I generally just try to get everything to look right in Opera and Firefox, and then apply some hacks to get it to work in IE6. All my pages showed up correctly in IE7, since most of the hacks that I use are to kill the double-floated margin or guillotine.
I don't really agree with using a "browser" attribute, because that allows browsers to not fully implement CSS specs in the future. It kind of sucks right now because everything's in a big transition, but it will be better in the future to make sure that browsers follow a standard, rather than being allowed to deviate.
I suggest using a server-side method for outputting the styles. Create a standard stylesheet that works fine in every browser, and then put the hacks for the individual browsers in their own specific files and only output them if you match their browser on the server end. I've done that before and it's worked well when it was simply impossible to get all the browsers to behave.
By the way, browsers can't really not support conditional comments. Browsers that don't see that it actually contains something will read the stylesheet reference as a comment. I do agree that it's kind of spammy and retarded, but it does work.
You may try using conditional comments, or the star HTML hack. In IE7, the element around the html element is gone, and using a selector of * html is no longer caught like it was in IE6. An example of conditional comments, which you can use to include a separate iesucks.css file, is below.
Yeah, this is the only cross-browser problem Flash has. I stand corrected. The problem is that the movie has a parameter of transparent added to it, so that any area within the Flash movie that doesn't have any content is see-through. I'm pretty sure that FF has transparency support, and Opera 9 supposedly does too, but you're right--neither one works.
In any application made with Flex, transparency shouldn't really be added anyway, so this won't be an issue. The big deal for most people is the whole JavaScript drop-down menu disappearing behind a Flash movie--transparency is the only workaround.
The dumb part is: in this case, it doesn't look like the movie even needs to be transparent.
Flex has been around for quite some time now--way before Macromedia was acquired.
Here's the breakdown: Flex allows you to create web applications using Flash as the interface. Yeah, you can do this yourself, but Flex does all the hard work, such as laying out the UI and joining it with the business logic. If you've programmed your application using MVC or some other tiered application development pattern, you should be able to hook your Flex-built Flash movie into the business logic controller and it will work. The advantage to doing it this way is that you don't have to fool around with HTML/CSS/JS and getting it to work cross-browser. Flash is Flash--you do it once and it looks right, no cross-browser problems.
It's not meant to replace simple menus and contact forms, it's for creating hardcore programs--things like a CRM tool or project management software. Pretty much anything enterprise-wide.
The reason it might not make sense to you is because you're a designer/animator, not a programmer. Or at least that's how it sounds. Web app developers can get pretty excited about Flex--it saves the work of designing the application cross browser, and most of the components are prebuilt and more powerful than standard web counterparts. It's ridiculous trying to build a dynamic chart on the web.
Typical obstinate answer. The truth is, you can't prove that slavery as regulated in the Bible is wrong any more than you can prove that PB&J sandwiches are bad. If your mom made crappy PB&J for you when you were a kid, you're likely to think that everyone else's sucked too. I hope that the analogy isn't too stupid for your inestimably powerful analysis, reasoning and debating skills.
Just so it's clear--I believe that slavery as instituted by most masters in American history is wrong, very wrong. I'll agree wholeheartedly with pretty much any slam you make against it. However, the actions of those masters is very much against how the Bible instructs masters to treat slaves.
Congratulations, you've taken your own background knowledge and applied it to a totally different situation. I believe when you say that slavery is barbaric and inhumane, you are referring to the American institution of slavery from earlier in its history, as well as comparably inhumane slavery initiatives of the past.
If you'd read the rest of the chapter instead of pulling Bible verses out of their necessary context, you would have seen that masters are in turn supposed to treat their slaves with the same respect that is required to them. Unfortunately, we don't always have ideal situations in life, and bosses/masters are cruel, but suppose with me that the Bible's true. If so, then this physical life on earth is relatively short to the infinity that is the rest of our existence. 60 years of being beaten and stepped on by a cruel master seems worth it in order to receive God's rewards forever. That concept can be found in Ephesians 6:7-8.
Also, I never said that the New Testament is more humane and gentle, and that its concepts override the OT's barbarism. The OT can be thought of as barbaric. I think of it as just. The nations that the Israelites warred against were, without exception, nations that had oppressed Israel before (notice that God has taken care of the revenge for oppressive masters?) or nations that were terribly caught up in wrongdoing. Sex with animals and family members, incessant murder and other things that everyone considers bad were characteristic of the nations that God had the Israelites destroy.
Besides, Jesus and God described in the New Testament aren't any less just, it's simply that there is a different manner of reconciliation with God. The barrier of animal sacrifice was removed for forgiveness of sin. Call it removing the middle man.
To conclude, slavery in past times was often what you and I would consider being a household servant. In exchange for taking care of the chores, such as growing food, preparing dinner and watching the kids, slaves were given shelter, food and comfort. There are plenty of exceptions to this, which God does not condone. He says he will punish masters who treat their slaves poorly, in fact.
I sincerely hope that before coming to the conclusions that all slavery is bad and the New Testament is more humane and gentle than the Old Testament, which is barbaric; that you read more than four Bible verses that are taken out of their context and shrouded with your specific view. I don't mind arguing Biblical topics with you, but at least do it in a way that argues about the topic at hand, and not about why I and others are stupid.
And the reasoning behind ignoring Leviticus can be backed in that Jesus mentioned many times that he has overcome the law, or that he IS the law. Also, most of Leviticus deals with sacrificing, which is part of the old covenant (Jesus created the new covenant), and civil laws. Saying to someone now to not cut their hair on the sides of their head would be similar to telling someone to obey our highway speed limits 4000 years from now. With that said, Leviticus does have some good concepts for how to keep yourself from getting diseases--things we now call hygiene.
Sorry, I use the Dvorak keyboard, so I have a legitimate reason. It's actually easier for me to type M$ than MS since I can alternate hands to type the keys. Besides, if we're going the anal-retentive route as you seem to like, it's not MICROSOFT either. It's Microsoft.
Apparently you don't hate to nitpick, because that's exactly what you're doing. You completely failed to see any reason behind my comment, simply because you're caught up in a trivial intentional misspelling.
While I don't necessarily agree with filtering results, I think it's good that Google is even getting into the Chinese market. Pretty much every move that Google's made that everybody gets in a huff about--i.e. the AOL 5% share buying--has turned out to be good for the company, and not bad for everyone else.
Before we go berserk about Google being hypocrites, look at it from their perspective: at least they can now show search results in China. Sure, the gov't wants them to restrict information, but that's just how it is in China. Maybe Google will be able to leverage some of their power once China's gov't sees that it's good for the economy.
To me, doing something that's subjectively evil is better than not doing a dang thing about the situation. Google has a lot of power, and they've been using it to get into markets that would otherwise be unaccessible. Until they start abusing me, the customer (directly or indirectly), I don't have any reason to believe that this situation is a problem.
On that note, I can't see everything in this situation. Can anyone with more insight than me see how this decision would affect the rest of the world, other than China? Economics, general business, etc. Speculation is fine.
Heck, even if it is just a simple scripting shortcut, it's well worth it. Most Javascript I write uses wrapper functions and objects that resolve inconsistencies between IE and Everyone Else. The event model, AJAX, positioning, etc.
Anything M$ does to resolve these inconsistencies means less coding/bug fixing and more problem solving on a higher level.
Wow--that's pretty brutal. I haven't seen Netscape 3 on my server logs in years. Just to attempt to see what you're seeing, I turned off CSS, JS and images and took a look at the Slashdot front page. Although it was refreshing without the ads, I think I'll stick with a modern browser (not that I could download Netscape 3 anyway).
I understand your need for browser preferences. Mine is Opera, for the same reasons as you--speed and "behaves how I want".
Well, have fun with your defunct browser. I guess I'll have to start targeting my websites for users like you now.
This is almost impossible to do, simply because of the multitude of ways you can structure/code a website, not to mention that plenty of ads are created through iframes and JavaScript functionality. It would be extremely difficult to catch all that. Beyond that, many valid news sites have their fair share of advertisements. Just because a site has them, you can't assume that it's a bad site. Adsense is good business.
Good web developers will structure their site correctly, meaning that each paragraph is within a p(aragraph) tag, headings will be used to separate sections of content, et.al. Are you going to punish somebody for not having 200 words in each paragraph, while the 10-year-old hack has their entire website inside a table with no rows or cells and gets accepted? I know you're just giving an example, but something perfectly valid will inevitably be cut out if you work using the algorithm given above.
The problem with staring at a monitor for hours on end is not the lights around you or how bright the screen is. The activity that your eyes perform is simply gathering as much light as they can and sending it through the appropriate channels to be interpreted by your brain. In a sense, your brain is doing all the work in setting brightness for you. In reality, if your brain didn't filter out what it deems "excess" light, you wouldn't be able to see a dang thing.
Your brain finds contrast in light, and therefore finds edges so that you perceive an object to be a certain size and distance away from you.
The actual reason that your eyes get crappy from sitting in front of a computer all day is because they receive no stimulation. You're focusing between 2 and 4 feet for 8 hours or so, pretty much constantly, so your eye muscles are not getting any workout. Just like people get fat and lazy from sitting in a chair all day, they get bad eyesight because they're not focusing near and far often enough. YMMV.
The best way to handle this is to not just stare at your monitor(s) all day long. Take breaks. Look out the window, or at your cubicle wall, whatever. Anything.
I decided to read a little bit about the Induce Act so that I could enlighten others who didn't know what it is
Ok, so the Induce act basically says that creating software (and other "devices") that encourages people to break copyright laws is illegal. For example, the Grokster case. Rather than suing the people that actually downloaded the pirated music and videos, MGM decided to sue the creators of Grokster, the software that allowed people to pass around pirated music, etc.
This is, in a sense, an intelligent idea. It's smart to cut a problem off as close to the source as possible. However, the other side to this coin is that the people who created Grokster didn't actually do any of the pirating.
I equate this method with enablers--people who help their husband or wife get fat by always making sure an overabundance of junk food is around. Yeah, the enabler may have contributed, but it's still the enablee's decision to actually eat the food.
More unfortunately, the Induce Act covers a very broad area of law, which means that some tool's going to try to use it down the road in a way it was never intended.
A lot of people choose Delaware because it has the Chancery Court, which is a court designed just for business legal issues. This helps resolve business problems and legalities quickly.
Also, there's no sales or personal property tax, and no income tax for companies that don't do business in Delaware. This is especially good for small companies to avoid double taxation. Double taxation occurs when your company is taxed for income, and then you as an individual are taxed when you pay yourself a salary.
Additionally, you don't have to have a few things--you don't have to keep corporate records in Delaware, and shareholders can act in writing. Normally, you have to actually have people show up in a building, which costs a lot of time and money.
Finally, it's cheap. Aside from legal fees for writing up your incorporation statement, it can be less than $100 initially, and less than $200 (depending on if you're an LLC) for the annual fee.
As you can probably tell, this makes it really easy to avoid the potential legal risks of sole proprietorship and just incorporate instead if it's just you, or if you want to have a small startup. For an extra couple bucks per year, it's worth it to have an LLC. No money comes out of your personal pocket if you get sued.
The main reason for me (though not the only one) is speed. Firefox feels like driving a tractor trailer through a slalom after using Opera. The memory footprint in Firefox doesn't help its case either.
Ahh...Kin Korn Karn...I haven't seen a good Pro Wrestling reference in years. I'm now having a flashback to the good old days of NES crowd noise/static and 2 frame animations. Thanks.
Although the article details an interesting exploit, Google fixed this on the 1st of this month--The title is somewhat misleading. It is useful to know that Google fixed this vulnerability 2 weeks after it was discovered, on November 15th.
Also, for those of us unaccustomed to DD/MM/YYYY date format, that's the format of all dates in the article.
My wife has a separate logon for our computer, and I left the main login screen as standard QWERTY, while my personal login is set to DVORAK. It works pretty well for us. The only problem is when I'm still logged in, or I lock the computer. However, she's learned to hunt and peck until she can type her name in DVORAK-ese.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally just try to get everything to look right in Opera and Firefox, and then apply some hacks to get it to work in IE6. All my pages showed up correctly in IE7, since most of the hacks that I use are to kill the double-floated margin or guillotine.
I don't really agree with using a "browser" attribute, because that allows browsers to not fully implement CSS specs in the future. It kind of sucks right now because everything's in a big transition, but it will be better in the future to make sure that browsers follow a standard, rather than being allowed to deviate.
I suggest using a server-side method for outputting the styles. Create a standard stylesheet that works fine in every browser, and then put the hacks for the individual browsers in their own specific files and only output them if you match their browser on the server end. I've done that before and it's worked well when it was simply impossible to get all the browsers to behave.
By the way, browsers can't really not support conditional comments. Browsers that don't see that it actually contains something will read the stylesheet reference as a comment. I do agree that it's kind of spammy and retarded, but it does work.
You may try using conditional comments, or the star HTML hack. In IE7, the element around the html element is gone, and using a selector of * html is no longer caught like it was in IE6. An example of conditional comments, which you can use to include a separate iesucks.css file, is below.
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link href="iesucks.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen"
<![endif]-->
Yeah, this is the only cross-browser problem Flash has. I stand corrected. The problem is that the movie has a parameter of transparent added to it, so that any area within the Flash movie that doesn't have any content is see-through. I'm pretty sure that FF has transparency support, and Opera 9 supposedly does too, but you're right--neither one works.
In any application made with Flex, transparency shouldn't really be added anyway, so this won't be an issue. The big deal for most people is the whole JavaScript drop-down menu disappearing behind a Flash movie--transparency is the only workaround.
The dumb part is: in this case, it doesn't look like the movie even needs to be transparent.
Flex has been around for quite some time now--way before Macromedia was acquired.
Here's the breakdown: Flex allows you to create web applications using Flash as the interface. Yeah, you can do this yourself, but Flex does all the hard work, such as laying out the UI and joining it with the business logic. If you've programmed your application using MVC or some other tiered application development pattern, you should be able to hook your Flex-built Flash movie into the business logic controller and it will work. The advantage to doing it this way is that you don't have to fool around with HTML/CSS/JS and getting it to work cross-browser. Flash is Flash--you do it once and it looks right, no cross-browser problems.
It's not meant to replace simple menus and contact forms, it's for creating hardcore programs--things like a CRM tool or project management software. Pretty much anything enterprise-wide.
The reason it might not make sense to you is because you're a designer/animator, not a programmer. Or at least that's how it sounds. Web app developers can get pretty excited about Flex--it saves the work of designing the application cross browser, and most of the components are prebuilt and more powerful than standard web counterparts. It's ridiculous trying to build a dynamic chart on the web.
Typical obstinate answer. The truth is, you can't prove that slavery as regulated in the Bible is wrong any more than you can prove that PB&J sandwiches are bad. If your mom made crappy PB&J for you when you were a kid, you're likely to think that everyone else's sucked too. I hope that the analogy isn't too stupid for your inestimably powerful analysis, reasoning and debating skills.
Just so it's clear--I believe that slavery as instituted by most masters in American history is wrong, very wrong. I'll agree wholeheartedly with pretty much any slam you make against it. However, the actions of those masters is very much against how the Bible instructs masters to treat slaves.
Congratulations, you've taken your own background knowledge and applied it to a totally different situation. I believe when you say that slavery is barbaric and inhumane, you are referring to the American institution of slavery from earlier in its history, as well as comparably inhumane slavery initiatives of the past.
If you'd read the rest of the chapter instead of pulling Bible verses out of their necessary context, you would have seen that masters are in turn supposed to treat their slaves with the same respect that is required to them. Unfortunately, we don't always have ideal situations in life, and bosses/masters are cruel, but suppose with me that the Bible's true. If so, then this physical life on earth is relatively short to the infinity that is the rest of our existence. 60 years of being beaten and stepped on by a cruel master seems worth it in order to receive God's rewards forever. That concept can be found in Ephesians 6:7-8.
Also, I never said that the New Testament is more humane and gentle, and that its concepts override the OT's barbarism. The OT can be thought of as barbaric. I think of it as just. The nations that the Israelites warred against were, without exception, nations that had oppressed Israel before (notice that God has taken care of the revenge for oppressive masters?) or nations that were terribly caught up in wrongdoing. Sex with animals and family members, incessant murder and other things that everyone considers bad were characteristic of the nations that God had the Israelites destroy.
Besides, Jesus and God described in the New Testament aren't any less just, it's simply that there is a different manner of reconciliation with God. The barrier of animal sacrifice was removed for forgiveness of sin. Call it removing the middle man.
To conclude, slavery in past times was often what you and I would consider being a household servant. In exchange for taking care of the chores, such as growing food, preparing dinner and watching the kids, slaves were given shelter, food and comfort. There are plenty of exceptions to this, which God does not condone. He says he will punish masters who treat their slaves poorly, in fact.
I sincerely hope that before coming to the conclusions that all slavery is bad and the New Testament is more humane and gentle than the Old Testament, which is barbaric; that you read more than four Bible verses that are taken out of their context and shrouded with your specific view. I don't mind arguing Biblical topics with you, but at least do it in a way that argues about the topic at hand, and not about why I and others are stupid.
And the reasoning behind ignoring Leviticus can be backed in that Jesus mentioned many times that he has overcome the law, or that he IS the law. Also, most of Leviticus deals with sacrificing, which is part of the old covenant (Jesus created the new covenant), and civil laws. Saying to someone now to not cut their hair on the sides of their head would be similar to telling someone to obey our highway speed limits 4000 years from now. With that said, Leviticus does have some good concepts for how to keep yourself from getting diseases--things we now call hygiene.
Sorry, I use the Dvorak keyboard, so I have a legitimate reason. It's actually easier for me to type M$ than MS since I can alternate hands to type the keys. Besides, if we're going the anal-retentive route as you seem to like, it's not MICROSOFT either. It's Microsoft.
Apparently you don't hate to nitpick, because that's exactly what you're doing. You completely failed to see any reason behind my comment, simply because you're caught up in a trivial intentional misspelling.
Anyway, chill out.
While I don't necessarily agree with filtering results, I think it's good that Google is even getting into the Chinese market. Pretty much every move that Google's made that everybody gets in a huff about--i.e. the AOL 5% share buying--has turned out to be good for the company, and not bad for everyone else.
Before we go berserk about Google being hypocrites, look at it from their perspective: at least they can now show search results in China. Sure, the gov't wants them to restrict information, but that's just how it is in China. Maybe Google will be able to leverage some of their power once China's gov't sees that it's good for the economy.
To me, doing something that's subjectively evil is better than not doing a dang thing about the situation. Google has a lot of power, and they've been using it to get into markets that would otherwise be unaccessible. Until they start abusing me, the customer (directly or indirectly), I don't have any reason to believe that this situation is a problem.
On that note, I can't see everything in this situation. Can anyone with more insight than me see how this decision would affect the rest of the world, other than China? Economics, general business, etc. Speculation is fine.
Heck, even if it is just a simple scripting shortcut, it's well worth it. Most Javascript I write uses wrapper functions and objects that resolve inconsistencies between IE and Everyone Else. The event model, AJAX, positioning, etc.
Anything M$ does to resolve these inconsistencies means less coding/bug fixing and more problem solving on a higher level.
Wow--that's pretty brutal. I haven't seen Netscape 3 on my server logs in years. Just to attempt to see what you're seeing, I turned off CSS, JS and images and took a look at the Slashdot front page. Although it was refreshing without the ads, I think I'll stick with a modern browser (not that I could download Netscape 3 anyway).
I understand your need for browser preferences. Mine is Opera, for the same reasons as you--speed and "behaves how I want".
Well, have fun with your defunct browser. I guess I'll have to start targeting my websites for users like you now.
I'm curious--what browser are you using that doesn't support CSS (or has it disabled)?
I knew my parents were up to something when I was a kid...
This is almost impossible to do, simply because of the multitude of ways you can structure/code a website, not to mention that plenty of ads are created through iframes and JavaScript functionality. It would be extremely difficult to catch all that. Beyond that, many valid news sites have their fair share of advertisements. Just because a site has them, you can't assume that it's a bad site. Adsense is good business.
Good web developers will structure their site correctly, meaning that each paragraph is within a p(aragraph) tag, headings will be used to separate sections of content, et.al. Are you going to punish somebody for not having 200 words in each paragraph, while the 10-year-old hack has their entire website inside a table with no rows or cells and gets accepted? I know you're just giving an example, but something perfectly valid will inevitably be cut out if you work using the algorithm given above.
No insult intended--just explaining my position.
The problem with staring at a monitor for hours on end is not the lights around you or how bright the screen is. The activity that your eyes perform is simply gathering as much light as they can and sending it through the appropriate channels to be interpreted by your brain. In a sense, your brain is doing all the work in setting brightness for you. In reality, if your brain didn't filter out what it deems "excess" light, you wouldn't be able to see a dang thing.
Your brain finds contrast in light, and therefore finds edges so that you perceive an object to be a certain size and distance away from you.
The actual reason that your eyes get crappy from sitting in front of a computer all day is because they receive no stimulation. You're focusing between 2 and 4 feet for 8 hours or so, pretty much constantly, so your eye muscles are not getting any workout. Just like people get fat and lazy from sitting in a chair all day, they get bad eyesight because they're not focusing near and far often enough. YMMV.
The best way to handle this is to not just stare at your monitor(s) all day long. Take breaks. Look out the window, or at your cubicle wall, whatever. Anything.
I decided to read a little bit about the Induce Act so that I could enlighten others who didn't know what it is
Ok, so the Induce act basically says that creating software (and other "devices") that encourages people to break copyright laws is illegal. For example, the Grokster case. Rather than suing the people that actually downloaded the pirated music and videos, MGM decided to sue the creators of Grokster, the software that allowed people to pass around pirated music, etc.
This is, in a sense, an intelligent idea. It's smart to cut a problem off as close to the source as possible. However, the other side to this coin is that the people who created Grokster didn't actually do any of the pirating.
I equate this method with enablers--people who help their husband or wife get fat by always making sure an overabundance of junk food is around. Yeah, the enabler may have contributed, but it's still the enablee's decision to actually eat the food.
More unfortunately, the Induce Act covers a very broad area of law, which means that some tool's going to try to use it down the road in a way it was never intended.
Well, that's the extent of my research. Enjoy.
A lot of people choose Delaware because it has the Chancery Court, which is a court designed just for business legal issues. This helps resolve business problems and legalities quickly.
Also, there's no sales or personal property tax, and no income tax for companies that don't do business in Delaware. This is especially good for small companies to avoid double taxation. Double taxation occurs when your company is taxed for income, and then you as an individual are taxed when you pay yourself a salary.
Additionally, you don't have to have a few things--you don't have to keep corporate records in Delaware, and shareholders can act in writing. Normally, you have to actually have people show up in a building, which costs a lot of time and money.
Finally, it's cheap. Aside from legal fees for writing up your incorporation statement, it can be less than $100 initially, and less than $200 (depending on if you're an LLC) for the annual fee.
As you can probably tell, this makes it really easy to avoid the potential legal risks of sole proprietorship and just incorporate instead if it's just you, or if you want to have a small startup. For an extra couple bucks per year, it's worth it to have an LLC. No money comes out of your personal pocket if you get sued.
The main reason for me (though not the only one) is speed. Firefox feels like driving a tractor trailer through a slalom after using Opera. The memory footprint in Firefox doesn't help its case either.
...calling this software the eCondom assumes that IE hasn't been shooting blanks this whole time...
On a related note, imagine telling your grandfather to "put an eCondom on" before he gets on the net to watch his stocks or whatever.
Ahh...Kin Korn Karn...I haven't seen a good Pro Wrestling reference in years. I'm now having a flashback to the good old days of NES crowd noise/static and 2 frame animations. Thanks.
Although the article details an interesting exploit, Google fixed this on the 1st of this month--The title is somewhat misleading. It is useful to know that Google fixed this vulnerability 2 weeks after it was discovered, on November 15th.
Also, for those of us unaccustomed to DD/MM/YYYY date format, that's the format of all dates in the article.
And I still haven't figured out what "magltheuansr" is.
"Menstrual Hag"--courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server.
My wife has a separate logon for our computer, and I left the main login screen as standard QWERTY, while my personal login is set to DVORAK. It works pretty well for us. The only problem is when I'm still logged in, or I lock the computer. However, she's learned to hunt and peck until she can type her name in DVORAK-ese.
Best. Argument. Ever. Well done.
How come you're not reading the rest of the comments? I was referring to Stephen King's It -- the clown.