Properly written AJAX isn't any less accessible than a plain old HTML form. Just make sure your AJAX events are triggered by actions that would normally result in a regular HTTP request (like clicking an anchor or submit button on a form). This way, there's nothing lost if Javascript is off. Everything else can follow the 508 guidelines just as strictly as a well-designed static page. So go ahead and pitch that AJAX app to NASA.
One of the most entertaining ironies about Google is that it's essentially an advertising company that devotes close to 0% of their budget to advertising. No superbowl commercials, almost no billboards, etc.
However, their continued success requires that they stay on the forefront of the minds of their potential users -- and indeed, they manage to do this astoundingly well. Not by flashy magazine ads, but by constantly rolling out new products. While some do have obvious built-in revenue potential (Gmail), some (perhaps Google Base) don't.
It doesn't matter.
Google Talk, Google Wifi, and Google Office^H^H^H^H^H^HReader were scarcely cold on our lips when Google Base came around. And that's all within the last four months!
Add to this the controversy over Google Print, endless speculation about future products, and the ongoing love triangle (quadrilateral?) between Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and AOL, and you can't open up a newspaper or visit c|net without reading all about Google, many times over.
Is it any wonder that Google is the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they want to find something online?
And good for them! When a company spends $100 million on airtime, we sometimes get clever commercials. When a company spends $100 million on developing cool new products, we (almost) all benefit. I'll take the latter.
And given Google's success, it seems like a winning strategy.
While I agree that Microsoft's way leaves much to be desired (primarily because AJAX on IE requires that you leave your browser open to ActiveX insercurities), I'm afraid there isn't really a "correct" way to do it. Your way (testing for the native XMLHttpRequest object, and then falling back to the ActiveX object if necessary) is certainly the best way, however.
IIRC, Mozilla's XMLHttpRequest object was created to mimic the functionality of Microsoft's ActiveX version, and then Safari and Opera (to a certain extent) followed suit. However, the XMLHttpRequest has never been part of ECMAScript (the standard that Javascript is based on) nor the W3C DOM. It has always been an "extension" that Microsoft has foisted upon the world, much like the <marquee> tags and layers we love to hate.
As such, it is inconsistently supported -- particularly in Opera and Safari 1.3/2.0. There are also minor differences (e.g. the number of arguments that the send method accepts) that arise due to the lack of a standard specification.
Fortunately, because of its immense utility in creating modern web-apps, it has become a de-facto standard and thus rather reliable. I would love to eventually see browsers support a standards-based version of AJAX (something like the W3C Level 3 DOM Load and Save specification), but until then, there is no truly "correct" way to do it.
This isn't exactly impossible. Google can tell (via their long-lasting cookie) if you've clicked on one search result, and then a few seconds later clicked on another. This doesn't necessarily indicate that you're actually left the first page (for instance, I generally open multiple results in tabs before checking them out). In many cases (especially for the 85%+ that still use a tabless browser) it does indicate that you didn't find what you were looking for on the first page.
Combining click-through tracking with timestamps and clever algorithms probably can yield a useful ranking modifier this way, and without the use of spyware!
Sorry to spoil the fun, but the article is out-of-date an incorrect.
(Gotta love the Information Age!)
Today, a Yahoo! representative said that the "full support" statement was "factually inaccurate."
"In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology. I'm not saying we are not going to be developing and exploring other areas -- we are. But there are so many different products on the Yahoo network that there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser," the representative said.
Hopefully, they'll still be able to expand Firefox support in the near future.
Consumers will be the only ones to gain from this.
Not the only ones, I assure you. Any good standards-based web designer has by now had more than their fair share of headaches trying to tweak around IE's half-hearted CSS support.
If Firefox reaches a large enough marketshare (probably around 15%-25%), gone will be the days when an IE-only site is acceptable. Standards-based web design will become slowly become the rule, rather than the exception. As you say, either (1) we'll all fall in with the fox, or (2) MS will need to get IE out of its funk. Web designers will save hours when they can design a site once and not have to worry about 4-year-old rendering problems.
In the end, of course, the consumer will win even more. Widespread standards adoption will drive the further development of the web to everyone's benefit. Very neat things can be done with CSS, SVG, X-Forms and the like. Remember the days when competition between Netscape and IE brought out nifty new features on a regular basis (javascript, delicious delicacies, etc)? Thanks to Firefox, we'll hopefully be out of these doldrums very soon!
Microsoft's director of product management responds:
"I still believe in the end that most users will decide that IE is the best choice when they take into account all the factors that led them to choose IE in the first place," Schare said.
Microsoft knows as well as anyone that users don't "choose" IE - they've been getting it for the last 7 years as the default browser on their machinces. Ever since the death of Netscape, anytime someone actively makes a choice about a web browser, it's for something other than IE. People may have made the choice to switch to IE back at the tail end of the browser wars (I did), but MS hasn't given us a single reason to switch to IE since they stagnated at IE6 in 2001...
In fact, the "factors that led [me] to choose IE in the first place" where that is was faster, slimmer than communicator, and seemed to be more of a standard than Netscape was (back in 1998). Now if I take those same factors into account, Firefox is slimmer, less cluttered, works faster, and is far, far more standards-compliant than IE6
The fact that MS is getting defensive about their numbers seems to indicate that they might actually be worried again (like they were about Netscape and the Web becoming the dominant application platform, instead of Windows).
Turn that around and you can also say "Senator Martinez's support for American interests and jobs can be made into a campaign issue."
I hadn't intended to make a comprehensive argument for one side or the other. I'm simply giving reasons why it would still make sense to send the treaty to the Senate even if it has no chance for ratification. But, since you bring it up...
I'm going to vote for the candidate who best supports American interests, not Russian interests, not Chinese interests, not Indian interests, or any other national interest.
Fair enough. And while retaining American jobs at the expense of global climate change is certainly in our short term interests, a good case could be made that averting global climate change is in our overall best interests (as in, for instance, not losing California to the Atlantic Ocean.
There's a direct analogy to be made with outsourcing (although it may not make me any friends on/.). Although outsourcing American jobs is certainly not within our short term interests, the consensus among economists is that it is within the medium/long-term interests of both America and its trading partners.
We can argue 'til the cows come home about whether we should prioritize short or long term interests. The consensus view among environmental scientists is similarly that emissions can bring about global climate change, and global climate change can bring about some very, very bad things.
This globalization stuff is something non-U.S. nationals have come up with as an excuse to damage the U.S. economically and politically because they can't do so militarily.
The primary accomplishment of globalization has been the expansion of US commercial power around the globe. That's not something non-US nationals came up with. Incidentally, I think that expansion of US commercial power is primarily a good thing, even if it does cause widespread short-term problems.
There are several good reasons to sign a treaty even if it won't be ratified. For one thing, the senators become accountable for every treaty they vote against. So, for instance, when Senator Martinez comes up for re-election, his opposition to Kyoto can be made into a campaign issue.
It also clarifies the administrations position on the treaty, and can turn it into a national issue. If there is a large public outcry in favor of the treaty due to a ratification controversy, it might compel some senators to change their votes.
It can also buy "political capital" in the international community. If other countries see that the president supports a treaty, even if it doesn't get ratified, fewer doors will close to the president.
With this president, too, the story is a bit different. Bill Frist doesn't have enough political strength to run the senate as a force separate from the president (unlike, say, LBJ). Bush's policy pretty much sets the agenda for this Senate nowadays.
The problem arises when (MP|RI)AA lobbyists put it into the head of lawmakers that it the applications are partially to blame for the copyright infringement. This is what we saw driving the INDUCE act.
With Bush's re-election and widening GOP majorities in both houses, I fear that we might see BitTorrent and other P2P systems targetted by a second incarnation of INDUCE. Hopefully the fact that BT isn't anonymous will innoculate against that possibility.
A better idea would be parenting classes, offered freely, and perhaps mandatory for first tiem parents.
Since all parents in China are (in theory) first-time parents (thanks to the one-child rule), this would effectively be mandatory parenting classes for all parents.
That may not be such a bad idea - even in the US. After all, you need take take written and performance tests to drive; you need to undergo a background check to buy a gun; you even need a license to sell flowers in Louisiana -- but any damn fool can have a kid!
Has anyone suggested purchasing those "copyrights" for the purpose of putting them out in the public domain?
Perhaps someone with more financial/legal savvy could put together a trust fund to keep a vulture-like watch on SCO, ready to snap up the "copyrights" on the cheap once they go under.
Donations from a couple thousand./'ers and a few interested corporations could ensure that no SCO-wannabes rise, Phoenix-like, from the rubble of this whole mess.
(I suspect, however, that no company in its right mind would bother taking up a case that bankrupted SCO and is entirely without merit. No one says that Microsoft is in its right mind, though...)
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Properly written AJAX isn't any less accessible than a plain old HTML form. Just make sure your AJAX events are triggered by actions that would normally result in a regular HTTP request (like clicking an anchor or submit button on a form). This way, there's nothing lost if Javascript is off. Everything else can follow the 508 guidelines just as strictly as a well-designed static page. So go ahead and pitch that AJAX app to NASA.
One of the most entertaining ironies about Google is that it's essentially an advertising company that devotes close to 0% of their budget to advertising. No superbowl commercials, almost no billboards, etc.
However, their continued success requires that they stay on the forefront of the minds of their potential users -- and indeed, they manage to do this astoundingly well. Not by flashy magazine ads, but by constantly rolling out new products. While some do have obvious built-in revenue potential (Gmail), some (perhaps Google Base) don't.
It doesn't matter.
Google Talk, Google Wifi, and Google Office^H^H^H^H^H^HReader were scarcely cold on our lips when Google Base came around. And that's all within the last four months!
Add to this the controversy over Google Print, endless speculation about future products, and the ongoing love triangle (quadrilateral?) between Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and AOL, and you can't open up a newspaper or visit c|net without reading all about Google, many times over.
Is it any wonder that Google is the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they want to find something online?
And good for them! When a company spends $100 million on airtime, we sometimes get clever commercials. When a company spends $100 million on developing cool new products, we (almost) all benefit. I'll take the latter.
And given Google's success, it seems like a winning strategy.
... the counter is still up. With less than 5 million to go before 100,000,000, I don't want to miss the final tick as it goes by.
While I agree that Microsoft's way leaves much to be desired (primarily because AJAX on IE requires that you leave your browser open to ActiveX insercurities), I'm afraid there isn't really a "correct" way to do it. Your way (testing for the native XMLHttpRequest object, and then falling back to the ActiveX object if necessary) is certainly the best way, however.
IIRC, Mozilla's XMLHttpRequest object was created to mimic the functionality of Microsoft's ActiveX version, and then Safari and Opera (to a certain extent) followed suit. However, the XMLHttpRequest has never been part of ECMAScript (the standard that Javascript is based on) nor the W3C DOM. It has always been an "extension" that Microsoft has foisted upon the world, much like the <marquee> tags and layers we love to hate.
As such, it is inconsistently supported -- particularly in Opera and Safari 1.3/2.0. There are also minor differences (e.g. the number of arguments that the send method accepts) that arise due to the lack of a standard specification.
Fortunately, because of its immense utility in creating modern web-apps, it has become a de-facto standard and thus rather reliable. I would love to eventually see browsers support a standards-based version of AJAX (something like the W3C Level 3 DOM Load and Save specification), but until then, there is no truly "correct" way to do it.
This isn't exactly impossible. Google can tell (via their long-lasting cookie) if you've clicked on one search result, and then a few seconds later clicked on another. This doesn't necessarily indicate that you're actually left the first page (for instance, I generally open multiple results in tabs before checking them out). In many cases (especially for the 85%+ that still use a tabless browser) it does indicate that you didn't find what you were looking for on the first page.
Combining click-through tracking with timestamps and clever algorithms probably can yield a useful ranking modifier this way, and without the use of spyware!
Not the only ones, I assure you. Any good standards-based web designer has by now had more than their fair share of headaches trying to tweak around IE's half-hearted CSS support.
If Firefox reaches a large enough marketshare (probably around 15%-25%), gone will be the days when an IE-only site is acceptable. Standards-based web design will become slowly become the rule, rather than the exception. As you say, either (1) we'll all fall in with the fox, or (2) MS will need to get IE out of its funk. Web designers will save hours when they can design a site once and not have to worry about 4-year-old rendering problems.
In the end, of course, the consumer will win even more. Widespread standards adoption will drive the further development of the web to everyone's benefit. Very neat things can be done with CSS, SVG, X-Forms and the like. Remember the days when competition between Netscape and IE brought out nifty new features on a regular basis (javascript, delicious delicacies, etc)? Thanks to Firefox, we'll hopefully be out of these doldrums very soon!
Microsoft knows as well as anyone that users don't "choose" IE - they've been getting it for the last 7 years as the default browser on their machinces. Ever since the death of Netscape, anytime someone actively makes a choice about a web browser, it's for something other than IE. People may have made the choice to switch to IE back at the tail end of the browser wars (I did), but MS hasn't given us a single reason to switch to IE since they stagnated at IE6 in 2001...
In fact, the "factors that led [me] to choose IE in the first place" where that is was faster, slimmer than communicator, and seemed to be more of a standard than Netscape was (back in 1998). Now if I take those same factors into account, Firefox is slimmer, less cluttered, works faster, and is far, far more standards-compliant than IE6
The fact that MS is getting defensive about their numbers seems to indicate that they might actually be worried again (like they were about Netscape and the Web becoming the dominant application platform, instead of Windows).
I hadn't intended to make a comprehensive argument for one side or the other. I'm simply giving reasons why it would still make sense to send the treaty to the Senate even if it has no chance for ratification. But, since you bring it up...
I'm going to vote for the candidate who best supports American interests, not Russian interests, not Chinese interests, not Indian interests, or any other national interest.Fair enough. And while retaining American jobs at the expense of global climate change is certainly in our short term interests, a good case could be made that averting global climate change is in our overall best interests (as in, for instance, not losing California to the Atlantic Ocean.
There's a direct analogy to be made with outsourcing (although it may not make me any friends on /.). Although outsourcing American jobs is certainly not within our short term interests, the consensus among economists is that it is within the medium/long-term interests of both America and its trading partners.
We can argue 'til the cows come home about whether we should prioritize short or long term interests. The consensus view among environmental scientists is similarly that emissions can bring about global climate change, and global climate change can bring about some very, very bad things.
This globalization stuff is something non-U.S. nationals have come up with as an excuse to damage the U.S. economically and politically because they can't do so militarily.The primary accomplishment of globalization has been the expansion of US commercial power around the globe. That's not something non-US nationals came up with. Incidentally, I think that expansion of US commercial power is primarily a good thing, even if it does cause widespread short-term problems.
There are several good reasons to sign a treaty even if it won't be ratified. For one thing, the senators become accountable for every treaty they vote against. So, for instance, when Senator Martinez comes up for re-election, his opposition to Kyoto can be made into a campaign issue.
It also clarifies the administrations position on the treaty, and can turn it into a national issue. If there is a large public outcry in favor of the treaty due to a ratification controversy, it might compel some senators to change their votes.
It can also buy "political capital" in the international community. If other countries see that the president supports a treaty, even if it doesn't get ratified, fewer doors will close to the president.
With this president, too, the story is a bit different. Bill Frist doesn't have enough political strength to run the senate as a force separate from the president (unlike, say, LBJ). Bush's policy pretty much sets the agenda for this Senate nowadays.
That's certainly true. For now at least.
The problem arises when (MP|RI)AA lobbyists put it into the head of lawmakers that it the applications are partially to blame for the copyright infringement. This is what we saw driving the INDUCE act.
With Bush's re-election and widening GOP majorities in both houses, I fear that we might see BitTorrent and other P2P systems targetted by a second incarnation of INDUCE. Hopefully the fact that BT isn't anonymous will innoculate against that possibility.
Since all parents in China are (in theory) first-time parents (thanks to the one-child rule), this would effectively be mandatory parenting classes for all parents.
That may not be such a bad idea - even in the US. After all, you need take take written and performance tests to drive; you need to undergo a background check to buy a gun; you even need a license to sell flowers in Louisiana -- but any damn fool can have a kid!
Has anyone suggested purchasing those "copyrights" for the purpose of putting them out in the public domain?
Perhaps someone with more financial/legal savvy could put together a trust fund to keep a vulture-like watch on SCO, ready to snap up the "copyrights" on the cheap once they go under.
Donations from a couple thousand ./'ers and a few interested corporations could ensure that no SCO-wannabes rise, Phoenix-like, from the rubble of this whole mess.
(I suspect, however, that no company in its right mind would bother taking up a case that bankrupted SCO and is entirely without merit. No one says that Microsoft is in its right mind, though...)