Ok, I see your point now, thanks for the clarification.
Well, the issue I have there is that you can get the documentation from their "real" sources (W3C for XSLT,...), while the Microsoft source for "external" standards they used sometimes (often?) have the proprietary MS extensions embedded in them as "legid" (supposedly) features of the language, which means that you can hardly use them as cross platforms documentations.
I'd much prefer links to the real source to a full central documentation that may not be up to date or may not stick to the standards.
My point is that (tadaa) XSLT and Javascript are not "Mozilla features" as in "something they have others don't", they merely are standards that have actually been implemented in Moz
But maybe HTML/XHTML and CSS are "mozilla features" to you, in which case i'll agree that XSLT and JS are, too.
The API between ActiveX and the browser, or plugins and the browser, or ActiveX and the OS itself (hint: Mozilla plugins cannot toy around with your OS, they're restricted to the OS itself and even in the OS they can't do whatever they want. And clearly can't install themselves silently as the default setting.)
I think there are enough people out there who have to use ActiveX that support will eventually be added as a special module or something.
Too bad you don't think like the Mozilla.org foundation does.
It's been stated repeatedly that Mozilla.org products will never implement ActiveX out of the box... ever...
There are extensions, if there weren't you could develop them, it's up to you to implement ActiveX in moz/fox and degrade your security, but THAT won't come from the foundation.
Um yeah. A Windows user trying to switch to FireFox or OO doesn't give a flying fuck if AX will work on Linux or not. Pardon my bluntness, but you're rationalizing NOT putting a feature in that some people need. That's bullshit.
The worst issue of ActiveX (the one that you missed, and that prevents AX to be implemented in his project by any sane dev) is that it has no security AT ALL.
MS didn't disable ActiveX in WXP SP2 for the fun, they did it because half MSIE's security issues come from ActiveX...
Implementing ActiveX is not only dumb, it's harmful for god's sake, it's like opening your door and putting giant neons saying "hey guys, my door is unlocked, i'm gone for two months and i have no alarm or security device, but please don't come break in my house thanks".
Oh and BTW i'm pretty sure there is an ActiveX extension for Firefox (remember, The Firefox Rule: if it isn't avaible out of the box and can be interresting, someone has done an extension for it... Doesn't fail often, that rule of thumb)
But it's very very hard to sort through it all. Every so often I start playing with various features common to Mozillaish browsers like XPI, XSLT, and Javascript. It always strikes me how much potential there is to make some very cool applications using these. One pet project of mine is to see if I could create a set of XSLT documents that would transform glade projects into XUL applications, which could be themed via css.
XPI is the only feature of Mozilla browsers.
XSLT is a W3C standard, and supposed to be handled by the MSXML parser (which in fact often fails at that on the most complicated rules, better use a standalone parser such as Saxon or Xalan)
Javascript is an ECMA standard (ECMA-262) and supposedly uses the DOM, first created by Netscape (DOM-0) and standardized by W3C as DOM-1 (and DOM-2 soon) and DOM Events. Here again, MSIE is supposed to handle them but fails 9 times out of 10 (while Moz browsers "only" fail half the time)
BTW if you're looking for informations on Javascript/ECMAScript (and you don't already know about that website), you should visit Quirksmode, it's one of the most extensive, complete, precise and fully true Javascript resources I've ever seen. And it's got some CSS infos on top.
it was feared that Compuserve would abuse it's power on all platforms
Actually it wasn't Compuserve who owned the patent but Unisys. They got friendly with Compuserve because Compuserve was the introducer of the technology (in 1987)
On the other hand, PNG has surpassed GIF's by adding alpha layer transparency... in other words, you can have certain pixels that are 100% opaque, or 10%, or 55% solid, or whatever.
That's far from the only thing PNG has:
Better compression than GIF on 95% of the images you can find (try recompressing your GIFs with the impressive PNG Optimizer if you don't believe me), usually around 20%
Ability to handle many color formats (8bits and 16bits grayscale, 8bits palletized or 24bits truecolors)
8bits alpha channel (progressive alpha is also supposed to be avaible on palettized PNGs)
gamma correction
Interlacing (much better than GIF's)
File integrity check
The only thing the PNG is currently missing is the equivalent to animated GIFs, which happens to exist as the MNG file format but barely has implementations avaible
1- Because the Foundation dropped it (they'll keep on updating 1.7.x, but 1.8.x is already stillborn, Gecko1.8 code will only appear with Firefox 1.1)
2- Because not everyone needs all the Moz features
IIRC all changes apple made to khtml were returned to the khtml team(Abiding by the GNU GPL) and konqueror has really improved because of it.
Thank you very much for that information, I wasn't sure of that hence why I made that conditional comment.
Well, Hyatt's dedication therefore becomes even more interresting for the whole KHTML community, and not specifically the Apple-KHTML sub-community.
KHTML (or more exacly Safari engine, I don't know how many of the Safari-induced changes get back to the main KHTML trunk) progresses fast in terms of quality and may be the first browser to pass Acid2
While I'm far from a mac fan (heck, I don't even have one) I can't do anything but be impressed by the dedication and transparency Dave Hyatt puts in the Safari dev.
The Apple community is hella lucky to have such a guy handling their browsing needs...
Guess I've been wasting my time, working with computers these past 20 years: apparently my capacity to be impressed by anything beyond purest spartan functionality relegates me to the contemptible masses of the "computer illiterate".
Of course not...
But your capacity to be impressed by useless crappy bloated technologies does indeed.
Running flash in a website is kinda like putting a steam engine on a straw.
Yup, some people might find it "pretty" (ugh) but it's damn freaking useless and a waste of everything you could actually waste.
You can create decent looking websites without Flash. I might argue that you cannot create a decent website with Flash.
Much above "decent" in fact, if you have both the will and the skills.
See CSS Zen Garden for proof of that...
(and for the web illiterates out there: there are no tables in CSSZG, and the only thing that changes between two designs is the stylesheet associated with the page, the HTML file doesn't change anywhere but where it links the aforementioned stylesheets)
For instance, the bugs grew uglier so they wouldn't get eaten. How did they do that? But let's suppose they did. The article claims their DNA actually changed. I don't get that at all.
They didn't "grow uglier" (or anything)
It seems more likely that when there were more predators only the ugly bugs survived to leave eggs. The others got eaten.
That's basically it, this part is the "survival of the most adapted", some bugs (randomly) appeared that were adapted to the predators by being ugly and therefore not an enjoying meal, they weren't eaten, they reproduced and the "ugly" genes stayed in the gene pool while the "pretty" ones disappeared because of the predators. Which is probably why Aliens aren't all dead yet
But their DNA didn't change, the tasty-looking bugs just got weeded out.
Yes it did, from a small population of probably tasty-looking bugs was born a random mutation that made some ugly. It's just a matter of a pair of genes, i could have made the mutated bugs blind or something, but it made them ugly and allowed them to survive and take over the specie.
If the DNA had in fact changed, they would have stayed ugly.
Genetics are not that simple, for example with the fairly simple matter human hair colour there are tenth of genes involved, the interactions are awfully complex and genetics don't even dictate *everything*, the environment and how the organism grows (food, weather,...) may have things to say too
Sure, because blindly accepting that life on this planet just *happened* for no apparent reason against all mathematical odds doesn't take any faith at all, does it.
Uh, against which mathematical odds?
Please parent, do show us how you don't understand the very concepts of statistics, randomness and such.
Well, since the scientific meaning of "theory" implies that it's backed by facts (a theory is supposed to explain facts and predict others, you know how intelligent/well built/whatever a theory is based on the realisation of it's predictions), it's "just" a regular theory. A good one though.
Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory because there are no facts to back it and none predicted that we could check creationism against.
It's merely random gibberish spewed forth by braindead zombies.
Well, no one has ever observed the earth coming into existence and we still all believe that it exists...
Without any proof
For fuck's sake, some people even believe GOD exists, have they ever seen something that even remotely looks like a god? No. Do they have anything that could hint the existence of one? No (while we have many hints of the reality of Evolution... more than many in fact, there are boatful of facts that back the theory). Do they still thing there is a god? Hell yeah.
Same for the afterlife (which is usually believed in by the same type of "people" btw)
or just recommend Mozilla for everybody because it runs everywhere, including Windows 98? (which is unsupported by IE7)
Well it's not just W98, i doubt IE7 will support W2K either since MS barely accepted making it avaible with Windows XP (and it probably won't run without SP2)
BTW, Windows users unhappy with the current Firefox bloat (because Firefox is bugged & bloated, and even though it should be fixed with 1.1 it's annoying) should check the lightweight, lightning fast native Win32 "K-Meleon".
It's clearly not for end users (text-editing browser config files thought) but it's stable and awfully efficient (when compared to FF at least) and runs the same rendering engine (gecko 1.7)
Slashdot Mirror
The Opera website has been "slashdotted" for hours. I haven't been able to hit a single mirror yet...
Amen to that
Ok, I see your point now, thanks for the clarification.
...), while the Microsoft source for "external" standards they used sometimes (often?) have the proprietary MS extensions embedded in them as "legid" (supposedly) features of the language, which means that you can hardly use them as cross platforms documentations.
Well, the issue I have there is that you can get the documentation from their "real" sources (W3C for XSLT,
I'd much prefer links to the real source to a full central documentation that may not be up to date or may not stick to the standards.
My point is that (tadaa) XSLT and Javascript are not "Mozilla features" as in "something they have others don't", they merely are standards that have actually been implemented in Moz
But maybe HTML/XHTML and CSS are "mozilla features" to you, in which case i'll agree that XSLT and JS are, too.
Thank you, drive thru
The API between ActiveX and the browser, or plugins and the browser, or ActiveX and the OS itself (hint: Mozilla plugins cannot toy around with your OS, they're restricted to the OS itself and even in the OS they can't do whatever they want. And clearly can't install themselves silently as the default setting.)
It's been stated repeatedly that Mozilla.org products will never implement ActiveX out of the box... ever...
There are extensions, if there weren't you could develop them, it's up to you to implement ActiveX in moz/fox and degrade your security, but THAT won't come from the foundation.
Try again.
MS didn't disable ActiveX in WXP SP2 for the fun, they did it because half MSIE's security issues come from ActiveX...
Implementing ActiveX is not only dumb, it's harmful for god's sake, it's like opening your door and putting giant neons saying "hey guys, my door is unlocked, i'm gone for two months and i have no alarm or security device, but please don't come break in my house thanks".
Oh and BTW i'm pretty sure there is an ActiveX extension for Firefox (remember, The Firefox Rule: if it isn't avaible out of the box and can be interresting, someone has done an extension for it... Doesn't fail often, that rule of thumb)
XSLT is a W3C standard, and supposed to be handled by the MSXML parser (which in fact often fails at that on the most complicated rules, better use a standalone parser such as Saxon or Xalan)
Javascript is an ECMA standard (ECMA-262) and supposedly uses the DOM, first created by Netscape (DOM-0) and standardized by W3C as DOM-1 (and DOM-2 soon) and DOM Events. Here again, MSIE is supposed to handle them but fails 9 times out of 10 (while Moz browsers "only" fail half the time)
BTW if you're looking for informations on Javascript/ECMAScript (and you don't already know about that website), you should visit Quirksmode, it's one of the most extensive, complete, precise and fully true Javascript resources I've ever seen. And it's got some CSS infos on top.
- Better compression than GIF on 95% of the images you can find (try recompressing your GIFs with the impressive PNG Optimizer if you don't believe me), usually around 20%
- Ability to handle many color formats (8bits and 16bits grayscale, 8bits palletized or 24bits truecolors)
- 8bits alpha channel (progressive alpha is also supposed to be avaible on palettized PNGs)
- gamma correction
- Interlacing (much better than GIF's)
- File integrity check
The only thing the PNG is currently missing is the equivalent to animated GIFs, which happens to exist as the MNG file format but barely has implementations avaible1- Because the Foundation dropped it (they'll keep on updating 1.7.x, but 1.8.x is already stillborn, Gecko1.8 code will only appear with Firefox 1.1)
2- Because not everyone needs all the Moz features
Well, Hyatt's dedication therefore becomes even more interresting for the whole KHTML community, and not specifically the Apple-KHTML sub-community.
Which is a Good Thing ©
KHTML (or more exacly Safari engine, I don't know how many of the Safari-induced changes get back to the main KHTML trunk) progresses fast in terms of quality and may be the first browser to pass Acid2
While I'm far from a mac fan (heck, I don't even have one) I can't do anything but be impressed by the dedication and transparency Dave Hyatt puts in the Safari dev.
The Apple community is hella lucky to have such a guy handling their browsing needs...
Mmm maybe they did a hell of a work on their custom (unattended/OEM) Windows install?
Let's run a slashdot interview featuring the IBM Thinkpad team please
But your capacity to be impressed by useless crappy bloated technologies does indeed.
Running flash in a website is kinda like putting a steam engine on a straw.
Yup, some people might find it "pretty" (ugh) but it's damn freaking useless and a waste of everything you could actually waste.
See CSS Zen Garden for proof of that...
(and for the web illiterates out there: there are no tables in CSSZG, and the only thing that changes between two designs is the stylesheet associated with the page, the HTML file doesn't change anywhere but where it links the aforementioned stylesheets)
Please parent, do show us how you don't understand the very concepts of statistics, randomness and such.
Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory because there are no facts to back it and none predicted that we could check creationism against.
It's merely random gibberish spewed forth by braindead zombies.
Well, no one has ever observed the earth coming into existence and we still all believe that it exists...
Without any proof
For fuck's sake, some people even believe GOD exists, have they ever seen something that even remotely looks like a god? No. Do they have anything that could hint the existence of one? No (while we have many hints of the reality of Evolution... more than many in fact, there are boatful of facts that back the theory). Do they still thing there is a god? Hell yeah.
Same for the afterlife (which is usually believed in by the same type of "people" btw)
Few truer words were ever spoken...
Mozilla... or Opera, I find Opera to be a very nice piece of software, especially the 8th version (currently avaible as a beta)...
I still stick with firefox because of my extensions addiction, though
The Firefox Download counter is probably much more interresting
BTW, Windows users unhappy with the current Firefox bloat (because Firefox is bugged & bloated, and even though it should be fixed with 1.1 it's annoying) should check the lightweight, lightning fast native Win32 "K-Meleon".
It's clearly not for end users (text-editing browser config files thought) but it's stable and awfully efficient (when compared to FF at least) and runs the same rendering engine (gecko 1.7)
Yes indeed, thanks to slashdot we've just discovered that about 5850000000 out of the 6 billion humans are actually all females