I realise this is a sensitive issue for you, and I'm sorry for whatever trauma I accidentally touched upon with my comment, but you really can't expect us to magically know what issues to avoid because some visitor might get seizures from it.
In fact, if you're that sensitive, perhaps you'd do better to avoid Slashdot altogether. People post the weirdest stuff here.
Anyway, sit down, take a deep breath, think of something that makes you happy, and forget all about compatibility issues if they upset you so much.
(Or do you have a workaround you want to share with us? Because, you know, that's what this thread is really about.)
"Note that EVERY major religion EXCEPT Christianity actively encourages the subjugation or extermination of non-believers in one form or another"
This is incorrect, christianity merely delays the subjugation and annihilation of unbelievers until judgment day,
Are you saying that's not a huge difference? People killing/enslaving other people versus people leaving other people alone leaving it to God to sort them out?
XHTML does give you something that HTML 4 doesn't have: it's XML, rather than SGML. Do you have any idea what sort of ugly code, unsupported by any browser, is perfectly valid SGML and therefore perfectly valid HTML4? That sort of crap won't be acceptable as XHTML, which makes XHTML the superior standard IMO.
That all looks good on paper. My concern however is that any element that's sufficiently complex and insufficiently spec'ed will have subtle differences between render engines.
That could be prevented if only W3C provided a reference implementation for their standards. Other standard bodies do it, why not W3C?
So, if the compilers generating jumps everywhere anyway, why not the programmer?
Ever had a formal programming course? Particularly one about software engineering? Because you're displaying a really basic misunderstanding here.
The problem with gotos isn't that jumping around is inherently bad. In fact, it's completely unavoidable. for, while, if, procedure calls, they all translate to jumps eventually.
The real issue is code maintainability. If the main control flow of your program consists of jumping around to arbitrary points in the code and not returning to where you came from (which is what gotos do), then your code becomes hard to read and hard to maintain. And therefore expensive and error-prone.
If the control flow of your program is handled by well defined control statements that return the flow of control to whereever they were called from, then you don't have to analyse every procedure in your path to see if it doesn't do anything weird in unusual circumstances, you can blindly trust that, whatever that procedure does, the flow of control will eventually return and continue where you're reading. This does wonders for the maintainability of your code, and goto is really the only statement that's a threat to this readability.
As long as you don't do cross procedural jumps without care for the stackframe, you're fine...
Sure, but that's a rather big if. Once you use gotos, jumps like that can and eventually will happen, and then you find your once beautiful code has suddenly turned into an unreadable pile of shit.
You know what, if it were truly possible to divide content from the presentation, I would be the happiest man in the world right now. The unfortunate reality of the matter is, it's not, at least with the current incarnation of CSS and HTML.
I can't deny that, but the current incarnation of HTML + CSS was definitely a big step in the right direction compared to the crap we had before.
Now it turns out that one step didn't quite get us to our destination yet. But rather than making a step back to where we came from, I'd like to propose making another step in that direction: fix CSS instead of putting layout back into the HTML.
At the end of the day, on most websites, the thing that matters IS the presentation
Depends on the website. On a lot of websites, content really does matter. And then there's a lot of websites where flexible presentation matters. And CSS helps quite a lot there. More than tables.
Although I do like the idea of CSS, it's the implementation that has failed.
So we need to fix the implementation, rather than going back to a solution that was crap to begin with.
Also, it would be great if we could have variables. As in $text="Put your long interesting content here"
Even more than that, I'd like to be able to do stuff in CSS like:
That HTML/CSS is a convoluted mess that lacks consistency and has no clear design philosophy?
HTML 4 and XHTML 1 are pretty good. A lot less convoluted than the mess that HTML 2 and 3 were. The problem is that CSS is incomplete in some parts of advanced layouting stuff.
The HTML 5 spec is already out of date, by the time it gets wide browser support it will still require epic amounts of code to do anything advanced in terms of ui, and even then the results will probably be as buggy and divergent as they are now. W3C specs are nice, but the whole process is so bogged down that it's almost irrelevant.
If you want to do advanced UI with little work, XHTML 2 is supposed to be real nice. Only the browser makers won't support it, which sucks.
Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is <table>. Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!
In the '90s, yes. Nowadays, most people use CSS.
(Okay, I admit there are a couple of really vital features missing from CSS, but tables are really the wrong solution. I'd rather use javascript to fix my layout than fucking up the html itself.)
When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page?
That was the last time I laid out a site. The last time I used tables for layout was when I was working on a site from the '90s.
HTML 5, I await you with open arms, hope and understanding. Improve the table element (if possible) and create a solid datagrid element. Deliver me from Flash.
I'm actually hoping for XHTML 2. As far as I understand, HTML 5 is mostly to make browser makers' lives easier, whereas XHTML 2 is supposed to make the lives of web developers easier. But apparently the browser makers all agreed not to implement XHTML 2.
Excuse me, but why are you paying money you don't owe, when they're the ones committing fraud? Isn't there some agency in your country that investigates and fights this sort of fraud? Aren't there any media willing to give lots of attention to companies screwing over honest customers for hundreds of dollars?
You should have nailed them to a cross, publicly shamed them and sued them for everything they're worth. Instead you're rewarding them for their crime.
Seriously, hundreds of dollars? I'd make an issue out of this for tens of dollars. Why pay through the nose to reward someone who criminally screws you over?
I, for one, don't want any party to have that much power.
The only way to accomplish that is by having a multi-party system so no single party will ever have a majority on its own, and by not giving a single elected individual (like a president) too much power on his own.
The US political system is unfortunately designed to work the way it does. If you want it to work differently, you need to change the system.
That said, it's still Nader's fault, because despite the faults of the US voting system, Nader knew those faults, and knew exactly what he was doing. He thought that getting more funding for his party was worth 4 years of George Bush and as I recall he didn't even get enough votes to get the extra funding anyway so he shafted us, and everything he stood for for 8 years to prove a point.
This is silly. Nader didn't cast those votes, the voters did. They are the only ones who are to blame for 8 years of George Bush. But mostly Bush and Congress are to blame for what he did in those years, because I don't think he actually ran with an election promise to revoke various civil rights and to torture more people.
Of course the US voters carry all the blame for the last 4 years of the Bush regime. They knew what he did and still re-elected him. That's not something you can blame on Nader.
Jammie Thomas is a parent herself. Also, nobody has actually proven she has stolen anything. Innocent until proven guilty, you know?
I'm aware basic judicial procedures and fair trials have lost popularity in the US in recent years, but as long as the RIAA doesn't accuse her of terrorism (they just might), she deserves to be assumed innocent.
That usually includes national long distance and several thousand minutes a month.
Several thousand? I never use more than a hundred. I believe there are more expensive iPhone subscriptions here that give you more minutes and more SMSs, but I really don't need that.
Normal cell plans generally cost $40-$50/mo here (you pay for incoming calls but get lots of outgoing calls in your plan). What would a plan in Netherlands cost that included 2000 minutes of calls to any other Eurozone number plus unlimited data and unmetered evening weekend calls to any Eurozone number?
The difference between the whole US and a single EU country is a really good point. When I call abroad, I pay extra. When I am abroad, I pay extra for both calls and data. International connectivity of EU phone networks is absolutely horrible. So basically a Dutch subscription would be comparable to a subscription where you had to pay extra when calling outside of Florida (or a similarly sized state).
But 2000 minutes? My other phone subscription is a SIM-only for a few hundred minutes a month (which I never use), for $5 per month. (I pay extra for each SMS, unfortunately.) On the other hand, we don't pay for incoming calls here. Only outgoing.
Buy the handset, not the contract. It might seem cheaper but really it never is in the long-run.
I think I calculated that when I bought my iPhone. Let's see if I can reproduce those results:
An unlocked iPhone costs about EUR 600. My T-Mobile iPhone cost about EUR 200 (possibly a bit less, I think). I'm paying EUR 30 per month. I'm not sure how much a SIM-only subscription that includes UMTS would cost, but I think a SIM-only without UMTS that's otherwise as generous as my iPhone subscription would cost EUR 10 per month. So I'm paying EUR 20 * 24 months - EUR 400 = EUR 80 for 24 months of unlimited UMTS.
I'm not really feeling ripped off here, although I admit I made a couple of assumptions, and you as iPhone user you do get less choice than as SIM-only user.
PS: Slashdot doesn't handle the Euro symbol properly. Looks like â.
I'm really surprised to read that an iPhone subscription in the US costs $70 per month. Do people really buy iPhones at that cost? I'm paying EUR 30 per month, and although the euro is worth more than the dollar nowadays, it's not that much more. $70 is hideously expensive, and $70 without thethering is just criminal.
I'm glad to see a tech gadget cheaper in Netherland than in the US though. Must have been a first.
Yeah, Id be willing to bet that a couple of horny guys screwed some monkeys (I mean, they are 98% like we are) is more likely than AIDS contaminated meat.
I disagree. Chimps are a lot easier to kill than to fuck with. They're not as meek as sheep, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
I realise this is a sensitive issue for you, and I'm sorry for whatever trauma I accidentally touched upon with my comment, but you really can't expect us to magically know what issues to avoid because some visitor might get seizures from it.
In fact, if you're that sensitive, perhaps you'd do better to avoid Slashdot altogether. People post the weirdest stuff here.
Anyway, sit down, take a deep breath, think of something that makes you happy, and forget all about compatibility issues if they upset you so much.
(Or do you have a workaround you want to share with us? Because, you know, that's what this thread is really about.)
People keep posting cool stuff here, in between all the unfounded sensationalism. And occasionally there are some interesting comments.
Most people here know Slashdot is rife with all sorts of bias, but many people are also smart enough to recognise and deal with that bias.
I occasionally had the opposite problem. I learned how to say "I don't understand Japanese" clearly and with no accent - then folks didn't believe me.
I've got the same thing with French. They just don't believe you when you can say "je ne parle pas Francais" fluently.
It's not the accent that's my problem, it's the words. That and stringing them together to sentences.
"Note that EVERY major religion EXCEPT Christianity actively encourages the subjugation or extermination of non-believers in one form or another"
This is incorrect, christianity merely delays the subjugation and annihilation of unbelievers until judgment day,
Are you saying that's not a huge difference? People killing/enslaving other people versus people leaving other people alone leaving it to God to sort them out?
Biggest work around? I'd say having to use windows to do my job.
Fortunately I don't have to use Windows for my job, but I do like playing games at home. Games that have only been written for Windows.
My options for work-arounds are:
All of these workarounds are cumbersome and stupid, and none of them are particularly appealing.
XHTML does give you something that HTML 4 doesn't have: it's XML, rather than SGML. Do you have any idea what sort of ugly code, unsupported by any browser, is perfectly valid SGML and therefore perfectly valid HTML4? That sort of crap won't be acceptable as XHTML, which makes XHTML the superior standard IMO.
That all looks good on paper. My concern however is that any element that's sufficiently complex and insufficiently spec'ed will have subtle differences between render engines.
That could be prevented if only W3C provided a reference implementation for their standards. Other standard bodies do it, why not W3C?
So, if the compilers generating jumps everywhere anyway, why not the programmer?
Ever had a formal programming course? Particularly one about software engineering? Because you're displaying a really basic misunderstanding here.
The problem with gotos isn't that jumping around is inherently bad. In fact, it's completely unavoidable. for, while, if, procedure calls, they all translate to jumps eventually.
The real issue is code maintainability. If the main control flow of your program consists of jumping around to arbitrary points in the code and not returning to where you came from (which is what gotos do), then your code becomes hard to read and hard to maintain. And therefore expensive and error-prone.
If the control flow of your program is handled by well defined control statements that return the flow of control to whereever they were called from, then you don't have to analyse every procedure in your path to see if it doesn't do anything weird in unusual circumstances, you can blindly trust that, whatever that procedure does, the flow of control will eventually return and continue where you're reading. This does wonders for the maintainability of your code, and goto is really the only statement that's a threat to this readability.
As long as you don't do cross procedural jumps without care for the stackframe, you're fine...
Sure, but that's a rather big if. Once you use gotos, jumps like that can and eventually will happen, and then you find your once beautiful code has suddenly turned into an unreadable pile of shit.
You know what, if it were truly possible to divide content from the presentation, I would be the happiest man in the world right now. The unfortunate reality of the matter is, it's not, at least with the current incarnation of CSS and HTML.
I can't deny that, but the current incarnation of HTML + CSS was definitely a big step in the right direction compared to the crap we had before.
Now it turns out that one step didn't quite get us to our destination yet. But rather than making a step back to where we came from, I'd like to propose making another step in that direction: fix CSS instead of putting layout back into the HTML.
At the end of the day, on most websites, the thing that matters IS the presentation
Depends on the website. On a lot of websites, content really does matter. And then there's a lot of websites where flexible presentation matters. And CSS helps quite a lot there. More than tables.
Although I do like the idea of CSS, it's the implementation that has failed.
So we need to fix the implementation, rather than going back to a solution that was crap to begin with.
Also, it would be great if we could have variables. As in $text="Put your long interesting content here"
Even more than that, I'd like to be able to do stuff in CSS like:
#foo {
height: #bar.height - 50px;
}
That HTML/CSS is a convoluted mess that lacks consistency and has no clear design philosophy?
HTML 4 and XHTML 1 are pretty good. A lot less convoluted than the mess that HTML 2 and 3 were. The problem is that CSS is incomplete in some parts of advanced layouting stuff.
The HTML 5 spec is already out of date, by the time it gets wide browser support it will still require epic amounts of code to do anything advanced in terms of ui, and even then the results will probably be as buggy and divergent as they are now. W3C specs are nice, but the whole process is so bogged down that it's almost irrelevant.
If you want to do advanced UI with little work, XHTML 2 is supposed to be real nice. Only the browser makers won't support it, which sucks.
Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is <table>. Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!
In the '90s, yes. Nowadays, most people use CSS.
(Okay, I admit there are a couple of really vital features missing from CSS, but tables are really the wrong solution. I'd rather use javascript to fix my layout than fucking up the html itself.)
When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page?
That was the last time I laid out a site. The last time I used tables for layout was when I was working on a site from the '90s.
HTML 5, I await you with open arms, hope and understanding. Improve the table element (if possible) and create a solid datagrid element. Deliver me from Flash.
I'm actually hoping for XHTML 2. As far as I understand, HTML 5 is mostly to make browser makers' lives easier, whereas XHTML 2 is supposed to make the lives of web developers easier. But apparently the browser makers all agreed not to implement XHTML 2.
Excuse me, but why are you paying money you don't owe, when they're the ones committing fraud? Isn't there some agency in your country that investigates and fights this sort of fraud? Aren't there any media willing to give lots of attention to companies screwing over honest customers for hundreds of dollars?
You should have nailed them to a cross, publicly shamed them and sued them for everything they're worth. Instead you're rewarding them for their crime.
Seriously, hundreds of dollars? I'd make an issue out of this for tens of dollars. Why pay through the nose to reward someone who criminally screws you over?
I, for one, don't want any party to have that much power.
The only way to accomplish that is by having a multi-party system so no single party will ever have a majority on its own, and by not giving a single elected individual (like a president) too much power on his own.
The US political system is unfortunately designed to work the way it does. If you want it to work differently, you need to change the system.
Why should it give you nightmares? Do you really want politicians to sit there and debate about everything and not actually get anything done?
Depends on what they want to get done. Compared to the last 8 years, yes, I'd prefer them to not get anything done.
That said, it's still Nader's fault, because despite the faults of the US voting system, Nader knew those faults, and knew exactly what he was doing. He thought that getting more funding for his party was worth 4 years of George Bush and as I recall he didn't even get enough votes to get the extra funding anyway so he shafted us, and everything he stood for for 8 years to prove a point.
This is silly. Nader didn't cast those votes, the voters did. They are the only ones who are to blame for 8 years of George Bush. But mostly Bush and Congress are to blame for what he did in those years, because I don't think he actually ran with an election promise to revoke various civil rights and to torture more people.
Of course the US voters carry all the blame for the last 4 years of the Bush regime. They knew what he did and still re-elected him. That's not something you can blame on Nader.
I thought it was only libel/slander cases where the burden of proof was reversed.
Jammie Thomas is a parent herself. Also, nobody has actually proven she has stolen anything. Innocent until proven guilty, you know?
I'm aware basic judicial procedures and fair trials have lost popularity in the US in recent years, but as long as the RIAA doesn't accuse her of terrorism (they just might), she deserves to be assumed innocent.
That usually includes national long distance and several thousand minutes a month.
Several thousand? I never use more than a hundred. I believe there are more expensive iPhone subscriptions here that give you more minutes and more SMSs, but I really don't need that.
Normal cell plans generally cost $40-$50/mo here (you pay for incoming calls but get lots of outgoing calls in your plan). What would a plan in Netherlands cost that included 2000 minutes of calls to any other Eurozone number plus unlimited data and unmetered evening weekend calls to any Eurozone number?
The difference between the whole US and a single EU country is a really good point. When I call abroad, I pay extra. When I am abroad, I pay extra for both calls and data. International connectivity of EU phone networks is absolutely horrible. So basically a Dutch subscription would be comparable to a subscription where you had to pay extra when calling outside of Florida (or a similarly sized state).
But 2000 minutes? My other phone subscription is a SIM-only for a few hundred minutes a month (which I never use), for $5 per month. (I pay extra for each SMS, unfortunately.) On the other hand, we don't pay for incoming calls here. Only outgoing.
...I use my wife's iPhone to scrape ice off the windshield.
Doesn't surprise me at all somebody wrote an app for that.
Buy the handset, not the contract. It might seem cheaper but really it never is in the long-run.
I think I calculated that when I bought my iPhone. Let's see if I can reproduce those results:
An unlocked iPhone costs about EUR 600. My T-Mobile iPhone cost about EUR 200 (possibly a bit less, I think). I'm paying EUR 30 per month. I'm not sure how much a SIM-only subscription that includes UMTS would cost, but I think a SIM-only without UMTS that's otherwise as generous as my iPhone subscription would cost EUR 10 per month. So I'm paying EUR 20 * 24 months - EUR 400 = EUR 80 for 24 months of unlimited UMTS.
I'm not really feeling ripped off here, although I admit I made a couple of assumptions, and you as iPhone user you do get less choice than as SIM-only user.
PS: Slashdot doesn't handle the Euro symbol properly. Looks like â.
I'm really surprised to read that an iPhone subscription in the US costs $70 per month. Do people really buy iPhones at that cost? I'm paying EUR 30 per month, and although the euro is worth more than the dollar nowadays, it's not that much more. $70 is hideously expensive, and $70 without thethering is just criminal.
I'm glad to see a tech gadget cheaper in Netherland than in the US though. Must have been a first.
christians practice ritualistic cannibalism every sunday, body of christ, blood of christ, etc.
Only for catholics. For protestants it's all symbolic.
Ability to produce viable offspring is actually only one measure of whether two species are separate, but it's a fairly useful one.
It's an outdated one. It's still popular with many people, but there are too many problems with this definition when you look closely.
Yeah, Id be willing to bet that a couple of horny guys screwed some monkeys (I mean, they are 98% like we are) is more likely than AIDS contaminated meat.
I disagree. Chimps are a lot easier to kill than to fuck with. They're not as meek as sheep, you know.