Right, exactly like I said. With it not built into the browser you have to write custom javascript to do the same thing.
The advantage of it being in the browser is that you didn't need to spend time writing this basic glue code every time you wanted to use an xml data island.
I don't know if you've seen the types of sites this is aimed at. Go to http://maps.google.com/ and find your hometown and surf around. Really sweet interface, so quick to scroll, lets you move all around and load surrounding images as needed.
Now, view the page source. It's completely unreadable. A text reader would simply not be able to make use of this. Search for directions to your house or office. You can clearly see the directions in the right hand side, again page source will show nothing usable.
The DHTML isn't to make the site more accessible, the proposed changes will make DHTML driven sites more accessible.
XML data islands were really a pretty cool technology. Much more straightforward than writing Javascript to do XMLHttp requests to the server for the XML and then parsing it into HTML. Clean, simple, and unfortunately proprietary.
Firefox already supports all the DHTML Javascript in discussion. All this will do is make those AJAX style websites more accessible to the disabled. A text reader trying to read something like google maps would be totall lost currently.
At the bottom of the page, a lot of their examples didn't look right. I checked it in IE and they looked fine. Does anyone know if there's a Firefox bug with overflow:visible or overflow-x:scroll; overflow-y:hidden;? They look like I'd expect in IE but the overflowing isn't working in Firefox.
The IE only style text-overflow:ellipsis; which I'd never heard of before would really be handy. I wonder why it was never part of the standard?
All government web sites are supposed to be section 508 compliant, which includes being usable by a text reader.
What could possibly be on this website that requires IE? IE might be required for a site that uses ActiveX, but if you have to support text readers you have to be writing normal basic HTML.
You're right. As soon as I get home I know that I personally was planning on destroying all my furniture with an axe to replace it with cardboard boxes.
By the way, if you read the article you'd see he's being represented by lawyers at Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. He got free furniture AND free legal services. He seems really good at getting things for free.
I second this suggestion. It does a great job of producing comprehensible html out of the normal word mess. Now why this isn't the default option I'm at a loss to explain.
Dreamweaver and the like may do a better job, but if you don't want to buy a tool like that for the occassional content paste, then this technique eliminates at least 80% of the work.
I don't know about you, but if I don't find what I'm looking for on the first couple pages of results, I add something else to my search.
In effect, for me and millions like me, search engines only return 20-30 results. The most important thing to me is that what I'm looking for is there, and it's usually the kind of thing where the same info is on dozens of websites. So I really don't care whether I get all of those dozens of sites, I just care that one copy of the info I'm looking for is at the top of the list.
The one thing I think they could both do is make advanced searching easier for novice users. Rather than having a separate page, it might be nice to incorporate that into the page that shows the results. So you see your top ten results and realize they're all shopping sites when you wanted technical. I would type in "-buy -sale -shopping", but I've always thought there should be an alternate mechanism for the less geeky.
Actually, if you want to figure out what an error message means I've found that searching "site:experts-exchange.com errormessage" works great. So go ahead and sign up for it. If you don't find an answer there already you get free points to post your own question and pick among the responses to give the points to, and you can keep posting followups like "I tried that and it didnt' work, what should I try next?". I've found the site very helpful, and often go there in downtime to answer questions on topics I know.
Oh, you know what it is? Their new graphic layout is crap. Where you see the "sign up to see the solution" - just keep scrolling down the page. The answer's right there. You only need to sign in to do things like get email alerts when someone posts an answer to your question.
I appreciate your comments, but I still think there's a bias that life can only arise in situations similar to ours. We simply don't know enough to say that that's so.
Here's what Wikipedia says about life:
How can one tell when an entity is a lifeform? It would be relatively straightforward to offer a practical set of guidelines if one's only concern were life on Earth as we know it (see biosphere), but as soon as one considers questions about life's origins on Earth, or the possibility of extraterrestrial life, or the concept of artificial life, it becomes clear that the question is fundamentally difficult and comparable in many respects to the problem of defining intelligence. Also, loosely speaking, some theories are grounded in the basic assumption that "ideas have a life of their own".
In biology, a lifeform has traditionally been considered to be a member of a population whose members can exhibit all the following phenomena at least once during their existence:
1. Growth
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability to create entities that are similar to, yet seperate from, itself
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions.
These criteria are not without their uses, but their disparate nature makes them unsatisfactory from a number of perspectives; in fact, it is not difficult to find counterexamples and examples that require further elaboration. For example, according to the above definition, one could say:
* Mules and people who are impotent cannot reproduce and thus would not qualify as lifeforms.
* Fire and Stars could be considered lifeforms.
* Viruses do not grow and cannot reproduce outside of a host cell and thus would not qualify as lifeforms. (Although, this is not a very solid counterexample as viruses are no more than a nucleic acid.)
So I just don't think the answer is so simple.
I never said you could make creatures out of hydrogen. Consider the matter-antimatter balance though. Matter and anti-matter were created in roughly the same amount, and most of it collided with its opposite and vaporised. For some reason not yet understood, there was slightly more matter than anti-matter, and here we are. What if the situation had been exactly reversed? Anti-matter is just particles with the opposite spin. Those particles could have given rise to complex chemistry similar to our own. There's no reason they couldn't have. That's what I meant about things could have worked out differently.
We've detected what - a dozen or so extrasolar planets? Out of trillions and trillions of star systems? We do not know enough to say anything about 'normal' conditions throughout the universe.
Again, you are assuming that only the conditions that exist on earth are capable of giving birth to complex life. That is a valid theory given that it's falsifiable. I expect it to be proven false at some point, but at this point that's just my personal belief that life will arise anywhere that conditions allow, and that there's nothing special about our particular conditions. Let's continue this discussion in 1,000 years or so.
Your argument has the same flaw you pointed out in mine. Given that our world as it exists is the only one we know, why do you assume that there were any "remarkable coincidences" at all? It happened, so it's obviously not too unlikely.
Surprisingly enough, SatanicPuppy doesn't know any good arguments for the existence of God. Does he know any good arguments for the existence of Satan? Or puppies for that matter?
"why the Universe must be the way it is for life to exist"
I'm so tired of this anthropomorphism. We can only exist in the Universe as it is today. If there were a lot of different natural laws, or a slightly different unfolding in the first few seconds of the universe or something, other creatures would live there and say "wow, it looks like this universe was tailor made for us".
We are tailor made for our environment, not the other way around. And it's a pretty broad environment, including organisms living near hot springs deep underwater feeding on minerals, blind fish living in caves miles from sunlight, etc. Most of the individual things you'd think to point at as essential for life: sunlight, atmosphere, etc. we can find plenty of examples on earth of organisms that do not need those to live.
Look at their page again. It shows an arrow extending about a half inch in the cardinal directions out from the sphere. What doesn't make sense is I want to scroll horizontall all the way across and i have a sphere in the middle to run over. If I wanted a sphere at all I'd get a thumb trackball kind of mouse, where it would be in a much more useful place.
I just think they were too concerned with "wow it's touch sensitive all over the place" and not enough with tactile feedback and ergonomics - my two main criteria in a mouse.
My original point is that your post had nothing to do with the discussion at all, and was just "Dude, I'm so much cooler than that."
OO databases have been 'the future of data storage' for like 10 years with absolutely no market penetration.
My point about JavaScript is that you can embed a huge amount of application logic in there, providing a better user experience and reducing server load. If you know how to do it right it degrades gracefully, but then most people don't know how to do it right. Yes I'm sure Python is elegant, but having all your logic server side has a huge drawback to app usability, regardless of what language you use. You don't need to embed ANY javascript into your html document. Just link to an external.js file which runs through the document and creates event handlers for the items you need.
That is a 360 degree "roll" for whatever application might use that. They implemented vertical and horizontal scroll across that mini-trackball from what I can tell of their moving diagram. Which would really suck to use now that I think about it. You're scrolling up really far and right in the middle of that you roll over a mini-trackball. I just don't see that making any sense. And I think you would need to know where the vertical/horizontal scrolling is as you wouldn't want to suddenly be clicking with a button.
Maybe it works well, but it seems very unlikely. Lots of flash and andvanced tech to hide the fact that they're finally producing a two button mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, exactly like I said. With it not built into the browser you have to write custom javascript to do the same thing.
The advantage of it being in the browser is that you didn't need to spend time writing this basic glue code every time you wanted to use an xml data island.
I don't know if you've seen the types of sites this is aimed at. Go to http://maps.google.com/ and find your hometown and surf around. Really sweet interface, so quick to scroll, lets you move all around and load surrounding images as needed.
Now, view the page source. It's completely unreadable. A text reader would simply not be able to make use of this. Search for directions to your house or office. You can clearly see the directions in the right hand side, again page source will show nothing usable.
The DHTML isn't to make the site more accessible, the proposed changes will make DHTML driven sites more accessible.
XML data islands were really a pretty cool technology. Much more straightforward than writing Javascript to do XMLHttp requests to the server for the XML and then parsing it into HTML. Clean, simple, and unfortunately proprietary.
Firefox already supports all the DHTML Javascript in discussion. All this will do is make those AJAX style websites more accessible to the disabled. A text reader trying to read something like google maps would be totall lost currently.
That would be a very good point.
Except that the GW Bush biography shows up in the top ten of Yahoo's search results as well.
I just checked out that site. Specifically, this page: http://ncdesign.org/html/s040box.htm#box/.
At the bottom of the page, a lot of their examples didn't look right. I checked it in IE and they looked fine. Does anyone know if there's a Firefox bug with overflow:visible or overflow-x:scroll; overflow-y:hidden;? They look like I'd expect in IE but the overflowing isn't working in Firefox.
The IE only style text-overflow:ellipsis; which I'd never heard of before would really be handy. I wonder why it was never part of the standard?
All government web sites are supposed to be section 508 compliant, which includes being usable by a text reader.
What could possibly be on this website that requires IE? IE might be required for a site that uses ActiveX, but if you have to support text readers you have to be writing normal basic HTML.
Dude that's hilarious.
Um.... like our power grid you mean? We already centralize production.
If you're talking about Sweden where it's dark for half the year, sorry but solar just ain't gonna cut it.
I think one concern is safety. What is the temperature at the focal point of the parabola?
And do you really want flash-fried birds falling out of the sky on you?
Quite often the producers and refiners are in the same company, so it doesn't really matter which side is turning the profit.
He's a software developer who makes good money, but recently moved and is temporarily paying two rents.
I have enough trouble furnishing my place with the one mortgage.
You're right. As soon as I get home I know that I personally was planning on destroying all my furniture with an axe to replace it with cardboard boxes.
By the way, if you read the article you'd see he's being represented by lawyers at Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. He got free furniture AND free legal services. He seems really good at getting things for free.
I second this suggestion. It does a great job of producing comprehensible html out of the normal word mess. Now why this isn't the default option I'm at a loss to explain.
Dreamweaver and the like may do a better job, but if you don't want to buy a tool like that for the occassional content paste, then this technique eliminates at least 80% of the work.
I don't know about you, but if I don't find what I'm looking for on the first couple pages of results, I add something else to my search.
In effect, for me and millions like me, search engines only return 20-30 results. The most important thing to me is that what I'm looking for is there, and it's usually the kind of thing where the same info is on dozens of websites. So I really don't care whether I get all of those dozens of sites, I just care that one copy of the info I'm looking for is at the top of the list.
The one thing I think they could both do is make advanced searching easier for novice users. Rather than having a separate page, it might be nice to incorporate that into the page that shows the results. So you see your top ten results and realize they're all shopping sites when you wanted technical. I would type in "-buy -sale -shopping", but I've always thought there should be an alternate mechanism for the less geeky.
Actually, if you want to figure out what an error message means I've found that searching "site:experts-exchange.com errormessage" works great. So go ahead and sign up for it. If you don't find an answer there already you get free points to post your own question and pick among the responses to give the points to, and you can keep posting followups like "I tried that and it didnt' work, what should I try next?". I've found the site very helpful, and often go there in downtime to answer questions on topics I know.
Oh, you know what it is? Their new graphic layout is crap. Where you see the "sign up to see the solution" - just keep scrolling down the page. The answer's right there. You only need to sign in to do things like get email alerts when someone posts an answer to your question.
I appreciate your comments, but I still think there's a bias that life can only arise in situations similar to ours. We simply don't know enough to say that that's so.
Here's what Wikipedia says about life: How can one tell when an entity is a lifeform? It would be relatively straightforward to offer a practical set of guidelines if one's only concern were life on Earth as we know it (see biosphere), but as soon as one considers questions about life's origins on Earth, or the possibility of extraterrestrial life, or the concept of artificial life, it becomes clear that the question is fundamentally difficult and comparable in many respects to the problem of defining intelligence. Also, loosely speaking, some theories are grounded in the basic assumption that "ideas have a life of their own". In biology, a lifeform has traditionally been considered to be a member of a population whose members can exhibit all the following phenomena at least once during their existence: 1. Growth 2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste 3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion 4. Reproduction, the ability to create entities that are similar to, yet seperate from, itself 5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions. These criteria are not without their uses, but their disparate nature makes them unsatisfactory from a number of perspectives; in fact, it is not difficult to find counterexamples and examples that require further elaboration. For example, according to the above definition, one could say: * Mules and people who are impotent cannot reproduce and thus would not qualify as lifeforms. * Fire and Stars could be considered lifeforms. * Viruses do not grow and cannot reproduce outside of a host cell and thus would not qualify as lifeforms. (Although, this is not a very solid counterexample as viruses are no more than a nucleic acid.) So I just don't think the answer is so simple.
I never said you could make creatures out of hydrogen. Consider the matter-antimatter balance though. Matter and anti-matter were created in roughly the same amount, and most of it collided with its opposite and vaporised. For some reason not yet understood, there was slightly more matter than anti-matter, and here we are. What if the situation had been exactly reversed? Anti-matter is just particles with the opposite spin. Those particles could have given rise to complex chemistry similar to our own. There's no reason they couldn't have. That's what I meant about things could have worked out differently.
We've detected what - a dozen or so extrasolar planets? Out of trillions and trillions of star systems? We do not know enough to say anything about 'normal' conditions throughout the universe.
Again, you are assuming that only the conditions that exist on earth are capable of giving birth to complex life. That is a valid theory given that it's falsifiable. I expect it to be proven false at some point, but at this point that's just my personal belief that life will arise anywhere that conditions allow, and that there's nothing special about our particular conditions. Let's continue this discussion in 1,000 years or so.
BTW, why are you posting as AC?
Your argument has the same flaw you pointed out in mine. Given that our world as it exists is the only one we know, why do you assume that there were any "remarkable coincidences" at all? It happened, so it's obviously not too unlikely.
Surprisingly enough, SatanicPuppy doesn't know any good arguments for the existence of God. Does he know any good arguments for the existence of Satan? Or puppies for that matter?
"why the Universe must be the way it is for life to exist"
I'm so tired of this anthropomorphism. We can only exist in the Universe as it is today. If there were a lot of different natural laws, or a slightly different unfolding in the first few seconds of the universe or something, other creatures would live there and say "wow, it looks like this universe was tailor made for us".
We are tailor made for our environment, not the other way around. And it's a pretty broad environment, including organisms living near hot springs deep underwater feeding on minerals, blind fish living in caves miles from sunlight, etc. Most of the individual things you'd think to point at as essential for life: sunlight, atmosphere, etc. we can find plenty of examples on earth of organisms that do not need those to live.
Look at their page again. It shows an arrow extending about a half inch in the cardinal directions out from the sphere. What doesn't make sense is I want to scroll horizontall all the way across and i have a sphere in the middle to run over. If I wanted a sphere at all I'd get a thumb trackball kind of mouse, where it would be in a much more useful place.
I just think they were too concerned with "wow it's touch sensitive all over the place" and not enough with tactile feedback and ergonomics - my two main criteria in a mouse.
My original point is that your post had nothing to do with the discussion at all, and was just "Dude, I'm so much cooler than that."
.js file which runs through the document and creates event handlers for the items you need.
OO databases have been 'the future of data storage' for like 10 years with absolutely no market penetration.
My point about JavaScript is that you can embed a huge amount of application logic in there, providing a better user experience and reducing server load. If you know how to do it right it degrades gracefully, but then most people don't know how to do it right. Yes I'm sure Python is elegant, but having all your logic server side has a huge drawback to app usability, regardless of what language you use. You don't need to embed ANY javascript into your html document. Just link to an external
That is a 360 degree "roll" for whatever application might use that. They implemented vertical and horizontal scroll across that mini-trackball from what I can tell of their moving diagram. Which would really suck to use now that I think about it. You're scrolling up really far and right in the middle of that you roll over a mini-trackball. I just don't see that making any sense. And I think you would need to know where the vertical/horizontal scrolling is as you wouldn't want to suddenly be clicking with a button.
Maybe it works well, but it seems very unlikely. Lots of flash and andvanced tech to hide the fact that they're finally producing a two button mouse.