You can also use hydrogen (or specifically isotopes hydrogen-1 and hydrogen-2) in fusion reactions. Granted, we don't have the technology right now, but it is practically possible and theoratically profitable. Hydrogen would provide unlimited energy, with no radioactive waste to worry about.
Also, Populare Science had an article a few months ago about Bush's plan to mine the moon for hellium-3 isotope, which can be used in fusion reactors. The reactors would be far cheaper than for hydrogen. I don't have the article handy, so I don't have details, but the main idea is to offer a commercial reason for returning to the moon and developing new space technologies. If it works out, the moon could be the next Alaska (i.e. goldrush). Very nice.
Has that article been discussed on Slashdot yet? It was a cover story.
Perhaps the "singularity" will be the creation/adoption of a fusion or zero-point energy source. Once energy is no longer an issue, many more things become possible. You need to get a starship into orbit? Just use a giant super-conducting magnet to launch it. Build giant greenhouses and flood them with artificial light to solve crop shortages.
Add some nano-technology into the mix, and Startrek-style replicators aren't far off either. You can either re-arrange existing atoms or use controlled fusion/fission to create atoms of the desired material. Maybe directly transform energy into matter: m=(e/c^2)! (Ok, so there is the problem of increasing entropy.)
And what if we don't solve the energy crisis? Will we end up with a Matrix-style power generation scheme? Or perhaps the world will fall into a sort of dark age where things like medicine are advanced, but electrical energy is scarce? That's the beauty of the singularity; it describes the climax of political, economic, cultural and social evolution (as we know it), and it's unpredictable.
It sort of reminds me of the quantum uncertainty principle - by recognizing the sigularity exists, we may in fact be causing/averting it.
I can understand why writers are finding it difficult to extrapolate far into the future; it is simply hard to imagine that all of these will stall out.
Furthermore, the article talks about how it is difficult to predict the not-so-distant future. While it may be easy to say, "In the year 10240 humans will live on other planets in a perfect society", it is much more difficult to say what events will occure in our own lifetime which will lead to this "perfect society".
I totally agree with this. As you said, the internet has had a major impact on our lives and our economy - in just over 10 years! What happens when we have enough bandwidth/storage/processing power to transmit life-size holographic images? Will people even bother traveling or meeting in person? This could happen very soon.
It looks like this was already discussed and even partially implemented in various projects. See the
discussion on Slashcode.
From the discussion there is an intersting link to
a site that shows Slashdot.org converted to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and discusses all the advantages (including like 10Gig/day of bandwidth savings).
Hmm, I never tried the "Light" mode. It's one step in the right direction, but there isn't enough semantic markup (meaning) to have complete control over the presentation in CSS.
For example, if there was a <div class="slashbox> tag or something like that around every slashbox (and maybe a <div id="slashboxes"> around that whole section), then it would be possible to do things like making the boxes float on the left/right, etc. Similarly, you could take the menu that is stuck at the top of the "lighter" page, and make it vertical. Or maybe you would like it always be visible, and float on the right.
If the Slashcode was fixed up to be at least proper HTML 4.01 Transitional, it would work in both old and new browsers well. There wouldn't be any need to have the "lighter" version. Of course, if someone is going to fix up slashcode to generate proper HTML, might as well go for XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The real difference is you have to close all your tags; what a tragedy:)
I am not saying that this is a grave bug/error in Slashcode, but it's something to work on.
Can you explain why the value attribute of LI and the target attribute of A were deprecated way back in HTML 4?
The "target" attribute was deprecated, because its use leads to bad design habits. The "target" attribute is used either in framesets or to open new windows. Both practices are indicators of bad design. See:
Let me put a different perspective on your arguments:
I work with several amateur web designers...they all make their pages by
writing the HTML. If you surf through the net, you will find that
there's millions of people who are writing their own code. Even those
using frontpage spend a great deal of their time in the HTML edit mode.
You can edit XHTML just as easily as HTML by hand. In fact, XHTML is
probably 2x less code, because you don't have FONT tags everywhere. It's
much easier to see the information you are trying to convey.
I watched a large numbers of people who had little difficulty learning
HTML have tremendous difficulties with XHTML...
It depends on how one approches it. If you think "This text needs to be
bold and red," then XHTML is harder. On the other hand if you think
"This text is important," and then later decide it should be bold and
red, XHTML become easier.
Take something simple like centering. The decision to center a paragraph
or image is often made at run time.
I am not sure what you mean by "at run time". Run time of what? A web
application? A script? It is possible to put styles into a "style"
attribute rather than a stylesheet. The scrip can also set the "class"
attribute of the P tag, and the stylesheet can specify that that text
should be centered.
The fact that so many real people are avoiding the new think indicates
to me that there's problems with the new think. I now agree with and
encourage those who resist XHTML.
People always avoid new things; it is our nature to resist change.
People have complained about GUI programming, the "new" taskbar in
Windows 95, you name it. Just because the majority is not quick enough
to accept something does not mean it's bad.
I agree that the box model is best for overall page layout, but the
deprecated tag attributes are better for run time design decisions.
Do you even know what the box model is? It has little to do with
deprecated tag attributes. The attributes were deprecated for other
reasons.
There are many reasons why the FONT tag
and it's attributes were deprecated. Same goes for most of the other
tags like B and I.
Although I am modded a troll for saying it. I think the W3C is still too
much under the influence of Microsoft and other big firms...
I am not were you are getting this information from. The way I see it,
Microsoft and other companies that make WYSIWYG editors are interested in
the code being too complicated for the M and P to write it out by hand. HTML
pages are more complicated, than XHTML (just take a look at cnn.com), so I
would think MS is interested in using old relaxed HTML (why do you think IE
is so relaxed?)
XHTML will probably make it easier to maintain the Slashcode by stripping out the presentation markup and putting it into a static.css files. Structured sites such as Slashdot a perfect for XHTML.
I haven't looked at the Slashcode yet, but I would guess it already treats data by meaning (comments, user IDs, slashboxes, etc. are distinguished), so a migration to XHTML would be a natural extention.
Once the HTML has been stripped down to the basic semantic markup, I can see people writing thousands of different stylesheets for Slashdot... a whole new artform:)
I am not saying it would be easy, but it's not like we are trying to patch IE to be standards-compliant:)
P.S. I am willing to help out, but I would not do it alone (not because it's too hard coding-wise; Slashdot is just BIG!)
Appareantly google isn't even trying to be complient... they don't even include a DTD!
Just because a major website does (or does not) do something, doesn't mean they are right. Standards are there to make sure that "if you do A, everyone who follows the standard will be able to read your page". HTML works 98% of the time, which is why people use it. For the 2% of the time (visually-impared, text-based browsers) it fails horribly. XHTML is supposed to fix that.
Of course XHTML is just a stricter set of rules designed to make it harder to use sloppy coding. However, it won't prevent you from abusing H1 tags and tables. It is the mindset of web developers that has to shift from "how is this going to look" to "what am I trying to say?"
Considering how few tags are allowed in comments, this isn't hard in theory:
Use HTML Tidy like you suggested to make sure all tags are closed.
Replace any remaining
<b>
and
<i>
tags with
<span style="font-weight:bold">
and
<span syle="font-style: italic">
.
(Optionally) Add an XHTML validator (and auto tag closer) to the Slashcode to parse and fix comments.
The problem is, this may break a lot of comments were the author was expecting one thing, and now it looks different.
Maybe if we all start writing well-coded comments, the transition will be easier!
Here is another idea: instead of allowing HTML in comments, maybe slashdot should switch to something like BB codes, and then just render them as proper XHTML!
As a representation of the Internet community, Slashdot needs to set the example for the rest of the community to follow.
Maybe they don't want to raise the ire of the feds and their competitors by saying "Hey everybody we were given a thorough beating with a clue stick and now realize that digital delivery to the end user is the way to go."
Um, they are pretty open about going for VoIP. From the article:
The company also announced that it is shifting its focus away from traditional consumer services such as wireline residential telephone services, and concentrating its growth efforts going forward on business markets and emerging technologies, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), that can serve businesses as well as consumers.
It looks like they are leaving the "traditional" residential market and entering the VoIP (residential and business) markets.
Well, in PHP 4 you can just call session_start() and then put any variables you want to keep into the $_SESSION array. PHP can even edit all your links to add the session id automatically. Very convenient.
I would still think it's hard to do things like locking records while the user edits them. How would you know if the user hasn't just left the site (without using client-side tricks)? Or does ASP.NET have some nice feature for this?
I think what the origional poster was talking about, was not forcing all Linux users to use a single toolkit, mail reader, etc. It was about making a distribution for novice users were the choice is made for the user.
Everyone agrees choice is good. However, many people are afraid of choices (that is why we make one choice by voting for a political party and have them make the other choices for us). Furthermore, making a proper choice requires research and/or experience.
Now imagine your non-technical grandfather or friend asks you to show them how to use e-mail.
What they want to hear is: "Turn on the computer. Wait. Click the envelope icon."
They don't want to hear: "First you have to decide between GNOME and KDE. Here is a 10-page article discussing the Pros and Cons. Next, there are 10 different clients you can use under each desktop environment. Oh, maybe you would like to use a command-line client..."
In other words, people want to get the work done, rather than spending the time making choices. No one program is perfect, but most are good enough. For example, I don't use KMail, because it can't filter messages into IMAP folders. Would a novice user notice that? Probably not! If he/she learns enough to use IMAP and mail filters, he/she is ready to learn about other mail clients too! We don't want to overwelm people; it isn't good promoting/marketing.
The article was biased in that it compared ASP.NET with PHP in the areas that PHP is designed and works for. But the article was correct that for the things PHP is used for, it is definitely the better choice.
And the one thing that PHP does have over ASP, as the article mentions, is cross-platform and cross-server compatibility. Plus no complex licensing and being open-source helps.
Also, since HTTP is a stateless protocol, I would consider a client-side solution if the application is so complex it requires an event-driven interface.
I would recommend reading about the upcomming Perl 6, which amongst other things has a complete Object Oriented design.
I disagree that building the interface should be the user's task. Even if the process was drag 'n drop, most non-technical users don't want to spend any time building the interface. They want to click an "envelope" icon, type a message, and press a "send" button on the toolbar. They want the most important commands to be on the toolbars, buttons in the right place, etc.
While a good uniform way of customizing the GUIs would be very good, the developer must still make sure the default interface is as good as it can be for a novice user to use.
Furthermore, tabbed browsing can be useful in browsing library catalogues as well. For example, find a good book, open the description in a new tab, and move on. Then you can look through your "list" of books (tabs) and pick the ones you want to find. No paper!
Of course, this is only possible if the catalogue is not some java-based monster.
I also agree that tabbed browsing is non-intrusive. Some people may not even know about middle-clicking, and not all mice have a middle button.
The problem with writing non-standard-compliant web applications (or writing them according to Microsoft "standards") is that sooner or later Microsoft, with its wonderful history of backward compatability, will decide to modify those standards. Then you have to re-write your apps anyways, as well as upgrade all your computers.
And you can not keep using your old software because Microsoft will not release it's promissed security patches four times a week!
Even worse, those same developers are going to use those same development tools to develop the company website, and then integrate it with their intranet system... one more "Viewed only with IE6" website for us to choke on.
Slashdot Mirror
You can also use hydrogen (or specifically isotopes hydrogen-1 and hydrogen-2) in fusion reactions. Granted, we don't have the technology right now, but it is practically possible and theoratically profitable. Hydrogen would provide unlimited energy, with no radioactive waste to worry about.
Also, Populare Science had an article a few months ago about Bush's plan to mine the moon for hellium-3 isotope, which can be used in fusion reactors. The reactors would be far cheaper than for hydrogen. I don't have the article handy, so I don't have details, but the main idea is to offer a commercial reason for returning to the moon and developing new space technologies. If it works out, the moon could be the next Alaska (i.e. goldrush). Very nice.
Has that article been discussed on Slashdot yet? It was a cover story.
Perhaps the "singularity" will be the creation/adoption of a fusion or zero-point energy source. Once energy is no longer an issue, many more things become possible. You need to get a starship into orbit? Just use a giant super-conducting magnet to launch it. Build giant greenhouses and flood them with artificial light to solve crop shortages.
Add some nano-technology into the mix, and Startrek-style replicators aren't far off either. You can either re-arrange existing atoms or use controlled fusion/fission to create atoms of the desired material. Maybe directly transform energy into matter: m=(e/c^2)! (Ok, so there is the problem of increasing entropy.)
And what if we don't solve the energy crisis? Will we end up with a Matrix-style power generation scheme? Or perhaps the world will fall into a sort of dark age where things like medicine are advanced, but electrical energy is scarce? That's the beauty of the singularity; it describes the climax of political, economic, cultural and social evolution (as we know it), and it's unpredictable.
It sort of reminds me of the quantum uncertainty principle - by recognizing the sigularity exists, we may in fact be causing/averting it.
Furthermore, the article talks about how it is difficult to predict the not-so-distant future. While it may be easy to say, "In the year 10240 humans will live on other planets in a perfect society", it is much more difficult to say what events will occure in our own lifetime which will lead to this "perfect society".
I totally agree with this. As you said, the internet has had a major impact on our lives and our economy - in just over 10 years! What happens when we have enough bandwidth/storage/processing power to transmit life-size holographic images? Will people even bother traveling or meeting in person? This could happen very soon.
This is a very exciting time.
From the discussion there is an intersting link to a site that shows Slashdot.org converted to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and discusses all the advantages (including like 10Gig/day of bandwidth savings).
Hmm, I never tried the "Light" mode. It's one step in the right direction, but there isn't enough semantic markup (meaning) to have complete control over the presentation in CSS.
:)
For example, if there was a <div class="slashbox> tag or something like that around every slashbox (and maybe a <div id="slashboxes"> around that whole section), then it would be possible to do things like making the boxes float on the left/right, etc. Similarly, you could take the menu that is stuck at the top of the "lighter" page, and make it vertical. Or maybe you would like it always be visible, and float on the right.
If the Slashcode was fixed up to be at least proper HTML 4.01 Transitional, it would work in both old and new browsers well. There wouldn't be any need to have the "lighter" version. Of course, if someone is going to fix up slashcode to generate proper HTML, might as well go for XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The real difference is you have to close all your tags; what a tragedy
I am not saying that this is a grave bug/error in Slashcode, but it's something to work on.
My appologies. As kristaps.kaupe had already pointed out, B and I tags are OK even in XHTML. That was my mistake.
/. get rid of the table-based layout, because that DOES make the pages 12 times larger!
However, I would still like to see
The "target" attribute was deprecated, because its use leads to bad design habits. The "target" attribute is used either in framesets or to open new windows. Both practices are indicators of bad design. See:
As you can see, this isn't a new problem.
Unfortunately I can't find were it says the "value" attribute of LI is deprecated.
Let me put a different perspective on your arguments:
You can edit XHTML just as easily as HTML by hand. In fact, XHTML is probably 2x less code, because you don't have FONT tags everywhere. It's much easier to see the information you are trying to convey.
It depends on how one approches it. If you think "This text needs to be bold and red," then XHTML is harder. On the other hand if you think "This text is important," and then later decide it should be bold and red, XHTML become easier.
I am not sure what you mean by "at run time". Run time of what? A web application? A script? It is possible to put styles into a "style" attribute rather than a stylesheet. The scrip can also set the "class" attribute of the P tag, and the stylesheet can specify that that text should be centered.
People always avoid new things; it is our nature to resist change. People have complained about GUI programming, the "new" taskbar in Windows 95, you name it. Just because the majority is not quick enough to accept something does not mean it's bad.
Do you even know what the box model is? It has little to do with deprecated tag attributes. The attributes were deprecated for other reasons.
There are many reasons why the FONT tag and it's attributes were deprecated. Same goes for most of the other tags like B and I.
I am not were you are getting this information from. The way I see it, Microsoft and other companies that make WYSIWYG editors are interested in the code being too complicated for the M and P to write it out by hand. HTML pages are more complicated, than XHTML (just take a look at cnn.com), so I would think MS is interested in using old relaxed HTML (why do you think IE is so relaxed?)
Just my two cents (well, maybe four) :)
XHTML will probably make it easier to maintain the Slashcode by stripping out the presentation markup and putting it into a static .css files. Structured sites such as Slashdot a perfect for XHTML.
I haven't looked at the Slashcode yet, but I would guess it already treats data by meaning (comments, user IDs, slashboxes, etc. are distinguished), so a migration to XHTML would be a natural extention.
Once the HTML has been stripped down to the basic semantic markup, I can see people writing thousands of different stylesheets for Slashdot... a whole new artform :)
I am not saying it would be easy, but it's not like we are trying to patch IE to be standards-compliant :)
P.S. I am willing to help out, but I would not do it alone (not because it's too hard coding-wise; Slashdot is just BIG!)
Appareantly google isn't even trying to be complient... they don't even include a DTD!
Just because a major website does (or does not) do something, doesn't mean they are right. Standards are there to make sure that "if you do A, everyone who follows the standard will be able to read your page". HTML works 98% of the time, which is why people use it. For the 2% of the time (visually-impared, text-based browsers) it fails horribly. XHTML is supposed to fix that.
Of course XHTML is just a stricter set of rules designed to make it harder to use sloppy coding. However, it won't prevent you from abusing H1 tags and tables. It is the mindset of web developers that has to shift from "how is this going to look" to "what am I trying to say?"
Considering how few tags are allowed in comments, this isn't hard in theory:
The problem is, this may break a lot of comments were the author was expecting one thing, and now it looks different.
Maybe if we all start writing well-coded comments, the transition will be easier!
Here is another idea: instead of allowing HTML in comments, maybe slashdot should switch to something like BB codes, and then just render them as proper XHTML!
As a representation of the Internet community, Slashdot needs to set the example for the rest of the community to follow.
Um, they are pretty open about going for VoIP. From the article:
It looks like they are leaving the "traditional" residential market and entering the VoIP (residential and business) markets.
I would still think it's hard to do things like locking records while the user edits them. How would you know if the user hasn't just left the site (without using client-side tricks)? Or does ASP.NET have some nice feature for this?
I think what the origional poster was talking about, was not forcing all Linux users to use a single toolkit, mail reader, etc. It was about making a distribution for novice users were the choice is made for the user.
Everyone agrees choice is good. However, many people are afraid of choices (that is why we make one choice by voting for a political party and have them make the other choices for us). Furthermore, making a proper choice requires research and/or experience.
Now imagine your non-technical grandfather or friend asks you to show them how to use e-mail.
What they want to hear is:
"Turn on the computer. Wait. Click the envelope icon."
They don't want to hear:
"First you have to decide between GNOME and KDE. Here is a 10-page article discussing the Pros and Cons. Next, there are 10 different clients you can use under each desktop environment. Oh, maybe you would like to use a command-line client..."
In other words, people want to get the work done, rather than spending the time making choices. No one program is perfect, but most are good enough. For example, I don't use KMail, because it can't filter messages into IMAP folders. Would a novice user notice that? Probably not! If he/she learns enough to use IMAP and mail filters, he/she is ready to learn about other mail clients too! We don't want to overwelm people; it isn't good promoting/marketing.
The article was biased in that it compared ASP.NET with PHP in the areas that PHP is designed and works for. But the article was correct that for the things PHP is used for, it is definitely the better choice.
And the one thing that PHP does have over ASP, as the article mentions, is cross-platform and cross-server compatibility. Plus no complex licensing and being open-source helps.
Also, since HTTP is a stateless protocol, I would consider a client-side solution if the application is so complex it requires an event-driven interface.
I would recommend reading about the upcomming Perl 6, which amongst other things has a complete Object Oriented design.
While a good uniform way of customizing the GUIs would be very good, the developer must still make sure the default interface is as good as it can be for a novice user to use.
Furthermore, tabbed browsing can be useful in browsing library catalogues as well. For example, find a good book, open the description in a new tab, and move on. Then you can look through your "list" of books (tabs) and pick the ones you want to find. No paper!
Of course, this is only possible if the catalogue is not some java-based monster.
I also agree that tabbed browsing is non-intrusive. Some people may not even know about middle-clicking, and not all mice have a middle button.
And you can not keep using your old software because Microsoft will not release it's promissed security patches four times a week!
Even worse, those same developers are going to use those same development tools to develop the company website, and then integrate it with their intranet system... one more "Viewed only with IE6" website for us to choke on.