Essentially, what MS is doing is pitching for vendor neutrality
Not really. While some of the bits of the post cited on adapting WebKit-optimized webpages to also be IE10-optmized might be seen in that light (the parts that refer to making sure to use unprefixed versions of webkit-prefixed CSS properties where IE10 supports the unprefixed version), what Microsoft is doing is exactly what the article title suggests -- telling people how to make websites work well on IE10 specifically. A lot of that has nothing to do with "vendor neutrality" (some of it using special ms-prefixed CSS, and a lot of it is about using non-standard MS JavaScript APIs or HTML extensions.)
With their resources they should be able to match or even outdo a browser like Chrome (another browser with a boatload of dough behind it).
Though, through the magic of open source, Chrome might be seen to have a bigger boatload of dough behind it, since as well as getting improvements from Google investments (whether they go into Chrome directly or through Google's contributions upstream to WebKit), it also gets the benefit of the effort Apple puts into WebKit.
I think the parent means the document provided by the WHATWG, basically the WHATWG version of what they considered to be HTML5.
The WhatWG HTML Living Standard isn't finalized now, nor is it ever intended to be, and it (called HTML5 at the time, but since renamed) wasn't finalized when W3C started working off of it to make the W3C HTML5 standard.
So, if that's what was meant...its still wrong.
You're missing the point, every f-ing webdeveloper was bashing MS for not following standards, but now Webkit also refuses to follow the standard it's ok because it's not MS..
Using vendor prefixes for proposed extensions and incomplete, or not-yet-finalized implementations of standard features is required by the CSS 2.1 standard (and the CSS3 modules are all backward-compatible updates to parts of CSS2.1, so this isn't changed in CSS after 2.1 either.) So, the behavior Microsoft is complaining about Webkit following the standard.
And, its also something every browser vendor, including Microsoft does. In fact, part of the Microsoft Developer Network article on adapting webkit-optimized sites to also be IE10-optimized involves adding certain ms-prefixed CSS properties where webkit-prefixed properties already exist on the page. (Much of the rest is on adding support for IE10's particular non-standard pointer event model, which requires both non-standard javascript APIs and non-standard HTML properties.)
Then again, 'HTML5' is still in development so it's actually moronic that a lot of sites are already using it in production..
This is much more about CSS than HTML, anyway.
Webdevelopers should use the standard and not use webkit specific extentions or IE specific extentions
Progress toward standardization usually comes through wide use of extensions, so that's not really a realistic preference. Obviously, once a bit of functionality has a standardized and widely supported mechanism supporting it, new development should target the standard, but not all web development is going to wait for the existence of single standardized and widely supported mechanism (and, if it did, we'd never get progress.)
Actually, it's the "winner takes all" setup that causes the two-party system.
True, but...
There is only 1 presidential position to distribute, meaning people will only vote for one of the two candidates that actually stand a chance of winning.
This isn't really the reason there is a two-party system in the US. Lots of systems with a President elected directly or (as in the US) indirectly using have multiparty systems. The main reason the US doesn't is that single-winner contests using either plurality or majority-runoff elections are also used for elections to both houses of Congress and for most State elections in the US. Legislative election systems have far more influence on the party systems of modern democracies than the election systems used for chief executives.
Because.gov predates the geographical domains like.us.
They were introduced at the same time, in the same RFC...
They were described in the same RFC, but.gov was established at that time and.us was not. Specifically, in RFC 920, the following TLDs domains are identified as established with specific administrators and agents:
ARPA (temporary, for existing ARPA-Internet sites pending transition to new TLDs), GOV, EDU, COM, MIL, and ORG.
Additionally, the following categories of domains were described as being available, but having no instances established: countries (identified by the ISO-standard two-letter english country codes—which would include US), and multiorganizations.
"Apple sells hardware. Microsoft sells software. " Mission statements aside, they both sell software and are in competition with each other.
Apple is a hardware company (that also makes software to support the hardware) that has been slowly pivoting to sell online services and serve as the middle man in content delivery.
Microsoft is a software company (that sometimes also makes hardware to move the software) that has been slowly pivoting to sell online services as serve as the middleman in content delivery.
Apple dropping prices on iPhones and Microsoft dropping prices on Windows and similar software both make sense in that context -- where they are competing with firms that are already optimized to sell online services and serve as the middle man in content delivery and which are also delivering hardware and software -- at low prices -- to support the online services / content delivery business (e.g., Google, Amazon.)
hardly think that ethnicity is the definition of diversity in that sentence. I'd have understood diverse applications of ruby, or diverse techniques of ruby.
That would make sense -- if the response to the initial criticism by the convention organizer had been to explain the sense in which "diversity" was meant, rather than make vague claims about how he really was trying about race and gender inclusion.
And the original post didn't say that it was being cancelled because people criticized. It said it was being cancelled because sponsors were being pressured by social networks.
The "pressure" was the public criticism on social networks. And none of the sponsors had pulled out or even threatened to pull out -- the organizer cancelled it because, viewing things in the light most favorable to his own descriptions, speculative concerns about what the public criticism might motivate sponsors to do further down the road.
...except that they were forced to cancel their conference because there weren't enough token minorities.
The organizer wasn't forced to do anything. They chose to do so, no sponsor backed out, no indication has been made that any sponsor even indicated that they might back out, no one even threatened any action which would compel the organizer to cancel the conference or incur any additional costs. The official explanation for the cancelation was that the organizer might be left with legal or financial obligations they couldn't meet if any of the sponsors cancelled, but there was no reason given to believe that would happen.
There are many types of diversity. Economic, Religous, Ethnic, Cultural, etc.
If you thought the word "diversity" in this case meant "racially different" in this case you were incorrect.
Had this been the case -- had some other kind of diversity been meant and the organizer responded with a description of the actual diversity they had rather than claims that he was still trying to make it diverse through the 5 open slots after the 15 invited slots were filled with all white men -- I suspect that the discussion over this particular conference would have evolved differently than it did.
So one guy tries to discredit his competitor, and that's all it takes? I'm not talking about the one guy. One guy didn't pressure the entire show to cancel.
No one pressured the show to cancel. People criticized the organizer for failing to live up to one of the points on which the conference was being sold.
And there is nothing wrong with inviting your friends to your conference. And there's nothing wrong with your friends all being the same colour. It's your conference, you can do with it whatever you like. People aren't forced to attend.
Sure. And there is nothing wrong with criticizing someone who does that and attempts to promote their conference as particularly diverse -- "one of the largest and most diverse Ruby conferences in Europe" -- for failing to actually, you know, be diverse. If you choose to have a private gathering of your white male buddies to discuss Ruby, that's fine. But don't be surprised if you get criticism when you try to sell your white-boys-club-meeting to the public and sponsors as a particularly diverse conference.
Considering that the native population of Europe is almost all white, I'd say it's about as disgraceful to have all white speakers at a European conference as it is to have all East Asian speakers at a Chinese conference.
What does native have to do with presenting at a conference?
And is the native population of Europe almost all white men?
And, again, there may be an argument that diversity shouldn't be an issue in tech conferences (and there may be another argument that that's more true in Europe than in general), but the point is that the conference organizer made it an issue by claiming diversity as a selling point. Once that happened, its pretty hard to argue that people shouldn't point out that the selling point was untrue.
[I'm all for diversity, but...]...isn't this going a bit too far?
Isn't what going to far? Are you referring to the criticism directed at a conference that billed itself as one of the most diverse in Europe -- thus inviting attention to its diversity or lack thereof -- but whose entire 15-speaker invited-speaker list was white men, or the response of the organizer to that criticism in cancelling the conference?
Real diversity means keeping an open system that is truly fair to all, if only white male presenters turned up to be speakers then that shouldn't be an issue.
The criticism was about the slate of 15 actively-invited speakers for the conference billed as one of Europe's largest and most diverse Ruby conferences, not about people who "turned up" in response to the open invitation for the remaining 5 slots.
We do NOT have a diversity problem in IT. In fact, other than it being mostly male, it is more diverse than other fields precisely because there isn't much of an advantage to having english as your first language.
Assuming that to be a correct, that would make it more -- not less -- shocking that conference billing itself as particularly diverse would have its entire invited speaker line-up as white men. After all, if the field doesn't have a diversity problem, a particularly diverse conference in the field should be particularly diverse, and the standard defense that the lack of diversity of the conference merely reflects the lack of diversity in the field would not be available.
Exactly. It's enforced diversity, so that you can be Utopian and Progressive.
Well, except for no one is enforcing anything. Though some people were questioning, in part based on the fact that BritRuby was selling itself as one of Europe's largest and most diverse Ruby conferences.
There can be no "guy's nights" or all-white fraternities.
Is this a complete non-sequitur to the issue at hand, or would you really have a problem with people questioning the claim of an all-white fraternity to being "one of the most diverse social organizations in Europe"?
Instead of having race quotas to treat the symptom, explore the cause by investigating various demographic breakdowns of those in STEM fields.
The demographic breakdown of those in STEM fields in general, programming more particularly, or Ruby programming most specifically, makes it extremely unlikely that a selection process that is biased neither by sex nor race would produce a 15 speaker panel that is all white men.
It certainly provides a legitimate basis for raising the kind of criticism that BritRuby received, especially that BritRuby claimed to be "one of Europe's largest and most diverse Ruby conferences".
Instead of complaining that a conference is all white, run your own conference and make it as diverse as you want.
You do know that John Susser -- the author of the tweet pointing out the all-white-male lineup at the sold-as-diverse BritRuby -- is a GoGaRuCo organizer (and has been for every GoGaRuCo since 2009), right?
Quit complaining when someone else does what they want. I don't imagine that in this case the organizer turned away non-white speakers.
Since the 15 speakers in the all-white-male lineup were the invited speakers (5 slots were held open for proposals), it isn't an issue of "turning away", but "actively building an all-white-male lineup" and then selling the conference as "diverse".
Again, be responsible for something of your own, and you'll find that you won't care what others do on their own.
This is demonstrably false, as the facts in this case show.
It sounds like the problem was they were working on it until this Susser guy implied on Twitter that they're racist misogynists.
Its reading quite a bit into a comment that the lineup looks good except for being all white men -- at a conference billed as one of the most diverse in Europe in its subject area -- to say that it implies that the organizers are "racist misogynists". Rather than, you know, just overselling the diversity thing.
Assuming the article is accurate, people should really just mind their damn business until there's something concrete and legitimately wrong to make accusations over.
The tweet at issue didn't make any accusations, and at least arguable something was concretely and legitimately wrong with BritRuby's entire invited slate being white men when the organizer was trumpeting the "diversity" of the conference.
If they have selected 15 British Ruby programmers at random they would also get 15 white males with a high chance.
"The profile of our conference presenters resembles what you'd expect choosing programmers at random", on any axis, probably isn't a selling point.
And its probably not a great justification for an all-white-male lineup at what the organizers claim is one of the most diverse Ruby conferences in Europe.
Diversity (in and of itself) has literally zero merit.
This is political correctness gone COMPLETELY INSANE.
Granting -- only for the sake of argument -- your claim about the merit of diversity, the next sentence is still false. The part that keeps not getting mentioned is that BritRuby advertised itself as one of Europe's "most diverse" Ruby conferences. Whether or not diversity has merit, BritRuby specifically asked for attention to its "diversity", so criticism of it on that ground is legitimate simply in terms of the accuracy of how the conference was being sold, independently of whether or not diversity would be a valid measure of the merit of a conference if it wasn't one of the organizers' selling points.
Repeat after me: Enforced Diversity is NOT the opposite of Discrimination.
Enforced diversity isn't at issue here. No one was enforcing a diversity requirement on BritRuby. BritRuby claimed diversity, people pointed out that it didn't seem to live up to that claim, and the organizer decided that the best response to that criticism was to cancel the conference.
Do you REALLY want a Ruby (or anything else, for that matter) conference with One White Guy expert and PURELY FOR THE SAKE OF DIVERSITY one homeless female immigrant from Uzbeckistan who has never handled an electronic device in her life and can barely speak any english?
Nope, and neither did any of the people criticizing the failure of BritRuby to demonstrate the diversity that it claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. While some of the bits of the post cited on adapting WebKit-optimized webpages to also be IE10-optmized might be seen in that light (the parts that refer to making sure to use unprefixed versions of webkit-prefixed CSS properties where IE10 supports the unprefixed version), what Microsoft is doing is exactly what the article title suggests -- telling people how to make websites work well on IE10 specifically. A lot of that has nothing to do with "vendor neutrality" (some of it using special ms-prefixed CSS, and a lot of it is about using non-standard MS JavaScript APIs or HTML extensions.)
Though, through the magic of open source, Chrome might be seen to have a bigger boatload of dough behind it, since as well as getting improvements from Google investments (whether they go into Chrome directly or through Google's contributions upstream to WebKit), it also gets the benefit of the effort Apple puts into WebKit.
The WhatWG HTML Living Standard isn't finalized now, nor is it ever intended to be, and it (called HTML5 at the time, but since renamed) wasn't finalized when W3C started working off of it to make the W3C HTML5 standard. So, if that's what was meant...its still wrong.
Using vendor prefixes for proposed extensions and incomplete, or not-yet-finalized implementations of standard features is required by the CSS 2.1 standard (and the CSS3 modules are all backward-compatible updates to parts of CSS2.1, so this isn't changed in CSS after 2.1 either.) So, the behavior Microsoft is complaining about Webkit following the standard. And, its also something every browser vendor, including Microsoft does. In fact, part of the Microsoft Developer Network article on adapting webkit-optimized sites to also be IE10-optimized involves adding certain ms-prefixed CSS properties where webkit-prefixed properties already exist on the page. (Much of the rest is on adding support for IE10's particular non-standard pointer event model, which requires both non-standard javascript APIs and non-standard HTML properties.)
This is much more about CSS than HTML, anyway.
Progress toward standardization usually comes through wide use of extensions, so that's not really a realistic preference. Obviously, once a bit of functionality has a standardized and widely supported mechanism supporting it, new development should target the standard, but not all web development is going to wait for the existence of single standardized and widely supported mechanism (and, if it did, we'd never get progress.)
Now you know.
True, but...
This isn't really the reason there is a two-party system in the US. Lots of systems with a President elected directly or (as in the US) indirectly using have multiparty systems. The main reason the US doesn't is that single-winner contests using either plurality or majority-runoff elections are also used for elections to both houses of Congress and for most State elections in the US. Legislative election systems have far more influence on the party systems of modern democracies than the election systems used for chief executives.
They were described in the same RFC, but .gov was established at that time and .us was not. Specifically, in RFC 920, the following TLDs domains are identified as established with specific administrators and agents:
ARPA (temporary, for existing ARPA-Internet sites pending transition to new TLDs), GOV, EDU, COM, MIL, and ORG.
Additionally, the following categories of domains were described as being available, but having no instances established: countries (identified by the ISO-standard two-letter english country codes—which would include US), and multiorganizations.
Because .gov predates the geographical domains like .us.
Apple is a hardware company (that also makes software to support the hardware) that has been slowly pivoting to sell online services and serve as the middle man in content delivery.
Microsoft is a software company (that sometimes also makes hardware to move the software) that has been slowly pivoting to sell online services as serve as the middleman in content delivery.
Apple dropping prices on iPhones and Microsoft dropping prices on Windows and similar software both make sense in that context -- where they are competing with firms that are already optimized to sell online services and serve as the middle man in content delivery and which are also delivering hardware and software -- at low prices -- to support the online services / content delivery business (e.g., Google, Amazon.)
That would make sense -- if the response to the initial criticism by the convention organizer had been to explain the sense in which "diversity" was meant, rather than make vague claims about how he really was trying about race and gender inclusion.
The "pressure" was the public criticism on social networks. And none of the sponsors had pulled out or even threatened to pull out -- the organizer cancelled it because, viewing things in the light most favorable to his own descriptions, speculative concerns about what the public criticism might motivate sponsors to do further down the road.
The organizer wasn't forced to do anything. They chose to do so, no sponsor backed out, no indication has been made that any sponsor even indicated that they might back out, no one even threatened any action which would compel the organizer to cancel the conference or incur any additional costs. The official explanation for the cancelation was that the organizer might be left with legal or financial obligations they couldn't meet if any of the sponsors cancelled, but there was no reason given to believe that would happen.
Had this been the case -- had some other kind of diversity been meant and the organizer responded with a description of the actual diversity they had rather than claims that he was still trying to make it diverse through the 5 open slots after the 15 invited slots were filled with all white men -- I suspect that the discussion over this particular conference would have evolved differently than it did.
No one pressured the show to cancel. People criticized the organizer for failing to live up to one of the points on which the conference was being sold.
Sure. And there is nothing wrong with criticizing someone who does that and attempts to promote their conference as particularly diverse -- "one of the largest and most diverse Ruby conferences in Europe" -- for failing to actually, you know, be diverse. If you choose to have a private gathering of your white male buddies to discuss Ruby, that's fine. But don't be surprised if you get criticism when you try to sell your white-boys-club-meeting to the public and sponsors as a particularly diverse conference.
Unlike BritRuby, GoGaRuCo doesn't bill itself as "one of the most diverse Ruby conferences" on its continent.
Probably. Also, four are women.
Why? Its a conference not sold on the basis of diversity which is more diverse than BritRuby, which was sold as "one of the most diverse", was.
Interestingly, Susser never accused BritRuby of racism or sexism.
What does native have to do with presenting at a conference? And is the native population of Europe almost all white men? And, again, there may be an argument that diversity shouldn't be an issue in tech conferences (and there may be another argument that that's more true in Europe than in general), but the point is that the conference organizer made it an issue by claiming diversity as a selling point. Once that happened, its pretty hard to argue that people shouldn't point out that the selling point was untrue.
Isn't what going to far? Are you referring to the criticism directed at a conference that billed itself as one of the most diverse in Europe -- thus inviting attention to its diversity or lack thereof -- but whose entire 15-speaker invited-speaker list was white men, or the response of the organizer to that criticism in cancelling the conference?
The criticism was about the slate of 15 actively-invited speakers for the conference billed as one of Europe's largest and most diverse Ruby conferences, not about people who "turned up" in response to the open invitation for the remaining 5 slots.
Assuming that to be a correct, that would make it more -- not less -- shocking that conference billing itself as particularly diverse would have its entire invited speaker line-up as white men. After all, if the field doesn't have a diversity problem, a particularly diverse conference in the field should be particularly diverse, and the standard defense that the lack of diversity of the conference merely reflects the lack of diversity in the field would not be available.
In the case of the conference at issue, one factor was its claim to be one of the largest and most diverse Ruby conferences in Europe.
Well, except for no one is enforcing anything. Though some people were questioning, in part based on the fact that BritRuby was selling itself as one of Europe's largest and most diverse Ruby conferences.
Is this a complete non-sequitur to the issue at hand, or would you really have a problem with people questioning the claim of an all-white fraternity to being "one of the most diverse social organizations in Europe"?
The demographic breakdown of those in STEM fields in general, programming more particularly, or Ruby programming most specifically, makes it extremely unlikely that a selection process that is biased neither by sex nor race would produce a 15 speaker panel that is all white men.
It certainly provides a legitimate basis for raising the kind of criticism that BritRuby received, especially that BritRuby claimed to be "one of Europe's largest and most diverse Ruby conferences".
You do know that John Susser -- the author of the tweet pointing out the all-white-male lineup at the sold-as-diverse BritRuby -- is a GoGaRuCo organizer (and has been for every GoGaRuCo since 2009), right?
Since the 15 speakers in the all-white-male lineup were the invited speakers (5 slots were held open for proposals), it isn't an issue of "turning away", but "actively building an all-white-male lineup" and then selling the conference as "diverse".
This is demonstrably false, as the facts in this case show.
Its reading quite a bit into a comment that the lineup looks good except for being all white men -- at a conference billed as one of the most diverse in Europe in its subject area -- to say that it implies that the organizers are "racist misogynists". Rather than, you know, just overselling the diversity thing.
The tweet at issue didn't make any accusations, and at least arguable something was concretely and legitimately wrong with BritRuby's entire invited slate being white men when the organizer was trumpeting the "diversity" of the conference.
"The profile of our conference presenters resembles what you'd expect choosing programmers at random", on any axis, probably isn't a selling point. And its probably not a great justification for an all-white-male lineup at what the organizers claim is one of the most diverse Ruby conferences in Europe.
Granting -- only for the sake of argument -- your claim about the merit of diversity, the next sentence is still false. The part that keeps not getting mentioned is that BritRuby advertised itself as one of Europe's "most diverse" Ruby conferences. Whether or not diversity has merit, BritRuby specifically asked for attention to its "diversity", so criticism of it on that ground is legitimate simply in terms of the accuracy of how the conference was being sold, independently of whether or not diversity would be a valid measure of the merit of a conference if it wasn't one of the organizers' selling points.
Enforced diversity isn't at issue here. No one was enforcing a diversity requirement on BritRuby. BritRuby claimed diversity, people pointed out that it didn't seem to live up to that claim, and the organizer decided that the best response to that criticism was to cancel the conference.
Nope, and neither did any of the people criticizing the failure of BritRuby to demonstrate the diversity that it claimed.