Hmm... perhaps you're onto something there! If we could advertise Firefox as "the best browser for viewing porn sites without screwing your PC", I wonder if even more people would want to install it?
But then, I guess that might put you out of business, so probably isn't worth the hassle for you to install for people!
I'm not a blogger, but it's basically often no different than having a diary, that just happens to be online for other people to read, should they wish to.
A lot of it is boring shit, but that's what you'd undoubtedly find in people's personal diaries as well. If people want to write shit, it's their decision - you don't have to waste your time reading it.
Bye bye Gentoo users? Sheesh, we don't even need stop using things while they upgrade. Just emerge and forget about it while carrying on as normal.
All this hot air about learning stuff from Gentoo is partly true, but the main reason I use it is because it's stupidly easy to maintain and keep up to date. Compiling certain things takes a while, and I don't bother to compile OpenOffice because it's not worth it. Still, it's not like I even have to stop using the computer while it's going on - I just fire, forget, and get on with my work.
Eurgh! Not to mention that the total size of the homepage is 480kB (yes, almost half a megabyte), because none of the thumbnail images seem to have been resized from their originals... making them look like shit too! Yeah, love those jaggies!
That shit would be a minute and a half upwards to download the homepage alone over a dial-up connection! It was even noticably slow (seemed to take more than 10 seconds) over my 750kb cable connection!
I guess that's reason to be happy it was posted on Slashdot, because their bandwidth useage must have just gone through the roof in the last 24 hours... muahaha! (Had to do server-refresh a few times just make sure I was seeing the most up-to-date version... LOL!)
Also, taking a look at the source code, you'll find they've invented a nice new <fooorm> tag, and my Firefox HTML Validator tells me that there are 3 errors and 142 warnings in their code.
I'd say it barely even qualifies to be called a web page!;-)
This is one totally amateur looking website! Not sure what the hell it's all about even, but I can't take it seriously just because it looks like someone's 13 year old kid put it together in Frontpage.
I mean... the branding is weak, the layout is sub-par and uninteresting - the overall impression created by that page is just one of confusion!
Who are they, and what is the point they are trying to make? I can't even be bothered to find out, really, because the website makes me switch off before I get that far.
I can't take this kind of critical commentary seriously from anybody with such an amateur looking website, and theris isn't even up to the visual appeal of the average contemporary blog! Awful!
Moreover, you can use what I call "The Grand Equaliser Rule" as the first thing in your stylesheet to put you on a more even footing in all browsers in the first place:
... although I haven't yet. Still, can't see it causing any major problems, since it's basically more of the same.
Anyway, this fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies between the browsers, and starts you off on a nice blank page where you're forced to specify the things you actually want to see, rather than rely on the browser's default settings.
Awesome, thanks for alerting me to something I wasn't aware of before. I really do like it when that happens - anything that makes me a better coder is a good thing indeed.
As it happens, I'm only messing around with XHTML 1.1 DTD on one of my own sites at the moment, and haven't actually put my upgraded (from XHTML 1.0 Strict) version live yet, but I will definitely implement this q-value thing before it goes live. Thanks again!
Yuk! How about because it's unnecessary, unreliable, harder to maintain and extremely kludgy to boot?
Browser sniffing is the worst way of making web pages, the way that was favoured around the time of the dot-bomb. Instead of testing for actual abilities and using what is available, it relies on assumptions, which are often wrong. Why restrict something and say "sorry, your browser can't do that" when instead you can just do a general, easy test for it and use it if it's there?
The correct way to cope with the capabilities of different browsers is by using feature detection to weed out the ones that don't support things fully, and giving the more advanced stuff to the ones that do - entirely on the client side.
Browser sniffing based on user agent strings really needs to die the death it should have died many years ago. I suggest you buy a copy of Designing With Web Standards and get reading about the right way to do things.
Well, for starters min-width and max-width would be incredibly useful, as well as easy to implement. There are work arounds for those, but they suck and often don't work very well.
All the other stuff like attribute selectors and so on would be really great, but if they could just add support for min-width and max-width and fix the bugs in the stuff they've got nearly-implemented (peekaboo bug, 3px jog etc.), as well as add proper support for XHTML 1.1 as "application/xhtml+xml" it would be a step in the right direction.
IE chokes on "application/xhtml+xml", which is the problem, because for XHTML 1.0 you're supposed to send it as "application/xhtml+xml", but you can send it as "text/html" if you really want (and most people seem to) and it'll still be OK.
With XHTML 1.1 DTD, you have to use "application/xhtml+xml", and IE is too shit to handle it, which means you either revert back to XHTML 1.0 Strict and send as "text/html", or you incorrectly send XHTML 1.1 with the wrong mime type. To be honest, it's not a massive problem since there are very few differences between the two, so you won't really have to change your code, but still it's rather annoying because neither solution is ideal.
However, using 1.1 and "application/xhtml+xml" is good for the newer browsers, since certainly with Firefox (and probably with others too) it uses the XML engine to render the page, and from my (limited) testing, does seem to be a bit quicker, as well as guaranteeing your page is well-formed, because you will know if it's not!
I use the following piece of PHP to switch between them depending on browser capabilities (note: this is content negotiation, which is very different to evil browser sniffing), and it works perfectly. Unfortunately Slashdot doesn't preserve indenting (and messes up some of the spacing in the strings I'm testing on - weird?), but this should work OK with a minor bit of re-adjustment:
The $doctype variable can be used later if there's anything else you need to change based on the type of the page being sent. Feel free to modify the code to suit your needs. Perhaps you want UTF-8, but I like my ISO-8859-1, dammit!
This page also has some useful info on the subject.
Hate to pick holes in your plan there, but it's generally best to code for the better browser in the first place and then hack against the broken one.
You're proposing using the broken stuff for IE, then fixing it for the better browsers, but it's better to code for the good browsers and then provide the extra stuff that only IE will understand.
The star-html hack is one of the cleanest ways of doing this:
#mydiv { /* This is for all good browsers */ width: 100px; height: 150px; }
* html #mydiv { /* This is extra stuff for crappy IE */ width: 140px; height: 190px; }
The star-html hack keeps your hacks away from better browsers (because they basically ignore it) so it's only IE that has to read things twice.
Why make the good browsers work harder, and this way you can surgically remove the hacks at a later stage and be left with the nice clean, simple CSS that you really wanted.
There are times when you're forced to hack the other way around, but it's generally better not to other than as a last resort.
The chart on this site is an absolute life-saver for all kinds of CSS hackery.
I think personal sites (as in, not business, so perhaps blogs and so on) that care about web standards would be enough to at least get noticed. I think 10,000 sites is not an unrealistic number to get on a campaign like this - it's as much about creating the media attention as it is about sending the message to users of IE7.
Losing traffic and annoying visitors is a bad thing, but it's not as bad a thing as another five years of IE's crappy CSS, which is what we'll be stuck with if we don't take some action. It sucks, but Microsoft have forced us to this by not adhering to the standards that they themselves helped to draw up.
Regardless, a protest is better than sitting by and doing nothing, letting the web stagnate because of Microsoft again.
However, as far as web developer interests go, there are no mentions of fixing their badly broken CSS implementation or adding proper PNG alpha-transparency support, so my guess is that IE7 is going to continue to hold the web back for at least another five years with it's totally crap support for web standards.
The more I think about this though, the more I think that what is needed is a way to force Microsoft to fix their web standards problems, so I'm proposing the following solution:
If IE7 is released without the CSS and PNG issues of IE6 being addressed, as many sites that care about standards and can afford the trouble should block it's users from accessing the site, with a clear message about exactly why, and links to better browsers.
There's no way I could do this on any of my customer's sites (I'm a freelance web dev), but on my personal sites, in the event that IE7 still has improper CSS support and broken alpha-PNG, I will almost certainly be blocking it's users from accessing the site, with a message to "come back with a browser that supports standards".
We need to plan this campaign now to put a stop to the adoption of IE7 almost as soon as it comes out, if MS don't fix the issues that web developers are demanding.
I'm not planning to block IE6, because that's been and gone, but what is important is to make sure that IE7 gets it right. Even though I won't be using it myself, I'm damned if I'm going to be stuck having to mangle my perfectly good CSS to cope with it all over again for another five years.
If there's one good thing I hoped Firefox would bring, it would be better standards support for the IE-using masses, so we webdevs could finally make use of CSS2 without having to hack our sites to pieces to cope with IE's crappy CSS implementation.
It seems that MS are going to completely ignore this issue, unless we force them to fix it. So, I think some direct action is required!
(Although I still see fit to put <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true"/> in the head of every site I build, thanks to that nasty scheme, just in case they ever change their minds.)
Anyway, if true, this is a real bitch to website owners. I really hope Google haven't turned to the dark side, but I have noticed that it's taking longer and longer to get new website content properly indexed these days, so in a way, I'm wishing for something to come along and put a bit of competition back into the search engine world, because Google ain't what it used to be.
How long before the Google toolbar is considered spyware? Last I checked, modifying page content was a tactic that well and truly belonged to spyware... and Microsoft.
One of my pet hates (as a freelance web developer, diehard on web standards and doing things properly) is people who pretend to use XHTML, but don't actually fucking USE XHTML!
This site is written oldskool style, with a table based layout done in XHTML - completely missing the point of using XHTML to do semantic layout and CSS for visual arrangement. OK, they've used CSS, but it's to style their already laid-out-in-a-table content.
Furthermore, the site does not validate - not even close! Yet again, half the point of using XHTML is to make well-formed documents. What's the fucking point when developers don't even check their pages validate?
We've got nesting errors, invalid characters, use of attributes that don't exist in XHTML, and two closing html tags? You might have thought whoever wrote this site might have validated their code before putting it live, but the author of this page appears not to even have given it a cursory glance.
Who knows how much this site cost? I'll bet it was a considerable sum of tax money, and it hasn't even been built properly. Fucking USELESS!
When are we going to see a government site built properly, using web standards correctly? It's hardly rocket science, but these idiots in charge of our national computer security can't even use a fucking HTML validator, so is it any wonder the public are screwed?
Speaking of, is there anything remotely close to FL for Linux for music production?
Hydrogen is pretty close to old-skool Fruityloops, like version 3 or something.
Actually, at that point, I preferred Fruity to where it's at now, because it was simpler and did a really good job of making nice loops to mess around with. In that vein, Hydrogen is a winner!
There's quite a big difference between being influenced by a design and copying the website in full before changing some text here and there.
Think of it like taking a sample from some music - which is something I do pretty regularly, being an electronic musician in my spare time.
If took a sample of (say) The Beatles and did something new and original with it (like mangling it beyond comprehension), that would be the creative process in action.
If I burned a copy of The White Album and released it under my own name, merely changing some of the song titles and dubbing my own lyrics over it, that would be akin to what's being exhibited over at Pirate Sites.
In my day job as a web developer, I regularly borrow a bit here and there from other sources (a CSS trick, bit of JavaScript, idea for a simple background pattern and so on), but that's a whole different ballpark than taking a 1:1 copy of a site before changing a few details and releasing it as "my own work".
You claim to understand the creative process, so surely you can see the difference?
The difference is between being inspired to understand a technique and implement it in your own way, versus plagiarizing it verbatum.
As a serious web standards practitioner, I've seen this crap situation coming for a long time.
Don't get me wrong, I will be over the moon if IE7 has correct CSS support, PNG alpha support and so on, but the fact is that it makes hardly any difference to us web developers.
Even after IE7 comes out, we'll still be stuck with coding for IE6's massive userbase, and most likely still IE5 for sometime as well.
Thankfully people don't seem to use IE4 any more, but I still spend probably an extra 30-50% of my page template development time fixing my perfectly good standards compliant CSS for IE's broken implementation. Heaven only knows how much extra wasted development time IE has cost me since the start of my career, but it's probably into weeks, if not months by now.
As if that wasn't bad enough already, IE5.0 and IE5.5 have a few subtle differences, not to mention IE on the Mac.
The fact is, at the moment, if you're really serious about web standards, you've got your work cut out to learn all the workarounds for at least four different versions of Internet Explorer.
When IE7 comes out, it'll offer a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, but with a time delay of probably at least another five years before professional web developers can afford not to care so much about IE5, let alone IE6.
Microsoft have caused this problem by not giving a flying fuck about supporting the web standards that they themselves helped to draw up, which is why I find it utterly criminal that it's not them who pay the price of their bodgework on a daily basis.
Quite frankly, Internet Explorer is holding back the web, because those of us who really know our shit are being prevented from developing professional websites to the best of our abilities.
Sure, do some nice standards-compliant stuff in your blog or whatever, but when clients are paying money, they expect websites to work in Internet Explorer, and that includes version 5.0.
This situation is not going to change for a LONG time yet.
my home PC's became infected with Spyware after my daughter installed a malware ActiveX control from a website.
Sounds to me like you could really just do with installing Firefox and preventing this kind of stuff in the first place. IE is a walking security hazard.
If you've got ZoneAlarm or similar installed too, set it so that IE is banned from connecting to anything.
You can even go the extra mile and hide the real IE icon but make a Firefox shortcut with the "blue e" Internet Explorer icon, thus helping people who are just looking for "the web browser". This is the approach I use on parents etc. when I've had to fix their machines after too much spyware - do it right and they barely notice anything has changed.
The problem is easy to solve - just dump that IE pile of junk and mandate that it isn't used on any of your machines. There are much safer alternatives that are mature enough to use instead, and really, there's no need to use IE any more.
If you don't like Firefox, try Opera, the main Mozilla browser or even just Netscape 7. Anything is better than IE!
(Apologies for preaching to the choir - I guess most Slashdot visitors are probably already running alternative browsers.)
Slashdot Mirror
LOL!! That's a winner right there! :-D
Hmm... perhaps you're onto something there! If we could advertise Firefox as "the best browser for viewing porn sites without screwing your PC", I wonder if even more people would want to install it?
But then, I guess that might put you out of business, so probably isn't worth the hassle for you to install for people!
I'm not a blogger, but it's basically often no different than having a diary, that just happens to be online for other people to read, should they wish to.
A lot of it is boring shit, but that's what you'd undoubtedly find in people's personal diaries as well. If people want to write shit, it's their decision - you don't have to waste your time reading it.
...not being a spelling fascist in the slightest, but chuckling at your advice to avoid it like the plaque!
Laugh, it's funny! :-)
Bye bye Gentoo users? Sheesh, we don't even need stop using things while they upgrade. Just emerge and forget about it while carrying on as normal.
All this hot air about learning stuff from Gentoo is partly true, but the main reason I use it is because it's stupidly easy to maintain and keep up to date. Compiling certain things takes a while, and I don't bother to compile OpenOffice because it's not worth it. Still, it's not like I even have to stop using the computer while it's going on - I just fire, forget, and get on with my work.
Eurgh! Not to mention that the total size of the homepage is 480kB (yes, almost half a megabyte), because none of the thumbnail images seem to have been resized from their originals... making them look like shit too! Yeah, love those jaggies!
That shit would be a minute and a half upwards to download the homepage alone over a dial-up connection! It was even noticably slow (seemed to take more than 10 seconds) over my 750kb cable connection!
I guess that's reason to be happy it was posted on Slashdot, because their bandwidth useage must have just gone through the roof in the last 24 hours... muahaha! (Had to do server-refresh a few times just make sure I was seeing the most up-to-date version... LOL!)
Also, taking a look at the source code, you'll find they've invented a nice new <fooorm> tag, and my Firefox HTML Validator tells me that there are 3 errors and 142 warnings in their code.
I'd say it barely even qualifies to be called a web page! ;-)
This is one totally amateur looking website! Not sure what the hell it's all about even, but I can't take it seriously just because it looks like someone's 13 year old kid put it together in Frontpage.
I mean... the branding is weak, the layout is sub-par and uninteresting - the overall impression created by that page is just one of confusion!
Who are they, and what is the point they are trying to make? I can't even be bothered to find out, really, because the website makes me switch off before I get that far.
I can't take this kind of critical commentary seriously from anybody with such an amateur looking website, and theris isn't even up to the visual appeal of the average contemporary blog! Awful!
That, my friend, is an awesome idea!!!
Moreover, you can use what I call "The Grand Equaliser Rule" as the first thing in your stylesheet to put you on a more even footing in all browsers in the first place:
I daresay you could even use...
... although I haven't yet. Still, can't see it causing any major problems, since it's basically more of the same.
Anyway, this fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies between the browsers, and starts you off on a nice blank page where you're forced to specify the things you actually want to see, rather than rely on the browser's default settings.
Awesome, thanks for alerting me to something I wasn't aware of before. I really do like it when that happens - anything that makes me a better coder is a good thing indeed.
As it happens, I'm only messing around with XHTML 1.1 DTD on one of my own sites at the moment, and haven't actually put my upgraded (from XHTML 1.0 Strict) version live yet, but I will definitely implement this q-value thing before it goes live. Thanks again!
Yuk! How about because it's unnecessary, unreliable, harder to maintain and extremely kludgy to boot?
Browser sniffing is the worst way of making web pages, the way that was favoured around the time of the dot-bomb. Instead of testing for actual abilities and using what is available, it relies on assumptions, which are often wrong. Why restrict something and say "sorry, your browser can't do that" when instead you can just do a general, easy test for it and use it if it's there?
The correct way to cope with the capabilities of different browsers is by using feature detection to weed out the ones that don't support things fully, and giving the more advanced stuff to the ones that do - entirely on the client side.
Browser sniffing based on user agent strings really needs to die the death it should have died many years ago. I suggest you buy a copy of Designing With Web Standards and get reading about the right way to do things.
Well, for starters min-width and max-width would be incredibly useful, as well as easy to implement. There are work arounds for those, but they suck and often don't work very well.
All the other stuff like attribute selectors and so on would be really great, but if they could just add support for min-width and max-width and fix the bugs in the stuff they've got nearly-implemented (peekaboo bug, 3px jog etc.), as well as add proper support for XHTML 1.1 as "application/xhtml+xml" it would be a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, Microsoft don't even care about fixing the bugs that have been documented since forever.
Still, I hear they'll finally be adding proper support for alpha-transparency PNGs, thank the heavens.
IE chokes on "application/xhtml+xml", which is the problem, because for XHTML 1.0 you're supposed to send it as "application/xhtml+xml", but you can send it as "text/html" if you really want (and most people seem to) and it'll still be OK.
With XHTML 1.1 DTD, you have to use "application/xhtml+xml", and IE is too shit to handle it, which means you either revert back to XHTML 1.0 Strict and send as "text/html", or you incorrectly send XHTML 1.1 with the wrong mime type. To be honest, it's not a massive problem since there are very few differences between the two, so you won't really have to change your code, but still it's rather annoying because neither solution is ideal.
However, using 1.1 and "application/xhtml+xml" is good for the newer browsers, since certainly with Firefox (and probably with others too) it uses the XML engine to render the page, and from my (limited) testing, does seem to be a bit quicker, as well as guaranteeing your page is well-formed, because you will know if it's not!
I use the following piece of PHP to switch between them depending on browser capabilities (note: this is content negotiation, which is very different to evil browser sniffing), and it works perfectly. Unfortunately Slashdot doesn't preserve indenting (and messes up some of the spacing in the strings I'm testing on - weird?), but this should work OK with a minor bit of re-adjustment:
The $doctype variable can be used later if there's anything else you need to change based on the type of the page being sent. Feel free to modify the code to suit your needs. Perhaps you want UTF-8, but I like my ISO-8859-1, dammit!
This page also has some useful info on the subject.
Hate to pick holes in your plan there, but it's generally best to code for the better browser in the first place and then hack against the broken one.
You're proposing using the broken stuff for IE, then fixing it for the better browsers, but it's better to code for the good browsers and then provide the extra stuff that only IE will understand.
The star-html hack is one of the cleanest ways of doing this:
The star-html hack keeps your hacks away from better browsers (because they basically ignore it) so it's only IE that has to read things twice.
Why make the good browsers work harder, and this way you can surgically remove the hacks at a later stage and be left with the nice clean, simple CSS that you really wanted.
There are times when you're forced to hack the other way around, but it's generally better not to other than as a last resort.
The chart on this site is an absolute life-saver for all kinds of CSS hackery.
I think personal sites (as in, not business, so perhaps blogs and so on) that care about web standards would be enough to at least get noticed. I think 10,000 sites is not an unrealistic number to get on a campaign like this - it's as much about creating the media attention as it is about sending the message to users of IE7.
Losing traffic and annoying visitors is a bad thing, but it's not as bad a thing as another five years of IE's crappy CSS, which is what we'll be stuck with if we don't take some action. It sucks, but Microsoft have forced us to this by not adhering to the standards that they themselves helped to draw up.
Regardless, a protest is better than sitting by and doing nothing, letting the web stagnate because of Microsoft again.
IE7 is going to suck, make no mistake about it. For average users, the security and so on will have been beefed up a few notches, and the word seems to be that they'll be adding tabs and other user-facing features.
However, as far as web developer interests go, there are no mentions of fixing their badly broken CSS implementation or adding proper PNG alpha-transparency support, so my guess is that IE7 is going to continue to hold the web back for at least another five years with it's totally crap support for web standards.
I wrote an article in my blog about this, and others have done the same.
The more I think about this though, the more I think that what is needed is a way to force Microsoft to fix their web standards problems, so I'm proposing the following solution:
If IE7 is released without the CSS and PNG issues of IE6 being addressed, as many sites that care about standards and can afford the trouble should block it's users from accessing the site, with a clear message about exactly why, and links to better browsers.
There's no way I could do this on any of my customer's sites (I'm a freelance web dev), but on my personal sites, in the event that IE7 still has improper CSS support and broken alpha-PNG, I will almost certainly be blocking it's users from accessing the site, with a message to "come back with a browser that supports standards".
We need to plan this campaign now to put a stop to the adoption of IE7 almost as soon as it comes out, if MS don't fix the issues that web developers are demanding.
I'm not planning to block IE6, because that's been and gone, but what is important is to make sure that IE7 gets it right. Even though I won't be using it myself, I'm damned if I'm going to be stuck having to mangle my perfectly good CSS to cope with it all over again for another five years.
If there's one good thing I hoped Firefox would bring, it would be better standards support for the IE-using masses, so we webdevs could finally make use of CSS2 without having to hack our sites to pieces to cope with IE's crappy CSS implementation.
It seems that MS are going to completely ignore this issue, unless we force them to fix it. So, I think some direct action is required!
Are you with me?
It seems that the new version of the Google toolbar is evil, featuring "Autolink", basically the same as M$'s uproar-causing page-modifying "Smart Tags" that thankfully got dropped.
(Although I still see fit to put <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" /> in the head of every site I build, thanks to that nasty scheme, just in case they ever change their minds.)
Anyway, if true, this is a real bitch to website owners. I really hope Google haven't turned to the dark side, but I have noticed that it's taking longer and longer to get new website content properly indexed these days, so in a way, I'm wishing for something to come along and put a bit of competition back into the search engine world, because Google ain't what it used to be.
How long before the Google toolbar is considered spyware? Last I checked, modifying page content was a tactic that well and truly belonged to spyware... and Microsoft.
You're telling me! Shoddy web code for a start!
One of my pet hates (as a freelance web developer, diehard on web standards and doing things properly) is people who pretend to use XHTML, but don't actually fucking USE XHTML!
This site is written oldskool style, with a table based layout done in XHTML - completely missing the point of using XHTML to do semantic layout and CSS for visual arrangement. OK, they've used CSS, but it's to style their already laid-out-in-a-table content.
Furthermore, the site does not validate - not even close! Yet again, half the point of using XHTML is to make well-formed documents. What's the fucking point when developers don't even check their pages validate?
We've got nesting errors, invalid characters, use of attributes that don't exist in XHTML, and two closing html tags? You might have thought whoever wrote this site might have validated their code before putting it live, but the author of this page appears not to even have given it a cursory glance.
Who knows how much this site cost? I'll bet it was a considerable sum of tax money, and it hasn't even been built properly. Fucking USELESS!
When are we going to see a government site built properly, using web standards correctly? It's hardly rocket science, but these idiots in charge of our national computer security can't even use a fucking HTML validator, so is it any wonder the public are screwed?
Speaking of, is there anything remotely close to FL for Linux for music production?
Hydrogen is pretty close to old-skool Fruityloops, like version 3 or something.
Actually, at that point, I preferred Fruity to where it's at now, because it was simpler and did a really good job of making nice loops to mess around with. In that vein, Hydrogen is a winner!
There's quite a big difference between being influenced by a design and copying the website in full before changing some text here and there.
Think of it like taking a sample from some music - which is something I do pretty regularly, being an electronic musician in my spare time.
If took a sample of (say) The Beatles and did something new and original with it (like mangling it beyond comprehension), that would be the creative process in action.
If I burned a copy of The White Album and released it under my own name, merely changing some of the song titles and dubbing my own lyrics over it, that would be akin to what's being exhibited over at Pirate Sites.
In my day job as a web developer, I regularly borrow a bit here and there from other sources (a CSS trick, bit of JavaScript, idea for a simple background pattern and so on), but that's a whole different ballpark than taking a 1:1 copy of a site before changing a few details and releasing it as "my own work".
You claim to understand the creative process, so surely you can see the difference?
The difference is between being inspired to understand a technique and implement it in your own way, versus plagiarizing it verbatum.
Find a site you like (there are literally millions to choose from.)
Copy the html.
Change the content to match your company.
Bingo....cheap website.
You forgot:
...Find yourself humiliated on Pirated Sites
As a serious web standards practitioner, I've seen this crap situation coming for a long time.
Don't get me wrong, I will be over the moon if IE7 has correct CSS support, PNG alpha support and so on, but the fact is that it makes hardly any difference to us web developers.
Even after IE7 comes out, we'll still be stuck with coding for IE6's massive userbase, and most likely still IE5 for sometime as well.
Thankfully people don't seem to use IE4 any more, but I still spend probably an extra 30-50% of my page template development time fixing my perfectly good standards compliant CSS for IE's broken implementation. Heaven only knows how much extra wasted development time IE has cost me since the start of my career, but it's probably into weeks, if not months by now.
As if that wasn't bad enough already, IE5.0 and IE5.5 have a few subtle differences, not to mention IE on the Mac.
The fact is, at the moment, if you're really serious about web standards, you've got your work cut out to learn all the workarounds for at least four different versions of Internet Explorer.
When IE7 comes out, it'll offer a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, but with a time delay of probably at least another five years before professional web developers can afford not to care so much about IE5, let alone IE6.
Microsoft have caused this problem by not giving a flying fuck about supporting the web standards that they themselves helped to draw up, which is why I find it utterly criminal that it's not them who pay the price of their bodgework on a daily basis.
Quite frankly, Internet Explorer is holding back the web, because those of us who really know our shit are being prevented from developing professional websites to the best of our abilities.
Sure, do some nice standards-compliant stuff in your blog or whatever, but when clients are paying money, they expect websites to work in Internet Explorer, and that includes version 5.0.
This situation is not going to change for a LONG time yet.
The revolution will not be streamed.
...but a .torrent will be leaked before the official release date anyway, so it's hardly a major setback!
my home PC's became infected with Spyware after my daughter installed a malware ActiveX control from a website.
Sounds to me like you could really just do with installing Firefox and preventing this kind of stuff in the first place. IE is a walking security hazard.
If you've got ZoneAlarm or similar installed too, set it so that IE is banned from connecting to anything.
You can even go the extra mile and hide the real IE icon but make a Firefox shortcut with the "blue e" Internet Explorer icon, thus helping people who are just looking for "the web browser". This is the approach I use on parents etc. when I've had to fix their machines after too much spyware - do it right and they barely notice anything has changed.
The problem is easy to solve - just dump that IE pile of junk and mandate that it isn't used on any of your machines. There are much safer alternatives that are mature enough to use instead, and really, there's no need to use IE any more.
If you don't like Firefox, try Opera, the main Mozilla browser or even just Netscape 7. Anything is better than IE!
(Apologies for preaching to the choir - I guess most Slashdot visitors are probably already running alternative browsers.)
Of course, the more clueful have Google Toolbar installed so they've had a good popup blocker for a long time, whether they use SP2 or not.
Sorry to nitpick, but I would have said:
Of course, the more clueful have Firefox installed so they've had a good popup blocker for a long time, whether they use Windows or not.