As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2
No. The short version is that somebody at Netscape invented 0.9something based on RDF. The public release (another 0.9something) was rushed for my.netscape.com and wasn't based on RDF. Then Netscape abandoned the format, and Dave Winer republished the 0.9something specification. He made a couple more basic changes, all 0.9somethings. Then somebody else published a 1.0 that was again based on RDF. Dave threw a hissy fit, accusing them of stealing "his" RSS, and renamed 0.9something as 2.0.
It's more or less true that 1.0 was released as a fait accompli, however unintentional. However the real thorn stopping people from working together is, and always has been, Dave Winer. The guy's an asshole.
The referring to the W3C as a standards organisation is a relatively recent thing that cashes in on the "web standards" buzzwords that are trendy these days. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the W3C, says he didn't want to create a standards body in his book "Weaving the Web", which is all about the birth of the web and the W3C. That's why you'll see the HTML, CSS, DOM, etc specifications uniformly named recommendations, not standards.
"I did not want to form a standards body per se, but some kind of organization that could help developers of servers and browsers reach consensus on how the Web should operate."
-- Tim Berners-Lee
The W3C is a vendor consortium, not a standards body.
By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols
Some of them are only semi-open. For example, the HTML recommendations rely on ISO standards (actual standards) that you have to pay for. Sure, most people muddle through and write HTML parsers that mostly work, but that's not good enough for what is touted as an "open standard", is it?
No. I use this stupidly named account because of Slashdot's stupid timeout requirements ("You already posted two hours ago so you can't post again...").
Coding to simpler and more robust standards, rather than "feature-driven" ones, reduces the load on the browser, on the server, on the bandwidth, and in the long-term on the designer.
Not true.
The "load" on the browser? To what, specifically, are you referring? Even "flat" HTML (I assume you mean HTML 3.2-style HTML as opposed to HTML 4 with CSS) gets processed according to CSS rules in browsers that implemement CSS.
The load on the server and bandwidth? Using external stylesheets means style is shared between multiple pages - and much more cachable, especially when you use PHP includes. PHP includes happen on the server-side, which means the full page has to be generated and downloaded each page view. CSS, on the other hand, means that the stylesheet is already probably in the cache, so no download at all apart from bare-bones HTML. That's less load on the server and bandwidth.
The designer? CSS means less code to write. CSS means I can hand off the HTML to copy writers without worrying if they'll screw up the layout. CSS is simply more manageable.
It also keeps the websites accessible and workable for the blind or almost blind
So does CSS. In fact, the WCAG published by the W3C, which is aimed at making things accessible, specifically recommends the use of stylesheets.
"Coding for all browsers is expensive and increases our development and support costs".
That's the BS I usually hear from people who develop only for one browser - typically the "corporate standard" browser.
No, it's true. Try developing a website using CSS 2. It'll work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari just fine. Now check it in Internet Explorer. Whoops!
If you want your website to work in all browsers, then you have to either forget about CSS 2 (meaning slower development) or hack around Internet Explorer's problems (meaning slower development). Slower development == costs more.
How many tutorials have you seen with different methods of achieving multiple column layouts? Did you know that you just need a couple of lines of code to do it (display:table-cell etc) in all the major browsers except Internet Explorer?
We have a very small software development staff. As the manager of this organization, I can say with confidence that supporting all browsers versus just one costs us zero dollars.
I'm in a similar situation, and I can say with confidence that Internet Explorer slows us down, which costs us money. Coding to standards is not the same thing as making it work in all browsers.
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well.
What they produced was an absolute mess. CSS boxes were built to IE handling, and rendered incorrectly on Mozilla...
When they were done, maintenance was handed over to me...
Waitasecond... they ignored you and built something that didn't meet the requirements you had laid out up front... and yet you still paid for it and used it?
This is the reason the web development industry has so many scammers and clueless idiots in it.
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding.
What you should have learnt: make sure your requirements are on a signed bit of paper and include problem resolution in your contract saying what happens when they don't meet their end of the deal.
That way, when they deliver something sub-standard, you get your design for free and punish idiot scammers.
A website that is properly designed should not have to get ready for any version of a web browser, since it should already support most browsers on the maket
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
I don't know what you think progressive enhancement is, but it's got nothing to do with being non-standard.
This works for Javascript and non-Javascript user-agents. This last one is an example of progressive enhancement. You provide a basic version that works everywhere, and you progressively enhance it where the user-agent supports it.
It's all about being compatible with less capable user-agents while still using the fancy stuff that advanced user-agents are capable of. It's got nothing to do with being non-standard - you can comply with the W3C specifications when using progressive enhancement, or you can ignore the W3C specifications when using progressive enhancement. It's a completely separate issue.
In other words, MS wouldn't need to bother to mention this if IE7 was standards compliant.
Newsflash: every browser has bugs. No browser is "standards compliant" (hint: the W3C is a vendor consortium that publishes specifications, they are not a standards body that publish standards).
When the HTTP specification was being written, they understood that it might be necessary to work around specific browser shortcomings. That's the whole reason why the User-Agent header is there in the first place.
I'm pessimistic about Internet Explorer 7 too. But the things you point out are completely reasonable and expected from any major browser release.
If there's ANY standards-compliant browser in which tabbing through elements doesn't Just Work, the solution is incomplete.
Don't worry, that won't be a problem. There are no standards-compliant browsers, so obviously there are no standards-compliant browsers in which tabbing through elements doesn't Just Work.
The majority of politicians these days don't even understand that there is more to the internet than what Internet Explorer shows them. If they start throwing around regulations that are impossible to follow (like "ban all sites that might offend someone, but we can't give you a list because that would be offensive", how many times have we heard THAT now?)
So you are saying that the USA should continue to manage the DNS infrastructure, because if the UN gets hold of it, they might act... like the USA?
For 10 years now my friends and I have managed to form a loose musicians collective with the purpose of putting our totally free music/art online for free access.
Then you said:
if we put our stuff on someone else's server, we have zero control over it.
...and:
Putting it on some other host just gives that host the right to manage our free art accordingly.. thats not the point of our project.
I think you are using a different definition of "totally free" to the popular one here. Could you define "totally free" for us so we know what is and isn't acceptable?
What kind of moronic statement is this? Optimising for size is optimising for performance. What, does he think that the Apple guys are optimising for size to cut down on shipping costs?
This guy in the front row says "You've got to stop banging on people whose motivation is something other than money." There's always a Hari Krishna in the audience: "It's illegal to make money at this. We're all garage bands, and you sold your soul to the devil for a handful of dollars."
Er, but the "guy in the front row" wasn't saying it's illegal to make money at this. He was complaining that the asshole keeps moaning about hobbyists. And the asshole used it as an excuse to go into another name-calling rant about hobbyists! It's a straw-man argument of the worst kind.
So I go, "Have you contributed anything?" and usually they say no and I stop it there.
Er, did you even read the link you provided? It's a myth that Apache was named because it's "a patchy server". It was named because of the Apache people's meritocracy.
With the GPL, relicensing to a commercial customer can become impossible. A developer can easily find themselves in a situation where he would want to license his work, but some earlier, relatively small contributions can have made this legally basically impossible.
No. In that situation, the developer would not be licensing his work, he'd be licensing his work and everybody else's contributed work. Think about it. If he was only licensing his own work, there wouldn't be a problem.
The fix to this is already common knowledge. Get people to assign copyright to you when they submit code or require them to submit it under a BSD type license to you. GNU already require this for their projects, so you can use their practices as a template for your own.
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The iTMS could always say that. This is the first time it can say it truthfully though.
The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.
Three? Try nine.
As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2
No. The short version is that somebody at Netscape invented 0.9something based on RDF. The public release (another 0.9something) was rushed for my.netscape.com and wasn't based on RDF. Then Netscape abandoned the format, and Dave Winer republished the 0.9something specification. He made a couple more basic changes, all 0.9somethings. Then somebody else published a 1.0 that was again based on RDF. Dave threw a hissy fit, accusing them of stealing "his" RSS, and renamed 0.9something as 2.0.
It's more or less true that 1.0 was released as a fait accompli, however unintentional. However the real thorn stopping people from working together is, and always has been, Dave Winer. The guy's an asshole.
Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be.
Atom was created as a replacement for RSS. There wouldn't be much point in creating it if it wasn't far superior.
The referring to the W3C as a standards organisation is a relatively recent thing that cashes in on the "web standards" buzzwords that are trendy these days. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the W3C, says he didn't want to create a standards body in his book "Weaving the Web", which is all about the birth of the web and the W3C. That's why you'll see the HTML, CSS, DOM, etc specifications uniformly named recommendations, not standards.
The W3C is a vendor consortium, not a standards body.
By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols
Some of them are only semi-open. For example, the HTML recommendations rely on ISO standards (actual standards) that you have to pay for. Sure, most people muddle through and write HTML parsers that mostly work, but that's not good enough for what is touted as an "open standard", is it?
Linus, is that you?
No. I use this stupidly named account because of Slashdot's stupid timeout requirements ("You already posted two hours ago so you can't post again...").
Coding to simpler and more robust standards, rather than "feature-driven" ones, reduces the load on the browser, on the server, on the bandwidth, and in the long-term on the designer.
Not true.
The "load" on the browser? To what, specifically, are you referring? Even "flat" HTML (I assume you mean HTML 3.2-style HTML as opposed to HTML 4 with CSS) gets processed according to CSS rules in browsers that implemement CSS.
The load on the server and bandwidth? Using external stylesheets means style is shared between multiple pages - and much more cachable, especially when you use PHP includes. PHP includes happen on the server-side, which means the full page has to be generated and downloaded each page view. CSS, on the other hand, means that the stylesheet is already probably in the cache, so no download at all apart from bare-bones HTML. That's less load on the server and bandwidth.
The designer? CSS means less code to write. CSS means I can hand off the HTML to copy writers without worrying if they'll screw up the layout. CSS is simply more manageable.
It also keeps the websites accessible and workable for the blind or almost blind
So does CSS. In fact, the WCAG published by the W3C, which is aimed at making things accessible, specifically recommends the use of stylesheets.
"Coding for all browsers is expensive and increases our development and support costs".
That's the BS I usually hear from people who develop only for one browser - typically the "corporate standard" browser.
No, it's true. Try developing a website using CSS 2. It'll work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari just fine. Now check it in Internet Explorer. Whoops!
If you want your website to work in all browsers, then you have to either forget about CSS 2 (meaning slower development) or hack around Internet Explorer's problems (meaning slower development). Slower development == costs more.
How many tutorials have you seen with different methods of achieving multiple column layouts? Did you know that you just need a couple of lines of code to do it (display:table-cell etc) in all the major browsers except Internet Explorer?
We have a very small software development staff. As the manager of this organization, I can say with confidence that supporting all browsers versus just one costs us zero dollars.
I'm in a similar situation, and I can say with confidence that Internet Explorer slows us down, which costs us money. Coding to standards is not the same thing as making it work in all browsers.
I think that if a major PC buyer - read government, decided not to let systems with non compliant browsers be marketed in the country...
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well.
What they produced was an absolute mess. CSS boxes were built to IE handling, and rendered incorrectly on Mozilla...
When they were done, maintenance was handed over to me...
Waitasecond... they ignored you and built something that didn't meet the requirements you had laid out up front... and yet you still paid for it and used it?
This is the reason the web development industry has so many scammers and clueless idiots in it.
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding.
What you should have learnt: make sure your requirements are on a signed bit of paper and include problem resolution in your contract saying what happens when they don't meet their end of the deal.
That way, when they deliver something sub-standard, you get your design for free and punish idiot scammers.
A website that is properly designed should not have to get ready for any version of a web browser, since it should already support most browsers on the maket
Internet Explorer 7 isn't on the market yet.
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
I don't know what you think progressive enhancement is, but it's got nothing to do with being non-standard.
Take this example:
It works pretty much everywhere. Now this:
This breaks on non-Javascript user-agents. Now this:
This works for Javascript and non-Javascript user-agents. This last one is an example of progressive enhancement. You provide a basic version that works everywhere, and you progressively enhance it where the user-agent supports it.
It's all about being compatible with less capable user-agents while still using the fancy stuff that advanced user-agents are capable of. It's got nothing to do with being non-standard - you can comply with the W3C specifications when using progressive enhancement, or you can ignore the W3C specifications when using progressive enhancement. It's a completely separate issue.
In other words, MS wouldn't need to bother to mention this if IE7 was standards compliant.
Newsflash: every browser has bugs. No browser is "standards compliant" (hint: the W3C is a vendor consortium that publishes specifications, they are not a standards body that publish standards).
When the HTTP specification was being written, they understood that it might be necessary to work around specific browser shortcomings. That's the whole reason why the User-Agent header is there in the first place.
I'm pessimistic about Internet Explorer 7 too. But the things you point out are completely reasonable and expected from any major browser release.
If there's ANY standards-compliant browser in which tabbing through elements doesn't Just Work, the solution is incomplete.
Don't worry, that won't be a problem. There are no standards-compliant browsers, so obviously there are no standards-compliant browsers in which tabbing through elements doesn't Just Work.
The majority of politicians these days don't even understand that there is more to the internet than what Internet Explorer shows them. If they start throwing around regulations that are impossible to follow (like "ban all sites that might offend someone, but we can't give you a list because that would be offensive", how many times have we heard THAT now?)
So you are saying that the USA should continue to manage the DNS infrastructure, because if the UN gets hold of it, they might act... like the USA?
You said:
For 10 years now my friends and I have managed to form a loose musicians collective with the purpose of putting our totally free music/art online for free access.
Then you said:
if we put our stuff on someone else's server, we have zero control over it.
Putting it on some other host just gives that host the right to manage our free art accordingly .. thats not the point of our project.
I think you are using a different definition of "totally free" to the popular one here. Could you define "totally free" for us so we know what is and isn't acceptable?
I said "optimising for size is optimising for performance".
You read "optimising for performance is optimising for size".
You disagree with the latter. So do I. I said the former.
A second issue you may not realise is that sex is, fundamentally, neutral. It can be used for good and for bad.
Finally, a description of sex the average Slashdotter can comprehend!
Sex is like the Force.
Fine. You can keep DNS so long as you stop using the WWW, URLs and HTTP. After all, they all belong to the British.
they optimize for size, not for performance
What kind of moronic statement is this? Optimising for size is optimising for performance. What, does he think that the Apple guys are optimising for size to cut down on shipping costs?
I thought it was the GHz speed of the processor you need.
The "educated minority"? Gee anyone who uses Windows is uneducated.
Do you not understand the meaning of the words "often choose"? Here's a hint: it doesn't mean "always choose".
He isn't saying what you think he is saying and if you had decent English comprehension skills, you would have understood that.
This guy in the front row says "You've got to stop banging on people whose motivation is something other than money." There's always a Hari Krishna in the audience: "It's illegal to make money at this. We're all garage bands, and you sold your soul to the devil for a handful of dollars."
Er, but the "guy in the front row" wasn't saying it's illegal to make money at this. He was complaining that the asshole keeps moaning about hobbyists. And the asshole used it as an excuse to go into another name-calling rant about hobbyists! It's a straw-man argument of the worst kind.
So I go, "Have you contributed anything?" and usually they say no and I stop it there.
Ad hominems too. The guy truly is an asshole.
No, because in that case, it's obviously swiss cheese that is better. I mean, come on.
Last time I installed (a year or so ago) php still didn't work with apache 2, so I couldn't use it.
PHP has been working with Apache 2 for years. It's FUD that the PHP guys are spreading that it doesn't work with Apache 2.
It's unreliable with Apache 2's threaded MPMs, but it works fine with the (default) prefork MPM.
Apache Software Foundation member calling the PHP guys "just plain wrong".
Er, did you even read the link you provided? It's a myth that Apache was named because it's "a patchy server". It was named because of the Apache people's meritocracy.
With the GPL, relicensing to a commercial customer can become impossible. A developer can easily find themselves in a situation where he would want to license his work, but some earlier, relatively small contributions can have made this legally basically impossible.
No. In that situation, the developer would not be licensing his work, he'd be licensing his work and everybody else's contributed work. Think about it. If he was only licensing his own work, there wouldn't be a problem.
The fix to this is already common knowledge. Get people to assign copyright to you when they submit code or require them to submit it under a BSD type license to you. GNU already require this for their projects, so you can use their practices as a template for your own.
There's no "legal impossibility" here whatsoever.
So I suppose the Apache Foundation should just give up the work they've done?
The majority of the Apache developers are paid by companies to work. They do it as a job, not "to help people".
I suppose name-recognition for a popular BSD project isn't enough for you?
Somehow, when the person you are replying to said "if you want to help people", I don't think he was referring to boosting your own ego.
Likewise, is there something wrong with working for Habitat for Humanity, the Peace Corps, and The Hunger Project?
What the fuck are you on about?