It's not the JavaScript language itself that differs between IE and Mozilla. It's the DOM, which is the data structure for accessing elements on the web page. Your friend is incorrect about Mozilla; it's IE that makes up its own DOM standards.
Win what? Is there some competition to get more people using Mozilla than IE? That's a battle that will never be won as long as IE is shipped with nearly all new desktop computers and Mozilla is shipped with nearly none.
To me the interesting battle is to get enough users to use standards compliant browsers and not use old browsers such as Netscape 4 and IE 4 that web developers can finally just write according to web standards and know their websites can work for more than 99% of users.
except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development
I don't think the situation would be any different today if Mozilla 1.0 had been released in say 1999. IE is preinstalled on nearly all desktop computers shipped, and nearly all users will not download another browser if there's a working browser already on the computer. That's why IE has well over 90% of page hits, not because of any flaw in any other browser.
Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth, has created an interesting little critter called colorForth that does just this. Stick the floppy in the drive, turn on the power, and boot straight into colorForth. The system is at your command. No OS, other than colorForth itself. The most bloated piece of software on the machine is the BIOS.
You still use a bloated BIOS? I just wire together transistors and program in machine code with switches. Of course, it takes me days to do what my coworkers can do in seconds, but at least I'm in complete control of every bit and every cycle.
Postscript is based on Forth. You can "program" Postscript...
Don't know why a non-printer driver person would want to, but you can...
Using PostScript you can send a very small text file to the printer and have it print some amazing graphics. I used it years ago to draw dragon curves (a type of fractal), charts, and text that followed a wavy line for a poster.
PostScript isn't really based on Forth. It's just another stack-based language, as is the language used for HP calculators, and virtual machines such as Java bytecode and.Net CIL.
There are more tests available through the parent of that link. The latest version of Mozilla seems to do very well on the tests. IE 6 for Windows does poorly on many.
including Mozilla in 8 isn't gonna help. They don't have the power any more to make a major switch like this.
They have made the switch in AOL 8.0 for Mac OS X. If there aren't many serious problems, we'll probably see Mozilla in AOL 9.0 for Windows.
With time, complaints about Mozilla not working will naturally decrease. Web developers are finally realizing that there are other browsers besides IE and Netscape 4. Some of them even realize there are standards they should be following.
Does anyone who frequents Slashdot know of a tool that will take a language standard as its input, and generate a working, bug-free, efficient compiler?
Think about it. If such a thing were possible, why would compiler writers waste all their time doing it manually?
There are lexer and parser generators (e.g. flex and bison) that take a context-free simplification of the language and automatically produce efficient and bug-free lexers and parsers. But you have to take care of the context-sensitive part of the language (e.g. checking that variables are declared before they are used) and the code generation manually.
I downloaded it to test on my amd 333 64mb laptop, but it is still too slow for me to use.
Your problem is likely not enough RAM. 64 MB is the minimum requirement for Mozilla, and if you have any other programs running at the same time, the virtual memory will start thrashing. After I upgraded my 366 laptop from 64 MB to 256 MB earlier this year, Mozilla and other apps ran much more smoothly.
Many people make a big deal that these standards are called "recommendations," but this is semantic quibbling. It's like saying that you don't believe in the theory of relativity because it's only a "theory."
I started leaving a large gap between my car and the car ahead of me in stop and go traffic several years ago. I've never had significant problems with cars cutting in and filling up the gap. Read the FAQ on his web page to get some explanations why.
No, the principle is that paradoxically, if you want to drive faster overall, you need to drive slower at some points. If you continually go as fast as you can go right behind the car in front of you, it creates traffic jams. Driving at the average speed and leaving a large gap between you and the car ahead of you can speed up all the traffic behind you.
5. Mozilla correctly uses MIME types according to W3C recommendations. If you have any problem downloading files, it's almost certainly a misconfigured server.
6. I never have to enter any passwords into Mozilla, let alone every time I run it. Mozilla just remembers all my passwords for me.
Instead of just waiting for a new release of Mozilla to come out, get involved. The first time you started Mozilla, a page informing you of how to do this should have appeared. After all, that's how open source software works!
I got started with computers in the early 80's on a PDP-11. Once I found a program that converted files from uppercase letters to lowercase letters. The interesting thing is that it had the supervisor bit set so that the program would have supervisor privileges while runnnig. I could destroy most compiled software by "lowercasing" the "uppercase" data in them. Lucky for them I didn't know which files were part of the OS!
Then there was the time I told someone the admin's password was "zapper". I watched the keys he typed as he entered his password!
Mozilla lets me block or allow cookies and images on a per-site basis. I'd like the same level of granularity for pop-up blocking.
Is this possible? Does anyone else have this need?
Yes and yes. Pop-up blocking on an site-by-site basis is a feature of the latest nightlies. You now get pop-ups, but you can disable further pop-ups from that site by checking a box in the pop-up window. There is also a Popup manager similar to the Image manager.
From his perspective, the software companies should make sure that their software does not make unnecessary deviations from standard, thus breaking older sites. You think that the designers should predict change and design their sites to take this into account.
But it's not software that makes deviations from the standards that causes websites to become obsolete, it's websites that make deviations from the standards that causes those websites to become obsolete.
I do not think designers should predict change. I think designers should simply use recent standards and ensure that they adhere to these standards by using validators such as the W3C HTML validator. Absolutely no predicition is necessary!
Please re-read the article, as it is very clear on these points.
99.9% of web sites are obslete, and every computer for sale is obsolete by the time it hits the store.
What's the difference?
The difference, as the article explains well, is that if you design your website with standards in mind, it can be forwards compatible with newer browsers. If you do so, it will be a very long time before it is "obsolete," as Zeldman uses the term, if ever.
Everyone who I have ever worked with has generated invalid HTML that has made even current browsers crash or behave erratically in different browsers. When I realized that I was also making these mistakes, I finally learned my lesson and started using the W3C validator to make sure my web pages are valid HTML. Since then, I have not had any problem with my pages not working in any browser. This is exactly what Zeldman is asking web developers to do.
It worked in all the current browsers a year ago.
but with IE 6 and the new netscape coming out - you would *THINK* there would be backwards compatability.
You have backwards and forwards compatibility mixed up.
Backwards compatibility means it works in older browsers. As Zeldman mentions, it always has some cutoff point, such as Netscape 3 or IE 2.
Forwards compatibility means that it works in newer browsers. There is not necessarily any cutoff point, as long as you have constructed the website correctly. Structural problems and other typos in the HTML, proprietary and deprecated tags, and versioning can all limit the forward compatibility of the page.
Read the article and you'll see that Zeldman is arguing that web designers should be developing with forwards compatiblity in mind. Unsurprisingly, yours is one of the 99.9% of all sites that have not.
Slashdot Mirror
You are lucky. Look at Charles Upsdell's browser stats or web browsers used to access Google for more typical stats.
It's not the JavaScript language itself that differs between IE and Mozilla. It's the DOM, which is the data structure for accessing elements on the web page. Your friend is incorrect about Mozilla; it's IE that makes up its own DOM standards.
Yeah, I suppose writing patches for WONTFIX and INVALID bugs is pretty much a waste of time. Idiot.
To me the interesting battle is to get enough users to use standards compliant browsers and not use old browsers such as Netscape 4 and IE 4 that web developers can finally just write according to web standards and know their websites can work for more than 99% of users.
Wimps!
PostScript isn't really based on Forth. It's just another stack-based language, as is the language used for HP calculators, and virtual machines such as Java bytecode and .Net CIL.
There are more tests available through the parent of that link. The latest version of Mozilla seems to do very well on the tests. IE 6 for Windows does poorly on many.
With time, complaints about Mozilla not working will naturally decrease. Web developers are finally realizing that there are other browsers besides IE and Netscape 4. Some of them even realize there are standards they should be following.
There are lexer and parser generators (e.g. flex and bison) that take a context-free simplification of the language and automatically produce efficient and bug-free lexers and parsers. But you have to take care of the context-sensitive part of the language (e.g. checking that variables are declared before they are used) and the code generation manually.
Not planning on retiring != planning on not retiring. I'm not thinking about my breathing, but that's doesn't mean I'm thinking about not breathing!
Many people make a big deal that these standards are called "recommendations," but this is semantic quibbling. It's like saying that you don't believe in the theory of relativity because it's only a "theory."
I started leaving a large gap between my car and the car ahead of me in stop and go traffic several years ago. I've never had significant problems with cars cutting in and filling up the gap. Read the FAQ on his web page to get some explanations why.
No, the principle is that paradoxically, if you want to drive faster overall, you need to drive slower at some points. If you continually go as fast as you can go right behind the car in front of you, it creates traffic jams. Driving at the average speed and leaving a large gap between you and the car ahead of you can speed up all the traffic behind you.
5. Mozilla correctly uses MIME types according to W3C recommendations. If you have any problem downloading files, it's almost certainly a misconfigured server. 6. I never have to enter any passwords into Mozilla, let alone every time I run it. Mozilla just remembers all my passwords for me. Instead of just waiting for a new release of Mozilla to come out, get involved. The first time you started Mozilla, a page informing you of how to do this should have appeared. After all, that's how open source software works!
Then there was the time I told someone the admin's password was "zapper". I watched the keys he typed as he entered his password!
The Mozilla Spellchecker is scheduled to be added to Mozilla.
I do not think designers should predict change. I think designers should simply use recent standards and ensure that they adhere to these standards by using validators such as the W3C HTML validator. Absolutely no predicition is necessary!
Please re-read the article, as it is very clear on these points.
Everyone who I have ever worked with has generated invalid HTML that has made even current browsers crash or behave erratically in different browsers. When I realized that I was also making these mistakes, I finally learned my lesson and started using the W3C validator to make sure my web pages are valid HTML. Since then, I have not had any problem with my pages not working in any browser. This is exactly what Zeldman is asking web developers to do.
Backwards compatibility means it works in older browsers. As Zeldman mentions, it always has some cutoff point, such as Netscape 3 or IE 2.
Forwards compatibility means that it works in newer browsers. There is not necessarily any cutoff point, as long as you have constructed the website correctly. Structural problems and other typos in the HTML, proprietary and deprecated tags, and versioning can all limit the forward compatibility of the page.
Read the article and you'll see that Zeldman is arguing that web designers should be developing with forwards compatiblity in mind. Unsurprisingly, yours is one of the 99.9% of all sites that have not.