Luckily, some companies are getting it. For example, Gearbox made a page (unfortunately apparently offline again, although there are copies) that lists how many PC-specific features Borderlands 2 has. One of them is offline LAN multiplayer. We've gotten to the point where the more customer-savvy companies are starting to use "no always-on requirement" as a selling point, just like "no DRM" has become a selling point recently.
I think this can be used as a basic gauge for how connected a company is with the gamers. Blizzard has done a full 180, treating every game like World of Warcraft (and angering everyone who doesn't want to play ladder all the time); Gearbox understands that always-on DRM is very unpopular and companies like GOG or indie developers usually eschew DRM entirely.
Which is the entire point of the technology. More lm/W with the same characteristics as a traditional incandescent. In fact, that's why I like halogen lamps: You get a continuous spectrum, no flicker, non-hazardous waste and instant turn-on times with reasonable efficiency (class C, to be precise).
Of course in Europe we will probably see a requirement for class B lights starting 2016; it would be great if ESL turned out to have a reasonable spectrum and to be sufficiently efficient until then.
Actually, the light bulb has been improved on. Halogen lamps are still incandescents with all their drawbacks and advantages but they are more energy-efficient than traditional incandescents.
They do have the added disadvantage that you need to keep the bulb very clean; however, most household halogen bulbs sold are either drop-in replacements for normal lightbulbs (which means they have an outer bulb that doesn't need to be kept clean) or are reflector lamps for sockets like MR16, which also come with a largely dirt-agnostic closed case.
Seeing Aeris die wasn't fun because her "heal the entire party every few turns" limit breaks made her damn useful while she lasted. Okay, so she was a cardboard cutout but at least she was a useful carboard cutout.
I wouldn't have minded too much if Cloud had died, though. That guy was just annoying.
I do have to agree, though, that FF7 made less and less sense as the game went on. The gameplay was good (well, except for a few grindtastic things) but the lack of sense did hurt the game. I'd put FF Tactics (the original, not the horrible sequels) as head and shoulders above FF7, even with the botched translation.
I have to agree with my siblings. "Vaio" used to mean "high-quality subnotebook". Today they slap it on anything with a processor, which I learned after buying an entry-level notebook of that name for a relative. Their wireless driver has bad string handling (padding the SSID with random junk) and occasionally just disconnects, Num Lock sometimes toggles itself while you're typing and the whole thing has very shoddy build quality. Last week the power jack snapped off!
That purchase has taught me a lot about researching whether a reputation is still deserved before buying something.
That's because you use an iPad. Kas Thomas uses a smartphone that cold-boots in under a second so it's obviously Apple's hardware that's holding you back. (Actually I think his smartphone emulates his input in the cloud when it's not running.)
From a we developer's view, WebKit is shaping up to be the next Internet Explorer 6. There are plenty features that become part of it the instant the WebKit team pitches them to the standards commitees and of course Google and Apple would love to see us use them. (This wouldn't be an issue if there weren't plenty developers who do use them.) CSS is a similar issue with WebKit - web designers are encouraged to use vendor-prefixed stuff everywhere and certain places (I'm looking at you, GitHub) are flooded with code snippets that include CSS with exactly one prefix: -webkit-.
Part of this does come from the fact that web designers tend to lap up those fancy mono-prefixed presentations browser vendors love to show us. But it's still disconcerting when Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft consider supporting WebKit's CSS prefix in addition to their own (and Mozilla is pondering user agent spoofing, putting us solidly back in 1995) because so many developers can't fathom that more than one browser in the world understands CSS3 yet they absolutely have to use it. Now imagine if they decide that requiring NaCl is a smart move. It'll be ActiveX all over again, whether or not the other vendors can "just" take the source code and implement their own version within a year or so.
WebKit needs to lose market share. It's becoming rather destructive to the web, even more so than Internet Explorer once the IE6/7 minefield has thinned out more. We need to cut back on browser-specific code, especially code that has no relation to any standard, but that's not likely to happen while Chrome is everyone's darling.
For the time being, though: No NaCl, no Dart. If you want those to see widespread adoption, lobby for them to become part of the HTML specification.
Plus neologisms, proper names and contractions. "john's nightly adventures in vaxholm", "beeb anchor cornflakes explosion" or "overdramatic grimdark etymology sideshow" are all unlikely to fall to simple dictionary attacks, although one could of course compile a dictionary that includes nicknames for TV channels, Swedish municipalities and internet slang. Perhaps not an entire additional bit but still slightly better.
Of course one should avoid common phrases as well. I'd expect "robots in disguise" to fall fairly quickly if passphrases were widespread enough to warrant the use of phrase dictionaries.
That may be true but I don't think the metonymy of "RIAA" is universally accepted. The AC was at least technically right and may have legitimately perceived the RIAA as a distinct entity.
Well, it is true. The RIAA is basically a special interest group for the music industry but they're not a publisher. The publishers themselves are who's shafting the artists.
In the post "in the post ____ era, the world will never be the same" era, the world will never be the same. For one, it will have one overused overdramatic phrase less.
Why not use a reasonable whitelist? It's unlikely that a new version of Unicode would turn a printable character into a bidi control character and printable JIS characters are not automatically evil, especially not if the lameness filter treats them as non-letters.
As for "people could spam ASCII art": People could also flood Slashdot with bizarre textual porn copypasta. The key part of "posting ASCII art faster than the mods can cope" is "faster than the mods can cope", not "ASCII art".
It is fairly weird that a geek-centric website like Slashdot doesn't support Unicode but instead relies on an undocumented subset of Latin-1. Especially in 2012.
The big problem with Chrome's UI is not that is's bad. It's that it's set in stone. Firefox gives you a lot of building blocks and a default arrangement for them. If you want to change something you can usually do so and if not there's probably an add-on that does it. Even with the new push to imitate Chrome wherever possible it's possible to turn Firefox into something resembling 3.x with just a few clicks.
Different people have different preferences. Some of us think that the Chrome UI is horrible and won't use Chrome because of it - and perhaps we would use Chrome if Google made the UI as configurable as that of Firefox. Plus, that might help Chrome get some more elaborate add-ons.
I am aware that most users won't customize their browser UI. Of course that doesn't mean that those who would aren't a valid target demographic. (Cf. the debates about Unity and Gnome 3.)
The same applies to just about anything. Have you ever seen what happens when some joker decides to have a smoke in a mill? My father used to be in charge of workplace safety for a company that had one (a mill, not an idiot who set it on fire) and he had a large catalog of materials and their behavior in aerosol form. It could mostly be summed up as "nasty when exposed to fire".
Anything more-or-less flammable when powdered can become really nasty once dispersed in air. Gasoline has the properties of being volatile and storing a lot of energy, both of which don't help - but then again that's usually not what happens with cars. Those just tend to catch fire, which is still bad if someone's inside but not nearly as dramatic as Micheal Bay movies or German action shows like to pretend.
Well, that's the level the rest of the thread operates on. I do agree that an expensive gift is not neccessarily a good one - but usually a game or an operating system are only given when appropriate and are almost automatically a better gift than a USB stick with a few apps on it.
This is a gadget for a rather small market. Assistive devices tend to be rather expensive. This little gadget would probably retail for somewhere between 100 bucks and some multiple of that.
And for the low price of 399.98 USD you can safely* cross the street again!
Good arguments. Perhaps one could use longer terms to get concessions out of the content industry. They can get five years of zealously-guarded copyright, ten years of "you're on your own" or fifteen years of self-policed limited copyright with complex EULAs and DRM being explicitly forbidden.
I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and some companies might feel that seven years is a bit too little to invest a truckload of money into. (Yes, extremely expensive movies tend to be drivel but there's a legitimate market for them.)
But I'd still say that fifteen years should be a hard upper limit, reserved for areas like movies where investments of dozens of millions of $CURRENCY are not unusual.
Well, the USB sticks are intended as stocking stuffers, i.e. small things that you give along with the main presents. When I add a bar of good chocolate to a christmas present I don't try to wow the recipient by the fact that I could spend five whole bucks on a bar of chocolate; I just try to make a nice gift a little bit nicer.
Likewise, the software is basically a stocking stuffer for a stocking stuffer. A few freeware games or tools aren't going to make someone break out in tears of gratitude but they might be nice, nonetheless. If the recipient doesn't want them they can just delete them to reclaim the space and it's possible that they do like them but have never heard about them before.
For instance, I know a lot of people who have no idea that something like du or its graphical counterparts exist; while some free disk usage analyzer isn't going to be the software they've been spending their whole life preparing for it might be found useful. I think the proper response to aim for is not "best gift ever" but rather "hey, that's nifty".
Admittedly, Skyrim or Windows 7 would be nicer stocking stuffers but most people aren't quite wealthy enough to use them in that role.
Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between.com, and.ca or.uk can be substantial.
Well, yes. But we only differentiate between "my ccTLD" and "every other TLD". No non-techie cares about the difference between.com,.info and.mil; they will assume that domains start with "www." and end with ".de" (me being in Germany).
If you're a private person there's only one TLD relevant to you, your local ccTLD. If you're a company then there are more relevant ccTLDs, mainly to avoid malicious websites posing as yours - but that amounts to the local ccTLD (e.g..de), the regional ccTLD (e.g..eu),.com,.net and.biz (which already was a horrible idea).
In the end foobar.xxx will be distinct from foobar.com only in having a Levenshtein distance of three - the company behind it will probably be the same simply because they want to avoid posers..xxx is the new.biz.
Xfce has a program menu just like Gnome 2. In fact, the only difference between the Xfce menu and the Gnome menu is that the Xfce menu contains an entry for the Xfce settings manager. (I use awn on Xfce; it used to be DockbarX but I made the mistake up upgrading the box to Ubuntu 11.10, which is hell if you want to use anything Gnome 2 related).
Xfce is pretty much what Gnome used to be. It's fairly simple but configurable and comes with a handful of dock applets - with all Gnome 2 dock applets being available if you install XfApplet.
Menu on-top, same issue, great when you have a small screen, awful and confusing on a big screen one, especially when an app spawns multiple windows.
Oh, it can work very well - if the applications are designed to have a single menu shared between their windows. If they aren't then it's a horrible idea to pretend they are. There's a reason why Apple doesn't even try to do it with X11.app.
Of course Shuttleworth said himself why Unity is unpopular, even though he didn't realize it: Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done.
Gnome, XFCE and KDE allow me to customize by UI by adding panels, widgets and whatnot to do what I need how I need it. I don't think they added that to Unity since I last looked. Of course since Ubuntu 11.10 most of the Gnome panel apps are also gone because they're written against Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 doesn't support legacy panel apps at all. (This goes so far that I can't build them without having to supply several dependencies myself even though my Xubuntu is full of Gnome 2 libraries. Some packages were even banished because they have optional dependencies on Gnome 2. Gentoo is more user-friendly than that!)
Funny you should mention that... I have always been opposed to browser sniffing, and have ALWAYS found ways to write code that doesn't depend on it.
That doesn't change the fact that browser-specific sites were rather common, especially as far as IE6+ActiveX is concerned. Plus, I can distinctly remember having to write a good bit of browser-specific code even for "portable" websites because Trident simply couldn't handle standards-compliant code. That's still the case but it's much easier to avoid or automate today (plus recent versions of Trident have been developed by people who have actually read the specs they're coding against).
No, it's because the next version of the standard was decertified by W3C a couple of years ago xhtml is officially dead.
XHTML 2.0 never went anywere but XHTML 1.1 is still a fully working recommendation. I doubt that "there's not going to be an upgrade path to the next version" was the main thing that killed XHTML 1.1 or we wouldn't still see XHTML 1.0 everywhere; there is no upgrade path to 2.0 because 1.1 was DOA. What killed 1.1 was that Internet Explorer didn't support XHTML until IE9, treating it like HTML 4 instead and refusing to deal with application/xhtml+xml at all - which 1.1 was required to be used with until 2009. The W3C canceling XHTML 2.0 was just a symptom of the standard having gotten strangled back in its 1.0 incarnation, which lingers on like a zombie. There are a few things about 1.1 that tend to throw off some parsers even today.
If you're willing to accept bloat, go for it. I still do all mine by hand.
There are always tradeoffs. Depending on the complexity of the task I will go with or without jQuery but in some cases it does speed up development a lot. Besides, jQuery is being used increasingly because JavaScript has gone from ungodly slow to fairly fast. Another big change that changes the rules of the game somewhat.
So what are you going to do when browsers begin supporting other scripting languages? Or when the OS itself begins supporting html5 without needing a browser to interpret it (because that's where we're heading).
<script type="text/javascript">. The language attribute is, and has always been, nonstandard. It was considered acceptable for a while because writing your HTML for Trident was considered acceptable.
My point, which you missed, is that learning new features of a language is not learning a new skill any more than learning to read a new book in your native language is a new skill - it's *might* be considered as adding to your current skill level for that skill, but that's not in any way a new "skill", whereas learning how to read that same book in a new language is a new skill, same as learning a new language is.
That depends on how much the language and the environment it's used in changes. Web apps ten years ago looked quite a lot differently from how they look today. There was a time when ActiveX was considered a valid web technology. CSS transitions are very much different from JavaScript animations done by changing an object's style information and even more different from building a Flash page. And yes, pointless but pretty animations are a part of modern web design. Not everywhere but in some nontrivial sectors like company frontpages.
The "two years" figure is debatable but tech skills do age. While some things transfer from early-2000s-era DHTML to HTML5+ECMAScript 5 or from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 8 it's also clear that some things don't. You will always have a certain foundation but that foundation alone doesn't neccessarily make you competitive with someone who's up-to-date.
Of course there's things like C++ where the speed of development is glacial. Those skills age much slower than some others.
Slashdot Mirror
Luckily, some companies are getting it. For example, Gearbox made a page (unfortunately apparently offline again, although there are copies) that lists how many PC-specific features Borderlands 2 has. One of them is offline LAN multiplayer. We've gotten to the point where the more customer-savvy companies are starting to use "no always-on requirement" as a selling point, just like "no DRM" has become a selling point recently.
I think this can be used as a basic gauge for how connected a company is with the gamers. Blizzard has done a full 180, treating every game like World of Warcraft (and angering everyone who doesn't want to play ladder all the time); Gearbox understands that always-on DRM is very unpopular and companies like GOG or indie developers usually eschew DRM entirely.
Which is the entire point of the technology. More lm/W with the same characteristics as a traditional incandescent. In fact, that's why I like halogen lamps: You get a continuous spectrum, no flicker, non-hazardous waste and instant turn-on times with reasonable efficiency (class C, to be precise).
Of course in Europe we will probably see a requirement for class B lights starting 2016; it would be great if ESL turned out to have a reasonable spectrum and to be sufficiently efficient until then.
Actually, the light bulb has been improved on. Halogen lamps are still incandescents with all their drawbacks and advantages but they are more energy-efficient than traditional incandescents.
They do have the added disadvantage that you need to keep the bulb very clean; however, most household halogen bulbs sold are either drop-in replacements for normal lightbulbs (which means they have an outer bulb that doesn't need to be kept clean) or are reflector lamps for sockets like MR16, which also come with a largely dirt-agnostic closed case.
Seeing Aeris die wasn't fun because her "heal the entire party every few turns" limit breaks made her damn useful while she lasted. Okay, so she was a cardboard cutout but at least she was a useful carboard cutout.
I wouldn't have minded too much if Cloud had died, though. That guy was just annoying.
I do have to agree, though, that FF7 made less and less sense as the game went on. The gameplay was good (well, except for a few grindtastic things) but the lack of sense did hurt the game. I'd put FF Tactics (the original, not the horrible sequels) as head and shoulders above FF7, even with the botched translation.
I have to agree with my siblings. "Vaio" used to mean "high-quality subnotebook". Today they slap it on anything with a processor, which I learned after buying an entry-level notebook of that name for a relative. Their wireless driver has bad string handling (padding the SSID with random junk) and occasionally just disconnects, Num Lock sometimes toggles itself while you're typing and the whole thing has very shoddy build quality. Last week the power jack snapped off!
That purchase has taught me a lot about researching whether a reputation is still deserved before buying something.
That's because you use an iPad. Kas Thomas uses a smartphone that cold-boots in under a second so it's obviously Apple's hardware that's holding you back. (Actually I think his smartphone emulates his input in the cloud when it's not running.)
From a we developer's view, WebKit is shaping up to be the next Internet Explorer 6. There are plenty features that become part of it the instant the WebKit team pitches them to the standards commitees and of course Google and Apple would love to see us use them. (This wouldn't be an issue if there weren't plenty developers who do use them.) CSS is a similar issue with WebKit - web designers are encouraged to use vendor-prefixed stuff everywhere and certain places (I'm looking at you, GitHub) are flooded with code snippets that include CSS with exactly one prefix: -webkit-.
Part of this does come from the fact that web designers tend to lap up those fancy mono-prefixed presentations browser vendors love to show us. But it's still disconcerting when Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft consider supporting WebKit's CSS prefix in addition to their own (and Mozilla is pondering user agent spoofing, putting us solidly back in 1995) because so many developers can't fathom that more than one browser in the world understands CSS3 yet they absolutely have to use it. Now imagine if they decide that requiring NaCl is a smart move. It'll be ActiveX all over again, whether or not the other vendors can "just" take the source code and implement their own version within a year or so.
WebKit needs to lose market share. It's becoming rather destructive to the web, even more so than Internet Explorer once the IE6/7 minefield has thinned out more. We need to cut back on browser-specific code, especially code that has no relation to any standard, but that's not likely to happen while Chrome is everyone's darling.
For the time being, though: No NaCl, no Dart. If you want those to see widespread adoption, lobby for them to become part of the HTML specification.
Plus neologisms, proper names and contractions. "john's nightly adventures in vaxholm", "beeb anchor cornflakes explosion" or "overdramatic grimdark etymology sideshow" are all unlikely to fall to simple dictionary attacks, although one could of course compile a dictionary that includes nicknames for TV channels, Swedish municipalities and internet slang. Perhaps not an entire additional bit but still slightly better.
Of course one should avoid common phrases as well. I'd expect "robots in disguise" to fall fairly quickly if passphrases were widespread enough to warrant the use of phrase dictionaries.
That may be true but I don't think the metonymy of "RIAA" is universally accepted. The AC was at least technically right and may have legitimately perceived the RIAA as a distinct entity.
Well, it is true. The RIAA is basically a special interest group for the music industry but they're not a publisher. The publishers themselves are who's shafting the artists.
In the post "in the post ____ era, the world will never be the same" era, the world will never be the same. For one, it will have one overused overdramatic phrase less.
Why not use a reasonable whitelist? It's unlikely that a new version of Unicode would turn a printable character into a bidi control character and printable JIS characters are not automatically evil, especially not if the lameness filter treats them as non-letters.
As for "people could spam ASCII art": People could also flood Slashdot with bizarre textual porn copypasta. The key part of "posting ASCII art faster than the mods can cope" is "faster than the mods can cope", not "ASCII art".
It is fairly weird that a geek-centric website like Slashdot doesn't support Unicode but instead relies on an undocumented subset of Latin-1. Especially in 2012.
Devices are release and Google is both. A stealth comment on consumerism? (I know it's not but let me have the illusion at least...)
The big problem with Chrome's UI is not that is's bad. It's that it's set in stone. Firefox gives you a lot of building blocks and a default arrangement for them. If you want to change something you can usually do so and if not there's probably an add-on that does it. Even with the new push to imitate Chrome wherever possible it's possible to turn Firefox into something resembling 3.x with just a few clicks.
Different people have different preferences. Some of us think that the Chrome UI is horrible and won't use Chrome because of it - and perhaps we would use Chrome if Google made the UI as configurable as that of Firefox. Plus, that might help Chrome get some more elaborate add-ons.
I am aware that most users won't customize their browser UI. Of course that doesn't mean that those who would aren't a valid target demographic. (Cf. the debates about Unity and Gnome 3.)
The same applies to just about anything. Have you ever seen what happens when some joker decides to have a smoke in a mill? My father used to be in charge of workplace safety for a company that had one (a mill, not an idiot who set it on fire) and he had a large catalog of materials and their behavior in aerosol form. It could mostly be summed up as "nasty when exposed to fire".
Anything more-or-less flammable when powdered can become really nasty once dispersed in air. Gasoline has the properties of being volatile and storing a lot of energy, both of which don't help - but then again that's usually not what happens with cars. Those just tend to catch fire, which is still bad if someone's inside but not nearly as dramatic as Micheal Bay movies or German action shows like to pretend.
Well, that's the level the rest of the thread operates on. I do agree that an expensive gift is not neccessarily a good one - but usually a game or an operating system are only given when appropriate and are almost automatically a better gift than a USB stick with a few apps on it.
This is a gadget for a rather small market. Assistive devices tend to be rather expensive. This little gadget would probably retail for somewhere between 100 bucks and some multiple of that.
And for the low price of 399.98 USD you can safely* cross the street again!
*All responsibility lies with the user.
Like I told the sibling, good point.
Good arguments. Perhaps one could use longer terms to get concessions out of the content industry. They can get five years of zealously-guarded copyright, ten years of "you're on your own" or fifteen years of self-policed limited copyright with complex EULAs and DRM being explicitly forbidden.
I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and some companies might feel that seven years is a bit too little to invest a truckload of money into. (Yes, extremely expensive movies tend to be drivel but there's a legitimate market for them.)
But I'd still say that fifteen years should be a hard upper limit, reserved for areas like movies where investments of dozens of millions of $CURRENCY are not unusual.
Well, the USB sticks are intended as stocking stuffers, i.e. small things that you give along with the main presents. When I add a bar of good chocolate to a christmas present I don't try to wow the recipient by the fact that I could spend five whole bucks on a bar of chocolate; I just try to make a nice gift a little bit nicer.
Likewise, the software is basically a stocking stuffer for a stocking stuffer. A few freeware games or tools aren't going to make someone break out in tears of gratitude but they might be nice, nonetheless. If the recipient doesn't want them they can just delete them to reclaim the space and it's possible that they do like them but have never heard about them before.
For instance, I know a lot of people who have no idea that something like du or its graphical counterparts exist; while some free disk usage analyzer isn't going to be the software they've been spending their whole life preparing for it might be found useful. I think the proper response to aim for is not "best gift ever" but rather "hey, that's nifty".
Admittedly, Skyrim or Windows 7 would be nicer stocking stuffers but most people aren't quite wealthy enough to use them in that role.
Let me guess, you are an american?
Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between .com, and .ca or .uk can be substantial.
Well, yes. But we only differentiate between "my ccTLD" and "every other TLD". No non-techie cares about the difference between .com, .info and .mil; they will assume that domains start with "www." and end with ".de" (me being in Germany).
.de), the regional ccTLD (e.g. .eu), .com, .net and .biz (which already was a horrible idea).
.xxx is the new .biz.
If you're a private person there's only one TLD relevant to you, your local ccTLD. If you're a company then there are more relevant ccTLDs, mainly to avoid malicious websites posing as yours - but that amounts to the local ccTLD (e.g.
In the end foobar.xxx will be distinct from foobar.com only in having a Levenshtein distance of three - the company behind it will probably be the same simply because they want to avoid posers.
Xfce has a program menu just like Gnome 2. In fact, the only difference between the Xfce menu and the Gnome menu is that the Xfce menu contains an entry for the Xfce settings manager. (I use awn on Xfce; it used to be DockbarX but I made the mistake up upgrading the box to Ubuntu 11.10, which is hell if you want to use anything Gnome 2 related).
Xfce is pretty much what Gnome used to be. It's fairly simple but configurable and comes with a handful of dock applets - with all Gnome 2 dock applets being available if you install XfApplet.
Menu on-top, same issue, great when you have a small screen, awful and confusing on a big screen one, especially when an app spawns multiple windows.
Oh, it can work very well - if the applications are designed to have a single menu shared between their windows. If they aren't then it's a horrible idea to pretend they are. There's a reason why Apple doesn't even try to do it with X11.app.
Of course Shuttleworth said himself why Unity is unpopular, even though he didn't realize it: Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done.
Gnome, XFCE and KDE allow me to customize by UI by adding panels, widgets and whatnot to do what I need how I need it. I don't think they added that to Unity since I last looked. Of course since Ubuntu 11.10 most of the Gnome panel apps are also gone because they're written against Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 doesn't support legacy panel apps at all. (This goes so far that I can't build them without having to supply several dependencies myself even though my Xubuntu is full of Gnome 2 libraries. Some packages were even banished because they have optional dependencies on Gnome 2. Gentoo is more user-friendly than that!)
Funny you should mention that ... I have always been opposed to browser sniffing, and have ALWAYS found ways to write code that doesn't depend on it.
That doesn't change the fact that browser-specific sites were rather common, especially as far as IE6+ActiveX is concerned. Plus, I can distinctly remember having to write a good bit of browser-specific code even for "portable" websites because Trident simply couldn't handle standards-compliant code. That's still the case but it's much easier to avoid or automate today (plus recent versions of Trident have been developed by people who have actually read the specs they're coding against).
No, it's because the next version of the standard was decertified by W3C a couple of years ago xhtml is officially dead.
XHTML 2.0 never went anywere but XHTML 1.1 is still a fully working recommendation. I doubt that "there's not going to be an upgrade path to the next version" was the main thing that killed XHTML 1.1 or we wouldn't still see XHTML 1.0 everywhere; there is no upgrade path to 2.0 because 1.1 was DOA. What killed 1.1 was that Internet Explorer didn't support XHTML until IE9, treating it like HTML 4 instead and refusing to deal with application/xhtml+xml at all - which 1.1 was required to be used with until 2009. The W3C canceling XHTML 2.0 was just a symptom of the standard having gotten strangled back in its 1.0 incarnation, which lingers on like a zombie. There are a few things about 1.1 that tend to throw off some parsers even today.
If you're willing to accept bloat, go for it. I still do all mine by hand.
There are always tradeoffs. Depending on the complexity of the task I will go with or without jQuery but in some cases it does speed up development a lot. Besides, jQuery is being used increasingly because JavaScript has gone from ungodly slow to fairly fast. Another big change that changes the rules of the game somewhat.
So what are you going to do when browsers begin supporting other scripting languages? Or when the OS itself begins supporting html5 without needing a browser to interpret it (because that's where we're heading).
<script type="text/javascript">. The language attribute is, and has always been, nonstandard. It was considered acceptable for a while because writing your HTML for Trident was considered acceptable.
My point, which you missed, is that learning new features of a language is not learning a new skill any more than learning to read a new book in your native language is a new skill - it's *might* be considered as adding to your current skill level for that skill, but that's not in any way a new "skill", whereas learning how to read that same book in a new language is a new skill, same as learning a new language is.
That depends on how much the language and the environment it's used in changes. Web apps ten years ago looked quite a lot differently from how they look today. There was a time when ActiveX was considered a valid web technology. CSS transitions are very much different from JavaScript animations done by changing an object's style information and even more different from building a Flash page. And yes, pointless but pretty animations are a part of modern web design. Not everywhere but in some nontrivial sectors like company frontpages.
The "two years" figure is debatable but tech skills do age. While some things transfer from early-2000s-era DHTML to HTML5+ECMAScript 5 or from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 8 it's also clear that some things don't. You will always have a certain foundation but that foundation alone doesn't neccessarily make you competitive with someone who's up-to-date.
Of course there's things like C++ where the speed of development is glacial. Those skills age much slower than some others.