It is fully possible and reasonable to develop fully standards-compliant pages that display with a great degree of fidelity across platforms and browsers
What is the standards-compliant, cross-platform way to add sound effects to scripts for those users who request notification sound effects? Which web browsers implement the aural parts of CSS with any degree of fidelity?
Since when do you display a sound in any browser? Sounds may be played, but unless you've got a gift for sensing auditory feedback through your eyes, my comment doesn't really apply.
That said, I suppose you'd approach incorporating aural feedback into your page the same way you would any other standard would be incorporated: by invoking a standard declaration in a style sheet or a standard element on a page. That way, user agents that didn't understand the syntax would at least finish processing the page and just leave out the piece it didn't understand, as any well-behaved, standards-compliant user agent should -- the point being that one element of a page should not keep the entire page from rendering.
You don't think that developers would like to be able to develop against concrete standards today? We have to develop where the users are. And if the users are on IE, as unfortunate as it is, we have to develop there.
I think your distinction here is artificial, unnecessarily exclusive, and a little bit lazy. What you've effectively said is that you can afford to throw away 15% of any potential audience and/or market because it makes your life easier. So you save a few of hours of development time, but at the expense of those 15% who might be perfectly willing to read your content, buy your product, click on your adsense ads, etc.
It is fully possible and reasonable to develop fully standards-compliant pages that display with a great degree of fidelity across platforms and browsers, and give all users the impression that this company has provided a great online experience for them. And the development process starts and ends with coding to the W3C standards first.
If all this compliaince BS was actually to HELP developers, the OSS community would've adopted IE settings as the standard. I mean, why not?
Because the objective, codified standard has already been set? And Microsoft helped to set it? And then they promptly and deliberately went out and broke it -- or at least interpreted the standard differently than everyone else did? Why should I forsake those user agents that DO follow the standards in consistent, predictible ways over the one that has shown a willingness to change things arbitrarily?
Um...did you just use "MySpace" and "style" in the same sentence?
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
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CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
Ah, now that you say that, I recall that. Thanks for the refresher.
Ah well, at least I could use my incorrect recollection to successfully push for a standards reform at my job...;-)
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
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CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 2, Insightful
ESPN.com had a high-profile conversion in 2003 that was supposed to reduce its load time and file size signficantly. A peek at the front page today shows that, in fact, the site is contained within divs. On the downside, however, it appears that the front page designers have gotten lazy -- currently the page does not validate against its embedded doctype.
As for why tables-based layouts are done 'everywhere', it could be because of a lot of reasons: no time to do a proper redesign, no desire to mess with a working display, old work habits from developers, not having adequately skilled resources doing the design, or any other reasons that lead upper management to believe that the cost/benefit analysis doesn't demand serious structural changes.
From my experience, two of the biggest hindrances I've seen to implementing a CSS-based design are making sure that the application developers that work on a site are on board so that their output html validates AND making sure that the html designer knows exactly what kinds of permutations of content might be generated from the applications used on the site. After all, most big sites are really just the results of application output, and without significant planning and design, it's far too easy for developers to fall back on the default output templates that their IDEs *cough*visualstudio*cough* provide.
As to your question of "It's my personal opinion that some things are just way easier to do with tables than CSS, and that's why people keep doing it. Am I right?", well, yes and no. Yes, it's easier to keep adhering to bad habits than it is to learn new habits. No, it's not any harder to develop alternate and comparable means of display using proper semantic markup and valid xhtml/css. No, I didn't say IDENTICAL designs, I said comparable; some table effects can be done only with, um, tables. But just as a serious print designer would be better served by setting type in an application like inDesign or Quark rather than making one big image file in photoshop, it's a matter of using the right techniques with the right tools.
That said, I think that the case for coding a proper xhtml/css site is compelling -- bandwidth savings (and improved browser response/user experience), minimal template changes for alternate content delivery, easier path to section 508 compliance, better search engine rankings in google, and forward compatibility are all legitimate reasons to consider using the display methods as they were meant to be used, not as they were hobbled together in the mid- to late-90s.
Our jobs are BORING. Admit it. If the true essence of our profession was placed on film, people would walk out of the theatre.
Absolutely.
My wife is a pediatrician, and despite the fact that she deals with disease and injury every day, she cannot help but watch every medical show -- fiction or reality -- that comes on TV. One day I wondered aloud why she would want to subject herself to tv that is essentially work to her, and why no one makes TV shows about my chosen profession.
She replied that
a) the fictional TV shows generally get as much wrong with their medicine as movies with tech themes get technology wrong and
b) no one wants to watch a show consisting of a bunch of web geeks sitting in front of their computers all day.
I had to concede that she was right, but that didn't make me feel any better....
publish a detailed spec? So that SEO slime could game the search engines even more than they already do, and get sites with pitches for for V!@gRrraAA@@ placed ahead of the sites that I'm really looking for?
I'm generally all for open standards, but in this case, I'm content to have Google keep their algorithms proprietary, which in turn keeps the SEO spammers chasing their tails and out of my search results. If an open spec is that much better for searching, a competitor will come up with a way for it to work. As Google has shown, a productive search engine pays (stockholders) handsomly -- to this point.
. If people want cellphones for whatever reason, why not?
Well, in the context of a school setting, a phone can be a disruption, and I'm surprised they're not outright banned in schools more than they apparently are.
Why? Students weren't allowed to pass notes in class before the advent of cell phones, because it distracted them from the class. So isn't a text message the same idea? The cell phone can be much more intrusive than the old-school note, and that much more disruptive to the educational process.
Of course, back to the point of the article -- you want to keep your principal from raiding your cell phone? Leave it in your car or at home.
Staffer 1: Oh man, I forgot to email that report to Senator Stevens on Friday!
Staffer 2: Oh, just tell him it got caught up in the internet behind some spam. It works every time!
...
...the next Monday...
...
Sen. Stephens: Another critical internet from my staffers slowed down because of spam?! What could be the cause of all this? Marilyn, get the internet people on the phone; I need some questions answered NOW!
That doesn't change the fact that tables were never intended for page layout; they were intended for tabular data. Wrapping non-tabular content in tables -- no matter how pretty the styling -- still unnecessarily complicates the content tagging process.
No, the tables in this site were a complex mess of nested tables inside nested tables with very precise widths, font treatments, and backgrounds. They needed to be as large as they were in order to fine-tune every bit of presentation to make things look exactly the same -- which you seem to think is the full advantage of a table.
In fact, you are not making good use of tables if you're using them for anything besides presentation of tabular data.
The problem is that the web inherently is not a precise presentation medium. The moment you let go of the notion that you can make everything look exactly the same all the time, the sooner you can focus on marking up the content in a way that makes sense rather than wrapping content in table tag after table tag.
I'm working on a redesign from a table soup layout to a CSS layout. My page weight of just the HTML document is now 1/5 of what it used to be. My total page load -- including images, style sheets, javascripts, etc. is easily HALF of what it used to be.
If you can't make a div layout lighter than a table layout, you're doing something wrong.
So essentially you're saying that people should be smart enough to fully understand their electronic hardware, but shouldn't have to read through their contracts with a service to provider to understand the rights they do and don't have?
My initial hunch was right; you have no actual interaction with people in your real life, do you?
Yes, the term is caveat emptor; unfortunately, I don't think you fully realize what it means. It doesn't mean -- as you seem to imply -- "buyer, this is a guaranteed SCAM!" it only means "let the buyer beware." In other words, it's an exhortation -- not a demand -- for the buyer to know what he is buying beforehand and to understand what the implications of that purchase are.
I know perfectly well what the limitations of music bought through the ITMS are, and I know the terms of the terms of service. And yet I still use them. Why? Because it's a fucking 2 minute and 45 second song that I want to buy now without being encumbered with the other 13 tracks of pablum and $15 that it would cost me to buy the physical medium. If the rest of the album is something that worthwhile, or I just can't live without that 4-inch-square piece of flimsy paper with a second-rate print job, I still have the option to go buy the shrinkwrapped, overpriced goodness at my nearest big-box purveyor of extended warranties.
In the meantime, I can still back up my original files to any medium I choose and re-copy them to my machine for as long as I want. i can also burn an unencumbered CD that I understand is not as good as an original I might buy in the store that will play in all the players your virgin CD will play in for the next hundred years -- or until the compact disc ceases to be a viable medium. (After all, despite your hyperbolic claims, how many phonographs from 1906 do you still see laying around and operable?)
At any rate, I know the limitations of the ITMS and I accept them in exchange for the convenience and cost savings I get for only having to buy the music I want. If I ever find something out there that's worth buying, I still have the option to go out and purchase the unencumbered CD.
Would I prefer it if all the music publishers offered their music online in hihg-quality, non-DRM'd formats? Sure. That'd be great. I'd absolutely replace my current collection with those. Just let me know when you expect that to happen, and I'll be sure to have a couple of parkas delivered to Hell at that time.
But you still never addressed my main point -- which actually had nothing to do with DRM: the purpose of any well-written software and competently manufactured hardware is to make the user's job easier and to act as you might expect it to. Apple's success with the iPod and iTunes (separate from your conspiratorial ravings about the Music Store aspects) is that the duo do exactly that. They make it completely painless to rip music (to unecnumbered files, by default even!), organize the music, create playlists, export them to the player, etc. Sure, it would be easy to write esoteric interface software for a music player that required plenty of quality time with the manual and online newsgroups to fully appreciate the power, but why? To satisfy the übergeek in you and make it easier for you to ridicule the lusers who can't understand the product?
At least I've learned one thing about you: you don't really have to worry about having to preserve your music for your progeny....
Most folk don't want to have to install the software to make their microwave work, they just want to push buttons, and likewise, they want their music to be that simple too, as simple as turning on the radio, or as close as they can get to that.
I completley agree with you. We should all have degrees in electrical engineering and have to break out the soldering irons and manually calibrate our microwaves each time we want a bag of popcorn!
Isn't that essentially your gripe? That people want a system that will work as they think it should without having an advanced programming degree? Or even a basic one?
Apple is appealing to the masses, that's for sure -- by doing what software companies are supposed to do: solve a technical problem so that the task becomes easy for the end user to accomplish.
As others have noted, I thin you've mistaken the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. The iPod emphatically does not require any kind of DRM on the music files loaded onto its hard drive. As for the music files sold on ITMS sucking away every last right you have to music...
Fair use is almost gone. You want to play iPod music anywhere but on your computer (or four others, God Bless you Apple) or your iPod? Forget it.
Oh wait, you can spin the track out to a CD, then rip (a wink and a nod) an mp3 or other sans DRM that will play on your other mp3 players. Maybe.
Of course, that's assuming some other mechanism isn't in the pipeline to circumvent that.
Oh, and the music you're writing to a CD to rip back to mp3s?
it started out inferior in quality... with compression.
it will lose quality as it gets passed up the chain and back down -- you will have to make some "quality" decisions about what level mp3 you need to retain even the quality left in the track.
Oh yeah, you're going to have to re-enter the track, album, and artist info, that gets lost in the process.
You seem to imply that your right to fair use includes making as many perfect copies as you want. Has that ever been the case? IANAL, but as I understand it, fair use was intended to allow end users a means to convey the meaning and context of a piece and -- in the case of software -- preserve a duplicate copy for archival purposes.
As this applies to music, for ages we've been compiling mix tapes and making outright copies of CDs, tapes, and records to audio tape. The record companies grumbled about this, of course, but didn't do much with it because -- besides being near impossible to track in the person-to-person distribution model of taping, those copies were of obviously inferior quality from the first generation on.
With those old-school uses in mind, how is Apple's DRM radically different from what you could practically do before? Can you...
Make a copy for archival purposes? Yes*
Compile a mixed set of music (at potentially lesser audio quality) for free distribution to your friends? Yes
Listen to the original composition as you purchased it on multiple devices? Yes**
I fail to see how fair use is on the way out the door based on Apple's current implementation of FairPlay.
Of course, what you fail to note is that the iPod doesn't require you to use iTunes. You are free to rip lossless files from your own CDs and distribute them any way you want. Your iPod will not refuse those files, and it will gladly play them alongside that copy of Sweet Caroline you just couldn't resist buying from ITMS when you first got into iTunes.
*I can save all the AAC files to any backup media that I want and file them away in cold storage; if my hard drive ever dies, I can retrieve the backup, copy them to the new drive, and be back in business.
**Sure, after I make ten copies of the exact same playlist I have to switch a song or two around or delete the list and recreate it, but for all intents and purposes this is still easier than 1987 when I either had to copy the same 17 songs over and over again to get first-generation 'quality' for each mix tape I was making, or settle on making all second-generation copies...
They show up in search engines just fine, download speed is a matter of data size not standard compliance as is bandwidth and as well, you can follow all the standards and still not be usable and you can break all the standards and have a more usable site than others.
I'm working on a redesign of a site that is a perfect example of what happens when you let developers write code that "just works". Our pages are served out of a CMS that is provided by a little company in the Pacific Northwest that you may or may not have heard of (the name starts with 'M' and ends with 'icrosoft'). The templates we currently use are the bastard child of using their out-of-the-box output methods combined with template designers who used every table and spacer widget trick in the box to deliver their templates in as short a time frame as possible.
According to half the comments I've read in this thread, this is how it should be: we should be focused on the end result for the user, and to hell with standards; they're nothing but esoteric junk that waste back-end developers' precious time.
Of course, this great time-saving philosophy has resulted in the following results:
Template modifications are ridiculously hard to make without breaking the output. Because our template developers nested table after table and inserted seemingly random spacer gifs in order to get the layout 'just right', and then we had to split our template into components to ensure that the right pieces get fed at the right point in the logic, making updates are a laborious, time-consuming chore that regularly break , requiring further break fixes.
Our pages are bloated and slow-loading. Our home page is our lightest page, and the HTML document itself weighs in at over 63K -- to present all of 500 words. The bulk of that HTML? Javascript to sniff for different kinds of browsers and to feed dropdown menus. With all the spacers and image widgets, the total page load is over 120K.
We have to re-code templates over and over. For every alternate use of the same set of content -- printer-friendly, handheld, audio, braille -- we have to write similar templates that exclude the cruft of the browser-based view. Given our audiences, we cannot ignore these uses.
We pay a shitload for traffic. In the case of our home page, we served that page -- and all 500+ words contained upon it -- 670,000 times in the last year. Multiply that by the number of overall pages we serve a year (8.6 million), and our bandwidth costs for serving pages weighing 120-200K each are enormous. Even with users caching previously visited pages in their browser, we still serve a ton of traffic.
Now, as I said, we've been developing a redesign around standards that should improve our lot in life significantly, and our conclusions have been based on data, not a BS meme.
Fact: we will simplify our template files significantly. Without having to dig through partial tables and being able to store semantically significant chunks within the development environment, our developers have to spend less time reconstructing bad HTML to preserve a rickety template. Modification times in development have been easily cut in half.
Fact: we will serve less data to represent the same amount of content. Our html files are now up to 1/5 the size that they used to be, and the total size of all associated files for each page are now literally half of what they used to be. We don't sniff for different browsers, and our drop-down menus that once took hundreds of lines of javascript are accomplished with a few:hover declarations in the style sheet in the CSS and a 12-line javascript snippet to make IE behave correctly.
Fact: Our redevelopment time will take significantly less time in the future, and will not require us to re-code enti
And they did it at the behest of the content owners. It was the difference between having an online store (and a way to move their music player hardware) and having nothing but a couple of crappy creative commons songs. And as soul-less as DRM restrictions may be, at least Apple pushed for one of the least restrictive DRM schemes available. To wit: their content does not expire after a certain number of days or a certain number of plays; it does not require you to keep a subscription to a service in order to keep your music alive; it does not limit your right to burn CDs -- just the order in which you burn the list.
Apple change the "rules" about how users can use their music (number of CDs a song can be burnt onto was reduced) using the DRM and software updates, even when the songs have ALREADY been purchased by the users.
See one of the child posts, but my understanding is that Fairplay is versioned so that those songs that were bought with certain rights MAINTAIN those rights. Further, the limits on burning songs to CDs are not set at the individual song level, it's set at the playlist level -- in other words, i can burn any song to CD as many times as i want to; i just can't use the exact same playlist more than ten times.
Apple sue students for posting rumours about their products on the internet.
Unfortunately, that's the climate of business in the US today; businesses have an obligation to their shareholders to protect their competitve secrets. Of course, for every rumor that lands the rumor-monger in court, there are dozens that don't. The difference is probably in how big of an impact such a rumor can have on a company's competitiveness, and how stiffly the NDAs were worded with the source who originally leaked to the rumor site.
It appears that any evil you want to ascribe to Apple is really either a problem you have with how business in the US is run in general, or by taking the dimmest view possible of their actions without considering the constraints under which the company operates. At any rate, they can hardly be viewed as MORE evil than other large, convicted monopolists who have done far more restrictive things with their technologies.
If Apple wants me to license their software, rather than buy a copy, they can present me with the terms of the license before I pay and make agreement to the license a condition of the transaction.
An interesting legal argument. How does it hold up if, on the side of the box, Apple has included the following:
Important Use of this product is subject to acceptance of the software license agreement(s) included in this package
Based on the fact that they have alerted you to the existence of a license AND that either the store associate can either tell you the terms or give you a copy of the terms, or link to the terms if you're buying online, haven't Apple made this licensing condition apparent and available before the sale is completed?
(And don't get me wrong -- I'm no fan of giving up rights if I don't have to. I'm just playing devil's advocate here...)
I see a problem when you try to switch from a working traditional model to a barely young one, especially when you don't have a name for yourself.
In independent radio circles, WOXY 97.7 did have a name for itself. It was regularly listed as one of the top alternative stations in Rolling Stone, and enjoyed extensive critical acclaim. As I understand it, their internet streams were constantly in the years leading up to the sale of the terrestrial signal.
Why Internet only?
Because the original owners of the station were reaching retirement age, and they needed to sell the terrestrial station to actually survive retirement. They couldn't guarantee that whoever bought the terrestrial station would keep the station format consistent with their original vision -- let alone keep the same staff -- so instead, they sold the signal and hardware, but stipulated that they would get to keep the music library, the brand, and the domain name, with the plan to obtain funding to take the station internet-only.
Why don't they keep their radio frequency, and use the net for free?
The radio frequency has already been sold. And using the net ISN'T free. There are broadcasts fees for internet broadcasts, and in fact, ASCAP royalties are more expensive for internet-only broadcasts than for simulcast over-the-air/internet broadcasts. And those royalties are about to get steeper...
Free is the word, b/c its with it that we share culture and grow... not locally or regionally, but globally.
Free is a nice word...until you realize free don't pay the DJs. Or their families.
Most of your objections are not applicable to woxy.com. Why? Let me share...
1. The music is usually bad
I don't know your taste in music, but woxy.com plays modern rock -- primarily independent music that isn't overly processed and is generally written and performed by the performers.
2. The music is the same playlist shuffled differently for each new day
Hardly. I've had requests for recent songs dinged by their DJs (very politely) becuase they had just played the within the last three days. Sure, they have their rotations, but heavy rotation on woxy.com is much lighter than at any corporate terrestrial station.
3. There are no deejays that will actually play obscure requests
woxy's DJs have a wall of THOUSANDS of CDs from their very beginning -- 1983 or so -- that they can easily access and do on multiple occasions. In addition, they have no problem playing deep cuts on any album if it goes with the flow of the set. Their music ranges runs the alternative gamut from new wave to punk to techno; part of their library is also dedicated to reggae and blues. The latter may not get played nearly as much, but they are available.
4. Too many annoying commercials / fake deejays
The DJs at woxy.com are anything but fake. Their morning DJ, Barb, responds to EVERY email I send her, and she mentions her listners on a regular basis. The other jocks have always responded similarly.
Unfortunately, they don't have enough annoying commercials, which is why they're going to a listner-supported model. The thing is, you can have one or the other: advertising-filled for free or advertising-free for a fee.
5. Too many stations are owned by the same companies
woxy is completely independent; they take the risks, they give the people what they want, and there is no corporate angel (or devil) saving their butts/flipping their format when it doesn't bring in enough revenue.
6. Companies have been doing 'pay to play' illegally - big surprise
As I understand it, woxy didn't receive that kind of promotional, um, consideration from the record companies because they would play songs before they were supposed to, and playing deeply into the album -- two things that are actually good for the listener, but negatively impacts a song or artist's chart ranking.
7. I buy my own music to hear the artists I enjoy - I am in control
Fair enough. But woxy.com has introduced me to a ton of music that I wouldn't have thought to buy in the past all based on hearing new stuff on woxy. Once introduced, I did sample and buy more from those artists, and now i'm in control of those lists.
The fact is that woxy is a breath of fresh air among the staleness of corporate radio. I don't disagree with you that MOST radio stations adhere to those seven reasons why you stopped listening to radio; but woxy is not most stations. It is the antithesis to the kinds of stations that/.ers generally rail against.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you improve upon brown? WIll it be puke green? Or puke orange?
Since when do you display a sound in any browser? Sounds may be played, but unless you've got a gift for sensing auditory feedback through your eyes, my comment doesn't really apply.
That said, I suppose you'd approach incorporating aural feedback into your page the same way you would any other standard would be incorporated: by invoking a standard declaration in a style sheet or a standard element on a page. That way, user agents that didn't understand the syntax would at least finish processing the page and just leave out the piece it didn't understand, as any well-behaved, standards-compliant user agent should -- the point being that one element of a page should not keep the entire page from rendering.
I think your distinction here is artificial, unnecessarily exclusive, and a little bit lazy. What you've effectively said is that you can afford to throw away 15% of any potential audience and/or market because it makes your life easier. So you save a few of hours of development time, but at the expense of those 15% who might be perfectly willing to read your content, buy your product, click on your adsense ads, etc.
It is fully possible and reasonable to develop fully standards-compliant pages that display with a great degree of fidelity across platforms and browsers, and give all users the impression that this company has provided a great online experience for them. And the development process starts and ends with coding to the W3C standards first.
Because the objective, codified standard has already been set? And Microsoft helped to set it? And then they promptly and deliberately went out and broke it -- or at least interpreted the standard differently than everyone else did? Why should I forsake those user agents that DO follow the standards in consistent, predictible ways over the one that has shown a willingness to change things arbitrarily?
Um...did you just use "MySpace" and "style" in the same sentence?
Ah, now that you say that, I recall that. Thanks for the refresher.
Ah well, at least I could use my incorrect recollection to successfully push for a standards reform at my job... ;-)
ESPN.com had a high-profile conversion in 2003 that was supposed to reduce its load time and file size signficantly. A peek at the front page today shows that, in fact, the site is contained within divs. On the downside, however, it appears that the front page designers have gotten lazy -- currently the page does not validate against its embedded doctype.
As for why tables-based layouts are done 'everywhere', it could be because of a lot of reasons: no time to do a proper redesign, no desire to mess with a working display, old work habits from developers, not having adequately skilled resources doing the design, or any other reasons that lead upper management to believe that the cost/benefit analysis doesn't demand serious structural changes.
From my experience, two of the biggest hindrances I've seen to implementing a CSS-based design are making sure that the application developers that work on a site are on board so that their output html validates AND making sure that the html designer knows exactly what kinds of permutations of content might be generated from the applications used on the site. After all, most big sites are really just the results of application output, and without significant planning and design, it's far too easy for developers to fall back on the default output templates that their IDEs *cough*visualstudio*cough* provide.
As to your question of "It's my personal opinion that some things are just way easier to do with tables than CSS, and that's why people keep doing it. Am I right?", well, yes and no. Yes, it's easier to keep adhering to bad habits than it is to learn new habits. No, it's not any harder to develop alternate and comparable means of display using proper semantic markup and valid xhtml/css. No, I didn't say IDENTICAL designs, I said comparable; some table effects can be done only with, um, tables. But just as a serious print designer would be better served by setting type in an application like inDesign or Quark rather than making one big image file in photoshop, it's a matter of using the right techniques with the right tools.
That said, I think that the case for coding a proper xhtml/css site is compelling -- bandwidth savings (and improved browser response/user experience), minimal template changes for alternate content delivery, easier path to section 508 compliance, better search engine rankings in google, and forward compatibility are all legitimate reasons to consider using the display methods as they were meant to be used, not as they were hobbled together in the mid- to late-90s.
Our jobs are BORING. Admit it. If the true essence of our profession was placed on film, people would walk out of the theatre.
Absolutely.
My wife is a pediatrician, and despite the fact that she deals with disease and injury every day, she cannot help but watch every medical show -- fiction or reality -- that comes on TV. One day I wondered aloud why she would want to subject herself to tv that is essentially work to her, and why no one makes TV shows about my chosen profession.
She replied that
a) the fictional TV shows generally get as much wrong with their medicine as movies with tech themes get technology wrong and
b) no one wants to watch a show consisting of a bunch of web geeks sitting in front of their computers all day.
I had to concede that she was right, but that didn't make me feel any better....
publish a detailed spec? So that SEO slime could game the search engines even more than they already do, and get sites with pitches for for V!@gRrraAA@@ placed ahead of the sites that I'm really looking for?
I'm generally all for open standards, but in this case, I'm content to have Google keep their algorithms proprietary, which in turn keeps the SEO spammers chasing their tails and out of my search results. If an open spec is that much better for searching, a competitor will come up with a way for it to work. As Google has shown, a productive search engine pays (stockholders) handsomly -- to this point.
Well, in the context of a school setting, a phone can be a disruption, and I'm surprised they're not outright banned in schools more than they apparently are.
Why? Students weren't allowed to pass notes in class before the advent of cell phones, because it distracted them from the class. So isn't a text message the same idea? The cell phone can be much more intrusive than the old-school note, and that much more disruptive to the educational process.
Of course, back to the point of the article -- you want to keep your principal from raiding your cell phone? Leave it in your car or at home.
Heard on Capitol Hill...
Staffer 1: Oh man, I forgot to email that report to Senator Stevens on Friday!
Staffer 2: Oh, just tell him it got caught up in the internet behind some spam. It works every time!
...
...
Sen. Stephens: Another critical internet from my staffers slowed down because of spam?! What could be the cause of all this? Marilyn, get the internet people on the phone; I need some questions answered NOW!
well, my employer has its own internet too. Of course, we call it an intranet, but what's a couple of misplaced letters among bad legislation?
That doesn't change the fact that tables were never intended for page layout; they were intended for tabular data. Wrapping non-tabular content in tables -- no matter how pretty the styling -- still unnecessarily complicates the content tagging process.
No, the tables in this site were a complex mess of nested tables inside nested tables with very precise widths, font treatments, and backgrounds. They needed to be as large as they were in order to fine-tune every bit of presentation to make things look exactly the same -- which you seem to think is the full advantage of a table.
In fact, you are not making good use of tables if you're using them for anything besides presentation of tabular data.
The problem is that the web inherently is not a precise presentation medium. The moment you let go of the notion that you can make everything look exactly the same all the time, the sooner you can focus on marking up the content in a way that makes sense rather than wrapping content in table tag after table tag.
Shennanigans.
I'm working on a redesign from a table soup layout to a CSS layout. My page weight of just the HTML document is now 1/5 of what it used to be. My total page load -- including images, style sheets, javascripts, etc. is easily HALF of what it used to be.
If you can't make a div layout lighter than a table layout, you're doing something wrong.
Funny. In my xhtml/css world, your table code translates to
That's 26 characters reduced to 11. What math do you use to find that 11 is 4 times bigger than 26?
2. Price.
I don't know what Bob cost, but its had to be far more expensive than it was worth...Vista will be the first expensive Microsoft product in history
So essentially you're saying that people should be smart enough to fully understand their electronic hardware, but shouldn't have to read through their contracts with a service to provider to understand the rights they do and don't have?
My initial hunch was right; you have no actual interaction with people in your real life, do you?
Yes, the term is caveat emptor; unfortunately, I don't think you fully realize what it means. It doesn't mean -- as you seem to imply -- "buyer, this is a guaranteed SCAM!" it only means "let the buyer beware." In other words, it's an exhortation -- not a demand -- for the buyer to know what he is buying beforehand and to understand what the implications of that purchase are.
I know perfectly well what the limitations of music bought through the ITMS are, and I know the terms of the terms of service. And yet I still use them. Why? Because it's a fucking 2 minute and 45 second song that I want to buy now without being encumbered with the other 13 tracks of pablum and $15 that it would cost me to buy the physical medium. If the rest of the album is something that worthwhile, or I just can't live without that 4-inch-square piece of flimsy paper with a second-rate print job, I still have the option to go buy the shrinkwrapped, overpriced goodness at my nearest big-box purveyor of extended warranties.
In the meantime, I can still back up my original files to any medium I choose and re-copy them to my machine for as long as I want. i can also burn an unencumbered CD that I understand is not as good as an original I might buy in the store that will play in all the players your virgin CD will play in for the next hundred years -- or until the compact disc ceases to be a viable medium. (After all, despite your hyperbolic claims, how many phonographs from 1906 do you still see laying around and operable?)
At any rate, I know the limitations of the ITMS and I accept them in exchange for the convenience and cost savings I get for only having to buy the music I want. If I ever find something out there that's worth buying, I still have the option to go out and purchase the unencumbered CD.
Would I prefer it if all the music publishers offered their music online in hihg-quality, non-DRM'd formats? Sure. That'd be great. I'd absolutely replace my current collection with those. Just let me know when you expect that to happen, and I'll be sure to have a couple of parkas delivered to Hell at that time.
But you still never addressed my main point -- which actually had nothing to do with DRM: the purpose of any well-written software and competently manufactured hardware is to make the user's job easier and to act as you might expect it to. Apple's success with the iPod and iTunes (separate from your conspiratorial ravings about the Music Store aspects) is that the duo do exactly that. They make it completely painless to rip music (to unecnumbered files, by default even!), organize the music, create playlists, export them to the player, etc. Sure, it would be easy to write esoteric interface software for a music player that required plenty of quality time with the manual and online newsgroups to fully appreciate the power, but why? To satisfy the übergeek in you and make it easier for you to ridicule the lusers who can't understand the product?
At least I've learned one thing about you: you don't really have to worry about having to preserve your music for your progeny....
I completley agree with you. We should all have degrees in electrical engineering and have to break out the soldering irons and manually calibrate our microwaves each time we want a bag of popcorn!
Isn't that essentially your gripe? That people want a system that will work as they think it should without having an advanced programming degree? Or even a basic one?
Apple is appealing to the masses, that's for sure -- by doing what software companies are supposed to do: solve a technical problem so that the task becomes easy for the end user to accomplish.
As others have noted, I thin you've mistaken the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. The iPod emphatically does not require any kind of DRM on the music files loaded onto its hard drive. As for the music files sold on ITMS sucking away every last right you have to music...
You seem to imply that your right to fair use includes making as many perfect copies as you want. Has that ever been the case? IANAL, but as I understand it, fair use was intended to allow end users a means to convey the meaning and context of a piece and -- in the case of software -- preserve a duplicate copy for archival purposes.
As this applies to music, for ages we've been compiling mix tapes and making outright copies of CDs, tapes, and records to audio tape. The record companies grumbled about this, of course, but didn't do much with it because -- besides being near impossible to track in the person-to-person distribution model of taping, those copies were of obviously inferior quality from the first generation on.
With those old-school uses in mind, how is Apple's DRM radically different from what you could practically do before? Can you...
I fail to see how fair use is on the way out the door based on Apple's current implementation of FairPlay.
Of course, what you fail to note is that the iPod doesn't require you to use iTunes. You are free to rip lossless files from your own CDs and distribute them any way you want. Your iPod will not refuse those files, and it will gladly play them alongside that copy of Sweet Caroline you just couldn't resist buying from ITMS when you first got into iTunes.
*I can save all the AAC files to any backup media that I want and file them away in cold storage; if my hard drive ever dies, I can retrieve the backup, copy them to the new drive, and be back in business.
**Sure, after I make ten copies of the exact same playlist I have to switch a song or two around or delete the list and recreate it, but for all intents and purposes this is still easier than 1987 when I either had to copy the same 17 songs over and over again to get first-generation 'quality' for each mix tape I was making, or settle on making all second-generation copies...
I'm working on a redesign of a site that is a perfect example of what happens when you let developers write code that "just works". Our pages are served out of a CMS that is provided by a little company in the Pacific Northwest that you may or may not have heard of (the name starts with 'M' and ends with 'icrosoft'). The templates we currently use are the bastard child of using their out-of-the-box output methods combined with template designers who used every table and spacer widget trick in the box to deliver their templates in as short a time frame as possible.
According to half the comments I've read in this thread, this is how it should be: we should be focused on the end result for the user, and to hell with standards; they're nothing but esoteric junk that waste back-end developers' precious time.
Of course, this great time-saving philosophy has resulted in the following results:
Now, as I said, we've been developing a redesign around standards that should improve our lot in life significantly, and our conclusions have been based on data, not a BS meme.
There are a couple of problems with your rant:
Apple spread DRM.
And they did it at the behest of the content owners. It was the difference between having an online store (and a way to move their music player hardware) and having nothing but a couple of crappy creative commons songs. And as soul-less as DRM restrictions may be, at least Apple pushed for one of the least restrictive DRM schemes available. To wit: their content does not expire after a certain number of days or a certain number of plays; it does not require you to keep a subscription to a service in order to keep your music alive; it does not limit your right to burn CDs -- just the order in which you burn the list.
Apple change the "rules" about how users can use their music (number of CDs a song can be burnt onto was reduced) using the DRM and software updates, even when the songs have ALREADY been purchased by the users.
See one of the child posts, but my understanding is that Fairplay is versioned so that those songs that were bought with certain rights MAINTAIN those rights. Further, the limits on burning songs to CDs are not set at the individual song level, it's set at the playlist level -- in other words, i can burn any song to CD as many times as i want to; i just can't use the exact same playlist more than ten times.
Apple sue students for posting rumours about their products on the internet.
Unfortunately, that's the climate of business in the US today; businesses have an obligation to their shareholders to protect their competitve secrets. Of course, for every rumor that lands the rumor-monger in court, there are dozens that don't. The difference is probably in how big of an impact such a rumor can have on a company's competitiveness, and how stiffly the NDAs were worded with the source who originally leaked to the rumor site.
It appears that any evil you want to ascribe to Apple is really either a problem you have with how business in the US is run in general, or by taking the dimmest view possible of their actions without considering the constraints under which the company operates. At any rate, they can hardly be viewed as MORE evil than other large, convicted monopolists who have done far more restrictive things with their technologies.
An interesting legal argument. How does it hold up if, on the side of the box, Apple has included the following:
Based on the fact that they have alerted you to the existence of a license AND that either the store associate can either tell you the terms or give you a copy of the terms, or link to the terms if you're buying online, haven't Apple made this licensing condition apparent and available before the sale is completed?
(And don't get me wrong -- I'm no fan of giving up rights if I don't have to. I'm just playing devil's advocate here...)
Of course, you do realize that woxy.com has relocated to downtown Cincinnati since they went internet-only, right? They're in Longworth Hall now.
In independent radio circles, WOXY 97.7 did have a name for itself. It was regularly listed as one of the top alternative stations in Rolling Stone, and enjoyed extensive critical acclaim. As I understand it, their internet streams were constantly in the years leading up to the sale of the terrestrial signal.
Because the original owners of the station were reaching retirement age, and they needed to sell the terrestrial station to actually survive retirement. They couldn't guarantee that whoever bought the terrestrial station would keep the station format consistent with their original vision -- let alone keep the same staff -- so instead, they sold the signal and hardware, but stipulated that they would get to keep the music library, the brand, and the domain name, with the plan to obtain funding to take the station internet-only.
The radio frequency has already been sold. And using the net ISN'T free. There are broadcasts fees for internet broadcasts, and in fact, ASCAP royalties are more expensive for internet-only broadcasts than for simulcast over-the-air/internet broadcasts. And those royalties are about to get steeper...
Free is a nice word...until you realize free don't pay the DJs. Or their families.
I don't know your taste in music, but woxy.com plays modern rock -- primarily independent music that isn't overly processed and is generally written and performed by the performers.
Hardly. I've had requests for recent songs dinged by their DJs (very politely) becuase they had just played the within the last three days. Sure, they have their rotations, but heavy rotation on woxy.com is much lighter than at any corporate terrestrial station.
woxy's DJs have a wall of THOUSANDS of CDs from their very beginning -- 1983 or so -- that they can easily access and do on multiple occasions. In addition, they have no problem playing deep cuts on any album if it goes with the flow of the set. Their music ranges runs the alternative gamut from new wave to punk to techno; part of their library is also dedicated to reggae and blues. The latter may not get played nearly as much, but they are available.
The DJs at woxy.com are anything but fake. Their morning DJ, Barb, responds to EVERY email I send her, and she mentions her listners on a regular basis. The other jocks have always responded similarly.
Unfortunately, they don't have enough annoying commercials, which is why they're going to a listner-supported model. The thing is, you can have one or the other: advertising-filled for free or advertising-free for a fee.
woxy is completely independent; they take the risks, they give the people what they want, and there is no corporate angel (or devil) saving their butts/flipping their format when it doesn't bring in enough revenue.
As I understand it, woxy didn't receive that kind of promotional, um, consideration from the record companies because they would play songs before they were supposed to, and playing deeply into the album -- two things that are actually good for the listener, but negatively impacts a song or artist's chart ranking.
Fair enough. But woxy.com has introduced me to a ton of music that I wouldn't have thought to buy in the past all based on hearing new stuff on woxy. Once introduced, I did sample and buy more from those artists, and now i'm in control of those lists.
The fact is that woxy is a breath of fresh air among the staleness of corporate radio. I don't disagree with you that MOST radio stations adhere to those seven reasons why you stopped listening to radio; but woxy is not most stations. It is the antithesis to the kinds of stations that /.ers generally rail against.