I think a reason that XHTML has not taken off is due to its unforgiving strictness. From what I understand, if you make a single mistake in XHTML the page will not work
This is not true. There is only one class of errors that causes a fatal error, and that's when the document isn't well-formed. Invalid pages can still be served without tripping the mandatory error-handling.
for that reason it is not intended to be handwritten.
No, handwritten is still fine. Handwriting XHTML and then publishing it without any attempt to load it in a browser or check it for errors first is a bad idea though. But then again, it was a bad idea with HTML too.
My understanding that XHTML requires is that document formatting be separate from the content of the document.
No, this is also not true. It's considered best practice with both HTML and XHTML, both have document types that enforce this separation, and both have document types that don't enforce this separation. It's your choice.
Yet sometimes is so much simpler to use a CENTER tag
XHTML 1.0 has the <center> element type (not "tag").
Take Fark for instance. After years and years, a critical mass of people are finally learning a, b, u, i, big, super, img, and other standard tags, most of which just don't work the same or at all under XHTML.
Every single one of those element types (not "tags") are included in XHTML 1.0. They all work the same too, except for <img> , which only requires a single additional slash compared with its HTML equivalent. Hardly the gigantic leap of incompatibility you are making it out to be.
I would rather have xhtml then go back to the mess that html was with its styling embedding directly into the tags
Give me clean code and forced usage of CSS any day.
There is no difference between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 in this regard. You can have "styling embedding directly into the tags" with XHTML and you can use CSS with HTML. Forget the idea that this has anything to do with CSS, it's a red herring.
FR looks AWFUL. Not in a vile MySpace way, but in a "My first attempt at HTML" way. Facebook is slick and so 2007. Friends Reunited is clunky and basic, so 1997. There is no way any self-respecting net user is going to evangelise about FR.
So you claim that the looks are disgusting but not bad like MySpace (which is possibly the most successful social site so far) but bad like "My first attempt at HMTL"... like all the customized pages on MySpace?
It's not expressed well, but I think the same thing. It's not so much the looks of Friends Reunited as the interface style. Back in the 90s, people made absolutely shocking design decisions that just left sites confusing and crippled. These days, there's at least some pretense at making things fairly well organised and easy to use.
Now sure, MySpace is really ugly, but that's because normal people choose to make it that way by customising their pages. You still have the standard interface elements that makes it (fairly) easy to navigate through the site. Friends Reunited, on the other hand, is designed by supposed professionals, and just gives you a headache trying to work out how to get from A to B. I don't think any thought whatsoever has gone into how people use the site, it seems they had an original idea that worked well, and then every expansion since has geared around finding a place to stuff a link to a new feature or finding a place to stuff an advert or charge money.
More importantly, can you tell the difference between a kid that doesn't have social skills and and kid that is faking not having social skills? I can see the thought process now:
Hmm... if I stop talking, I'll get a cool robot to play with...
You are looking at the HTTP transaction, in a technical "layer", not the publishing transaction, in a contract layer.
No, I'm saying that the technical layer has implications for the contract layer. You yourself used this argument in another comment. You argued that caching was legal because it's an assumed part of the technical layer that publishers can opt out of. I'm saying that transformation is legal because it is also an assumed part of the technical layer that publishers can opt out of. You said:
The HTTP protocol includes "opt-out", in "NOPROXY" headers, so pages without them are implicitly granting the right to proxies in the permitted transaction.
If allowing HTTP access implicitly grants the right to copy because that's part of HTTP and HTTP allows you to opt out, then by the same logic, allowing HTTP access implicitly grants the right to transform because that's also part of HTTP and HTTP allows you to opt out of that too.
The right my ISP has to copy it is only for the purpose of publishing it in the transaction I have explicitly permitted: publishing it on URL requests.
Assuming you mean "implicitly" and not "explicitly" (did you sign something regarding "URL requests"?), you should be aware that the HTTP protocol allows for changes to be made to content by intermediaries, so allowing publication via HTTP would give them this right. If you publish your content with the Cache-Control: no-transform HTTP header, it would be a different matter, but virtually nobody has even heard of it, so I doubt that is the case.
Also, bear in mind that what you are complaining about (alteration of content without permission) is something that's vital to many mobile applications. For instance, the latest J2ME version of the Opera web browser performs transformations automatically.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is also oblivious to XHTML 1.1's existence, which means you'll be turning away the majority of your visitors (assuming typical demographics).
When I checked it there was script just after the html element but before the head.
The problem was not the placement of the <script> element. While the <head> element is mandatory in HTML 4.01, its opening and closing tags are optional. All you had to do was delete your opening <head> tag. Everything after the opening <html> tag but before your closing </head> tag would be assumed to be in the <head> element.
The real problem was that they didn't specify the mandatory type attribute for the <script> element, which results in an invalid document, and that they used the deprecated language attribute, which cannot appear in a valid Strict document.
The MPAA stepped up and created the system they have now. Non-governmental "voluntary" doesn't mean there aren't penalties for theaters that let minors in, just that it isn't government doing the punishment.
Right, so instead of democratically-elected representatives that are accountable to the public deciding the law, you have unelected MPAA businessmen doing it. And you think that's better?
You say that, but why should we hold games to a higher standard than movies, which are also voluntary?
No, it's illegal to sell violent films to children here in the UK and other places in Europe as well. The USA idea that children should be able to buy violent films is considered quite odd by people over here.
Problem is, the parents will just come back and buy the games for them anyway.
Precisely. The government is putting the decision in the hands of the parents, rather than letting the kids decide for themselves. You think that's a bad thing?
I don't think it's nitpicking in this day and age to ask that a web-browser be skinnable as well.
I think it is. Why is there this requirement to make one application look different to everything else? You don't get people complaining that their email applications, their spreadsheets, their word processors and their anti-virus applications absolutely must be skinnable. They all rely on the operating environment's look & feel, which is usually customisable. Why isn't this enough for web browsers as well?
a clone product is broadly defined as "a product (or major component thereof) of a Party that has the same or substantially the same features and functionality as a then-existing product (or major component thereof) of the other Party... and that has the same or substantially the same user interface, or implements all or substantially all of the Application Programming Interfaces of the Prior Product."
What a long-winded, obfuscated way of saying "interoperable competitor".
I think it's about time web applications like WordPress included an update service. Put update notifications into an Atom feed pointing to tarballs incorporating an update script, patches, etc, and label them as security/minor/major. Have the system periodically retrieve them, automatically apply the security updates, and prompt the admin next time he logs in to apply the others.
The only difficulty is that the developers need to have proper release management. No more bundling security fixes into whatever the latest development version is. No more releasing updates that fiddle with styles at the same time as fixing serious bugs. I don't think that's feasible for many web applications, but it's certainly achievable for bigger projects like Wordpress.
I can't think of any web application that does this already off the top of my head. Does anybody know of any projects doing this?
I came out of education a few years ago and we got plenty of education about the Holocaust, GCSE level History was two years mostly spent on the German history between WWI and WWII.
Ditto. At my school, we not only learned all about the Holocaust, but we went on a school trip to visit Auschwitz. There were plenty of Muslim students in my class, and none of them complained, they got on with the work like everybody else, because if they didn't, they'd get Fs.
I clicked the link and laughed as soon as i saw the URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk./ They make no references to the number of schools or anything else.
For non-Brits: The Daily Mail is the UK equivalent to Fox News. So right-wing it used to be nicknamed "the Daily Heil". Their current bogeymen are political correctness and immigration, so the idea that the nation's schools are pandering to Muslims is right up their street, even though it's not a widespread practice and it's being eliminated next year.
the school district is desperately backpeddling to find a good reason why they should be able to sue over a youtube clip.
If you aren't going to read the article, at least read the summary. He's suing the school for suspending him. They aren't suing him.
Even a ONE DAY suspension for getting up and dancing behind the teacher's back is disproportionate.
This appears to be intentional humiliation of a teacher. That's got serious repercussions; who'd want to go to work where they are routinely humiliated by people they are trying to help? It creates a seriously hostile working environment, something employers have a responsibility to address.
Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another aloe strip on that fucker, too. That's right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather. You heard me--the second strip lathers. It's a whole new way to think about shaving. Don't question it. Don't say a word. Just key the music, and call the chorus girls, because we're on the edge--the razor's edge--and I feel like dancing.
Gillette has escalated the razor wars yet again, unveiling a new line of razors on Wednesday with five blades and a lubricating strip on both the front and back.
The UK is adding laws requiring compulsory reporting of people who might be criminals.
Um, no. This is something the Home Office is considering. Before this can actually become law, they have to write a bill, read it multiple times in both Houses of Parliament, debate it, pass it, and then it requires Royal Assent.
This is just a stupid idea some high-ranking policeman has had, which got attention because he circulated a memo. It's simply wrong to say that "The UK is adding laws...".
It's an asynchronous conversation. If I want to know if you are coming to the pub later, I don't need to know right now, I don't need to interrupt what you are doing, and I don't particularly want to chat, because that's what we'll be doing at the pub. If I see a programme on television about fat chicks, I might text my mate — who is a bit of a chubby chaser — to take the piss, but I don't necessarily want a response or to talk to him. And from a purely lazy perspective, sending a few words via text message just seems like less hassle than a conversation. I'll typically talk to between six and ten people when deciding what to do at the weekend, it takes much less attention and time to do it with SMS than with voice.
Slashdot translation: voice == TCP, SMS == UDP. Voice and TCP require a set-up, whether that's a three-way handshake or a "Hi how are you doing?". SMS and UDP just communicate the relevant information and let you deal with it in your own time.
Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages I can't think of any reason re-programming the standard keys is useful and it must add stacks to the cost.
Different keyboard modes have a much wider scope than layouts and languages. It's for displaying the right icons for when you are playing Quake, for displaying the effects of shortcuts when you are in Photoshop, for displaying the right functions when you switch modes in vi, for showing the right characters when you hold down Alt Gr when you want curly quotes, em dashes, etc.
I think a keyboard like this could be very useful even to computer novices — perhaps especially to computer novices. I've been using computers for decades, and I haven't memorised a fraction of the keyboard shortcuts I could find useful. It would be a lot easier for me if I could hold down Ctrl and look at my keyboard to see the right key to press. If a power user like me can't learn all the shortcuts, how could a newbie?
The real problem is that they went all out for the full-colour display, the animation, the integrated USB mass storage, etc, when you can get 99% of the value of this thing with a monochrome, high-latency, no-hard-drive version for a fraction of the cost. There's no way I'd pay this much for a keyboard, but I'd certainly jump at the chance if somebody were offering the cheaper version I describe. I've heard of various proof-of-concepts, but nothing for sale to end-users outside of the USA.
Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple of decent articles about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.
Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know is that staying in control of your computer is a decent policy to stick to, and Opera would have to be significantly better than Firefox or Konqueror for me to use it. That's not being "blind", as you put it, it's being sensible in exercising caution.
There needs to be a way to refer to decentralized internet resources in a unique fashion. We need the equivalent of the URL for a file that is hosted simultaneously in many places.
This is known as a URN. URLs and URNs are together known as URIs.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not true. There is only one class of errors that causes a fatal error, and that's when the document isn't well-formed. Invalid pages can still be served without tripping the mandatory error-handling.
No, handwritten is still fine. Handwriting XHTML and then publishing it without any attempt to load it in a browser or check it for errors first is a bad idea though. But then again, it was a bad idea with HTML too.
No, this is also not true. It's considered best practice with both HTML and XHTML, both have document types that enforce this separation, and both have document types that don't enforce this separation. It's your choice.
XHTML 1.0 has the <center> element type (not "tag").
Every single one of those element types (not "tags") are included in XHTML 1.0. They all work the same too, except for <img> , which only requires a single additional slash compared with its HTML equivalent. Hardly the gigantic leap of incompatibility you are making it out to be.
There is no difference between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 in this regard. You can have "styling embedding directly into the tags" with XHTML and you can use CSS with HTML. Forget the idea that this has anything to do with CSS, it's a red herring.
It's not expressed well, but I think the same thing. It's not so much the looks of Friends Reunited as the interface style. Back in the 90s, people made absolutely shocking design decisions that just left sites confusing and crippled. These days, there's at least some pretense at making things fairly well organised and easy to use.
Now sure, MySpace is really ugly, but that's because normal people choose to make it that way by customising their pages. You still have the standard interface elements that makes it (fairly) easy to navigate through the site. Friends Reunited, on the other hand, is designed by supposed professionals, and just gives you a headache trying to work out how to get from A to B. I don't think any thought whatsoever has gone into how people use the site, it seems they had an original idea that worked well, and then every expansion since has geared around finding a place to stuff a link to a new feature or finding a place to stuff an advert or charge money.
More importantly, can you tell the difference between a kid that doesn't have social skills and and kid that is faking not having social skills? I can see the thought process now:
Hmm... if I stop talking, I'll get a cool robot to play with...
No, I'm saying that the technical layer has implications for the contract layer. You yourself used this argument in another comment. You argued that caching was legal because it's an assumed part of the technical layer that publishers can opt out of. I'm saying that transformation is legal because it is also an assumed part of the technical layer that publishers can opt out of. You said:
If allowing HTTP access implicitly grants the right to copy because that's part of HTTP and HTTP allows you to opt out, then by the same logic, allowing HTTP access implicitly grants the right to transform because that's also part of HTTP and HTTP allows you to opt out of that too.
Assuming you mean "implicitly" and not "explicitly" (did you sign something regarding "URL requests"?), you should be aware that the HTTP protocol allows for changes to be made to content by intermediaries, so allowing publication via HTTP would give them this right. If you publish your content with the Cache-Control: no-transform HTTP header, it would be a different matter, but virtually nobody has even heard of it, so I doubt that is the case.
Also, bear in mind that what you are complaining about (alteration of content without permission) is something that's vital to many mobile applications. For instance, the latest J2ME version of the Opera web browser performs transformations automatically.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is also oblivious to XHTML 1.1's existence, which means you'll be turning away the majority of your visitors (assuming typical demographics).
The problem was not the placement of the <script> element. While the <head> element is mandatory in HTML 4.01, its opening and closing tags are optional. All you had to do was delete your opening <head> tag. Everything after the opening <html> tag but before your closing </head> tag would be assumed to be in the <head> element.
The real problem was that they didn't specify the mandatory type attribute for the <script> element, which results in an invalid document, and that they used the deprecated language attribute, which cannot appear in a valid Strict document.
Right, so instead of democratically-elected representatives that are accountable to the public deciding the law, you have unelected MPAA businessmen doing it. And you think that's better?
No, it's illegal to sell violent films to children here in the UK and other places in Europe as well. The USA idea that children should be able to buy violent films is considered quite odd by people over here.
Precisely. The government is putting the decision in the hands of the parents, rather than letting the kids decide for themselves. You think that's a bad thing?
I think it is. Why is there this requirement to make one application look different to everything else? You don't get people complaining that their email applications, their spreadsheets, their word processors and their anti-virus applications absolutely must be skinnable. They all rely on the operating environment's look & feel, which is usually customisable. Why isn't this enough for web browsers as well?
What a long-winded, obfuscated way of saying "interoperable competitor".
I think it's about time web applications like WordPress included an update service. Put update notifications into an Atom feed pointing to tarballs incorporating an update script, patches, etc, and label them as security/minor/major. Have the system periodically retrieve them, automatically apply the security updates, and prompt the admin next time he logs in to apply the others.
The only difficulty is that the developers need to have proper release management. No more bundling security fixes into whatever the latest development version is. No more releasing updates that fiddle with styles at the same time as fixing serious bugs. I don't think that's feasible for many web applications, but it's certainly achievable for bigger projects like Wordpress.
I can't think of any web application that does this already off the top of my head. Does anybody know of any projects doing this?
Ditto. At my school, we not only learned all about the Holocaust, but we went on a school trip to visit Auschwitz. There were plenty of Muslim students in my class, and none of them complained, they got on with the work like everybody else, because if they didn't, they'd get Fs.
For non-Brits: The Daily Mail is the UK equivalent to Fox News. So right-wing it used to be nicknamed "the Daily Heil". Their current bogeymen are political correctness and immigration, so the idea that the nation's schools are pandering to Muslims is right up their street, even though it's not a widespread practice and it's being eliminated next year.
If you aren't going to read the article, at least read the summary. He's suing the school for suspending him. They aren't suing him.
This appears to be intentional humiliation of a teacher. That's got serious repercussions; who'd want to go to work where they are routinely humiliated by people they are trying to help? It creates a seriously hostile working environment, something employers have a responsibility to address.
How is accusing your competitors of breaking the law not libellous?
Sometimes it's just downright hilarious.
The Onion, February 2004:
CNN, September 2005:
Yes we did. We vote for cameras every time we vote for a candidate that is in favour of them or hasn't got a stated policy on them.
Yes we do. We have the option of voting for politicians that actually reflect our wishes.
Um, no. This is something the Home Office is considering. Before this can actually become law, they have to write a bill, read it multiple times in both Houses of Parliament, debate it, pass it, and then it requires Royal Assent.
This is just a stupid idea some high-ranking policeman has had, which got attention because he circulated a memo. It's simply wrong to say that "The UK is adding laws...".
It's an asynchronous conversation. If I want to know if you are coming to the pub later, I don't need to know right now, I don't need to interrupt what you are doing, and I don't particularly want to chat, because that's what we'll be doing at the pub. If I see a programme on television about fat chicks, I might text my mate — who is a bit of a chubby chaser — to take the piss, but I don't necessarily want a response or to talk to him. And from a purely lazy perspective, sending a few words via text message just seems like less hassle than a conversation. I'll typically talk to between six and ten people when deciding what to do at the weekend, it takes much less attention and time to do it with SMS than with voice.
Slashdot translation: voice == TCP, SMS == UDP. Voice and TCP require a set-up, whether that's a three-way handshake or a "Hi how are you doing?". SMS and UDP just communicate the relevant information and let you deal with it in your own time.
To be perfectly honest, I think the slave girls will do more to combat repetitive strain injury in your wrists than an ergonomic keyboard ever could.
Different keyboard modes have a much wider scope than layouts and languages. It's for displaying the right icons for when you are playing Quake, for displaying the effects of shortcuts when you are in Photoshop, for displaying the right functions when you switch modes in vi, for showing the right characters when you hold down Alt Gr when you want curly quotes, em dashes, etc.
I think a keyboard like this could be very useful even to computer novices — perhaps especially to computer novices. I've been using computers for decades, and I haven't memorised a fraction of the keyboard shortcuts I could find useful. It would be a lot easier for me if I could hold down Ctrl and look at my keyboard to see the right key to press. If a power user like me can't learn all the shortcuts, how could a newbie?
The real problem is that they went all out for the full-colour display, the animation, the integrated USB mass storage, etc, when you can get 99% of the value of this thing with a monochrome, high-latency, no-hard-drive version for a fraction of the cost. There's no way I'd pay this much for a keyboard, but I'd certainly jump at the chance if somebody were offering the cheaper version I describe. I've heard of various proof-of-concepts, but nothing for sale to end-users outside of the USA.
Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple of decent articles about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.
Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know is that staying in control of your computer is a decent policy to stick to, and Opera would have to be significantly better than Firefox or Konqueror for me to use it. That's not being "blind", as you put it, it's being sensible in exercising caution.
This is known as a URN. URLs and URNs are together known as URIs.