It may be difficult to a newbie, but if you can write/read HTML then you can write/read XML. There's absolutely no difference in difficulty there.
People can't write HTML either, that's why browsers had to be as lenient as they are.
As for semantics, I agree that the semantic tags in html5 are a bit silly, as were those in earlier html versions. But I think the WHATWG are less semantic-obsessed than the W3C were, and have shown more focus on more useful things (e.g. video). If "an arbitrary and already outdated list of semantic tags" is the worst thing in the spec, I can live with that.
Browsers have, almost universally been shit pieces of software, we simply use them because they've always been as bad as each other.
They're the most successful pieces of software in history, and they got there by being pragmatic, and giving users what they want. Again, browser makers may not know about making something theoretically pure, but they do know about making something widely used - which is what you want from a spec.
Unethical trade in various commodities (conflict diamonds spring immediately to mind) has damaged their reputation and hence their value. It would apply equally to gold-backed currencies if there were any gold-backed currencies left.
Gold has many practical applications in electronics, jewelry etc., and a history as a store of value. Bitcoins have none of that. I could make something functionally equivalent to a million dollars in bitcoin in 5 minutes (take the existing client, change one of the numbers), and it'd be worthless; if I dug up something that wasn't gold but had gold's practical properties (ductility, conductivity etc.) it would still be valuable.
Maybe I trust the specific MyBank certificate because I've confirmed it directly with MyBank. But MyBank happened to go with ShadyCA, and I don't want to trust ShadyCA's root certificate in general. Browsers do not make it easy (is it even possible?) for me to trust just the MyBank certificate and not the ShadyCA root.
You don't have to be dead to be an artist. I've got no problem with real-world products in movies, but when you compromise the aesthetics for the sake of the advertising (perfect example: transformers has a scene where it's doing a smooth pan across a fair, then pauses for half a second or so on a screen consisting of nothing but a big Dell banner, then resumes panning) then your movie becomes less interesting to me - and you'll get less revenue as a result.
The only really different effort I've seen is Monkeysphere, which uses the openpgp web of trust to authenticate a site's SSL cert. Haven't heard much about it lately though, and whether it's any better is a matter of opinion.
I'm by no means a java fan, but assembly is not the magic bullet you seem to think it is. Linear algebra is a special case, but for general-purpose programs and assuming you have memory to spare, java's auto-tuning capabilities will generally result in a faster overall program than the equivalent code in a compiled language. I thought your crack about the JVM being written in C++ was to point out that it's possible to implement optimization at runtime in compiled languages: yes it is, but why would you bother when the JVM's already done it.
The HTML 3.2 "standard" was a retroactive "standardization" of what was already implemented by IE and Netscape Navigator. So to the best of my knowledge the only HTML standard that was developed under the W3C standards process is HTML4 (and XHTML1 if you want to count it)
I was actually thinking that certain businesses tend to be located in certain areas. But it's also well-known that banks lend on different terms to people with different credit scores, of which address forms a component, so I don't get what you're driving at.
I guess we're all supposed to disable our radios and never drive with our kid in the car
I'm not aware of radios being a problem, but on the kid side yes, yes, a thousand times yes. As a cyclist I find most vehicles are actually decent and competent (and a quick-thinking truck driver probably saved my life when I made a particularly stupid mistake), but drivers with kids in the back are a threat to public safety.
even if something is technically "not your fault" an accident sucks and if you can avoid it safely then why not?
True enough, but there's another side to it: often the worst accidents are caused by people trying to avoid something that would've been a lot more minor.
Language is defined by consensus, so these subjective terms pretty much have to apply to anyone who defines themselves as that. Same with christians or feminists or..., you don't get to say "oh they're not TRUE xs"
Also consider that it's a fair assumption that NO child WANTS, and hence does not consent to having, images of their abuse distributed.
We've had stories here of child porn laws used to charge guys whose 17-year-old girlfriends had sent them photos of themselves.
Outlawing the distribution and possession is an attempt to reduce to market, and thus incentive to commit the original crime
Is that sufficient grounds to allow censorship? Nixon could've argued that whoever was leaking information to the press was breaking the law, and so outlawing distribution and possession of that information was an attempt to reduce the market etc.
Re:Holding off using it for other reasons
on
Hard Truths About HTML5
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· Score: 1, Insightful
some of us are competent enought o actually use the right tool for the job.
XML is never the right tool for the job, it's a perfect example of trying to be all things to all people. It's not really human-readable and certainly not human-writable, but at the same time it has too much parsing overhead for a useful machine format. If you wanted the right tool for the job you'd use either a lightweight, actually-human-editable format like json or yaml, or an efficient binary format.
If it had only adhered to HTML5's bastardised SGML syntax then it would've been a nightmare to integrate with this legacy system.
HTML is a nightmare to parse - but browsers are always going to have to parse it (even if we switched to something else today there's too much legacy web for them not to support it), and as such there are plenty of libraries available to handle it. And once you've parsed it, manipulating a document in a real programming language is far more efficient and effective than using XSLT. I was once a big fan of XSLT, but having worked on systems that use it, no.
this is the problem. Too many developers haven't come from a professional background
And yet somehow they've produced a far more successful platform than any "professional" effort. The web grew based on browsers and site writers implementing whatever they needed; if you look at its history, formal standardization of the web coincides with a huge stagnation in functionality.
HTML is and always has been a presentational format; it isn't and shouldn't be a semantic format. Browsers don't want or need semantic information, and couldn't trust it if it was there. Look at the img alt=... attribute; it's come to specify "mouseover text", regardless of its supposed semantic meaning, because that's the presentation browsers give it so that's how site authors have used it. So now you have some sites that use it with its original intended semantic meaning and some with another semantic meaning, and there's no way for a browser to distinguish between the two; the only meaningful semantics that html has are display semantics, because that's the only thing browsers provide and the only thing site authors test. You may have a need or desire for a semantic markup format, but the solution to that is to make one, not try and turn html into one.
The "HTML spec people" actually preferred the XML route, and genuinely still seem to to this day. The problem is the "HTML spec people" have now had the web standards agenda hijacked by a bunch of inept cowboys, who have now become the new "HTML spec people".
The original spec people spent about a decade coming up with nothing useful. In fact as far as I can see every major choice the spec people made was wrong - the stupid CSS box model, the treatment of iframes, object vs. embed... HTML4 (the only actual standard version AFAIK) has zero advantage over HTML3.2 (the name for what MS and Netscape implemented on their own). CSS is a classic case of design-by-committee; it's not expressive enough to replace programmatic generation of html, but it's still so complex that not only has the full standard never been implemented, I've heard serious doubts that it's even possible to implement.
The guys now in charge of the standards are the ones who wrote the software we all use daily to browse the web, rather than the ones who sat in endless discussions and produced nothing. I think you've got the wrong notion of who's inept.
Ok, so yes, if you really want to, you can write your own auto-tuning code in C++, equivalent to reimplementing the JVM, and get equivalent performance to java. Or you can write your code in java in the first place and save yourself the bother.
Now I have to pay tax at the highest rate on whatever meagre capital gains I get when I sell my shares as well! Thanks buddy. You've just made investing in the stock market less attractive than rolling my money up in tight wads and shoving it up my nostrils.
I doubt that. Suppose taxes were the same on direct income and capital gains (just add up your income and capital gains for the year, then figure out tax bands in the usual way). If you want to increase your income by a particular amount (say $10,000) then you choose to devote your time to investing or labour, on equal terms, and the free market will ensure that you spend your time doing whichever of the two is most valuable to society. That's the obviously correct way to do it.
There are good and bad bets in currency as in anything else. Even if I live in the US, whether I'm more confident that dollar bills or swiss francs will let me buy food in 30 years' time is an open question.
"Big ideas" are ten-a-penny, particularly now that the internet makes it so easy to publish them. It should be no surprise that incremental improvements - which evidently require more thought and are more useful - are more valued.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be difficult to a newbie, but if you can write/read HTML then you can write/read XML. There's absolutely no difference in difficulty there.
People can't write HTML either, that's why browsers had to be as lenient as they are.
As for semantics, I agree that the semantic tags in html5 are a bit silly, as were those in earlier html versions. But I think the WHATWG are less semantic-obsessed than the W3C were, and have shown more focus on more useful things (e.g. video). If "an arbitrary and already outdated list of semantic tags" is the worst thing in the spec, I can live with that.
Browsers have, almost universally been shit pieces of software, we simply use them because they've always been as bad as each other.
They're the most successful pieces of software in history, and they got there by being pragmatic, and giving users what they want. Again, browser makers may not know about making something theoretically pure, but they do know about making something widely used - which is what you want from a spec.
Unethical trade in various commodities (conflict diamonds spring immediately to mind) has damaged their reputation and hence their value. It would apply equally to gold-backed currencies if there were any gold-backed currencies left.
Gold has many practical applications in electronics, jewelry etc., and a history as a store of value. Bitcoins have none of that. I could make something functionally equivalent to a million dollars in bitcoin in 5 minutes (take the existing client, change one of the numbers), and it'd be worthless; if I dug up something that wasn't gold but had gold's practical properties (ductility, conductivity etc.) it would still be valuable.
True enough, but it's still a relevant part of the news story.
Maybe I trust the specific MyBank certificate because I've confirmed it directly with MyBank. But MyBank happened to go with ShadyCA, and I don't want to trust ShadyCA's root certificate in general. Browsers do not make it easy (is it even possible?) for me to trust just the MyBank certificate and not the ShadyCA root.
So you only get a right to free speech if you can make a public interest argument for what you're saying?
You choose how much trust you allocate to each member - though I imagine most users wouldn't care enough to change the defaults.
You don't have to be dead to be an artist. I've got no problem with real-world products in movies, but when you compromise the aesthetics for the sake of the advertising (perfect example: transformers has a scene where it's doing a smooth pan across a fair, then pauses for half a second or so on a screen consisting of nothing but a big Dell banner, then resumes panning) then your movie becomes less interesting to me - and you'll get less revenue as a result.
The only really different effort I've seen is Monkeysphere, which uses the openpgp web of trust to authenticate a site's SSL cert. Haven't heard much about it lately though, and whether it's any better is a matter of opinion.
No it isn't. Try writing a mathematical paper that way and submitting it to a journal.
While C++ has and always has had plenty of crap in it, I still find it hilarious that C++ got lambda before java did.
I'm by no means a java fan, but assembly is not the magic bullet you seem to think it is. Linear algebra is a special case, but for general-purpose programs and assuming you have memory to spare, java's auto-tuning capabilities will generally result in a faster overall program than the equivalent code in a compiled language. I thought your crack about the JVM being written in C++ was to point out that it's possible to implement optimization at runtime in compiled languages: yes it is, but why would you bother when the JVM's already done it.
The HTML 3.2 "standard" was a retroactive "standardization" of what was already implemented by IE and Netscape Navigator. So to the best of my knowledge the only HTML standard that was developed under the W3C standards process is HTML4 (and XHTML1 if you want to count it)
I was actually thinking that certain businesses tend to be located in certain areas. But it's also well-known that banks lend on different terms to people with different credit scores, of which address forms a component, so I don't get what you're driving at.
I guess we're all supposed to disable our radios and never drive with our kid in the car
I'm not aware of radios being a problem, but on the kid side yes, yes, a thousand times yes. As a cyclist I find most vehicles are actually decent and competent (and a quick-thinking truck driver probably saved my life when I made a particularly stupid mistake), but drivers with kids in the back are a threat to public safety.
even if something is technically "not your fault" an accident sucks and if you can avoid it safely then why not?
True enough, but there's another side to it: often the worst accidents are caused by people trying to avoid something that would've been a lot more minor.
Because of the typical spanish temperament, the running of spain suits the spanish. If it didn't they would change it.
By and large they just waited for their dictator to die. But they went to a different system pretty quick as soon as he did so.
What would Welsh mercenaries do, offer the rioters cups of tea?
Language is defined by consensus, so these subjective terms pretty much have to apply to anyone who defines themselves as that. Same with christians or feminists or..., you don't get to say "oh they're not TRUE xs"
Also consider that it's a fair assumption that NO child WANTS, and hence does not consent to having, images of their abuse distributed.
We've had stories here of child porn laws used to charge guys whose 17-year-old girlfriends had sent them photos of themselves.
Outlawing the distribution and possession is an attempt to reduce to market, and thus incentive to commit the original crime
Is that sufficient grounds to allow censorship? Nixon could've argued that whoever was leaking information to the press was breaking the law, and so outlawing distribution and possession of that information was an attempt to reduce the market etc.
some of us are competent enought o actually use the right tool for the job.
XML is never the right tool for the job, it's a perfect example of trying to be all things to all people. It's not really human-readable and certainly not human-writable, but at the same time it has too much parsing overhead for a useful machine format. If you wanted the right tool for the job you'd use either a lightweight, actually-human-editable format like json or yaml, or an efficient binary format.
If it had only adhered to HTML5's bastardised SGML syntax then it would've been a nightmare to integrate with this legacy system.
HTML is a nightmare to parse - but browsers are always going to have to parse it (even if we switched to something else today there's too much legacy web for them not to support it), and as such there are plenty of libraries available to handle it. And once you've parsed it, manipulating a document in a real programming language is far more efficient and effective than using XSLT. I was once a big fan of XSLT, but having worked on systems that use it, no.
this is the problem. Too many developers haven't come from a professional background
And yet somehow they've produced a far more successful platform than any "professional" effort. The web grew based on browsers and site writers implementing whatever they needed; if you look at its history, formal standardization of the web coincides with a huge stagnation in functionality.
HTML is and always has been a presentational format; it isn't and shouldn't be a semantic format. Browsers don't want or need semantic information, and couldn't trust it if it was there. Look at the img alt=... attribute; it's come to specify "mouseover text", regardless of its supposed semantic meaning, because that's the presentation browsers give it so that's how site authors have used it. So now you have some sites that use it with its original intended semantic meaning and some with another semantic meaning, and there's no way for a browser to distinguish between the two; the only meaningful semantics that html has are display semantics, because that's the only thing browsers provide and the only thing site authors test. You may have a need or desire for a semantic markup format, but the solution to that is to make one, not try and turn html into one.
The "HTML spec people" actually preferred the XML route, and genuinely still seem to to this day. The problem is the "HTML spec people" have now had the web standards agenda hijacked by a bunch of inept cowboys, who have now become the new "HTML spec people".
The original spec people spent about a decade coming up with nothing useful. In fact as far as I can see every major choice the spec people made was wrong - the stupid CSS box model, the treatment of iframes, object vs. embed... HTML4 (the only actual standard version AFAIK) has zero advantage over HTML3.2 (the name for what MS and Netscape implemented on their own). CSS is a classic case of design-by-committee; it's not expressive enough to replace programmatic generation of html, but it's still so complex that not only has the full standard never been implemented, I've heard serious doubts that it's even possible to implement.
The guys now in charge of the standards are the ones who wrote the software we all use daily to browse the web, rather than the ones who sat in endless discussions and produced nothing. I think you've got the wrong notion of who's inept.
Ok, so yes, if you really want to, you can write your own auto-tuning code in C++, equivalent to reimplementing the JVM, and get equivalent performance to java. Or you can write your code in java in the first place and save yourself the bother.
Now I have to pay tax at the highest rate on whatever meagre capital gains I get when I sell my shares as well! Thanks buddy. You've just made investing in the stock market less attractive than rolling my money up in tight wads and shoving it up my nostrils.
I doubt that. Suppose taxes were the same on direct income and capital gains (just add up your income and capital gains for the year, then figure out tax bands in the usual way). If you want to increase your income by a particular amount (say $10,000) then you choose to devote your time to investing or labour, on equal terms, and the free market will ensure that you spend your time doing whichever of the two is most valuable to society. That's the obviously correct way to do it.
There are good and bad bets in currency as in anything else. Even if I live in the US, whether I'm more confident that dollar bills or swiss francs will let me buy food in 30 years' time is an open question.
"Big ideas" are ten-a-penny, particularly now that the internet makes it so easy to publish them. It should be no surprise that incremental improvements - which evidently require more thought and are more useful - are more valued.