Presumably, they may be excluded if they do not acknowledge a "Supreme Being"
That's exactly my point. "May be". The Texas constitution doesn't bar atheists from office. It merely fails to extend the protection from religious tests to atheists. So unless some other law bars atheists from office, they are okay. And if some other law does bar atheists from office, then it's the other law that bars them, not the Texas constitution.
Take an example. Three people, Alex the Atheist, Chuck the Christian and Jim the Jew.
Jim the Jew is elected. What does the constitution say? It says that it's unconstitutional to exclude him from office because of his religious sentiments, because he acknowledges the existence of a supreme being.
Alex the Atheist is elected. What does the constitution say? Nothing at all. Alex the Atheist doesn't acknowledge the existence of a supreme being, so article one, section four doesn't apply to him.
Now let's say Chuck the Christian comes along and tries to bar non-Christians from public office. Jim the Jew gets re-elected, and what's the consequence? Nothing. He still gets to hold public office, because he is protected from a law such as this by the Texas constitution.
Now Alex the Atheist gets re-elected, and what's the consequence? He falls foul of the law Chuck the Christian pushed for, because he isn't protected by the Texas constitution in the same way Jim the Jew is.
Do you see what role the Texas constitution plays now? It doesn't bar atheists from office. It protects non-atheists from having their religious views held against them. It doesn't say anything at all about atheists.
If you don't get it now, I don't think I can dumb it down any more. It's basic English and basic logic.
article 1 section 4 of the bill of 'rights' of the texas constitution states that people may not hold office if they don't "acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being".
No it doesn't. Read it again. It says that people who acknowledge the existence of a supreme being are not subject to any other religious requirements. It doesn't say anything about people who do not acknowledge the existence of a supreme being.
It's a statement restricting what the government can demand of public officials who believe in a deity. It's practically the opposite of a requirement to hold office — it's a loophole, not a demand.
It's a stupid law alright, but it doesn't forbid atheists from holding office per se, it just doesn't give them the same loophole as everybody else.
Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading movie download service. Sorry, but Movielink is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States.
So they've thrown out Mac users, thrown out Linux users, thrown out BSD users, thrown out 98 and ME users, and thrown out everybody outside the USA. The majority of web surfers aren't even allowed to see their homepage!
There are significant differences between Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.2 (totally different rendering engine), 5.5, 6.0 (different rendering depending on doctype sniffing) and 7.0. I've even found some bugs manifest themselves within the same version of Internet Explorer only depending on whether they are running on an NT-based or DOS-based Windows.
In my experience, Opera, Firefox and Safari, three totally different codebases, have a better shot at rendering alike than Internet Explorer 5.x and Internet Explorer 7, provided that you use valid code. It's entirely possible that their reason is to reduce compatibility testing, but it's a false economy assuming you've hired competent developers. The compatibility testing for vaguely conformant browsers is a drop in the ocean compared with what you already have to do for Internet Explorer.
To escape this visionary world, you have to write your own OS, own tools, own compiler, own C library, everything
Nonsense. Just because an OS is GPLed, it doesn't mean everything running on it has to be. Just because a compiler is GPLed, it doesn't mean that the things you compile with it must be. Just because tools are GPLed, it doesn't mean the things you use them for must be. The GPL is only as viral as copyright normally is.
Government websites have to be fully accessible according to a government standard (508, I think), but non-government websites certainly don't.
Please don't talk as if the USA is the only country in existence. Accessibility laws across the world vary quite widely, and there's plenty of places where non-government organisations are bound by law to ensure their websites are accessible. Even in the USA, it's not as clear-cut as you make out - non-government organisations have been sued under the ADA, and they've set conflicting precedents, so it's not at all clear what is legally required and what isn't.
the box model is the direct result of the div structure of XHTML 1
Er, "the div structure"? There is nothing special about the <div> element type whatsoever. It's just like any other element type. Sure, a lot of newbie web developers seem to think that <div>s are a type of layout scheme, but it's really just a general-purpose block-level element type.
I know why you say otherwise. Conventionally, when we talk about the box model, we are talking about CSS's use of it, but technically, convention is wrong, in that the box is defined in the XHTML rather than the CSS.
You're close, but not quite there.
XHTML doesn't involve itself with layout, and doesn't define any kind of box model. If you disagree, go read the specs.
CSS defines the box model. According to the CSS specifications, elements from the source document may generate boxes.
So that's where you got the idea that the box model comes from XHTML. But as you can see, it's not the XHTML specification that defines the box model, it's the CSS that describes the box model and where to get the boxes from.
Now you can argue that a particular XHTML document defines some of the boxes in a particular rendering, but the boxes themselves and the box model are two separate things. The box model is the way it all works. The boxes are artifacts of a particular document that has been rendered according to the box model.
What this does is sets the default font size for the page at whatever the user has set as default in their browser.
This code is actually useless by definition. You don't have to set the default to be the default because it's the default. The definition of 1em is the same size as the parent element, and the font-size property is inherited by default, so specifying "1em" for the font size is unnecessary unless you are overriding another rule.
I'd be happy if we just had a way to layout the page such that it would size with the browser window.
Er, we do, and it's actually the default. Load a page without any styling information at all and see for yourself. If you want to specify a width, use { width: 75%; } or whatever relative width you like instead of using px, pt or whatever you are using now.
Are you deliberately misreading my comments? I didn't say that adjacent links are confusing and I didn't say that anybody needs help to figure out that they are separate links. What I said was that when you interact with them with the mouse (i.e. when hover rules are relevant), it's not always immediately obvious exactly which link you are interacting with, and hover rules can improve that.
Do you seriously not get this? Even unstyled links on separate lines are adjacent to one another, no extra styling necessary to cause this problem. One pixel can mean the difference between clicking on one link and clicking on the other. How do you find out? Well you can squint at the screen and hope for the best, or you can look at your status bar, or you can move your mouse further away from the edges or, if the web designer has provided hover rules, it can be immediately obvious. Which do you think is the most user-friendly?
It was introduced by Mark Shuttleworth, early today, this release will come full composite as default, according to Mark."
How on earth do you get that, when what he actually said was:
On a personal note, the monkey on my back has been composite-by-default,
which I had hoped would happen in Edgy, then Feisty. I'm nervous to
predict it now for Gutsy, for fear of a third strike, but I'm told that
great work is being done in the Compiz/Beryl community and upstream in
X. There's a reasonable chance that Gutsy will deliver where those
others have not.
Wow, Go2Linux really did well with this. They copy & pasted the email and the release schedule, they added a totally incorrect summary, submitted their own story to Slashdot, and got onto the front page. It's almost as if Slashdot is trying to reward incompetence.
Links are immediately obvious in regular HTML pages because they're a different color and usually underlined. Your mouse cursor also changes when it is pointing at them.
Did you even read my comment? I'm talking about when you are moving through a list of links, like a navbar. Just because the links look like links and your mouse pointer indicates that you are over a link, it doesn't mean you are getting strong visual feedback about exactly which link you are over.
If you have a bunch of links back to back in such a way that it is difficult to tell where one stops and another ends, then you probably need to redesign your webpage anyway.
Take a look at your own page. You provide an unstyled list of links at the top. When I put my mouse over the first one and move it down over the list, it's not obvious exactly which one I am over when I am anywhere near the edges. I have to look at the status bar if I want to be sure.
This is not about funky layouts or designs that scew things up. This is about a totally normal situation — adjacent links — being slightly improved by the appropriate use of visual feedback.
why should that be part of the page design, and not a feature of the user's reader
With CSS, it can be both. The "C" in "CSS" stands for "Cascading". The style rules suggested by a web designer cascade together with style rules preferred by the user.
As for why it's a good idea for web designers to have this feature, well it's for the same reason any styling is useful for the web designer to have. Because although the user should have the final say (which CSS allows), it's difficult to predict exactly which presentation is most suitable for all the pages you are likely to encounter in the future. The web designer that produced the page, on the other hand, knows the context in which the information is being related and has a good chance of being able to come up with a more appropriate presentation than something that is generic to all pages.
However, there is a completely different conception of the internet where the pages should be marked up as generally as possible, and the user's browser should then choose how to display the information in a way that's meaningful to the user.
Well if that's what you want, then pages being "marked up as generally as possible" is exactly the opposite of what you want. If you are relying on the browser to handle all presentation, then what you need is specific, accurate markup, not general stuff.
In any case, the two goals are not mutually exclusive, and CSS has been handling this for over a decade. For those users who like to be in control, they can configure their browsers to ignore author-supplied stylesheets. Everybody else can take what is suggested by the web designer, or configure their browser to make only minimal changes (e.g. font size).
If you are sticking to the HTML 3.2 standard you are doing exactly the opposite of what you state. Before CSS...
While it doesn't apply to the person you are responding to, it's perfectly possible to use CSS with HTML 3.2. In fact, you can use it with HTML 2.0. From the HTML 2.0 RFC:
The <LINK> element is typically used to indicate authorship, related indexes and glossaries, older or more recent versions, document hierarchy, associated resources such as style sheets, etc.
CSS might not have been invented when HTML 2.0 was around, but that doesn't mean they hadn't already come up with the way to associate stylesheets with HTML documents.
And as for "HTML doing things formerly reserved for Javascript", I literally have no idea what you're referring to.
I suspect he's talking about how you can do client-side validation declaratively with HTML 5 instead of writing JavaScript event handlers for form submit events.
Hover rules aren't useless eye candy. Hover rules are visual feedback letting you know you are over something clickable. If you move your cursor across a bunch of links, it's immediately obvious which one you are currently over without having to pay attention to precisely where your cursor is. Usability++.
I thought it was because it was a pointless and unneeded reformulation of existing standards with no BC?
You're welcome to that opinion, but I think the fact that it's a work-in-progress is the relevant factor to consider when wondering why people aren't using it. Even the W3C themselves don't want anybody to use it yet. In their own words, from the top of the latest specification: "It should in no way be considered stable, and should not be normatively referenced for any purposes whatsoever."
Lynx will never support application/xhtml+xml
Lynx already supports application/xhtml+xml. According to the changelog, support was added almost three years ago.
You prefer writing little-stupid javascript functions to just putting a:hover rule in your CSS?
I get the impression he's not a professional web designer, so he can just ignore stuff like that entirely.
HTML 3.2 is really the only standard the most browsers agree upon
There's a very good reason for that. The W3C were working on HTML 3 when it became apparent that their work was diverging from what browsers understood; browser vendors were adding stuff at a crazy rate while ignoring the HTML 3 work. So the W3C decided to scrap HTML 3 and make a decent description of what browsers understood in HTML 3.2.
Basically, the reason why "most browsers agree upon HTML 3.2" is because HTML 3.2 was merely rubber-stamping what browsers already did.
IE6/7 have all those weird box model problems with XHTML 1.0
There's no such thing as a "box model" in XHTML 1.0. The box model is a feature of CSS.
I agree that it's silly that they are required attributes, but merely missing the attributes off doesn't dump you into quirks mode. Quirks mode is determined by the doctype you use.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly my point. "May be". The Texas constitution doesn't bar atheists from office. It merely fails to extend the protection from religious tests to atheists. So unless some other law bars atheists from office, they are okay. And if some other law does bar atheists from office, then it's the other law that bars them, not the Texas constitution.
Take an example. Three people, Alex the Atheist, Chuck the Christian and Jim the Jew.
Jim the Jew is elected. What does the constitution say? It says that it's unconstitutional to exclude him from office because of his religious sentiments, because he acknowledges the existence of a supreme being.
Alex the Atheist is elected. What does the constitution say? Nothing at all. Alex the Atheist doesn't acknowledge the existence of a supreme being, so article one, section four doesn't apply to him.
Now let's say Chuck the Christian comes along and tries to bar non-Christians from public office. Jim the Jew gets re-elected, and what's the consequence? Nothing. He still gets to hold public office, because he is protected from a law such as this by the Texas constitution.
Now Alex the Atheist gets re-elected, and what's the consequence? He falls foul of the law Chuck the Christian pushed for, because he isn't protected by the Texas constitution in the same way Jim the Jew is.
Do you see what role the Texas constitution plays now? It doesn't bar atheists from office. It protects non-atheists from having their religious views held against them. It doesn't say anything at all about atheists.
If you don't get it now, I don't think I can dumb it down any more. It's basic English and basic logic.
You could probably get away with Diana Ross.
No it doesn't. Read it again. It says that people who acknowledge the existence of a supreme being are not subject to any other religious requirements. It doesn't say anything about people who do not acknowledge the existence of a supreme being.
It's a statement restricting what the government can demand of public officials who believe in a deity. It's practically the opposite of a requirement to hold office — it's a loophole, not a demand.
It's a stupid law alright, but it doesn't forbid atheists from holding office per se, it just doesn't give them the same loophole as everybody else.
Actually, it's even worse than that.
So they've thrown out Mac users, thrown out Linux users, thrown out BSD users, thrown out 98 and ME users, and thrown out everybody outside the USA. The majority of web surfers aren't even allowed to see their homepage!
There are significant differences between Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.2 (totally different rendering engine), 5.5, 6.0 (different rendering depending on doctype sniffing) and 7.0. I've even found some bugs manifest themselves within the same version of Internet Explorer only depending on whether they are running on an NT-based or DOS-based Windows.
In my experience, Opera, Firefox and Safari, three totally different codebases, have a better shot at rendering alike than Internet Explorer 5.x and Internet Explorer 7, provided that you use valid code. It's entirely possible that their reason is to reduce compatibility testing, but it's a false economy assuming you've hired competent developers. The compatibility testing for vaguely conformant browsers is a drop in the ocean compared with what you already have to do for Internet Explorer.
Nonsense. Just because an OS is GPLed, it doesn't mean everything running on it has to be. Just because a compiler is GPLed, it doesn't mean that the things you compile with it must be. Just because tools are GPLed, it doesn't mean the things you use them for must be. The GPL is only as viral as copyright normally is.
You've already had a client-side include for over a decade. It's called the <object> element type.
Please don't talk as if the USA is the only country in existence. Accessibility laws across the world vary quite widely, and there's plenty of places where non-government organisations are bound by law to ensure their websites are accessible. Even in the USA, it's not as clear-cut as you make out - non-government organisations have been sued under the ADA, and they've set conflicting precedents, so it's not at all clear what is legally required and what isn't.
Actually, CSS 2 does. But Internet Explorer doesn't implement that bit of CSS 2, despite the spec turning nine years old this year.
Yes there is.
Actually, that became a Recommendation just over three years ago. There's nothing "proposed" about it.
I remember trying out DOM3LS a couple of years ago, and Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror all supported the draft specification.
Er, "the div structure"? There is nothing special about the <div> element type whatsoever. It's just like any other element type. Sure, a lot of newbie web developers seem to think that <div>s are a type of layout scheme, but it's really just a general-purpose block-level element type.
You're close, but not quite there.
XHTML doesn't involve itself with layout, and doesn't define any kind of box model. If you disagree, go read the specs.
CSS defines the box model. According to the CSS specifications, elements from the source document may generate boxes.
So that's where you got the idea that the box model comes from XHTML. But as you can see, it's not the XHTML specification that defines the box model, it's the CSS that describes the box model and where to get the boxes from.
Now you can argue that a particular XHTML document defines some of the boxes in a particular rendering, but the boxes themselves and the box model are two separate things. The box model is the way it all works. The boxes are artifacts of a particular document that has been rendered according to the box model.
Actually, you are reinventing the wheel. That shortcut syntax is part of HTML. I don't think any browser ever implemented it though.
This code is actually useless by definition. You don't have to set the default to be the default because it's the default. The definition of 1em is the same size as the parent element, and the font-size property is inherited by default, so specifying "1em" for the font size is unnecessary unless you are overriding another rule.
Er, we do, and it's actually the default. Load a page without any styling information at all and see for yourself. If you want to specify a width, use { width: 75%; } or whatever relative width you like instead of using px, pt or whatever you are using now.
Are you deliberately misreading my comments? I didn't say that adjacent links are confusing and I didn't say that anybody needs help to figure out that they are separate links. What I said was that when you interact with them with the mouse (i.e. when hover rules are relevant), it's not always immediately obvious exactly which link you are interacting with, and hover rules can improve that.
Do you seriously not get this? Even unstyled links on separate lines are adjacent to one another, no extra styling necessary to cause this problem. One pixel can mean the difference between clicking on one link and clicking on the other. How do you find out? Well you can squint at the screen and hope for the best, or you can look at your status bar, or you can move your mouse further away from the edges or, if the web designer has provided hover rules, it can be immediately obvious. Which do you think is the most user-friendly?
How on earth do you get that, when what he actually said was:
Wow, Go2Linux really did well with this. They copy & pasted the email and the release schedule, they added a totally incorrect summary, submitted their own story to Slashdot, and got onto the front page. It's almost as if Slashdot is trying to reward incompetence.
Did you even read my comment? I'm talking about when you are moving through a list of links, like a navbar. Just because the links look like links and your mouse pointer indicates that you are over a link, it doesn't mean you are getting strong visual feedback about exactly which link you are over.
Take a look at your own page. You provide an unstyled list of links at the top. When I put my mouse over the first one and move it down over the list, it's not obvious exactly which one I am over when I am anywhere near the edges. I have to look at the status bar if I want to be sure.
This is not about funky layouts or designs that scew things up. This is about a totally normal situation — adjacent links — being slightly improved by the appropriate use of visual feedback.
With CSS, it can be both. The "C" in "CSS" stands for "Cascading". The style rules suggested by a web designer cascade together with style rules preferred by the user.
As for why it's a good idea for web designers to have this feature, well it's for the same reason any styling is useful for the web designer to have. Because although the user should have the final say (which CSS allows), it's difficult to predict exactly which presentation is most suitable for all the pages you are likely to encounter in the future. The web designer that produced the page, on the other hand, knows the context in which the information is being related and has a good chance of being able to come up with a more appropriate presentation than something that is generic to all pages.
Well if that's what you want, then pages being "marked up as generally as possible" is exactly the opposite of what you want. If you are relying on the browser to handle all presentation, then what you need is specific, accurate markup, not general stuff.
In any case, the two goals are not mutually exclusive, and CSS has been handling this for over a decade. For those users who like to be in control, they can configure their browsers to ignore author-supplied stylesheets. Everybody else can take what is suggested by the web designer, or configure their browser to make only minimal changes (e.g. font size).
While it doesn't apply to the person you are responding to, it's perfectly possible to use CSS with HTML 3.2. In fact, you can use it with HTML 2.0. From the HTML 2.0 RFC:
CSS might not have been invented when HTML 2.0 was around, but that doesn't mean they hadn't already come up with the way to associate stylesheets with HTML documents.
I suspect he's talking about how you can do client-side validation declaratively with HTML 5 instead of writing JavaScript event handlers for form submit events.
Well read the spec then. That's the HTML 5 doctype. The only reason they use a doctype at all is because otherwise it would trigger quirks mode.
Hover rules aren't useless eye candy. Hover rules are visual feedback letting you know you are over something clickable. If you move your cursor across a bunch of links, it's immediately obvious which one you are currently over without having to pay attention to precisely where your cursor is. Usability++.
Yes, because MS FrontPage would never output broken HTML, would it?
You're welcome to that opinion, but I think the fact that it's a work-in-progress is the relevant factor to consider when wondering why people aren't using it. Even the W3C themselves don't want anybody to use it yet. In their own words, from the top of the latest specification: "It should in no way be considered stable, and should not be normatively referenced for any purposes whatsoever."
Lynx already supports application/xhtml+xml. According to the changelog, support was added almost three years ago.
If that's what it takes to stop you using <blink>, so be it :).
I get the impression he's not a professional web designer, so he can just ignore stuff like that entirely.
There's a very good reason for that. The W3C were working on HTML 3 when it became apparent that their work was diverging from what browsers understood; browser vendors were adding stuff at a crazy rate while ignoring the HTML 3 work. So the W3C decided to scrap HTML 3 and make a decent description of what browsers understood in HTML 3.2.
Basically, the reason why "most browsers agree upon HTML 3.2" is because HTML 3.2 was merely rubber-stamping what browsers already did.
There's no such thing as a "box model" in XHTML 1.0. The box model is a feature of CSS.
I agree that it's silly that they are required attributes, but merely missing the attributes off doesn't dump you into quirks mode. Quirks mode is determined by the doctype you use.