I'm sure you'll respond that Dems will scare terrorists away better than Reps will
No, I'll respond that Democrats will do a much better job at making it so there is less terrorism. Only a Republican or an idiot would think that you can scare terrorists off. The way you should go about it is to make as much of the world as possible prosperous (or at least not in poverty, starved, and in constant danger of death). With more happy people, there are fewer terrorists.
With public libraries, that's more a problem than you'd think. They have to be perfectly locked down, or you'll have some kid who thinks himself (gah, that seems wrong after reading the entire pronoun debate up above) cool coming in and doing whatever he can to mess it up. And I have never seen a perfectly locked down Windows machine. So in his case a lot of it depends on how good the rest of the library staff is (whether they can recognize the troublemakers and kick them out) and how big the library in general is (more people = more troublemakers).
Web apps might be a bit hackish, yes, but they're quite useful. Look, for example, at an airline booking site--that's a web app. So are eBay and Amazon. Can you think of any other reasonable way to allow everyone to book flights or buy stuff online? Web apps also drastically reduce the cost of developing and distributing the program in a corporate intranet.
Also, they're hackish because the languages used (namely HTML) weren't designed with web apps in mind and thus are missing a number of features that would be good for them. whatwg is trying to remedy that.
P.S. Not to be pedantic, but I will.:-) Did you know that the blockquote tag requires a block-level element inside of it?
Don't use CSS if you can use templates with PHP or ASP. Don't use JavaScript unless you really need it. HTML 4 still works.
No, use CSS whenever you need (or want) to say how something's displayed. Use Javascript whenever you need (or want) a page to be dynamic (but don't use it for things that you can accomplish with CSS/HTML!). And yes, as you say, HTML 4 still works. Just make sure your html is semantic.
The World Wide Web is about transferring documents - not programs.
It was originally designed that way, but now it is quite useful for documents, small programs (like rot13ing text, or something on a similar scale) and web applications (where a user interacts with a program that is actually on the server by means of a web browser and an html interface)
Actually, the good ones are both. The CSS 2.1 spec is wonderful for authors if they're already familiar with CSS (ie, if they're not a clueless newbie, but just need to learn how to do something), and the html 4.01 spec is decent too.
As for CSS I'd tend to agree its a headache. Its time to move off to full fledged DTDs and have nice programs that help in their creation.
WHAT??? A DTD defines (in a machine parseable way) what the legal syntax for a language is. CSS defines how stuff's displayed on the screen. They are for completely different purposes.
And what really annoys me? CSS wasn't even that well designed. It's got huge gaping holes in functionality. You should be able to align anything by top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right of an object (such as a div) both as an absolute and a percentage. You should also be able to specify on what layer within that said container the object you are positioning should be drawn. Of course that doesn't work in any recent browser, because the developers have been too busy trying to impliment the mixed messages coming out of the W3C, and ensuring backwards compliance, along with supporting 'real world' hacks due to the dominance of IE.
How ironic that the two examples of missing functionality you give are very definitely easily possible, and the way they're possible makes complete sense.
For the first, make the parent element position:relative to take it out of the normal flow, and then use position:absolute on the child. Yes, you can position it from whatever corner you want, and yes, you can use lengths or percentages.
For the "specifying on what layer..." I assume you want the z-index. Mozilla supports that, and IIRC IE does also. (Mozilla has a bug (#78087) with negative z-indicies).
CSS was well designed. It has a few problems, most of which will be solved in CSS3 (image borders, some numbered list stuff) but it is a good spec.
Nope. The specs contain all sorts of optional stuff. There's also a lot of things where the functionality is defined but the display isn't, like form controls. Two browsers could both be completly standards compliant, but still display stuff quite differently.
Thing that bugs me most about them is they take a full few seconds to show up on the screen, during which time you can't use the computer. You have to just sit there and wait.
There are two programs: one is the OS, the other is a user program, connected to the internet. There are four possibilities for (this part of) how they interact:
Neither of them checks to see if the input is coming from a trusted source
Obviously bad, as was the case here
Just the user program checks to see if the data is trusted
Provides the security, but means this has to be implemented in every single user program
Just the OS checks to see if the input is trusted
Provides security, and only needs to be implemented once
Both the OS and the user program check to see if the input is trusted
Redundant, though arguably more secure
If you're paranoid, you should have both of them check to see if the data is trusted, otherwise just the OS should check.
My diagnosis is that this is a severe bug in Windows and is Microsoft's fault, however, since it was there, Mozilla should have blocked it from showing up.
The fact that once they realized it could be a problem they did block it is only a good thing.
shell: is like any other protocol, such as http: or ftp:. What Necko (the networking part of Mozilla) does is if it doesn't recognize the protocol, it asks the OS. Windows recognizes shell:, and lets it do pretty much anything. None of the other OSs recognize it, which is why this only affects Windows
The developers considered changing from scheme blacklisting to whitelisting, in which case all schemes and protocols would be disallowed unless explicitly allowed.
Mozilla Foundation spokesmen said a future version of the browsers will change to whitelisting, but the interim fix just disables the shell protocol. Several other schemes, such as vbscript, are already disabled by default.
So in other words, this fix only changes a pref which is easy to do without a huge download, etc. and is easy for the clueless, since it requires one click. Future versions will have a fix for the problem in general, rather than just this specific case.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'll respond that Democrats will do a much better job at making it so there is less terrorism. Only a Republican or an idiot would think that you can scare terrorists off. The way you should go about it is to make as much of the world as possible prosperous (or at least not in poverty, starved, and in constant danger of death). With more happy people, there are fewer terrorists.
A cubic shitload? Wouldn't that make it 9 dimensional? Or are you using feces of a one dimensional being?
So in other words, metamod needs an option +1 Moderation Was Funny.
With public libraries, that's more a problem than you'd think. They have to be perfectly locked down, or you'll have some kid who thinks himself (gah, that seems wrong after reading the entire pronoun debate up above) cool coming in and doing whatever he can to mess it up. And I have never seen a perfectly locked down Windows machine. So in his case a lot of it depends on how good the rest of the library staff is (whether they can recognize the troublemakers and kick them out) and how big the library in general is (more people = more troublemakers).
Web apps might be a bit hackish, yes, but they're quite useful. Look, for example, at an airline booking site--that's a web app. So are eBay and Amazon. Can you think of any other reasonable way to allow everyone to book flights or buy stuff online? Web apps also drastically reduce the cost of developing and distributing the program in a corporate intranet.
Also, they're hackish because the languages used (namely HTML) weren't designed with web apps in mind and thus are missing a number of features that would be good for them. whatwg is trying to remedy that.
No, I didn't. Thank you. :-)
That's a bug with incremental layout in Gecko. It's been fixed.
FYI: incremental layout is displaying part of a page before the whole page has come over the internet
No, use CSS whenever you need (or want) to say how something's displayed. Use Javascript whenever you need (or want) a page to be dynamic (but don't use it for things that you can accomplish with CSS/HTML!). And yes, as you say, HTML 4 still works. Just make sure your html is semantic.
It was originally designed that way, but now it is quite useful for documents, small programs (like rot13ing text, or something on a similar scale) and web applications (where a user interacts with a program that is actually on the server by means of a web browser and an html interface)
The other stuff you wrote was good, though.
Actually, the good ones are both. The CSS 2.1 spec is wonderful for authors if they're already familiar with CSS (ie, if they're not a clueless newbie, but just need to learn how to do something), and the html 4.01 spec is decent too.
WHAT??? A DTD defines (in a machine parseable way) what the legal syntax for a language is. CSS defines how stuff's displayed on the screen. They are for completely different purposes.
How ironic that the two examples of missing functionality you give are very definitely easily possible, and the way they're possible makes complete sense.
For the first, make the parent element position:relative to take it out of the normal flow, and then use position:absolute on the child. Yes, you can position it from whatever corner you want, and yes, you can use lengths or percentages.
For the "specifying on what layer ..." I assume you want the z-index. Mozilla supports that, and IIRC IE does also. (Mozilla has a bug (#78087) with negative z-indicies).
CSS was well designed. It has a few problems, most of which will be solved in CSS3 (image borders, some numbered list stuff) but it is a good spec.
And yes, I've read it. The whole thing.
Hmm, they don't even allow linking to the front page. How odd. I just filed Bug 254852 on that, which of course you can't get to from here. :-P
P.S.: If you remove the contractions, your sig becomes a haiku :-)
That doesn't mean that Mozilla wasn't right in the first place. HTML can be buggy and still be valid, just not be what you wanted to write.
You mean like:
?
Nope. The specs contain all sorts of optional stuff. There's also a lot of things where the functionality is defined but the display isn't, like form controls. Two browsers could both be completly standards compliant, but still display stuff quite differently.
Okay, after deleting the As I get
Frankly, I'm stumped. Wanna give a hint about the "obvious" part?
No it isn't. Linux isn't an email client, and one isn't occasional.
Again, no it's not redeeming.
Thing that bugs me most about them is they take a full few seconds to show up on the screen, during which time you can't use the computer. You have to just sit there and wait.
IIRC, no. shell: didn't exist back then.
There are two programs: one is the OS, the other is a user program, connected to the internet. There are four possibilities for (this part of) how they interact:
Neither of them checks to see if the input is coming from a trusted source Obviously bad, as was the case here Just the user program checks to see if the data is trusted Provides the security, but means this has to be implemented in every single user program Just the OS checks to see if the input is trusted Provides security, and only needs to be implemented once Both the OS and the user program check to see if the input is trusted Redundant, though arguably more secureIf you're paranoid, you should have both of them check to see if the data is trusted, otherwise just the OS should check.
My diagnosis is that this is a severe bug in Windows and is Microsoft's fault, however, since it was there, Mozilla should have blocked it from showing up.
The fact that once they realized it could be a problem they did block it is only a good thing.
Mabye *n*x just doesn't have insecure protocol handlers? (Don't ask me...)
Because shell: doesn't exist on Linux.
shell: is like any other protocol, such as http: or ftp:. What Necko (the networking part of Mozilla) does is if it doesn't recognize the protocol, it asks the OS. Windows recognizes shell:, and lets it do pretty much anything. None of the other OSs recognize it, which is why this only affects Windows
Go to the Tools menu. Click on Options. Click on the Advanced panel icon. Open the Software Update section.
How about Javascript? You run with that off?
Well obviously there has to be a Liberal Media somewhere...
From the article:
So in other words, this fix only changes a pref which is easy to do without a huge download, etc. and is easy for the clueless, since it requires one click. Future versions will have a fix for the problem in general, rather than just this specific case.