Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Apparently you (and Microsoft) read a different spec than I did. It shows EXACTLY how the box model should be displayed and describes how its dimensions should be calculated. They interpreted it differently because they thought it was a good idea.
From that page: The size of the box is the sum of the element width (i.e. formatted text or image) and the padding, the border and the margin areas. There is nothing complicated about that sentence.
All that said, you're absolutely correct. The could've fixed their box model in IE 5.0, 5.0, 6.0 or SP2. But they didn't.
This definitely sounds like how the W3C (the group that creates standards for the web, for those who don't know) works. At least the part about standards. It seems to be working really well so far too. If IE wasn't bundled with Windows, people would have to choose on their browser based on what they liked about it. People like Firefox because of the extensions, Opera because it's fast and "just works" (Safari for the same reasons), OmniWeb because it's extremely innovative. Granted, this is a gloss-over stereotype, but how many people choose IE? Not very many, if they know about other options.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft is using it's power in an entirely separate market (operating systems) to gain ground in another (web, media players, etc). Obviously the suit for $32 million isn't exactly going to make M$ reconsider their business practices, but it is another step in the process to non-monopolistic competition.
The hardest part about the situation is education--if people are given a chance to try different products, they just might switch to them. Too often, though, people don't know that there ARE alternatives to media player, IE, etc. until those products start making headlines, like Firefox and iTunes have.
The following URL has some information from a counter service that seems to have aggregated their data. http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/September/jav as.php. I admit, this data is skewed because the service is probably not tracking users by IP (which is flawed anyway). However, if they're getting that many people with JS disabled and they have a pretty small slice of the pie, then it's obvious there are plenty more. The percentage is probably pretty accurate in either case.
If you're not using AJAX in some sort of application, chances are pretty good you're using it the wrong way anyway. It looks like we're probably going to continue disagreeing, which is fine by me, but I believe in moving past 1997 with "best viewed with so-and-so browser" or a page telling me to enable something I otherwise wouldn't have to. If that's an acceptable trade-off to you, fine. I prefer to keep it behind the scenes so it works for the user, javascript or not.
Sorry, I don't think that's where you should be focussing. Cache frequently accessed items in client memory. In the javascript.
That's quite possibly the stupidest idea I've heard today. How the heck do you expect anyone to get data in the first place? It's not going to magically appear in the client's cache. I sure hope you mean doing it both ways, if anything, although I don't see any benefit to caching anything on the client-side...if you're working with data, chances are good it's going to be entered into the DOM after you use it.
Or maybe drop support for those without?
This is a horrible idea. Repeat after me. This is a horrible idea. The only, only, ONLY exception is if you know exactly who's going to be using your application or web site--for example, in the case of an intranet app that's restricted to a small amount of users. Don't give me any crap about what a small percentage of people don't have Javascript enabled. It's still 10 million folks or more.
Duh. But why display:none? Why not just '' or something similar? But again, this is about caching in the browser, not the server. You'll have to load the page the first time.
Look, smart guy--the poster is obviously concerned about performance with his application. I gave him a suggestion. Don't assume that everybody knows everything you do about Javascript.
While I think JSON is awesome, I think XML is faster overall.
Either way is fine--it's mostly preference if you're using mod_gzip, like you said. However, some browsers parse an XML DOM very slowly. IE, Mozilla (older versions) and pretty much any Linux browser, for example.
I think eventually we'll either go back to Java...
I do have to wonder what you're thinking here...do you mean Java on the client side or the server side? If you mean client side, you should probably just pack up your things and go home. I agree with your other suggestion: decent AJAX libraries. I created a pretty thin one here at work that does what we need.
Maybe it was unclear, but my comments about caching were server-side based only. Really, the only hangups for AJAX speed are how long the server takes to process things, which can get intensive if you have huge queries with nasty joins or something of the like. That's where caching the results of the query help. It's much more efficient to store a commonly-used recordset in memory.
You have a lot of good comments, but it doesn't seem like you're using best practices.
It's going to be tempting to use a lot of AJAX, especially if sounds fun. In reality though, you should be considering user experience, since this is a community site. Don't use an AJAX call where someone might expect a page refresh.
With that said, it's best to try to cache frequently accessed items in memory (regardless of whether you're doing AJAX calls). ASP.NET does a good job of this--I don't know what you're programming in, but definitely find out how to cache so that you don't have to read the database all the time. This reduced our database server load from 55% to 45% upon implementation (it's separate from the web server).
To specifically answer your question, the thing that's fast about AJAX is mostly perceived. Yes, you'll reduce calls, but at the sacrifice of having to code things twice: once for users with JS, once for those without. Use it in places where it's senseless to reload an entire page. For example, opening a nested menu. Searches that aren't done by keyword are good as well. Like has been said above, delay a server request until the user is done typing so that you can reduce calls. Remember, it's still a hit on your server, it just doesn't have to get all the rest of the crap on the page.
To reduce bandwidth, use JSON instead of XML, and only pass the headers that you need to into the AJAX call. To reduce server strain, cache frequently accessed database calls/results. Also, other non-AJAX javascript can help reduce calls, such as switching between "tabs" with some display:none action instead of reloading a page.
The answer is not gratuitous AJAX, the answer is thinking through how people will most commonly use your site, and making those parts easiest (so users don't have to redo things, therefore wasting your server capacity/bandwidth). Take things that shouldn't have to refresh the page and make them work using javascript, AJAX or not. Depending on how crappily things are coded now, you should see between a 15 and 35% reduction in server load and database calls.
Re:Everyone loves to bash MS and VB...
on
Build a Program Now
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· Score: -1, Troll
Just remember, all you have to do is follow/. karma rule #5: Say that you know you're going to get modded down or lose karma, and people will mod you up.
Why would anybody WANT to pay a big bandwidth bill? It's called being smart so that he doesn't get the shaft when he has to pay his utilities this month.
Well, either Real's servers recovered or your browser/internet connection sucks. It loaded in less that a second on our less-than-perfect connection here at work.
By the way, I don't think your 15 year old sister could do a better job. I think too many people don't understand that just because "anyone can create a website" doesn't mean that everyone does it well. Their website isn't that bad. In fact, it seems to be the best thing Real has ever done. Their main product is Real Player. Guess what's at the top of the page? Real Player. Guess what's new? Rhapsody? It's at the top of the page too. I think you just got out of the bed on the wrong side this morning...they seem to be doing a fine job of releasing their product, crappy though it is.
Sorry, I didn't mean programming as in lineup, I meant computer programming, which would explain the slowness of the inline brwoser that they implement. Real player is also quite slow, sometimes stuttery, even with plenty of RAM. Is rhapsody the same way? I know it's only dealing with music, which is obviously much less intensive than video. I just don't think it's worth it to have to pay a subscription as well as for each song you want to download. Are there any major benefits over iTunes?
I already don't trust Real--I sure wouldn't want to give them any money to continue their annoying advertising and generally poor quality programming by paying their subscriptions. Also, I don't think I'd want to stream music through a browser. When I'm listening to music, I want the player down in a tray.
No, amino acids in the context of attempting to create amino acids from scratch is the red flag you're looking for.
An RNA molecule that could do what the world hypothesis claims would need the information to do both the work of normal RNA, as well as DNA if it's going to replicate at some point. This would be an extremely complex molecule, which would lead to even more overwhelming statistics than I mentioned above. Oh, and let's not forget that RNA is basically dead in the water without the normal protection of a cell.
I know this is offtopic and everything, but Genesis 2 is a detailed recap of the summary that is Genesis 1. It's the more detailed story of how God created man and woman.
I believe the Bible is truth, whether it's allegorical or literal. Just because something's an allegory doesn't mean it's untrue.
By the way, I'm sure the next of your contradictions was going to be that insects don't have four feet, and snails do not melt. Infidels.org, anyone? Remember, classifications are something modern man has created. Moses and his folks didn't know or care that bats are classified as mammals in a taxonomy created by Carl Linnaeus, who was born at least 5,000 years after Moses died. Also, the hare you refer to is not the same as a rabbit. In Hebrew, the language that verse was written in originally, it's called the arnevet, or arnebet. I have no idea what the heck that was, but I'll bet it chewed the cud like a cow. We have the writers of the King James Version of the Bible for passing that one down. Who made the mistake? The writers of the KJV. Is the Bible wrong? No. Does it matter if the arnevet chews the cud? I could believe in God without knowing the answer to that question.
The problem with your argument is the scale of the statistics. Chances of being hit by lightning are not "astronomically low", it's about 1 in 600,000, or 1.66 x 10^-6.
Here's the breakdown for random chance of life of a prokaryotic bacterium:
The first bacterium would need 10,000 amino acid connections (conservative estimate).
Same goes for the nucleotides of DNA, we'll assume there are 100,000, which is also quite a conservative estimate--normally it would need at least 500,000
All these amino acid connections have to take place at the same time
All of these components of the DNA had to be at the same place
We'll use 15 billion years (generally accepted based on Hubble research, among others) as the amount of time available to create this bacterium. This is 10^17 seconds.
Common accepted amount of matter is something like 10^84 baryons (pieces of atoms)
There's a limit to how many interactions between these particles can occur within a given amount of time. We'll say 10^20 per second. This is pretty conservative
Estimated chances of a cell randomly assembling are something like 10 to the 100 billionth power (10^100,000,000,000). Assumptions 4, 5 and 6 above (statistics based on space, matter and time) together give us a probability of 10^121, or 10^17 * 10^84 * 10^20. So we have 10^121 chances within the realm of possibility (10^100,000,000,000) to randomly make a cell. Overall, this leaves us with a chance of 1 in 10^99,999,999,879. That's a lot smaller of a chance than getting struck by lightning. By the way, any chance smaller than 10-50 is considered 0 by pretty much any mathmetician.
Also, 50,000 * 10^8 should be written 5.0 × 10^12.
I'm not quite sure that this article is really all that informative or new. I thought it was pretty much commonly accepted that the Archaeopteryx was a bird. Forgive me for not believing in evolution (which I guess is why this article was posted), but it seems like it was a bird that existed a long time ago, and then died.
The conclusion of the article is that the archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds. Can someone reasonably explain why the archaeopteryx and modern birds couldn't have just existed at the same time, except the archaeopteryx went extinct?
I'm not sure if you know this already, but Opera has a really good mail client called M2 built in. It also has a feed reader and an IRC client, if you want to go that far.
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to use Lotus Notes. Outlook, for all its problems, is certainly better than anything IBM/Lotus has come out with. We use Notes 5 at work, which means we're behind by about 8 years or so. Anyway, the folks in my group here at work use a connector so we can use Outlook. I think the better solution for the problem that Microsoft is trying to solve is to buy out Lotus Notes and destroy it. Forget RSS extensions.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you (and Microsoft) read a different spec than I did. It shows EXACTLY how the box model should be displayed and describes how its dimensions should be calculated. They interpreted it differently because they thought it was a good idea.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1.html#formatting-mode l is W3's spec with an example of how boxes should be renderered.
From that page: The size of the box is the sum of the element width (i.e. formatted text or image) and the padding, the border and the margin areas. There is nothing complicated about that sentence.
All that said, you're absolutely correct. The could've fixed their box model in IE 5.0, 5.0, 6.0 or SP2. But they didn't.
FTA: "A new worm that targets users of America Online's AOL Instant Messenger..."
What did anyone expect?
This definitely sounds like how the W3C (the group that creates standards for the web, for those who don't know) works. At least the part about standards. It seems to be working really well so far too. If IE wasn't bundled with Windows, people would have to choose on their browser based on what they liked about it. People like Firefox because of the extensions, Opera because it's fast and "just works" (Safari for the same reasons), OmniWeb because it's extremely innovative. Granted, this is a gloss-over stereotype, but how many people choose IE? Not very many, if they know about other options.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft is using it's power in an entirely separate market (operating systems) to gain ground in another (web, media players, etc). Obviously the suit for $32 million isn't exactly going to make M$ reconsider their business practices, but it is another step in the process to non-monopolistic competition.
The hardest part about the situation is education--if people are given a chance to try different products, they just might switch to them. Too often, though, people don't know that there ARE alternatives to media player, IE, etc. until those products start making headlines, like Firefox and iTunes have.
The following URL has some information from a counter service that seems to have aggregated their data. http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/September/jav as.php. I admit, this data is skewed because the service is probably not tracking users by IP (which is flawed anyway). However, if they're getting that many people with JS disabled and they have a pretty small slice of the pie, then it's obvious there are plenty more. The percentage is probably pretty accurate in either case.
If you're not using AJAX in some sort of application, chances are pretty good you're using it the wrong way anyway. It looks like we're probably going to continue disagreeing, which is fine by me, but I believe in moving past 1997 with "best viewed with so-and-so browser" or a page telling me to enable something I otherwise wouldn't have to. If that's an acceptable trade-off to you, fine. I prefer to keep it behind the scenes so it works for the user, javascript or not.
Why don't you just get headphones? Someone's right by my desk right now yapping away at my neighbor, and I can't hear a word they're saying.
Sorry, I don't think that's where you should be focussing. Cache frequently accessed items in client memory. In the javascript.
That's quite possibly the stupidest idea I've heard today. How the heck do you expect anyone to get data in the first place? It's not going to magically appear in the client's cache. I sure hope you mean doing it both ways, if anything, although I don't see any benefit to caching anything on the client-side...if you're working with data, chances are good it's going to be entered into the DOM after you use it.
Or maybe drop support for those without?
This is a horrible idea. Repeat after me. This is a horrible idea. The only, only, ONLY exception is if you know exactly who's going to be using your application or web site--for example, in the case of an intranet app that's restricted to a small amount of users. Don't give me any crap about what a small percentage of people don't have Javascript enabled. It's still 10 million folks or more.
Duh. But why display:none? Why not just '' or something similar? But again, this is about caching in the browser, not the server. You'll have to load the page the first time.
Look, smart guy--the poster is obviously concerned about performance with his application. I gave him a suggestion. Don't assume that everybody knows everything you do about Javascript.
While I think JSON is awesome, I think XML is faster overall.
Either way is fine--it's mostly preference if you're using mod_gzip, like you said. However, some browsers parse an XML DOM very slowly. IE, Mozilla (older versions) and pretty much any Linux browser, for example.
I think eventually we'll either go back to Java...
I do have to wonder what you're thinking here...do you mean Java on the client side or the server side? If you mean client side, you should probably just pack up your things and go home. I agree with your other suggestion: decent AJAX libraries. I created a pretty thin one here at work that does what we need.
Maybe it was unclear, but my comments about caching were server-side based only. Really, the only hangups for AJAX speed are how long the server takes to process things, which can get intensive if you have huge queries with nasty joins or something of the like. That's where caching the results of the query help. It's much more efficient to store a commonly-used recordset in memory.
You have a lot of good comments, but it doesn't seem like you're using best practices.
Thank you for the insight. It was a joke.
It's going to be tempting to use a lot of AJAX, especially if sounds fun. In reality though, you should be considering user experience, since this is a community site. Don't use an AJAX call where someone might expect a page refresh.
With that said, it's best to try to cache frequently accessed items in memory (regardless of whether you're doing AJAX calls). ASP.NET does a good job of this--I don't know what you're programming in, but definitely find out how to cache so that you don't have to read the database all the time. This reduced our database server load from 55% to 45% upon implementation (it's separate from the web server).
To specifically answer your question, the thing that's fast about AJAX is mostly perceived. Yes, you'll reduce calls, but at the sacrifice of having to code things twice: once for users with JS, once for those without. Use it in places where it's senseless to reload an entire page. For example, opening a nested menu. Searches that aren't done by keyword are good as well. Like has been said above, delay a server request until the user is done typing so that you can reduce calls. Remember, it's still a hit on your server, it just doesn't have to get all the rest of the crap on the page.
To reduce bandwidth, use JSON instead of XML, and only pass the headers that you need to into the AJAX call. To reduce server strain, cache frequently accessed database calls/results. Also, other non-AJAX javascript can help reduce calls, such as switching between "tabs" with some display:none action instead of reloading a page.
The answer is not gratuitous AJAX, the answer is thinking through how people will most commonly use your site, and making those parts easiest (so users don't have to redo things, therefore wasting your server capacity/bandwidth). Take things that shouldn't have to refresh the page and make them work using javascript, AJAX or not. Depending on how crappily things are coded now, you should see between a 15 and 35% reduction in server load and database calls.
Actually, they already do quite a bit. http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.microsoft.com &position=limited&lookup=Search. Yes, this does means that it's been confirmed by Netcraft.
Just remember, all you have to do is follow /. karma rule #5: Say that you know you're going to get modded down or lose karma, and people will mod you up.
I'll probably get modded down for this
Why would anybody WANT to pay a big bandwidth bill? It's called being smart so that he doesn't get the shaft when he has to pay his utilities this month.
Well, either Real's servers recovered or your browser/internet connection sucks. It loaded in less that a second on our less-than-perfect connection here at work.
By the way, I don't think your 15 year old sister could do a better job. I think too many people don't understand that just because "anyone can create a website" doesn't mean that everyone does it well. Their website isn't that bad. In fact, it seems to be the best thing Real has ever done. Their main product is Real Player. Guess what's at the top of the page? Real Player. Guess what's new? Rhapsody? It's at the top of the page too. I think you just got out of the bed on the wrong side this morning...they seem to be doing a fine job of releasing their product, crappy though it is.
Meaning that we get to pay the RIAA to sue more 12 year olds and grandparents, or that artists are getting a decent cut of the dough?
Sorry, I didn't mean programming as in lineup, I meant computer programming, which would explain the slowness of the inline brwoser that they implement. Real player is also quite slow, sometimes stuttery, even with plenty of RAM. Is rhapsody the same way? I know it's only dealing with music, which is obviously much less intensive than video. I just don't think it's worth it to have to pay a subscription as well as for each song you want to download. Are there any major benefits over iTunes?
I already don't trust Real--I sure wouldn't want to give them any money to continue their annoying advertising and generally poor quality programming by paying their subscriptions. Also, I don't think I'd want to stream music through a browser. When I'm listening to music, I want the player down in a tray.
No, amino acids in the context of attempting to create amino acids from scratch is the red flag you're looking for.
An RNA molecule that could do what the world hypothesis claims would need the information to do both the work of normal RNA, as well as DNA if it's going to replicate at some point. This would be an extremely complex molecule, which would lead to even more overwhelming statistics than I mentioned above. Oh, and let's not forget that RNA is basically dead in the water without the normal protection of a cell.
I know this is offtopic and everything, but Genesis 2 is a detailed recap of the summary that is Genesis 1. It's the more detailed story of how God created man and woman.
I believe the Bible is truth, whether it's allegorical or literal. Just because something's an allegory doesn't mean it's untrue.
By the way, I'm sure the next of your contradictions was going to be that insects don't have four feet, and snails do not melt. Infidels.org, anyone? Remember, classifications are something modern man has created. Moses and his folks didn't know or care that bats are classified as mammals in a taxonomy created by Carl Linnaeus, who was born at least 5,000 years after Moses died. Also, the hare you refer to is not the same as a rabbit. In Hebrew, the language that verse was written in originally, it's called the arnevet, or arnebet. I have no idea what the heck that was, but I'll bet it chewed the cud like a cow. We have the writers of the King James Version of the Bible for passing that one down. Who made the mistake? The writers of the KJV. Is the Bible wrong? No. Does it matter if the arnevet chews the cud? I could believe in God without knowing the answer to that question.
The problem with your argument is the scale of the statistics. Chances of being hit by lightning are not "astronomically low", it's about 1 in 600,000, or 1.66 x 10^-6.
Here's the breakdown for random chance of life of a prokaryotic bacterium:
Estimated chances of a cell randomly assembling are something like 10 to the 100 billionth power (10^100,000,000,000). Assumptions 4, 5 and 6 above (statistics based on space, matter and time) together give us a probability of 10^121, or 10^17 * 10^84 * 10^20. So we have 10^121 chances within the realm of possibility (10^100,000,000,000) to randomly make a cell. Overall, this leaves us with a chance of 1 in 10^99,999,999,879. That's a lot smaller of a chance than getting struck by lightning. By the way, any chance smaller than 10-50 is considered 0 by pretty much any mathmetician.
Also, 50,000 * 10^8 should be written 5.0 × 10^12.
How is this modded insightful?
I'm not quite sure that this article is really all that informative or new. I thought it was pretty much commonly accepted that the Archaeopteryx was a bird. Forgive me for not believing in evolution (which I guess is why this article was posted), but it seems like it was a bird that existed a long time ago, and then died.
The conclusion of the article is that the archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds. Can someone reasonably explain why the archaeopteryx and modern birds couldn't have just existed at the same time, except the archaeopteryx went extinct?
Well, it's 9:00 or so CST, which means 10 EST, and it's available on the official site now. http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. Enjoy.
I'm not sure if you know this already, but Opera has a really good mail client called M2 built in. It also has a feed reader and an IRC client, if you want to go that far.
In the interview Bram made an oblique reference to some future deal his company is going to do with them...
The future deal is that Bram gets to be the voice of Aslan in the next Narnia movie that comes out. *_*
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to use Lotus Notes. Outlook, for all its problems, is certainly better than anything IBM/Lotus has come out with. We use Notes 5 at work, which means we're behind by about 8 years or so. Anyway, the folks in my group here at work use a connector so we can use Outlook. I think the better solution for the problem that Microsoft is trying to solve is to buy out Lotus Notes and destroy it. Forget RSS extensions.
Download the connector here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=8EBBBA59-5F17-4E52-8980-C4F0DFA92D65&displa ylang=en
FTA: "No, not the shimmering rainbow effect you see when the light catches a clear soap bubble."
What's wrong with the shimmering rainbow effect? The colored bubbles look like they came straight from the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese's.