I don't think that's really a fair comment, because there are also plenty of places where Java has succesfully been used in a cross platform way with no need for modification. But it really just goes back to what the GP was saying - use the right tool for the job, and the fact that Java has failed in it's original goals in a lot of cases merely reiterates that perhaps Java wasn't the right tool for the job in those cases. I thinkt he GP is right and that's that it IS a good concept, but it's not a perfect concept, and it doesn't work universally, but that doesn't mean it isn't the right tool for the job still in some scenarios.
I understand your point in your final paragraph, but I think something needs to be clarified to people who may misinterpret it. Java has other advantages too- better security by default, and easier to produce software with a lower amount of defects like memory leaks. Not to mention that development is inherently faster when you don't have to worry about some things like memory management. If all you're doing is a simple UI front end to access a database then Java really is the right tool for the job, because you'll get it done quicker, safer, with less potential problems than with C++ - and such an application likely will be at least Windows/Linux cross platform to boot.
Really it just goes right back to what the GP was saying- use the right tool for the job, with the only caveat arising from your comment being, that all too often people have used Java where it probably wasn't the right tool for the job, not that Java isn't sometimes the right tool for the job, which was the GPs point.
Don't you drive on the left like us Brits? If so they'll probably just use the same excuse they do here- right hand drives are a niche market so require expensive changes to production lines.
That's all bollocks of course, but that's how they'll get away with it.
Apple was bollocked in the EU previously for charging British customers more than other European customers which is illegal in the common market, they simply waited it out and the recession happened, the pound weakened, and so they claimed it's close enough now to not need to change it. We still get charged more though.
But don't expect any support from your government- just like in Britain it's not in government interest to fix the problem- higher prices = higher VAT sum received. If you're anything like us in Australia, then your successive governments will have built their economic spending around you, the consumers, getting ripped off in this manner, and now it's too hard to fix without a tax shortfall.
It's simple. If they cared about a cause, and had a point to make, they wouldn't want their cause associated with mindless looting and violence, because that would do nothing but harm their cause.
Hence, no one there seriously had a cause that they cared about.
To be fair, this particular shill, like Florian Mueller, is actually a Microsoft shill.
So it's not that he's supporting Facebook per-se, although Microsoft has a lot of shares in Facebook and is closely aligned with it so that will be a positive side effect from their point of view. It's more that he's trying to slap down Microsoft's competitors and threats. Google is of course a massive threat to Microsoft in that it's one of the biggest driving forces into moving people away from the desktop into the cloud. The cloud being a place where Windows becomes far less relevant.
You're right that he's a shill, but I'm pretty sure he's not shilling for who you think he's shilling for!
"Stuff like 3G, compass, GPS, even rear facing camera could all be jettisoned if necessary since it's largely superfluous for what most tablets will be used for in the first place."
Would it need to be? The Orange San Francisco aka ZTE Blade has all these things and costs £90 off contract and both Orange, and ZTE each still make a profit on that. The handset isn't dual core but does have some decent hardware acceleration. I think you could still keep all this. Does it really cost say £150 - £200 more just to make a bigger screen, stick in a bigger battery, and a slightly better processor/memory at the manufacturer keeping in mind you could subtract from the original £90 the cost of the smaller battery, GSM stuff, and the cell phone sized AMOLED screen which you'd no longer need.
NetBooks packed much of the same hardware for similarly low prices 3 years ago so you're right, it's definitely doable now.
"If "an arbitrary and already outdated list of semantic tags" is the worst thing in the spec, I can live with that."
It's just one of many bad things, none of which really needed to exist.
"You can't get by with just OK products which is all Motorola have had for years. That is why they are losing money quarter after quarter."
Apart from operating systems you mean? Are you going to now tell us how awesome the likes of Windows has been all these years too?
"and they got there by being pragmatic,"
This simply isn't true, browsers never became popular by being software people wanted- on the contrary, IE5/IE6 was the bane of many people's lives, but what other choice was there for years?, they became popular because the web was a good idea and you had to use one to access it. It was the concept of the web that drove browsers, not vice versa, and that's why standards should serve to make the web better, not make lazy browser vendors lives easier by making sloppyness an acceptable standard.
"You can't get by with just OK products which is all Motorola have had for years. That is why they are losing money quarter after quarter. "
It's shit like this. It doesn't even make any sense. Motorola Mobility isn't the same company as Motorola was as a single entity. Motorola mobility's losses are entirely down to the restructuring costs right now. As a standalone business as it is prior to the Google takeover it looks perfectly well placed to make a profit after these initial restructuring costs are out the way.
But prominently, you're still focussing on what Motorola did wrong, rather than what Google can do right. It's like someone saying a few years back that the fat iPod nano was shit, so Apple couldn't possibly produce anything good in the future- obviously that's bollocks, they produced the iPhone and iPad. Google has staff talented enough to do something similar software and design wise, and now they have experts in the hardware side of things too.
But you'll see down the line how wrong you are. You've been wrong on so many predictions and right on pretty much none by blindly defending your "faith" in Apple, sometimes even proven wrong by Apple themselves.
"You do realize you are taking one number out of a large financial report, and totally ignoring OBLIGATIONS????"
Yes, I saw you mention this elsewhere, but I don't think you understand what they are or how they fit in. They're paid out of revenue, and it is these obligations currently preventing MMI turning a profit. Because they're primarily paid out of revenue though, it doesn't matter that they're high, they don't touch the cold hard pool of cash, unless things reach a point whereby revenue isn't covering them, which was to the tune of at most $70million last financial year, which is a rounding error on $3bn.
"And people who think Motorola can help Google in regards to ANY other aspect of commuting are missing the fact that Motorola has been dying in all spaces for some time now."
Sigh, you've always got to reduce your posts to your typical Apple fanboyism retardedness. This is really silly, the Xoom may not be as succesful as the iPad, and the Atrix not as succesful as the iPhone, but both products and many of other Motorola products are highly succesful relative to the general market (Apple is of course exceptional relative to the general market). To suggest Motorola is dying off is utterly retarded, and is just petty ignorant, childish fanboyism. As usual your brand insecurity is showing through and you feel the need to pathetically make out something is what it's not to try and cover your fears that somehow this is a threat to Apple. Get over it, Apple's glory days aren't going to last forever, just as Microsoft's didn't before it, and IBM's didn't before that. It may be this that changes Apple's standing, it might be something else. But unless you're an Apple employee, wrapping your whole life around Apple as you do is really kind of sad.
It's a shame because if you weren't such a fanboy (and don't pretend your not, you're probably the worst and most rabid Apple fanboy on Slashdot, bar perhaps bonch) then I think you'd genuinely be capable of making fairly good points. As it stands though you ruin the intellect you have with rabidly childish often irrational and illogical fanboy pro-Apple, anti-Apple competitor rantings.
Just to illustrate how retarded your comments are, we should bare in mind that it was only a few years back that Motorola succeded in producing the most succesful mobile phone to date - yes, even more succesful than the iPhone even now - the Motorola RAZR shifted more handsets than any other has yet bar the low end phones Nokia shifted to China, Africa, India and so forth.
You can troll all you want, but it really doesn't change the fact Google's Motorola purchase is somewhat of a game changer in bringing a 3rd force into the whole digital ecosystem battle. It doesn't really matter what Motorola's fuckups were in the past, it had some of the greatest successes of all time for the categories it works with too. But what really matters is what Google can do with it in the future. So what if set top boxes are dying? that doesn't prevent Google using Motorola's set top box hardware expertise to make IPTV boxes too. What about Motorola's satnav division? there's massive potential for an Android based Satnav using Google maps, which due to the likes of Google's streetview archive is probably the best Satnav tech going.
If you really can't see the massive potential Motorola opens up for Google then I feel sorry for you, but the sad thing is I'm pretty sure you can see the potential, you just like to talk it down because again, your extreme fanboyism is letting your potential to engage in reasonable discussion down.
But here's one final point for you- no one is swayed by your over the top rhetoric, no one believes the FUD, when you jump to such absurd extremes you're talking only to yourself. So please, kindly tone it down, and focus on having slightly more rational, down to earth, and more fact based conversations. I'm an Apple user too- I have an iPad2, but personally I don't care for one brand or the other, I go for best in class at the time. What I do
"You do not "fein interest" in something by bidding a few billion dollars. What if they had won? Very obviously they meant to get that, or at least it was a serious attempt."
If you want it, you also don't turn down an option of joining the consortium most likely to be able to purchase it either.
"so in fact Apple and Microsoft (and other partners) have been shown to be eerily prescient in requiring said patents even IF this had been Google's plan all along."
Or it could be because Apple has already been burnt by copying Nokia's IP without the license, so recognised that it kinda needed a pool in the cell phone arena to prevent other firms burning it in a similar way.
"It's not like Google has ONLY paid 12 billion dollars, they have bought continuing obligations that will cost more."
But it's not like much of that wont be recouped. Motorola has a cash pool of $3bn, and many of the sections of Motorola Google doesn't need can be sold off decreasing the figure further.
It's also not like they just bought patents as in the Nortel deal either, they bought the ability to produce their own mobile phones, their own tablets, their own satnavs, their own set top boxes etc. Motorola Mobility's current losses aren't that bad, and are almost exclusively a result of the fact that Motorola recently restructure spinning off Mobility as a separate company- that's always going to be a costly endeavour at first, it's always going to take a few years for something to reach profit, and in fact Mobility's losses have been relatively small compared to many other such spinoffs in corporate history. Products like the Xoom and Atrix have been succesful enough off the bat to dampen the inevitable costs of such a fundamental restructure meaning their turnaronud into a profitable firm will also be much quicker than has been the case for many companies in the past.
Google's strategy is to bring the web into the home, the car, and mobile, and buying Motorola allows them to make massive strides in this respect. They now have a hardware manufacturer that just happened to produce everything they needed for the fully integrated digital lifestyle vision to become a reality without relying on a 3rd party. That's kind of a big deal well beyond the mere mobile patent spat, and something that's arguably worth $12.5bn in itself, because it's frankly the future of computing. Apple realises this, which is why it's moving away from iTunes and moving things to the cloud so that the iPad, iPhone, Macs, and AppleTV can start to integrate better without being tied down to some piss poor desktop based application. Microsoft similarly realise it, with their integration between Windows Phone 7, the XBox 360, and Windows 8, and their deals with Ford for in car computing. Google can now build a similar digital ecosystem all by itself with this acquisition too.
People who think this is merely about mobile patents and nothing else are missing the bigger picture, it's not. It's about the future of consumer oriented computing across every facet of our lives.
Sony Ericsson produce Android handsets, and RIM's playbook supports Android apps, which is amusing, because it means there's actually two companies with a vested interest in defending Android in the Nortel patent chest deal too.
It depends on the terms of the deal of course, but I imagine Sony and RIM will have, as part of that deal, made sure it was the case that the Nortel patents couldn't be used to try and deem Android technology infringing of those patents too, else Sony and RIM could find themselves in the firing line either directly, or indirectly from the very patent chest they contributed to.
Agreed, it's a difficult balance giving employees freedom to interact with the public, but also maintaining some degree of professionality. If an employee is pissed off or otherwise emotional about something they they'll likely not be in a state of mind to really think about the potential consequences of what they post, as such I can at least full well understand why some companies choose to just not let their employees blog.
I suppose there's a fair argument that Google could've just told it's employees "don't blog about the patent situation for the next 3 months" or whatever, perhaps they missed an opportunity there, which in hindsight could've been solved by something like that, who knows.
"Presumably things like this is why they dropped the version number and moved to a "Living Standard". The HTML specification will be continually updated, so there's always going to be time to extend the spec to meet changes in the web."
Agreed but it also means you can't necessarily write an HTML5 compliant site, and leave it for a few years, and still find it's HTML5 compliant. A living spec means the standard is changing- and that's just not what competent standards do.
The real solution would've been one that abstracts semantics out of the presentation document, just as CSS abstracts styles away from the presentation document. The point is that if your standard has to be a "living standard" then you've got a fault in your standard, and WHATWG, despite having these flaws pointed out to them, has moved ahead anyway. This implies that their interest isn't in producing a decent spec, but more likely simply hijacking web standards for their own goals. This seems to have been largely succesful too, HTML5 is controlled almost entirely by desktop browser vendors like Google, Mozilla, and Apple, with no input from the people who actually develop web applications, no input from people who produce accessibility tools and so forth taken into account.
"The very minor incompatibilities between today's browsers are nothing like the incompatibilities of the Netscape/IE battles."
Have you looked at some of the HTML5 inconsistencies between browsers? Some web apps using things like canvas outright just don't work unless you're using a specific browser. That seems at least as bad as the Netscape/IE days to me.
"Modern incompatibilities tend to revolve around the best way to render rounded corners."
Modern yes, things were pretty well nailed down in recent years between browsers for the XHTML and HTML specs prior to HTML5, but HTML5 changes all that, everything's up in the air again and takes us back to square one.
"XML is never the right tool for the job, it's a perfect example of trying to be all things to all people"
I agree XML is grossly overused, but never the right tool for the job? That's silly.
"It's not really human-readable and certainly not human-writable"
What? It may be difficult to a newbie, but if you can write/read HTML then you can write/read XML. There's absolutely no difference in difficulty there.
"HTML is and always has been a presentational format; it isn't and shouldn't be a semantic format."
You know, I largely agree with this, but this is precisely why I said semantics should be applied with external sheets, just like styles are- precisely so HTML can stick to being what it is, a presentational format. I was under the impression you were arguing against me, but you seem to be agreeing with me here- if HTML is a presentational format and shouldn't have semantics embedded in it then why the fuck does HTML5 add an arbitrary and already outdated list of semantic tags? It just adds clutter to the spec, doesn't solve the semantic problem, and offers no real benefit. I'm not actually that fussed about the "semantic web" idea but my point is merely that if we are going to attach semantics to HTML, then let's at least fucking do it properly, rather than mix it in with the presentational markup in a very half-arsed manner.
"The original spec people spent about a decade coming up with nothing useful."
Look, avoiding the arguments about the usefulness of the spec (frankly I think some of it is useful personally) then even if mistakes have been made in the past, does that really excuse yet more mistakes like embedding semantics into the code in HTML5 excusable? WHATWG claimed to come around because W3C aren't listening- but they've not listened to the flaws themselves, they've produced a spec that's amateurish and as you point out, mixes semantics and the like directly into what should be a presentational format. Let's forget what the W3C has done wrong in the past- does that really make WHATWG's attempt worthy of avoiding criticism?
"The guys now in charge of the standards are the ones who wrote the software we all use daily to browse the web, rather than the ones who sat in endless discussions and produced nothing. I think you've got the wrong notion of who's inept."
Really? You don't think browser manufacturers are inept? How many serious bugs, how many serious security flaws, how many issues with performance, many of which are braindead flaws that should not even exist have we seen in browsers through the years. They may have been the ones that got us where we are, but that doesn't imply as you seem to suggest that they've done a good job. Browsers have, almost universally been shit pieces of software, we simply use them because they've always been as bad as each other. The only positive side to this is that at least competition is heating up in the browser market nowadays, so hopefully that wont remain the case.
"The problem with your argument is that there really are many instances where that 5 hours tomorrow never come."
Right. This is what COBOL developers used to say up until a few years before the millenium came along. Oh, and 640k is enough for anybody too.
"Adopting "XHTML6" in your interpretation would mean that nobody could save those 5 minutes, even if I'm just writing a hello world page."
Yes, except there's no time penalty to writing XML based HTML markup. So that assertion is false. The only downside is the initial learning curve is ever so slightly, but largely unnoticably more steep in that you simply have to learn about 4 additional very simple rules which come naturally about an hour after working with it.
"The truly worst code I've seen are the ones that try to be "future proof", "encapsulate functions", "pluggable", "modular", whatever. They make code that perform trivial functions look like a huge mess of spaghetti code."
Worst, or you simply don't understand them? When I was less experienced I found such well written systems harder to understand too, but for what you lose in difficulty for new developers you gain massively in productivity, maintainability, lower bug counts. Sure there are plenty of cases of overengineering out there, but to suggest it's universal is false. Just because some people fail to do things right, doesn't mean we should just do things bad all the time instead.
"Requirements of perfection (i.e. "separation of concerns", "lack of duplicate features", etc) is *not* universal, and you seem to be demanding it in one of the most widely used standards in the world."
It's universal in complicated software as that's the only way you'll ever get big systems built, and systems are getting bigger and bigger all the time so it's only going to become more important. Sure I agree small projects don't need it. I'm not advocating that everyone should have to adhere to these standards for every project- if people don't want to be standards compliant that's fine, but standards exist to support interop and HTML5 fails miserably in that respect which is a big problem. Standards should specify what should be done, and if it isn't then fine- just don't be standards compliant. But suggesting even the most poorly interoperable tosh with horrendous inconsistency is an acceptable standard? that's just an awful situation.
"One thing that XML failed miserably is keeping simple things simple."
But it's not necessarily designed to be. Although I don't personally think it's that complex, it's really not hard to understand XML. XML is designed to facilitate interop and to help make moving data between systems easier. Sure you might not think it's simple but it's tremendously good at what it's designed to do- far easier than working with arbitrary data formats. The web is the biggest thing in the IT world, wanting that to be just as easily interoperated with should not be seen as a bad thing- much less when HTML itself already has 99.9999% of the complexity of XML, so the minor added rules of XML aren't a disproportionate increase in difficulty relative to the massive benefits of a longer term goal- a fully interoperable web where data can be exchanged to web pages from documents, and from web pages into documents, and databases with simple XSL transforms. For someone not having any background in computing I agree XML might be difficult, but if someone is capable of HTML, they're plenty capable of XML so the argument of it being to complex for the web is just utter fud.
"The moment you started ad-homing the parent and calling him a "terrible developer", you diminished your argument and damaged your own credibility."
I only pointed out what he made clear from his post. You simply cannot be a good developer if you genuinely think quality should just be chucked out the window so easily. I understand in some projects it must, but implying it's never a concern? that's a bad developer.
"The parent was criticising the a certain engineering philosophy with XML, and asserting that the complexity of XML is disproportionate to the benefits it delivers "
Yes, if you work on very simple systems. Many of us don't, systems are becoming more and more complex, so XML is becoming more and more important. Developers who only work on simple systems and think their simple system mindset applies globally are destined to be left in the dust.
"You lose."
Oh right, I'm glad you decided that. Because obviously you're the grand dictator of who wins debates on the internet.
Oh wait, no you're not. You're just another online nobody who himself thinks he knows all, but manages to only demonstrate a lack of real experience in the field he likes to profess about.
Don't worry, perhaps one day you'll be competent enough to play with the big boys, on real projects.
"The WHATWG accepted input from everyone. Stop spreading lies."
Yes everyone, but again, what does it matter if they "accept" input, when they don't listen? How else do you explain the large amount of faults in the spec which have no reason to exist, but were pointed out to them time and time again?
"I recall them saying that versioning should be dropped because HTML is an ever-evolving spec, which is pretty much right."
Er, no, that's stupid. You clearly have no concept of why standards even exist in the first place if you genuinely believe this.
"XML prioritises well-formed mark-up while the focus should be on semantically rich pages."
Why prioritise when you can have both with the sort of solution I and many others have pointed out? The very premise you have to choose one over the other is false.
"It requires the client to check for well-formed mark-up each time when it's the job of the server/webmaster. If the check fails, you get an unhelpful error page instead of the content."
This is a FUD argument. Making sure content is well formed adhering to XML syntax doesn't inherently mean you have to serve it as XML. Just ensuring the content adheres to XML syntax alone gives you all the advantages.
"It's an extra barrier of entry for beginning webmasters that ultimately isn't meaningful. Everyone should easily be able to publish on the web."
But no one's publishing on the web now in pure HTML- they're all using blogger, facebook, twitter and so forth. You know, the kind of apps that are written by professional developers that would be better served by a spec that supports good practice software development.
"Moving the problem doesn't seem like a solution to me."
If you think the solution I suggested is just "moving the problem" rather than a fully fledged solution and you can't grasp that from my previous explanation then you have no place discussing this topic as you clearly don't even understand basic principles about web and software development. Putting style information in CSS style sheets wasn't merely about moving the content- it was about producing a far more flexible solution.
"It sounds to me like you're the one who is angry here that they didn't incorporate your ideas."
Which would be a great troll comment, if they were just my ideas. The problem is even Microsoft, the largest browser vendor on earth at the time pointed out half the flaws with HTML5 and whilst they've accepted now they're going to have to live with it as it is, they were clearly unhappy too with the process. When the process doesn't even listen to the largest browser vendor on earth when it points out legitimate faults, which to this day are not fixed, how can you seriously claim it's an open, democratic process?
"Your idea also sounds like making HTML into something it is not, and that's bad for backwards compatibility."
Backwards compatibility is done in the browser- changing a future HTML spec doesn't do a thing to backwards compatability providing the browser manufacturers are competent enough to ensure their browser handles the new spec properly without them simultaneously deciding to break the old spec. It's not a hard problem, computer scientists have been doing it years with supporting different protocol versions and so forth. But again, because you don't understand this it suggests you're trying to engage in a topic which you simply do not understand the details of. You sound like a fanboy who has jumped on the HTML5 bandwagon without actually really having any technical knowledge of web development and software development- you just know it's the latest buzzword, so feel you must defend it.
Seriously, if you're going to argue about a topic either learn about it first, or if you do understand it, try to avoid making comments that make it look like you're playing dumb for the sake of trying to make an argument.
"You're guilty of revisionism there. The truth is that the XHTML 2.0 spec writers hijacked the web standards process, locking out everyone from commenting and contributing to the process. The spec was becoming a nightmare with things like making every element a possible anchor."
What utter tosh. The HTML specification process was managed by the W3C whose members comprise just about every single industry sector under the sun and number in the hundreds. Are you seriously saying this is a less balanced process than a couple of browser manufacturers going their own way and riding a way of populism and ignorance to push their spec? I'm not sure how the current situation is better where sure comments are allowed, but they're ignored by grand dicator Hixie et al. I suggest you check the W3C's member list and see how many varied the input into XHTML2 actually was. No, what WHATWG mean when they say people were left out is "We threw our teddy out the pram, because the other firms wouldn't let us have our own way". THAT is preciely what it was all about, now they have their own way, and they're proving what a shit job they can do. It seems there was good reason no one was listening to them before.
The spec was taking time because it takes time to make sure things are done properly, and to make sure raised issues are examined, and, if need be, correct. WHATWG still don't get this to this day, which is why they've declared HTML5 a living spec, ready for use, rather than just waiting for W3C to ratify it when it's been confirmed acceptable.
But even then, since when was everyone a standards expert? standards aren't designed so that everyone can insert whatever the fuck idea they want, they're designed to support interoperability above all else. HTML5 is an epic fail at this, particularly with it's backwards move away from XML, and it's "live" spec ideology. It was far far better having thousands of experts from hundreds of varied companies running the process, than a select bunch of dictators pretending to listen, but not actually caring. Further, at least the W3C had proper accountability processes, again WHATWG is more like a monarchy with grand dicator hixie at the top, and his court closing rank around him when any criticism arises of his plans.
"it's to give the web developer the tools that he has been missing for years"
Right, so why does introducing new and important features require taking a backwards step, like pushing SGML-esque markup up the long proven beneficial XML markup? That isn't about giving developers tools they need, that's about a select group who never quite got why XML etc. were important pushing their view on the rest of the world.
"For example, there's no semantic meaning to be gained from <div class="article">. Introducing the article element does add semantic meaning."
No but there is semantic meaning to be gained by adding something akin to CSS where you can either do it inline with semantic= or with a sheet declaring semantics which are applied to the relevant classes. In contrast, there's only partial semantic meaning to be gained from:
It's a half arsed solution, it only helps an arbitrary set of components of a page, it's not a full solution. It's 100% useless for applying semantics to many elements of modern pages because the list of sections that got their own tags is based on an arbitrary and already long outdated study of prominent tags. In this context it's easy to question whether it was ever about semantics at all, or simply about being able to write yet more sloppy markup- skip the classes, just chuck some arbitrary one word tags in, but only in some places, because the list is necessarily finite, and rapidly out of date. Again, this sort of proposed solution I mention has all the benefits of CSS too- spread separation of concerns amongst a de
"And it's time web-developers got back into control actually."
IMO this is a key part of the problem. WHATWG hijacked the web standards process, and primarily folks behind Safari and Firefox.
The problem is whilst Firefox was much better than IE at standards compliance it was still far from perfect, and Safari for Windows is probably the worst browser I've ever had the misfortunate to touch.
If these people can't even get their own field right, why are we trusting them with getting the web standards themselves right? We've seen in the last year how silly Firefox development has become with it's fucked up versioning system, completely useless features, increasing memory leaks, increased bloat. That's not the sort of folk I want developing web standards.
An argument I've seen for HTML5 is that the layman can't cope with XML syntax, now, apart from the fact that I think that's frankly bollocks, it's not hard, there's also an element of so what? How many laymen actually write markup nowadays? Everyone publishes through web applications like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, and so forth, so wouldn't it make more sense to make things easier for the professional web developers who build these systems, than the theoretical average joe who will never actually touch markup in the end in practice nowadays anyway?
I completely agree- web standards need to be built for the people who actually use them day in day out - the web applications developers, not for some mythical average joe, and not for the browser vendors who STILL manage to fuck up their implementation even when they're the ones outright dictating them now.
Re:Holding off using it for other reasons
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Hard Truths About HTML5
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think there's a fair bit of mileage in what you've said.
Let's be honest the web wasn't designed for interactive applications and I think there's a fair question as to whether if that's what we want, then shouldn't we build a tool for just that rather than mangling HTML to try and do it, and do it badly?
It'll take a brave soul to define the next generation of web standards to replace HTML, something that's geared to proper interactive applications rather than mere content display as is the case with HTML. But I don't think you're far wrong in suggesting that that's the real, true solution to the problem. It'll be difficult if not only because it'd mean getting the browser manufacturers on board, and they couldn't even get the relatively trivial task of implementing proper XML display engines in place- something which you quite righly note, the likes of Microsoft with WPF, and many other such manufacturers have done with ease in their technologies.
Whether it's WPF or something else (probably something else, because I doubt people want a Microsoft technology becoming dominant on the web!), that sort of solution is certainly optimal.
There isn't a lack of XML compatibility, HTML5 still has it's XHTML5 mode, which still fully supports XML markup. The problem is that the HTML route not only exists, but seems encouraged, which means that rather than a push towards the much better XML syntax that we've had over the last 10 years, we're now in danger of seeing a backwards trend to the much worse syntax such that we run the risk of being back where we were 10 years ago.
You may think it's no big deal but it really is. Thanks to XML's tools that are prevalent in just about every language, it's trivial to take markup and automatically manipulate it in whatever way is needed. You may still be thinking so what? well, in this mobile era, where screens are changing form and size all the time, where we may well soon even see wristwatch computing become a much more interesting reality, then the ability to trivially and efficiently transform content on the fly to suit the display device, or program that's manipulating the content is kind of important.
Computers just aren't good at ambiguity, and whilst you can often work around ambiguity, it's inevitable there will be issues, cases where the developer didn't think this or that might happen. Sometimes ambiguity is important and even useful, but web content is not one of those cases. HTML5 vastly increases ambiguity, whereas XML removes it, and this is one reason why HTML5 is bad, and is a backwards step for the web. We can work around HTML5's issues, and if HTML5 grows and grows and grows, we'll have to, and we probably will. But why are we even having to when the solution already exists? - just write better markup in the first place with XML syntax.
Re:Holding off using it for other reasons
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Hard Truths About HTML5
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Another sad case of a XML brainwashed believer...."
Believer? that implies I merely believe XML is useful. No, sorry, many of us in the real world actually find XML useful. We develop large systems where XML helps no end. I'm sorry that you've never worked on a project where XML has come in useful, but some of us are competent enought o actually use the right tool for the job.
"XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?"
Yes thanks. We had an old black box system that we needed to integrate with a new web based system, it produced web pages that were thankfully at least XHTML1 compliant. Because we couldn't yet get rid of this system we were fortunately able to XSLT transform the output into useful data, and feed back inputs to it to transparently integrate it with the new system. If it had only adhered to HTML5's bastardised SGML syntax then it would've been a nightmare to integrate with this legacy system.
"XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers. You may say the standard is "shit", the practices are "amateurish" (when benchmarked against what they teach you in the textbooks), but all that counts is what people are able to do with the stuff."
Right, and this is the problem. Too many developers haven't come from a professional background. They write code that would make old school C++ developers, and high end Java developers alike cry themselves to sleep at night. They managed to get a basic site working in PHP once, and have moved on from their, they don't understand what MVC or OOP is and don't see why they should because they never needed it so just carry on as normal. The problem is, they're also the ones who are responsible for sites that are always falling over, getting hacked, miserably hopeless in terms of scalability. Stuff isn't put into textbooks for a laugh, or to give you something to study, it's put in there base on experience, it's put in there so that you don't repeat the mistakes made by others before you - and there's the problem, too many web developers do repeat those mistakes time and time again, which is why things like SQL injection and XSS attacks are some of the most common to this day, despite solutions to them being long available and known, well, if you read the textbooks that is.
"Theoretical aesthetic purity is not an ends in itself. The "separation of concerns", "removal of arbitrary tags/duplicate functionality", "future proof" stuffs actually make the XML/XHTML spec more useless, harder to work with, and decreases productivity. You may marvel at its aesthetic beauty, but for people like us who actually need to do things on a schedule, those restrictions hinder our productivity when there's no way to opt out of it."
You are a terribly developer. Sorry, it needs to be said. You've basically admitted you're writing terrible code just to get something working. Your code is the type of code responsible for nightmarish maintainability, horrendous bugs and security exploits. Please, get the fuck out of the software development industry now. We don't need more bad software. I understand that in some places the constraints are such that speed of development and hence reduced cost is put well over and above quality but that's not the same everywhere. Please don't assume your complete lack of focus on quality is universal.
"For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to bold-text? Why should we have to , or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?"
It depends. Sure it might take you an extra 5 minutes today, but that's 5 hours saved tommorrow when you have to come back and fix things. Separating off semantics means that for larger software teams you can even have people dedicated to looking after just that, so the developers can focus on developing, without getting in each other's way.
"The HTML spec people took 10 years to realize the mistake of going the XML way. It seems that you still
The semantic tags are out of date before the spec has even finalised, because it doesn't cover thing like comments tags which are prominent in todays sites, illustrating what a dumb decision it was to add a bunch of random semantic tags based on an arbitrary web survey carried out years ago. Semantics should be applied to classes just like styles are using a semantic definition language. This would of course have the advantage of allowing 3rd parties to produce semantic definition archives for no longer maintained sites etc. that browser could look up but well, there you go, that's what happens when people who apparently don't have even the slightest grasp of separation of concerns get their hands on something as fundamental as an HTML spec. It's like they didn't even realise why it's better to not have all your styles embedded in your document structure markup - i.e. your HTML and hence why CSS was developed the way it was.
Thus far it seems to have taken the web backwards in terms of compatibility, many of the new features work differently in different browsers, harking back to the days of HTML3/4 and Netscape/IE battles.
XML syntax seems discouraged which means you'll run into more people using the SGML syntax which seems to be pushed more than XML which makes the web more of a ballache to work with- no more of a push towards simple XSLT to trivially move data around and into and out of web displayable formats and instead a push away from that. I don't really care if it's served as XML or not, the point is that if it's not well formed XML it becomes a massive ballache to deal with, because XML tools and libraries are so prevalent.
The ethos surrounding HTML5 is that well, lots of old sites didn't follow newer standards, so lets make those web sites standard by taking everything they did shit, and making that standard. So great, yes, let's make shit, the standard. No, that's not how standards work- standards define a high quality that allows maximum compatibility which developers should strive to adhere to, if some don't then don't cater to them- just point out they're shit because they're not standards compliant.
Really, I don't think I'll touch it unless it gets to the point where you can't avoid it. I think I'll wait for a spec that's written by adults than a bunch of PHP kiddies who don't have the first clue about how to right good web software, and instead prefer to bung any old shit into the mix and call it a standard. Not to mention the drama about it being a living standard- good standards don't need to be living, good standards are generic and flexible enough to be future proof for a good number of years - you know, like, say, the XML spec.
It's not that I don't like some of the new features proposed in HTML5 like canvas etc., I think they're great ideas. It's just a shame the rest of it is just so painfully amateurish from a software development perspective. The net result is a spec that basically takes the web back to where it was 10 years ago- a messy inconsistent mess of arbitrary tags that needlessly duplicate functionality, causing annoying ambiguity with a dash of incompatibility chucked in to boot.
I'm hoping for a quick iteration to XHTML6, run by people who actually know what they're doing so we can just bypass the mess that is HTML5, but that's probably a bit much to hope for.
"five US JDAM bombs hit the People's Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade"
Five JDAMs? well they certainly didn't fuck around did they.
As you say, it seems quite clear what it was really about:
"Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet testified before a congressional committee that the bombing was the only one in the campaign organized and directed by his agency."
Which really says one of two things:
a) We're so incompetent you shouldn't let the CIA ever direct bombing campaigns, because the one time we did we fucked it up hardcore.
Or:
b) We knew exactly what we were doing, mission accomplished.
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I don't think that's really a fair comment, because there are also plenty of places where Java has succesfully been used in a cross platform way with no need for modification. But it really just goes back to what the GP was saying - use the right tool for the job, and the fact that Java has failed in it's original goals in a lot of cases merely reiterates that perhaps Java wasn't the right tool for the job in those cases. I thinkt he GP is right and that's that it IS a good concept, but it's not a perfect concept, and it doesn't work universally, but that doesn't mean it isn't the right tool for the job still in some scenarios.
I understand your point in your final paragraph, but I think something needs to be clarified to people who may misinterpret it. Java has other advantages too- better security by default, and easier to produce software with a lower amount of defects like memory leaks. Not to mention that development is inherently faster when you don't have to worry about some things like memory management. If all you're doing is a simple UI front end to access a database then Java really is the right tool for the job, because you'll get it done quicker, safer, with less potential problems than with C++ - and such an application likely will be at least Windows/Linux cross platform to boot.
Really it just goes right back to what the GP was saying- use the right tool for the job, with the only caveat arising from your comment being, that all too often people have used Java where it probably wasn't the right tool for the job, not that Java isn't sometimes the right tool for the job, which was the GPs point.
Don't you drive on the left like us Brits? If so they'll probably just use the same excuse they do here- right hand drives are a niche market so require expensive changes to production lines.
That's all bollocks of course, but that's how they'll get away with it.
Apple was bollocked in the EU previously for charging British customers more than other European customers which is illegal in the common market, they simply waited it out and the recession happened, the pound weakened, and so they claimed it's close enough now to not need to change it. We still get charged more though.
But don't expect any support from your government- just like in Britain it's not in government interest to fix the problem- higher prices = higher VAT sum received. If you're anything like us in Australia, then your successive governments will have built their economic spending around you, the consumers, getting ripped off in this manner, and now it's too hard to fix without a tax shortfall.
You believe in Santa claus and the Easter bunny don't you?
Because, I mean, no one's proven to you they don't exist yet.
It's simple. If they cared about a cause, and had a point to make, they wouldn't want their cause associated with mindless looting and violence, because that would do nothing but harm their cause.
Hence, no one there seriously had a cause that they cared about.
To be fair, this particular shill, like Florian Mueller, is actually a Microsoft shill.
So it's not that he's supporting Facebook per-se, although Microsoft has a lot of shares in Facebook and is closely aligned with it so that will be a positive side effect from their point of view. It's more that he's trying to slap down Microsoft's competitors and threats. Google is of course a massive threat to Microsoft in that it's one of the biggest driving forces into moving people away from the desktop into the cloud. The cloud being a place where Windows becomes far less relevant.
You're right that he's a shill, but I'm pretty sure he's not shilling for who you think he's shilling for!
"Stuff like 3G, compass, GPS, even rear facing camera could all be jettisoned if necessary since it's largely superfluous for what most tablets will be used for in the first place."
Would it need to be? The Orange San Francisco aka ZTE Blade has all these things and costs £90 off contract and both Orange, and ZTE each still make a profit on that. The handset isn't dual core but does have some decent hardware acceleration. I think you could still keep all this. Does it really cost say £150 - £200 more just to make a bigger screen, stick in a bigger battery, and a slightly better processor/memory at the manufacturer keeping in mind you could subtract from the original £90 the cost of the smaller battery, GSM stuff, and the cell phone sized AMOLED screen which you'd no longer need.
NetBooks packed much of the same hardware for similarly low prices 3 years ago so you're right, it's definitely doable now.
"If "an arbitrary and already outdated list of semantic tags" is the worst thing in the spec, I can live with that."
It's just one of many bad things, none of which really needed to exist.
"You can't get by with just OK products which is all Motorola have had for years. That is why they are losing money quarter after quarter."
Apart from operating systems you mean? Are you going to now tell us how awesome the likes of Windows has been all these years too?
"and they got there by being pragmatic,"
This simply isn't true, browsers never became popular by being software people wanted- on the contrary, IE5/IE6 was the bane of many people's lives, but what other choice was there for years?, they became popular because the web was a good idea and you had to use one to access it. It was the concept of the web that drove browsers, not vice versa, and that's why standards should serve to make the web better, not make lazy browser vendors lives easier by making sloppyness an acceptable standard.
"You can't get by with just OK products which is all Motorola have had for years. That is why they are losing money quarter after quarter. "
It's shit like this. It doesn't even make any sense. Motorola Mobility isn't the same company as Motorola was as a single entity. Motorola mobility's losses are entirely down to the restructuring costs right now. As a standalone business as it is prior to the Google takeover it looks perfectly well placed to make a profit after these initial restructuring costs are out the way.
But prominently, you're still focussing on what Motorola did wrong, rather than what Google can do right. It's like someone saying a few years back that the fat iPod nano was shit, so Apple couldn't possibly produce anything good in the future- obviously that's bollocks, they produced the iPhone and iPad. Google has staff talented enough to do something similar software and design wise, and now they have experts in the hardware side of things too.
But you'll see down the line how wrong you are. You've been wrong on so many predictions and right on pretty much none by blindly defending your "faith" in Apple, sometimes even proven wrong by Apple themselves.
"You do realize you are taking one number out of a large financial report, and totally ignoring OBLIGATIONS????"
Yes, I saw you mention this elsewhere, but I don't think you understand what they are or how they fit in. They're paid out of revenue, and it is these obligations currently preventing MMI turning a profit. Because they're primarily paid out of revenue though, it doesn't matter that they're high, they don't touch the cold hard pool of cash, unless things reach a point whereby revenue isn't covering them, which was to the tune of at most $70million last financial year, which is a rounding error on $3bn.
"And people who think Motorola can help Google in regards to ANY other aspect of commuting are missing the fact that Motorola has been dying in all spaces for some time now."
Sigh, you've always got to reduce your posts to your typical Apple fanboyism retardedness. This is really silly, the Xoom may not be as succesful as the iPad, and the Atrix not as succesful as the iPhone, but both products and many of other Motorola products are highly succesful relative to the general market (Apple is of course exceptional relative to the general market). To suggest Motorola is dying off is utterly retarded, and is just petty ignorant, childish fanboyism. As usual your brand insecurity is showing through and you feel the need to pathetically make out something is what it's not to try and cover your fears that somehow this is a threat to Apple. Get over it, Apple's glory days aren't going to last forever, just as Microsoft's didn't before it, and IBM's didn't before that. It may be this that changes Apple's standing, it might be something else. But unless you're an Apple employee, wrapping your whole life around Apple as you do is really kind of sad.
It's a shame because if you weren't such a fanboy (and don't pretend your not, you're probably the worst and most rabid Apple fanboy on Slashdot, bar perhaps bonch) then I think you'd genuinely be capable of making fairly good points. As it stands though you ruin the intellect you have with rabidly childish often irrational and illogical fanboy pro-Apple, anti-Apple competitor rantings.
Just to illustrate how retarded your comments are, we should bare in mind that it was only a few years back that Motorola succeded in producing the most succesful mobile phone to date - yes, even more succesful than the iPhone even now - the Motorola RAZR shifted more handsets than any other has yet bar the low end phones Nokia shifted to China, Africa, India and so forth.
You can troll all you want, but it really doesn't change the fact Google's Motorola purchase is somewhat of a game changer in bringing a 3rd force into the whole digital ecosystem battle. It doesn't really matter what Motorola's fuckups were in the past, it had some of the greatest successes of all time for the categories it works with too. But what really matters is what Google can do with it in the future. So what if set top boxes are dying? that doesn't prevent Google using Motorola's set top box hardware expertise to make IPTV boxes too. What about Motorola's satnav division? there's massive potential for an Android based Satnav using Google maps, which due to the likes of Google's streetview archive is probably the best Satnav tech going.
If you really can't see the massive potential Motorola opens up for Google then I feel sorry for you, but the sad thing is I'm pretty sure you can see the potential, you just like to talk it down because again, your extreme fanboyism is letting your potential to engage in reasonable discussion down.
But here's one final point for you- no one is swayed by your over the top rhetoric, no one believes the FUD, when you jump to such absurd extremes you're talking only to yourself. So please, kindly tone it down, and focus on having slightly more rational, down to earth, and more fact based conversations. I'm an Apple user too- I have an iPad2, but personally I don't care for one brand or the other, I go for best in class at the time. What I do
I mean, if I were Facebook that's exactly what I'd do.
I'd hack into some random guy's computer, and create a photoshopped image of a contract that says he owns half the company.
"You do not "fein interest" in something by bidding a few billion dollars. What if they had won? Very obviously they meant to get that, or at least it was a serious attempt."
If you want it, you also don't turn down an option of joining the consortium most likely to be able to purchase it either.
"so in fact Apple and Microsoft (and other partners) have been shown to be eerily prescient in requiring said patents even IF this had been Google's plan all along."
Or it could be because Apple has already been burnt by copying Nokia's IP without the license, so recognised that it kinda needed a pool in the cell phone arena to prevent other firms burning it in a similar way.
"It's not like Google has ONLY paid 12 billion dollars, they have bought continuing obligations that will cost more."
But it's not like much of that wont be recouped. Motorola has a cash pool of $3bn, and many of the sections of Motorola Google doesn't need can be sold off decreasing the figure further.
It's also not like they just bought patents as in the Nortel deal either, they bought the ability to produce their own mobile phones, their own tablets, their own satnavs, their own set top boxes etc. Motorola Mobility's current losses aren't that bad, and are almost exclusively a result of the fact that Motorola recently restructure spinning off Mobility as a separate company- that's always going to be a costly endeavour at first, it's always going to take a few years for something to reach profit, and in fact Mobility's losses have been relatively small compared to many other such spinoffs in corporate history. Products like the Xoom and Atrix have been succesful enough off the bat to dampen the inevitable costs of such a fundamental restructure meaning their turnaronud into a profitable firm will also be much quicker than has been the case for many companies in the past.
Google's strategy is to bring the web into the home, the car, and mobile, and buying Motorola allows them to make massive strides in this respect. They now have a hardware manufacturer that just happened to produce everything they needed for the fully integrated digital lifestyle vision to become a reality without relying on a 3rd party. That's kind of a big deal well beyond the mere mobile patent spat, and something that's arguably worth $12.5bn in itself, because it's frankly the future of computing. Apple realises this, which is why it's moving away from iTunes and moving things to the cloud so that the iPad, iPhone, Macs, and AppleTV can start to integrate better without being tied down to some piss poor desktop based application. Microsoft similarly realise it, with their integration between Windows Phone 7, the XBox 360, and Windows 8, and their deals with Ford for in car computing. Google can now build a similar digital ecosystem all by itself with this acquisition too.
People who think this is merely about mobile patents and nothing else are missing the bigger picture, it's not. It's about the future of consumer oriented computing across every facet of our lives.
Sony Ericsson produce Android handsets, and RIM's playbook supports Android apps, which is amusing, because it means there's actually two companies with a vested interest in defending Android in the Nortel patent chest deal too.
It depends on the terms of the deal of course, but I imagine Sony and RIM will have, as part of that deal, made sure it was the case that the Nortel patents couldn't be used to try and deem Android technology infringing of those patents too, else Sony and RIM could find themselves in the firing line either directly, or indirectly from the very patent chest they contributed to.
Agreed, it's a difficult balance giving employees freedom to interact with the public, but also maintaining some degree of professionality. If an employee is pissed off or otherwise emotional about something they they'll likely not be in a state of mind to really think about the potential consequences of what they post, as such I can at least full well understand why some companies choose to just not let their employees blog.
I suppose there's a fair argument that Google could've just told it's employees "don't blog about the patent situation for the next 3 months" or whatever, perhaps they missed an opportunity there, which in hindsight could've been solved by something like that, who knows.
"Presumably things like this is why they dropped the version number and moved to a "Living Standard". The HTML specification will be continually updated, so there's always going to be time to extend the spec to meet changes in the web."
Agreed but it also means you can't necessarily write an HTML5 compliant site, and leave it for a few years, and still find it's HTML5 compliant. A living spec means the standard is changing- and that's just not what competent standards do.
The real solution would've been one that abstracts semantics out of the presentation document, just as CSS abstracts styles away from the presentation document. The point is that if your standard has to be a "living standard" then you've got a fault in your standard, and WHATWG, despite having these flaws pointed out to them, has moved ahead anyway. This implies that their interest isn't in producing a decent spec, but more likely simply hijacking web standards for their own goals. This seems to have been largely succesful too, HTML5 is controlled almost entirely by desktop browser vendors like Google, Mozilla, and Apple, with no input from the people who actually develop web applications, no input from people who produce accessibility tools and so forth taken into account.
"The very minor incompatibilities between today's browsers are nothing like the incompatibilities of the Netscape/IE battles."
Have you looked at some of the HTML5 inconsistencies between browsers? Some web apps using things like canvas outright just don't work unless you're using a specific browser. That seems at least as bad as the Netscape/IE days to me.
"Modern incompatibilities tend to revolve around the best way to render rounded corners."
Modern yes, things were pretty well nailed down in recent years between browsers for the XHTML and HTML specs prior to HTML5, but HTML5 changes all that, everything's up in the air again and takes us back to square one.
"XML is never the right tool for the job, it's a perfect example of trying to be all things to all people"
I agree XML is grossly overused, but never the right tool for the job? That's silly.
"It's not really human-readable and certainly not human-writable"
What? It may be difficult to a newbie, but if you can write/read HTML then you can write/read XML. There's absolutely no difference in difficulty there.
"HTML is and always has been a presentational format; it isn't and shouldn't be a semantic format."
You know, I largely agree with this, but this is precisely why I said semantics should be applied with external sheets, just like styles are- precisely so HTML can stick to being what it is, a presentational format. I was under the impression you were arguing against me, but you seem to be agreeing with me here- if HTML is a presentational format and shouldn't have semantics embedded in it then why the fuck does HTML5 add an arbitrary and already outdated list of semantic tags? It just adds clutter to the spec, doesn't solve the semantic problem, and offers no real benefit. I'm not actually that fussed about the "semantic web" idea but my point is merely that if we are going to attach semantics to HTML, then let's at least fucking do it properly, rather than mix it in with the presentational markup in a very half-arsed manner.
"The original spec people spent about a decade coming up with nothing useful."
Look, avoiding the arguments about the usefulness of the spec (frankly I think some of it is useful personally) then even if mistakes have been made in the past, does that really excuse yet more mistakes like embedding semantics into the code in HTML5 excusable? WHATWG claimed to come around because W3C aren't listening- but they've not listened to the flaws themselves, they've produced a spec that's amateurish and as you point out, mixes semantics and the like directly into what should be a presentational format. Let's forget what the W3C has done wrong in the past- does that really make WHATWG's attempt worthy of avoiding criticism?
"The guys now in charge of the standards are the ones who wrote the software we all use daily to browse the web, rather than the ones who sat in endless discussions and produced nothing. I think you've got the wrong notion of who's inept."
Really? You don't think browser manufacturers are inept? How many serious bugs, how many serious security flaws, how many issues with performance, many of which are braindead flaws that should not even exist have we seen in browsers through the years. They may have been the ones that got us where we are, but that doesn't imply as you seem to suggest that they've done a good job. Browsers have, almost universally been shit pieces of software, we simply use them because they've always been as bad as each other. The only positive side to this is that at least competition is heating up in the browser market nowadays, so hopefully that wont remain the case.
"The problem with your argument is that there really are many instances where that 5 hours tomorrow never come."
Right. This is what COBOL developers used to say up until a few years before the millenium came along. Oh, and 640k is enough for anybody too.
"Adopting "XHTML6" in your interpretation would mean that nobody could save those 5 minutes, even if I'm just writing a hello world page."
Yes, except there's no time penalty to writing XML based HTML markup. So that assertion is false. The only downside is the initial learning curve is ever so slightly, but largely unnoticably more steep in that you simply have to learn about 4 additional very simple rules which come naturally about an hour after working with it.
"The truly worst code I've seen are the ones that try to be "future proof", "encapsulate functions", "pluggable", "modular", whatever. They make code that perform trivial functions look like a huge mess of spaghetti code."
Worst, or you simply don't understand them? When I was less experienced I found such well written systems harder to understand too, but for what you lose in difficulty for new developers you gain massively in productivity, maintainability, lower bug counts. Sure there are plenty of cases of overengineering out there, but to suggest it's universal is false. Just because some people fail to do things right, doesn't mean we should just do things bad all the time instead.
"Requirements of perfection (i.e. "separation of concerns", "lack of duplicate features", etc) is *not* universal, and you seem to be demanding it in one of the most widely used standards in the world."
It's universal in complicated software as that's the only way you'll ever get big systems built, and systems are getting bigger and bigger all the time so it's only going to become more important. Sure I agree small projects don't need it. I'm not advocating that everyone should have to adhere to these standards for every project- if people don't want to be standards compliant that's fine, but standards exist to support interop and HTML5 fails miserably in that respect which is a big problem. Standards should specify what should be done, and if it isn't then fine- just don't be standards compliant. But suggesting even the most poorly interoperable tosh with horrendous inconsistency is an acceptable standard? that's just an awful situation.
"One thing that XML failed miserably is keeping simple things simple."
But it's not necessarily designed to be. Although I don't personally think it's that complex, it's really not hard to understand XML. XML is designed to facilitate interop and to help make moving data between systems easier. Sure you might not think it's simple but it's tremendously good at what it's designed to do- far easier than working with arbitrary data formats. The web is the biggest thing in the IT world, wanting that to be just as easily interoperated with should not be seen as a bad thing- much less when HTML itself already has 99.9999% of the complexity of XML, so the minor added rules of XML aren't a disproportionate increase in difficulty relative to the massive benefits of a longer term goal- a fully interoperable web where data can be exchanged to web pages from documents, and from web pages into documents, and databases with simple XSL transforms. For someone not having any background in computing I agree XML might be difficult, but if someone is capable of HTML, they're plenty capable of XML so the argument of it being to complex for the web is just utter fud.
"The moment you started ad-homing the parent and calling him a "terrible developer", you diminished your argument and damaged your own credibility."
I only pointed out what he made clear from his post. You simply cannot be a good developer if you genuinely think quality should just be chucked out the window so easily. I understand in some projects it must, but implying it's never a concern? that's a bad developer.
"The parent was criticising the a certain engineering philosophy with XML, and asserting that the complexity of XML is disproportionate to the benefits it delivers "
Yes, if you work on very simple systems. Many of us don't, systems are becoming more and more complex, so XML is becoming more and more important. Developers who only work on simple systems and think their simple system mindset applies globally are destined to be left in the dust.
"You lose."
Oh right, I'm glad you decided that. Because obviously you're the grand dictator of who wins debates on the internet.
Oh wait, no you're not. You're just another online nobody who himself thinks he knows all, but manages to only demonstrate a lack of real experience in the field he likes to profess about.
Don't worry, perhaps one day you'll be competent enough to play with the big boys, on real projects.
"The WHATWG accepted input from everyone. Stop spreading lies."
Yes everyone, but again, what does it matter if they "accept" input, when they don't listen? How else do you explain the large amount of faults in the spec which have no reason to exist, but were pointed out to them time and time again?
"I recall them saying that versioning should be dropped because HTML is an ever-evolving spec, which is pretty much right."
Er, no, that's stupid. You clearly have no concept of why standards even exist in the first place if you genuinely believe this.
"XML prioritises well-formed mark-up while the focus should be on semantically rich pages."
Why prioritise when you can have both with the sort of solution I and many others have pointed out? The very premise you have to choose one over the other is false.
"It requires the client to check for well-formed mark-up each time when it's the job of the server/webmaster. If the check fails, you get an unhelpful error page instead of the content."
This is a FUD argument. Making sure content is well formed adhering to XML syntax doesn't inherently mean you have to serve it as XML. Just ensuring the content adheres to XML syntax alone gives you all the advantages.
"It's an extra barrier of entry for beginning webmasters that ultimately isn't meaningful. Everyone should easily be able to publish on the web."
But no one's publishing on the web now in pure HTML- they're all using blogger, facebook, twitter and so forth. You know, the kind of apps that are written by professional developers that would be better served by a spec that supports good practice software development.
"Moving the problem doesn't seem like a solution to me."
If you think the solution I suggested is just "moving the problem" rather than a fully fledged solution and you can't grasp that from my previous explanation then you have no place discussing this topic as you clearly don't even understand basic principles about web and software development. Putting style information in CSS style sheets wasn't merely about moving the content- it was about producing a far more flexible solution.
"It sounds to me like you're the one who is angry here that they didn't incorporate your ideas."
Which would be a great troll comment, if they were just my ideas. The problem is even Microsoft, the largest browser vendor on earth at the time pointed out half the flaws with HTML5 and whilst they've accepted now they're going to have to live with it as it is, they were clearly unhappy too with the process. When the process doesn't even listen to the largest browser vendor on earth when it points out legitimate faults, which to this day are not fixed, how can you seriously claim it's an open, democratic process?
"Your idea also sounds like making HTML into something it is not, and that's bad for backwards compatibility."
Backwards compatibility is done in the browser- changing a future HTML spec doesn't do a thing to backwards compatability providing the browser manufacturers are competent enough to ensure their browser handles the new spec properly without them simultaneously deciding to break the old spec. It's not a hard problem, computer scientists have been doing it years with supporting different protocol versions and so forth. But again, because you don't understand this it suggests you're trying to engage in a topic which you simply do not understand the details of. You sound like a fanboy who has jumped on the HTML5 bandwagon without actually really having any technical knowledge of web development and software development- you just know it's the latest buzzword, so feel you must defend it.
Seriously, if you're going to argue about a topic either learn about it first, or if you do understand it, try to avoid making comments that make it look like you're playing dumb for the sake of trying to make an argument.
"You're guilty of revisionism there. The truth is that the XHTML 2.0 spec writers hijacked the web standards process, locking out everyone from commenting and contributing to the process. The spec was becoming a nightmare with things like making every element a possible anchor."
What utter tosh. The HTML specification process was managed by the W3C whose members comprise just about every single industry sector under the sun and number in the hundreds. Are you seriously saying this is a less balanced process than a couple of browser manufacturers going their own way and riding a way of populism and ignorance to push their spec? I'm not sure how the current situation is better where sure comments are allowed, but they're ignored by grand dicator Hixie et al. I suggest you check the W3C's member list and see how many varied the input into XHTML2 actually was. No, what WHATWG mean when they say people were left out is "We threw our teddy out the pram, because the other firms wouldn't let us have our own way". THAT is preciely what it was all about, now they have their own way, and they're proving what a shit job they can do. It seems there was good reason no one was listening to them before.
The spec was taking time because it takes time to make sure things are done properly, and to make sure raised issues are examined, and, if need be, correct. WHATWG still don't get this to this day, which is why they've declared HTML5 a living spec, ready for use, rather than just waiting for W3C to ratify it when it's been confirmed acceptable.
But even then, since when was everyone a standards expert? standards aren't designed so that everyone can insert whatever the fuck idea they want, they're designed to support interoperability above all else. HTML5 is an epic fail at this, particularly with it's backwards move away from XML, and it's "live" spec ideology. It was far far better having thousands of experts from hundreds of varied companies running the process, than a select bunch of dictators pretending to listen, but not actually caring. Further, at least the W3C had proper accountability processes, again WHATWG is more like a monarchy with grand dicator hixie at the top, and his court closing rank around him when any criticism arises of his plans.
"it's to give the web developer the tools that he has been missing for years"
Right, so why does introducing new and important features require taking a backwards step, like pushing SGML-esque markup up the long proven beneficial XML markup? That isn't about giving developers tools they need, that's about a select group who never quite got why XML etc. were important pushing their view on the rest of the world.
"For example, there's no semantic meaning to be gained from <div class="article">. Introducing the article element does add semantic meaning."
No but there is semantic meaning to be gained by adding something akin to CSS where you can either do it inline with semantic= or with a sheet declaring semantics which are applied to the relevant classes. In contrast, there's only partial semantic meaning to be gained from:
<article>
</article>
<div id="comments">
<div class="comment">
</div>
</div>
It's a half arsed solution, it only helps an arbitrary set of components of a page, it's not a full solution. It's 100% useless for applying semantics to many elements of modern pages because the list of sections that got their own tags is based on an arbitrary and already long outdated study of prominent tags. In this context it's easy to question whether it was ever about semantics at all, or simply about being able to write yet more sloppy markup- skip the classes, just chuck some arbitrary one word tags in, but only in some places, because the list is necessarily finite, and rapidly out of date. Again, this sort of proposed solution I mention has all the benefits of CSS too- spread separation of concerns amongst a de
"And it's time web-developers got back into control actually."
IMO this is a key part of the problem. WHATWG hijacked the web standards process, and primarily folks behind Safari and Firefox.
The problem is whilst Firefox was much better than IE at standards compliance it was still far from perfect, and Safari for Windows is probably the worst browser I've ever had the misfortunate to touch.
If these people can't even get their own field right, why are we trusting them with getting the web standards themselves right? We've seen in the last year how silly Firefox development has become with it's fucked up versioning system, completely useless features, increasing memory leaks, increased bloat. That's not the sort of folk I want developing web standards.
An argument I've seen for HTML5 is that the layman can't cope with XML syntax, now, apart from the fact that I think that's frankly bollocks, it's not hard, there's also an element of so what? How many laymen actually write markup nowadays? Everyone publishes through web applications like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, and so forth, so wouldn't it make more sense to make things easier for the professional web developers who build these systems, than the theoretical average joe who will never actually touch markup in the end in practice nowadays anyway?
I completely agree- web standards need to be built for the people who actually use them day in day out - the web applications developers, not for some mythical average joe, and not for the browser vendors who STILL manage to fuck up their implementation even when they're the ones outright dictating them now.
I think there's a fair bit of mileage in what you've said.
Let's be honest the web wasn't designed for interactive applications and I think there's a fair question as to whether if that's what we want, then shouldn't we build a tool for just that rather than mangling HTML to try and do it, and do it badly?
It'll take a brave soul to define the next generation of web standards to replace HTML, something that's geared to proper interactive applications rather than mere content display as is the case with HTML. But I don't think you're far wrong in suggesting that that's the real, true solution to the problem. It'll be difficult if not only because it'd mean getting the browser manufacturers on board, and they couldn't even get the relatively trivial task of implementing proper XML display engines in place- something which you quite righly note, the likes of Microsoft with WPF, and many other such manufacturers have done with ease in their technologies.
Whether it's WPF or something else (probably something else, because I doubt people want a Microsoft technology becoming dominant on the web!), that sort of solution is certainly optimal.
There isn't a lack of XML compatibility, HTML5 still has it's XHTML5 mode, which still fully supports XML markup. The problem is that the HTML route not only exists, but seems encouraged, which means that rather than a push towards the much better XML syntax that we've had over the last 10 years, we're now in danger of seeing a backwards trend to the much worse syntax such that we run the risk of being back where we were 10 years ago.
You may think it's no big deal but it really is. Thanks to XML's tools that are prevalent in just about every language, it's trivial to take markup and automatically manipulate it in whatever way is needed. You may still be thinking so what? well, in this mobile era, where screens are changing form and size all the time, where we may well soon even see wristwatch computing become a much more interesting reality, then the ability to trivially and efficiently transform content on the fly to suit the display device, or program that's manipulating the content is kind of important.
Computers just aren't good at ambiguity, and whilst you can often work around ambiguity, it's inevitable there will be issues, cases where the developer didn't think this or that might happen. Sometimes ambiguity is important and even useful, but web content is not one of those cases. HTML5 vastly increases ambiguity, whereas XML removes it, and this is one reason why HTML5 is bad, and is a backwards step for the web. We can work around HTML5's issues, and if HTML5 grows and grows and grows, we'll have to, and we probably will. But why are we even having to when the solution already exists? - just write better markup in the first place with XML syntax.
"Another sad case of a XML brainwashed believer...."
Believer? that implies I merely believe XML is useful. No, sorry, many of us in the real world actually find XML useful. We develop large systems where XML helps no end. I'm sorry that you've never worked on a project where XML has come in useful, but some of us are competent enought o actually use the right tool for the job.
"XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?"
Yes thanks. We had an old black box system that we needed to integrate with a new web based system, it produced web pages that were thankfully at least XHTML1 compliant. Because we couldn't yet get rid of this system we were fortunately able to XSLT transform the output into useful data, and feed back inputs to it to transparently integrate it with the new system. If it had only adhered to HTML5's bastardised SGML syntax then it would've been a nightmare to integrate with this legacy system.
"XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers. You may say the standard is "shit", the practices are "amateurish" (when benchmarked against what they teach you in the textbooks), but all that counts is what people are able to do with the stuff."
Right, and this is the problem. Too many developers haven't come from a professional background. They write code that would make old school C++ developers, and high end Java developers alike cry themselves to sleep at night. They managed to get a basic site working in PHP once, and have moved on from their, they don't understand what MVC or OOP is and don't see why they should because they never needed it so just carry on as normal. The problem is, they're also the ones who are responsible for sites that are always falling over, getting hacked, miserably hopeless in terms of scalability. Stuff isn't put into textbooks for a laugh, or to give you something to study, it's put in there base on experience, it's put in there so that you don't repeat the mistakes made by others before you - and there's the problem, too many web developers do repeat those mistakes time and time again, which is why things like SQL injection and XSS attacks are some of the most common to this day, despite solutions to them being long available and known, well, if you read the textbooks that is.
"Theoretical aesthetic purity is not an ends in itself. The "separation of concerns", "removal of arbitrary tags/duplicate functionality", "future proof" stuffs actually make the XML/XHTML spec more useless, harder to work with, and decreases productivity. You may marvel at its aesthetic beauty, but for people like us who actually need to do things on a schedule, those restrictions hinder our productivity when there's no way to opt out of it."
You are a terribly developer. Sorry, it needs to be said. You've basically admitted you're writing terrible code just to get something working. Your code is the type of code responsible for nightmarish maintainability, horrendous bugs and security exploits. Please, get the fuck out of the software development industry now. We don't need more bad software. I understand that in some places the constraints are such that speed of development and hence reduced cost is put well over and above quality but that's not the same everywhere. Please don't assume your complete lack of focus on quality is universal.
"For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to bold-text? Why should we have to , or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?"
It depends. Sure it might take you an extra 5 minutes today, but that's 5 hours saved tommorrow when you have to come back and fix things. Separating off semantics means that for larger software teams you can even have people dedicated to looking after just that, so the developers can focus on developing, without getting in each other's way.
"The HTML spec people took 10 years to realize the mistake of going the XML way. It seems that you still
Frankly, the spec is a bit of a joke.
The semantic tags are out of date before the spec has even finalised, because it doesn't cover thing like comments tags which are prominent in todays sites, illustrating what a dumb decision it was to add a bunch of random semantic tags based on an arbitrary web survey carried out years ago. Semantics should be applied to classes just like styles are using a semantic definition language. This would of course have the advantage of allowing 3rd parties to produce semantic definition archives for no longer maintained sites etc. that browser could look up but well, there you go, that's what happens when people who apparently don't have even the slightest grasp of separation of concerns get their hands on something as fundamental as an HTML spec. It's like they didn't even realise why it's better to not have all your styles embedded in your document structure markup - i.e. your HTML and hence why CSS was developed the way it was.
Thus far it seems to have taken the web backwards in terms of compatibility, many of the new features work differently in different browsers, harking back to the days of HTML3/4 and Netscape/IE battles.
XML syntax seems discouraged which means you'll run into more people using the SGML syntax which seems to be pushed more than XML which makes the web more of a ballache to work with- no more of a push towards simple XSLT to trivially move data around and into and out of web displayable formats and instead a push away from that. I don't really care if it's served as XML or not, the point is that if it's not well formed XML it becomes a massive ballache to deal with, because XML tools and libraries are so prevalent.
The ethos surrounding HTML5 is that well, lots of old sites didn't follow newer standards, so lets make those web sites standard by taking everything they did shit, and making that standard. So great, yes, let's make shit, the standard. No, that's not how standards work- standards define a high quality that allows maximum compatibility which developers should strive to adhere to, if some don't then don't cater to them- just point out they're shit because they're not standards compliant.
Really, I don't think I'll touch it unless it gets to the point where you can't avoid it. I think I'll wait for a spec that's written by adults than a bunch of PHP kiddies who don't have the first clue about how to right good web software, and instead prefer to bung any old shit into the mix and call it a standard. Not to mention the drama about it being a living standard- good standards don't need to be living, good standards are generic and flexible enough to be future proof for a good number of years - you know, like, say, the XML spec.
It's not that I don't like some of the new features proposed in HTML5 like canvas etc., I think they're great ideas. It's just a shame the rest of it is just so painfully amateurish from a software development perspective. The net result is a spec that basically takes the web back to where it was 10 years ago- a messy inconsistent mess of arbitrary tags that needlessly duplicate functionality, causing annoying ambiguity with a dash of incompatibility chucked in to boot.
I'm hoping for a quick iteration to XHTML6, run by people who actually know what they're doing so we can just bypass the mess that is HTML5, but that's probably a bit much to hope for.
I hadn't heard about this, but was intrigued to know more, so I Googled it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade
Particularly:
"five US JDAM bombs hit the People's Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade"
Five JDAMs? well they certainly didn't fuck around did they.
As you say, it seems quite clear what it was really about:
"Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet testified before a congressional committee that the bombing was the only one in the campaign organized and directed by his agency."
Which really says one of two things:
a) We're so incompetent you shouldn't let the CIA ever direct bombing campaigns, because the one time we did we fucked it up hardcore.
Or:
b) We knew exactly what we were doing, mission accomplished.
I think the latter is indeed most likely!