First thing's first, objects are based on classes.
Not necessarily. Object-oriented languages do not necessarily have any concept of "class". For example, you can use JScript for server-side scripting with ASP. JScript is an ECMAScript (JavaScript) implementation, and as such, is a prototype-based object-oriented language not a class-based object-oriented language.
Because BHOs require you to install them first and, at least in intelligent browsers, require you to accept the installation (in IE it's a simple matter of registry keys, as usual). Something that's not required with AX.
I just booted up Windows to check. The default settings are that unsigned ActiveX controls are completely ignored, and signed ActiveX controls result in a prompt for the user to download them. ActiveX controls cannot run without the user's permission, just like Firefox extensions.
if we tried to support real XHTML in IE 7 we would have ended up using our existing HTML parser (which is focused on compatibility) and hacking in XML constructs. It is highly unlikely we could support XHTML well in this way; in particular, we would certainly not detect a few error cases here or there, and we would silently support invalid cases.
I would much rather take the time to implement XHTML properly after IE 7, and have it be truly interoperable - but I did want to unblock deployment of XHTML as best we could, which is why we made sure to address the XML prolog/DOCTYPE issue.
No version of Internet Explorer supports XHTML. If you label XHTML as text/html, Internet Explorer will render it because it thinks it's HTML. There's a problem that XML prologs cause because of this, so they implemented a special-case workaround.
All of this is very well known to web developers, I suggest you actually ask your developers about this if you don't believe me.
Watch the Video on Expression Web Designer. It is the new FrontPage so to speak, and is designed to work with IE7 in the long run, and it pushes VERY HARD - XHTML and CSS standards, to the point it will break IE6 if you tell it to comply 100% with standards. They also wouldn't be making such a 'standards' based site development tool if it was going to break IE7.
XHTML is being treated as a buzzword these days. The document included in that video included a <meta> element that claimed the media type was text/html. This is not XHTML being parsed as XHTML. It's XHTML pretending to be HTML and being parsed as HTML - which is the only way in which any version of Internet Explorer can understand XHTML as it doesn't support XHTML.
In every way in which XHTML differs from HTML, Internet Explorer follows the HTML rules. If you disagree, please give examples. If you don't disagree, please explain how that means that Internet Explorer supports XHTML rather than "pretend XHTML".
Are you seriously making assumptions about what Internet Explorer supports by trying to spot implications from marketing material for a tangentially related product by the same company?
That isn't why it won't pass the Acid2 test. It won't pass the Acid2 test because that is far too much work for a single major revision. It would require implementing a lot of the CSS that is currently unsupported
This has 'little' to do with WHAT CSS is implemented, but more over what 'foreign and non-standard' CSS and IE specific goofs are allowed. IE7 does a good job of support CSS features, the DRAWBACK is that is STILL supports NON-STANDARD CSS and MS IE standards that when put to the ACID2 test fail.
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Have you looked at the Acid2 test at all? The problems Internet Explorer has with it are either parsing problems or outright lack of support for various features of CSS and HTML. Internet Explorer's support for non-standard CSS extensions are not a factor.
WindowsXP is 5 years old, it is about time people moved to it.
You can argue that people should upgrade all you like, it makes no difference as to whether they actually do it or not. I'm saying that lots of people don't upgrade for years. Telling me that they should is completely irrelevant. It's not up to me whether they upgrade.
So YES we can start moving to real XHTML and CSS based sit
The reason is simply that AX is the only technology where a webpage can directly affect your system.
Not true. Browser plugins and Firefox extensions, which giorgiofr already pointed out in the comment you are replying to, can also directly affect your system. Hence the question - why do you hate ActiveX for this when the others do it too? It looks suspiciously like you hate ActiveX because it's Microsoft's and are using the "directly affect your system" rubbish as an excuse.
IE7 supports CSS and XHTML 100 times better than IE6 so sites can start using them
Internet Explorer 7 hasn't got any support for XHTML whatsoever. You are still stuck having to pretend that your XHTML is actually HTML for Internet Explorer to do anything with it.
The CSS improvements are marginal. They've fixed a lot of bugs, but the new functionality is very sparse, it's just selectors I think. The rest of CSS 2 remains unimplemented.
I still don't like that IE7 still maintains some backward compatibility for the IE tags, (hence why it won't pass the ACID2 test)
That isn't why it won't pass the Acid2 test. It won't pass the Acid2 test because that is far too much work for a single major revision. It would require implementing a lot of the CSS that is currently unsupported.
So in the end, we can start using more advanced CSS and XHTML concepts in the next year
In the next year!? I wish!
Most sites can only start using them once there aren't many Internet Explorer < 7 users left. Bear in mind that work I'm doing today needs Internet Explorer 5.5 compatibility because lots of people still use it, and that a lot of people aren't going to even have the opportunity to upgrade to version 7 because it doesn't run on Windows 2000 or earlier.
I fully expect there to be enough Internet Explorer 6 users hanging around to make life difficult in the year 2010.
I manage around twenty websites for businesses around my state for some spare pocket money each month and all of them are xhtml1.1/css2 compliant (w3c) with a large hacks section for each to get them to work in ie6
XHTML 1.1 isn't allowed to be served as text/html. Internet Explorer 6 can only understand text/html. I assume you are serving XHTML 1.1 as text/html against spec? It's kinda hard to take you seriously complaining about Internet Explorer's lack of compliance when you don't comply either.
I'm being told it will all come in one hit in less than six months?
No. They've been releasing betas, which you can use to check for compatibility, and there's no way everybody will upgrade all at once. But if you've done your job and checked for compatibility, why would it even matter if everybody upgraded all at once?
Maybe M$
You appear to be really immature when you call Microsoft "M$".
Though that isn't what really scares me, what scares me is none of the company's I have done websites for and also maintain for will understand the implication of the sites needing recoded until customers start complaining. I can put that number, personally, to about thirty five businesses phoning up and complaining that their sites don't work which will a) not be their fault and b) be my fault for selling them a broken site which leads to two problems 1) they wont want to pay for the updat
You mean you've sold them a website without explaining to them what your policy is on future versions of browsers? Without putting something down in writing?
Imagine you weren't a web developer for a second. If you hire somebody to build you a website, it seems like a perfectly reasonable expectation to get something that will simply continue to work. If you didn't explain to them that this is not how websites work, then you didn't do your job when you initially took the work on, and it's simply taken until now for your corner-cutting to incur costs.
When you build websites, you need to explain these things to clients. What browsers are supported, your policies for older and newer browsers, when a bug is something you fix without payment and when they need to pay you to update the site. If you don't do that, you're a cowboy coder, not a professional that can be trusted.
You're reading far more into my comment than is actually there. When I mentioned non-standard syntax, I wasn't implying that SQL Server was particularly non-standard, merely that the opportunity is there for a book like this to make a mess of teaching things.
It isn't different for MySQL books, and if somebody had posted the same comment in a MySQL book review, I'd have said the same thing.
He might not be the target audience, but how would you expect a member of the target audience to pick up technical errors in a book such as this?
If it, say, taught you how to do something in a totally non-standard way that only worked on SQL Server when the standard way worked just as well, then I'd consider that to be a pretty big failing in a book like this. But somebody just beginning with SQL wouldn't have a chance of spotting something like that.
I think what they're worried about is another J++, where someone (Microsoft) creates an almost-but-not-quite Java
Which of these two scenarios do you think is most likely to cause that situation?
People who object to Sun's non-open license create a from-scratch implementation of Java, or
People take Sun's open-source Java and use it directly.
It seems fairly obvious to me that forcing people to create another Java implementation instead of letting them use the "canonical version" as they wish is far more likely to bring about another J++ situation.
In my experience, clients don't act anything even close to what you describe unless the sales people in your organisation have been persuading them that they need to spend extra money on "essential" Flash. Once you get a bit of experience doing sales yourself, you quickly find that the people just asking about specific technology are in a minority, let alone demanding specific technology.
I completely agree, but the problem is that the web developers — or their bosses — perceive the Flash version as being superior. Most of them don't even consider the possibility that somebody would have Flash installed but prefer the alternative content.
The more accessibility is known, the less we'll have websites made in Flash (or Flash navigation menus, Flash content, etc).
Sadly, this isn't the case. Using Flash doesn't make something less accessible, even older versions without support for screenreaders. It's when people use Flash without a fallback that accessibility problems arise. And of course, the latest versions of Flash have support for alternative user-agents built in.
The stupid web developers that annoy people with improper use of Flash can continue to annoy people and still create perfectly accessible websites. Accessibility != usability.
Just about the only trick I use that isn't in plain view is fish:// for opening directories and files over ssh.
Actually, that is in plain sight. From your desktop, open the System icon, go to Remote Places, and pick "Add a network folder". A wizard pops up asking you for the login details for WebDAV/FTP/Windows Network/SSH, etc, and it defaults to adding an icon for next time.
What's the difference between that and the built-in Alt-F2? I can hit that, type 'ko' and cycle through konqueror, konversation, etc with the arrow keys.
Then I must not understand the point of this line the typical approach is just to set a cookie that lets the server know that it should include a body { font-size: whatever; } rule.
You do understand what "typical" means, don't you? You said:
Wait... are you saying that they had an entire seperate page that they made simply made the font larger?
In actual fact, nobody does what you imagine to happen. They use the approach I described. Just because I described the approach, it doesn't mean that I approve of it or that I think it's the best way of doing things. It's not. You and I both agree on that, and this is the third time I've said so. If you look back through my posting history, you'll see that websites messing with the font size annoyme. I even wrote a user stylesheet when Slashdot fucked up the fonts in the redesign.
No, I knew exactly what you were getting at, which is why I said "I agree that it's stupid to have per-website controls for this". But one of your assumptions was way off, which is what I was addressing. I've been designing with CSS for years, you don't need to explain the basics to me.
You stole my argument. W3C isn't a goal in itself.
No, but it has beneficial consequences. For example:
Less chance of things breaking in the future: historically, when new versions of browsers are released, they have always tripped up on some kinds of invalid code that previous versions did not, while the valid equivalent continued to work. This is true of every major release of every major browser that I can think of.
Bandwidth savings. Taking the design out of the markup and putting it into an external stylesheet saves bandwidth and makes pages faster to load. This is especially true of dynamically generated pages like search results.
Quality assurance work is easier. When you run a validator over a page, it's easier to spot a single error that stops a page from being invalid than it is to spot a single error amongst dozens that you think can be safely ignored. And, when you scale that out to a large number of pages, it's infeasible to run a validation spider over hundreds of web pages on a regular basis to notify you of any errors it finds - unless you write valid code. Or do you want to be swamped with thousands of error messages in your inbox every day?
What beneficial consequences does making the design identical for Netscape 3 users have?
It's a waste of time and less user-friendly to try maintaining two versions. Accessibility improvements generally improve the experience for normal visitors as well. I guess you're assuming that an accessible design has to be boring and plain, but this isn't the case, you can have normal-looking designs that degrade gracefully so that they are still accessible.
The reason is of course not that Google cannot make a page without the use of tables or the font tag, but that the pages work with even the oldest of browsers (except IE 2.0 which doesn't do tables). You can't DIV or CSS your way around that.
That's because you don't need to. Using CSS doesn't make your page stop working with older browsers, it was specifically designed to be backwards compatible. For example, using <body bgcolor="#ffffff"> instead of body {background: #fff} is unnecessary in browsers as old as Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator 4, and browsers older than that get the default background colour, which is usually white anyway. Plus you can factor out CSS into an external stylesheet which is far more efficient.
W3C is nice but doesn't earn you money.
How much money do you think Google earns from searchers using vintage browsers who would use a different search engine if the page was slightly uglier?
Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, Tesco earned £13m per annum from accessibility improvements to their website, so blanket statements like that are simply false anyway.
Have you ever actually looked at Google's code? If they were that concerned about bandwidth, there's plenty of other things they could do to save bandwidth while still conforming to spec. Google's invalid code seems to be caused by ignorance or apathy, not efficiency.
I agree that it's stupid to have per-website controls for this, but you don't have to create entirely separate pages, the typical approach is just to set a cookie that lets the server know that it should include a body { font-size: whatever; } rule. The page contents can stay the same, it's an additional style rule that's included - one line of code.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. Object-oriented languages do not necessarily have any concept of "class". For example, you can use JScript for server-side scripting with ASP. JScript is an ECMAScript (JavaScript) implementation, and as such, is a prototype-based object-oriented language not a class-based object-oriented language.
I just booted up Windows to check. The default settings are that unsigned ActiveX controls are completely ignored, and signed ActiveX controls result in a prompt for the user to download them. ActiveX controls cannot run without the user's permission, just like Firefox extensions.
You are very misinformed.
I quote from the Internet Explorer developers' weblog:
No version of Internet Explorer supports XHTML. If you label XHTML as text/html, Internet Explorer will render it because it thinks it's HTML. There's a problem that XML prologs cause because of this, so they implemented a special-case workaround.
All of this is very well known to web developers, I suggest you actually ask your developers about this if you don't believe me.
XHTML is being treated as a buzzword these days. The document included in that video included a <meta> element that claimed the media type was text/html. This is not XHTML being parsed as XHTML. It's XHTML pretending to be HTML and being parsed as HTML - which is the only way in which any version of Internet Explorer can understand XHTML as it doesn't support XHTML.
In every way in which XHTML differs from HTML, Internet Explorer follows the HTML rules. If you disagree, please give examples. If you don't disagree, please explain how that means that Internet Explorer supports XHTML rather than "pretend XHTML".
Are you seriously making assumptions about what Internet Explorer supports by trying to spot implications from marketing material for a tangentially related product by the same company?
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Have you looked at the Acid2 test at all? The problems Internet Explorer has with it are either parsing problems or outright lack of support for various features of CSS and HTML. Internet Explorer's support for non-standard CSS extensions are not a factor.
You can argue that people should upgrade all you like, it makes no difference as to whether they actually do it or not. I'm saying that lots of people don't upgrade for years. Telling me that they should is completely irrelevant. It's not up to me whether they upgrade.
Not true. Browser plugins and Firefox extensions, which giorgiofr already pointed out in the comment you are replying to, can also directly affect your system. Hence the question - why do you hate ActiveX for this when the others do it too? It looks suspiciously like you hate ActiveX because it's Microsoft's and are using the "directly affect your system" rubbish as an excuse.
Internet Explorer 7 hasn't got any support for XHTML whatsoever. You are still stuck having to pretend that your XHTML is actually HTML for Internet Explorer to do anything with it.
The CSS improvements are marginal. They've fixed a lot of bugs, but the new functionality is very sparse, it's just selectors I think. The rest of CSS 2 remains unimplemented.
That isn't why it won't pass the Acid2 test. It won't pass the Acid2 test because that is far too much work for a single major revision. It would require implementing a lot of the CSS that is currently unsupported.
In the next year!? I wish!
Most sites can only start using them once there aren't many Internet Explorer < 7 users left. Bear in mind that work I'm doing today needs Internet Explorer 5.5 compatibility because lots of people still use it, and that a lot of people aren't going to even have the opportunity to upgrade to version 7 because it doesn't run on Windows 2000 or earlier.
I fully expect there to be enough Internet Explorer 6 users hanging around to make life difficult in the year 2010.
XHTML 1.1 isn't allowed to be served as text/html. Internet Explorer 6 can only understand text/html. I assume you are serving XHTML 1.1 as text/html against spec? It's kinda hard to take you seriously complaining about Internet Explorer's lack of compliance when you don't comply either.
No. They've been releasing betas, which you can use to check for compatibility, and there's no way everybody will upgrade all at once. But if you've done your job and checked for compatibility, why would it even matter if everybody upgraded all at once?
You appear to be really immature when you call Microsoft "M$".
You mean you've sold them a website without explaining to them what your policy is on future versions of browsers? Without putting something down in writing?
Imagine you weren't a web developer for a second. If you hire somebody to build you a website, it seems like a perfectly reasonable expectation to get something that will simply continue to work. If you didn't explain to them that this is not how websites work, then you didn't do your job when you initially took the work on, and it's simply taken until now for your corner-cutting to incur costs.
When you build websites, you need to explain these things to clients. What browsers are supported, your policies for older and newer browsers, when a bug is something you fix without payment and when they need to pay you to update the site. If you don't do that, you're a cowboy coder, not a professional that can be trusted.
Has it? I live in the UK and have travelled all over Europe, and I've never had anybody ask to see what's on my laptop.
You're reading far more into my comment than is actually there. When I mentioned non-standard syntax, I wasn't implying that SQL Server was particularly non-standard, merely that the opportunity is there for a book like this to make a mess of teaching things.
It isn't different for MySQL books, and if somebody had posted the same comment in a MySQL book review, I'd have said the same thing.
He might not be the target audience, but how would you expect a member of the target audience to pick up technical errors in a book such as this?
If it, say, taught you how to do something in a totally non-standard way that only worked on SQL Server when the standard way worked just as well, then I'd consider that to be a pretty big failing in a book like this. But somebody just beginning with SQL wouldn't have a chance of spotting something like that.
Which of these two scenarios do you think is most likely to cause that situation?
It seems fairly obvious to me that forcing people to create another Java implementation instead of letting them use the "canonical version" as they wish is far more likely to bring about another J++ situation.
In my experience, clients don't act anything even close to what you describe unless the sales people in your organisation have been persuading them that they need to spend extra money on "essential" Flash. Once you get a bit of experience doing sales yourself, you quickly find that the people just asking about specific technology are in a minority, let alone demanding specific technology.
In what way does it fall short? Here's a decent article about Flash accessibility support, it seems reasonable to me.
I completely agree, but the problem is that the web developers — or their bosses — perceive the Flash version as being superior. Most of them don't even consider the possibility that somebody would have Flash installed but prefer the alternative content.
Sadly, this isn't the case. Using Flash doesn't make something less accessible, even older versions without support for screenreaders. It's when people use Flash without a fallback that accessibility problems arise. And of course, the latest versions of Flash have support for alternative user-agents built in.
The stupid web developers that annoy people with improper use of Flash can continue to annoy people and still create perfectly accessible websites. Accessibility != usability.
Actually, that is in plain sight. From your desktop, open the System icon, go to Remote Places, and pick "Add a network folder". A wizard pops up asking you for the login details for WebDAV/FTP/Windows Network/SSH, etc, and it defaults to adding an icon for next time.
What's the difference between that and the built-in Alt-F2? I can hit that, type 'ko' and cycle through konqueror, konversation, etc with the arrow keys.
You do understand what "typical" means, don't you? You said:
In actual fact, nobody does what you imagine to happen. They use the approach I described. Just because I described the approach, it doesn't mean that I approve of it or that I think it's the best way of doing things. It's not. You and I both agree on that, and this is the third time I've said so. If you look back through my posting history, you'll see that websites messing with the font size annoy me. I even wrote a user stylesheet when Slashdot fucked up the fonts in the redesign.
No, I knew exactly what you were getting at, which is why I said "I agree that it's stupid to have per-website controls for this". But one of your assumptions was way off, which is what I was addressing. I've been designing with CSS for years, you don't need to explain the basics to me.
No, but it has beneficial consequences. For example:
What beneficial consequences does making the design identical for Netscape 3 users have?
You use tags to mark the beginning and ends of elements. That is all you can possibly do with them. You are talking about element types, not tags.
Perhaps, but why? Are you saying that it actually makes them money to have Netscape 3 users see a white background instead of a light grey background?
Marketing isn't an end in itself. The objective is to make money.
It's a waste of time and less user-friendly to try maintaining two versions. Accessibility improvements generally improve the experience for normal visitors as well. I guess you're assuming that an accessible design has to be boring and plain, but this isn't the case, you can have normal-looking designs that degrade gracefully so that they are still accessible.
That's because you don't need to. Using CSS doesn't make your page stop working with older browsers, it was specifically designed to be backwards compatible. For example, using <body bgcolor="#ffffff"> instead of body {background: #fff} is unnecessary in browsers as old as Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator 4, and browsers older than that get the default background colour, which is usually white anyway. Plus you can factor out CSS into an external stylesheet which is far more efficient.
How much money do you think Google earns from searchers using vintage browsers who would use a different search engine if the page was slightly uglier?
Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, Tesco earned £13m per annum from accessibility improvements to their website, so blanket statements like that are simply false anyway.
Have you ever actually looked at Google's code? If they were that concerned about bandwidth, there's plenty of other things they could do to save bandwidth while still conforming to spec. Google's invalid code seems to be caused by ignorance or apathy, not efficiency.
There's no such thing as an alt tag, alt is an attribute. Not everything remotely related to the web is called a "tag".
As for online shopping, Tesco's accessibility improvements earned them £13m per annum - accessibility can be a source of profits, not a cost.
I agree that it's stupid to have per-website controls for this, but you don't have to create entirely separate pages, the typical approach is just to set a cookie that lets the server know that it should include a body { font-size: whatever; } rule. The page contents can stay the same, it's an additional style rule that's included - one line of code.