Just because it's intentional, doesn't mean it's not a bug. The space-adding hack breaks code, breaks plain-text urls (exacerbated by the "Slashdot doesn't automatically turn URLs into links" bug), generally frustrates people, and can be fixed.
Slashdot's use of tables for layout is the only reason "page-widening trolls" exist. If Slashdot used a simple layout or a CSS layout, a single wide post would not cause other posts to wrap off of the screen. Slashdot's use of tables also makes IE users wait for the entire page to load before they can read the first comment, but the space-adding hack is the most visible result of using tables for layout. See also: More reasons to avoid using tables for layout rather than only using tables for tabular data.
I downloaded this in PDF format by following links from www.prvt.com. Italics as in original, bold mine.
Private Media Group Announces Offer for Napster Trademark and napster.com URL
Barcelona, September 12th, 2002/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Private Media Group Inc.
(Nasdaq: PRVT) a worldwide leader in premium quality adult entertainment products, services
and content, today announced that it has made an offer to Napster, Inc. to acquire the Napster
trademark and napster.com domain name for one million shares of Private common stock.
Private's offer, if accepted by Napster, is subject to customary terms and conditions, including
approval by the court having jurisdiction over Napster, Inc.'s bankruptcy proceeding.
With the Napster trademark, Private plans to create a unique peer-to-peer (P2P) environment that would offer the tens of millions of adult consumers worldwide the opportunity to share adult
content for free as well as access top quality adult content at a reasonable price.
Napster is one of the most recognized names in P2P file-swapping services that allow users to
trade and download files. At its height, Napster had 84 million users of its software and was the
fastest-growing software application ever monitored by online tracking services.
Charles Prast, President and CEO of Private Media Group stated: "Along with Hollywood and
the recording industry, we have become increasingly concerned about the level of copyright
infringement inherent in free peer-to-peer file swapping services. It is estimated that up to 35%
of all content downloaded from P2P sites is of an adult nature, which raises significant issues
both in terms of copyright infringement and lack of controls of access by minors. It is an
industry that presently has over 150 million users.
Mr. Prast continued: "At Private, we feel that there has been an excess of spamming, credit
card fraud, abuse of consumer data, and price gouging among many on-line providers of
adult content. We intend to use the strength of the Napster trademark to build a community for
adults to share content provided by Private and our industry partners.
"Private has high standards, both from a regulatory and financial perspective with a 37 year
track record of legal compliance. Private owns the largest library of quality adult content in the
world, global rights to all our content, and strong technological know-how. All of these factors
make Private uniquely suited to manage a viable and legal P2P network for consumers of
adult content", said Mr. Prast.
Private Media Group is a leading global adult entertainment company that distributes its
content over a wide range of media platforms, including narrow and broadband Internet, DVD
and video, magazines, broadcasting and wireless technologies. Private owns the worldwide
rights to the largest archive of high quality adult content in the world, which it distributes
digitally worldwide and physically in over 35 countries.
This release contains, in addition to historical information, forward-looking statements within
the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which reflect the Company's current judgments
of those issues. However, because those statements are forward-looking and apply to future
events, they are subject to such risks and uncertainties, which could lead to results materially
different than anticipated by the Company.
For further information about Private Media Group, please contact in Barcelona, Spain:
PRIVATE MEDIA GROUP
André F. Ribeiro
Phone: +34 679 983 772
E-mail: andre@private.com
URL: www.prvt.com
GRUPO ALBIÓN
Alejandra Moore Mayorga
Phone: +34 91 531 23 88
Mobile: +34 670 799 33
E-mail: amoore@grupoalbion.com
In your original post, you said you wanted access to the local hard drive. In your reply to the reply to your post, you said you should not have access to your hard drive. I'm confused.
If they release a movie with copy protection, they're evil because they're stopping consumers from wastching the movie the way they want to watch it.
If they release a movie without copy protection, they're evil because the only reason they released the movie on the Internet at all was so they could use the fact that everyone in the warez community has a copy as evidence of lost sales.
If they don't release a movie on the Internet, they're technophobes and we have the right to download, watch, and distribute pirate copies.
Eek, I left out a "not" and made it sound like IE does more incremental rendering than Mozilla. Corrected text:
One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows can not see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it can only do so in Slashdot's light mode.
Re:Line Length
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly.
Isn't this something that can be fixed in Perl?
No. It can only be fixed by reducing the use of the <TABLE> tag and then turning off word-length restrictions.
One of the evil things about using tables for layout is that it forces you to use word-length restrictions on text content and width restrictions on image content. Tables expand when there is a single long word. Since all of the comments are in a single table, one 9000px-long word in a comment causes other paragraphs, even paragraphs in other comments, to wrap at 9000px instead of at the edge of the browser window. Without layout tables, the long word would still make a horizontal scrollbar appear, but other comments would wrap at the edge of the screen as if there had been no scrollbar-forcing comment.
For some other problems with table layouts, see my comment at webmasterworld. Note that tables are great for tabular data, but using them for layout at the same time makes them less useful for tabular data.
One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows would be able to see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it could only do so in Slashdot's light mode.
In Slashdot light mode, fixing the page-expanding-comment problem may be as simple as removing a single table tag. In heavy mode, it requires rewriting the layout to replace several layers of nested tables with divs and CSS. (Examples of existing light and heavy modes: light, heavy.) You can use the "block structure" web development bookmarklet to give each table a border (blue, green, or red depending on nesting level) if you want to see how the tables are nested without digging through the HTML source.
I always get off on the guys who think it's their right to access on content on the internet for free and with no inconvenience to their almighty selves.
That's odd, I don't get off on the web site owners who think it's their right to open extra browser windows in order to make it harder to leave their site while they show me ads.
But you think it's right that most browsers allow sites to open as many windows as they want? It's a security hole, and plugging the hole should not be considered an attack on web site owners.
nytimes.com uses sneaky methods to get around Mozilla's pop-up blocking. In fact, the incompleteness of Mozilla's pop-up blocking is one reason Netscape 7.0 does not include it. The more people that use weak pop-up blocking, the weaker it becomes, because advertisers take time to study and exploit the weaknesses.
Yes, we should try to eliminate passwords, for security against bad passwords, for security against social engineering (calling a victim, posing as tech support, and asking for a password), and for convenience. How about this:
Web sites would stop using passwords, or at least make passwords optional. The login procedure would be similar to the current "lost password" procedure, involving e-mail, instant messages, or perhaps something better integrated with browsers. Many users would log in, accept a permanent login cookie, and be happy that they didn't have to think up and write down Yet Another Password. Mobile users might choose to use a password for the few services that they use in multiple locations if they can only access e-mail from one location. Paranoid users would choose session cookies instead of permanent cookies and might disable logging in by e-mail after setting a password.
How can "you should not quote a message to which you are replying" possibly be common sense? An algorithm that is vulnerable to a "social engineering" attack this simple should not be advertised as a secure algorithm. Encryption and signatures must become transparent and reliable if they are to be used by a large number of people.
I once participated in a similar discussion where I argued that headers like "to", "cc", and "date" should be included in the hash when signing a message, because people will send short messages such as "Today's meeting has been cancelled" whether you want them to or not. (I can't find that discussion now.) I was and still am shocked that the majority of participants in the discussion felt that the hole was the fault of the sender for not including enough context in the original signed message, or of the recipient for not noticing that the message lacked context and/or not suspecting that the e-mail might have been forwarded.
I'm sure that a few of the browsers I've used over the years (AWeb comes to mind) let the user choose how certain abstract things (such as emphasis tags) were rendered, whether it was bold, italic, different font, different size different color, or something like that.
If you want that level of control over how web pages appear, create a user style sheet. You can even use a bookmarklet to apply your styles to a specific site rather than all sites and without restarting your browser. This rule makes <strong> appear as italics rather than bold:
I think including "how should <strong> appear?" in UI prefs would be confusing. First, it's geeky because it involves specific HTML tags. Second, most sites use <b> when they mean <strong>, and prefs that work 20% of the time (or even 80% of the time) are usually not good. Third, misguided web designers might start intentionally using <b> when they mean <strong>, just like they specify text and background colors as black on white for simple pages where the user's preferred colors would work fine.
One example of how javascript can improve a web site: a webmail site could do a client-side sort in javascript-supporting browsers and a server-side sort in other browsers. I know that sorting a table works in at least IE/Win and Mozilla, because I wrote a bookmarklet that does it, yet none of the webmail sites I use do a client-side sort:(
Another example: an inline or onload script can focus a form element if the the user more likely to enter something into the form than scroll the page. Most major search engines do this. Alltheweb doesn't in alchemist mode and Netscape search never does.
Every time I close a tab by middle clicking on it, Moz thinks I just pasted into the location bar, damn annoying..
I think that bug was fixed in Mozilla 1.1 beta. I haven't checked because I use Windows. If it isn't fixed for you in Mozilla 1.1 beta, please add a comment to bug 107147.
How about having the option to disable "paste" on middle click in Linux?
Adding a pref is usually not a good way to fix a bug, partly because only a few users will find the pref and partly because each pref added makes other prefs harder to find. If we add that pref, it won't be because of a bug related to the feature.
here in KDE 2.something I select the window decoration at the edge of the screen
Please report this to the KDE folk as a bug if it's still present in a new version of KDE. Also, try Mozilla's full screen mode.
In general, I think Mozilla should avoid adding preferences that would be better fixed in the operating system. (Examples: anti-alias text of font sizes n and above, make all mouse buttons act like the left mouse button.)
I agree. I think the limit on votes should go. It might also be useful to allow 80 characters of text with each vote, so people can say things like "please fix this" or "this blocks my 100-person company from standardizing on Mozilla" without cluttering a bug where four people have already said the same thing. This text would appear on the votes list.
A related feature is negative votes or votes against a bug/feature request. Negative votes would help to solve another problem: some bad feature requests sit around for a long time even though several triagers have seen the bug and said "what the heck? how could that possibly be useful?" Unfortunately, Bugzilla has more feature requesters than UI designers, so negative votes could backfire if users interpreted "more positive votes than negative votes" as automatically meaning a feature or preference should be added to Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because it's intentional, doesn't mean it's not a bug. The space-adding hack breaks code, breaks plain-text urls (exacerbated by the "Slashdot doesn't automatically turn URLs into links" bug), generally frustrates people, and can be fixed.
Slashdot's use of tables for layout is the only reason "page-widening trolls" exist. If Slashdot used a simple layout or a CSS layout, a single wide post would not cause other posts to wrap off of the screen. Slashdot's use of tables also makes IE users wait for the entire page to load before they can read the first comment, but the space-adding hack is the most visible result of using tables for layout. See also: More reasons to avoid using tables for layout rather than only using tables for tabular data.
Private Media Group Announces Offer for Napster Trademark and napster.com URL
Barcelona, September 12th, 2002/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Private Media Group Inc. (Nasdaq: PRVT) a worldwide leader in premium quality adult entertainment products, services and content, today announced that it has made an offer to Napster, Inc. to acquire the Napster trademark and napster.com domain name for one million shares of Private common stock.
Private's offer, if accepted by Napster, is subject to customary terms and conditions, including approval by the court having jurisdiction over Napster, Inc.'s bankruptcy proceeding.
With the Napster trademark, Private plans to create a unique peer-to-peer (P2P) environment that would offer the tens of millions of adult consumers worldwide the opportunity to share adult content for free as well as access top quality adult content at a reasonable price.
Napster is one of the most recognized names in P2P file-swapping services that allow users to trade and download files. At its height, Napster had 84 million users of its software and was the fastest-growing software application ever monitored by online tracking services.
Charles Prast, President and CEO of Private Media Group stated: "Along with Hollywood and the recording industry, we have become increasingly concerned about the level of copyright infringement inherent in free peer-to-peer file swapping services. It is estimated that up to 35% of all content downloaded from P2P sites is of an adult nature, which raises significant issues both in terms of copyright infringement and lack of controls of access by minors. It is an industry that presently has over 150 million users.
Mr. Prast continued: "At Private, we feel that there has been an excess of spamming, credit card fraud, abuse of consumer data, and price gouging among many on-line providers of adult content. We intend to use the strength of the Napster trademark to build a community for adults to share content provided by Private and our industry partners.
"Private has high standards, both from a regulatory and financial perspective with a 37 year track record of legal compliance. Private owns the largest library of quality adult content in the world, global rights to all our content, and strong technological know-how. All of these factors make Private uniquely suited to manage a viable and legal P2P network for consumers of adult content", said Mr. Prast.
Private Media Group is a leading global adult entertainment company that distributes its content over a wide range of media platforms, including narrow and broadband Internet, DVD and video, magazines, broadcasting and wireless technologies. Private owns the worldwide rights to the largest archive of high quality adult content in the world, which it distributes digitally worldwide and physically in over 35 countries.
This release contains, in addition to historical information, forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which reflect the Company's current judgments of those issues. However, because those statements are forward-looking and apply to future events, they are subject to such risks and uncertainties, which could lead to results materially different than anticipated by the Company.
For further information about Private Media Group, please contact in Barcelona, Spain:
PRIVATE MEDIA GROUP
André F. Ribeiro
Phone: +34 679 983 772
E-mail: andre@private.com
URL: www.prvt.com
GRUPO ALBIÓN
Alejandra Moore Mayorga
Phone: +34 91 531 23 88
Mobile: +34 670 799 33
E-mail: amoore@grupoalbion.com
Please visit our Download Zone, where you can find relevant information relating to this announcement in PDF format: http://www.tresddb.com/gadz/private.html.
The Private Media Group's ticker symbol says it all: PRVT.
(I stole this post from Fuckedcompany.)
In case you missed it last year, Google has re-posted 9/11-related search data such as the top gaining searches during the week of 9-13-2001.
In your original post, you said you wanted access to the local hard drive. In your reply to the reply to your post, you said you should not have access to your hard drive. I'm confused.
But I want real examples where people were fully unable to continue or cope because of an "inconsistent user interface".
Since when was "no users give up" the only criterion for evaluating a program's usability?
Eek, I left out a "not" and made it sound like IE does more incremental rendering than Mozilla. Corrected text:
One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows can not see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it can only do so in Slashdot's light mode.
Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly.
Isn't this something that can be fixed in Perl?
No. It can only be fixed by reducing the use of the <TABLE> tag and then turning off word-length restrictions.
One of the evil things about using tables for layout is that it forces you to use word-length restrictions on text content and width restrictions on image content. Tables expand when there is a single long word. Since all of the comments are in a single table, one 9000px-long word in a comment causes other paragraphs, even paragraphs in other comments, to wrap at 9000px instead of at the edge of the browser window. Without layout tables, the long word would still make a horizontal scrollbar appear, but other comments would wrap at the edge of the screen as if there had been no scrollbar-forcing comment.
For some other problems with table layouts, see my comment at webmasterworld. Note that tables are great for tabular data, but using them for layout at the same time makes them less useful for tabular data.
One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows would be able to see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it could only do so in Slashdot's light mode.
In Slashdot light mode, fixing the page-expanding-comment problem may be as simple as removing a single table tag. In heavy mode, it requires rewriting the layout to replace several layers of nested tables with divs and CSS. (Examples of existing light and heavy modes: light, heavy.) You can use the "block structure" web development bookmarklet to give each table a border (blue, green, or red depending on nesting level) if you want to see how the tables are nested without digging through the HTML source.
I always get off on the guys who think it's their right to access on content on the internet for free and with no inconvenience to their almighty selves.
That's odd, I don't get off on the web site owners who think it's their right to open extra browser windows in order to make it harder to leave their site while they show me ads.
Cool. That's reasonable, although probably easy to defeat.
Bugzilla gets lots of reports of pop-ups on nytimes.com, so it's not Netscape-specific.
What's the regex corresponding to Mozilla's "Only allow web sites to open windows in response to a click?"
But you think it's right that most browsers allow sites to open as many windows as they want? It's a security hole, and plugging the hole should not be considered an attack on web site owners.
nytimes.com uses sneaky methods to get around Mozilla's pop-up blocking. In fact, the incompleteness of Mozilla's pop-up blocking is one reason Netscape 7.0 does not include it. The more people that use weak pop-up blocking, the weaker it becomes, because advertisers take time to study and exploit the weaknesses.
Mothra... that's a Bugzilla, right?
Yes. Bugzilla.mozilla.org is hosted on a server called mothra.mozilla.org. I think bugzilla.mozilla.org used to be on komodo.mozilla.org.
Yes, we should try to eliminate passwords, for security against bad passwords, for security against social engineering (calling a victim, posing as tech support, and asking for a password), and for convenience. How about this:
Web sites would stop using passwords, or at least make passwords optional. The login procedure would be similar to the current "lost password" procedure, involving e-mail, instant messages, or perhaps something better integrated with browsers. Many users would log in, accept a permanent login cookie, and be happy that they didn't have to think up and write down Yet Another Password. Mobile users might choose to use a password for the few services that they use in multiple locations if they can only access e-mail from one location. Paranoid users would choose session cookies instead of permanent cookies and might disable logging in by e-mail after setting a password.
How can "you should not quote a message to which you are replying" possibly be common sense? An algorithm that is vulnerable to a "social engineering" attack this simple should not be advertised as a secure algorithm. Encryption and signatures must become transparent and reliable if they are to be used by a large number of people.
I once participated in a similar discussion where I argued that headers like "to", "cc", and "date" should be included in the hash when signing a message, because people will send short messages such as "Today's meeting has been cancelled" whether you want them to or not. (I can't find that discussion now.) I was and still am shocked that the majority of participants in the discussion felt that the hole was the fault of the sender for not including enough context in the original signed message, or of the recipient for not noticing that the message lacked context and/or not suspecting that the e-mail might have been forwarded.
Which bank disallows IE?
I'm sure that a few of the browsers I've used over the years (AWeb comes to mind) let the user choose how certain abstract things (such as emphasis tags) were rendered, whether it was bold, italic, different font, different size different color, or something like that.
If you want that level of control over how web pages appear, create a user style sheet. You can even use a bookmarklet to apply your styles to a specific site rather than all sites and without restarting your browser. This rule makes <strong> appear as italics rather than bold:
strong { font-weight: inherit; font-style: italic; }
I think including "how should <strong> appear?" in UI prefs would be confusing. First, it's geeky because it involves specific HTML tags. Second, most sites use <b> when they mean <strong>, and prefs that work 20% of the time (or even 80% of the time) are usually not good. Third, misguided web designers might start intentionally using <b> when they mean <strong>, just like they specify text and background colors as black on white for simple pages where the user's preferred colors would work fine.
to each page of free content, what will you do to publishers who try to disable the pop-up ads?
One example of how javascript can improve a web site: a webmail site could do a client-side sort in javascript-supporting browsers and a server-side sort in other browsers. I know that sorting a table works in at least IE/Win and Mozilla, because I wrote a bookmarklet that does it, yet none of the webmail sites I use do a client-side sort :(
Another example: an inline or onload script can focus a form element if the the user more likely to enter something into the form than scroll the page. Most major search engines do this. Alltheweb doesn't in alchemist mode and Netscape search never does.
What other examples do you know?
Every time I close a tab by middle clicking on it, Moz thinks I just pasted into the location bar, damn annoying..
I think that bug was fixed in Mozilla 1.1 beta. I haven't checked because I use Windows. If it isn't fixed for you in Mozilla 1.1 beta, please add a comment to bug 107147.
How about having the option to disable "paste" on middle click in Linux?
Adding a pref is usually not a good way to fix a bug, partly because only a few users will find the pref and partly because each pref added makes other prefs harder to find. If we add that pref, it won't be because of a bug related to the feature.
here in KDE 2.something I select the window decoration at the edge of the screen
Please report this to the KDE folk as a bug if it's still present in a new version of KDE. Also, try Mozilla's full screen mode.
In general, I think Mozilla should avoid adding preferences that would be better fixed in the operating system. (Examples: anti-alias text of font sizes n and above, make all mouse buttons act like the left mouse button.)
I agree. I think the limit on votes should go. It might also be useful to allow 80 characters of text with each vote, so people can say things like "please fix this" or "this blocks my 100-person company from standardizing on Mozilla" without cluttering a bug where four people have already said the same thing. This text would appear on the votes list.
A related feature is negative votes or votes against a bug/feature request. Negative votes would help to solve another problem: some bad feature requests sit around for a long time even though several triagers have seen the bug and said "what the heck? how could that possibly be useful?" Unfortunately, Bugzilla has more feature requesters than UI designers, so negative votes could backfire if users interpreted "more positive votes than negative votes" as automatically meaning a feature or preference should be added to Mozilla.