"Although the defendant manufactures and sells these 'GeckoBoots' to the public, the public is not warned that the average kitchen ceiling is painted and thus not an appropriate surface for the GeckoBoots, nor is the public warned against attempting to use GeckoBoots near a dishdrainer filled with glasses and knives...."
Again, HTML is not a layout language.... That's right, CSS that specifies the layout....
True, but my question has long been: why is CSS not better at layout? Say I want a page with a header, three columns of content, and a footer that gets pushed down according to whichever column has the longest content. That's a very common layout task, and it's dead simple to do with a table, but so difficult with CSS that (the last time I checked) it was considered a difficult problem even for authors of CSS books! (I haven't tried your link to the Holy Grail on A List Apart, but you must admit that a layout solution that relies on negative margins is the very definition of a kludge.)
Don't get me wrong: I love using style sheets, and most of the time I'm grateful for CSS. But I hate it that some important things that were once easy have now become hard, all in the name of avoiding tables.
I'm simply not going to buy anything from Universal or it's parent company.
I'm not arguing with you, but that's a very long list, covering everybody on A&M, Def Jam, Geffen, Interscope, Motown, Mercury, Polydor, and more. I'd hate to give up some of the names on those lists.
Another idea: shaft Universal by buying only used CDs, because the labels get no additional royalties after the first sale. (Neither do the artists, of course.) Rip your favorite tracks and sell or trade the CDs back to the store. This is (AFAIK) entirely legal to do, supports small local businesses, and depending on your tastes you'll save at least 30%, often 50%, and sometimes much more compared to buying new CDs or iTunes tracks.
If you have the time and really know what you're doing, you can even make money from the record labels! Buy CDs cheaply at flea markets, charity thrift shops and garage sales, then sell or trade 'em at the record store. Don't count on paying the rent by buying retail and selling wholesale this way, but you might be able to pay for your music habit and even make a profit. (Warning: stores that deal in used merchandise are always picky, and many of the CDs, records, books, etc. at thrift shops etc. are there because they are very common or unpopular or damaged and thus near-impossible to sell. The CDs at your local thrift shop may have been donated by the local used record store getting rid of worthless stock!)
Duh, you're right, I thought attached images and base64 were different, but they're really the same. I often look at spam email source code, but not real email source code. My mistake.
or just making the pitch come in the form of an image
My question: why don't ISPs filter for spam based on emails that contain base64 encoded images? As far as I can recall, I've never gotten a single piece of legitimate email with a base64 image, but 95%+ of the spams I get that have images embed them that way.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 1
this website designer needs some serious help
No kidding! This is the website of "one of India's hottest Web designers"? Forget the coding, the cheesy colors and awkward layout are all you need to condemn it. Is there something in Webvastu that forbids adequate left and right margins for text? And this section on the home page made me laugh:
How to Order?
Click here to know how you can order this book.
...read
OK, maybe it's not fair to make fun of their English ability, but purely in terms of Web usability, it's really odd to have the headline be a question and a link, then have a superfluous "Click here" sentence that doesn't have a link (not that I'm advocating "Click here" links), then a "...read" that has another link to the same order page. Plus, there's a seemingly-out-of-place "Buy this book" link at the top of the page. And the book cover doesn't link to the About the Book page or the order page.
And that's just a two minute review of the home page. Frankly, the design of Slashdot is better (and even better balanced) than her personal site.
1) The Republicans agree to everything the critics want regarding electronic voting machines: greater security, paper trail, whatever, or just ditch the whole idea and go back to paper ballots. 2) The Democrats agree to picture ID for voting (available free to anyone too poor to have one), thorough cleaning of all voter rolls (to eliminate the cemetery voters, and situations like Philadelphia's where there are more registered voters than adult citizens over 18), and increased penalties for vote fraud (snowbirds who vote in Florida and New York, college students who vote at home and at school, bribing the homeless with cigarettes for votes, illegal alien voters, etc.).
My guess, though, is that Republicans would agree to this but Democrats wouldn't, because Democrat vote fraud is widespread and well-established, while Republican vote fraud is rare or is, as in the recent electronic voting machine cases, still hypothetical.
Are its machines not "sexy alternatives to the big, grey box?"
Yes, my first thought on reading the story was: Why bother? Just cut to the chase and give Jonathan Ive the money. I'll bet the next case he does for Apple will be better than anything that comes out of this contest.
Back in April, the semi-reliable (rumor-wise and server-wise) Mac OS Rumors claimed that 10.5 "Leopard" would have some pretty cool "thread farming" technology. I'll quote the whole page:
A critical component of not only Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," but also the Cocoa/Carbon for Windows package (more details in linked article above) will be new code co-developed with Intel that helps break up tasks into multiple threads -- therefore achieving considerably better efficiency on the next generation of multi-core Intel processors. The results we've seen on systems with up to 16 cores of Intel's next-generation "Conroe" desktop CPU architecture were amazing....with 10.4.6 as-is, the first core bears the vast majority of the workload particularly when only one or two resource-intensive apps are running.
Even when lots of different applications, many of them efficiently multi-threaded, are run on 10.4.5 or 10.4.6 only the first two CPUs are used efficiently while the third and fourth are getting plenty of work....but aren't quite living up to their full potential. Each added core after four seems to drop off in efficiency....not because OS X doesn't handle lots of processors properly, it does. In fact it's an industry leader in terms of being ready for the next generation of multicore, multiprocessor technology. It has been since day one and Apple has consistently kept it at the leading edge since then.
The problem is, simply, getting all of those core to have the maximum possible positive effect on the performance of each application. When simulating the realistic workloads of almost every kind of user, more than four cores rapidly lost any effect because there just weren't enough threads, efficiently enough balanced, to make good use of more CPU's.
Leopard changes this in every way that Apple and Intel have been able to devise. The techniques employed include tricks that both companies have been holding at ready for years, and some new things that have been developed in the past year or so to specifically address the way the "Core" (Yonah, Merom and Napa-Merom) and Codename 'Conroe' architectures work. Most of it goes beyond our technical competency; we're sure that the folks at Ars Technica will have a lot to say about this in the next few months as more details leak about the hardware and software involved in these enhancements.
Some, but certainly not all, of these techniques will eventually make their way into Intel's optimized in-house compilers. Some will even become part of the GCC compilers that are critical to building OS X and indeed most Xcode applications, eventually. But right now they are by and large highly experimental, being part of an operating system codebase that is not even quite "alpha" in terms of usability.
That said, it's a thing of beauty to see 16 cores used with bizarrely perfect symmetry even when performing relatively simple tasks that have nearly no application-level threading in their collective codebases. 32 cores work nearly as well, and somehow manage to make tasks that would normally only max out one or two cores and be unable to go beyond that point, spread out across nearly all the CPU's with a beautiful cascade effect created for just such a demonstration in the Leopard version of Activity Monitor (just wait until you see all the 3D OpenGL visualizations that have been whippped up....but that's another article entirely and bordering on embargoed territory to boot!).
How could they forget Armageddon? It's a movie premised on the idea that it's easier to teach oil drillers to be astronauts than teach astronauts how to drill a hole. It's got a shuttle docking on the outside ring of a rotating space station. It's got a single Russian cosmonaut refueling the shuttle through a single hose he wrestles around. It's got a nuclear bomb that must be planted exactly 800 feet below the surface of an asteroid, giving an excuse for dramatic dialog of the "Oh no! We're only at 790 feet!" sort. It's got inappropriate machine guns. It's the perfect example of a film about science and technology written and directed by Hollywood types who never took a word of advice from any pesky technical advisors.
These "Banned Books" lists that librarians like to trumpet tend to be lists of books which were ever banned anywhere by any library at any time, not books which are banned today. So if they can find that some old biddy in Vermont in 1903 didn't like "Huckleberry Finn", it goes straight on the list. The conclusion that you're supposed to draw is that Literature is Under Attack Even Today by Reactionaries who are hiding under your bed.
In general I agree, though there are recent complaints about Huckleberry Finn (because it includes the "n-word").
But there's another kind of "banning" that doesn't get included: bookstores refusing to carry nonfiction books they don't like. (I know this isn't "censorship" because it doesn't involve government action, but it is a form of "banning.") Recently the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, famous for supporting banned books and authors, told a customer "We don't carry books by fascists" when some asked for a book by Oriana Fallaci, who (ironically) actually fought against real fascists in World War II. There are other cases of books by conservative authors that have been intentionally misfiled by clerks in an attempt to hide them, or of bookstores that refuse to special order a book they don't like. I know this happened to The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS by Michael Fumento when it was published in 1990, but I've never seen it listed as a "banned book."
I use Goo Gone for getting stickers and adhesive residue off of books and such, and since it doesn't damage paperback books, it should be fine for plastic surfaces. It's available at most any hardware store.
It's the old "stable, fast, on schedule; pick two"
Very true, and at the risk of drifting offtopic, I first heard this "three qualities, pick two" proverb over 30 years ago under the title of "The Printer's Triangle": the corners were labeled Good, Fast, and Cheap and the caption was "Pick any two." Does anyone know the origin of this bit of wisdom? Do other businesses have other versions?
Back in April, the semi-reliable (rumor-wise and server-wise) Mac OS Rumors claimed that Leopard would have some pretty cool "thread farming" technology. I'll quote the whole page because their server is often down:
A critical component of not only Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," but also the Cocoa/Carbon for Windows package (more details in linked article above) will be new code co-developed with Intel that helps break up tasks into multiple threads -- therefore achieving considerably better efficiency on the next generation of multi-core Intel processors. The results we've seen on systems with up to 16 cores of Intel's next-generation "Conroe" desktop CPU architecture were amazing....with 10.4.6 as-is, the first core bears the vast majority of the workload particularly when only one or two resource-intensive apps are running.
Even when lots of different applications, many of them efficiently multi-threaded, are run on 10.4.5 or 10.4.6 only the first two CPUs are used efficiently while the third and fourth are getting plenty of work....but aren't quite living up to their full potential. Each added core after four seems to drop off in efficiency....not because OS X doesn't handle lots of processors properly, it does. In fact it's an industry leader in terms of being ready for the next generation of multicore, multiprocessor technology. It has been since day one and Apple has consistently kept it at the leading edge since then.
The problem is, simply, getting all of those core to have the maximum possible positive effect on the performance of each application. When simulating the realistic workloads of almost every kind of user, more than four cores rapidly lost any effect because there just weren't enough threads, efficiently enough balanced, to make good use of more CPU's.
Leopard changes this in every way that Apple and Intel have been able to devise. The techniques employed include tricks that both companies have been holding at ready for years, and some new things that have been developed in the past year or so to specifically address the way the "Core" (Yonah, Merom and Napa-Merom) and Codename 'Conroe' architectures work. Most of it goes beyond our technical competency; we're sure that the folks at Ars Technica will have a lot to say about this in the next few months as more details leak about the hardware and software involved in these enhancements.
Some, but certainly not all, of these techniques will eventually make their way into Intel's optimized in-house compilers. Some will even become part of the GCC compilers that are critical to building OS X and indeed most Xcode applications, eventually. But right now they are by and large highly experimental, being part of an operating system codebase that is not even quite "alpha" in terms of usability.
That said, it's a thing of beauty to see 16 cores used with bizarrely perfect symmetry even when performing relatively simple tasks that have nearly no application-level threading in their collective codebases. 32 cores work nearly as well, and somehow manage to make tasks that would normally only max out one or two cores and be unable to go beyond that point, spread out across nearly all the CPU's with a beautiful cascade effect created for just such a demonstration in the Leopard version of Activity Monitor (just wait until you see all the 3D OpenGL visualizations that have been whippped up....but that's another article entirely and bordering on embargoed territory to boot!).
From the sound of things, I'd guess it's not an engineering failure so much as a management failure.
I beg to differ. I'm not a structural engineer, but the idea that you hang 3-ton concrete panels from bolts attached to tricky-to-install epoxy anchors in the ceiling sounds insane to me. Have they never heard of that useful relative of the arch, the barrel vault?
And if for some reason that wasn't an option, why not think ahead, make the ceiling with some built-in rebar sticking out of the bottom, and attach the panels to those?
Sure, there was a management failure: it OKed this design! And construction failures may have played a role as well, but the core problem sure looks like poor design to me.
The article also doesn't mention the other crucial time factor, beyond transmission speed: the lag between unconscious perception (when the signal from the eye has reached the brain) and conscious perception (when you are aware that you see something). This lag of roughly half a second was first measured in the 1970s by psychologist Benjamin Libet. We don't sense any lag, though, because we automatically antedate the experience of our sensory inputs, pushing it all a half-second into the past, and thus experiencing everything as "now" even though we are actually a half-second behind. A good book about all this is The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders.
This could have something to do with the deja vu experience: something goes wrong in the brain, and we somehow sense that half-second lag in a way we normally don't. In other words, you did "see that before," but the "before" was only half a second ago!
We don't need eight cores, at least in the short-to-medium term, because it would require fundamentally rewriting all our software to be more parallel
Maybe not, at least for the Mac. Back in April the semi-reliable MacOS Rumors was reporting on "thread-farming" technology that makes more efficient use of multiple processors, which Apple is supposedly working on for OS X 10.5 (Leopard):
[...] it's a thing of beauty to see 16 cores used with bizarrely perfect symmetry even when performing relatively simple tasks that have nearly no application-level threading in their collective codebases. 32 cores work nearly as well, and somehow manage to make tasks that would normally only max out one or two cores and be unable to go beyond that point, spread out across nearly all the CPU's with a beautiful cascade effect created for just such a demonstration in the Leopard version of Activity Monitor [...]
In the '30s, someone planted some larch trees in the shape of a swastika in a pine forest in Germany. It was discovered after reunification and the trees cut down.
I read once a while back that deja vu was caused by the brain processing visual data from one eye marginally faster than from the other. This seems like a logical theory to me, but I am not a neurologist. Has anyone else heard of this?
I hadn't heard that specifically, but as explained in the interesting book The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders, in the 1970s psychologist Benjamin Libet showed that there is a lag of roughly half a second between unconscious and conscious perception. Our brains don't sense any lag, though, because we automatically antedate the experience of our sensory inputs, pushing it a half-second into the past, and thus experiencing everything as "now" even though we are actually a half-second behind.
This could have something to do with the deja vu experience: something goes wrong in the brain, and we somehow sense that half-second lag in a way we normally don't. In other words, you did "see that before," but the "before" was only half a second ago!
Another thing we learn from that: the movies aren't lying when someone is blown up by a bomb or suffers some other quick death and another character says "They never knew what hit them." They don't feel the blast of the bomb that kills them because, if they are killed in less than half a second, their consciousness doesn't have time to experience it.
Koza's scheme calls for an interstate compact that would require states to throw all of their electoral votes behind the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate wins in each state.
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress [...] enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State [...]
The W3C should focus more on design
on
Problems at the W3C
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Very good points, and it relates to my gripe about the W3C: it shortchanges design.
When the web was invented (thanks, Tim) its academic/scientific roots were plain, and unsurprisingly it seemed best suited for putting scientific papers online. Soon designers got more control over type and layout in the form of "tag soup" and tables for layout. Most page layouts involve multiple columns and headers and footers, and we could usually achieve that with nested tables. Plus, pages could be made "liquid," adjusting to the width of the browser window and expanding to fit the content: e.g., more content in the center cells would automatically push the footer down. And this worked (more or less) the same way in all browsers. Huzzah!
Then we got CSS, and many new things, especially involving type, became possible. Huzzah again! And yet in abandoning tables for layout, some things became harder: the creation of a multi-column page, with header and footer, that automatically resizes to window width and adjusts in length according to content, and works the same way in all browsers, is considered a difficult problem even by authors of CSS books! Why has this basic issue not been addressed by a standards committee? Perhaps the focus on separating content and presentation and on accessibility has resulted in shortchanging the presentation side of things?
And why can't content automatically overflow from one div/column to the next, as it can in every page layout program of the last 20+ years? And why don't we have a standard way of embedding a typeface in a web page, so that users can see actual text in the exact font the designer wants, beyond the bare handful that are common to all Windows/Mac/Linux users? I'm sure any web designer could add to this list.
Those are the sort of issues I wish the W3C were working on. Instead, they've spent a huge effort on accessibility for the disabled, and what we seem to have gotten out of it is a set of complex, unworkable guidelines. I don't want to seem heartless, but I'd like to see greater emphasis on standards for enhancing presentation for the majority of us who aren't disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. And who wants a computer-controlled windshield that can crash all on its own? That would be a true Blue Screen of Death!
"Although the defendant manufactures and sells these 'GeckoBoots' to the public, the public is not warned that the average kitchen ceiling is painted and thus not an appropriate surface for the GeckoBoots, nor is the public warned against attempting to use GeckoBoots near a dishdrainer filled with glasses and knives...."
You are correct to be suspicious of the term "social justice." Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek demolished the concept in his book Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice.
True, but my question has long been: why is CSS not better at layout? Say I want a page with a header, three columns of content, and a footer that gets pushed down according to whichever column has the longest content. That's a very common layout task, and it's dead simple to do with a table, but so difficult with CSS that (the last time I checked) it was considered a difficult problem even for authors of CSS books! (I haven't tried your link to the Holy Grail on A List Apart, but you must admit that a layout solution that relies on negative margins is the very definition of a kludge.)
Don't get me wrong: I love using style sheets, and most of the time I'm grateful for CSS. But I hate it that some important things that were once easy have now become hard, all in the name of avoiding tables.
I'm not arguing with you, but that's a very long list, covering everybody on A&M, Def Jam, Geffen, Interscope, Motown, Mercury, Polydor, and more. I'd hate to give up some of the names on those lists.
Another idea: shaft Universal by buying only used CDs, because the labels get no additional royalties after the first sale. (Neither do the artists, of course.) Rip your favorite tracks and sell or trade the CDs back to the store. This is (AFAIK) entirely legal to do, supports small local businesses, and depending on your tastes you'll save at least 30%, often 50%, and sometimes much more compared to buying new CDs or iTunes tracks.
If you have the time and really know what you're doing, you can even make money from the record labels! Buy CDs cheaply at flea markets, charity thrift shops and garage sales, then sell or trade 'em at the record store. Don't count on paying the rent by buying retail and selling wholesale this way, but you might be able to pay for your music habit and even make a profit. (Warning: stores that deal in used merchandise are always picky, and many of the CDs, records, books, etc. at thrift shops etc. are there because they are very common or unpopular or damaged and thus near-impossible to sell. The CDs at your local thrift shop may have been donated by the local used record store getting rid of worthless stock!)
Duh, you're right, I thought attached images and base64 were different, but they're really the same. I often look at spam email source code, but not real email source code. My mistake.
No kidding! This is the website of "one of India's hottest Web designers"? Forget the coding, the cheesy colors and awkward layout are all you need to condemn it. Is there something in Webvastu that forbids adequate left and right margins for text? And this section on the home page made me laugh:
OK, maybe it's not fair to make fun of their English ability, but purely in terms of Web usability, it's really odd to have the headline be a question and a link, then have a superfluous "Click here" sentence that doesn't have a link (not that I'm advocating "Click here" links), then a "...read" that has another link to the same order page. Plus, there's a seemingly-out-of-place "Buy this book" link at the top of the page. And the book cover doesn't link to the About the Book page or the order page.
And that's just a two minute review of the home page. Frankly, the design of Slashdot is better (and even better balanced) than her personal site.
1) The Republicans agree to everything the critics want regarding electronic voting machines: greater security, paper trail, whatever, or just ditch the whole idea and go back to paper ballots. 2) The Democrats agree to picture ID for voting (available free to anyone too poor to have one), thorough cleaning of all voter rolls (to eliminate the cemetery voters, and situations like Philadelphia's where there are more registered voters than adult citizens over 18), and increased penalties for vote fraud (snowbirds who vote in Florida and New York, college students who vote at home and at school, bribing the homeless with cigarettes for votes, illegal alien voters, etc.).
My guess, though, is that Republicans would agree to this but Democrats wouldn't, because Democrat vote fraud is widespread and well-established, while Republican vote fraud is rare or is, as in the recent electronic voting machine cases, still hypothetical.
Yes, my first thought on reading the story was: Why bother? Just cut to the chase and give Jonathan Ive the money. I'll bet the next case he does for Apple will be better than anything that comes out of this contest.
Back in April, the semi-reliable (rumor-wise and server-wise) Mac OS Rumors claimed that 10.5 "Leopard" would have some pretty cool "thread farming" technology. I'll quote the whole page:
How could they forget Armageddon? It's a movie premised on the idea that it's easier to teach oil drillers to be astronauts than teach astronauts how to drill a hole. It's got a shuttle docking on the outside ring of a rotating space station. It's got a single Russian cosmonaut refueling the shuttle through a single hose he wrestles around. It's got a nuclear bomb that must be planted exactly 800 feet below the surface of an asteroid, giving an excuse for dramatic dialog of the "Oh no! We're only at 790 feet!" sort. It's got inappropriate machine guns. It's the perfect example of a film about science and technology written and directed by Hollywood types who never took a word of advice from any pesky technical advisors.
In general I agree, though there are recent complaints about Huckleberry Finn (because it includes the "n-word").
But there's another kind of "banning" that doesn't get included: bookstores refusing to carry nonfiction books they don't like. (I know this isn't "censorship" because it doesn't involve government action, but it is a form of "banning.") Recently the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, famous for supporting banned books and authors, told a customer "We don't carry books by fascists" when some asked for a book by Oriana Fallaci, who (ironically) actually fought against real fascists in World War II. There are other cases of books by conservative authors that have been intentionally misfiled by clerks in an attempt to hide them, or of bookstores that refuse to special order a book they don't like. I know this happened to The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS by Michael Fumento when it was published in 1990, but I've never seen it listed as a "banned book."
I use Goo Gone for getting stickers and adhesive residue off of books and such, and since it doesn't damage paperback books, it should be fine for plastic surfaces. It's available at most any hardware store.
Like this one. And did you all know that Alexander Graham Bell was a pioneer in hydrofoils?
I beg to differ. I'm not a structural engineer, but the idea that you hang 3-ton concrete panels from bolts attached to tricky-to-install epoxy anchors in the ceiling sounds insane to me. Have they never heard of that useful relative of the arch, the barrel vault?
And if for some reason that wasn't an option, why not think ahead, make the ceiling with some built-in rebar sticking out of the bottom, and attach the panels to those?
Sure, there was a management failure: it OKed this design! And construction failures may have played a role as well, but the core problem sure looks like poor design to me.
The article also doesn't mention the other crucial time factor, beyond transmission speed: the lag between unconscious perception (when the signal from the eye has reached the brain) and conscious perception (when you are aware that you see something). This lag of roughly half a second was first measured in the 1970s by psychologist Benjamin Libet. We don't sense any lag, though, because we automatically antedate the experience of our sensory inputs, pushing it all a half-second into the past, and thus experiencing everything as "now" even though we are actually a half-second behind. A good book about all this is The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders.
This could have something to do with the deja vu experience: something goes wrong in the brain, and we somehow sense that half-second lag in a way we normally don't. In other words, you did "see that before," but the "before" was only half a second ago!
In the '30s, someone planted some larch trees in the shape of a swastika in a pine forest in Germany. It was discovered after reunification and the trees cut down.
I hadn't heard that specifically, but as explained in the interesting book The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders, in the 1970s psychologist Benjamin Libet showed that there is a lag of roughly half a second between unconscious and conscious perception. Our brains don't sense any lag, though, because we automatically antedate the experience of our sensory inputs, pushing it a half-second into the past, and thus experiencing everything as "now" even though we are actually a half-second behind.
This could have something to do with the deja vu experience: something goes wrong in the brain, and we somehow sense that half-second lag in a way we normally don't. In other words, you did "see that before," but the "before" was only half a second ago!
Another thing we learn from that: the movies aren't lying when someone is blown up by a bomb or suffers some other quick death and another character says "They never knew what hit them." They don't feel the blast of the bomb that kills them because, if they are killed in less than half a second, their consciousness doesn't have time to experience it.
Very good points, and it relates to my gripe about the W3C: it shortchanges design.
When the web was invented (thanks, Tim) its academic/scientific roots were plain, and unsurprisingly it seemed best suited for putting scientific papers online. Soon designers got more control over type and layout in the form of "tag soup" and tables for layout. Most page layouts involve multiple columns and headers and footers, and we could usually achieve that with nested tables. Plus, pages could be made "liquid," adjusting to the width of the browser window and expanding to fit the content: e.g., more content in the center cells would automatically push the footer down. And this worked (more or less) the same way in all browsers. Huzzah!
Then we got CSS, and many new things, especially involving type, became possible. Huzzah again! And yet in abandoning tables for layout, some things became harder: the creation of a multi-column page, with header and footer, that automatically resizes to window width and adjusts in length according to content, and works the same way in all browsers, is considered a difficult problem even by authors of CSS books! Why has this basic issue not been addressed by a standards committee? Perhaps the focus on separating content and presentation and on accessibility has resulted in shortchanging the presentation side of things?
And why can't content automatically overflow from one div/column to the next, as it can in every page layout program of the last 20+ years? And why don't we have a standard way of embedding a typeface in a web page, so that users can see actual text in the exact font the designer wants, beyond the bare handful that are common to all Windows/Mac/Linux users? I'm sure any web designer could add to this list.
Those are the sort of issues I wish the W3C were working on. Instead, they've spent a huge effort on accessibility for the disabled, and what we seem to have gotten out of it is a set of complex, unworkable guidelines. I don't want to seem heartless, but I'd like to see greater emphasis on standards for enhancing presentation for the majority of us who aren't disabled.
The early helicopter designer Anton Flettner made an interesting attempt in the '20s to harness wind power for ocean travel. The Flettner rotorship Bruckau used two tall, rotating cylinders to harness the Magnus Effect. It worked, but unfortunately turned out to be less efficient than normal propulsion.