Then they will only get those sites that have chosen their standard. If RDFa is indeed superior then a search engine utilising it will ultimately win out over those who choose to ignore it.
All of the major search engines have coordinated to support an opposing standard. It's incredibly naïve to suggest that merit alone is enough to challenge collusion of massive corporations, especially when those massive corporations represent almost the entire market. Merit doesn't dictate which standard wins; power does.
And h.264 has been widely adopted simply because it's downsides over a free alternative don't affect the decision-makers in a measurable way
Right, it just affects everyone else in a negative way. Thanks for demonstrating my point.
why push back against these companies when there is so little reason to do so?
There's tremendous reason to do so. h.264 represents a huge barrier to entry for a huge majority of people into a huge segment of the web. Fortunately, this is a space where corporate collusion is not nearly so great, and there is still a chance that the fates aren't sealed.
Metadata like this is not intended for browsers. It's intended for webmasters to indicate to search engines what exactly is in their pages.
Why the heck not? What law of nature determines that a "search engine" (whatever that is) is permitted to build powerful data-driven services, but that a "browser" (whatever that is) is not? RDFa specifies, in its abstract: "When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience:an event on a web page can be directly imported into a user's desktop calendar; a license on a document can be detected so that users can be informed of their rights automatically; a photo's creator, camera setting information, resolution, location and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing." Microdata uses, throughout its specification, the term "user agent", the same term the rest of the HTML specification uses to refer to browser et al.
Sure, you could write a plugin for a browser which used this data for some purpose
Or, you know, a browser which does so directly. Why not? Taking one of the examples from the RDFa abstract, I would imagine Apple has great interest in providing in-browser capabilities to interact between calendar web applications and iCal. This kind of metadata allows just that; why is it not the "real purpose"?
Being "invested in metadata" is such a vague, pointless claim. Who the fuck cares?
Let me clarify then: a huge, enormous part of their business model is driven by software and integration systems which leverage metadata. Their investment in the web is sure to reflect that.
This metadata in particular is describing websites to search engines.
Quite plainly it's not. It's describing structured data to machines.
So yahoo is to blame for this bloated web 2.0 buzzword shit that sprang up? Where simple damm text pages now take megs instead of a couple k?
The tools can certainly be used that way, but don't dictate it. YUI is modular, so it can be pretty lightweight while still providing good library functionality over the standard DOM. That said, it probably isn't best suited for "text pages", and neither is most "web 2.0" type functionality. Blame the library collectors, not the library developers.
My dictionary reads: "a brief or trivial item of news or information".
And the meaning of a word isn't "reality"; language is inherently social, and words are given meaning socially. Wikipedia (and my dictionary for that matter) is not the arbiter of reality, just a source (among many) intended to catalogue it.
Apple is heavily invested in metadata, is a browser vendor, and is almost comically reputed for their interfaces which marry power and ease-of-use. They *heavily* influence web standards. They have weight to throw around here.
Yahoo has been a pretty prominent contributor to developer tools for "web 2.0" and have probably had a great deal more impact than their market position would predict. That influence isn't going to vanish overnight.
Really? So, on a site like Slashdot, with a wide variety of locales represented, what would the algorithm do with "11/4/2011"? Would it surmise that, in the case of Slashdot, it may be m/d/y, it may be d/m/y, but it's probably just a bunch of nerds arguing and shouldn't be indexed at all? Metadata is made for having a standard way to describing loosely defined data; the example of an ambiguous date is such a great example because there are plenty of valid human-understandable date representations that will remain ambiguous in machine parsing, and ultimately deciding on one preferred representation is a bias, and ultimately a standard, and doesn't reflect the flexibility of data presentation that exists (and ought to exist). That is why it belongs in metadata.
The great thing about metadata is that it provides worlds of opportunity to differentiate featuresets while maintaining interoperability; that is, to offer your custom functionality beyond the scope of the standard, rather than contrary to it.
You mean... the entire web community "can" or "will" be the ones to decide whether they will cooperate with the source of most, if not almost all, of their traffic? And what happens when Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agree to index the syntax they agreed to propose? That's a lot of weight to be pitted against. Even more weight than that (frankly, Apple and Adobe) which undermined the "web community" by choosing h.264 over any free alternative. Don't mistake the fact that there's a "standards process" with "public comment" for anything resembling the will of the people who have to actually consume this stuff.
And don't get me wrong; most of HTML5 is a welcome departure from the W3C direction, despite being dictated by a handful of huge corporations. It's just silly to pretend that that departure came from anything other than a handful of huge corporations.
For what it's worth, since I've unwittingly done "cheeks'" propaganda job for them, I'll go ahead and address the Holocaust too.
Holocaust: happened. Committed: not by Palestinians, who bear no responsibility to shoulder the burden of making wrongs right. Homeland: probably a good idea, especially in the context of the Holocaust. "Jewish state": not the same thing as a homeland. "Jewish state" in Palestine: produced, inevitably, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and the colonial relationship that will make more ethnic cleansing and dispossession a constant and ongoing inevitability.
The Holocaust is a good defense of a Jewish safe-haven; it's an awful defense of an ethno-religious settler-colonial state created to engage in conquest.
Whoever moderated this "troll", assuming you know what "troll" means, I am impressed with your faith in the mental capacities of the people I'm apparently "trolling".
South African apartheid didn't apply to "its own citizens", it applied to a white elite ruling over a (set of) black nation(s); it implemented "sovereignty" for the black South Africans under terms like "homelands" and "bantustans". And while the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are not Israeli citizens, they are a population Israel has ruled over since 1967, and has effectively permanent sovereignty over. The whole of Palestine has been wholly Israel for 44 years, and given Israeli politics and US support, will continue to do so indefinitely. Israel can't have both rule over the Palestinians and independence from them.
And while Israel doesn't have "Jewish beaches and Arab beaches", it has "Israeli roads and Palestinian 'roads'", and a whole set of separate laws that apply differently to Jews than to Palestinians (whether Israeli citizens or not). The most obvious case is the fact that Palestinians are not permitted to emigrate to Israel (while Jews are, by law, guaranteed that right) and are excluded from buying most land held in public trust. And while building permits are ostensibly not segregated, denials of permits are almost exclusively given to Palestinians.
s/South Africa/Israel/ s/white/Israeli Jews/ s/black/Palestinian/ s/the majority/roughly half the population/ s/small number/politically dominant quasi-racial class/ s/20th century/20th and 21st centuries/ s/1980s/present/ s/banned in 1994/not yet banned/
The term Apartheid is not employed by Israel, which apparently wants to enjoy the propaganda coup of "democracy" while employing much of the same institutional policies that South Africa employed under the Apartheid regime. But the comparison is mostly apt, which has been recognized by former South African Apartheid leaders and resisters alike. There are some areas where the comparison breaks down, but those areas aren't particularly flattering to Israel; the most obvious difference being that, while Apartheid South Africa depended on black labor and exploited it in much the same way the US depends on migrant labor, Israel has shed a great deal of its dependence on Palestinian labor, leaving the population not just imprisoned under the rule of another people, but almost totally stripped of any kind of economic existence or leverage with which to improve their conditions.
There are other, probably more apt, comparisons available, but they tend to be just as controversial among those who take Israel's claims to be a "democracy" and so forth at face value. The most obvious is to the countless precedents of (settler and imperial) colonialism, and here the comparisons don't break down at all... except in the minor areas that they differ among themselves. It's probably wiser, in the long run, to expose the colonialist system itself for what it is, and to put Apartheid, too, in that context. But the use of Apartheid as a frame of reference remains relevant, as the systems are incredibly similar.
AFAIK (unless NoScript goes much further than its name suggests), many tactics available to poisoned search results won't be hindered by a script blocker; JS/etc. don't have any more power to initiate a download than a plain HTML webpage (with a meta tag) or an HTTP response header (with Location specified).
I don't think the AC was lecturing anyone, and in fact specifically said in the line you quoted that they don't necessarily oppose eating meat. If you're so self-conscious about your diet, you might consider spending more time being sure that it's the diet you want and less time lashing out at strangers on the Internet.
All of that said, I think it's a mistake for most people, at least in industrial societies, to regard their diet as a personal choice. A personal choice is a choice which only affects the person[s] making the choice. For those of us in industrial societies, our dietary choices affect far more than just ourselves. Even if you aren't willing to consider the effects on the animals you eat (or consume non-meat products from), the different farming methods available can have a huge impact on the quality of the surrounding environment—large factory farming operations create massive amounts of pollution, particularly harming water—as well as on the quality, diversity and affordability of foods available to the population at large.
He doesn't have to kill animals for food, but if he's to eat animals *somebody* has to do so. Having someone else do the killing is no more and no less an expression of "wanting to kill animals". There are plenty of reasons to want to be the person who does the slaughtering beyond a desire to kill: an ethical inclination to take responsibility for one's own actions; concern for the quality of treatment of the animal; concern for the quality of the meat.
I'm not sure what it has to do with being "discontent with having access to everything", as being involved in the production of the food one eats is a "thing" to "have access to"—and it's something that many, many people don't or can't have. That said, I don't see what would be wrong with such discontent; "having access to everything" hardly sounds like a fulfilling life, and while I have no interest in portraying him as anything heroic, I would imagine it's doubly unfulfilling to a person who is accustomed to creating.
And I'm not sure how any of that is reflective of "reevaluating the fundamental aspects of life"; how is "having access to everything" or having your animal slaughtering done for you a "fundamental aspect of life"? And even—no, especially—if it is, what is so wrong with reevaluating that?
There is not one component of your point that makes a lick of sense. I can't really fathom why people entrenched in the accoutrements of modern techno-living are so threatened by people who question some of those accoutrements... Are you afraid that you, too, might some day need to get your hands a little dirty?
Why wasn't it designed for those applications? It's a general purpose programming language. Perhaps the browser's APIs (DOM) weren't designed with those applications in mind, but even the first standardization of the DOM (DOM Level 1) APIs could implement most if not all of those applications' features, one way or another (eg. submitting forms to a frame—a feature introduced with JavaScript in Netscape 2—and periodically appending new scripts which contain server data).
There's a lot of reasons that those kinds of applications didn't appear until later, but they could have been made much sooner. But poor standards support in browsers made interoperability a nightmare, slow client hardware made performance questionable, and ultimately poor understanding of JavaScript and the DOM delayed serious uptake among developers for about a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they will only get those sites that have chosen their standard. If RDFa is indeed superior then a search engine utilising it will ultimately win out over those who choose to ignore it.
All of the major search engines have coordinated to support an opposing standard. It's incredibly naïve to suggest that merit alone is enough to challenge collusion of massive corporations, especially when those massive corporations represent almost the entire market. Merit doesn't dictate which standard wins; power does.
And h.264 has been widely adopted simply because it's downsides over a free alternative don't affect the decision-makers in a measurable way
Right, it just affects everyone else in a negative way. Thanks for demonstrating my point.
why push back against these companies when there is so little reason to do so?
There's tremendous reason to do so. h.264 represents a huge barrier to entry for a huge majority of people into a huge segment of the web. Fortunately, this is a space where corporate collusion is not nearly so great, and there is still a chance that the fates aren't sealed.
Metadata like this is not intended for browsers. It's intended for webmasters to indicate to search engines what exactly is in their pages.
Why the heck not? What law of nature determines that a "search engine" (whatever that is) is permitted to build powerful data-driven services, but that a "browser" (whatever that is) is not? RDFa specifies, in its abstract: "When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience: an event on a web page can be directly imported into a user's desktop calendar; a license on a document can be detected so that users can be informed of their rights automatically; a photo's creator, camera setting information, resolution, location and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing." Microdata uses, throughout its specification, the term "user agent", the same term the rest of the HTML specification uses to refer to browser et al.
Sure, you could write a plugin for a browser which used this data for some purpose
Or, you know, a browser which does so directly. Why not? Taking one of the examples from the RDFa abstract, I would imagine Apple has great interest in providing in-browser capabilities to interact between calendar web applications and iCal. This kind of metadata allows just that; why is it not the "real purpose"?
Being "invested in metadata" is such a vague, pointless claim. Who the fuck cares?
Let me clarify then: a huge, enormous part of their business model is driven by software and integration systems which leverage metadata. Their investment in the web is sure to reflect that.
This metadata in particular is describing websites to search engines.
Quite plainly it's not. It's describing structured data to machines.
So yahoo is to blame for this bloated web 2.0 buzzword shit that sprang up? Where simple damm text pages now take megs instead of a couple k?
The tools can certainly be used that way, but don't dictate it. YUI is modular, so it can be pretty lightweight while still providing good library functionality over the standard DOM. That said, it probably isn't best suited for "text pages", and neither is most "web 2.0" type functionality. Blame the library collectors, not the library developers.
My dictionary reads: "a brief or trivial item of news or information". And the meaning of a word isn't "reality"; language is inherently social, and words are given meaning socially. Wikipedia (and my dictionary for that matter) is not the arbiter of reality, just a source (among many) intended to catalogue it.
Apple is heavily invested in metadata, is a browser vendor, and is almost comically reputed for their interfaces which marry power and ease-of-use. They *heavily* influence web standards. They have weight to throw around here.
Even masturbating furiously over the standard we wish was adopted is a better thing to do than implement the standard we wish wasn't adopted.
I viewed the source:
<div about="urn:ISBN:0967686563">I, for <span content="viagra">one</span>, welcome <span resource="http://www.goatse.bz/">our</span> new mark-up vocabulary overlords.</div>
Yahoo has been a pretty prominent contributor to developer tools for "web 2.0" and have probably had a great deal more impact than their market position would predict. That influence isn't going to vanish overnight.
Really? So, on a site like Slashdot, with a wide variety of locales represented, what would the algorithm do with "11/4/2011"? Would it surmise that, in the case of Slashdot, it may be m/d/y, it may be d/m/y, but it's probably just a bunch of nerds arguing and shouldn't be indexed at all? Metadata is made for having a standard way to describing loosely defined data; the example of an ambiguous date is such a great example because there are plenty of valid human-understandable date representations that will remain ambiguous in machine parsing, and ultimately deciding on one preferred representation is a bias, and ultimately a standard, and doesn't reflect the flexibility of data presentation that exists (and ought to exist). That is why it belongs in metadata.
The great thing about metadata is that it provides worlds of opportunity to differentiate featuresets while maintaining interoperability; that is, to offer your custom functionality beyond the scope of the standard, rather than contrary to it.
Er, yes it is. You might not like it, but it specifies something. Albeit poorly in some areas.
You mean... the entire web community "can" or "will" be the ones to decide whether they will cooperate with the source of most, if not almost all, of their traffic? And what happens when Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agree to index the syntax they agreed to propose? That's a lot of weight to be pitted against. Even more weight than that (frankly, Apple and Adobe) which undermined the "web community" by choosing h.264 over any free alternative. Don't mistake the fact that there's a "standards process" with "public comment" for anything resembling the will of the people who have to actually consume this stuff.
And don't get me wrong; most of HTML5 is a welcome departure from the W3C direction, despite being dictated by a handful of huge corporations. It's just silly to pretend that that departure came from anything other than a handful of huge corporations.
Polite? This is Slashdot. But to be fair, being polite rarely gets anything other than passed over here.
I've never heard it used that way. I have, however, heard "truism" used that way, and I'm not sure it really means that either.
Oh, I get it. Good job.
For what it's worth, since I've unwittingly done "cheeks'" propaganda job for them, I'll go ahead and address the Holocaust too.
Holocaust: happened.
Committed: not by Palestinians, who bear no responsibility to shoulder the burden of making wrongs right.
Homeland: probably a good idea, especially in the context of the Holocaust.
"Jewish state": not the same thing as a homeland.
"Jewish state" in Palestine: produced, inevitably, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and the colonial relationship that will make more ethnic cleansing and dispossession a constant and ongoing inevitability.
The Holocaust is a good defense of a Jewish safe-haven; it's an awful defense of an ethno-religious settler-colonial state created to engage in conquest.
Whoever moderated this "troll", assuming you know what "troll" means, I am impressed with your faith in the mental capacities of the people I'm apparently "trolling".
South African apartheid didn't apply to "its own citizens", it applied to a white elite ruling over a (set of) black nation(s); it implemented "sovereignty" for the black South Africans under terms like "homelands" and "bantustans". And while the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are not Israeli citizens, they are a population Israel has ruled over since 1967, and has effectively permanent sovereignty over. The whole of Palestine has been wholly Israel for 44 years, and given Israeli politics and US support, will continue to do so indefinitely. Israel can't have both rule over the Palestinians and independence from them.
And while Israel doesn't have "Jewish beaches and Arab beaches", it has "Israeli roads and Palestinian 'roads'", and a whole set of separate laws that apply differently to Jews than to Palestinians (whether Israeli citizens or not). The most obvious case is the fact that Palestinians are not permitted to emigrate to Israel (while Jews are, by law, guaranteed that right) and are excluded from buying most land held in public trust. And while building permits are ostensibly not segregated, denials of permits are almost exclusively given to Palestinians.
This is a very small sliver of a very long list.
s/South Africa/Israel/
s/white/Israeli Jews/
s/black/Palestinian/
s/the majority/roughly half the population/
s/small number/politically dominant quasi-racial class/
s/20th century/20th and 21st centuries/
s/1980s/present/
s/banned in 1994/not yet banned/
The term Apartheid is not employed by Israel, which apparently wants to enjoy the propaganda coup of "democracy" while employing much of the same institutional policies that South Africa employed under the Apartheid regime. But the comparison is mostly apt, which has been recognized by former South African Apartheid leaders and resisters alike. There are some areas where the comparison breaks down, but those areas aren't particularly flattering to Israel; the most obvious difference being that, while Apartheid South Africa depended on black labor and exploited it in much the same way the US depends on migrant labor, Israel has shed a great deal of its dependence on Palestinian labor, leaving the population not just imprisoned under the rule of another people, but almost totally stripped of any kind of economic existence or leverage with which to improve their conditions.
There are other, probably more apt, comparisons available, but they tend to be just as controversial among those who take Israel's claims to be a "democracy" and so forth at face value. The most obvious is to the countless precedents of (settler and imperial) colonialism, and here the comparisons don't break down at all... except in the minor areas that they differ among themselves. It's probably wiser, in the long run, to expose the colonialist system itself for what it is, and to put Apartheid, too, in that context. But the use of Apartheid as a frame of reference remains relevant, as the systems are incredibly similar.
"Your worries will disappear" is one of the most worrisome things one can say in a discussion about security.
AFAIK (unless NoScript goes much further than its name suggests), many tactics available to poisoned search results won't be hindered by a script blocker; JS/etc. don't have any more power to initiate a download than a plain HTML webpage (with a meta tag) or an HTTP response header (with Location specified).
I don't think the AC was lecturing anyone, and in fact specifically said in the line you quoted that they don't necessarily oppose eating meat. If you're so self-conscious about your diet, you might consider spending more time being sure that it's the diet you want and less time lashing out at strangers on the Internet.
All of that said, I think it's a mistake for most people, at least in industrial societies, to regard their diet as a personal choice. A personal choice is a choice which only affects the person[s] making the choice. For those of us in industrial societies, our dietary choices affect far more than just ourselves. Even if you aren't willing to consider the effects on the animals you eat (or consume non-meat products from), the different farming methods available can have a huge impact on the quality of the surrounding environment—large factory farming operations create massive amounts of pollution, particularly harming water—as well as on the quality, diversity and affordability of foods available to the population at large.
You and your cheeseburger are not an island.
Wait... so because corporate farms/slaughterhouses are inhumane, so too must be all meat production?
He doesn't have to kill animals for food, but if he's to eat animals *somebody* has to do so. Having someone else do the killing is no more and no less an expression of "wanting to kill animals". There are plenty of reasons to want to be the person who does the slaughtering beyond a desire to kill: an ethical inclination to take responsibility for one's own actions; concern for the quality of treatment of the animal; concern for the quality of the meat.
I'm not sure what it has to do with being "discontent with having access to everything", as being involved in the production of the food one eats is a "thing" to "have access to"—and it's something that many, many people don't or can't have. That said, I don't see what would be wrong with such discontent; "having access to everything" hardly sounds like a fulfilling life, and while I have no interest in portraying him as anything heroic, I would imagine it's doubly unfulfilling to a person who is accustomed to creating.
And I'm not sure how any of that is reflective of "reevaluating the fundamental aspects of life"; how is "having access to everything" or having your animal slaughtering done for you a "fundamental aspect of life"? And even—no, especially—if it is, what is so wrong with reevaluating that?
There is not one component of your point that makes a lick of sense. I can't really fathom why people entrenched in the accoutrements of modern techno-living are so threatened by people who question some of those accoutrements... Are you afraid that you, too, might some day need to get your hands a little dirty?
Node is working on adopting Web Workers, but it already has the ability to spawn new processes.
Why wasn't it designed for those applications? It's a general purpose programming language. Perhaps the browser's APIs (DOM) weren't designed with those applications in mind, but even the first standardization of the DOM (DOM Level 1) APIs could implement most if not all of those applications' features, one way or another (eg. submitting forms to a frame—a feature introduced with JavaScript in Netscape 2—and periodically appending new scripts which contain server data).
There's a lot of reasons that those kinds of applications didn't appear until later, but they could have been made much sooner. But poor standards support in browsers made interoperability a nightmare, slow client hardware made performance questionable, and ultimately poor understanding of JavaScript and the DOM delayed serious uptake among developers for about a decade.