I am just jealous that your routine posts start out at 4. No offense, but surely you can recognize that there is something suspicious about the obfuscated moderation math that allows one to accrue sufficient karma during the same period one enjoys the New User Modifier. I stopped playing/. games years ago, so I find myself amused by my own annoyance at re-realizing the system is arbitrary.
I am just arguing that Apple does indeed have to use surprise as one of their on-going marketing techniques. That said, I don't really agree with their actions in this case.
By the way, I much appreciated your magazine cover link to Jobs with the Apple II on Time..
A half-assed Windows implementation would be more harmful to them than none at all. A limited subset would be worse than no compatibility at all.
I don't feel you have explained this assertion well enough. I think actually the opposite is true, and this is an aspect that is missing from this discussion. Apple neatly solves a few thorny problems with what Cringely outlines. You mention the trap OS/2 fell into. Since this Win32 API implementation approach freezes Windows under OS X by providing only XP compatibility, Apple professes not to be interested in full emulation nor playing feature catch up (for supporting Windows apps). Developers wishing to code for the Mac have little choice but to use Cocoa since their Vista-only versions are not compatible. The purposely limited support only makes the rest of OS X shine even more brightly in comparison, while simultaneous doing what it can to stifle an incentive for Vista development.
Windows 95 was quite compelling compared to Windows 3.1. As a result, OS/2 was in a no-win situation since supporting Win32 was too hard and only providing Win16 was not enough. I think most end-users are ambivalent about the advantages of Vista over XP. And since jumping to Vista requires a new box (again, for most end-users), if you are in that market, why not try a Mini instead? And it is still win-win for Apple because if a customer absolutely needs Vista, Boot Camp is an option for that.
The news broke simultaneously in several places, but most people, including many Mac-heads, saw it first on the front cover of Time, copies of which were handed out at MacWorld. The keynote was delayed a day, the only time I heard of that happening, so that the keynote would correspond with Time's usual distribution cycle for hitting the newsstand. I think I saw in earlier post that you pointed out the Time magazine was dated for a week after the keynote. Surely you realize that most magazines list the date they are to be replaced, not the date they come out?
That link I provided is perfectly relevant. Apple and Jobs had previous experience with the delicate negotiations, the importance of secrecy, and the value of the free publicity, and the differential for slipping off the front cover.
Apple got the cover story because the iMac looked damn sexy - it was different from the vast majority of PCs that came before it.
And the actual form factor was a surprise, hence news, hence worthy of Time's attention. I trolled for speculation on the shape as hard as anyone, the rumors sites were very far off base. If pictures had appeared prematurely, no way would the iMac have gotten on the front cover. Loose lips nocked the Mac off the cover before.
At least most reports have stopped claiming there was a virus!
Here is a better URL since Commander Taco (or someone else) is about to have their WSJ account suspended. Why do these news companies try to force people to provide a password? I hate that, putting up with advertising is annoying enough.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11409996477 6283796.html
I had been waiting for Apple to drop prices since the IIe, but I finally ponied up for a Bondi iMac and have never regreted it. Now that the Mini is available, complaining about prices is just stupid. Cost is no longer a large obsticle to the success of OS X. When you figure out why you think $500 is more computer than you deserve, you will have gained insight on yourself.
Yes, I have. You should try it some time. And read what I said, googlebot looks for particular meta tags that it cares about. It seems like you are trying to convince me that you are brain damaged.
Okay, so you understand that correct knowledge about the nature, structure, and variability of the source material to be parsed can dramatically, by orders of magnitude, decreases the effort and time needed to parse. Syntactically correct html is so much easier to parse than tag soup that it would be worth the Googlebot time to check for that. And Googlebot ignores meta tags, but they might influence less sophisticated algorithms. (Am I correct to infer that since you have resorted to pejoratives, that you cannot falsify my premises, nor find flaws in my logic?)
Ok, you have succeeded in convincing me. There is no clearer way for me to say THEY GET THE EXACT SAME RESULTS. If you cannot grasp this, and are too stupid to try it and see for yourself, then there is no point talking to you.
I explained in my last post they are not literally the same results. It is called alternative text for a reason after all! Nor are they the same results in practice. JAWS and WindowEyes both (in the default setting) will vocalize the word "image" before reading the alt content. You are correct that Lynx will hide the fact that is rendering (alt) text from an image (in the default setting), but this can result in howlers so most regular users adjust the behavior to display [image] before the (alt) text. (Yes, when failing to be persuasive, it is a useful technic to resort to SHOUTING. It really helps with your credibility.)
Just like images.
I never asserted that graphical text wasn't cross platform. I said it was fat, clumsy, and interferes with the desired behavior of Googlebot. I neglected to challenge your assertion earlier that: Simple text menu images aren't very big at all. They are large, relative to text+css menus. And a site author that cannot manage CSS probably isn't optimizing his images anyway, so the problem is worse.
Google for GD.
Right, poorly supported bleeding edge technology is just what sites like SCR Online need. And you think CSS is too hard?
I am not asserting that at all. I am asserting that its a waste of time, gets you nothing, and makes your site uglier. And if alt tags don't help for google, then stick invisible text in there, who cares?
Except I provided evidence to the contrary. And invisible text is one of the very things Googlebot discounts.
You have presented nothing logical or credible. I suggest you get some experience with writing spiders and then come back and read this to see how dumb you sound.
Please, ask a impartial person whose opinion you trust to read this thread, and ask them which of us is being more persuasive.
No, it doesn't have to do any of that, that's the whole point. Spiders don't give a shit what your markup is like. They index content, and only look for particular tags that have meaning to them (certain meta tags, a tags, etc). Again, I suggest you actually implement a spider and you will realize quickly how far off your misconceptions are.
Have you done no parsing at all? And Googlebots, unlike early spiders, pretty much ignore meta tags.
No, its not better for either, ITS 100% COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY IDENTICAL. How hard is this to grasp? Just try it and quit repeating this nonsense.
Text+CSS is better because text browsers and screen readers get the same content rather than being marginalized and dependent on charity code.
So don't do that, generate images of the dimensions you need as you need them. What part of dynamic did you not understand?
I have yet to see this well implemented except at demonstration sites. I would very much appreciate some examples of live sites that do a good job with the technology. In any case, it is well beyond the capabilities of our friends like SCR Online (who could handle CSS and even validity if he gave it a try).
No they aren't. The only windows version to support anti-aliased fonts is XP.
Valid code and text+CSS offers graceful degradation as well a being future proof.
I don't even know what you are trying to say in the last paragraph, except that you don't understand how search engines work. Just having a phrase in an alt tag (or in any other tag like you are suggesting) doesn't make the search engine care. It needs to occur repeatedly, and have other "related" terms on the same site. This is how they see if you are actually a site about whatever, or just putting the term in your site to try to get traffic.
I provide you evidence that Google isn't indexing alt text and you don't get my point? That particular slogan is on every page, and I bet SCR Online has been using it for years. Okay, try proving me wrong. Please provide an example of alt content influencing a Google search to the positive! We already know that plain text influences a Google search, and you are asserting that alt text gets equal (or at least similar) weight.
It's not a hack at all, it is the correct and recommended mime type for xhtml. If you serve xhtml as text/html, then it is parsed as tag soup.
Yes, I have garbled the details twice on this now. But please remember I agree with you that xhtml is over rated. As you observed, one is not using xhtml unless one serves it using application/xhtml+xml and that honest technique renders the page invisible to IE. It was the realization that the "work around" in wide use (using text/html) was an ugly hack in deference to the market penetration of IE that swore me back to html4.
No, it comes down to your "gut feeling" or "superstitious nonsense". If it came down to math then you would be able to mathematically prove the advantage of wasting time redoing your site in validating html for no reason at all.
My assertion on the utility of syntax to a search engine follows from deductive reasoning that I believe I have credibly represented here. I am find it curious that you are so resistant to my logic. Now, given limited time resources, I am less certain that validation has a higher return on investment than researching popular search terms. Fortunately, both things are relatively easy, so a competent site author can (and should) reasonably do both.
Or so you blindly assume. Do you think the google guys are retarded? They know alot of the web is broken html only renderable by IE. They design googlebot to deal with it, because their goal is to index as much info as possible. And of course, making your site validate (regardless of wether its as html or xhtml) doesn't magically give you any guarentees. You still have to test it in lots of browsers and still have no assurance that it will be parsed or displayed as you intended.
All browsers and all search engines have to render content in a deterministic way. It is willful ignorance to pretend that what you get from your eyes is the same as what a machine "sees". To do that, you have pay close attention to the source code. Yes, spiders can only make up for so many mistakes, they have to emulate all version of all browsers on all platforms. Because Google depends so much on honesty, any error the Googlebot might make will, by design, work against a site author. The only logical course of action for the site author is also to be honest. Give up the illusion that you as author control the rendering, focus on content, pay attention to structure but relax about formating. The only way to be confident of the parsing is use correct syntax. Your content will never be rendered everywhere (least of all to the robots) as you intend. Validate your code to make up for that. Developing processes so that your code is valid is much more time effective than using multiple versions of multiple browsers on multiple operating systems.
Wow, what's life like back there in 1998? Images are more widely supported than CSS actually, and with alt tags will degrade to text only browsers and screen readers EXACTLY the same as text+css would. Graphics do not have to be fixed size at all, that's a choice you make in using static images, you can use dynamic images if you want to. And they also scale just fine for people with vision problems (or just running 1600x1200 like me). Images also print just fine, I don't know what you are talking about with that one.
Yeah, code soup and graphical text is such a new concept! Alt attributes are okay for text only browser and screen reader, but text+CSS is still better for both. Using over sized graphics so they can stretch (for printing or on a large monitor) is still taking a gamble. And anti-aliased fonts are available on any system that supports vector graphics. You've never notice how typical it is for colored graphical text in a mast head (at 96 dpi on the screen, looks fine) to print like crap on a 300 dpi monochrome laser printer? Try looking at black and white print from a whole paragraph of graphical text (like the SCR Online home page that
There is no document/xhtml+xml mime type. See the RFC, it is application/xhtml+xml, like I said.
My apologies, I meant text/html mime type and I should have looked it up. (It has been a while since I was scared off application/xhtml+xml as a complete hack.)
And if you want to have some bizzare and unfounded religious belief that search engines punish invalid markup that's up to you, but you have to have some kind of evidence if you want people to take you seriously.
It comes down to mathematics. Correct syntax isn't really required, but no programmer would consider giving it up. Invalid code leads to a indeterministic state. You might think that by previewing a site in multiple browsers, that you are considering all the variables. Not only is this a lot of unneccessary work, but it is statistically doomed endeavor, there are just too many combinations of browsers and operating systems out there. So conscientionsous or not, you decide that some of those permutations are not important, and you dismiss them. You figure those versions will generate the same results as the ones you looked. This is wishful thinking that is not supported by any evidence. The problem is that the spiders and search engines have more in common with minority browsers you deliberately neglected than they do with IE.
Code soup leads to ambiguity. Some kinds of ambiguity can lead to exploits. You can be certain that in situations where the ambiguity leads the robots to have to make a choice that they never err in the site author's favor, well at least not the clever ones from Google. Would you release code with known flaws? Especially when the flaws are openly exposed to the public? Yes, it is wishful thinking not to expect sloppy code to have ramifications. The burden of proof falls to someone making the absurd assertion. Is it an absurd notion that a search engine would achieve more accurate results from source material that is easily parsed?
I can say search engines punish you for using blink tags, but it doesn't make it true (sadly).
That would be sweet! I am not talking about deliberate intent, although there could be that aspect of it. I am talking about Googlebots being designed so as not to be tricked. To a machine, code soup looks like a trick. The browser or the indexer respond as best they can to the trick, but they are serving different purposes and masters. The indexer will take the most conservative root possible.
Get real, not everyone is using an OS with antialised fonts, and in fact in many cases they may not even have the font you are trying to use anyways. Replacing images with text makes the site look worse for many people, and provides no benefit. With an image you know exactly how it will look for everyone who can view images, with text, you have no idea how it will look.
Text+CSS scales, prints well, downloads faster, and is more cross platform compatible than graphical text. Graphic text is of fixed size and color (which is especially hard for people with low vision) looks like crap when printed (and if your site is worth anything, pages will be printed) is slow (but hey, who cares about people with modems) and works well only on computers (those rich folks with hand held browsers never buy anything). Plus you get the added benefit that plain text is treated with more credibility by the search engines than alt text. Granted, it would be quite the trick to mock up the Coca Cola logo in text+CSS.
No it doesn't. You can have invalid xhtml just like you can have invalid html.
Yes, but the per-specification behavior of the browser/viewer is different. All xml (xhtml included) is suppose to invoke halt-on-error while being processed or -- at most -- just show the results so far. This the opposite from an html browser which, by design and per the specification, is expected to provide robust error recovery.
And unless you send it with an application/xhtml+xml header (which IE doesn't support), then it will be parsed using a "tag soup" parser anyways, not an xml parser.
This is why I don't disagree with you about the importance of xhtml being overstated. If a site really wants to use xhtml they need to be honest about it, which means sending it with a document/xhtml+xml header. But this means passing on IE traffic for the time being, which is not a choice most sites are willing to make.
Further, html can be well formed too. Html is an SGML language, and if correct will be well formed SGML. This is exactly like xhtml being well formed XML.
Html can be well formed but it doesn't have to be. Beyond that, there are aspects of pre-Wilbur html (and SGML), like tag minimization, that make the concept of "well-formedness" almost meaningless. Please, provide the URL for an online test for well-formed html? Testing for validity, by comparison, is programmatically easy and common place.
So as I said, there is no benefit here at all. Google does not punish you for having invalid markup, there's tons of sites that are listed #1 for common search terms that are not xhtml, nor are they even valid html.
Google does not punish you much for having invalid markup. One can speculate about exactly how deliberate and extensive the (small) penalty is, but it is not zero. It would be interesting to see a formal study on how much site authors are handicapping themselves by not using valid code. Your counter example is proof only that the disadvantage is reasonably small, not that it is nonexistent.
No it isn't, alt text is plain text. Adding alt text is part of making your site search engine (and visually impaired) friendly.
Screen readers and most search engines use the alt text only because they have no choice. Keep your pictures with the good alt content, but replace graphical text with CSS (and text) wherever you can. It is common, less so now thankfully than years ago, for alt attributes to be deliberately abused. The Google algorithms have been evolved to presume that that alt text is misleading, and subsequently they endeavor to confirm the relevancy of alt content. Usually this goes okay for the honest site author, but why take the chance?
There is no need at all to remove your images and replace them with plain text. It will have the same effect for search engines as adding alt tags, but it will make the site uglier for users.
No, that will leave you where the OP is now, with a crappy, low ranked site. Content is king. He needs to make sure common search terms actually appear in the content of his site, and make sure that his site is frequently updated. This gets you ranked higher in search engines, not blindly jumping on the "I'm too fucking stupid to research xhtml, so I am going to pretend it is the saviour of mankind and will cure cancer" bandwagon, like the guy giving shitty advice.
The advice you give is good, but so is the advice to validate and avoid graphical text. I agree that the advocacy to use xhtml is spurious.
First off thanks for the great responses. This is an excellent reason for why i like the slashdot discussions. Instead of just getting into pointless bashing all the time - I actually can learn a lot.
Thanks, I appreciate considered discourse as well.
You seem to think it strange to extrapolate from my "mundane experiences" to the rest of the world - but I think that it's rationally more sound than the alternative. If we disregard our own experiences doesn't that make us completely credulous?
All true, but it seems me that you are over-projecting from your first hand knowledge. What prompted me to chime in was your assertion that "there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing" which I definitely do not find to be credible. (Substitute Bill Gates or Jack Welch or other luminaries in your assertion I quoted, and I will still disagree with you!)
So I'm still somewhat skeptical. In my experience I've always felt that fundamentally people are people. This means they all operate on some relatively similar principles, but that they are all similarly irreducibly complex.
Consider (but just briefly) a history you know well. Would your church exist were it not for the very individual contributions of Joseph Smith and of Brigham Young?
To some extent what you say about great leaders holds true, but on the other hand we will never know how many Alexander the Greats or Napoleons never saw an army,
I believe those two men would have been tremendous leaders in just about any time or place. If around today, they probably would be in business! They probably would not have achieved the same historical recognition of course.
or how many Einsteins spent their lives in manual labor.
I believe that number is probably close to zero. For example, the influence of an Einstein in North America a few millennia ago might leave history only with the myth of Iktomi. Can I prove that? No, of course not, but such supposition is less preposterous than imagining an individual like Einstein living his life in ignominy, merely given different circumstances.
I'm willing to accept that there are extraordinary people - but at the same time I think that heroes and villains are largely products of the human attempt to impose narrative on our history. We need antagonists and protagonists - they are an essential element of the human experience even if they are not an essential element of objective reality.
Ah, but heros and villians clearly exist at some point in time, why not ours? Sure, history magnifies their influenece, just as time makes invisible the work of so many others. There is even a New Testament verse about how difficult it is to recognize a contemporary prophet! Yes, luck counts for a lot (that is the lesson of Accedential Empires, but that hardly diminishes the influence of indivuals.
But I'm eager to look into your references, and I appreciate them.
Okay, Joseph Campbell was one of the most influential authors I read while I was in college.
And it doesn't anger me to the point of vulgarity, I am always vulgar.
LOL. Made my day with that! We are deep enough off the main thread that no one else is likely to read this, let alone comment or mod, but I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss this with you.
No, it doesn't deserve more credit than I give it. Its completely wrong, like I said. You can't pretend his advice is useful just because the site sucks. His advice will do nothing to improve the site.
First, I agree with you that there is not, at this time, any real advantage of xhtml over html. I did, however, think the advice was useful, regardless that the site is mediocre. I would argue that the primary advantage of what xml gets you, by definition, is well-formedness. There is no such formal concept with html, so (in the absence of that) the choice is code soup or validity. Most sites go with the soup, hence the Web (fantastic as it is) is only a fraction as robust as it could be.
Without validity, and I have no idea if this is Shaper Pimp's thinking, authors are presenting unknown states to the world. They are accepting heuristics instead of algorithms. They are making a guess, instead of really being sure, about what the end user is experiencing. This generally works okay for human viewers, but of course, many of the end users are machines, that is, automata, such as search engines like Google. These robots are much more likely to be tripped up by bad syntax, and by design, giving an advantage to the site author in a non-deterministic situation would be an error. The programmers at Google work hard to prevent errors.
SCR Online was concerned with search engine optimization (SEO). Google is essentially looking for honesty. Google deliberately thwarts SEO, and penalizes what it recognizes as attempts to game their rankings. So what is a site author to do? Nothing really, which is frustrating. Or pay up, which of course costs money. The only course of action is to be forthright, and trust (or just hope) that Google deserves the reputation they have earned. Valid code is honest. Plain text is much more straightforward than alt text, so it counts for much more with Google (hence the advice to avoid graphical text and use CSS instead).
SJG is so stealth that I am a long time fan (anyone remember The Fantasy Trip) and still missed until recently that GURPS had been reformatted into d20. Anyway, the e23 CarWars link was missing a question mark. I only came across e23 recently too. Does SJG have all the ADQ on one CDROM by any chance? The price is right, but I just can not bring myself to pay for downloads. I require a professionally pressed disc to ease my conscience. Old school, I know.
You state the the assumption that there are many people who could do what Steve is doing is plainly incorrect because the US can not find a compelling candidate for president. That's flawed logic.
I cite that example as proof by demonstration that exemplary leaders are rare in general, not just in business. But politics being so corrupt, I understand how you missed my point.
I'm also not willing to follow your logic that Steve Jobs is a giant among insects - which seems to be your claim.
I find the example of Steve Jobs to be compelling even considering that the technology field offers many brilliant, interesting, and influential characters. The CEOs of these businesses are inevitably talented peoples. But even among these, Steve Jobs' track record is remarkable.
Finally if the influence of personality of the CEO on the organization as a whole is well documented than I am generally interested in reading more about it.
I'm not interested in hearing people try to tell me that Bill Gates is a tyrant out for world domination - especially if those same people are telling me that deep down Steve Jobs just wants to deliver quality products. Those are not people - those are caricatures.
When one reads widely, the same characterizations keep coming up, from disparate and varied source. Your skepticism is understandable, but the facts are dramatic enough to inspire twodocumentaries!
In my day to day experience the people I meet are neither angels nor demons.
So you extrapolate your mundane experiences to the rest of the world? Your homily is more true than false, but most famous people are notorious for valid reasons.
And I didn't say that you said the site was good! I am arguing that the posters advice deserves more credit than you give it. Why does his advice anger you to the point of vulgarity?
> I imagine that Jobs knows pretty much where Apple is going to be in 90 days/180 days/a year. I don't think that he has such a unique vision - it is just that he has a vision.
Well, overlooking that any vision at all is quite rare, the shift to Intel (and that the project has been underway for years) evidences that Jobs vision extends at least that far out. Personally, I would love to know where he thinks we (not just Apple) will be in ten or twenty years -- because I suspect his vision is unique.
Other comments about dismissing Jobs ability to predict the future because Apple gets to influence the market are just silly. Jobs is not a random pundant in some non-profit think tank, he is running a commercial enterprise accountable to stock holders. Jobs didn't make consumers love the the iPod, he caused Apple to offer a product that people loved. He was able to do that because he predicted where technology was going and has the vision to see the potential for demand. Apple was (and remains) a couple of years ahead of the competition. That is long term business vision.
> Money is clearly not the center of Bill Gates life.
True, but that is only because the money is incidental to his quest for world domination as opposed to Steve Jobs who is equally driven, but motivated to offer the best product possible.
> If it was, he wouldn't be the biggest philanthropist of all time.
You must be young. Bill Gate's charitable giving was almost nonexistent until he was shamed into action. It was only after his miserly become so infamous that it was interfering with business that he was compelled into action. Not surprisingly, he crafted his donations for maximum PR value. The money does good work, more than you or I can ever hope to accomplish, but is a tiny amount compared to his personal fortune, let alone the wealth he controls.
> I think that there's a ton of luck that goes into it as well.
True, hence the title of the book, Accidental Empires, that I cite above. But that doesn't give due credit to the full positive force of the personalities involved. These people would almost certainly have been successful (perhaps not famously so) in just about any field.
> I imagine there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing.
That assumption is plainly incorrect. Great leaders are so rare that the U.S. cannot find compelling candidates for president. There are plenty of books about the great leaders in business. The potential for a single individual at the top to influence corporate culture is well documented. Apple's floundering without Steve Jobs, despite talented CEOs, and his demonstrated ability to lead them twice now (not to mention two other companies in the mean time) is a unique story even among these other luminaries.
I agree with you that xhtml is of little advantage over html. You are also correct that good alt content can compensate, to some extent, for the ill considered overuse of graphical text. Still basic syntax checking is easy, and it's a hallmark of quality for those enlightened enough to look for it. Yes, one can find well designed commercial sites that are not valid. One cannot, however, find valid commercial sites that are not well designed! The results for SCR Online are poor, but quite typical for an ISP.
Bird suits don't have air foils for ascent. It is not the least surprising that when trying to ascend that he just stalled. Upstream drafts are so rare the suit is just not designed to take advantage of them. Level flight is the best he could hope for. Now, if he had been using an ultra light glider, he would have been set.
How about a link to that Aspyr status page for the Mac ports?
The twin joys of being a Mac gamer: waiting and the games are hardly ever discounted. Any chance the Civ3 Complete Edition will be available as an upgrade (and at a corresponding price)? I though not.:-(
Frankly, I got so much less enjoyment out of Civ3 than I did for SMAC/SMAX. Thanks again for the carbon ports for them. I went back to them (under OS X) after Civ3. Actually, after MoO3 -- also disappointing -- which I bought only because Civ3 was not engaging.
I am very much looking forward to Civ4 since it would seem that they are addressing all the shortcomings of Civ3. I am delighted you are on the job!
Slashdot Mirror
How about chucking (with a c) rather than dividing the iPod into chunks?
Network Mirror content is here. I was also able to get the original article by trimming back the cited URL:6 328378
http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA
I am just arguing that Apple does indeed have to use surprise as one of their on-going marketing techniques. That said, I don't really agree with their actions in this case.
By the way, I much appreciated your magazine cover link to Jobs with the Apple II on Time..
Windows 95 was quite compelling compared to Windows 3.1. As a result, OS/2 was in a no-win situation since supporting Win32 was too hard and only providing Win16 was not enough. I think most end-users are ambivalent about the advantages of Vista over XP. And since jumping to Vista requires a new box (again, for most end-users), if you are in that market, why not try a Mini instead? And it is still win-win for Apple because if a customer absolutely needs Vista, Boot Camp is an option for that.
How does a new user get a karma bonus?
The news broke simultaneously in several places, but most people, including many Mac-heads, saw it first on the front cover of Time, copies of which were handed out at MacWorld. The keynote was delayed a day, the only time I heard of that happening, so that the keynote would correspond with Time's usual distribution cycle for hitting the newsstand. I think I saw in earlier post that you pointed out the Time magazine was dated for a week after the keynote. Surely you realize that most magazines list the date they are to be replaced, not the date they come out?
That link I provided is perfectly relevant. Apple and Jobs had previous experience with the delicate negotiations, the importance of secrecy, and the value of the free publicity, and the differential for slipping off the front cover.
At least most reports have stopped claiming there was a virus! Here is a better URL since Commander Taco (or someone else) is about to have their WSJ account suspended. Why do these news companies try to force people to provide a password? I hate that, putting up with advertising is annoying enough. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11409996477 6283796.html
I had been waiting for Apple to drop prices since the IIe, but I finally ponied up for a Bondi iMac and have never regreted it. Now that the Mini is available, complaining about prices is just stupid. Cost is no longer a large obsticle to the success of OS X. When you figure out why you think $500 is more computer than you deserve, you will have gained insight on yourself.
Yes, I have. You should try it some time. And read what I said, googlebot looks for particular meta tags that it cares about. It seems like you are trying to convince me that you are brain damaged.
Okay, so you understand that correct knowledge about the nature, structure, and variability of the source material to be parsed can dramatically, by orders of magnitude, decreases the effort and time needed to parse. Syntactically correct html is so much easier to parse than tag soup that it would be worth the Googlebot time to check for that. And Googlebot ignores meta tags, but they might influence less sophisticated algorithms. (Am I correct to infer that since you have resorted to pejoratives, that you cannot falsify my premises, nor find flaws in my logic?)Ok, you have succeeded in convincing me. There is no clearer way for me to say THEY GET THE EXACT SAME RESULTS. If you cannot grasp this, and are too stupid to try it and see for yourself, then there is no point talking to you.
I explained in my last post they are not literally the same results. It is called alternative text for a reason after all! Nor are they the same results in practice. JAWS and WindowEyes both (in the default setting) will vocalize the word "image" before reading the alt content. You are correct that Lynx will hide the fact that is rendering (alt) text from an image (in the default setting), but this can result in howlers so most regular users adjust the behavior to display [image] before the (alt) text. (Yes, when failing to be persuasive, it is a useful technic to resort to SHOUTING. It really helps with your credibility.)Just like images.
I never asserted that graphical text wasn't cross platform. I said it was fat, clumsy, and interferes with the desired behavior of Googlebot. I neglected to challenge your assertion earlier that: Simple text menu images aren't very big at all. They are large, relative to text+css menus. And a site author that cannot manage CSS probably isn't optimizing his images anyway, so the problem is worse.Google for GD.
Right, poorly supported bleeding edge technology is just what sites like SCR Online need. And you think CSS is too hard?I am not asserting that at all. I am asserting that its a waste of time, gets you nothing, and makes your site uglier. And if alt tags don't help for google, then stick invisible text in there, who cares?
Except I provided evidence to the contrary. And invisible text is one of the very things Googlebot discounts.Let us recap:
Search for three words in alt text (that are on every page): 2 hits.
Search for three words in plain text: 61 hits.
You still want to stick with your faith that Google weighs all text equally?
You have presented nothing logical or credible. I suggest you get some experience with writing spiders and then come back and read this to see how dumb you sound.
Please, ask a impartial person whose opinion you trust to read this thread, and ask them which of us is being more persuasive.No, it doesn't have to do any of that, that's the whole point. Spiders don't give a shit what your markup is like. They index content, and only look for particular tags that have meaning to them (certain meta tags, a tags, etc). Again, I suggest you actually implement a spider and you will realize quickly how far off your misconceptions are.
Have you done no parsing at all? And Googlebots, unlike early spiders, pretty much ignore meta tags.No, its not better for either, ITS 100% COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY IDENTICAL. How hard is this to grasp? Just try it and quit repeating this nonsense.
Text+CSS is better because text browsers and screen readers get the same content rather than being marginalized and dependent on charity code.So don't do that, generate images of the dimensions you need as you need them. What part of dynamic did you not understand?
I have yet to see this well implemented except at demonstration sites. I would very much appreciate some examples of live sites that do a good job with the technology. In any case, it is well beyond the capabilities of our friends like SCR Online (who could handle CSS and even validity if he gave it a try).No they aren't. The only windows version to support anti-aliased fonts is XP.
Valid code and text+CSS offers graceful degradation as well a being future proof.I don't even know what you are trying to say in the last paragraph, except that you don't understand how search engines work. Just having a phrase in an alt tag (or in any other tag like you are suggesting) doesn't make the search engine care. It needs to occur repeatedly, and have other "related" terms on the same site. This is how they see if you are actually a site about whatever, or just putting the term in your site to try to get traffic.
I provide you evidence that Google isn't indexing alt text and you don't get my point? That particular slogan is on every page, and I bet SCR Online has been using it for years. Okay, try proving me wrong. Please provide an example of alt content influencing a Google search to the positive! We already know that plain text influences a Google search, and you are asserting that alt text gets equal (or at least similar) weight.It's not a hack at all, it is the correct and recommended mime type for xhtml. If you serve xhtml as text/html, then it is parsed as tag soup.
Yes, I have garbled the details twice on this now. But please remember I agree with you that xhtml is over rated. As you observed, one is not using xhtml unless one serves it using application/xhtml+xml and that honest technique renders the page invisible to IE. It was the realization that the "work around" in wide use (using text/html) was an ugly hack in deference to the market penetration of IE that swore me back to html4.
No, it comes down to your "gut feeling" or "superstitious nonsense". If it came down to math then you would be able to mathematically prove the advantage of wasting time redoing your site in validating html for no reason at all.
My assertion on the utility of syntax to a search engine follows from deductive reasoning that I believe I have credibly represented here. I am find it curious that you are so resistant to my logic. Now, given limited time resources, I am less certain that validation has a higher return on investment than researching popular search terms. Fortunately, both things are relatively easy, so a competent site author can (and should) reasonably do both.
Or so you blindly assume. Do you think the google guys are retarded? They know alot of the web is broken html only renderable by IE. They design googlebot to deal with it, because their goal is to index as much info as possible. And of course, making your site validate (regardless of wether its as html or xhtml) doesn't magically give you any guarentees. You still have to test it in lots of browsers and still have no assurance that it will be parsed or displayed as you intended.
All browsers and all search engines have to render content in a deterministic way. It is willful ignorance to pretend that what you get from your eyes is the same as what a machine "sees". To do that, you have pay close attention to the source code. Yes, spiders can only make up for so many mistakes, they have to emulate all version of all browsers on all platforms. Because Google depends so much on honesty, any error the Googlebot might make will, by design, work against a site author. The only logical course of action for the site author is also to be honest. Give up the illusion that you as author control the rendering, focus on content, pay attention to structure but relax about formating. The only way to be confident of the parsing is use correct syntax. Your content will never be rendered everywhere (least of all to the robots) as you intend. Validate your code to make up for that. Developing processes so that your code is valid is much more time effective than using multiple versions of multiple browsers on multiple operating systems.
Wow, what's life like back there in 1998? Images are more widely supported than CSS actually, and with alt tags will degrade to text only browsers and screen readers EXACTLY the same as text+css would. Graphics do not have to be fixed size at all, that's a choice you make in using static images, you can use dynamic images if you want to. And they also scale just fine for people with vision problems (or just running 1600x1200 like me). Images also print just fine, I don't know what you are talking about with that one.
Yeah, code soup and graphical text is such a new concept! Alt attributes are okay for text only browser and screen reader, but text+CSS is still better for both. Using over sized graphics so they can stretch (for printing or on a large monitor) is still taking a gamble. And anti-aliased fonts are available on any system that supports vector graphics. You've never notice how typical it is for colored graphical text in a mast head (at 96 dpi on the screen, looks fine) to print like crap on a 300 dpi monochrome laser printer? Try looking at black and white print from a whole paragraph of graphical text (like the SCR Online home page that
There is no document/xhtml+xml mime type. See the RFC, it is application/xhtml+xml, like I said.
My apologies, I meant text/html mime type and I should have looked it up. (It has been a while since I was scared off application/xhtml+xml as a complete hack.)
And if you want to have some bizzare and unfounded religious belief that search engines punish invalid markup that's up to you, but you have to have some kind of evidence if you want people to take you seriously.
It comes down to mathematics. Correct syntax isn't really required, but no programmer would consider giving it up. Invalid code leads to a indeterministic state. You might think that by previewing a site in multiple browsers, that you are considering all the variables. Not only is this a lot of unneccessary work, but it is statistically doomed endeavor, there are just too many combinations of browsers and operating systems out there. So conscientionsous or not, you decide that some of those permutations are not important, and you dismiss them. You figure those versions will generate the same results as the ones you looked. This is wishful thinking that is not supported by any evidence. The problem is that the spiders and search engines have more in common with minority browsers you deliberately neglected than they do with IE.Code soup leads to ambiguity. Some kinds of ambiguity can lead to exploits. You can be certain that in situations where the ambiguity leads the robots to have to make a choice that they never err in the site author's favor, well at least not the clever ones from Google. Would you release code with known flaws? Especially when the flaws are openly exposed to the public? Yes, it is wishful thinking not to expect sloppy code to have ramifications. The burden of proof falls to someone making the absurd assertion. Is it an absurd notion that a search engine would achieve more accurate results from source material that is easily parsed?
I can say search engines punish you for using blink tags, but it doesn't make it true (sadly).
That would be sweet! I am not talking about deliberate intent, although there could be that aspect of it. I am talking about Googlebots being designed so as not to be tricked. To a machine, code soup looks like a trick. The browser or the indexer respond as best they can to the trick, but they are serving different purposes and masters. The indexer will take the most conservative root possible.Get real, not everyone is using an OS with antialised fonts, and in fact in many cases they may not even have the font you are trying to use anyways. Replacing images with text makes the site look worse for many people, and provides no benefit. With an image you know exactly how it will look for everyone who can view images, with text, you have no idea how it will look.
Text+CSS scales, prints well, downloads faster, and is more cross platform compatible than graphical text. Graphic text is of fixed size and color (which is especially hard for people with low vision) looks like crap when printed (and if your site is worth anything, pages will be printed) is slow (but hey, who cares about people with modems) and works well only on computers (those rich folks with hand held browsers never buy anything). Plus you get the added benefit that plain text is treated with more credibility by the search engines than alt text. Granted, it would be quite the trick to mock up the Coca Cola logo in text+CSS.No it doesn't. You can have invalid xhtml just like you can have invalid html.
Yes, but the per-specification behavior of the browser/viewer is different. All xml (xhtml included) is suppose to invoke halt-on-error while being processed or -- at most -- just show the results so far. This the opposite from an html browser which, by design and per the specification, is expected to provide robust error recovery.And unless you send it with an application/xhtml+xml header (which IE doesn't support), then it will be parsed using a "tag soup" parser anyways, not an xml parser.
This is why I don't disagree with you about the importance of xhtml being overstated. If a site really wants to use xhtml they need to be honest about it, which means sending it with a document/xhtml+xml header. But this means passing on IE traffic for the time being, which is not a choice most sites are willing to make.Further, html can be well formed too. Html is an SGML language, and if correct will be well formed SGML. This is exactly like xhtml being well formed XML.
Html can be well formed but it doesn't have to be. Beyond that, there are aspects of pre-Wilbur html (and SGML), like tag minimization, that make the concept of "well-formedness" almost meaningless. Please, provide the URL for an online test for well-formed html? Testing for validity, by comparison, is programmatically easy and common place.So as I said, there is no benefit here at all. Google does not punish you for having invalid markup, there's tons of sites that are listed #1 for common search terms that are not xhtml, nor are they even valid html.
Google does not punish you much for having invalid markup. One can speculate about exactly how deliberate and extensive the (small) penalty is, but it is not zero. It would be interesting to see a formal study on how much site authors are handicapping themselves by not using valid code. Your counter example is proof only that the disadvantage is reasonably small, not that it is nonexistent.No it isn't, alt text is plain text. Adding alt text is part of making your site search engine (and visually impaired) friendly.
Screen readers and most search engines use the alt text only because they have no choice. Keep your pictures with the good alt content, but replace graphical text with CSS (and text) wherever you can. It is common, less so now thankfully than years ago, for alt attributes to be deliberately abused. The Google algorithms have been evolved to presume that that alt text is misleading, and subsequently they endeavor to confirm the relevancy of alt content. Usually this goes okay for the honest site author, but why take the chance?There is no need at all to remove your images and replace them with plain text. It will have the same effect for search engines as adding alt tags, but it will make the site uglier for users.
That is wishful thinking, but incorrect. And we are not talking plain text. Styled text may be a little more work, but there is no reason for it to be ugly!No, that will leave you where the OP is now, with a crappy, low ranked site. Content is king. He needs to make sure common search terms actually appear in the content of his site, and make sure that his site is frequently updated. This gets you ranked higher in search engines, not blindly jumping on the "I'm too fucking stupid to research xhtml, so I am going to pretend it is the saviour of mankind and will cure cancer" bandwagon, like the guy giving shitty advice.
The advice you give is good, but so is the advice to validate and avoid graphical text. I agree that the advocacy to use xhtml is spurious.First off thanks for the great responses. This is an excellent reason for why i like the slashdot discussions. Instead of just getting into pointless bashing all the time - I actually can learn a lot.
Thanks, I appreciate considered discourse as well.
You seem to think it strange to extrapolate from my "mundane experiences" to the rest of the world - but I think that it's rationally more sound than the alternative. If we disregard our own experiences doesn't that make us completely credulous?
All true, but it seems me that you are over-projecting from your first hand knowledge. What prompted me to chime in was your assertion that "there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing" which I definitely do not find to be credible. (Substitute Bill Gates or Jack Welch or other luminaries in your assertion I quoted, and I will still disagree with you!)
So I'm still somewhat skeptical. In my experience I've always felt that fundamentally people are people. This means they all operate on some relatively similar principles, but that they are all similarly irreducibly complex.
Consider (but just briefly) a history you know well. Would your church exist were it not for the very individual contributions of Joseph Smith and of Brigham Young?
To some extent what you say about great leaders holds true, but on the other hand we will never know how many Alexander the Greats or Napoleons never saw an army,
I believe those two men would have been tremendous leaders in just about any time or place. If around today, they probably would be in business! They probably would not have achieved the same historical recognition of course.
or how many Einsteins spent their lives in manual labor.
I believe that number is probably close to zero. For example, the influence of an Einstein in North America a few millennia ago might leave history only with the myth of Iktomi. Can I prove that? No, of course not, but such supposition is less preposterous than imagining an individual like Einstein living his life in ignominy, merely given different circumstances.
I'm willing to accept that there are extraordinary people - but at the same time I think that heroes and villains are largely products of the human attempt to impose narrative on our history. We need antagonists and protagonists - they are an essential element of the human experience even if they are not an essential element of objective reality.
Ah, but heros and villians clearly exist at some point in time, why not ours? Sure, history magnifies their influenece, just as time makes invisible the work of so many others. There is even a New Testament verse about how difficult it is to recognize a contemporary prophet! Yes, luck counts for a lot (that is the lesson of Accedential Empires, but that hardly diminishes the influence of indivuals.
But I'm eager to look into your references, and I appreciate them.
Okay, Joseph Campbell was one of the most influential authors I read while I was in college.And it doesn't anger me to the point of vulgarity, I am always vulgar.
LOL. Made my day with that! We are deep enough off the main thread that no one else is likely to read this, let alone comment or mod, but I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss this with you.
No, it doesn't deserve more credit than I give it. Its completely wrong, like I said. You can't pretend his advice is useful just because the site sucks. His advice will do nothing to improve the site.
First, I agree with you that there is not, at this time, any real advantage of xhtml over html. I did, however, think the advice was useful, regardless that the site is mediocre. I would argue that the primary advantage of what xml gets you, by definition, is well-formedness. There is no such formal concept with html, so (in the absence of that) the choice is code soup or validity. Most sites go with the soup, hence the Web (fantastic as it is) is only a fraction as robust as it could be.
Without validity, and I have no idea if this is Shaper Pimp's thinking, authors are presenting unknown states to the world. They are accepting heuristics instead of algorithms. They are making a guess, instead of really being sure, about what the end user is experiencing. This generally works okay for human viewers, but of course, many of the end users are machines, that is, automata, such as search engines like Google. These robots are much more likely to be tripped up by bad syntax, and by design, giving an advantage to the site author in a non-deterministic situation would be an error. The programmers at Google work hard to prevent errors.
SCR Online was concerned with search engine optimization (SEO). Google is essentially looking for honesty. Google deliberately thwarts SEO, and penalizes what it recognizes as attempts to game their rankings. So what is a site author to do? Nothing really, which is frustrating. Or pay up, which of course costs money. The only course of action is to be forthright, and trust (or just hope) that Google deserves the reputation they have earned. Valid code is honest. Plain text is much more straightforward than alt text, so it counts for much more with Google (hence the advice to avoid graphical text and use CSS instead).
SJG is so stealth that I am a long time fan (anyone remember The Fantasy Trip) and still missed until recently that GURPS had been reformatted into d20. Anyway, the e23 CarWars link was missing a question mark. I only came across e23 recently too. Does SJG have all the ADQ on one CDROM by any chance? The price is right, but I just can not bring myself to pay for downloads. I require a professionally pressed disc to ease my conscience. Old school, I know.
You state the the assumption that there are many people who could do what Steve is doing is plainly incorrect because the US can not find a compelling candidate for president. That's flawed logic.
I cite that example as proof by demonstration that exemplary leaders are rare in general, not just in business. But politics being so corrupt, I understand how you missed my point.
I'm also not willing to follow your logic that Steve Jobs is a giant among insects - which seems to be your claim.
I find the example of Steve Jobs to be compelling even considering that the technology field offers many brilliant, interesting, and influential characters. The CEOs of these businesses are inevitably talented peoples. But even among these, Steve Jobs' track record is remarkable.
Finally if the influence of personality of the CEO on the organization as a whole is well documented than I am generally interested in reading more about it.
How about you start with Jack?
I'm not interested in hearing people try to tell me that Bill Gates is a tyrant out for world domination - especially if those same people are telling me that deep down Steve Jobs just wants to deliver quality products. Those are not people - those are caricatures.
When one reads widely, the same characterizations keep coming up, from disparate and varied source. Your skepticism is understandable, but the facts are dramatic enough to inspire two documentaries!
In my day to day experience the people I meet are neither angels nor demons.
So you extrapolate your mundane experiences to the rest of the world? Your homily is more true than false, but most famous people are notorious for valid reasons.
And I didn't say that you said the site was good! I am arguing that the posters advice deserves more credit than you give it. Why does his advice anger you to the point of vulgarity?
> I imagine that Jobs knows pretty much where Apple is going to be in 90 days/180 days/a year. I don't think that he has such a unique vision - it is just that he has a vision.
Well, overlooking that any vision at all is quite rare, the shift to Intel (and that the project has been underway for years) evidences that Jobs vision extends at least that far out. Personally, I would love to know where he thinks we (not just Apple) will be in ten or twenty years -- because I suspect his vision is unique.
Other comments about dismissing Jobs ability to predict the future because Apple gets to influence the market are just silly. Jobs is not a random pundant in some non-profit think tank, he is running a commercial enterprise accountable to stock holders. Jobs didn't make consumers love the the iPod, he caused Apple to offer a product that people loved. He was able to do that because he predicted where technology was going and has the vision to see the potential for demand. Apple was (and remains) a couple of years ahead of the competition. That is long term business vision.
> Money is clearly not the center of Bill Gates life.
True, but that is only because the money is incidental to his quest for world domination as opposed to Steve Jobs who is equally driven, but motivated to offer the best product possible.
> If it was, he wouldn't be the biggest philanthropist of all time.
You must be young. Bill Gate's charitable giving was almost nonexistent until he was shamed into action. It was only after his miserly become so infamous that it was interfering with business that he was compelled into action. Not surprisingly, he crafted his donations for maximum PR value. The money does good work, more than you or I can ever hope to accomplish, but is a tiny amount compared to his personal fortune, let alone the wealth he controls.
> I think that there's a ton of luck that goes into it as well.True, hence the title of the book, Accidental Empires, that I cite above. But that doesn't give due credit to the full positive force of the personalities involved. These people would almost certainly have been successful (perhaps not famously so) in just about any field.
> I imagine there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing.
That assumption is plainly incorrect. Great leaders are so rare that the U.S. cannot find compelling candidates for president. There are plenty of books about the great leaders in business. The potential for a single individual at the top to influence corporate culture is well documented. Apple's floundering without Steve Jobs, despite talented CEOs, and his demonstrated ability to lead them twice now (not to mention two other companies in the mean time) is a unique story even among these other luminaries.
I am already morning the passing of ADC.
I agree with you that xhtml is of little advantage over html. You are also correct that good alt content can compensate, to some extent, for the ill considered overuse of graphical text. Still basic syntax checking is easy, and it's a hallmark of quality for those enlightened enough to look for it. Yes, one can find well designed commercial sites that are not valid. One cannot, however, find valid commercial sites that are not well designed! The results for SCR Online are poor, but quite typical for an ISP.
Bird suits don't have air foils for ascent. It is not the least surprising that when trying to ascend that he just stalled. Upstream drafts are so rare the suit is just not designed to take advantage of them. Level flight is the best he could hope for. Now, if he had been using an ultra light glider, he would have been set.
The twin joys of being a Mac gamer: waiting and the games are hardly ever discounted. Any chance the Civ3 Complete Edition will be available as an upgrade (and at a corresponding price)? I though not. :-(
Frankly, I got so much less enjoyment out of Civ3 than I did for SMAC/SMAX. Thanks again for the carbon ports for them. I went back to them (under OS X) after Civ3. Actually, after MoO3 -- also disappointing -- which I bought only because Civ3 was not engaging.
I am very much looking forward to Civ4 since it would seem that they are addressing all the shortcomings of Civ3. I am delighted you are on the job!