iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.
The Tories are like all politicians: they will say absolutely anything that might help them gain power. It's what they do once they have the power that counts, and believe me, it's never what they promised.
Basically the Tories are still suffering from the undying hatred that Margaret Thatcher earned them, so now they'll say anything that might make them seem cuddly and nice. They're still just a bunch of power-hungry exploitative bastards, though.
I work almost entirely from home, and regard my work as my hobby. OTOH, I'm damned if I'm ever going to invite a colleague round here. What does that make me - apart from an unsociable git?
Forum advice was to run "repair permissions", I did but it didn't help.
It didn't help because the people who gave you that advice are imbeciles who believe in voodoo. It was able to help with occasional problems caused by Classic and bad installers circa OS X 10.1, but there are hardly any circumstances where it will make any difference to anything on more recent versions, as explained here.
Yes, that's correct; what I meant was that, throughout the DOM documentation at developer.mozilla.org, the DOM recommendation which first introduced any given property or method is never stated. As their documentation is itself sufficiently detailed to allow one to get on with things, there is usually no reason to follow the links to the W3C recommendations, where it might become clear that a given property or method is unlikely to have much in the way of real-world support.
I don't think it's really fair to blame the IE Team for this one; they've gone to a lot of effort to make developers aware of the potential issues during the beta phase, and have provided plenty of solid information, as well as toolkits for testing app compatibility. It sounds like the problem isn't with IE 7, but with the developer(s) of the software you used. They've had over a year to get their reader ready for the switch, but as they haven't even responded to your emails, it sounds like they've abandoned the product.
Given that the only component of IE it's using is presumably the rendering engine, there may be something based on Gecko out there that would get you working again.
Good luck finding something to get your business back on track:-(
The textContent property is defined in DOM Level 3. Microsoft has never claimed to support that recommendation, and neither Apple nor Opera claim support for it either. Gecko supports it, although the documentation doesn't make it clear that it's from DOM Level 3. If you write code using features supported by only one browser, then you can hardly complain if it doesn't work on other browsers. What you've done is no different from a developer who codes only for IE-specific features, and then whines when they don't work on Firefox.
Coding to standards is important, but you're better off coding to the standards that have been implemented. Otherwise you're just playing with the cool new stuff that you like, and that's not how work gets done in the real world.
For over forty years Ecma has actively contributed to world-wide standardization in information technology and telecommunications.
which, if it "isn't much more than a Microsoft rubber stamp" means they must have been twiddling their thumbs for quite a few years waiting for Microsoft to be founded.
Have a look at their list of standards; as far as I know, Microsoft make no claim to be the originators of Corporate Telecommunication Networks - Signalling Interworking between QSIG and H.323 - Generic Functional Protocol for the Support of Supplementary Services, Eiffel: Analysis, Design and Programming Language or File Structure and Labelling of Magnetic Tapes for Information Interchange.
It's possible that a small number of people, probably in new towns like Welwyn and Letchworth, had cable, but the BBC has always broadcast radio over the airwaves, and the use of a radio receiver has always been the way that the majority of people in the UK listened.
One rather neat (or weird) hack in the early days, when many radios were only equipped with headphones, was to place the headphones in a round goldfish bowl (having first removed the goldfish and water). The resonance of the bowl allowed it to act as a primitive amplifier/loudspeaker, and the whole family would huddle round the bowl listening to the broadcast.
If you use the W3C Validator set to HTML 2, it gets close:
Unknown element HEADER - this was later renamed HEAD, so this isn't really invalid for this page;
BODY not allowed here - probably down to the lack of <html> which was presumably added later, meaning that again this probably isn't really an error;
</a> closing an element which isn't open - looks like somebody screwed up when adding ",etc." at the end of the last <dd>.
As the page is written in HTML 0.1 or some such, the first and second errors don't really count.
Interestingly, www.microsoft.com has two errors at the time of writing. So MS have finally got to the point where they're producing something only twice as broken as what we had 16 years ago:-)
Plus the camera has to work and have film in it, which seems to be a struggle for many camera operators.
The CCTV systems used to assist in keeping public order in British cities and towns don't use film; they are connected to (and recorded to either tape or digital media at) a central control room for the area, where operators keep an eye on things 24/7, with direct communication links to the emergency services (Police, Fire & Rescue, Ambulance/Paramedics, and presumably the Coastguard in relevant areas).
You may be thinking of older speed - sorry, road safety - cameras, which were often useless because of the month's film budget having been used up. But that problem (or solution;-) has pretty much disappeared, as the vast majority of traffic-policing-related cameras are now also digital - which is why there's no longer any point blowing them up when you're caught speeding.
(And, for what it's worth, all cities and many towns in the UK also have a third, separate network of cameras used by Area Traffic Control, who then get the local radio station to tell you that you're stuck in a traffic jam.)
...seeing as how he's complaining about Parallels refreshing the entire desktop every time a character is typed, I think using a PC via Remote Desktop will win performance-wise quite easily.
Actually, I think that's something to do with Visual Studio. I've noticed exactly the same thing when using Visual Studio over Remote Desktop Connection via a VPN on an old slow machine (at my end): VS appears to redraw the entire contents of the editor window for every keystroke.
Also note that he only perceived that phenomenon when Quartz Debug was running: that's a Mac Developer Tools utility that intercepts every API call related to display rendering and logs it to a GUI. Naturally it slows things down considerably, but it's nothing to do with Parallels exhibiting a problem in performance.
I do my development on a MacBook and run Win XP Pro in Parallels. Occasionally I've used RDC to go onto my Windows laptop for some reason, but it's hardly ever neccessary. All the applications I run on Windows in Parallels run well enough that they might just as well be in a native Windows environment, including memory and processor intensive apps like Visual Studio. Not only is it not worth the money to get another PC, for a couple of months now it's not even been worth a few seconds of my time to turn my Windows laptop on.
No, look at the diagram a few pages earlier showing the mapping of key names to the customer-accessible buttons; the CTRL key is the button on the bottom right.
The use of DHTML does not preclude accessibility, nor does it require a separate version of the site. Google for unobtrusive javascript or DOM Scripting. Major advances have been made even within the last twelve months on accessibility of sites with extensive JavaScript enhancement (note that I say "enhancement", not "requirement"), and assistive technologies such as screen readers used by those with visual impairment are now much more capable of dealing with dynamically updated content.
Oh, and data displayed as a graph? Eric Meyer has a working demo of an HTML table of data rendered as a bar graph via CSS. Totally accessible, one page for all users, looks good.
Thank you. I wish so too, but I take some consolation in the fact that, of the last nine days, I have been fortunate enough to spend three in the company of first 100 people, and then 350 people professionally involved in web development, across the spectrum from coding to marketing, all of whom are seriously dedicated to the cause of accessible web design. There really is change afoot in the industry, and those who fail to change will fall by the wayside. Andy Budd said it best:
Making a website S.508 compliant is very expensive and not as visually stimulating to their the vast majority of their customers.
This is simply untrue. If a site's design is implemented by a competent developer using standards-based HTML and CSS it will be accessible.
I used to work in a design studio where the graphic designers were accustomed to being able to give whatever print-oriented design they'd come up with to The Coder. As all of my predecessors had simply used some tool such as ImageReady to slice everything up into an inaccessible nightmare of nested tables and spacer gifs, they had never had to think about adapting their design skills to the medium of the web. However, by dint of hard work and taking a pride in my craft, I was able to implement all of their designs using semantically well-formed HTML with presentational styling applied via CSS; as a result the sites were accessible to users of assistive technologies while still having all the eye candy for those of us able to appreciate it.
Furthermore, when I had to make some fundamental changes to an existing site created by my predecessor, it was quicker and easier to spend a day converting the site to standards-based markup and styling and then add the relevant enhancements ( a rather complex bespoke content management system, in that case) because the separation of content, presentation and behaviour made possible by the correct application of web standards removes many of the problems related to site maintenance. There are reasons why a lot of smart people defined web technologies in the form in which they are currently implemented (poorly, in the case of most current Microsoft products, but that's only a showstopper to the lazy or incompetent) and enabling the creation of accessible websites through a separation of concerns was one of the most important reasons.
Since S.508 sites are seen as boring by the general population, typically a business has to have two websites, one accessible and one not.
I find it astonishing that these myths about accessibility still persist. These days I freelance, still implementing designs created by people with no understanding of the technical details of producing accessible implementations, and I ask my blind friend to test them for me. He is not a man to mince his words - having worked as a technologist until diabetes gradually robbed him of his sight over the last 8 years, he is well aware of the occasions when he is disadvantaged by the laziness of somebody who learnt how to use nested tables and spacer gifs, and still has the gall to call themselves a web developer, five years after they should have started updating and improving their skills. He has never had a problem with a site I have implemented, and none of them have a "special" version for the "special" people.
Those who still create inaccessible websites today are simply shoddy workers who have no place in the industry. They seem to want a career that allows them to work exactly the same way now as they did in 1998. Well, the technology has improved in leaps and bounds since then, there is a thriving online community sharing techniques and best practice, and it's as simple to get hold of all this knowledge as doing a few Google searches and subscribing to some RSS feeds - assuming you're willing to accept hard work as a precondition of being a competent craftsperson. Those who don't care about taking responsibility for continuous improvement of their skills should leave the industry and find work at McDonalds; I believe the skillset required there remains the same from decade to decade. Meanwhile, those of us who love our work and feel a sense of responsibility to society - including the disadvantaged members thereof - will continue to strive to constantly improve. Peddling the belief that accessibility somehow adds cost doesn't help, for it is, as I have said, simply untrue.
Slashdot Mirror
So why does TFA say:
As I said, "like all politicians" :-)
The Tories are like all politicians: they will say absolutely anything that might help them gain power. It's what they do once they have the power that counts, and believe me, it's never what they promised.
Basically the Tories are still suffering from the undying hatred that Margaret Thatcher earned them, so now they'll say anything that might make them seem cuddly and nice. They're still just a bunch of power-hungry exploitative bastards, though.
I work almost entirely from home, and regard my work as my hobby. OTOH, I'm damned if I'm ever going to invite a colleague round here. What does that make me - apart from an unsociable git?
Opera has been free (of charge) for quite a while now.
It didn't help because the people who gave you that advice are imbeciles who believe in voodoo. It was able to help with occasional problems caused by Classic and bad installers circa OS X 10.1, but there are hardly any circumstances where it will make any difference to anything on more recent versions, as explained here.
There is. It's called Firebug.
Yes, that's correct; what I meant was that, throughout the DOM documentation at developer.mozilla.org, the DOM recommendation which first introduced any given property or method is never stated. As their documentation is itself sufficiently detailed to allow one to get on with things, there is usually no reason to follow the links to the W3C recommendations, where it might become clear that a given property or method is unlikely to have much in the way of real-world support.
I don't think it's really fair to blame the IE Team for this one; they've gone to a lot of effort to make developers aware of the potential issues during the beta phase, and have provided plenty of solid information, as well as toolkits for testing app compatibility. It sounds like the problem isn't with IE 7, but with the developer(s) of the software you used. They've had over a year to get their reader ready for the switch, but as they haven't even responded to your emails, it sounds like they've abandoned the product.
Given that the only component of IE it's using is presumably the rendering engine, there may be something based on Gecko out there that would get you working again.
Good luck finding something to get your business back on track :-(
The textContent property is defined in DOM Level 3. Microsoft has never claimed to support that recommendation, and neither Apple nor Opera claim support for it either. Gecko supports it, although the documentation doesn't make it clear that it's from DOM Level 3. If you write code using features supported by only one browser, then you can hardly complain if it doesn't work on other browsers. What you've done is no different from a developer who codes only for IE-specific features, and then whines when they don't work on Firefox.
Coding to standards is important, but you're better off coding to the standards that have been implemented. Otherwise you're just playing with the cool new stuff that you like, and that's not how work gets done in the real world.
From the Wikipedia page:
which, if it "isn't much more than a Microsoft rubber stamp" means they must have been twiddling their thumbs for quite a few years waiting for Microsoft to be founded.
Have a look at their list of standards; as far as I know, Microsoft make no claim to be the originators of Corporate Telecommunication Networks - Signalling Interworking between QSIG and H.323 - Generic Functional Protocol for the Support of Supplementary Services, Eiffel: Analysis, Design and Programming Language or File Structure and Labelling of Magnetic Tapes for Information Interchange.
Actually, Netscape submitted the JavaScript spec for standardisation as ECMAScript in November 1996.
It's possible that a small number of people, probably in new towns like Welwyn and Letchworth, had cable, but the BBC has always broadcast radio over the airwaves, and the use of a radio receiver has always been the way that the majority of people in the UK listened.
One rather neat (or weird) hack in the early days, when many radios were only equipped with headphones, was to place the headphones in a round goldfish bowl (having first removed the goldfish and water). The resonance of the bowl allowed it to act as a primitive amplifier/loudspeaker, and the whole family would huddle round the bowl listening to the broadcast.
Wrong. So wrong I don't even know where to start.
Next time, hook up a white noise generator. Then you can watch him waste hours trying to re-tune his radio.
I find it bizarre that a person who claims to be "generally interested in radio communications" has never heard of the Wireless Telegraphy Act.
If you use the W3C Validator set to HTML 2, it gets close:
As the page is written in HTML 0.1 or some such, the first and second errors don't really count.
Interestingly, www.microsoft.com has two errors at the time of writing. So MS have finally got to the point where they're producing something only twice as broken as what we had 16 years ago :-)
The CCTV systems used to assist in keeping public order in British cities and towns don't use film; they are connected to (and recorded to either tape or digital media at) a central control room for the area, where operators keep an eye on things 24/7, with direct communication links to the emergency services (Police, Fire & Rescue, Ambulance/Paramedics, and presumably the Coastguard in relevant areas).
You may be thinking of older speed - sorry, road safety - cameras, which were often useless because of the month's film budget having been used up. But that problem (or solution ;-) has pretty much disappeared, as the vast majority of traffic-policing-related cameras are now also digital - which is why there's no longer any point blowing them up when you're caught speeding.
(And, for what it's worth, all cities and many towns in the UK also have a third, separate network of cameras used by Area Traffic Control, who then get the local radio station to tell you that you're stuck in a traffic jam.)
Actually, I think that's something to do with Visual Studio. I've noticed exactly the same thing when using Visual Studio over Remote Desktop Connection via a VPN on an old slow machine (at my end): VS appears to redraw the entire contents of the editor window for every keystroke.
Also note that he only perceived that phenomenon when Quartz Debug was running: that's a Mac Developer Tools utility that intercepts every API call related to display rendering and logs it to a GUI. Naturally it slows things down considerably, but it's nothing to do with Parallels exhibiting a problem in performance.
I do my development on a MacBook and run Win XP Pro in Parallels. Occasionally I've used RDC to go onto my Windows laptop for some reason, but it's hardly ever neccessary. All the applications I run on Windows in Parallels run well enough that they might just as well be in a native Windows environment, including memory and processor intensive apps like Visual Studio. Not only is it not worth the money to get another PC, for a couple of months now it's not even been worth a few seconds of my time to turn my Windows laptop on.
No, look at the diagram a few pages earlier showing the mapping of key names to the customer-accessible buttons; the CTRL key is the button on the bottom right.
The use of DHTML does not preclude accessibility, nor does it require a separate version of the site. Google for unobtrusive javascript or DOM Scripting. Major advances have been made even within the last twelve months on accessibility of sites with extensive JavaScript enhancement (note that I say "enhancement", not "requirement"), and assistive technologies such as screen readers used by those with visual impairment are now much more capable of dealing with dynamically updated content.
Oh, and data displayed as a graph? Eric Meyer has a working demo of an HTML table of data rendered as a bar graph via CSS. Totally accessible, one page for all users, looks good.
Thank you. I wish so too, but I take some consolation in the fact that, of the last nine days, I have been fortunate enough to spend three in the company of first 100 people, and then 350 people professionally involved in web development, across the spectrum from coding to marketing, all of whom are seriously dedicated to the cause of accessible web design. There really is change afoot in the industry, and those who fail to change will fall by the wayside. Andy Budd said it best:
This is simply untrue. If a site's design is implemented by a competent developer using standards-based HTML and CSS it will be accessible.
I used to work in a design studio where the graphic designers were accustomed to being able to give whatever print-oriented design they'd come up with to The Coder. As all of my predecessors had simply used some tool such as ImageReady to slice everything up into an inaccessible nightmare of nested tables and spacer gifs, they had never had to think about adapting their design skills to the medium of the web. However, by dint of hard work and taking a pride in my craft, I was able to implement all of their designs using semantically well-formed HTML with presentational styling applied via CSS; as a result the sites were accessible to users of assistive technologies while still having all the eye candy for those of us able to appreciate it.
Furthermore, when I had to make some fundamental changes to an existing site created by my predecessor, it was quicker and easier to spend a day converting the site to standards-based markup and styling and then add the relevant enhancements ( a rather complex bespoke content management system, in that case) because the separation of content, presentation and behaviour made possible by the correct application of web standards removes many of the problems related to site maintenance. There are reasons why a lot of smart people defined web technologies in the form in which they are currently implemented (poorly, in the case of most current Microsoft products, but that's only a showstopper to the lazy or incompetent) and enabling the creation of accessible websites through a separation of concerns was one of the most important reasons.
I find it astonishing that these myths about accessibility still persist. These days I freelance, still implementing designs created by people with no understanding of the technical details of producing accessible implementations, and I ask my blind friend to test them for me. He is not a man to mince his words - having worked as a technologist until diabetes gradually robbed him of his sight over the last 8 years, he is well aware of the occasions when he is disadvantaged by the laziness of somebody who learnt how to use nested tables and spacer gifs, and still has the gall to call themselves a web developer, five years after they should have started updating and improving their skills. He has never had a problem with a site I have implemented, and none of them have a "special" version for the "special" people.
Those who still create inaccessible websites today are simply shoddy workers who have no place in the industry. They seem to want a career that allows them to work exactly the same way now as they did in 1998. Well, the technology has improved in leaps and bounds since then, there is a thriving online community sharing techniques and best practice, and it's as simple to get hold of all this knowledge as doing a few Google searches and subscribing to some RSS feeds - assuming you're willing to accept hard work as a precondition of being a competent craftsperson. Those who don't care about taking responsibility for continuous improvement of their skills should leave the industry and find work at McDonalds; I believe the skillset required there remains the same from decade to decade. Meanwhile, those of us who love our work and feel a sense of responsibility to society - including the disadvantaged members thereof - will continue to strive to constantly improve. Peddling the belief that accessibility somehow adds cost doesn't help, for it is, as I have said, simply untrue.
Oh, and well-formed code can help wit
Apology for failure to preview previous post. Corrected link to Apple.