IE4 and below don't quite cut it, fallback to javascript code using serverside UA string detect. these are dying anyway, probably I will remove this support when IE7 appears.
In my experience, server-side browser detection isn't worthwhile. It's both more reliable and more maintainable to determine browser capabilities than to try and detect which browser the visitor is using and keep track of the capabilities of all the various browsers.
As for Internet Explorer 4.0 in particular, it's been about six years since you've even been able to actually obtain a legal copy. The last redesign of MSN was broken in Internet Explorer 5.x when it was first launched. I think the time has come to forget about any special workarounds for it.
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding.
Please don't tar all of us with the same brush. I'll admit that the kind of incompetence you describe is very widespread, but it's by no means universal. There are competent developers out there, and from the sounds of things, you are qualified enough to be able to judge whether any particular developer is competent from looking at their portfolio.
The real problem is that from an average PR manager's perspective, the quality of a site is generally judged on how it looks in whatever their favourite browser is. That's understandable, they are PR managers, not web developers, and if they were web developers they wouldn't need to hire an agency. But how can we make it possible for them to judge the technical quality of an agency's work? Can something like this be explained easily, or does it essentially involve teaching them web development? I can't see any easy answers there, I don't even think anybody's working on it, and until this problem is solved, incompetents will continue to get away with passing off shoddy work.
Seriously, what does Opera do that Konqueror doesn't?
A huge number of things. Opera supports way more in the way of standards (e.g. Konqueror is the last major browser not to support XHTML, not counting Internet Explorer). Opera has UserJS support. Opera works better with handhelds. Opera's up to date on more platforms than Konqueror. Built in BitTorrent support. Widgets. Dynamic site-specific fixups for popular sites that don't follow the standards.
That's off the top of my head, there's probably loads more I'm forgetting. And I don't even use Opera for anything other than compatibility testing, so I'm hardly an expert on all the things it supports.
Not just plugins and widgets, it also supports user JavaScript, which is basically the same as Greasemonkey. In fact, it was the original inspiration for Greasemonkey, and Opera has even added compatibility support so that lots of Greasemonkey scripts can run in Opera unchanged.
Opera's free version doesn't display ads any more. They took the ads out last year. And before that, it only displayed ads if you were using the free version, the paid version never had them.
The difference between Free Software and Open Source is a matter of philosophy and intended goals. The difference between Free Software and Open Source is not what you are permitted to do with the software. Open Source Software is just as redistributable and forkable as Free Software.
If you want to argue that there's significant differences between JPL and other NASA labs, and that this might have had an effect on the quality of their work, then go right ahead. But it's ludicrous for you to keep banging on about JPL not being part of NASA when they say they are themselves. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder and are trying to correct me when I wasn't wrong. Give it up.
No, and I never said it did, but they describe themselves as a "NASA laboratory" and a "NASA center". It's quite reasonable to describe them as part of NASA if they do it themselves, don't you think? If I'm going to look to an authority on the matter, I'll take JPL's word over a random Slashdotter's any day.
It was my understanding that JPL was part of NASA. JPL's website seems to concur:
Pushing the outer edge of exploration, in fact, is the reason JPL exists as a NASA laboratory.
JPL is a NASA center staffed and managed for the government by a leading private university, Caltech -- and thus we are known as a federally funded research and development center. I believe that this marriage of the government and university worlds lends us a wonderful intellectual infusion to drive our exploration efforts. Caltech anchors us in the world of excellence and academic curiosity, while NASA gives us the opportunity to reach for the stars.
Weirder still is the fact that Duke Nukem Forever has taken more time to create than NASA took to design & build a pair of robots, fly them to Mars, and drive them around for a year.
Creating a real photograph is a lot more complex than simply pressing the "Print Scrn" button on a keyboard.
Correction: creating a real photograph can be a lot more complex. In most cases it isn't, most people just point and shoot. And they are permitted to be hosted on Flickr aren't they? Even though the complexity of what they have done is the same as the people taking screenshots?
In any case, you've missed my point, despite quoting it. The process for creating the images may differ, but what difference does it make to Flickr's bottom line? The subject matter in most cases will be roughly analogous - people standing around, scenery, etc. The fact that one is real and one is virtual doesn't strike me as something Flickr would be overly concerned with.
If they are positioning themselves as some kind of photography site, then fair enough. But it seems Flickr's focus is on the sharing aspect rather than the photography aspect. I suspect that the original intention of this limitation was to stop people from turning Flickr into the average viral cartoon/funny photoshop picture dump, and that overzealous employees took it a bit too literally.
After all, is there any significant difference between capturing a scene from the real world and capturing a scene from a fictional world? That makes a difference to their business model?
I expect the policy will be clarified to allow things like screenshots from virtual worlds, but disallow things like movie posters and screenshots from desktop applications.
Why is the average standby time of my now ancient t39m so much better then that of my newer k300i, despite the later having a higher capacity and newer battery?
You'd have to ask the makers. It could be for any number of reasons unrelated to convergence. If you wish to claim that convergence was the cause, please say so and offer evidence beyond idle speculation.
Why should the fact that I spent the last 4 hours reading an ebook/listening to mp3s waste the standby time of my phone?
If you have these things in separate devices, then you are carrying three screens, three input mechanisms and three batteries. If you are concerned about battery life, then bring a couple of extra batteries along and you are still ahead.
isn't there some critical mass of things you can cram into a small package at this time?
Phones have been getting smaller and smaller up until a couple of years ago, where they levelled off. I think that's more to do with the fact that you can't make phones any smaller without making the interface unusable rather than any space issue.
Battery technology being what it is, it seems the more you ask a device to do, the less it will actually be able to do.
Obviously battery life is important, but how many of these features are actually wasting power when they aren't in use? And if they are in use, then what are you saving the power for, if not to use the device?
I think when a tool tries to do too much, it is in danger of not doing anything particularly well
That may be common, but I don't think it's an intrinsic consequence of convergence. And even if separate devices are of a higher quality, two separate devices of high quality aren't necessarily better than a single device that is good enough.
For example, I'm not going to carry a camera everywhere I go. I am going to carry my phone everywhere I go. I might be able to get higher quality photos from a digital camera, but that's of no use to me if I don't have the camera with me when I want to take a photo. Thus the camera phone is of more value than a separate phone and camera, even if the quality is lower. Sure, if I'm going somewhere where I expect to take photos, I'd bring a camera, but that's of absolutely no use to me when most of my photos are taken on the spur of the moment.
I think the disclosure of the source to someone "overseas" is the same thing to the government
They don't want source. RTFA. Theo even said he'd ignore the source if they gave it to him.
This is about data sheets. In other words, the interface a driver needs to know about to communicate with the hardware. There's no in-depth crypto stuff that needs to be in there, they don't need to know how the hardware works, they just need to know what to say to it to get it to do stuff.
The export argument is a distraction the hardware company came up with because they, for whatever reason, choose not to make knowledge of their interface freely available. If you read the article, Theo already called them on it.
The article is wrong when it claims that it's "a flaw in JavaScript", it's a flaw in Yahoo's webmail. So the answer to your question is almost certainly: nobody thought it was a good idea to enable JavaScript in emails, the developers working on Yahoo's webmail didn't escape things properly and nobody was doing decent QA to catch the mistake the developers made. So basically, it's a management error.
There doesn't seem to be detailed technical information available anywhere, but it sounds very much like it's just a specialised form of an XSS attack, where you sneak code into the application in such a way that the application doesn't encode it properly for output to another user.
it's also based on a very non-intuitive fact: they know what a sound was by knowing when there was no sound.
Surely there has to be more to it than that? Not only is it not "non-intuitive", it's completely bloody obvious, so much so that I already assumed that people did this in professional recording situations.
Think about it, it's just like weighing two things together, and then finding the weight of one item by weighing the other and taking the difference between the two measurements.
I think that the point at which formal niceties were important was passed when all the requests for an audience weren't even dignified with a response. It doesn't matter how much "pointless protocol" is observed, wearing a suit while you barge in uninvited doesn't make it any more polite.
You need a clean cut person in a suit who is familiar with the politics of that nation.
So politicians should ignore people who don't dress in suits? I expect you think that Gandhi should have been ignored because he was just a tramp in a loincloth, right?
I need to switch to a serif font, at least. What's the easiest way to do this?
If you are using Firefox, install the Stylish extension and use this user stylesheet. It changes the font size, the font family and the line-height back to normal (i.e. what is configured in your browser as the default, which is what Slashdot used to use).
W3C says "do as I say". They can't even implement what they recommend properly. They tried, with Amaya, and the project is now dead (not to mention it was always one buggy and slow piece of software).
Amaya's an experimental testbed intended to fit as many different technologies into one browser as possible. I think expecting it to be as polished as a commercial web browser is a little much, don't you think?
What makes you say that it's dead? The CVS shows activity as recent as two days ago and the last release was less than two months ago.
It looked to me that if I wanted a table with three columns, all of them with background colors filled to the bottom, I would have to create a fixed-size layout, knowing what the size of every element was at the start.
This is incorrect, there are a number of ways you can do this without using a fixed layout. Follow the links people have been posting in other comments.
So tell me, what is wrong with this approach? It seems to work very well for me. What can massive numbers of DIVs and complex markup do that tables cannot?
As I said in another comment, try looking through the CSS Zen Garden, there are plenty of designs that cannot be accomplished with table layouts.
If you are using "massive numbers of DIVs", then it sounds like you've fallen into the trap of thinking you need to use a <div> element for everything as a substitute for using a <td> element for everything. The idea behind CSS layouts is to use the most appropriate element type, not to simply change all the <td>s to <div>s. And why are you describing it as complex markup versus tables? Tables are complex markup.
Is a div really intrinsically better than a table?
For what? It all depends on the nature of your content. For tabular data, no that's what the <table> element type is for. For content that can be described more accurately with another element type? No, you use the other element type. You only use <div> elements when there's nothing more specific to use.
Seems to me they mean basically the same thing nowadays.
Some CSS newbies start thinking like this if they haven't learnt HTML properly. If you take a table layout and switch all the table cells to <div> elements, then you'd be screwing up. <div> isn't a replacement for tables, it's a generic division of content.
In reality they have no semantic meaning whatsoever.
If that were true, then it wouldn't be so bad. But tables do have semantic meaning. They mean that the cells are related across a number of axes. It's describing the relationship between multiple pieces of data, it's not instructions to put something on the screen in a particular way.
It so happens that there's a usual way of presenting a table that's useful in most situations, but the meaning of the information isn't defined by its presentation, and in some cases, it might be very useful to present that information in an alternative way. Table layouts have essentially made this impossible for browsers to do. How could a browser reformat a table in a better way now that a particular presentation is expected of it?
I'd much rather use
<sidebar>sidebar content</sidebar>
where sidebar was defined exactly as you would define h1. That would be TRUE semantic markup!
No, it's not semantic at all. Semantics describe the meaning of things. "sidebar" is a description of where something is on the page.
And even if you chose a true "semantic" element type, it would still be useless, because the semantics would be your own private definition that nobody else knew about. The benefit semantic markup brings is when everybody uses a standardised set of element types, so everybody understands the same element types to mean the same things.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it will.
In my experience, server-side browser detection isn't worthwhile. It's both more reliable and more maintainable to determine browser capabilities than to try and detect which browser the visitor is using and keep track of the capabilities of all the various browsers.
As for Internet Explorer 4.0 in particular, it's been about six years since you've even been able to actually obtain a legal copy. The last redesign of MSN was broken in Internet Explorer 5.x when it was first launched. I think the time has come to forget about any special workarounds for it.
Please don't tar all of us with the same brush. I'll admit that the kind of incompetence you describe is very widespread, but it's by no means universal. There are competent developers out there, and from the sounds of things, you are qualified enough to be able to judge whether any particular developer is competent from looking at their portfolio.
The real problem is that from an average PR manager's perspective, the quality of a site is generally judged on how it looks in whatever their favourite browser is. That's understandable, they are PR managers, not web developers, and if they were web developers they wouldn't need to hire an agency. But how can we make it possible for them to judge the technical quality of an agency's work? Can something like this be explained easily, or does it essentially involve teaching them web development? I can't see any easy answers there, I don't even think anybody's working on it, and until this problem is solved, incompetents will continue to get away with passing off shoddy work.
A huge number of things. Opera supports way more in the way of standards (e.g. Konqueror is the last major browser not to support XHTML, not counting Internet Explorer). Opera has UserJS support. Opera works better with handhelds. Opera's up to date on more platforms than Konqueror. Built in BitTorrent support. Widgets. Dynamic site-specific fixups for popular sites that don't follow the standards.
That's off the top of my head, there's probably loads more I'm forgetting. And I don't even use Opera for anything other than compatibility testing, so I'm hardly an expert on all the things it supports.
What's wrong with the testsuite the W3C provides?
Not just plugins and widgets, it also supports user JavaScript, which is basically the same as Greasemonkey. In fact, it was the original inspiration for Greasemonkey, and Opera has even added compatibility support so that lots of Greasemonkey scripts can run in Opera unchanged.
Opera's free version doesn't display ads any more. They took the ads out last year. And before that, it only displayed ads if you were using the free version, the paid version never had them.
Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. -- From the Open-Source definition.
The difference between Free Software and Open Source is a matter of philosophy and intended goals. The difference between Free Software and Open Source is not what you are permitted to do with the software. Open Source Software is just as redistributable and forkable as Free Software.
If you want to argue that there's significant differences between JPL and other NASA labs, and that this might have had an effect on the quality of their work, then go right ahead. But it's ludicrous for you to keep banging on about JPL not being part of NASA when they say they are themselves. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder and are trying to correct me when I wasn't wrong. Give it up.
No, and I never said it did, but they describe themselves as a "NASA laboratory" and a "NASA center". It's quite reasonable to describe them as part of NASA if they do it themselves, don't you think? If I'm going to look to an authority on the matter, I'll take JPL's word over a random Slashdotter's any day.
It was my understanding that JPL was part of NASA. JPL's website seems to concur:
Weirder still is the fact that Duke Nukem Forever has taken more time to create than NASA took to design & build a pair of robots, fly them to Mars, and drive them around for a year.
Correction: creating a real photograph can be a lot more complex. In most cases it isn't, most people just point and shoot. And they are permitted to be hosted on Flickr aren't they? Even though the complexity of what they have done is the same as the people taking screenshots?
In any case, you've missed my point, despite quoting it. The process for creating the images may differ, but what difference does it make to Flickr's bottom line? The subject matter in most cases will be roughly analogous - people standing around, scenery, etc. The fact that one is real and one is virtual doesn't strike me as something Flickr would be overly concerned with.
Don't wory George, I don't think anybody could accuse you of doing that!
If they are positioning themselves as some kind of photography site, then fair enough. But it seems Flickr's focus is on the sharing aspect rather than the photography aspect. I suspect that the original intention of this limitation was to stop people from turning Flickr into the average viral cartoon/funny photoshop picture dump, and that overzealous employees took it a bit too literally.
After all, is there any significant difference between capturing a scene from the real world and capturing a scene from a fictional world? That makes a difference to their business model?
I expect the policy will be clarified to allow things like screenshots from virtual worlds, but disallow things like movie posters and screenshots from desktop applications.
You'd have to ask the makers. It could be for any number of reasons unrelated to convergence. If you wish to claim that convergence was the cause, please say so and offer evidence beyond idle speculation.
If you have these things in separate devices, then you are carrying three screens, three input mechanisms and three batteries. If you are concerned about battery life, then bring a couple of extra batteries along and you are still ahead.
Phones have been getting smaller and smaller up until a couple of years ago, where they levelled off. I think that's more to do with the fact that you can't make phones any smaller without making the interface unusable rather than any space issue.
Obviously battery life is important, but how many of these features are actually wasting power when they aren't in use? And if they are in use, then what are you saving the power for, if not to use the device?
That may be common, but I don't think it's an intrinsic consequence of convergence. And even if separate devices are of a higher quality, two separate devices of high quality aren't necessarily better than a single device that is good enough.
For example, I'm not going to carry a camera everywhere I go. I am going to carry my phone everywhere I go. I might be able to get higher quality photos from a digital camera, but that's of no use to me if I don't have the camera with me when I want to take a photo. Thus the camera phone is of more value than a separate phone and camera, even if the quality is lower. Sure, if I'm going somewhere where I expect to take photos, I'd bring a camera, but that's of absolutely no use to me when most of my photos are taken on the spur of the moment.
Because the big, bulky, annoying, expensive part of carrying electronic devices around is a combination of:
Why carry more than one of each of those around when you don't have to?
Lots of people think so when it's Yahoo and the Chinese government.
They don't want source. RTFA. Theo even said he'd ignore the source if they gave it to him.
This is about data sheets. In other words, the interface a driver needs to know about to communicate with the hardware. There's no in-depth crypto stuff that needs to be in there, they don't need to know how the hardware works, they just need to know what to say to it to get it to do stuff.
The export argument is a distraction the hardware company came up with because they, for whatever reason, choose not to make knowledge of their interface freely available. If you read the article, Theo already called them on it.
The article is wrong when it claims that it's "a flaw in JavaScript", it's a flaw in Yahoo's webmail. So the answer to your question is almost certainly: nobody thought it was a good idea to enable JavaScript in emails, the developers working on Yahoo's webmail didn't escape things properly and nobody was doing decent QA to catch the mistake the developers made. So basically, it's a management error.
There doesn't seem to be detailed technical information available anywhere, but it sounds very much like it's just a specialised form of an XSS attack, where you sneak code into the application in such a way that the application doesn't encode it properly for output to another user.
Surely there has to be more to it than that? Not only is it not "non-intuitive", it's completely bloody obvious, so much so that I already assumed that people did this in professional recording situations.
Think about it, it's just like weighing two things together, and then finding the weight of one item by weighing the other and taking the difference between the two measurements.
I think that the point at which formal niceties were important was passed when all the requests for an audience weren't even dignified with a response. It doesn't matter how much "pointless protocol" is observed, wearing a suit while you barge in uninvited doesn't make it any more polite.
So politicians should ignore people who don't dress in suits? I expect you think that Gandhi should have been ignored because he was just a tramp in a loincloth, right?
If you are using Firefox, install the Stylish extension and use this user stylesheet. It changes the font size, the font family and the line-height back to normal (i.e. what is configured in your browser as the default, which is what Slashdot used to use).
Amaya's an experimental testbed intended to fit as many different technologies into one browser as possible. I think expecting it to be as polished as a commercial web browser is a little much, don't you think?
What makes you say that it's dead? The CVS shows activity as recent as two days ago and the last release was less than two months ago.
This is incorrect, there are a number of ways you can do this without using a fixed layout. Follow the links people have been posting in other comments.
As I said in another comment, try looking through the CSS Zen Garden, there are plenty of designs that cannot be accomplished with table layouts.
If you are using "massive numbers of DIVs", then it sounds like you've fallen into the trap of thinking you need to use a <div> element for everything as a substitute for using a <td> element for everything. The idea behind CSS layouts is to use the most appropriate element type, not to simply change all the <td>s to <div>s. And why are you describing it as complex markup versus tables? Tables are complex markup.
For what? It all depends on the nature of your content. For tabular data, no that's what the <table> element type is for. For content that can be described more accurately with another element type? No, you use the other element type. You only use <div> elements when there's nothing more specific to use.
Some CSS newbies start thinking like this if they haven't learnt HTML properly. If you take a table layout and switch all the table cells to <div> elements, then you'd be screwing up. <div> isn't a replacement for tables, it's a generic division of content.
If that were true, then it wouldn't be so bad. But tables do have semantic meaning. They mean that the cells are related across a number of axes. It's describing the relationship between multiple pieces of data, it's not instructions to put something on the screen in a particular way.
It so happens that there's a usual way of presenting a table that's useful in most situations, but the meaning of the information isn't defined by its presentation, and in some cases, it might be very useful to present that information in an alternative way. Table layouts have essentially made this impossible for browsers to do. How could a browser reformat a table in a better way now that a particular presentation is expected of it?
No, it's not semantic at all. Semantics describe the meaning of things. "sidebar" is a description of where something is on the page.
And even if you chose a true "semantic" element type, it would still be useless, because the semantics would be your own private definition that nobody else knew about. The benefit semantic markup brings is when everybody uses a standardised set of element types, so everybody understands the same element types to mean the same things.