M$ spouting about the value of transparency and open-ness. Next thing you know it'll be the need for interoperability with other OS'es and the value of supporting standards.
Re:Typicall awful font rendering on Linux
on
aMSN 0.95 Released
·
· Score: 1
I have a more-or-less default installation of Fedora 4 running on a high quality 19" Formac display set to its optimal resolution so there must be quite a few others out there with the same problem.
Re:Typicall awful font rendering on Linux
on
aMSN 0.95 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well it came more or less right out of the box from Fedora so that doesn't say much for desktop Linux, does it?
Re:Typicall awful font rendering on Linux
on
aMSN 0.95 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, all I can say is that successive incarnations of Firefox on Fedora are an embarrassment. I cross my fingers that none of my clients are viewing the websites I design for them with Firefox/Linux. 1px CSS borders turn into dotted borders and line spacing is almost doubled. I'm sure if I tweaked xorg somewhere I could get it right, or maybe it's how Firefox integrates with xorg. Who knows? All I know is it ain't ready for prime time and no-one at Mozilla.org seems to care.
Re:Typicall awful font rendering on Linux
on
aMSN 0.95 Released
·
· Score: 1
My 19" Formac is set to the correct resolution: 1280x1024. Fonts in Firefox and many other apps are dog awful. I would never recommend Firefox on Linux to anyone and I'd be embarrassed to display many websites I've designed viewed on Firefox/Linux but which display fine in Firefox/OS X or Firefox/XP. Doesn't this tell us something about Linux? Stop pretending it's there where graphics rendersing is concerned. It's light years away.
Typicall awful font rendering on Linux
on
aMSN 0.95 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The screenshots exemplify why Linux struggles to gain mindshare amongst Windows users. Font rendering is still awful on Linux and I'm afraid it's looks that count with IM apps. The same is true of that great open source flagship, Firefox. I love using it on OS X and XP but on Linux Firefox can't render simple CSS borders nor line-spacing properly. Websites just look awful viewed with Firefox on Linux (Fedora) and aMSN suffers similar problems with its flaky text. Linux is a serer OS with a half-decent graphics engine but with browsers and IM apps half-decent isn't good enough.
Rails seems to be to web development what Dreamweaver is to HTML authoring. Nice and visual at first then you discover how it starts to get in your way. Give me Perl and Emacs any day.
If CSS layout is so "powerful" how come it's so difficult to get a 3-column layout to extend the background colours in the 1st and 3rd columns to line up with the bottom line of the content?
Agreed. CSS, especially its especially layout model, hasn't added much that's useful other than a few formatting rules. The float model for layout is it's downfall. How can anyone believe box model+floats is superior to HTML tables? I don't get it.
This isn't the real issue with CSS. CSS's downfall is it's abominable layout model. Read Eric Meyer's definition of the float model and you'll want to go running back tables. No wonder most browser-manufacturers didn't get it right. If the W3C had any sense they would have developed a layout model which can do everything that tables can do AND just as easily. Instead we have the piece-of-crap float model and a bunch of "table-less design" purisits who probably spend their lives tweaking their precious CSS layouts. Some of us need to earn money developing dynamic sites where all of this is secondary.
I support the parent. CSS is badly designed and makes easy things difficult for the sake of being semantically correct. It's always been a pain in the ass to develop with and you'll find most developers who want to use their time productively developing dynamic, database-driven sites will still be using tables. That's not because they haven't heard of CSS. It's just that time is money to people other than the CSS/web standards purists and when you're generating rows of data a simple table row is much more efficient than its CSS float 'n div equivalent.
Surely this is the point the parent post is making. You can do it with CSS UNLESS you want basic feature X, Y, or Z. The point is that CSS, due it's misguided design and poor implementation, makes it harder to do what was easy with tables. Getting column backgrounds to line up with CSS layout is just that much harder than it is with tables. Long live tables.
A breath of fresh air to hear someone buck the trend of paying lip service to CSS and the W3C. CSS for layout has made web page authoring a nightmare for many developers. OK, you can blame IE but there's also the fact that the float model is much harder to implement than what preceded it - tables. After years of wasting whole days getting float-based layouts to render consistently I reverted to tables and am happy. The authors of the CSS specs should learn some simple guidelines - KISS and "If it ain't broke don't replace with something 'semantic' but a pain in the ass to use and likley to waste hours/days of developers' time".
First let me clarify that I would like to see desktop Linux succeed as much as anyone on Slashdot but do we all have our heads in the sand or what? We all rave about how great Firefox is yet compared with the Windows and Mac versions the Linux version is just plain ugly. I'm looking at a website I designed - www.trans-siberiangold.com - and in the Linux version of Firefox it is lightyears from what it should be. Line spacing is too wide, javascript menu text is misaligned. Christ, Firefox on Linux can't even draw a 1-pixel border round an image without converting it into a dotted line. Image text which appears smoothly anti-aliased on XP and OS X is abominably flaky on Fedora 4 and, yes, I do have X configured correctly. The site's text is standard Verdana but you wouldn't know it looking at it with Firefox on Linux. The site just looks awful. If my main client was using Linux/Firefox on the desktop I don't know what workarounds I'd have to use to make the site look decent. Until Linux, or at least Linux browsers, gets a half decent graphical rendering engine I don't see users warming to it for a long time.
Exactly. Doze software often won't work unless run from an Admin account. I recently installed a Belkin wireless card for a client and it wouldn't work when the user accounts were set to Limited User. Changed to Admin and everything ran fine. Another machine with Limited User accounts gave popup error messages at login generated by a USB webcam. Switched the account to Admin and all was fine. It's ****ing madness. You have software developers who seem not to be aware of the basic architecture of the platform they develop for.
Anyone who thinks role-playing drive-by shootings and glorifying criminal culuture is kewel needs their head examining, in my book. Get a life. Go out and find a girlfriend. Learn to dance. Support a charity. Fill your life with anything but this evil rubbish.
Exactly. This is the REAL issue. Now, come on you Red Hat/Novell guys. Get out a nice clean reliable desktop with Outlook integration and make hay when the sandstorm of confusion hits small businesses when Vista launches.
My prediction is that XP will have a very long life if M$ goes ahead with this absurdity. Either that or some Linux uberdistro with an excellent desktop will clean up. OS X could also benefit if they stear clear of DRM.
Each time M$ announce their intentions for Vista/Longhorn I rejoice. Their ideas are getting so crazy that I sometimes wonder if they're trying to self-destruct. This one has to be the craziest so far (checks date to make sure it's not 1st April). Vista, in its present state, will be the death of M$.
Whilst OS X is light years ahead of Windows in security terms I can't, for the life of me, understand why OS X comes with only an Administrator account setup by default. If this account is really necessary why not have a Standard user account setup in addition by default and advise the new user to use it for daily work and only use the Admin account for authenticating software installation? OS X has excellent security but this sets it back a little. Ordinary users don't think about permissions so should be setup with a least privilege account by default.
Dreamweaver used to be the last app keeping me tied to XP since font sizing on DW-OS X was so lame. Not that I needed it as an editor since I use Emacs for everything. It was just the templating, crude as it is. When I discovered Perl's Template Toolkit that was all I needed to ditch both DW and XP. Now I code websites while viewing in Mozilla and only right at the end will I boot XP to view in IE6, 5.5, 5.0 to fix CSS bugs. Works like a dream unless a client insists on messing with the templates and has heard of DW's "amazing" features.
I never got the "OS X is the perfect UNIX" thing either. Don't get me wrong I love using OS X - I have a dual 2Ghz G5 and a 1.5Ghz Powerbook - but if I need UNIX I turn to Linux. OS X is too much of a hybrid with its Mach/FreeBSD/Darwin/Aqua/Altivec brew. Still clinging on to its HFS+ filesystem and resource forks. No complete UNIX toolset on a default installation. "Fix permissions" has to be run frequently to avoid bottlenecks. 3 different systems for UNIX apps: DarwinPorts, FINK and source installs - all with their own requirements. NetInfo database conflicts in some cases.
A complete install of Fedora 4 takes about 40 minutes, after which I have everything I need to run all kinds of servers. OS X shines in the multimedia department. Sorry, GIMP+Inkscape don't come close to Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks. The UNIX subsystem is a bonus, giving it robust stability and security but for working with UNIX there's just too much missing.
You forgot the rest of the Dreamweaver crap: it can't display floated elements, code view loses focus when launched and the lousy layout update, especially with tables.
Why can't Linux users accept that Windows just happens to be better than Linux in one area - the rendering of...... windows. If you doubt this compare OpenOffice or Mozilla running on similar hardware between XP and Linux. Both open source apps run a lot faster on XP.
Let's face the facts. Linux has inherited the old X window system which is a dinosaur which grew up during an era when UNIX was mainly a console-based OS excelling in server performance. In many ways it is still Linux's niche, desite the attempts to promote desktop Linux. Until Linux gets a completely new windowing system I can't see it competing with Windows in rendering speed. So long as Linux relies on the X window system it'll continue to be mainly a server OS, at least as far as the average user is concerned.
Me, I've almost eliminated the need for Windows. Only use it for testing web pages in IE6, 5.5 and 5.1 (Virtual PC). My daughter needs it for her games, though. No "Barbie Secret Agent" for Linux yet.
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M$ spouting about the value of transparency and open-ness. Next thing you know it'll be the need for interoperability with other OS'es and the value of supporting standards.
I have a more-or-less default installation of Fedora 4 running on a high quality 19" Formac display set to its optimal resolution so there must be quite a few others out there with the same problem.
Well it came more or less right out of the box from Fedora so that doesn't say much for desktop Linux, does it?
Well, all I can say is that successive incarnations of Firefox on Fedora are an embarrassment. I cross my fingers that none of my clients are viewing the websites I design for them with Firefox/Linux. 1px CSS borders turn into dotted borders and line spacing is almost doubled. I'm sure if I tweaked xorg somewhere I could get it right, or maybe it's how Firefox integrates with xorg. Who knows? All I know is it ain't ready for prime time and no-one at Mozilla.org seems to care.
My 19" Formac is set to the correct resolution: 1280x1024. Fonts in Firefox and many other apps are dog awful. I would never recommend Firefox on Linux to anyone and I'd be embarrassed to display many websites I've designed viewed on Firefox/Linux but which display fine in Firefox/OS X or Firefox/XP. Doesn't this tell us something about Linux? Stop pretending it's there where graphics rendersing is concerned. It's light years away.
The screenshots exemplify why Linux struggles to gain mindshare amongst Windows users. Font rendering is still awful on Linux and I'm afraid it's looks that count with IM apps. The same is true of that great open source flagship, Firefox. I love using it on OS X and XP but on Linux Firefox can't render simple CSS borders nor line-spacing properly. Websites just look awful viewed with Firefox on Linux (Fedora) and aMSN suffers similar problems with its flaky text. Linux is a serer OS with a half-decent graphics engine but with browsers and IM apps half-decent isn't good enough.
Rails seems to be to web development what Dreamweaver is to HTML authoring. Nice and visual at first then you discover how it starts to get in your way. Give me Perl and Emacs any day.
It would have been a nightmare making this with tables for the layout in general.
Come again? This is the most basic of layouts so why would it make a difference whether you used tables or CSS?
If CSS layout is so "powerful" how come it's so difficult to get a 3-column layout to extend the background colours in the 1st and 3rd columns to line up with the bottom line of the content?
Agreed. CSS, especially its especially layout model, hasn't added much that's useful other than a few formatting rules. The float model for layout is it's downfall. How can anyone believe box model+floats is superior to HTML tables? I don't get it.
This isn't the real issue with CSS. CSS's downfall is it's abominable layout model. Read Eric Meyer's definition of the float model and you'll want to go running back tables. No wonder most browser-manufacturers didn't get it right. If the W3C had any sense they would have developed a layout model which can do everything that tables can do AND just as easily. Instead we have the piece-of-crap float model and a bunch of "table-less design" purisits who probably spend their lives tweaking their precious CSS layouts. Some of us need to earn money developing dynamic sites where all of this is secondary.
I support the parent. CSS is badly designed and makes easy things difficult for the sake of being semantically correct. It's always been a pain in the ass to develop with and you'll find most developers who want to use their time productively developing dynamic, database-driven sites will still be using tables. That's not because they haven't heard of CSS. It's just that time is money to people other than the CSS/web standards purists and when you're generating rows of data a simple table row is much more efficient than its CSS float 'n div equivalent.
Surely this is the point the parent post is making. You can do it with CSS UNLESS you want basic feature X, Y, or Z. The point is that CSS, due it's misguided design and poor implementation, makes it harder to do what was easy with tables. Getting column backgrounds to line up with CSS layout is just that much harder than it is with tables. Long live tables.
A breath of fresh air to hear someone buck the trend of paying lip service to CSS and the W3C. CSS for layout has made web page authoring a nightmare for many developers. OK, you can blame IE but there's also the fact that the float model is much harder to implement than what preceded it - tables. After years of wasting whole days getting float-based layouts to render consistently I reverted to tables and am happy. The authors of the CSS specs should learn some simple guidelines - KISS and "If it ain't broke don't replace with something 'semantic' but a pain in the ass to use and likley to waste hours/days of developers' time".
First let me clarify that I would like to see desktop Linux succeed as much as anyone on Slashdot but do we all have our heads in the sand or what? We all rave about how great Firefox is yet compared with the Windows and Mac versions the Linux version is just plain ugly. I'm looking at a website I designed - www.trans-siberiangold.com - and in the Linux version of Firefox it is lightyears from what it should be. Line spacing is too wide, javascript menu text is misaligned. Christ, Firefox on Linux can't even draw a 1-pixel border round an image without converting it into a dotted line. Image text which appears smoothly anti-aliased on XP and OS X is abominably flaky on Fedora 4 and, yes, I do have X configured correctly. The site's text is standard Verdana but you wouldn't know it looking at it with Firefox on Linux. The site just looks awful. If my main client was using Linux/Firefox on the desktop I don't know what workarounds I'd have to use to make the site look decent. Until Linux, or at least Linux browsers, gets a half decent graphical rendering engine I don't see users warming to it for a long time.
.... are belong to us!
Exactly. Doze software often won't work unless run from an Admin account. I recently installed a Belkin wireless card for a client and it wouldn't work when the user accounts were set to Limited User. Changed to Admin and everything ran fine. Another machine with Limited User accounts gave popup error messages at login generated by a USB webcam. Switched the account to Admin and all was fine. It's ****ing madness. You have software developers who seem not to be aware of the basic architecture of the platform they develop for.
Anyone who thinks role-playing drive-by shootings and glorifying criminal culuture is kewel needs their head examining, in my book. Get a life. Go out and find a girlfriend. Learn to dance. Support a charity. Fill your life with anything but this evil rubbish.
Exactly. This is the REAL issue. Now, come on you Red Hat/Novell guys. Get out a nice clean reliable desktop with Outlook integration and make hay when the sandstorm of confusion hits small businesses when Vista launches.
My prediction is that XP will have a very long life if M$ goes ahead with this absurdity. Either that or some Linux uberdistro with an excellent desktop will clean up. OS X could also benefit if they stear clear of DRM.
Each time M$ announce their intentions for Vista/Longhorn I rejoice. Their ideas are getting so crazy that I sometimes wonder if they're trying to self-destruct. This one has to be the craziest so far (checks date to make sure it's not 1st April). Vista, in its present state, will be the death of M$.
Whilst OS X is light years ahead of Windows in security terms I can't, for the life of me, understand why OS X comes with only an Administrator account setup by default. If this account is really necessary why not have a Standard user account setup in addition by default and advise the new user to use it for daily work and only use the Admin account for authenticating software installation? OS X has excellent security but this sets it back a little. Ordinary users don't think about permissions so should be setup with a least privilege account by default.
Dreamweaver used to be the last app keeping me tied to XP since font sizing on DW-OS X was so lame. Not that I needed it as an editor since I use Emacs for everything. It was just the templating, crude as it is. When I discovered Perl's Template Toolkit that was all I needed to ditch both DW and XP. Now I code websites while viewing in Mozilla and only right at the end will I boot XP to view in IE6, 5.5, 5.0 to fix CSS bugs. Works like a dream unless a client insists on messing with the templates and has heard of DW's "amazing" features.
I never got the "OS X is the perfect UNIX" thing either. Don't get me wrong I love using OS X - I have a dual 2Ghz G5 and a 1.5Ghz Powerbook - but if I need UNIX I turn to Linux. OS X is too much of a hybrid with its Mach/FreeBSD/Darwin/Aqua/Altivec brew. Still clinging on to its HFS+ filesystem and resource forks. No complete UNIX toolset on a default installation. "Fix permissions" has to be run frequently to avoid bottlenecks. 3 different systems for UNIX apps: DarwinPorts, FINK and source installs - all with their own requirements. NetInfo database conflicts in some cases.
A complete install of Fedora 4 takes about 40 minutes, after which I have everything I need to run all kinds of servers. OS X shines in the multimedia department. Sorry, GIMP+Inkscape don't come close to Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks. The UNIX subsystem is a bonus, giving it robust stability and security but for working with UNIX there's just too much missing.
You forgot the rest of the Dreamweaver crap: it can't display floated elements, code view loses focus when launched and the lousy layout update, especially with tables.
Why can't Linux users accept that Windows just happens to be better than Linux in one area - the rendering of ...... windows. If you doubt this compare OpenOffice or Mozilla running on similar hardware between XP and Linux. Both open source apps run a lot faster on XP.
Let's face the facts. Linux has inherited the old X window system which is a dinosaur which grew up during an era when UNIX was mainly a console-based OS excelling in server performance. In many ways it is still Linux's niche, desite the attempts to promote desktop Linux. Until Linux gets a completely new windowing system I can't see it competing with Windows in rendering speed. So long as Linux relies on the X window system it'll continue to be mainly a server OS, at least as far as the average user is concerned.
Me, I've almost eliminated the need for Windows. Only use it for testing web pages in IE6, 5.5 and 5.1 (Virtual PC). My daughter needs it for her games, though. No "Barbie Secret Agent" for Linux yet.