OK. I know this is gonna be controversial. But isn't the whole point of separating HTML from CSS about separating style from content?
Done right, the XHTML page is just a hierarchical data-structure. It's rightly part of the program and so part of the programmer's domain. CSS gives you all the control you need over the *appearance* of the page.
So I say the designers shouldn't mess with anything except style-sheets. No PHP, no HTML templates, nothing but CSS.
Of course, although XHTML and Javascript are part of your program, they're a special part of the code which gets executed in the browser. By all means you should also have a good strategy for encapsulating them away from the rest of your code. Have some kind of templating system if you like.
But it's a mistake to think this is the *same* separation as the firewall you want to put between coders and designers.
The problem is, of course, the *tools* aren't set up for this. Dreamweaver et al. imagine that the designer will be creating the actual HTML. I'm not sure if there are tools that support the separation I'm suggesting (but you know, toolbuilders, there should be) but it seems to me crazy that we're trying to invent and police the firewall between coders and designers when it already exists.
As for code and "content" if you mean the text and images on your site, these should probably be in a database or CMS of some kind rather than embedded directly into the HTML.
"But a Wiki would agree with the veterinarians and the public on this."
No it wouldn't, because *you'd* publish your criticism. You'd say "some people criticise "Science Diet" for the following reasons." And you'd give your reasons for thinking it's wrong.
Now the "science diet" people might try to vandalize the page, but that will noticed and commented on. More likely your list of criticisms will remain but the "science diet" people will try to defend themselves.
That's good. Even if readers don't know who to trust, they'll see there's an argument, and they'll see there's a structure to that argument. They'll see what the points of contention are *within* the argument. And that will give them the clues they need to try to find out more for themselves.
Re:Improved software engineering through genocide
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
·
· Score: 1
Sorry I don't understand the problem. Surely Greenspun is using this analogy partly to make some point or other, and partly, as a side effect, to remind people about Nazi attrocities.
So what's wrong? Are you saying people *shouldn't* be reminded of Nazi attrocities because of offence? Offending who? The Neo-fascists? Fuck them! People should always remember what they did.
Do you think it trivialiazes the attrocities because they're used in analogy with something more mundane? No, the descriptions speak for themselves. It's good to occasionally be reminded of important things, during mundane life.
I've been reading Weinberger's book while it was evolving online. I don't buy everything he says, but I think this is a pretty unfair review. It paints Weinberger as naive, stupid, or a breathles newbie, when he certainly isn't.
It strikes me either
a) Katz is undergoing a radical 180 degree shift from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism for some reason (disillusion, boredom, bandwagon jumping, personal tragedy) and is using the review to lay his own ghosts,
or
b) he's jealous.
Of course the internet is only an information distribution medium, so you can argue that it doesn't change anything in the physical world.
But that's a bit like saying, ideas are only neurons firing. Ideas and physics interact.
And the quantitative change in information flow can have qualitative effects in the physical world, and even more so in the world of ideas. The whole point of Weinberger's book is to argue that, and to try to show that our ideas have been changed by the net, including the great fundamentals like time, space and self.
These ideas are changing constantly throughout history. It's the job of philosophers, and historians like Weinberger to track these changes, in response to new economic systems, scientific theories and cultural events.
Is the web big enough to be one of these transforming factors. I'd say it sure is.
(If we forgive the trivial conflation of web and internet.)
For example, there are several ways my life is different from a pre-web world.
I'm British but I'm fortunate enough to live with my girlfriend in Brazil, while holding onto my job in the UK. I work remotely via the internet.
Without the net, when my girlfirend returned home, I would have been forced to chose between my relationship and staying with the company I helped found. As it is, I have both. And a weird kind of international existance, which does change my sense of space, and self in relation to it.
Sometimes I pretend to be in places where I'm not. When I use the phrase "you can send it to me" to my bank, I mean "you can send it somewhere far away from me, where someone will read it to me over the phone". The phrase "to me", which is about nothing but space and self, has changed its meaning.
Another previously impossible thing. Although I don't know Weinberger, I've added comments while the book was in progress. So maybe I even had an influence on it!
That's an experience which is pretty novel. Before, books had always come to me from publishers finished. I could have an opinion but not one that counted for anything. Increasingly I'm reading and buying books that I've discovered in draft form on the web, from writers who are accessable by email.
P2P networking has changed the way I discover, acquire and listen to music. Weblogs have changed my opinion about the media, its future, and its role in society. The open source model (whose success is an effect of the net) has changed the way I think about software development, and given me new faith in the efficacy of amateur projects run by communities of volunteers.
So the net challanges and changes my ideas all the time. It enables me to live in a way which would be impossible without it, among people who I would never have met. From my perspective it's a big deal. And I think the trend is more people are finding that too.
If you've only found adverts for big media and pr0n, you clearly aren't using it right.
All these articles are interesting, how come they generated so much slashdot crap? Are/. readers
just mindless jerks? Maybe those sad enough to log in at the weekend (written at 6.26 Sunday morning, ouch!)
Ten years ago I went looking at GIS systems for my employer, and the slogan you used to hear was "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it." The reason, as many on/. have pointed out, the cost is the data, not the software.
So how do you get a lot of data quickly and cheaply? It's another case for the cornucopia of the commons - distributed data collection.
Just as Napster turned the net into the celestial jukebox, and SETI at home harvested the
computer power of the net, how could we turn
everyone into Geographical data collectors?
Two devices that could play a part : (Global or equivalent) positioning in mobile phones. And digital cameras.
People are scared of being tracked by the position of their mobile, but anonymous tracking could be really useful. Think of the number of people who walk down the same streets. Drive down the same highways. Now imagine that the company who ran the mobile phones, also recorded the trajectories, of the phones, averaged and picked out the trends. What you'd end up with is a pretty accurate map of most of the heavily used roads and pedestrian walks within big cities, plus the major highways, outside.
Now imagine putting position recording into
other devices. Digital cameras which position and orientation stamp every picture they took, but also perhaps, make an estimate of their height when the picture is taken. When you upload your images to myPhoto.com, behind the scenes, the elevation of these points is being captured.
The key here is anonymity. No one wants their
devices tracking them if it tracks them personally. But the chips which do the data capture in the device can be open designed, so any expert can check that they aren't storing a unique ID number; and signed so that you can test
that the chip in your device is legit (and not a government spook chip)
"But as interesting as it is, and important as some of its applications and implications already are, I personally don't believe peer-to-peer will move beyond the interests and worklives of a relative handful of computer technologists, many of whom seem to have lost touch with the needs, aspirations, frustrations and lives of middle-class Americans, who are always -- always -- the people who decide which media technologies will actually revolutionize the world and which will not. "
Yeah right, that's OK then. It's only the
low-end, cheap hardware (like the stuff that
most of us can afford) which is going to have
all these copyright protections built in. I'm so relieved that those working for governments and banks will still have the chance to play with the cool stuff. Civilization is saved.
Check your contract carefully. You probably signed something that obliged you to hand over ownership of the IP to your employer, but that might NOT be the same as an obligation on you to help them apply for a patent.
Where is the clause that says you must go this extra step?
Just try refusing, stating politely that you have a principle on this. Your employer or ex-employer will go probably go ahead anyway but won't hold this against you. What's it worth to them to take you to court on this? Do they think that with your signature on the form they have more chance of getting the patent?
If they really think this, its probably because
they're worried you are going to try to fight them for the property later. If so, offer to sign a letter disclaiming any ownership for yourself. (Make sure this contains your true (principled) reasons for not signing the application.) That should protect them legally from you coming after them for the IP in future.
If you have to live in the UK... Brighton is as good as it gets for an English town :
Being on the South coast means better weather than most parts of the country - and you get seaside / touristy stuff
2 universities - student culture, and some tech startups. Sussex university has one of the UK's traditional centres of AI / ALife research... though that's gone a bit cold recently
growing multimedia / interactive TV / web scene
gay capital of Europe - and tends to be sympathetic to alternative / artistic / squatter / raver / geek cultures.
lots of cafes / clubs
cosmopolitan (a lot of language schools here)
it's pretty small geographically, which means everywhere is pretty much within walking distance of anywhere you're likely to live
Jon, I think you're being unfair about the narcisism thing. A good community, like any cybernetic system, needs to spend a certain amount of effort on self-monitoring / self-awareness. The Open Source software is always fascinated by the political interplay of the ESRs and RMSs.
I'm a geek and an intellectual, and I don't see any contradiction. Surely these are just words for the same thing?
But this isn't Katz's mistake, it started when romantic poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century, horrified by the dehumanizing work conditions of the industrial revolution, turned their back on science, rationality and the enlightenment in favour of worshipping nature without understanding it.
Since then we've been living through almost two centuries of a bogus division between technical and humanistic cultures, mainly propagated by the humanists - scientists have always read (and written) good novels, appreciated great art and music etc.
Finally, now, we might, if we're lucky, manage to get through the prejudices of the humanities educated administrarchy and put together a society where technical knowledge and its associated culture are an acknowledged part of mainstream culture.
Don't knock Katz. We need people like him to spell this out in thought sof one sylable.
Why all this stuff about RMS and license arguments? The point is that RMS has many strings to his bow, and one is that he is a veteran campaigner against software patents - which is what this is all about. The fact is, he has been drawing attention to this problem for years. I first heard about the possibility of patenting software at a talk he gave in London ~ 1989-90. Now Tim O'reilly seems to be doing some very useful work dialoguing with Bezos. Cool! But as I understand it, its RMS who actually spoke out and advocated the boycot of Amazon. And that's cool too. that's what campaigners are. People who demand changes and ask people to do things rather than just sit around watching history float past them. I figure it's in his capacity as a campaigner and advocate of the boycot that RMS and his letter should be interesting. And I think that's pretty clear and reasonable. Emphasize that a) Amazon don't just have a patent but are using it to sue a rival. Something that was pretty glossed over in the preceding dialogue between Bezos and O'Reilly. Then b) state that while he welcomes someone of Bezos statue calling for reform, that is not sufficient to let Amazon off the hook. That's O'Reilly's position as well. What's wrong with that?
Actually, I don't understand so much about real Marxism. What is the marxist theory as to how resources are to be allocated (or rather how are powers and needs are to be evaluated); which new ideas are to be exploited etc?
Is it a volunteer system as in open-source development?
Wow! what an extra-ordinary prediction. My understanding is communism failed, not because those guys had ideals, but because they believed centralized planning was the correct way to implement them. In fact, it turned out that the decentralized market, for all its faults, was the more robust and succesful solution to providing for our standard of living.
Bob seems not to understand this at all, either he doesn't know what was wrong with communism, or he doesn't know that it is the open-source movement who are the champions of massively parallel, decentralized systems. Someone should tell him.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. I know this is gonna be controversial. But isn't the whole point of separating HTML from CSS about separating style from content?
Done right, the XHTML page is just a hierarchical data-structure. It's rightly part of the program and so part of the programmer's domain. CSS gives you all the control you need over the *appearance* of the page.
So I say the designers shouldn't mess with anything except style-sheets. No PHP, no HTML templates, nothing but CSS.
Of course, although XHTML and Javascript are part of your program, they're a special part of the code which gets executed in the browser. By all means you should also have a good strategy for encapsulating them away from the rest of your code. Have some kind of templating system if you like.
But it's a mistake to think this is the *same* separation as the firewall you want to put between coders and designers.
The problem is, of course, the *tools* aren't set up for this. Dreamweaver et al. imagine that the designer will be creating the actual HTML. I'm not sure if there are tools that support the separation I'm suggesting (but you know, toolbuilders, there should be) but it seems to me crazy that we're trying to invent and police the firewall between coders and designers when it already exists.
As for code and "content" if you mean the text and images on your site, these should probably be in a database or CMS of some kind rather than embedded directly into the HTML.
"But a Wiki would agree with the veterinarians and the public on this."
No it wouldn't, because *you'd* publish your criticism. You'd say "some people criticise "Science Diet" for the following reasons." And you'd give your reasons for thinking it's wrong.
Now the "science diet" people might try to vandalize the page, but that will noticed and commented on. More likely your list of criticisms will remain but the "science diet" people will try to defend themselves.
That's good. Even if readers don't know who to trust, they'll see there's an argument, and they'll see there's a structure to that argument. They'll see what the points of contention are *within* the argument. And that will give them the clues they need to try to find out more for themselves.
So what's wrong? Are you saying people *shouldn't* be reminded of Nazi attrocities because of offence? Offending who? The Neo-fascists? Fuck them! People should always remember what they did.
Do you think it trivialiazes the attrocities because they're used in analogy with something more mundane? No, the descriptions speak for themselves. It's good to occasionally be reminded of important things, during mundane life.
I've been reading Weinberger's book while it was evolving online. I don't buy everything he says, but I think this is a pretty unfair review. It paints Weinberger as naive, stupid, or a breathles newbie, when he certainly isn't.
It strikes me either
a) Katz is undergoing a radical 180 degree shift from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism for some reason (disillusion, boredom, bandwagon jumping, personal tragedy) and is using the review to lay his own ghosts,
or
b) he's jealous.
Of course the internet is only an information distribution medium, so you can argue that it doesn't change anything in the physical world.
But that's a bit like saying, ideas are only neurons firing. Ideas and physics interact.
And the quantitative change in information flow can have qualitative effects in the physical world, and even more so in the world of ideas. The whole point of Weinberger's book is to argue that, and to try to show that our ideas have been changed by the net, including the great fundamentals like time, space and self.
These ideas are changing constantly throughout history. It's the job of philosophers, and historians like Weinberger to track these changes, in response to new economic systems, scientific theories and cultural events.
Is the web big enough to be one of these transforming factors. I'd say it sure is.
(If we forgive the trivial conflation of web and internet.)
For example, there are several ways my life is different from a pre-web world.
I'm British but I'm fortunate enough to live with my girlfriend in Brazil, while holding onto my job in the UK. I work remotely via the internet.
Without the net, when my girlfirend returned home, I would have been forced to chose between my relationship and staying with the company I helped found. As it is, I have both. And a weird kind of international existance, which does change my sense of space, and self in relation to it.
Sometimes I pretend to be in places where I'm not. When I use the phrase "you can send it to me" to my bank, I mean "you can send it somewhere far away from me, where someone will read it to me over the phone". The phrase "to me", which is about nothing but space and self, has changed its meaning.
Another previously impossible thing. Although I don't know Weinberger, I've added comments while the book was in progress. So maybe I even had an influence on it!
That's an experience which is pretty novel. Before, books had always come to me from publishers finished. I could have an opinion but not one that counted for anything. Increasingly I'm reading and buying books that I've discovered in draft form on the web, from writers who are accessable by email.
P2P networking has changed the way I discover, acquire and listen to music. Weblogs have changed my opinion about the media, its future, and its role in society. The open source model (whose success is an effect of the net) has changed the way I think about software development, and given me new faith in the efficacy of amateur projects run by communities of volunteers.
So the net challanges and changes my ideas all the time. It enables me to live in a way which would be impossible without it, among people who I would never have met. From my perspective it's a big deal. And I think the trend is more people are finding that too.
If you've only found adverts for big media and pr0n, you clearly aren't using it right.
Quote from the...
"But Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace department, warned against assuming Middle East extremists were behind the tragedy.
"We've been here before. With Oklahoma, everybody assumed it was Middle East [terrorists], then it turned out to be home-grown Timothy McVeigh," he said. "Again with the pipe bomb in Atlanta, it
turned out to be domestic."
All these articles are interesting, how come they generated so much slashdot crap? Are /. readers
just mindless jerks? Maybe those sad enough to log in at the weekend (written at 6.26 Sunday morning, ouch!)
Ten years ago I went looking at GIS systems for my employer, and the slogan you used to hear was "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it." The reason, as many on /. have pointed out, the cost is the data, not the software.
So how do you get a lot of data quickly and cheaply? It's another case for the cornucopia of the commons - distributed data collection.
Just as Napster turned the net into the celestial jukebox, and SETI at home harvested the
computer power of the net, how could we turn
everyone into Geographical data collectors?
Two devices that could play a part : (Global or equivalent) positioning in mobile phones. And digital cameras.
People are scared of being tracked by the position of their mobile, but anonymous tracking could be really useful. Think of the number of people who walk down the same streets. Drive down the same highways. Now imagine that the company who ran the mobile phones, also recorded the trajectories, of the phones, averaged and picked out the trends. What you'd end up with is a pretty accurate map of most of the heavily used roads and pedestrian walks within big cities, plus the major highways, outside.
Now imagine putting position recording into
other devices. Digital cameras which position and orientation stamp every picture they took, but also perhaps, make an estimate of their height when the picture is taken. When you upload your images to myPhoto.com, behind the scenes, the elevation of these points is being captured.
The key here is anonymity. No one wants their
devices tracking them if it tracks them personally. But the chips which do the data capture in the device can be open designed, so any expert can check that they aren't storing a unique ID number; and signed so that you can test
that the chip in your device is legit (and not a government spook chip)
phil
"But as interesting as it is, and important as some of its applications and implications already are, I personally don't believe peer-to-peer will move beyond the interests and worklives of a relative handful of computer technologists, many of whom seem to have lost touch with the needs, aspirations, frustrations and lives of middle-class Americans, who are always -- always -- the people who decide which media technologies will actually revolutionize the world and which will not. "
Would you have said the above about the web?
Yeah right, that's OK then. It's only the low-end, cheap hardware (like the stuff that most of us can afford) which is going to have all these copyright protections built in. I'm so relieved that those working for governments and banks will still have the chance to play with the cool stuff. Civilization is saved.
Check your contract carefully. You probably signed something that obliged you to hand over ownership of the IP to your employer, but that might NOT be the same as an obligation on you to help them apply for a patent.
Where is the clause that says you must go this extra step?
Just try refusing, stating politely that you have a principle on this. Your employer or ex-employer will go probably go ahead anyway but won't hold this against you. What's it worth to them to take you to court on this? Do they think that with your signature on the form they have more chance of getting the patent?
If they really think this, its probably because
they're worried you are going to try to fight them for the property later. If so, offer to sign a letter disclaiming any ownership for yourself. (Make sure this contains your true (principled) reasons for not signing the application.) That should protect them legally from you coming after them for the IP in future.
If you have to live in the UK ... Brighton is as good as it gets for an English town :
... though that's gone a bit cold recently
Being on the South coast means better weather than most parts of the country - and you get seaside / touristy stuff
2 universities - student culture, and some tech startups. Sussex university has one of the UK's traditional centres of AI / ALife research
growing multimedia / interactive TV / web scene
gay capital of Europe - and tends to be sympathetic to alternative / artistic / squatter /
raver / geek cultures.
lots of cafes / clubs
cosmopolitan (a lot of language schools here)
it's pretty small geographically, which means everywhere is pretty much within walking distance of anywhere you're likely to live
40 minutes - 1 hour from London by train or car
Jon, I think you're being unfair about the narcisism thing. A good community, like any cybernetic system, needs to spend a certain
amount of effort on self-monitoring / self-awareness. The Open Source software is always fascinated by the political interplay of the ESRs and RMSs.
Yeah, but does the mechanic down the garage own my car?
damn straight.
I'm a geek and an intellectual, and I don't see any contradiction. Surely these are just words for the same thing?
But this isn't Katz's mistake, it started when romantic poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century, horrified by the dehumanizing work conditions of the industrial revolution, turned their back on science, rationality and the enlightenment in favour of worshipping nature without understanding it.
Since then we've been living through almost two centuries of a bogus division between technical and humanistic cultures, mainly propagated by the humanists - scientists have always read (and written) good novels, appreciated great art and music etc.
Finally, now, we might, if we're lucky, manage to get through the prejudices of the humanities educated administrarchy and put together a society where technical knowledge and its associated culture are an acknowledged part of mainstream culture.
Don't knock Katz. We need people like him to spell this out in thought sof one sylable.
Why all this stuff about RMS and license arguments? The point is that RMS has many strings to his bow, and one is that he is a veteran campaigner against software patents - which is what this is all about. The fact is, he has been drawing attention to this problem for years. I first heard about the possibility of patenting software at a talk he gave in London ~ 1989-90. Now Tim O'reilly seems to be doing some very useful work dialoguing with Bezos. Cool! But as I understand it, its RMS who actually spoke out and advocated the boycot of Amazon. And that's cool too. that's what campaigners are. People who demand changes and ask people to do things rather than just sit around watching history float past them. I figure it's in his capacity as a campaigner and advocate of the boycot that RMS and his letter should be interesting. And I think that's pretty clear and reasonable. Emphasize that a) Amazon don't just have a patent but are using it to sue a rival. Something that was pretty glossed over in the preceding dialogue between Bezos and O'Reilly. Then b) state that while he welcomes someone of Bezos statue calling for reform, that is not sufficient to let Amazon off the hook. That's O'Reilly's position as well. What's wrong with that?
Actually,
I don't understand so much about real Marxism. What is the marxist theory as to how resources are to be allocated (or rather how are powers and needs are to be evaluated); which new ideas are to be exploited etc?
Is it a volunteer system as in open-source development?
now curious
philip
Wow!
what an extra-ordinary prediction. My understanding is communism failed, not because those guys had ideals, but because they believed centralized planning was the correct way to implement them. In fact, it turned out that the decentralized market, for all its faults, was the more robust and succesful solution to providing for our standard of living.
Bob seems not to understand this at all, either he doesn't know what was wrong with communism, or he doesn't know that it is the open-source movement who are the champions of massively parallel, decentralized systems. Someone should tell him.
philip