards compatibility is a Good Thing. But *forwards* compatibility is a lot more productive and a lot less work. There comes a point whereupon you have to tell people "your browser is massively outdated, so I'm sorry but you can't see the design."
And besides, those older browsers still get to see the content, even if they miss the design. If the only thing whatsoever to your site Is the design, then I question the value of your site in the first place.
That doesn't really say anything; I know of several web design firms that, while they habitually do very nice standards-compliant code, will do their own personal site in all the Latest And Greatest Glitz And Glamour, just to show that they are capable of doing it if need be.
:)
Of course, whether or not Razorfish qualifies as one of these is beyond me; as I don't have Flash going, I can't look at their portfolio.
I always preferred using CSS2 selectors myself, such as, instead of "a.foo", do "* a.foo". Works just as well, and you can see the rules side by side for quicker debugging.
:)
But this is kind of diverging from the topic a bit anyways.
What Bugzilla bugs? Keep in mind that if you reported bugs that basically demanded a return to the rendering model of yesteryear then they're likely to remain languishing for quite some time. Switching to standards-compliance requiures a little more than just slapping on a 4.01 Transitional doctype and praying.
You might try looking here: http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/standards.html
And as a small aside point, yes, you *can* choose to keep coding for MSIE; it's just that doing such is a very unwise course of action.
I rather like the fact that this got posted, actually. It helps me confirm that I made the right decision when I stopped watching the show.
I mean, c'mon. Few seasons back, "I, the mysterious Cigarette-smoking Man, am your father." *bang*. It got overdone a long time ago.