Here's the section of the law that Wired says might invalidate the licenses already granted:
USC 17 205 E
(e) Priority Between Conflicting Transfer of Ownership and Nonexclusive License. - A nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner's duly authorized agent, and if -
(1) the license was taken before execution of the transfer; or
(2) the license was taken in good faith before recordation of the transfer and without notice of it.
IANAL - #include stddisclaimer.h etc. BUT
I can read. This says that IF the license was in writing with a signature from the original copyright holder on it then it would stand. It does not say that because there is no signature it does not hold - it doesn't say anything one way or the other about the typical software license which no one signs. I couldn't find anywhere else in the code that addresses that issue.
IF this is taken by the court to invalidate the pre-existing licenses in this case the precedent would also invalidate 99% of commercial software licenses along with it, meaning for instance that Symantec could demand everyone who has bought Quarterdeck software in the past to quit using it and surrender all copies, since they bought Quarterdeck. Not sure why they would want to, but they could, if that is the precedent that's set. Very strange.
What strikes me as truly absurd about such an outcome is that (someone correct me if I am wrong here) I believe it is firmly established that the original copyright owner that granted the license cannot revoke it (except as allowed for by the particular license) yet if this is the ruling they would suddenly be able to sidestep the license entirely by selling it to someone else and having them revoke the license? Very strange.
If it's not causing us a problem (i.e. bounced/blocked mail) then it's not high enough on our priority list to allocate the time and resources required to do it right.
This is exactly why the RBL exists. Because a lot of people have this attitude - if you want them to fix their screw-ups you have to cause them a little pain. Like the proverbial mule and the two by four.
And please note - despite the horde of uninformed (or misinforming?) posters, the ORBS list is not a blackhole.
had to take off both MAPS-RBL and ORBS because they block a gigantic amount of abusing servers which are also used for a lot of legitimate mailing.
This is the tough part. Most if not all spam does come through relays that are used for other purposes as well. But if you let that stop you from blocking them, then what incentive is there to fix the relay?
SPAM is theft. Theft of network resources, and of time. If you want to stop it you have to show some backbone, and you have to be willing to inconvienience the legitimate customers so *they* will put pressure on their admins to quit being accessories to the theft. If you aren't willing to do that, then in affect you are also an accessory to the thieves.
But the case is settled -- how will Mattel be able to bring it in the court again? And against whom will it be, new copyright holder that happens to be Mattel itself?
#insert stddisclaimer.h
IANAL
If they could show fraud in the settlement they could repudiate it and take the programmers back to court. If not, they could still bring action against the mirror sites and attempt to show that the software and the essay are inherently illegal.
...are there any major browsers that don't support frames anymore?
I believe webtv doesn't (I've never used it) I am not sure about arachne, and hell one of the many reasons I like Opera is that you can (and I have) turned frames off. People still using older browsers (and there are quite a few, for various reasons) won't have frame support. Voice browsers cannot do anything useful with frames either. And I am not sure palm browsers and the like support frames either, but even if they do, the page is not likely to be readable on that small a display. However if the noframes tag were filled in properly and the alt attributes set not only would all those platforms be able to render the content appropriately - any properly written browser on any platform - including ones no one has even imagined yet, could be guaranteed to handle it properly.
Arguments that there is no need to use proper html because everyone is using one of the browsers you are familiar with it, and it isn't a problem in any of them, are firstly wrong (practically every browser you have ever heard of, and dozens more that you haven't, are still in use by somebody somewhere) but beyond that they totally miss the point. The whole idea of html is platform independence, and platform independence doesn't mean "this will work on all the common systems you might think of" it means it will work on systems that you have never imagined too. This is the beauty and the promise of HTML, and it is quite possible to fulfill, in the vast majority of cases, with very little effort. There is no good excuse not to do this, particularly when your business is web design!
... she's got a kewl script that breaks out of frames.;)
I saw that too, and I don't think it's a very good idea to autoexecute that like she does. What if I want to view that page inside a frame? Why not let the user decide whether or not to activate the script? I've seen other pages do this, it's not difficult at all. As it is, if I want to view her page inside a frame I have to turn off scripting.
I know why people use graphics that are simply text. If there were a good, standard way to give everyone the same fonts, we could just use that. But there isn't, not really.
You are right that there isn't any way to make an html page show up in the same font on everyones display. This is not a problem with html - it is an implication of being cross-platform! HTML frees the author from worrying about tedious layout questions so s/he can focus on content, while the layout is handled on the browser end. There is no other way to handle this without discarding the entire notion of cross platform portability. A font which looks good on one machine with one browser and one configuration file may be unreadable on the same browser on the same machine with a different config! Let alone the same browser on a different machine, or a different browser on a different machine. Remember - some browsers run in environments that don't even have fonts.
The whole point to HTML is to free the web designer from having to worry about this stuff. Don't use font tags - label your content properly and let the browser decide on the fonts. The browser is in a position to know what display properties your viewer has - the web designer is not.
Now that said, there are a lot of people out there that still want to do silly things like using gifs of text - and the standard is flexible enough to allow that, and host of other things, script languages, frames, fonts and colours etc - that are not always portable across platforms. Writing good HTML does NOT mean writing for the lowest common denominator as sometimes is asserted by those who don't want to bother writing good html - it is perfectly possible to write a fancy-schmancy page that is customised for a particular browser on a particular OS with a particular resolution that will still work on any other platform too - this is the genius of the HTML spec. The key is the concept of graceful degradation. When you use frames - use the noframes tag (and don't leave it empty.) When you use graphics - use the alt attribute. These things aren't that difficult - and take far less time than is typically spent tuning pages for even a single display.
Lynx also shows the names of the images in the links, and these images are all named consistently. The ALT text would be exactly the same, except without the ".gif". w3m goes one better, and just shows the names, and that they are images.
Ok, there are two browsers that are going out of their way to compensate for the poor design of the site. BTW, I just checked it out in lynx myself, and while it is sort of usable in lynx, this is because lynx is going far beyond the call of duty in trying to handle these situations by displaying the filename in absence of an alt tag - you cannot assume any other browser is going to do this. A good web designer does not assume that the viewer is using a browser that s/he is familiar with!
Load that page up Opera with autoload=no show=yes (mode 2) and all you get is two frames, the left one is nothing but white space, the right is white space down to the bottom of the page, then two links, both with the same text, "Learning Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 for the web." I haven't bothered to reboot to check this in Netscape, but Opera in mode 2 generally renders almost identically to Netscape with images turned off. Put Opera in mode 1 (load=no and show=no - text only mode) and you now get a bunch of undifferentiated image-boxes in both frames, most (but not all) of which are links, each box marked with the same word - IMAGE. Opera *will* render the page just fine - if you put it in mode 3 and enable frames, but the fact that the page fails to render meaningfully in 2 out of 3 modes (and in any mode without turning frames on) is damning. By comparison Slashdot (hardly a paragon of good HTML) renders in a usable fashion in any configuration.
Your guess is as good as mine precisely what that page would sound like through a voice browser - but I do know that if the alt attributes were set and the noframes tag was used properly a voice browser would be able to handle it properly, and that as it is a voice browser is simply not going to be able to handle it in any meaningful way.
However, you're right, someone doesn't know how to write HTML, was in a hurry, or hacked a pre-existing page. You should never have a closing body without a starting body tag, and frames don't need a starting body tag, so...
Yes, and while this sort of thing is unfortunately rampant on the web lately, the fact that she sets herself up as a teacher of web designs makes it particularly shameful.
But even with all that, these pages look fine in most any browser, AFAICT. Isn't that the point?
I hope I have made it clear that this page will not in fact renderly properly in any browser, and that is my point.
The worst of all are the sites that set the background tho white without setting a foreground, forcing me to leave my web defaults black on grey when I use Windows as white on blue. I wish I could have a browser that ignores the setting in that case.
Using one right now. Opera. I have it set to white text on blue background, which I prefer. When I hit a page that sets one colour but not the other (ick) or worse yet one that sets both and makes the page totally unreadable, there's a button to disable document settings. Works great on slashdot (text is set to black, background isn't set - if my background was set to black it would be totally unreadable without override, as it is it's just not pretty;^)
The linux port is coming right along - I can't wait. I love linux but I find myself rebooting to use the web - once you've used opera netscape just is not acceptable anymore.
Accessible web design increases the size of the audience for your page. Inaccessible designs lock part of your audience out. How is that justifed by "da bottom line?"
That's fine. I have nothing against artful designs, or even WYSIWYG editors for that matter (they are great time savers.) But neither of those is an excuse for bad HTML, and that's what I found all over her site. There is no excuse for an empty noframes tag. There is no excuse for a page of links, all tied to graphics which are simply obfuscated text, with no alt attributes. Particularly when this page belongs to someone who presents herself as an expert on web page design.
I am no expert on web design, but I was able to find three serious errors on one of her pages without even trying. Design errors, that flaunt ideals she presented herself as an advocate of in the interview. I am NOT talking about running her pages through a validator and bitching about picky pedantic errors - I am talking usability and accessibility problems. Ones that could have been fixed in a few minutes if she cared.
Sure, it was probably her wysiwyg editor, but that is no excuse. There isn't any wysiwyg editor on the market that produces ready to publish html - and likely never will be. You use them to rough out your page - then you tidy it up before you publish. Any web design student should know that, let alone a teacher!
The agreement also states that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.
IANAL, but I don't see how that language was false. They DID have all rights to the code, they had uncontested copyright. The GPL does not affect who owns copyrights - it is just a license. Granting a license - even to the entire public - does not change, grant, or assign your copyright to someone else, AFAICT.
Whether or not I am right, I smell big legal fees on both sides though.
If courts rule that this software is illegal, the type of license it was published under is irrelevant.
True. But the court has not ruled that the software is illegal. Mattel attempted to avoid having to prove it illegal (and prove that the courts involved actually have jurisdiction in sweden!) by getting the authors to sign over copyright. The GPL thus is an issue here - Mattel is doubtless now exploring whether or not they can get it ruled invalid. If not, then they are back where they started - they'll have to establish that the software is illegal and that the court has jurisdiction to make their case.
I think that technically by releasing the code under GPL they did not actually assign their rights to anyone - granting a license is not the same thing as re-assigning a copyright. But IANAL. If the agreement does turn out to be invalidated by their prior release, their lawyers screwed up.If not, then Mattel got seriously outmaneuvered here, as I suggested yesterday. I sure hope I was right.;^)
If not, it's probably time to start taking up a collection to get these guys better lawyers.:~(
However, when you say, "For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.", you must be forgetting what the default Slashdot page looks like in the first place.
It's true that slashdot isn't a great html example. But there is light mode (it's why I made an account in fact, now I don't have to keep typing it in, I just set it in preferences and be done) as you mention, slashdot is dynamically generated and that always makes it harder (though not impossible) to produce good html, and finally, even at it's worst, slashdot is far better than her site.
I don't follow a "semantic html religion" - I am talking about usability and portability, not the results of a validator. Mind you, I'm not saying pages shouldn't validate either, ideally they should, but I'd rather see a purely technical error on a good page than a bad page that validates. Validators will fail a page for errors that are pretty inconsequential, and pass pages that have major problems. I posted an example of the major problems on her site in this post btw - these are not picky validation errors, but major design flaws that would be easy to correct if she really cared about "open standards" and particularly "cross-platform compatibility" as she claimed in the interview.
*Specifically, what is Lynda doing that deliberately breaks cross-platform compatibility? Her pages looked readable in w3m under Linux, and that's good enough for me.*
OK let's take a look at that web page then. Try browsing it in Lynx. Now try it in Netscape with image loading off. It doesn't take an "expert" to set up a webpage that degrades gracefully when image loading is turned off or not available. Granted there may be cases where this is not practical - but for the majority (if not all) of her site it would be quite practical.
Look at lynda.com/resources/inspiration/index.html - it is quite a good example of the site as a whole. First off it's a frames page, which is fine, but take a look at the noframes section of that page. The tags are:
*cough* I think that pretty well speaks for itself.
Another major design flaw on that same page is that the left hand frame (http://lynda.com/resources/inspiration/menu2.html ) a long list of links, each anchored to a graphic. These graphics are, in fact, simply obfuscated text, see for instance http://lynda.com/resources/inspiration/images2/col or.gif which is a gif image of the word color in a sans-serif font. The rest of the menu is exactly the same, it's just a series of gif images of text used as links, and to top THAT off there isn't an alt tag on any of them. This is a textbook example of how NOT to code a page of this type - and this woman is billed as an expert and a teacher for people building webpages!
There are likely more errors on that page, but this is enough to make my point - 3 major design errors on a single page, chosen at random (or as close as I can easily come to random, I maximized that window, closed my eyes, flipped the mouse ball around for awhile and clicked.)
1) The use of the noframes tag so as to completely defeat it's purpose is totally wrong - she might as well have just not had a noframes section at all, for the same affect.
2) The use of graphics which are simply text is bizaare and pointless. It's the sort of thing I might expect to see from a "Proud Teenage Single Moms of AOL" site - certainly not from a so-called expert.
3) Even if she feels an uncontrollable urge to use graphics of text, the lack of alt tags is utterly inexcusable. Since the graphics are simply text in disguise anyway, it would take no thought whatsoever to determine the correct alt attributes for them; color, background tiles, frames, navigation, rollovers, etc.
I don't claim to be an expert, far from it, but I would be too ashamed to ever show my face again if I put such a poorly written page on the web. How much moreso someone who makes a living teaching people to write web pages should be ashamed of such a monstrosity!
Particularly when the fixes are so easy - all that would be necessary would be to eliminate the gifs in favour of text, or at the very *least* to add alt attributes (which are a REQUIRED, not optional, part of the HTML standard anyway,) in the file menu2.html, and then insert that code in the noframes section of the main file! 5 minutes work, and if it were done then her content would be available to all. In the time I've taken to write this message, she probably could have fixed those sorts of glaring errors all over her entire site.
I guess she thought it was more important to spend that time doing an interview to promote her book and talking about how much she is in favour of "open standards" and "cross platform compatibility" though.
Hopefully this makes my original point crystal clear?
If you want more control over display than a language like HTML can provide, the solution is to find another media - pdf for instance - NOT to mangle html.
What adds insult to injury is her going on to blithely claim to be in favour of standards and interoperability, when she's teaching people to mangle and destroy those very things.
I wasn't aware an image's ALT tag was required to be html4 compliant...
There is actually a very good reason for this. HTML is designed to degrade gracefully. Using the alt tag allows for image based designs to degrade gracefully in non-graphic browsers (and in graphic browsers with image loading off.) Think of your typical graphical button. Now think of it in a text browser. Say the image is your logo, or a cute little button that says Home or whatever - and pressing it goes back to your main page. Without the alt tag that functionality is completely lost to someone using lynx or arachne. Set alt="home" and all is now well - in a text browser I still get a control there, with the text "home" on it to let me know what it is. If you have a picture of you on your page, you can use something like alt="a picture of the author (png-50k)" - admittedly this is of limited help to someone in a text browser, but it is likely to be greatly appreciated by people using graphical browsers with image autoloading off, as it gives them the information they need to decide whether or not they want to load that image.
Of course, there are (way too many) images out there on webpages that don't have any real function at all - in those cases alt="" is appropriate, and the validators have no problem with that.
What is not appropriate, and very annoying is alt="ALT" which I've seen all over the web.
Actually it looks ok on Opera - IF you mess with the window size and/or zoom function for awhile. I totally agree with you though, the design is awful, and her advice is awful. I'm really ashamed to be a slashdotter today... ugh, she's being held up as an expert, a teacher, a role model... this is sick.
Lynda: Open standards, open source, browser compatibility and cross-platform compatibility. A tall order indeed.
If she wants open standards, why is she teaching people to disregard them? If she want's compatibility, why does she teach people to write poor html and deliberately break the cross-platform compatibility that's already there?
She speaks as if things like open standards and cross platform compatibility don't exist. You seem to have bought this, and think she must be great because she wants them to. This is just bull. These things do exist - they just aren't idiot proof. Just because it is possible to write poor html, violate standards, and by doing so break compatibility doesn't mean they don't exist - it means you should learn to write proper html. Too bad Lynda declines to teach people to do this.
I just checked out her webpage and the interview. What I found is a bunch of just bloody awful advice for web designers. For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.
Just off the first two pages I've already seen two really poor commands (suggestions would be a nicer word, but less accurate it seems) to her clueless followers - using tables to control text flow and designing pages for particular screen sizes, both of which are things that anyone that understands html would know better than to do. Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!
Go here if you are looking for good html resources - not to Lynda's site.
Imagine trying to navigate Slashdot without any images...
I do. It's nice. Want to see slashdot the way I do? Turn off image loading on your browser (if you have Opera use mode 2, this is what I am actually using, but Netscape with image loading disabled will be very similar) and load up http://slashdot.org/?light
Not only does it load a lot faster like this, it's also a hell of a lot easier to read and navigate.
Although it's been passed in Virginia, it is not yet in affect. Once it does come into affect (if the people of Virginia don't come to their senses and get it repealed first) then there could be some interesting test cases.
Even if this does become law (and let's not let it) it still cannot apply to licenses granted before it becomes law, not in the U.S. at least. The US Constitution has some very plain language in it about ex post facto laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point.
Here's the section of the law that Wired says might invalidate the licenses already granted:
USC 17 205 E
(e) Priority Between Conflicting Transfer of Ownership and Nonexclusive License. - A nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner's duly authorized agent, and if -
IANAL - #include stddisclaimer.h etc. BUT
I can read. This says that IF the license was in writing with a signature from the original copyright holder on it then it would stand. It does not say that because there is no signature it does not hold - it doesn't say anything one way or the other about the typical software license which no one signs. I couldn't find anywhere else in the code that addresses that issue.
IF this is taken by the court to invalidate the pre-existing licenses in this case the precedent would also invalidate 99% of commercial software licenses along with it, meaning for instance that Symantec could demand everyone who has bought Quarterdeck software in the past to quit using it and surrender all copies, since they bought Quarterdeck. Not sure why they would want to, but they could, if that is the precedent that's set. Very strange.
What strikes me as truly absurd about such an outcome is that (someone correct me if I am wrong here) I believe it is firmly established that the original copyright owner that granted the license cannot revoke it (except as allowed for by the particular license) yet if this is the ruling they would suddenly be able to sidestep the license entirely by selling it to someone else and having them revoke the license? Very strange.
If it's not causing us a problem (i.e. bounced/blocked mail) then it's not high enough on our priority list to allocate the time and resources required to do it right.
This is exactly why the RBL exists. Because a lot of people have this attitude - if you want them to fix their screw-ups you have to cause them a little pain. Like the proverbial mule and the two by four.
And please note - despite the horde of uninformed (or misinforming?) posters, the ORBS list is not a blackhole.
BZZT! Wrong.
Orbs isn't a blackhole list.
Try again.
had to take off both MAPS-RBL and ORBS because they block a gigantic amount of abusing servers which are also used for a lot of legitimate mailing.
This is the tough part. Most if not all spam does come through relays that are used for other purposes as well. But if you let that stop you from blocking them, then what incentive is there to fix the relay?
SPAM is theft. Theft of network resources, and of time. If you want to stop it you have to show some backbone, and you have to be willing to inconvienience the legitimate customers so *they* will put pressure on their admins to quit being accessories to the theft. If you aren't willing to do that, then in affect you are also an accessory to the thieves.
But the case is settled -- how will Mattel be able to bring it in the court again? And against whom will it be, new copyright holder that happens to be Mattel itself?
#insert stddisclaimer.h
IANAL
If they could show fraud in the settlement they could repudiate it and take the programmers back to court. If not, they could still bring action against the mirror sites and attempt to show that the software and the essay are inherently illegal.
I believe webtv doesn't (I've never used it) I am not sure about arachne, and hell one of the many reasons I like Opera is that you can (and I have) turned frames off. People still using older browsers (and there are quite a few, for various reasons) won't have frame support. Voice browsers cannot do anything useful with frames either. And I am not sure palm browsers and the like support frames either, but even if they do, the page is not likely to be readable on that small a display. However if the noframes tag were filled in properly and the alt attributes set not only would all those platforms be able to render the content appropriately - any properly written browser on any platform - including ones no one has even imagined yet, could be guaranteed to handle it properly.
Arguments that there is no need to use proper html because everyone is using one of the browsers you are familiar with it, and it isn't a problem in any of them, are firstly wrong (practically every browser you have ever heard of, and dozens more that you haven't, are still in use by somebody somewhere) but beyond that they totally miss the point. The whole idea of html is platform independence, and platform independence doesn't mean "this will work on all the common systems you might think of" it means it will work on systems that you have never imagined too. This is the beauty and the promise of HTML, and it is quite possible to fulfill, in the vast majority of cases, with very little effort. There is no good excuse not to do this, particularly when your business is web design!
I saw that too, and I don't think it's a very good idea to autoexecute that like she does. What if I want to view that page inside a frame? Why not let the user decide whether or not to activate the script? I've seen other pages do this, it's not difficult at all. As it is, if I want to view her page inside a frame I have to turn off scripting.
I know why people use graphics that are simply text. If there were a good, standard way to give everyone the same fonts, we could just use that. But there isn't, not really.
You are right that there isn't any way to make an html page show up in the same font on everyones display. This is not a problem with html - it is an implication of being cross-platform! HTML frees the author from worrying about tedious layout questions so s/he can focus on content, while the layout is handled on the browser end. There is no other way to handle this without discarding the entire notion of cross platform portability. A font which looks good on one machine with one browser and one configuration file may be unreadable on the same browser on the same machine with a different config! Let alone the same browser on a different machine, or a different browser on a different machine. Remember - some browsers run in environments that don't even have fonts.
The whole point to HTML is to free the web designer from having to worry about this stuff. Don't use font tags - label your content properly and let the browser decide on the fonts. The browser is in a position to know what display properties your viewer has - the web designer is not.
Now that said, there are a lot of people out there that still want to do silly things like using gifs of text - and the standard is flexible enough to allow that, and host of other things, script languages, frames, fonts and colours etc - that are not always portable across platforms. Writing good HTML does NOT mean writing for the lowest common denominator as sometimes is asserted by those who don't want to bother writing good html - it is perfectly possible to write a fancy-schmancy page that is customised for a particular browser on a particular OS with a particular resolution that will still work on any other platform too - this is the genius of the HTML spec. The key is the concept of graceful degradation. When you use frames - use the noframes tag (and don't leave it empty.) When you use graphics - use the alt attribute. These things aren't that difficult - and take far less time than is typically spent tuning pages for even a single display.
Lynx also shows the names of the images in the links, and these images are all named consistently. The ALT text would be exactly the same, except without the ".gif". w3m goes one better, and just shows the names, and that they are images.
Ok, there are two browsers that are going out of their way to compensate for the poor design of the site. BTW, I just checked it out in lynx myself, and while it is sort of usable in lynx, this is because lynx is going far beyond the call of duty in trying to handle these situations by displaying the filename in absence of an alt tag - you cannot assume any other browser is going to do this. A good web designer does not assume that the viewer is using a browser that s/he is familiar with!
Load that page up Opera with autoload=no show=yes (mode 2) and all you get is two frames, the left one is nothing but white space, the right is white space down to the bottom of the page, then two links, both with the same text, "Learning Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 for the web." I haven't bothered to reboot to check this in Netscape, but Opera in mode 2 generally renders almost identically to Netscape with images turned off. Put Opera in mode 1 (load=no and show=no - text only mode) and you now get a bunch of undifferentiated image-boxes in both frames, most (but not all) of which are links, each box marked with the same word - IMAGE. Opera *will* render the page just fine - if you put it in mode 3 and enable frames, but the fact that the page fails to render meaningfully in 2 out of 3 modes (and in any mode without turning frames on) is damning. By comparison Slashdot (hardly a paragon of good HTML) renders in a usable fashion in any configuration.
Your guess is as good as mine precisely what that page would sound like through a voice browser - but I do know that if the alt attributes were set and the noframes tag was used properly a voice browser would be able to handle it properly, and that as it is a voice browser is simply not going to be able to handle it in any meaningful way.
However, you're right, someone doesn't know how to write HTML, was in a hurry, or hacked a pre-existing page. You should never have a closing body without a starting body tag, and frames don't need a starting body tag, so...
Yes, and while this sort of thing is unfortunately rampant on the web lately, the fact that she sets herself up as a teacher of web designs makes it particularly shameful.
But even with all that, these pages look fine in most any browser, AFAICT. Isn't that the point?
I hope I have made it clear that this page will not in fact renderly properly in any browser, and that is my point.
The essay says do what you want with it. The source says GPL. Two different licenses.
Using one right now. Opera. I have it set to white text on blue background, which I prefer. When I hit a page that sets one colour but not the other (ick) or worse yet one that sets both and makes the page totally unreadable, there's a button to disable document settings. Works great on slashdot (text is set to black, background isn't set - if my background was set to black it would be totally unreadable without override, as it is it's just not pretty ;^)
The linux port is coming right along - I can't wait. I love linux but I find myself rebooting to use the web - once you've used opera netscape just is not acceptable anymore.
I F YOU PAID $1,000,000 to advertise on the Super Bowl and only viewers with a Sony 35 inch TV set could see it, would you be getting your money's worth?
Accessible web design increases the size of the audience for your page. Inaccessible designs lock part of your audience out. How is that justifed by "da bottom line?"
That's fine. I have nothing against artful designs, or even WYSIWYG editors for that matter (they are great time savers.) But neither of those is an excuse for bad HTML, and that's what I found all over her site. There is no excuse for an empty noframes tag. There is no excuse for a page of links, all tied to graphics which are simply obfuscated text, with no alt attributes. Particularly when this page belongs to someone who presents herself as an expert on web page design.
I am no expert on web design, but I was able to find three serious errors on one of her pages without even trying. Design errors, that flaunt ideals she presented herself as an advocate of in the interview. I am NOT talking about running her pages through a validator and bitching about picky pedantic errors - I am talking usability and accessibility problems. Ones that could have been fixed in a few minutes if she cared.
Sure, it was probably her wysiwyg editor, but that is no excuse. There isn't any wysiwyg editor on the market that produces ready to publish html - and likely never will be. You use them to rough out your page - then you tidy it up before you publish. Any web design student should know that, let alone a teacher!
Any opinion on whether or not the licensing constitutes an "assignment of rights" in a sense that would invalidate the settlement?
According to the wired article:
IANAL, but I don't see how that language was false. They DID have all rights to the code, they had uncontested copyright. The GPL does not affect who owns copyrights - it is just a license. Granting a license - even to the entire public - does not change, grant, or assign your copyright to someone else, AFAICT.
Whether or not I am right, I smell big legal fees on both sides though.
If courts rule that this software is illegal, the type of license it was published under is irrelevant.
True. But the court has not ruled that the software is illegal. Mattel attempted to avoid having to prove it illegal (and prove that the courts involved actually have jurisdiction in sweden!) by getting the authors to sign over copyright. The GPL thus is an issue here - Mattel is doubtless now exploring whether or not they can get it ruled invalid. If not, then they are back where they started - they'll have to establish that the software is illegal and that the court has jurisdiction to make their case.
Interesting question. I don't know.
I think that technically by releasing the code under GPL they did not actually assign their rights to anyone - granting a license is not the same thing as re-assigning a copyright. But IANAL. If the agreement does turn out to be invalidated by their prior release, their lawyers screwed up.If not, then Mattel got seriously outmaneuvered here, as I suggested yesterday. I sure hope I was right. ;^)
If not, it's probably time to start taking up a collection to get these guys better lawyers. :~(
However, when you say, "For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.", you must be forgetting what the default Slashdot page looks like in the first place.
It's true that slashdot isn't a great html example. But there is light mode (it's why I made an account in fact, now I don't have to keep typing it in, I just set it in preferences and be done) as you mention, slashdot is dynamically generated and that always makes it harder (though not impossible) to produce good html, and finally, even at it's worst, slashdot is far better than her site.
I don't follow a "semantic html religion" - I am talking about usability and portability, not the results of a validator. Mind you, I'm not saying pages shouldn't validate either, ideally they should, but I'd rather see a purely technical error on a good page than a bad page that validates. Validators will fail a page for errors that are pretty inconsequential, and pass pages that have major problems. I posted an example of the major problems on her site in this post btw - these are not picky validation errors, but major design flaws that would be easy to correct if she really cared about "open standards" and particularly "cross-platform compatibility" as she claimed in the interview.
*Specifically, what is Lynda doing that deliberately breaks cross-platform compatibility? Her pages looked readable in w3m under Linux, and that's good enough for me.*
l ) a long list of links, each anchored to a graphic. These graphics are, in fact, simply obfuscated text, see for instance http://lynda.com/resources/inspiration/images2/col or.gif which is a gif image of the word color in a sans-serif font. The rest of the menu is exactly the same, it's just a series of gif images of text used as links, and to top THAT off there isn't an alt tag on any of them. This is a textbook example of how NOT to code a page of this type - and this woman is billed as an expert and a teacher for people building webpages!
OK let's take a look at that web page then. Try browsing it in Lynx. Now try it in Netscape with image loading off. It doesn't take an "expert" to set up a webpage that degrades gracefully when image loading is turned off or not available. Granted there may be cases where this is not practical - but for the majority (if not all) of her site it would be quite practical.
Look at lynda.com/resources/inspiration/index.html - it is quite a good example of the site as a whole. First off it's a frames page, which is fine, but take a look at the noframes section of that page. The tags are:
<noframes><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> </body></noframes>
*cough* I think that pretty well speaks for itself.
Another major design flaw on that same page is that the left hand frame (http://lynda.com/resources/inspiration/menu2.htm
There are likely more errors on that page, but this is enough to make my point - 3 major design errors on a single page, chosen at random (or as close as I can easily come to random, I maximized that window, closed my eyes, flipped the mouse ball around for awhile and clicked.)
1) The use of the noframes tag so as to completely defeat it's purpose is totally wrong - she might as well have just not had a noframes section at all, for the same affect.
2) The use of graphics which are simply text is bizaare and pointless. It's the sort of thing I might expect to see from a "Proud Teenage Single Moms of AOL" site - certainly not from a so-called expert.
3) Even if she feels an uncontrollable urge to use graphics of text, the lack of alt tags is utterly inexcusable. Since the graphics are simply text in disguise anyway, it would take no thought whatsoever to determine the correct alt attributes for them; color, background tiles, frames, navigation, rollovers, etc.
I don't claim to be an expert, far from it, but I would be too ashamed to ever show my face again if I put such a poorly written page on the web. How much moreso someone who makes a living teaching people to write web pages should be ashamed of such a monstrosity!
Particularly when the fixes are so easy - all that would be necessary would be to eliminate the gifs in favour of text, or at the very *least* to add alt attributes (which are a REQUIRED, not optional, part of the HTML standard anyway,) in the file menu2.html, and then insert that code in the noframes section of the main file! 5 minutes work, and if it were done then her content would be available to all. In the time I've taken to write this message, she probably could have fixed those sorts of glaring errors all over her entire site.
I guess she thought it was more important to spend that time doing an interview to promote her book and talking about how much she is in favour of "open standards" and "cross platform compatibility" though.
Hopefully this makes my original point crystal clear?
If you want more control over display than a language like HTML can provide, the solution is to find another media - pdf for instance - NOT to mangle html.
What adds insult to injury is her going on to blithely claim to be in favour of standards and interoperability, when she's teaching people to mangle and destroy those very things.
I wasn't aware an image's ALT tag was required to be html4 compliant...
There is actually a very good reason for this. HTML is designed to degrade gracefully. Using the alt tag allows for image based designs to degrade gracefully in non-graphic browsers (and in graphic browsers with image loading off.) Think of your typical graphical button. Now think of it in a text browser. Say the image is your logo, or a cute little button that says Home or whatever - and pressing it goes back to your main page. Without the alt tag that functionality is completely lost to someone using lynx or arachne. Set alt="home" and all is now well - in a text browser I still get a control there, with the text "home" on it to let me know what it is. If you have a picture of you on your page, you can use something like alt="a picture of the author (png-50k)" - admittedly this is of limited help to someone in a text browser, but it is likely to be greatly appreciated by people using graphical browsers with image autoloading off, as it gives them the information they need to decide whether or not they want to load that image.
Of course, there are (way too many) images out there on webpages that don't have any real function at all - in those cases alt="" is appropriate, and the validators have no problem with that.
What is not appropriate, and very annoying is alt="ALT" which I've seen all over the web.
Actually it looks ok on Opera - IF you mess with the window size and/or zoom function for awhile. I totally agree with you though, the design is awful, and her advice is awful. I'm really ashamed to be a slashdotter today... ugh, she's being held up as an expert, a teacher, a role model... this is sick.
Lynda: Open standards, open source, browser compatibility and cross-platform compatibility. A tall order indeed.
If she wants open standards, why is she teaching people to disregard them? If she want's compatibility, why does she teach people to write poor html and deliberately break the cross-platform compatibility that's already there?
Supporting standards and not designing pages which are browser specific is the real way to keep the market for browsers open and to keep browser technology improving.
She speaks as if things like open standards and cross platform compatibility don't exist. You seem to have bought this, and think she must be great because she wants them to. This is just bull. These things do exist - they just aren't idiot proof. Just because it is possible to write poor html, violate standards, and by doing so break compatibility doesn't mean they don't exist - it means you should learn to write proper html. Too bad Lynda declines to teach people to do this.
I just checked out her webpage and the interview. What I found is a bunch of just bloody awful advice for web designers. For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.
Just off the first two pages I've already seen two really poor commands (suggestions would be a nicer word, but less accurate it seems) to her clueless followers - using tables to control text flow and designing pages for particular screen sizes, both of which are things that anyone that understands html would know better than to do. Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!
Go here if you are looking for good html resources - not to Lynda's site.Imagine trying to navigate Slashdot without any images...
I do. It's nice. Want to see slashdot the way I do? Turn off image loading on your browser (if you have Opera use mode 2, this is what I am actually using, but Netscape with image loading disabled will be very similar) and load up http://slashdot.org/?light
Not only does it load a lot faster like this, it's also a hell of a lot easier to read and navigate.
Although it's been passed in Virginia, it is not yet in affect. Once it does come into affect (if the people of Virginia don't come to their senses and get it repealed first) then there could be some interesting test cases.
Even if this does become law (and let's not let it) it still cannot apply to licenses granted before it becomes law, not in the U.S. at least. The US Constitution has some very plain language in it about ex post facto laws.
On what grounds do you claim they didn't have the right?