Of course it isn't, and I, for one, welcome our brand new multiple-versions websites Browser War.
We all missed having to write 3 times every page we coded, but thanks to the Happy Slashdot Thinker and Microsoft these fine days of craft and worksmanship will soon be back...
Oh, BTW, TCP/IP is mandatory for internet, the Web, on the other hand, is all about HTTP content that's supposed to work the same in every user agent avaible, hence needs interoperability. And it runs on top of internet. Without cross-browsers compliant webpages, you don't have "the web", you have "Corporate 'I have the monopoly so fuck you' Extranet"
Sorry, my firefox doesn't seem to care much, it just gets a page that auto reloads every 10th of a second or so, and flashblock takes care of whatever the animation may be...
From the debris the more valueable and profitable lines could be reopened by private companies and run more efficiently. Then you might see a change in how they work. Until then don't hold your breath.
You wouldn't, check UK for a failure of private transport system. Their railroads are probably the worst of western europe, with the highest cost per distance and the lowest reliability.
Because track requires huge investments, especially to do a train generation change (you won't run bullet trains at bullet speed on 50+ years old tracks). To get a chance to switch, railroads would need to be either fully state/federal govt operated or rails handled by the state/federal govt and lent to the companies.
I'd guess that it wouldn't be worth it to deploy bullet trains in the USA:
Very long distances, you could probably use bullet trains for central california, but not Washington DC to Los Angeles.
These long distances mean that the checkin/checkout times are much less of a burden over the total travel time
USA don't have a "train" culture, it'd probably be tough making them accept to use trains
Bullet trains don't use regular tracks, unless they walk them at regular trains' speeds. You need special tracks designed for them. And that costs a lot.
Private companies don't like spending a lot if they don't get immediate profits. In western europe or Japan, the state takes a lot of the financial burden and gets some of the money back later, I doubt this would be accepted in the USA.
Cheapness varies, in western europe or japan it's usually worth considering, especially since you don't have any kind of check ins or anything, just jump into the train and you're done (if you have your ticket already, that is).
And it's much less dangerous, you can't even compare bullet train danger with planes danger (one of the factor being that if the engines fail the tain just stops...)
Derailment usually isn't a problem for bullet trains unless the rails themselves fail: they are built as a single unit, not as separate parts, which means that the whole train won't be endangered if a wagon gets offtrack.
Happened a few times on the TGV (unforeseen shock, some wheels of a wagon getting offtrack) and wasn't even noticed.
And yes, you need special tracks to run high speed, even though they're usually able to use regular tracks, they're just much slower using them.
Wrong, units are not mere tools, they're communication tools, and the most important is not to be familiar with the communication tools it's that everyone is able to use&understand them. The efficiency of a communication tool comes from the quality and reliability of the communication it provides.
metric is the standardised universal way to communicate, hence the tool to use.
Just as english is currently the standardized and *mostly* universal communication language and should therefore be used whenever avaible.
The whole thread comes down to usability versus standards compliance.
Does it?
Do you really consider most "IE Only" website to be "usable"? I find most of them to be bloated pieces of crap, barely usable with a mouse and not at all without one, and I won't even touch security issues such as surfing with ActiveX or javascript disabled...
This is also the only way to properly address radio buttons (exercise left to the reader).
That's wrong, and since you need an ID to use labels on form elements (nifty thing if you have anything but IE) you'll usually be able to use getElementById on pretty much anything
Currently, 3 browsers pass Acid2 (not the original Acid test): Safari (first to), Konqueror and iCab3, 2 of which are avaible only on Macintosh and one on *nix platforms.
However none of the Acid2 compliant browsers are in a release state, only development versions pass Acid2.
Firefox devs don't seem to be too concerned with Acid2 right now because they feel that their other problems with Gecko 1.8 are much more important, Acid2 won't be seriously worked on until Gecko 1.9 development starts (~Firefox 1.1 release)
Acid2 support is being worked on at Opera, you can find the dev's progress posted from time to time on their forums, and Opera Software intends to implement full CSS2.1 in their handled version as soon as the main one will be Acid2 compliant.
How about teaching web designers and website creators so that they create standards compliant websites?
Oh wait, that's what happening as of today...
I guess your problem doesn't exist. It doesn't for me anyway, if a website doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (whichever i'm browsing with at the moment) I'll just drift away from it, to the concurrence for example, effectively lowering the income of the fleed seller and getting closer to driving them out of business
With CSS, you usually have to deal with pixels and as soon as you want to translate your website into another language your whole website falls apart and/or it's fixed to a specific resolution.
You should switch dealer, your crack is awfully bad quality.
Working with CSS doesn't mean you have to "deal with pixels", dealing with pixels is a designer's choice (and quite a stupid one if I may add), fixed design is one type, liquid, elastic, flexible are others.
Pick the one that fits your needs, but don't spout bullshit about CSS being about pixels, it's not.
Here's another concept. Instead of 10% of the world's web developers rewriting their websites, why doesn't Firefox just spend it's time and money to develop support for the extra non-standard features that IE already supports??
Do you mean the buggy stupid borked sorry excuse for an implementation of the standards that IE features or the magical security tar pit that ActiveX are?
Non standard features? Most if not all of the sensible ones have already been reimplemented in other browsers (opacity? done; xmlHttpRequest? done), and usually in a much better/more stable/more efficient way.
Not to mention that all the nice MSIE "features" are awfully undocumented and that it's behaviors are inconsistantto the point that it may be considered a quantic software.
Just compare a W3C compliant page in IE 5, IE5 for Mac, IE 5.5 and IE6. I don't have the link handy, but i think David Hyatt had a nice write-up of IE's rendering, with elements jumping around.
That was a problem with floats, because MSIE has a lot of problems handling floating elements, in fact it damn fucking sucks at floating anything.
But you know, you do not HAVE to use floats, and experienced web designers (ones who've already been hit fair and square by IE's bugginess quite a few times) can sense where it'll become buggy, and if they don't they know how to work around the problem or where to find the resources that'll help them
What would happen if Microsoft stopped Hotmail from displaying properly in any other browser, there would be some very big critics giving them an ego bashing...
Fucking up most Hotmail links by pointing 95% of them to Javascript scripts instead of regular links looks like a first step to me.
That thing is fricking stupid, UA sniffing is sheer bullshit 99% of the time (part of which is cause modern browsers can camouflage themselves with 2 clicks, or you can create custom UAs, or block UA alltogether).
How about using sensible detections for a change?
For example, MS provided us the wonderful thing called Conditional Comments.
<!--[if lt IE 7]> your code <![endif]>
Your code will only be read by MSIE browsers under version 7 (aka up to and including IE6), presenting them with unique content without tracking tricky or dumb things.
Same thing in Javascript, don't use User Agent sniffing, use Object sniffing for exemple. Aka if your script uses document.createElement, precede the script with
if(!document.createElement) return;
Which will only try to feed the script to browsers which can actually handle it (those who have implemented document.createElement)
Then, if you're a really good and tricky web designer, you can do it Malarkey Style, presenting both different presentation and suggestion to switch to a better browser to crappy browsers users... using CSS advanced functions (one design uses CSS1, the other one uses CSS2, CSS2 non compliant browsers will only get v1 black&white, and as soon as a CSS2 compliant MSIE is born it should be allowed to see v2 design). Try it out with MSIE, then with any CSS2 (somewhat) compliant browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror,...)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it isn't, and I, for one, welcome our brand new multiple-versions websites Browser War.
We all missed having to write 3 times every page we coded, but thanks to the Happy Slashdot Thinker and Microsoft these fine days of craft and worksmanship will soon be back...
Oh, BTW, TCP/IP is mandatory for internet, the Web, on the other hand, is all about HTTP content that's supposed to work the same in every user agent avaible, hence needs interoperability. And it runs on top of internet. Without cross-browsers compliant webpages, you don't have "the web", you have "Corporate 'I have the monopoly so fuck you' Extranet"
The "they win, you lose" part was not "Trolltech wins the customer lose" but more like "Trolltech wins, and parent misses the cluetrain".
Qt "free" is not under a BSD style license, it's under GPL, this means that an application using OpenQt must be released under GPL.
Not many business accept releasing their apps under GPL.
And therefore don't use free Qt.
And buy commercial version.
Generating income for Trolltech.
Case closed, they win, you lose.
Sorry, my firefox doesn't seem to care much, it just gets a page that auto reloads every 10th of a second or so, and flashblock takes care of whatever the animation may be...
Because track requires huge investments, especially to do a train generation change (you won't run bullet trains at bullet speed on 50+ years old tracks). To get a chance to switch, railroads would need to be either fully state/federal govt operated or rails handled by the state/federal govt and lent to the companies.
and TGV can do it since 1981, with train's world speed record since 1990 (515.3 km/h / 320.2 mph)
These long distances mean that the checkin/checkout times are much less of a burden over the total travel time
Private companies don't like spending a lot if they don't get immediate profits. In western europe or Japan, the state takes a lot of the financial burden and gets some of the money back later, I doubt this would be accepted in the USA.
Cheapness varies, in western europe or japan it's usually worth considering, especially since you don't have any kind of check ins or anything, just jump into the train and you're done (if you have your ticket already, that is).
And it's much less dangerous, you can't even compare bullet train danger with planes danger (one of the factor being that if the engines fail the tain just stops...)
Derailment usually isn't a problem for bullet trains unless the rails themselves fail: they are built as a single unit, not as separate parts, which means that the whole train won't be endangered if a wagon gets offtrack.
Happened a few times on the TGV (unforeseen shock, some wheels of a wagon getting offtrack) and wasn't even noticed.
And yes, you need special tracks to run high speed, even though they're usually able to use regular tracks, they're just much slower using them.
Wrong, units are not mere tools, they're communication tools, and the most important is not to be familiar with the communication tools it's that everyone is able to use&understand them. The efficiency of a communication tool comes from the quality and reliability of the communication it provides.
metric is the standardised universal way to communicate, hence the tool to use.
Just as english is currently the standardized and *mostly* universal communication language and should therefore be used whenever avaible.
Do you really consider most "IE Only" website to be "usable"? I find most of them to be bloated pieces of crap, barely usable with a mouse and not at all without one, and I won't even touch security issues such as surfing with ActiveX or javascript disabled...
Usability versus Standards? my ass
However none of the Acid2 compliant browsers are in a release state, only development versions pass Acid2.
Firefox devs don't seem to be too concerned with Acid2 right now because they feel that their other problems with Gecko 1.8 are much more important, Acid2 won't be seriously worked on until Gecko 1.9 development starts (~Firefox 1.1 release)
Acid2 support is being worked on at Opera, you can find the dev's progress posted from time to time on their forums, and Opera Software intends to implement full CSS2.1 in their handled version as soon as the main one will be Acid2 compliant.
Meanwhile we've learnt that MSIE7 will have no less than 4 CSS1 bugfixes (whoa), no word on Acid2/CSS2.1 compliance... and they try to teach us how to make crappy bloated table-based rounded corners instead...
sooo Probably until Sam's project succeeds See above See above
You know some people out there surf with javascript disabled?
And the recent NoScript extension helps, too...
How about teaching web designers and website creators so that they create standards compliant websites?
Oh wait, that's what happening as of today...
I guess your problem doesn't exist. It doesn't for me anyway, if a website doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (whichever i'm browsing with at the moment) I'll just drift away from it, to the concurrence for example, effectively lowering the income of the fleed seller and getting closer to driving them out of business
Darwinian selection at it's best baby
Working with CSS doesn't mean you have to "deal with pixels", dealing with pixels is a designer's choice (and quite a stupid one if I may add), fixed design is one type, liquid, elastic, flexible are others.
Pick the one that fits your needs, but don't spout bullshit about CSS being about pixels, it's not.
What's changing now is that Joe Sixpack is starting to use Firefox too, as well as you mother and Henry's grandparents.
Non standard features? Most if not all of the sensible ones have already been reimplemented in other browsers (opacity? done; xmlHttpRequest? done), and usually in a much better/more stable/more efficient way.
Not to mention that all the nice MSIE "features" are awfully undocumented and that it's behaviors are inconsistantto the point that it may be considered a quantic software.
But you know, you do not HAVE to use floats, and experienced web designers (ones who've already been hit fair and square by IE's bugginess quite a few times) can sense where it'll become buggy, and if they don't they know how to work around the problem or where to find the resources that'll help them
In fact, it was such a retarded move that some people went through the trouble of creating an extension to reverse this change back
How about using sensible detections for a change?
For example, MS provided us the wonderful thing called Conditional Comments.Your code will only be read by MSIE browsers under version 7 (aka up to and including IE6), presenting them with unique content without tracking tricky or dumb things.
Same thing in Javascript, don't use User Agent sniffing, use Object sniffing for exemple. Aka if your script uses document.createElement, precede the script withWhich will only try to feed the script to browsers which can actually handle it (those who have implemented document.createElement)
Then, if you're a really good and tricky web designer, you can do it Malarkey Style, presenting both different presentation and suggestion to switch to a better browser to crappy browsers users... using CSS advanced functions (one design uses CSS1, the other one uses CSS2, CSS2 non compliant browsers will only get v1 black&white, and as soon as a CSS2 compliant MSIE is born it should be allowed to see v2 design). Try it out with MSIE, then with any CSS2 (somewhat) compliant browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror,
They don't have "industry constraints", therefore don't need "industry practices"