As a counterpoint to this, i'm a huge fan of the Flaming Lips - I currently own five of their CDs. If it was not for the availabilty of peer-to-peer file transfer software that would be ~£50/~$75 that would have been spent elsewhere - you see i'd heard a single song by them when flicking through some music channels (Fight Test from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots) so when I got a change downloaded a few albums of theirs and fell in love with the music. There are many, many other bands who's patronage they've gained from me thanks to the ability to download albumbs before purchase and the same goes for Films and TV series.
But hey, all copyright infringement hurts their profit margins so I must be a 'thief'.
Well Sony, Lycos, Yahoo &/. don't seem to have any problems with with scalability, and the last two specifically are amongst the most visited sites on the net. I don't know about yourself but if I was in your shoes that would be more than enough information for me to at least look into mySQL as a way to save my employers money, that is of course unless I was a Microsoft apologist.
I've been playing WH40k on and off for the last decade, and although I agree with you to some extent that Games Workshop do keep 'upgrading' the rules and releasing newer versions of the minis, in their defence you can use the older minis in games with the new rules assuming the equiptment on the mini is the same as on your list. For example, I still semi-regularily play at my local Games Workshop store using some minis from the Rogue Trader era without problems. Additionally, the models have improved leaps and bounds so the re-release of certain troop types is quite justified.
My main beef with Games Workshop is the constant price hikes they insist on, the cost of some minis has doubled in the 10 years i've been playing and I can't see rate at which they increase the cost slowing down,
Interoperability - with a GNU/Linux system I know that data I produce today will be just as accessible 10 years down the line thanks to open formats and standards, I cannot say the same for Microsoft's products. Additionally Samba lets me work nicely with Windows shares, Firefox allows me to view webpages written with all but the worst markup and OpenOffice allow me to recover old MSWord documents better than newer versions of MSWord does.
Freedom (again) - I know that with GNU/Linux (specifically my favorite distro, Debian) I'm not locked in a forced upgrade cycle where if I don't fork over the cash for an OS upgrade every five years or so that I can have the latest features/web browser etc.
Warm fuzzy feeling - so shoot me, I couldn't think of a fifth thing:P
You're entirely missing the point. The idea behind this is likely be specifically to avoid such horrible, unmaintainable conditional serving of webpages depending on the device that we saw in the late 90s. Stict HTML 4.01 should be viewable on any browser worth it's existance whereas non-standard propriatary elements will be by their very nature targetted at a single browser, thus requiring the very conditional serving of content that you seem so worried about.
As for an arbratary rule, in this case I think the benefit of it's existance outweighs any percieved issues with it's existance.
That URI works fine in 1.0.7 under both GNU/Linux and win32 - I suspect the problem is related to an extension you have installed (much like the conflict between LiveHTTPHeaders and SessionSaver which makes all file uploads crash Fx).
Except the Apache HTTPD Server (I assume this is what you meant by "anyone who compiles apache") is licenced under the Apache Licence v2.0, which happens to be GPL v2 compatible. Also, although IANAL I would disagree that binarys are considered derivative works unless you modified the source of said binarys - they're the explicit intended result of making source available to download in this context, following your logic running Microsoft Windows on my desktop would create derivative works of some of the programs that make it up - I am afterall loading parts of them into memory aren't I?
As for your apocalyptic (for the Free/Open Source world) prediction, I really don't see it ever happening. As an interesting side-note though, the Linux kernel is exclusively licenced under the GPL v2, because the 'or later versions' clause was (for whatever reason) removed.
Obviosly no more than the latest version of XFree. The thing you must keep in mind is that the Debian team choose one version of major packages and generally stick with it throughout the lifetime of the branch (from unstable through to testing and finally stable) and backport all necessary bugfixes and security fixes to it without adding features. Switching from XFree to Xorg just for the sake of it would lose all that work, and they couldn't just change the names and backport fixes from Xorh because of how different Debian's version of XFree is from the 'official' release.
Agreed! SNES/Megadrive (Genesis to the Americans) era games were the games with the best balance between gamplay and graphics - before that machines simply weren't powerful enought to create such beautiful games so the emphasis was (rightly) placed upon gameplay and afterwards the emphasis has shifted towards prettier graphics and 'interactive movies' for the most part (with notable exceptions).
[...] there have been no improvements to the standard significant enough for me to EOL all my old site code.
I very strongly disagree, since IE5 and NN6 were became the majority browsers it has been possible to design pages only with semantic, plain HTML 4.01 styled with CSS. Now that IE6 and Fx1 are the current standard browsers (with ~85% and ~10% of market share respectively) and Opera/Safari/KHTML taking the rest there is no good reason not to go down the semantic HTML and CSS route, other than blind pigheadedness and an unwillinness to be dragged into the new millenium. There are huge benefits to such designs both for users, disabled and non-disabled alike, low bandwidth and broadband users alike and yourself as the webmaster/designer.
No offense but this just sounds elitist to me. `I use XHTML, and EOL HTML because I'ma "proffesional" all you writing HTML just simply aren't "proffesionals"'? Again my users never once judged the validity of my website based on what HTML standard I'm using or how "proffesional" they think my coding practices are.
The thing is I DON'T use XHTML, as i've already said repeatedly. If you're not even going to read my posts than please don't bother replying to them. What I was saying is the fucking terrible mess of nested tables, depreciated elements and attributes and non-validating code is incredibly, mind-boggling unprofessional. Using five levels of nested tables for layout is about as far as one can get from best-practice when it comes to designing webpages. The 'videos' page of your "streetfire.net" page is 110Kb just for the non-compliant kruft-filled markup, that's fucking insane. Further said markup has no semantic meaning.
Now really, are you going to address any of my arguements or just continue rambling on about markup practices from the early ninetys?
That is a value of course, but for the time it takes to render a site on multiple devices (hand held Cell phone.... apparently Brail Browser too considering what that Anonymous Coward wrote) It's almost.... not it is easier for me to just go ahead and write a new site for each device and let the CMS propogate content as needed.
It may be, it may not be. But there are several things you don't seem to have considered: Firstly once you've made a stylesheet it's done - you can use it for one page, one thousand pages or a million pages. Then when you decide to change the layout or colour scheme you have a handfull of simple files to edit rather than whatever custom hack you've made's method. Secondly the custom stylesheets work 'automagically' without user interaction or any extra effort on your behalf and no, you don't have to target every media type, just the ones pertinant to the site at hand. So rather than a hyperlink to a 'print version' it's simply printed with the print stylesheet - without having a 'handheld devices go here' link you just let the user agent use the handheld styleshet.
It's not as Sexy of a solution, but it saves oceans of times for cross browser/device compliance. Case in point.NET server pages with complex client side controls render fine in Safari and OSX-Firefox, but blow up in OSX-Internet Explorer. It's easier for me to just write a custom IE-OSX specific control, than it is to make a single control work in all environments. Google had this same plroblem with early releases of GMail too, and we all know they are the ultimate God's of how to do things right....(faceous).
Do you have any idea how tiny Mac/IE5's market share really is? That's like saying you don't use CSS at all because 0.01% of your users view it in NN4. And of course you're forgetting that the job of the web is to propegate and present information - our ability to make the information look nice is just a bonus.
My point is that you write code to cater to the largest possible demographic of your user base. They don't care if it's XHTML or HTML 1.0 if they can't tell the difference in the end result, and they also don't care how sexy or basic your code is either.
Agreed, but as a professional I do. Further I have to maintain my markup for a potentially indefinite period of time, and from past experience some extra effort made at the beginning can make a huge difference later on.
Now I can go the new standards route, but why should I if it' just as easy... no easier to just pop it out in the old trusted reliable format?
Once again it's a matter of professionalism, it disgusts me just how unproffesional the majority of the 'website development' industry is - although it's still relatively young that is no excuse.
So it's against the law to make a video website that doesn't cater to blind people?
Disabled != Blind.
'Disabled' is a term which covers a broad spectrum of ailments from the minor to the very severe. 10% of all men are at least partially colour blind, there are users like myself who although not blind are short-sighted so often need to up the font size, there are users whos eyes are fine but have difficulty with delicate motor control (here DHTML menus can be a big pain) etc etc.
Well, in 90 days we've gone from 1,000 unique visitors/day to 40,000 with 30% week to week growth and are now pushing a sustained 70Mbps of traffic. Are you trying to tell me that if I designed the site using XHTML the site would be more popular?
Nowhere did I say that the popularity of a site is dependant on the underlying markup -/. is an excellent example to prove this is not so. What I did say is that for most popular sites significant bandwidth gains can be made by using minimalistic semantic markup and stylesheets when compared to the old-school cruft filled nested tables. Of course if you're serving streaming media the benefits of this are probably minimalistic in the grand scheme of things.
You could however get some benefit from seperating presentation from content if you decide to redisign the site at a later point or wish to give users the choice between multiple styles.
Selectors like "input[type=password]:hover"? There are lots of wonderful ways we as designers could use the complex CSS selectors specified in the CSS 2.1 spec if only a certain browser made by Microsoft supported them...
Also you can use all the goodness of CSS1, 2.1 and 3 with HTML 4.01 so there's still no need for you to switch to XHTML:)
Replying to myself because I forgot to mention one very important benefit: Being able to target stylesheets to specific devices is wonderful - all of my sites look as good (although differnet) in handheld browsers, when people print out my pages they get a clean copy with few or no colours, no superlous navigation etc etc.
Personally I will be glad when dinosaurs like yourself finally become extinct - sure i'm just some young 'whippersnapper' compared to you, i've only been doing website development since 1998 but I have adopted my practices as the nature of the web has changed, both for the benefit of low-bandwidth users, disabled users and such as well as for myself. Doing all styling with a CSS file makes my life an order of mangitude easier when I have to go back to a previous site and do a redesign. Semantic, non-presentation markup saves significantly on bandwidth used and when combined with caching of stylesheets the bandwidth saving can be fairly significant on more popular sites. The lack of junk markup means my sites have a significantly higher content to markup ratio than they once did (and competitors still do) and there is significant evidence that search engines use this as one of their variables for search rankings.
OTOH I still mostly use HTML 4.01 because for most sites there is currently no real reason to use XHTML and probably wont be for some time and I refuse to send XHTML as text/html on my clients sites (although most of my own site is currently XHTML 1.0 valid) because that is not what it is. One must find a sane balance between the almost 'faddish' XHTML & CSS pushing and the realities of modern user agents and for now there is nothing I can do with XHTML (that works in all popular browsers) that I cannot do with HTML 4.01, and HTML 4.01 is alot more supported than XHTML and will be for the forseeable future.
Untrue, one can develop XUL applications that run in the browser window for use only with the XUL platform, of course it would be very foolish to do so without at least offering a plain HTML/JavaScript version for browsers not based on the XUL platform (and no worse that relying on ActiveX or Java imho).
May I suggest you try a Fx nightly of the 1.1 branch? After recently doing so myself I feel quite strongly it's support of the SVG open standard may be the 'killer feature' it needs to make a large dent in Internet Explorer's market-share.
The nightly builds can be grabbed from ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/
Some variations on the svg tiger can be found through Google.
Except that this was with a slipstreamed copy of XP w/ SP2 and it cannot support my hardware, and bare in mind this hardware is nearing a year and a half old now and is not some wierd, esoteric motherboard - it's a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro 2 so yes, I can make the comparison.
Eclipe, i'd say that Eclipse for developing Java applications is far superior to Visual Studio for developing any of the languages it supports (although admitedly i've only used it with C++).
Actually, WinXP doesn't detect my gigabit ethernet card, nor does it detect my on-board SATA controller or drives and about a half-dozen other (but minor) devices - this makes setting XP up a huge pain in the arse, requiring a floppy with drivers for my SATA card on installation and a copy of my ethernet drivers on my USB memory stick post-install (I access the internet over my LAN, so I can't just download them from the Gigabyte site). Debian/Sarge otoh automagically detects all my hardware (including an obscure TV card) and sets it all up for me with no fuss, all I have to do post-install is apt-get the nv binary drivers from the non-free repoistory...
Post-install of Sarge, only selecting the Desktop environment gives me the choice between Gnome/KDE, the choice between Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla Suite for my web browser - the choice between Evolution and something else for my Email client - the choice between Kopete or Gaim for my IM client... on top of this I can simply su and apt-get Firefox/Thunderbird/Dillo and so on as I need. Then when patches are released I can apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and have all of these applications updated - i'm sorry but Windows will probably never reach this ease of use.
Slashdot Mirror
As a counterpoint to this, i'm a huge fan of the Flaming Lips - I currently own five of their CDs. If it was not for the availabilty of peer-to-peer file transfer software that would be ~£50/~$75 that would have been spent elsewhere - you see i'd heard a single song by them when flicking through some music channels (Fight Test from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots) so when I got a change downloaded a few albums of theirs and fell in love with the music. There are many, many other bands who's patronage they've gained from me thanks to the ability to download albumbs before purchase and the same goes for Films and TV series.
But hey, all copyright infringement hurts their profit margins so I must be a 'thief'.
Well Sony, Lycos, Yahoo & /. don't seem to have any problems with with scalability, and the last two specifically are amongst the most visited sites on the net. I don't know about yourself but if I was in your shoes that would be more than enough information for me to at least look into mySQL as a way to save my employers money, that is of course unless I was a Microsoft apologist.
I've been playing WH40k on and off for the last decade, and although I agree with you to some extent that Games Workshop do keep 'upgrading' the rules and releasing newer versions of the minis, in their defence you can use the older minis in games with the new rules assuming the equiptment on the mini is the same as on your list. For example, I still semi-regularily play at my local Games Workshop store using some minis from the Rogue Trader era without problems. Additionally, the models have improved leaps and bounds so the re-release of certain troop types is quite justified.
My main beef with Games Workshop is the constant price hikes they insist on, the cost of some minis has doubled in the 10 years i've been playing and I can't see rate at which they increase the cost slowing down,
You're entirely missing the point. The idea behind this is likely be specifically to avoid such horrible, unmaintainable conditional serving of webpages depending on the device that we saw in the late 90s. Stict HTML 4.01 should be viewable on any browser worth it's existance whereas non-standard propriatary elements will be by their very nature targetted at a single browser, thus requiring the very conditional serving of content that you seem so worried about.
As for an arbratary rule, in this case I think the benefit of it's existance outweighs any percieved issues with it's existance.
That URI works fine in 1.0.7 under both GNU/Linux and win32 - I suspect the problem is related to an extension you have installed (much like the conflict between LiveHTTPHeaders and SessionSaver which makes all file uploads crash Fx).
Except the Apache HTTPD Server (I assume this is what you meant by "anyone who compiles apache") is licenced under the Apache Licence v2.0, which happens to be GPL v2 compatible. Also, although IANAL I would disagree that binarys are considered derivative works unless you modified the source of said binarys - they're the explicit intended result of making source available to download in this context, following your logic running Microsoft Windows on my desktop would create derivative works of some of the programs that make it up - I am afterall loading parts of them into memory aren't I?
As for your apocalyptic (for the Free/Open Source world) prediction, I really don't see it ever happening. As an interesting side-note though, the Linux kernel is exclusively licenced under the GPL v2, because the 'or later versions' clause was (for whatever reason) removed.
Am I the only person who gets the (not-so-subtle) reference to Brasseye?
http://technocrat.net/
It's called GimpShop.
Obviosly no more than the latest version of XFree. The thing you must keep in mind is that the Debian team choose one version of major packages and generally stick with it throughout the lifetime of the branch (from unstable through to testing and finally stable) and backport all necessary bugfixes and security fixes to it without adding features. Switching from XFree to Xorg just for the sake of it would lose all that work, and they couldn't just change the names and backport fixes from Xorh because of how different Debian's version of XFree is from the 'official' release.
Agreed! SNES/Megadrive (Genesis to the Americans) era games were the games with the best balance between gamplay and graphics - before that machines simply weren't powerful enought to create such beautiful games so the emphasis was (rightly) placed upon gameplay and afterwards the emphasis has shifted towards prettier graphics and 'interactive movies' for the most part (with notable exceptions).
I very strongly disagree, since IE5 and NN6 were became the majority browsers it has been possible to design pages only with semantic, plain HTML 4.01 styled with CSS. Now that IE6 and Fx1 are the current standard browsers (with ~85% and ~10% of market share respectively) and Opera/Safari/KHTML taking the rest there is no good reason not to go down the semantic HTML and CSS route, other than blind pigheadedness and an unwillinness to be dragged into the new millenium. There are huge benefits to such designs both for users, disabled and non-disabled alike, low bandwidth and broadband users alike and yourself as the webmaster/designer.
The thing is I DON'T use XHTML, as i've already said repeatedly. If you're not even going to read my posts than please don't bother replying to them. What I was saying is the fucking terrible mess of nested tables, depreciated elements and attributes and non-validating code is incredibly, mind-boggling unprofessional. Using five levels of nested tables for layout is about as far as one can get from best-practice when it comes to designing webpages. The 'videos' page of your "streetfire.net" page is 110Kb just for the non-compliant kruft-filled markup, that's fucking insane. Further said markup has no semantic meaning.
Now really, are you going to address any of my arguements or just continue rambling on about markup practices from the early ninetys?
It may be, it may not be. But there are several things you don't seem to have considered: Firstly once you've made a stylesheet it's done - you can use it for one page, one thousand pages or a million pages. Then when you decide to change the layout or colour scheme you have a handfull of simple files to edit rather than whatever custom hack you've made's method. Secondly the custom stylesheets work 'automagically' without user interaction or any extra effort on your behalf and no, you don't have to target every media type, just the ones pertinant to the site at hand. So rather than a hyperlink to a 'print version' it's simply printed with the print stylesheet - without having a 'handheld devices go here' link you just let the user agent use the handheld styleshet.
Do you have any idea how tiny Mac/IE5's market share really is? That's like saying you don't use CSS at all because 0.01% of your users view it in NN4. And of course you're forgetting that the job of the web is to propegate and present information - our ability to make the information look nice is just a bonus.
Agreed, but as a professional I do. Further I have to maintain my markup for a potentially indefinite period of time, and from past experience some extra effort made at the beginning can make a huge difference later on.
Once again it's a matter of professionalism, it disgusts me just how unproffesional the majority of the 'website development' industry is - although it's still relatively young that is no excuse.
Disabled != Blind.
'Disabled' is a term which covers a broad spectrum of ailments from the minor to the very severe. 10% of all men are at least partially colour blind, there are users like myself who although not blind are short-sighted so often need to up the font size, there are users whos eyes are fine but have difficulty with delicate motor control (here DHTML menus can be a big pain) etc etc.
Nowhere did I say that the popularity of a site is dependant on the underlying markup - /. is an excellent example to prove this is not so. What I did say is that for most popular sites significant bandwidth gains can be made by using minimalistic semantic markup and stylesheets when compared to the old-school cruft filled nested tables. Of course if you're serving streaming media the benefits of this are probably minimalistic in the grand scheme of things.
You could however get some benefit from seperating presentation from content if you decide to redisign the site at a later point or wish to give users the choice between multiple styles.
Selectors like "input[type=password]:hover"? There are lots of wonderful ways we as designers could use the complex CSS selectors specified in the CSS 2.1 spec if only a certain browser made by Microsoft supported them...
Also you can use all the goodness of CSS1, 2.1 and 3 with HTML 4.01 so there's still no need for you to switch to XHTML :)
Replying to myself because I forgot to mention one very important benefit: Being able to target stylesheets to specific devices is wonderful - all of my sites look as good (although differnet) in handheld browsers, when people print out my pages they get a clean copy with few or no colours, no superlous navigation etc etc.
Pre-excuse: I'm not entirely sober right now...
HTML 3? - 330 errors. Nearly as bad as /. ;)
Personally I will be glad when dinosaurs like yourself finally become extinct - sure i'm just some young 'whippersnapper' compared to you, i've only been doing website development since 1998 but I have adopted my practices as the nature of the web has changed, both for the benefit of low-bandwidth users, disabled users and such as well as for myself. Doing all styling with a CSS file makes my life an order of mangitude easier when I have to go back to a previous site and do a redesign. Semantic, non-presentation markup saves significantly on bandwidth used and when combined with caching of stylesheets the bandwidth saving can be fairly significant on more popular sites. The lack of junk markup means my sites have a significantly higher content to markup ratio than they once did (and competitors still do) and there is significant evidence that search engines use this as one of their variables for search rankings.
OTOH I still mostly use HTML 4.01 because for most sites there is currently no real reason to use XHTML and probably wont be for some time and I refuse to send XHTML as text/html on my clients sites (although most of my own site is currently XHTML 1.0 valid) because that is not what it is. One must find a sane balance between the almost 'faddish' XHTML & CSS pushing and the realities of modern user agents and for now there is nothing I can do with XHTML (that works in all popular browsers) that I cannot do with HTML 4.01, and HTML 4.01 is alot more supported than XHTML and will be for the forseeable future.
Untrue, one can develop XUL applications that run in the browser window for use only with the XUL platform, of course it would be very foolish to do so without at least offering a plain HTML/JavaScript version for browsers not based on the XUL platform (and no worse that relying on ActiveX or Java imho).
The nightly builds can be grabbed from ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/
Some variations on the svg tiger can be found through Google.
Except that this was with a slipstreamed copy of XP w/ SP2 and it cannot support my hardware, and bare in mind this hardware is nearing a year and a half old now and is not some wierd, esoteric motherboard - it's a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro 2 so yes, I can make the comparison.
Eclipe, i'd say that Eclipse for developing Java applications is far superior to Visual Studio for developing any of the languages it supports (although admitedly i've only used it with C++).
Actually, WinXP doesn't detect my gigabit ethernet card, nor does it detect my on-board SATA controller or drives and about a half-dozen other (but minor) devices - this makes setting XP up a huge pain in the arse, requiring a floppy with drivers for my SATA card on installation and a copy of my ethernet drivers on my USB memory stick post-install (I access the internet over my LAN, so I can't just download them from the Gigabyte site). Debian/Sarge otoh automagically detects all my hardware (including an obscure TV card) and sets it all up for me with no fuss, all I have to do post-install is apt-get the nv binary drivers from the non-free repoistory... Post-install of Sarge, only selecting the Desktop environment gives me the choice between Gnome/KDE, the choice between Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla Suite for my web browser - the choice between Evolution and something else for my Email client - the choice between Kopete or Gaim for my IM client... on top of this I can simply su and apt-get Firefox/Thunderbird/Dillo and so on as I need. Then when patches are released I can apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and have all of these applications updated - i'm sorry but Windows will probably never reach this ease of use.
Note the subdomain ;)
One would assume that update.mozilla.org is whitelisted to allow the automagical updater to work for normal users...