Huh? Who is arguing against publicizing the case? Please leave your strawman arguments home.
Sorry, I certainly did not intend to use any strawman arguments. I was only referring to this line in the article which suggests a possible solution:
Perhaps the story should not have been covered at all, or anywhere near as much as it was.
I didn't mean to suggest that you thought it was a good idea. I was just tossing it out there as an example of a solution, because I don't really see any viable solution. I can see how this looks like a strawman argument. I guess not publishing the names would be a good idea, but I wonder how long that would last with blogs, facebook, etc.
What I'm saying is: I don't think the verdict is dangerous to depressed kids, but assuming that you're correct that it is, I'm not sure that that should have any significant impact on our future decision making anyway.
Well, either that or the bullied kid would have to be ignorant of the details of the case, and just know that the person who screwed with [Megan's] head went to jail, and got her name dragged through the mud in the national press.
Okay, so let's assume the bullied kid misunderstands the case. Are we then going to say: "Don't publicize far-reaching cases that might influence an unstable person who misunderstands the facts to act in a way that harms themselves?"
That seems like a fairly big trade-off to me. There's been a legal precedent set that could affect countless Americans, but we shouldn't warn them about this because someone might misunderstand the facts and act irrationally?
The thrust of the argument here seems to be that the MySpace Verdict creates incentive for bullied kids to "get back" at bullies by harming themselves, thus subjecting the bullies to the force of the law. But, as I understand it, the MySpace Verdict only says that you can't break a website's Terms of Service in order to harass someone. In other words, had the 'Kyle' alias been real, there wouldn't have been a case. Now, for your argument to work the bullied kid would have to know that the bully wasn't real because otherwise there would have been no case.
I'd like to suggest that:
Such cases are far less plausible than people being bullied by real people, at least insofar as it escalates up to the point of, "Well I'll show them, I'll just kill myself!"
It would be difficult to prove the case against the bully, because presumably if the bullied kid knew they weren't real, it would be more difficult to argue that the bully was the cause of death. The bullied kid would have to hide their knowledge, which would take a pretty devious kid.
I'm not saying it's a good verdict; it's not. I'm just saying your particular concern about creating incentive for bullied kids to harm themselves seems a little exaggerated when you consider that they would have to know the bully was violating the terms of service before harming themselves in order to bring punishment on the bully.
When I first heard of this trick, I thought it was pretty damn clever. But the way I'd imagined it from the headline was that it would use the mailto: pseudo-protocol to paste to Mail, and would use HTML5 client-side database or a cookie of some sort to store it in the browser. My idea was basically three bookmarklets:
Copy: Stores selected text in client-side database or cookie
Paste: Pastes into text field in browser
Paste to Mail: Opens a URL to mailto:replace@this.com?body=$clipboardContents
Obviously this wouldn't work for copying from Mail to Safari, but I was kind of confused as to when that would come in handy anyway. The trade-off for security would be worth it, and if you really wanted to, you could still do a trip to a server for Mail-to-Safari copying.
I haven't delved into the bookmarklets yet, so maybe it's not possible for some reason, but does anyone know why they would choose to have it make a trip to the server when it seems like it could be pretty easily avoided?
I do declare this as a stupid waste of time. If people can sign up for a service, then they can check-mark which sex they are
And if they don't enter their gender? Then most people will make an assumption based on what they know about the user (e.g. their name). But most people won't know all the rules about naming from all the different cultures, so their assumptions might be incorrect. If the computer can be programmed to make better guesses than most users, why shouldn't we use such a system?
It reminds me of grammar check: sure, there's no real substitute for knowing the rules of grammar yourself, but if the computer can do a better job than most people, it might be useful to have such a feature available.
Yeah, sorry, this sounds like it's utterly useless, you've taken what once was a simple question of "Are you male or female?", and turned it into "Based on your name our software thinks you're X, is this correct?".
I don't think it tries to guess your gender, I think it tries to guess the gender of the user you're talking to. So instead of you thinking, "I wonder if this person is male or female?" it suggests: "Kyle is from North America and this is usually a boy's name." Of course, "Kyle" is a bad example because you probably already know that. But if the other user were from a different culture, you might not be familiar with the naming conventions, or you might erroneously assume they coincide with your culture's naming conventions.
I think the idea is that people are going to make these assumptions anyway, so maybe a computer can help them be more accurate. This is why the invention is useful.
The whole point of the patent is that it's for cross-cultural communication, not just for English names only. It's not a totally unreasonable idea. It sounds like it looks the user's gender up based on where they are from and what their name is. Odd spellings would likely be classified as unisex, unless there were a general rule for naming conventions (e.g. In North America, names ending in 'i' are likely to be female.) Furthermore, you could build up your 'odd spelling' database by recording the gender people select for themselves.
The example ozamosi posted below would be covered fairly well by this patent: Robins in North America would be classified as female, but Robins from Sweden would be classified as male.
My criticism of the invention's effectiveness is that it's not completely fool-proof, and would inevitably assign the wrong gender for people with the spelling typically adopted by the opposite gender. It might be a worse "faux pas" to address a male as female (or vice versa), than to leave assumptions of their gender out of the picture. Of course this might vary from culture to culture, and I really don't know about that. It might be more effective to just force the user to input their gender, but this would have to be done on every client, which could be problematic.
Of course, I'm not sure whether we should be assisting the enforcement of "societal conventions" based on differences in gender, but that's a different topic from the invention's effectiveness.
By the way, here's the relevant part:
an expansive list of names compiled from those used in many different cultures catalogued according to gender (that is, male, female, or unisex), a list of rules for associating a username not included in the list of names with a particular culture, and a list of rules derived from naming conventions that are employed in many different cultures catalogued culturally, linguistically, nationally, regionally, and/or according to other relevant anthroponomastic criteria.
In short, a console should be judged based on whether *I* enjoy the experience it offers, not whether people who may be entirely unlike me do. By that measure, my Wii is a great console.
I agree, but he's trying to make an informed buying decision, presumably without spending the money on renting all the consoles to try them for himself. I don't think an analysis based on game ratings is completely accurate either, but I do think it gives a good ballpark. When you have aggregate ratings showing that Wii has less than half a "good game rate" than the other consoles, you have to think something is going on there. (But I wouldn't buy a 360 because it has a 3.39 GGPM as opposed to PS3's 3.29 GGPM. The difference is too little.)
I think you are spot-on about the monthly gaming budget, though. That's a better way of distinguishing what I meant when I compared "hardcore" gamers to the people Nintendo is targeting. Nintendo is going after a group of people with lower gaming budgets and more homogeneous tastes.
It's striking that DS has a similar GGPM rate to Wii, and that both are lower than the other consoles. I think the explanation for the discrepancy is Nintendo's target audience. First, a lot of people who buy Nintendo consoles buy them specifically for Nintendo games: Mario, Zelda, etc. Compare the top selling games for the different consoles: almost all of Wii's are first-party, whereas Xbox 360 and PS3 have more variety in their publishers. So the target market for Nintendo is mostly interested in first party titles.
The other thing is that Nintendo's target market probably buys fewer games per console. How many games does the average Nintendo customer buy a month? I'm not talking about "hardcore" gamers, I'm talking about the average person with a Nintendo console. I would be hard-pressed to say its more than 1 a month.
For the other consoles, you've got more "hardcore" gamers that buy games more frequently, but that can't be expected to buy the same games as each other. As a rough example, 9.53 million Mario Kart Wii sales per 30.55 million Wiis, vs. 3 million MGS4 sales per 16.84 million PS3 sales. Put another way, about 1 in 3 Wii owners bought Mario Kart, but less than 1 in 5 PS3 owners bought MGS4. (I realize there are some important differences, but this is just to give a rough idea.)
This would explain why Nintendo puts out fewer quality games. Their target audience only wants so many games per month, and they can be expected to buy the same quality games as each other. By comparison, the other consoles have to put out more diverse quality games because of the more diverse and frenzied appetites of their target market.
If customers are only using their mobile phones to make phone calls, they would have little reason to upgrade. You might get a slimmer model or something, but it's probably not that high of a priority for people who only use their phone to make calls.* How many people buy a new home phone every year?
Then along comes something like the iPhone that actually makes you want to use your phone for different things. GPS maps, a "real" web browser, mail client, etc... and all pleasant to use. People get used to it, and when the next iPhone comes out, with more features most people aren't thinking of, people will want to upgrade. Which means sales, but also renewed contracts.
The analogy here is the personal computer. Back when computers were becoming more commonplace, manufacturers may have said, "We're building these great computers with superfast 28.8k modems, but all anyone uses their computers for is word processing!"
OK, yes, they could've sold computers as glorified typewriters, but if they get people using their computers for more than that, people will want more. There's a quote attributed to Henry Ford along these lines: "If I'd asked people what they'd wanted, they would've asked for a better horse."
* I realize people continue to buy new cellphones every year and do not use the features. These are essentially fashion statements, but I think eventually a lot of people will just settle for what they have. Additionally, the iPhone may have been set to monopolize the market in that it's both fashionable and functional.
AIDS already exists, too. A frightening real disease which ought not be compared to issues of whatever internet posse comitatus happens to rain the occasional parade for those networks who voluntarily implement SBL, et al.
I don't have Leopard, but couldn't you edit your desktop picture to just put a white bar at the top? That would sit under the menu bar, making it look less transparent, I would think.
If they have the technology, why wouldn't they do the same across the board? It's not as though there's added value in seeing someone's face or license plate. The article doesn't mention anything about this.
The only exams should be at the start of term to determine if a student possesses the prerequisite knowledge to handle the course material.
Is that really any different than what we have now? We have exams at the end of courses, to verify we learned what we need to know. Passing those courses is a prerequisite for attending other courses. And even under your proposed system, we would still have the question, "Is this going to be on next year's exam?"
The only real change I see your system adding is a free-ride for the last year of your education, since you won't be graded for doing any work. Unless your statement that "anyone who graduates has to have known enough to do so" means final exams in your last year. Which is still flawed, because someone might drop out without passing, but still have the "1 year university experience" on their resume.
If it had GPS, it could know where you are, and display advertisements accordingly. This could just be the splash screen on your phone. Also, you could press "Food" or enter "pizza" and it would show you restaurants in the area, maybe even give you directions. Maybe you could even set it to ring a certain way when you're near a good restaurant.
Tying you to their other products (Gmail, Picasa) will also bring them ad revenue. It could also legitimate Google's services for the Blackberry crowd. I think that like iPhone for Apple, this would fill the gap for Google's PDA.
And I imagine contact information is worth a lot to them. Who's in your address book, who you're calling, when you call people, when you're phone is on/off, etc. Not to mention if there's GPS, they'd know where you go during the day.
I have actually seen some reports of a "new" Googlebot requesting the CSS and Javascript. The rumour I heard was that it was using the Gecko rendering engine or something along those lines. This was some time ago. I'm not sure what ever became of this.
I agree with you that with a small enough user base (or one that is adequately controlled), you can cut some corners, especially if time is a constraint. Generally I would say whenever your users could reasonably demand their browser work. That is, if the site is going to be publicly accessible, I would not make Javascript a requirement. I'm not sure what the actual "limit" I would put on the number of users would be; I think that would vary from project to project.
It's a matter of project requirements, really. I didn't mean to come off as though what I was suggesting were absolute rules. They are best practices, and especially on the web I think they should be followed.
But I don't think it's always a duplication of efforts. You're right, sometimes it is a duplication of efforts, like if you can only present the interface you want in Javascript (e.g. if you used drag and drop or something). But a lot of the time Javascript is only used to enhance a form, so it would only be adding functionality, not replicating it.
Also,have you considered what would happen if someone sues the school (is it for a school?) if they are blind and the site is inaccessible?
So, what do you have to say about websites that have their entire user-interfaces built with content that gets filled by javascript asynchronously from a single html page?
If I understand you, you something like this: The site has two parts, a menu and content. When you click a menu item, rather than being taken to a new URL, it executes Javascript which fetches only the new content from the web server, then replaces the content section. So the URL doesn't change.
It's a nice improvement. Less bandwidth used, and a quicker interface.
Unfortunately, it's not often done right. The way I would do it is to first make the menu work like it normally would. Make each menu item a link to a new page. Then you apply Javascript to the menu item. Something like this:
// menuLink is the DOM element for each menu link. // (i.e. get it from document.getElementById(), etc.) menuLink.onclick = function() { getNewContent(); return false; }
(FYI, this is how I do pop-up windows, too.)
Putting it behind a login screen doesn't solve all the problems. You're right that it won't be searchable anyway, but people with older browsers or screen readers won't be able to access it.
I think Gmail actually offers two versions. One for older browser that uses no (or little?) Javascript, and the other which almost everyone else (including me) uses and loves. But I'm not sure how easy it would be to maintain two versions of the same code like that. I also don't think it's nice for the end user to have to choose "I want the simple version", though it may encourage them to update to a newer browser, I guess.
(Of course this is all "ideally speaking", I realize there are deadlines to meet and I violate some of my own guidelines sometimes. I still think they're good practices, though.)
Define "work". A web page without formatting is going to be useless to anyone who isn't a part-time web developer.
How's this? Disable CSS on Slashdot. First you get the top menu, then some options to skip to the menu, the content, etc. Then you get the menu, then the content. It's very easy to use it that way.
To them, it's just going to be one big, messy looking freak out... akin to a television show whose cable descrambler broke. Sure all the "information" is there, somewhere, but in such a horrible format that a human being can't use it.
Well, for one thing, we are talking about a search engine here, which isn't a human being. So, there's one client that can "use" the information better in XHTML format. Then there's the visually impaired (who use screen readers as their clients), and those using a non-graphical client. Additionally, I would imagine it would be easier to screen scrape XHTML to get just the part you want (since a lot of content would be assigned an ID and/or a class.)
Web pages are dynamic these days. Saying that the only acceptable model is staticly defined strict XHTML mixed with an additional layer of tableless CSS is foolish zelotry.
Your first sentence is true, the second isn't. Web pages are dynamic, yes. I outlined how dynamic pages should be designed. That is, they should be made to work as static (X)HTML, then dynamically updated with Javascript. I don't see how your second sentence follows from the first at all. Web pages are dynamic... so we shouldn't follow standards? We shouldn't accommodate search engine crawlers, the blind, those using older browsers, or those who have Javascript support disabled?
Notice I keep putting the X in (X)HTML in brackets. That's because I'm not convinced strict XHTML is the only viable method (though I'm not convinced it's not -- I'm on the fence).
Why was I interested? Well, with all the "Web 2.0 technologies that rely on JavaScript (in the form of AJAX) to populate a page with content, it's important to know how it's treated to determine if the content is searchable.
Good. I am glad it doesn't work. Google's crawler should never support Javascript.
The model for websites is supposed to work something like this:
(X)HTML holds the content
CSS styles that content
Javascript enhances that content (e.g. provides auto-fill for a textbox)
In other words, your web page should work for any browser that supports HTML. It should work regardless of whether CSS and/or Javascript is enabled.
So why would Google's crawler look at the Javascript? Javascript is supposed to enhance content, not add it.
Now, that's not saying many people don't (incorrectly) use Javascript to add content to their pages. But maybe when they find out search engines aren't indexing them, they'll change their practices.
The only problem I can see is with scam sites, where they might put content in the HTML, then remove/add to it with Javascript so the crawler sees something different than the end-user does. I think they already do this with CSS, either by hiding sections or by making the text the same color as the background. Does anyone know how Google deals with CSS that does this?
I think steve missed a critical moment in his letter. He should have pointed out with a LOT more punch that they are all ALREADY selling their ENTIRE music collections without DRM in physical stores... and that we're simply talking about making the same possible on online stores.
Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That's right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
As long as people can still share indie labels and underground artists, then they can still expand their horizons by listening to songs their friends have and like.
On most peoples' Zunes, Sony and Universal music probably makes up a fair percentage of the total number of songs. Since these are "unsharable", the software appears to be "broken." To the average person the ins and outs of these deals are unimportant. They want to share their songs (as they were told they could), but they can't. The software appears "broken."
Picture two people with Zunes (suspension of disbelief required):
A: Hey man, you should check out this rad song I got. It's called In Da Club! B: Oh man I have never heard that before! Squirt it on me, big boy! A: Alright... here goes! Did you get it? Oh... oh wait, it says I can't squirt it to you. Uhh... sorry about that. B: Yeah, I guess I'll download it off BitTorrent when I get home. See you later, man.
Such a situation is awkward and somewhat embarassing. In the future these people would likely avoid using the sharing feature. So people are discouraged from using the sharing feature, indie music or otherwise, and the record industry continues to control the distribution of music.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I certainly did not intend to use any strawman arguments. I was only referring to this line in the article which suggests a possible solution:
I didn't mean to suggest that you thought it was a good idea. I was just tossing it out there as an example of a solution, because I don't really see any viable solution. I can see how this looks like a strawman argument. I guess not publishing the names would be a good idea, but I wonder how long that would last with blogs, facebook, etc.
What I'm saying is: I don't think the verdict is dangerous to depressed kids, but assuming that you're correct that it is, I'm not sure that that should have any significant impact on our future decision making anyway.
Okay, so let's assume the bullied kid misunderstands the case. Are we then going to say: "Don't publicize far-reaching cases that might influence an unstable person who misunderstands the facts to act in a way that harms themselves?"
That seems like a fairly big trade-off to me. There's been a legal precedent set that could affect countless Americans, but we shouldn't warn them about this because someone might misunderstand the facts and act irrationally?
I'd like to suggest that:
I'm not saying it's a good verdict; it's not. I'm just saying your particular concern about creating incentive for bullied kids to harm themselves seems a little exaggerated when you consider that they would have to know the bully was violating the terms of service before harming themselves in order to bring punishment on the bully.
Obviously this wouldn't work for copying from Mail to Safari, but I was kind of confused as to when that would come in handy anyway. The trade-off for security would be worth it, and if you really wanted to, you could still do a trip to a server for Mail-to-Safari copying.
I haven't delved into the bookmarklets yet, so maybe it's not possible for some reason, but does anyone know why they would choose to have it make a trip to the server when it seems like it could be pretty easily avoided?
And if they don't enter their gender? Then most people will make an assumption based on what they know about the user (e.g. their name). But most people won't know all the rules about naming from all the different cultures, so their assumptions might be incorrect. If the computer can be programmed to make better guesses than most users, why shouldn't we use such a system?
It reminds me of grammar check: sure, there's no real substitute for knowing the rules of grammar yourself, but if the computer can do a better job than most people, it might be useful to have such a feature available.
I don't think it tries to guess your gender, I think it tries to guess the gender of the user you're talking to. So instead of you thinking, "I wonder if this person is male or female?" it suggests: "Kyle is from North America and this is usually a boy's name." Of course, "Kyle" is a bad example because you probably already know that. But if the other user were from a different culture, you might not be familiar with the naming conventions, or you might erroneously assume they coincide with your culture's naming conventions.
I think the idea is that people are going to make these assumptions anyway, so maybe a computer can help them be more accurate. This is why the invention is useful.
The example ozamosi posted below would be covered fairly well by this patent: Robins in North America would be classified as female, but Robins from Sweden would be classified as male.
My criticism of the invention's effectiveness is that it's not completely fool-proof, and would inevitably assign the wrong gender for people with the spelling typically adopted by the opposite gender. It might be a worse "faux pas" to address a male as female (or vice versa), than to leave assumptions of their gender out of the picture. Of course this might vary from culture to culture, and I really don't know about that. It might be more effective to just force the user to input their gender, but this would have to be done on every client, which could be problematic.
Of course, I'm not sure whether we should be assisting the enforcement of "societal conventions" based on differences in gender, but that's a different topic from the invention's effectiveness.
By the way, here's the relevant part:
I agree, but he's trying to make an informed buying decision, presumably without spending the money on renting all the consoles to try them for himself. I don't think an analysis based on game ratings is completely accurate either, but I do think it gives a good ballpark. When you have aggregate ratings showing that Wii has less than half a "good game rate" than the other consoles, you have to think something is going on there. (But I wouldn't buy a 360 because it has a 3.39 GGPM as opposed to PS3's 3.29 GGPM. The difference is too little.)
I think you are spot-on about the monthly gaming budget, though. That's a better way of distinguishing what I meant when I compared "hardcore" gamers to the people Nintendo is targeting. Nintendo is going after a group of people with lower gaming budgets and more homogeneous tastes.
It's striking that DS has a similar GGPM rate to Wii, and that both are lower than the other consoles. I think the explanation for the discrepancy is Nintendo's target audience. First, a lot of people who buy Nintendo consoles buy them specifically for Nintendo games: Mario, Zelda, etc. Compare the top selling games for the different consoles: almost all of Wii's are first-party, whereas Xbox 360 and PS3 have more variety in their publishers. So the target market for Nintendo is mostly interested in first party titles.
The other thing is that Nintendo's target market probably buys fewer games per console. How many games does the average Nintendo customer buy a month? I'm not talking about "hardcore" gamers, I'm talking about the average person with a Nintendo console. I would be hard-pressed to say its more than 1 a month.
For the other consoles, you've got more "hardcore" gamers that buy games more frequently, but that can't be expected to buy the same games as each other. As a rough example, 9.53 million Mario Kart Wii sales per 30.55 million Wiis, vs. 3 million MGS4 sales per 16.84 million PS3 sales. Put another way, about 1 in 3 Wii owners bought Mario Kart, but less than 1 in 5 PS3 owners bought MGS4. (I realize there are some important differences, but this is just to give a rough idea.)
This would explain why Nintendo puts out fewer quality games. Their target audience only wants so many games per month, and they can be expected to buy the same quality games as each other. By comparison, the other consoles have to put out more diverse quality games because of the more diverse and frenzied appetites of their target market.
If customers are only using their mobile phones to make phone calls, they would have little reason to upgrade. You might get a slimmer model or something, but it's probably not that high of a priority for people who only use their phone to make calls.* How many people buy a new home phone every year?
Then along comes something like the iPhone that actually makes you want to use your phone for different things. GPS maps, a "real" web browser, mail client, etc... and all pleasant to use. People get used to it, and when the next iPhone comes out, with more features most people aren't thinking of, people will want to upgrade. Which means sales, but also renewed contracts.
The analogy here is the personal computer. Back when computers were becoming more commonplace, manufacturers may have said, "We're building these great computers with superfast 28.8k modems, but all anyone uses their computers for is word processing!"
OK, yes, they could've sold computers as glorified typewriters, but if they get people using their computers for more than that, people will want more. There's a quote attributed to Henry Ford along these lines: "If I'd asked people what they'd wanted, they would've asked for a better horse."
* I realize people continue to buy new cellphones every year and do not use the features. These are essentially fashion statements, but I think eventually a lot of people will just settle for what they have. Additionally, the iPhone may have been set to monopolize the market in that it's both fashionable and functional.
I posted one, but my ISP filtered the post.
If they have the technology, why wouldn't they do the same across the board? It's not as though there's added value in seeing someone's face or license plate. The article doesn't mention anything about this.
Not very professional.
The only real change I see your system adding is a free-ride for the last year of your education, since you won't be graded for doing any work. Unless your statement that "anyone who graduates has to have known enough to do so" means final exams in your last year. Which is still flawed, because someone might drop out without passing, but still have the "1 year university experience" on their resume.
If it had GPS, it could know where you are, and display advertisements accordingly. This could just be the splash screen on your phone. Also, you could press "Food" or enter "pizza" and it would show you restaurants in the area, maybe even give you directions. Maybe you could even set it to ring a certain way when you're near a good restaurant.
Tying you to their other products (Gmail, Picasa) will also bring them ad revenue. It could also legitimate Google's services for the Blackberry crowd. I think that like iPhone for Apple, this would fill the gap for Google's PDA.
And I imagine contact information is worth a lot to them. Who's in your address book, who you're calling, when you call people, when you're phone is on/off, etc. Not to mention if there's GPS, they'd know where you go during the day.
I have actually seen some reports of a "new" Googlebot requesting the CSS and Javascript. The rumour I heard was that it was using the Gecko rendering engine or something along those lines. This was some time ago. I'm not sure what ever became of this.
I agree with you that with a small enough user base (or one that is adequately controlled), you can cut some corners, especially if time is a constraint. Generally I would say whenever your users could reasonably demand their browser work. That is, if the site is going to be publicly accessible, I would not make Javascript a requirement. I'm not sure what the actual "limit" I would put on the number of users would be; I think that would vary from project to project.
It's a matter of project requirements, really. I didn't mean to come off as though what I was suggesting were absolute rules. They are best practices, and especially on the web I think they should be followed.
But I don't think it's always a duplication of efforts. You're right, sometimes it is a duplication of efforts, like if you can only present the interface you want in Javascript (e.g. if you used drag and drop or something). But a lot of the time Javascript is only used to enhance a form, so it would only be adding functionality, not replicating it.
Also,have you considered what would happen if someone sues the school (is it for a school?) if they are blind and the site is inaccessible?
It's a nice improvement. Less bandwidth used, and a quicker interface.
Unfortunately, it's not often done right. The way I would do it is to first make the menu work like it normally would. Make each menu item a link to a new page. Then you apply Javascript to the menu item. Something like this: (FYI, this is how I do pop-up windows, too.)
Putting it behind a login screen doesn't solve all the problems. You're right that it won't be searchable anyway, but people with older browsers or screen readers won't be able to access it.
I think Gmail actually offers two versions. One for older browser that uses no (or little?) Javascript, and the other which almost everyone else (including me) uses and loves. But I'm not sure how easy it would be to maintain two versions of the same code like that. I also don't think it's nice for the end user to have to choose "I want the simple version", though it may encourage them to update to a newer browser, I guess.
(Of course this is all "ideally speaking", I realize there are deadlines to meet and I violate some of my own guidelines sometimes. I still think they're good practices, though.)
Notice I keep putting the X in (X)HTML in brackets. That's because I'm not convinced strict XHTML is the only viable method (though I'm not convinced it's not -- I'm on the fence).
The model for websites is supposed to work something like this:
In other words, your web page should work for any browser that supports HTML. It should work regardless of whether CSS and/or Javascript is enabled.
So why would Google's crawler look at the Javascript? Javascript is supposed to enhance content, not add it.
Now, that's not saying many people don't (incorrectly) use Javascript to add content to their pages. But maybe when they find out search engines aren't indexing them, they'll change their practices.
The only problem I can see is with scam sites, where they might put content in the HTML, then remove/add to it with Javascript so the crawler sees something different than the end-user does. I think they already do this with CSS, either by hiding sections or by making the text the same color as the background. Does anyone know how Google deals with CSS that does this?
He did exactly that:
Picture two people with Zunes (suspension of disbelief required):
A: Hey man, you should check out this rad song I got. It's called In Da Club!
B: Oh man I have never heard that before! Squirt it on me, big boy!
A: Alright... here goes! Did you get it? Oh... oh wait, it says I can't squirt it to you. Uhh... sorry about that.
B: Yeah, I guess I'll download it off BitTorrent when I get home. See you later, man.
Such a situation is awkward and somewhat embarassing. In the future these people would likely avoid using the sharing feature. So people are discouraged from using the sharing feature, indie music or otherwise, and the record industry continues to control the distribution of music.
Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us. [murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat]
(link)