but without copyright, the creative commons and GPL wouldn't work, these things rely on copyright law.
The Creative Commons is not one single license. It is a family of documents that give varying permissions. Some of them are dedications to the public domain, which would work identically if copyright did not exist. It's not correct to say that the Creative Commons depends on copyright. Some of the Creative Commons documents depend on copyright, and some do not.
When a painting's copyright term expires, the owner is in control of it. When a piece of software's copyright expires, it's still under the control of the copyright holder, because they are the only ones with the source code.
There's nothing stopping somebody with a public domain portrait from scribbling a moustache on it and distributing copies, but in order to do the equivalent with software, you need the source code. Further, when a piece of software expires, it will likely be inoperable due to the fact that the operating system it was designed for is obsolete and unable to run on modern computers. To remedy this, again, the source code is necessary. A painting doesn't become obsolete in this way.
These problems are unique to software and are caused by applying copyright to software without any acknowledgement that software is different to a painting. My suggestion is not a random scheme I've cooked up. The equivalent thing happens with patents. In order to be granted a patent, you need to describe exactly how your invention works. This is so, when the patent expires, the rest of humanity can build upon that work instead of it being a secret. Disclosure of source code in order to gain copyright protection is the exact equivalent.
Are you saying that discontinued products should be made available for free or that they should be open-sourced?
I can't speak for clang_jangle, but I believe that software should be required to ship with buildable source if it is to qualify for copyright protection. It would be the software/copyright analogue of the disclosure required for patents. It would go some way to mitigating the problems caused by copyright as it is applied to software, abandonware being one of them.
In the UK (and I think the US has similar legislation) companies are required by law to take reasonable steps to ensure that their services are accessible to those with disabilites. This includes website design but it does take account of the nature and size of the company.
Yes, and it's having an effect. The website for the Sydney Olympics was inaccessible and they were successfully sued in Australia. In the USA, Section 508 applies to government websites in the USA, and the ADA may apply to many commercial websites in the USA. AOL was sued under the ADA and eventually settled. One airline lost a lawsuit and one won in the same month for providing an inaccessible service.
I look forward to the day some website design company (hopefully not mine!) gets sued by their client following prosecution under the DDA.
Wonder when we are going to get "web police" that ensure this, and other company laws, are followed.
It's already happening, but it rarely gets to court. The RNIB has been going to specific firms when blind people complain and pointing out the law and threatening lawsuits. The websites in question usually get quietly fixed before it becomes necessary to sue them.
I think one of the things that kept IE back was that all the great open-source and power-user browsers that jumped on board to implement it, screwed up.
This is incorrect. Internet Explorer was held back by the fact that no developers were assigned to work on its rendering engine for five years. This began shortly after Internet Explorer 6 was released and is clearly the primary reason why it is so far behind.
At the time the development team was disbanded, Internet Explorer 6 had the best CSS implementation of any browser. It was only surpassed a year later by Mozilla. So as you can see, it's impossible for any other browsers' supposed failure to be responsible for Internet Explorer's dismal compliance with the W3C's specifications. It was already dead in the water by that point.
Even if the abandonment of Internet Explorer's development was preceded by an open-source failure of some kind, your claim is ridiculous. Microsoft aren't responsible for Internet Explorer being crippled, the other browsers getting it wrong are responsible for Internet Explorer being crippled? Despite being demonstrably far ahead of Internet Explorer in this regard? Really? What kind of Microsoft apologist do you have to be to say that with a straight face?
Acid2 only tested a few narrow aspects of CSS2 compliance. Who's to say there aren't more bugs that no one understands in the various gearhead browsers on the market?
I'm sure there are. But since when does the lack of flawless implementations count against a specification? No software is without bugs.
You can't blame MS for that, only the W3C.
Microsoft were on the working groups that published these specifications. You cannot blame the W3C without, in part, blaming Microsoft. You are keen on absolving Microsoft, aren't you? Microsoft helped create the specifications, then they failed to implement them while others did just that. The existence of bugs in other browsers does not absolve Microsoft from responsibility.
Once Netscape's "air supply" had been cut off, Internet Explorer's job was done. Microsoft disbanded the Internet Explorer team, assigned the team members to different projects and discontinued development. Things remained that way for five years. That is why Internet Explorer is so far behind.
W3C was so fast and complete they got out in front of all the web demand so that Microsoft didn't have to go inventing defacto standards out of whole cloth?
Microsoft was a member of the W3C working groups that developed and published these specifications. You'll find numerous acknowledgements to their employees in the specifications.
Maybe they worked fast but in the wrong direction. They focused on display without enhancing the form components. I remember that 7 years ago I wanted to implement a simple combo box (select + edit new value) and had no choice. Now is still the same apart from libraries that are doing workarounds.
Even now looking at the "Web 2 revolution" they are still focusing on stylesheets for display instead of looking for standards for interaction with the users and comunication with the servers.
XForms 1.0, published by the W3C in 2003, includes this functionality, separates the data structure from the UI, and improves communication with the server. Good luck finding a browser that supports it though. Yet another case of the "glacial" W3C being blamed for browsers not keeping up with them.
oh it takes 10 hours to program a page that should take 10 minutes to program were everyone fascistically devoted to standards? well then you wouldn't have a job genius. you wouldn't be needed. the mess you have to deal with is proof you are needed.
That's the broken window fallacy. Work for the sake of work is not an accomplishment, it's an embarrassment.
if it weren't messy, you'd be downsized and replaced by a perl script
I've actually replaced somebody's weekend work with VBScript. You're forgetting that somebody needs to write that script. If you are competent, you shouldn't be scared of unnecessary, repetitive, annoying work going away, you should welcome it.
A few years ago I had a girlfriend (yes I know this is Slashdot) and she was blind. Her biggest complaint was that her reader was completely useless when presented with a site that used Flash for its navigation system. Looking around now I'm sure that matters have become even worse.
Flash accessibility has improved significantly in the past few years. However that doesn't mean that Flash designers always avail themselves of this technology. I suspect the type of designer who would happily use Flash for navigation is the type of designer who is unaware blind people use computers at all.
That's not really an alternative to Flash movies, which are usually embedded in a page rather than linked to. The alternative to Flash movies would be <object type="video/mpeg"> , which was introduced with HTML 4 in 1997.
CSS 3 is a family of specifications, not a single specification. Some of those too are at candidate recommendation stage, ready for implementing, just like CSS 2.1.
In any case, what's your point? I mentioned CSS 2 because it was published by the W3C a decade ago and its features are still not available to most web developers because Internet Explorer doesn't support it. How is the fact that the W3C carried on and started working on CSS 3 relevant? It still means the bottleneck is Internet Explorer, miles behind the "glacial" W3C.
At what size of web site would you consider forcing the web site's operator to purchase at least three workstations, including one that runs Windows and one that runs Mac OS X?
That argument disappeared with the introduction of x86 Macs. Buy an x86 Mac and you can test in every major browser on every major platform. And what's the third workstation for?
You may be thinking of CSS 2.1, which is a candidate recommendation. What this means is that it is ready to be implemented. In order for it to reach final recommendation status, there needs to be at least two interoperable implementations for every feature. To achieve that, browser vendors need to go ahead and implement it.
There are also problems with the lack of any kind of dynamic font loading to use custom fonts in a web page.
The W3C put font loading into the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago. The browser vendors ignored it until recently. Now, ten years later, the browser vendors are starting to implement it, and apparently this means the W3C moves too slowly?
It always amazes me when people call the W3C slow. As a web developer, there is one main thing holding me back. That is Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer 8 is not yet released. When it is, it is likely that it will finally include support for CSS 2. This is one of the most fundamental parts of a modern web browser, and this specification was published over ten years ago.
The rise of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, etc, was largely precipitated by the lack of support for DOM 2 Events in Internet Explorer. That specification was published in the year 2000.
The main draw for Flash has traditionally been the ability to use vector graphics. The alternative provided by the W3C, which is SVG, was first published in 2001.
The article complains that the last XHTML/HTML recommendation the W3C published was in 2001, seven years ago. What it neglects to mention is that even the next version of Internet Explorer, version 8, will not include any support at all for XHTML 1.0, let alone 1.1.
Can the W3C work faster? Probably. But how fast the W3C works is irrelevant, as they are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the rate of development in browsers, and one browser in particular, Internet Explorer. And it just so happens that the proprietary alternative of Silverlight is something developed and owned by the same company.
Unless there's something actually linking you personally to this site, like a photo or bio, [...]
Yes, that is exactly the original complaint.
I don't see anything like that in the article. It seems entirely based around the name.
Through their user moderation system I'm seeing many profiles that appear to be Nigerian scammers that are creating profiles using pictures and names lifted from other places.
Sure, but the combination of a name and a photo does uniquely identify a person. The name alone does not. The phenomenon you are talking about is qualitatively different. I'm sure that if the site mentioned in the article had used his photograph as well, then he would have mentioned it.
That's interesting. The site has been around for a while, and it's based on electoral roll data from the year 2000. These genealogy people seem to think that it's legit, if a little inaccurate, giving numbers in the same vicinity as other sources. It's certainly given consistent results over the years. This is a similar service for USA data, and it gives similar results (rare names give low numbers, common names give high numbers).
You didn't put an asterisk in the first name field did you? You don't have to use a wildcard, you just leave the field blank. If you use an asterisk, it assumes it's part of the name, and gives you zero results.
What makes you think this is some type of scam, and not merely somebody with the same name as you?
No, just because you have an unusual name, it doesn't mean you are the only one with it. I have a very unusual name too. I've never even met anybody with the same surname that wasn't a member of my immediate family. I've googled my own name; I'm the only person with my name that has a web presence. But when a website was launched to check how unique your name is, I discovered that there are at least two other people with my name in my country alone. If I registered on a dating site, those two people would probably feel the same about me.
Unless there's something actually linking you personally to this site, like a photo or bio, I don't see any basis for calling this a scam. Your name is not unique enough to be your property.
It seems that corporate/government users don't have as much of a choice in when to update their browsers
It's not just corporate users. It's everybody who isn't running XP or higher. For a huge number of people, upgrading to the most recent version of Internet Explorer means buying a new operating system. Of course there are a lot of people who aren't upgrading. It's one of the consequences of Microsoft tying Internet Explorer to Windows so tightly. To upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, you need to take on board all the crap XP and/or Vista were laden with, like product activation and DRM antifeatures. And you need to pay for the privilege!
Where once people penned carefully authored essays, they then started writing papers. That was too much effort, so they started making articles. Articles were too much trouble so poorly researched, error-filled, rashly composed blog posts became the new norm.
Essays, papers, articles and blog posts are all the same thing. The only exception is that a blog post is tied to a specific medium. Think about it - everything you say about blog posts can just as easily apply to the others.
The same works in reverse. The good qualities of essays can apply to the others as well:
Carefully authored blog post
Carefully authored article
Carefully authored paper
A blog post is just the modern-day essay. On average, the quality of blog posts may be dire, but that's because a) more people are in a position to spend their time writing, b) more people are inclined to do so, and c) all are available a click away rather than the cream of the crop being reproduced in libraries or wherever. That's one hell of a selection bias.
Twitter is intrinsically different. It's limited to one or two sentences. It's only useful for throwing out a single thought. You can't elaborate. You can't form an argument. You can't support an argument with evidence. It's superficial by its very nature.
But does this really matter? Twitter isn't designed to replace blog posts, or articles, or papers, or essays. It isn't used for that purpose. It's a way of just throwing out a single nugget of information. Can that information be trivial and useless, for instance, "taking a dump, BRB"? Sure. Can it be useful, for instance letting people know about a service update? Sure.
Twitter isn't useless, and it isn't part of a trend. Overhyped, yes. Often used for stupid things, yes. But the link between Twitter and more serious communication is tenuous at best. The difference between Twitter and blog posts is like the difference between leaning over to another desk and mentioning something to a colleague compared with sending a company-wide memo. They are simply different things.
You need to build this into the flash when creating as far as I know.
Yes, that's true. Emphasis added to the comment I was replying to:
Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want.
nine-times was specifically talking about options available to developers.
With html based sites no special work is required to make a page bookmarkable (aside from some ajax stuff, or in-page anchors).
That's usually true, but like you say, there are exceptions, and it's not just the ones you mention. Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
I would welcome this if it is clear that it's flash content (like PDFs) in the search results, so I can make a judgment accordingly.
I'm not sure if you are aware of this (a lot of people here don't seem to be), but search engines already index Flash. Google example. Yes, Flash results are identified in the same way PDF results are.
This isn't a new feature, it's Adobe helping search engines improve the indexing they already do.
Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want.
That has been possible for years. Possibly ever since the first version, I'm not sure. You use a fragment identifier in the link and check it to find out which "page" to display.
There's enough wrong with Flash that misrepresenting it is unnecessary and only serves to discredit you in the eyes of people who know better.
Slashdot Mirror
The Creative Commons is not one single license. It is a family of documents that give varying permissions. Some of them are dedications to the public domain, which would work identically if copyright did not exist. It's not correct to say that the Creative Commons depends on copyright. Some of the Creative Commons documents depend on copyright, and some do not.
When a painting's copyright term expires, the owner is in control of it. When a piece of software's copyright expires, it's still under the control of the copyright holder, because they are the only ones with the source code.
There's nothing stopping somebody with a public domain portrait from scribbling a moustache on it and distributing copies, but in order to do the equivalent with software, you need the source code. Further, when a piece of software expires, it will likely be inoperable due to the fact that the operating system it was designed for is obsolete and unable to run on modern computers. To remedy this, again, the source code is necessary. A painting doesn't become obsolete in this way.
These problems are unique to software and are caused by applying copyright to software without any acknowledgement that software is different to a painting. My suggestion is not a random scheme I've cooked up. The equivalent thing happens with patents. In order to be granted a patent, you need to describe exactly how your invention works. This is so, when the patent expires, the rest of humanity can build upon that work instead of it being a secret. Disclosure of source code in order to gain copyright protection is the exact equivalent.
I can't speak for clang_jangle, but I believe that software should be required to ship with buildable source if it is to qualify for copyright protection. It would be the software/copyright analogue of the disclosure required for patents. It would go some way to mitigating the problems caused by copyright as it is applied to software, abandonware being one of them.
Indeed. Change for the worse is hardly unbelievable, is it?
Yes, and it's having an effect. The website for the Sydney Olympics was inaccessible and they were successfully sued in Australia. In the USA, Section 508 applies to government websites in the USA, and the ADA may apply to many commercial websites in the USA. AOL was sued under the ADA and eventually settled. One airline lost a lawsuit and one won in the same month for providing an inaccessible service.
It's already happening, but it rarely gets to court. The RNIB has been going to specific firms when blind people complain and pointing out the law and threatening lawsuits. The websites in question usually get quietly fixed before it becomes necessary to sue them.
This is incorrect. Internet Explorer was held back by the fact that no developers were assigned to work on its rendering engine for five years. This began shortly after Internet Explorer 6 was released and is clearly the primary reason why it is so far behind.
At the time the development team was disbanded, Internet Explorer 6 had the best CSS implementation of any browser. It was only surpassed a year later by Mozilla. So as you can see, it's impossible for any other browsers' supposed failure to be responsible for Internet Explorer's dismal compliance with the W3C's specifications. It was already dead in the water by that point.
Even if the abandonment of Internet Explorer's development was preceded by an open-source failure of some kind, your claim is ridiculous. Microsoft aren't responsible for Internet Explorer being crippled, the other browsers getting it wrong are responsible for Internet Explorer being crippled? Despite being demonstrably far ahead of Internet Explorer in this regard? Really? What kind of Microsoft apologist do you have to be to say that with a straight face?
I'm sure there are. But since when does the lack of flawless implementations count against a specification? No software is without bugs.
Microsoft were on the working groups that published these specifications. You cannot blame the W3C without, in part, blaming Microsoft. You are keen on absolving Microsoft, aren't you? Microsoft helped create the specifications, then they failed to implement them while others did just that. The existence of bugs in other browsers does not absolve Microsoft from responsibility.
Thanks. Slashdot has a nasty bug where it nests replies incorrectly. It was displayed as a reply to my comment, which is why I was confused.
Once Netscape's "air supply" had been cut off, Internet Explorer's job was done. Microsoft disbanded the Internet Explorer team, assigned the team members to different projects and discontinued development. Things remained that way for five years. That is why Internet Explorer is so far behind.
Microsoft was a member of the W3C working groups that developed and published these specifications. You'll find numerous acknowledgements to their employees in the specifications.
XForms 1.0, published by the W3C in 2003, includes this functionality, separates the data structure from the UI, and improves communication with the server. Good luck finding a browser that supports it though. Yet another case of the "glacial" W3C being blamed for browsers not keeping up with them.
That's the broken window fallacy. Work for the sake of work is not an accomplishment, it's an embarrassment.
I've actually replaced somebody's weekend work with VBScript. You're forgetting that somebody needs to write that script. If you are competent, you shouldn't be scared of unnecessary, repetitive, annoying work going away, you should welcome it.
Flash accessibility has improved significantly in the past few years. However that doesn't mean that Flash designers always avail themselves of this technology. I suspect the type of designer who would happily use Flash for navigation is the type of designer who is unaware blind people use computers at all.
That's not really an alternative to Flash movies, which are usually embedded in a page rather than linked to. The alternative to Flash movies would be <object type="video/mpeg"> , which was introduced with HTML 4 in 1997.
CSS 3 is a family of specifications, not a single specification. Some of those too are at candidate recommendation stage, ready for implementing, just like CSS 2.1.
In any case, what's your point? I mentioned CSS 2 because it was published by the W3C a decade ago and its features are still not available to most web developers because Internet Explorer doesn't support it. How is the fact that the W3C carried on and started working on CSS 3 relevant? It still means the bottleneck is Internet Explorer, miles behind the "glacial" W3C.
That argument disappeared with the introduction of x86 Macs. Buy an x86 Mac and you can test in every major browser on every major platform. And what's the third workstation for?
This is simply not true. The CSS 2 recommendation was published on the 12th of May 1998.
You may be thinking of CSS 2.1, which is a candidate recommendation. What this means is that it is ready to be implemented. In order for it to reach final recommendation status, there needs to be at least two interoperable implementations for every feature. To achieve that, browser vendors need to go ahead and implement it.
Opera, Safari and Konqueror support SVG too. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that doesn't.
The W3C put font loading into the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago. The browser vendors ignored it until recently. Now, ten years later, the browser vendors are starting to implement it, and apparently this means the W3C moves too slowly?
It always amazes me when people call the W3C slow. As a web developer, there is one main thing holding me back. That is Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer 8 is not yet released. When it is, it is likely that it will finally include support for CSS 2. This is one of the most fundamental parts of a modern web browser, and this specification was published over ten years ago.
The rise of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, etc, was largely precipitated by the lack of support for DOM 2 Events in Internet Explorer. That specification was published in the year 2000.
The main draw for Flash has traditionally been the ability to use vector graphics. The alternative provided by the W3C, which is SVG, was first published in 2001.
The article complains that the last XHTML/HTML recommendation the W3C published was in 2001, seven years ago. What it neglects to mention is that even the next version of Internet Explorer, version 8, will not include any support at all for XHTML 1.0, let alone 1.1.
Can the W3C work faster? Probably. But how fast the W3C works is irrelevant, as they are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the rate of development in browsers, and one browser in particular, Internet Explorer. And it just so happens that the proprietary alternative of Silverlight is something developed and owned by the same company.
I don't see anything like that in the article. It seems entirely based around the name.
Sure, but the combination of a name and a photo does uniquely identify a person. The name alone does not. The phenomenon you are talking about is qualitatively different. I'm sure that if the site mentioned in the article had used his photograph as well, then he would have mentioned it.
That's interesting. The site has been around for a while, and it's based on electoral roll data from the year 2000. These genealogy people seem to think that it's legit, if a little inaccurate, giving numbers in the same vicinity as other sources. It's certainly given consistent results over the years. This is a similar service for USA data, and it gives similar results (rare names give low numbers, common names give high numbers).
You didn't put an asterisk in the first name field did you? You don't have to use a wildcard, you just leave the field blank. If you use an asterisk, it assumes it's part of the name, and gives you zero results.
What makes you think this is some type of scam, and not merely somebody with the same name as you?
No, just because you have an unusual name, it doesn't mean you are the only one with it. I have a very unusual name too. I've never even met anybody with the same surname that wasn't a member of my immediate family. I've googled my own name; I'm the only person with my name that has a web presence. But when a website was launched to check how unique your name is, I discovered that there are at least two other people with my name in my country alone. If I registered on a dating site, those two people would probably feel the same about me.
Unless there's something actually linking you personally to this site, like a photo or bio, I don't see any basis for calling this a scam. Your name is not unique enough to be your property.
It's not just corporate users. It's everybody who isn't running XP or higher. For a huge number of people, upgrading to the most recent version of Internet Explorer means buying a new operating system. Of course there are a lot of people who aren't upgrading. It's one of the consequences of Microsoft tying Internet Explorer to Windows so tightly. To upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, you need to take on board all the crap XP and/or Vista were laden with, like product activation and DRM antifeatures. And you need to pay for the privilege!
Essays, papers, articles and blog posts are all the same thing. The only exception is that a blog post is tied to a specific medium. Think about it - everything you say about blog posts can just as easily apply to the others.
The same works in reverse. The good qualities of essays can apply to the others as well:
A blog post is just the modern-day essay. On average, the quality of blog posts may be dire, but that's because a) more people are in a position to spend their time writing, b) more people are inclined to do so, and c) all are available a click away rather than the cream of the crop being reproduced in libraries or wherever. That's one hell of a selection bias.
Twitter is intrinsically different. It's limited to one or two sentences. It's only useful for throwing out a single thought. You can't elaborate. You can't form an argument. You can't support an argument with evidence. It's superficial by its very nature.
But does this really matter? Twitter isn't designed to replace blog posts, or articles, or papers, or essays. It isn't used for that purpose. It's a way of just throwing out a single nugget of information. Can that information be trivial and useless, for instance, "taking a dump, BRB"? Sure. Can it be useful, for instance letting people know about a service update? Sure.
Twitter isn't useless, and it isn't part of a trend. Overhyped, yes. Often used for stupid things, yes. But the link between Twitter and more serious communication is tenuous at best. The difference between Twitter and blog posts is like the difference between leaning over to another desk and mentioning something to a colleague compared with sending a company-wide memo. They are simply different things.
Yes, that's true. Emphasis added to the comment I was replying to:
nine-times was specifically talking about options available to developers.
That's usually true, but like you say, there are exceptions, and it's not just the ones you mention. Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
I'm not sure if you are aware of this (a lot of people here don't seem to be), but search engines already index Flash. Google example. Yes, Flash results are identified in the same way PDF results are.
This isn't a new feature, it's Adobe helping search engines improve the indexing they already do.
That has been possible for years. Possibly ever since the first version, I'm not sure. You use a fragment identifier in the link and check it to find out which "page" to display.
There's enough wrong with Flash that misrepresenting it is unnecessary and only serves to discredit you in the eyes of people who know better.