> That's like saying you can make animations with HTML just because you can access HTML tags through the DOM and script them.
Um, no it's not. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a markup language for producing vector graphics, which HTML most definitely isn't. Right there in the name, even.
Those whose idea of a Web page is a Photoshop mockup or big fat Flash banner will hate this browser, and people using this browser will hate such pages.
Those who produce well-structured and meaningfully-styled Web documents have nothing to fear from it... but people surfing such pages probably won't gain that much from using this browser.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ -- NS4 didn't support a number of elements (OPTGROUP, FIELDSET, OBJECT, LABEL, etc.).
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS/ and http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ -- Not only did NS4 not support a lot of these standards at all, but it supported some portions of them completely incorrectly; and some CSS even made it crash altogether! Both behaviours violate the rule, "Where a UA doesn't support a feature, it should fail gracefully."
http://www.w3.org/DOM/ -- NS4 did not support DOM Levels 1 and 2 at all. What's worse is that people are still writing scripts that perform the "if it's Netscape [or sometimes: it it doesn't understand the MSIE-only 'document.all'], use the abomination known as 'document.layers'" thereby raising errors in Mozilla Netscape 6 & 7, which *do* support W3C-DOM (as well as the full HTML 4 spec, and most of CSS-2, and do it better than any other browser out there).
If you actually write Web pages to standards, you'll find that Mozilla, Netscape 6/7 and Opera 5+ do very well, MSIE 5+ does mostly okay, and Netscape 4.X just plain blows goats.
The thought that there might be people who are actually still using NS4 just makes me cringe.
Same here -- been using it since around Moz 0.8.something and been very happy with it.
Come to think of it, I've *never* used Outlook or Outlook Express in the 7+ years I've been online. And, even though I've mostly used Windows (95/98/2k), I've *never* been infected with a virus, either.
(Recently had to get some drivers and stuff off the Web using someone else's computer running WinXP and MSIE 6.0 with the default settings. I couldn't believe all the popups and ActiveX controls and crap like Gator that I was assaulted with over about an hour's time. It was fucking *insane*. No wonder so many people seem scared by the WWW... I would be, too, if that's all I had to access it with. I think I'd just as soon give up my nutsack as I would Mozilla.)
Re:BG-why windows is a better proposition than lin
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Yeah, he sounds a lot like Bush trying to explain why cutting taxes on the rich is really better for the poor, or where the WMDs went.
Re:Recompile for PDF support?
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PHP 5 Beta 1
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Sure, this is probably not quite so fast as a compiled library, but uploading 2 PHP includes to a webserver is almost certain to be a lot faster than waiting for someone at your client's hosting company to pull their finger out and install php_pdf and/or php_cpdf.
The ease-of-use factor makes this preferable to PDFLib or cPDF in any case.
Considered purely as a language, PHP may not be the greatest thing around. I'm a bit disappointed that it seems to be headed in a More-Java-Than-Java direction; some of the new features aren't bad, but the implementations are u-U-ugly. (Personally, I've always thought that PHP would be a great fit with prototype-based inheritance like SmallTalk or JavaScript, but that's another rant.) However, given a little time and ingenuity, you really can do just about *anything* in PHP. And it very well may be that someone's already done it -- all you have to do is look for it.
I got this comment in metamod -- who the hell moderated it "funny"? What the poster is putting forward here is dead serious and spot on (and should have been modded Insightful, as it mostly was).
I metamodded it Unfunny, but I felt obliged to clarify that I (a) agree with archeoprterix and (b) disagree with the idea that there's much if any humour in what he has to say. I don't think he intended any.
They're not the only ones... Look at what CNET did to Builder Buzz and TechRepublic members... Started charging people to access the content they'd contributed over 3-4 years.
> I have made MANY web sites that validate (strict) and they look right on IE and Opera, but not moz/netscape.
Passing the HTML validator != "correct". (This has been pointed out before. Wish I had a link to one of the relevant convos/posts.)
Mozilla's CSS compliance runs circles around MSIE's, and is a hair better than Opera's. For example, MSIE does table CSS totally wrong. Well... that's not quite true: actually it doesn't do real table CSS at all.
There's boatloads of the CSS-2 spec that MSIE simply ignores.
And there are also plenty of sites out there whose HTML and CSS both validate fine, but that have bad document structure, using various hacks to achieve a given "look" whether or not things are intended to be used that way.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll add that to the "oh, yes it is" list the next time somebody tries to claim that JS isn't good for anything other than image rollovers.
(Heads off to TrollTech's site to see what's up with QtScript...)
I didn't get to see the show (hopefully they'll run it here in Oz sometime soon), but I used to have the book, and it was very interesting and well thought out. I particularly liked the ground-dwelling descendants of bats and (IIRC) the giant penguins that had evolved to resemble whales. I turned the bat things into AD&D monsters that were among my favourites -- and among those that my players LEAST enjoyed encountering, buahahaha.
> (yes, I know you can do fairly large and complicated projects with [JavaScript], but come on... it's very limited as far as what it's able to do... (writing to files etc) )
That depends on the environment and what objects it exposes for scripting. There are a lot more implementations out there than you'd think:
You can use it (as JScript) serverside in ASP (or J# in ASP.Net) and for system tasks in Windows Scripting Host. (I do nearly all my ASP work using JScript.)
There is (or at least used to be -- haven't checked their site in a while) also a system & server scripting environment called ScriptEase that uses JavaScript and C.
Dreamweaver uses it for interface scripting (I'm talking about the program interface, not the JS/DHTML in DW-generated pages).
Adobe has a JavaScript API for PDFs.
Flash ActionScript is ECMAScript compliant and will look very familiar to anyone who's done clientside JS.
Mozilla uses XML (XUL and XBL, actually) and JavaScript to build its UI.
Do a Google search on "Microsoft astroturf" -- here, allow me: 1600+ hits.
There are plenty of documented instances where MS has paid people to post on NG's, Web forums, etc. Not to mention writing fake letters to the editors of newspapers. The list goes on, but you can check the search results yourself.
Moderators, please moderate the parent down. This is (at least) the third time that friendly_fire (whose Joyce-esque style -- or lack thereof -- is instantly recognisable to anyone who's spent time on the NYT Forums in the last two years) has posted this today.
friendly, plase grow a pair and create an account so I can add you to my Foes list.
> If Mozilla used a GUI toolkit with good performance from the beginning, those projects wouldn't be neccessary.
Then you run into porting issues. You wind up either (a) having to port your interface code or (b) not porting to platforms that you otherwise could. Since Gecko parses XUL directly, all you have to do is compile Gecko for your target platform and -- ta-daaa! -- you've got the GUI. In addition, XUL makes it dead easy for non-C++ types to write interface enhancements. XUL has the potential to do for GUI application development what HTML did for document creation.
(Which is quite possibly the very reason why so many C++ developers slag it so much...?)
Since one of the stated goals of Mozilla is to provide a browser that behaves the same way on as many platforms as possible, XUL seems to me a very good thing. It's already fairly mature, and just because you see a widget behave in a certain fashion doesn't mean that's the only behaviour it can have. If you don't like any of the available themes, learn XUL and write a better one.
If you think XUL is too slow, dig into the Mozilla source and figure out how to make it run faster.
In other words, friendly_fire, you've linked to one of your own pro-MS posts at the NYT?
This is just as I've suspected all along -- you're nothing more than a ringer, trying to make pro-OSS people look bad by association.
Back on topic: I think Moz rocks, the only time I use MSIE anymore is to see what's broken in it that I have to do workarounds for after creating standards-compliant pages. Pretty ironic considering that MS was first to market with a CSS implementation back in '96, and now there's huge chunks of the CSS-2 spec they don't even implement that make CSS really powerful.
For example, say you want to make all text inputs and textareas have a background colour of light yellow, but you want submit and reset buttons to be silver-grey. Using attribute selectors in Mozilla (see the CSS-2 spec), you can accomplish this with 2 lines of CSS only, with no additions to your markup required:
Slashdot Mirror
> That's like saying you can make animations with HTML just because you can access HTML tags through the DOM and script them.
Um, no it's not. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a markup language for producing vector graphics, which HTML most definitely isn't. Right there in the name, even.
No soup for you.
Mozilla.org's had SVG-enabled builds for about 2 years now.
Those whose idea of a Web page is a Photoshop mockup or big fat Flash banner will hate this browser, and people using this browser will hate such pages.
Those who produce well-structured and meaningfully-styled Web documents have nothing to fear from it... but people surfing such pages probably won't gain that much from using this browser.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ -- NS4 didn't support a number of elements (OPTGROUP, FIELDSET, OBJECT, LABEL, etc.).
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS/ and http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ -- Not only did NS4 not support a lot of these standards at all, but it supported some portions of them completely incorrectly; and some CSS even made it crash altogether! Both behaviours violate the rule, "Where a UA doesn't support a feature, it should fail gracefully."
http://www.w3.org/DOM/ -- NS4 did not support DOM Levels 1 and 2 at all. What's worse is that people are still writing scripts that perform the "if it's Netscape [or sometimes: it it doesn't understand the MSIE-only 'document.all'], use the abomination known as 'document.layers'" thereby raising errors in Mozilla Netscape 6 & 7, which *do* support W3C-DOM (as well as the full HTML 4 spec, and most of CSS-2, and do it better than any other browser out there).
If you actually write Web pages to standards, you'll find that Mozilla, Netscape 6/7 and Opera 5+ do very well, MSIE 5+ does mostly okay, and Netscape 4.X just plain blows goats.
The thought that there might be people who are actually still using NS4 just makes me cringe.
Same here -- been using it since around Moz 0.8.something and been very happy with it.
Come to think of it, I've *never* used Outlook or Outlook Express in the 7+ years I've been online. And, even though I've mostly used Windows (95/98/2k), I've *never* been infected with a virus, either.
(Recently had to get some drivers and stuff off the Web using someone else's computer running WinXP and MSIE 6.0 with the default settings. I couldn't believe all the popups and ActiveX controls and crap like Gator that I was assaulted with over about an hour's time. It was fucking *insane*. No wonder so many people seem scared by the WWW... I would be, too, if that's all I had to access it with. I think I'd just as soon give up my nutsack as I would Mozilla.)
Yeah, he sounds a lot like Bush trying to explain why cutting taxes on the rich is really better for the poor, or where the WMDs went.
Hell, you don't even need a .so or .dll.
This is what I use: ezPDF.
Sure, this is probably not quite so fast as a compiled library, but uploading 2 PHP includes to a webserver is almost certain to be a lot faster than waiting for someone at your client's hosting company to pull their finger out and install php_pdf and/or php_cpdf.
The ease-of-use factor makes this preferable to PDFLib or cPDF in any case.
Considered purely as a language, PHP may not be the greatest thing around. I'm a bit disappointed that it seems to be headed in a More-Java-Than-Java direction; some of the new features aren't bad, but the implementations are u-U-ugly. (Personally, I've always thought that PHP would be a great fit with prototype-based inheritance like SmallTalk or JavaScript, but that's another rant.) However, given a little time and ingenuity, you really can do just about *anything* in PHP. And it very well may be that someone's already done it -- all you have to do is look for it.
I got this comment in metamod -- who the hell moderated it "funny"? What the poster is putting forward here is dead serious and spot on (and should have been modded Insightful, as it mostly was).
I metamodded it Unfunny, but I felt obliged to clarify that I (a) agree with archeoprterix and (b) disagree with the idea that there's much if any humour in what he has to say. I don't think he intended any.
Ever consider the possibility that he got snagged for only 2 grand but actually got away with more?
They're not the only ones... Look at what CNET did to Builder Buzz and TechRepublic members... Started charging people to access the content they'd contributed over 3-4 years.
> In the Anglo Saxon legal system, a contract has equal status as the law...
Not quite. Clauses that require breaking the law are themselves illegal and can't be enforced.
> I have made MANY web sites that validate (strict) and they look right on IE and Opera, but not moz/netscape.
Passing the HTML validator != "correct". (This has been pointed out before. Wish I had a link to one of the relevant convos/posts.)
Mozilla's CSS compliance runs circles around MSIE's, and is a hair better than Opera's. For example, MSIE does table CSS totally wrong. Well... that's not quite true: actually it doesn't do real table CSS at all.
There's boatloads of the CSS-2 spec that MSIE simply ignores.
And there are also plenty of sites out there whose HTML and CSS both validate fine, but that have bad document structure, using various hacks to achieve a given "look" whether or not things are intended to be used that way.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll add that to the "oh, yes it is" list the next time somebody tries to claim that JS isn't good for anything other than image rollovers.
(Heads off to TrollTech's site to see what's up with QtScript...)
I didn't get to see the show (hopefully they'll run it here in Oz sometime soon), but I used to have the book, and it was very interesting and well thought out. I particularly liked the ground-dwelling descendants of bats and (IIRC) the giant penguins that had evolved to resemble whales. I turned the bat things into AD&D monsters that were among my favourites -- and among those that my players LEAST enjoyed encountering, buahahaha.
Land-going squids, eh? Cool!
That depends on the environment and what objects it exposes for scripting. There are a lot more implementations out there than you'd think:
There are doubtless other examples.
Um, dude, do you live under a rock?
Do a Google search on "Microsoft astroturf" -- here, allow me: 1600+ hits.
There are plenty of documented instances where MS has paid people to post on NG's, Web forums, etc. Not to mention writing fake letters to the editors of newspapers. The list goes on, but you can check the search results yourself.
You can use this to kill the display of all ESR comments on any of the Halloween pages.
(WTF do you think CSS is for anyway? It's to enable users to do stuff just like this.)
> ...just change the color to transparent.
Better yet, just add display:none; so it won't bork the formatting.
Use Mozilla's "View Page Info" feature (Media tab). Gives you a "Save" option for any embedded media in a page.
/.ing.
What? You're not using Mozilla? Too bad.
Compliments to those providing mirrors, btw. A lot more helpful than posting more links and encouraging even more
Um.... Hasn't this been posted before?
I can't find a link, but I'm pretty sure that it's recycled.
Moderators, please moderate the parent down. This is (at least) the third time that friendly_fire (whose Joyce-esque style -- or lack thereof -- is instantly recognisable to anyone who's spent time on the NYT Forums in the last two years) has posted this today.
friendly, plase grow a pair and create an account so I can add you to my Foes list.
> If Mozilla used a GUI toolkit with good performance from the beginning, those projects wouldn't be neccessary.
Then you run into porting issues. You wind up either (a) having to port your interface code or (b) not porting to platforms that you otherwise could. Since Gecko parses XUL directly, all you have to do is compile Gecko for your target platform and -- ta-daaa! -- you've got the GUI. In addition, XUL makes it dead easy for non-C++ types to write interface enhancements. XUL has the potential to do for GUI application development what HTML did for document creation.
(Which is quite possibly the very reason why so many C++ developers slag it so much...?)
Since one of the stated goals of Mozilla is to provide a browser that behaves the same way on as many platforms as possible, XUL seems to me a very good thing. It's already fairly mature, and just because you see a widget behave in a certain fashion doesn't mean that's the only behaviour it can have. If you don't like any of the available themes, learn XUL and write a better one.
If you think XUL is too slow, dig into the Mozilla source and figure out how to make it run faster.
And so do the Russians, for that matter.
In other words, friendly_fire, you've linked to one of your own pro-MS posts at the NYT?
This is just as I've suspected all along -- you're nothing more than a ringer, trying to make pro-OSS people look bad by association.
Back on topic: I think Moz rocks, the only time I use MSIE anymore is to see what's broken in it that I have to do workarounds for after creating standards-compliant pages. Pretty ironic considering that MS was first to market with a CSS implementation back in '96, and now there's huge chunks of the CSS-2 spec they don't even implement that make CSS really powerful.
For example, say you want to make all text inputs and textareas have a background colour of light yellow, but you want submit and reset buttons to be silver-grey. Using attribute selectors in Mozilla (see the CSS-2 spec), you can accomplish this with 2 lines of CSS only, with no additions to your markup required:In MSIE, you have to do this with class selectors and then assign class attributes to all your input and textarea tags.
And yes, tabbed browsing is da bomb -- it's completely changed how I use the Web (for the better).