Please. In the entire first GENERATION of netbooks, it was much easier to find Linux ones on the shelf than Microsoft ones. In fact, IIRC, first-generation netbooks didn't even have enough storage to run XP if they wanted, except maybe an exclusive few.
Why don't you see Linux on netbooks now? The main reason is that the minimum netbook hardware spec can easily run XP now. A healthy proportion of them have HDs, and those that have SSDs have much larger SSDs than the first generation.
I'm sorry to break this to the Linux fans, but the netbook industry only embraced Linux long enough to keep their product lines alive until they could ship the OS that their customers actually want.
Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.
Could you possibly be more vague? Tell me what specific behaviors constitute "being secure" via whatever definition you're using, and I'll check off which ones IE8 does. Without that, this is a complete non-answer.
It's hard to take your FUD-spreading accusations seriously when your only criticism is more FUD.
(Oh wait, you used the weasel-words "if not", so I guess you're simply admitting here that you have absolutely NO idea what you're talking about.)
Take your pick. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.
Add-ons aren't part of Firefox. Firefox does not have a feature equivalent to InPrivate browsing.
They are not valid test cases because there are no tests.
Uh, wha? So the 3,221 test cases don't even exist now?
There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).
Ok, so basically, you have absolutely no clue whether or not the test cases (which may or may not exist, according to you) are accurate or not... but you're just going to assume they're not because Microsoft is so evil. Is that basically it?
You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality.
And you've been countering facts with nothing but a steady stream of vagueness and bullshit. At this point, I'd wager you've never even used IE8 and, in fact, have absolutely NO basis in fact for anything you've said in this thread. You've lost the small amount of confidence I had in your opinion when this discussion started.
IE is less secure
PROVE it.
offers less privacy protections
PROVE it.
and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari
PROVE it.
conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".
Possibly; but at this point I'm more likely to trust them than you. At least they pretended to be unbiased in their comparison table; you've been foaming at the mouth about how evil Microsoft is so much that you barely even know what product you're talking about-- just any excuse to rant, huh?
These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.
By saying Microsoft's comparison table is lies, then offering "IE is less secure" as your rebuttal makes you a hypocrite. I hate hypocrites.
As for developer tools - the visual studio tools doesn't help much, sometimes you need to analyze the end result in the web browser, and Firefox with Firebug will help a lot. And the source view in Firefox is a lot better since it's color-coded.
The developer tools in IE8 aren't the "visual studio tools" you refer to.
(I don't even know what you mean; presumably you're referring to debugging JS in VS? The "classic" way of doing web development in IE is to use the DOM Inspector Toolbar, which is virtually identical to Firebug except for the lack of a JS debugger.)
Anyway, in IE8, the tools (DOM Inspector, CSS Inspector and Javascript Debugger) are integrated directly in the browser. It's really quite slick.
Please at least spend a fraction of a second actually *using* IE8 before presuming to critique it. You'd make the world-in-general a much less stupid place.
Security - IE8: * FF: CR: - Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.
A lie.
Want to elaborate on that? Care to provide any evidence?
Like it or not, IE8 does include a lot of security features that other browsers do not, or do not to the same degree. Terms like "better phishing and malware protection" might be vague, but they're not necessarily inaccurate. And, don't forget that IE8 runs in a sandboxed security environment.
Privacy - IE8: * FF: CR: - InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering help Internet Explorer 8 claim privacy victory.
A falsehood.
I'm using Firefox right now; please point to me where the private browsing feature is. I don't see one. Yes, I can clear personal data when I'm done browsing, I can even automatically clear personal data every time I close Firefox, but neither of those is the same thing as InPrivate Browsing.
(The only thing misleading here is that Microsoft left Safari off the feature grid-- and Safari does have this feature. But Firefox does not.)
A barefaced, shameless, utterly false lie. For you see, there is no W3C CSS 2.1 test suite. There is a Pre-Alpha CSS 2.1 Test Suite, but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases, or at least that was the case last August 18th.
Are they valid test cases? If so, it's not a lie.
I think you might be fuzzy on the term "lie" here. If IE8 passes the test cases, that's the truth regardless of who wrote the test cases.
If, in fact, the IE8 term wrote the vast majority of test cases, and those test cases are valid (and you've provided no evidence that they aren't), then you're actually arguing that they're going FAR above and beyond other browsers in the realm of CSS 2.1 compatibility!
All three conclusions are false. These are lies.
By my count: Security: may or may not be true; hard to judge without more historical data IMO InPrivate Browsing: IE and Safari have this feature, Firefox does not. (I'm not sure about Chrome; I don't have it installed to check). Not a lie. CSS 2.1 compatibility: Not a lie.
I get what you're saying, and it's logically correct, but you have to consider the human element here. That's why it's called "human resources." People who mostly deal with software (including myself) should space themselves 10 miles away from anything to do with HR, except for just implementing the extremely precise spec.
One thing I'd love to see is for a console to open up their development process and create an App Store similar to the iPhone. There would be an explosion of freeware, indie games, and assorted applications.
I mean think of mario the game as a concept, imagine you tried to sell it today: It's a game about a plumber that runs around stomping on turtle-beings called koopa's and these things called goomba's, and there's this dragon-turtle esque thing we call koopa who's invades the mushroom kingdom.
No weirder than Katamari Damacy, which was a big hit recently.
I think Prince of persia is one of the only games that doesn't try to take the whole movie thing to far and be a game first. The original Prince of persia: Sands of time was one of my favorite games,
Ok, wait a minute.
First of all, Sands of Time wasn't the first Prince of Persia game. It's the third, by my reckoning. (Prince of Persia, Prince of Persia: Shadow and the Flame, Prince of Persia 3D).
Secondly, are you seriously trying to tell us that Sands of Time was good because it "wasn't trying to be a movie?" You're in opposite-land. Sands of Time is one of the most cinematic games ever made, in fact. I agree that it's a masterpiece, but your argument makes little sense here.
A - I'll give you. But if your GUI is any good, this should never be needed anyway-- GUIs are supposed to be discoverable, if you have to explain in great detail where something is, the GUI has failed at its job. Remember, when you compare GUI (as a concept) to the CLI (as a concept), you need to pick a GUI that isn't full of fail. Obviously a godawful GUI is worse than a really good CLI, but that doesn't tell us much.
B - You obviously never used AppleScript on a Mac Classic computer. (I'm not sure if Automator in OS X is comparable; but AppleScript definitely met all your requirements.) This is certainly possible on a GUI-- the question you need to ask yourself is why most GUI makers (other than Apple) don't do it. Hint: there's no demand for this feature.
C - Mac Classic let you print any window on the computer, including file listings. (Well, obviously third-party applications could neglect to add a Print command, but the OS had them.) I'd really argue that if you ever actually *need* to do this, your GUI has failed... I could imagine wanting to print, say, image previews from a list a files, but why would you ever need to print just a list of file names?
OTOH I wouldn't want to be doing waveform editing or (as you mention) photo editing without a gui. But to state that gui is always superior is just plain wrong, even when you are talking about non-nerds (e.g. see a/ above).
The problem with having this debate with Linux users is:
1) The general contempt for users, the "if you can't figure it out, you're dumb" attitude.
2) The geek-like disdain for spatial memory, something that the vast majority of people find easier than rote memory.
3) The fact that none of them, being Linux users, have experience with a really killer GUI. They assume all GUIs are as crummy as the ones used in Linux. This is really what's fueling your points, since they've all been addressed by at least one GUI in the past. (Mac Classic.)
There's also the hypocrisy that even the most hard-core "CLI RULES!!!" type user runs their CLI *in* a GUI.
That doesn't work with the Javascript-using version, though. Just this particular non-JS version.
Since Javascript can still query for the computed style, it knows whether the browser determined that it should have the ":visited" background-- in fact the Javascript version doesn't require images at all, you can simply pick a unique color, or some other CSS property. (There are hundreds to choose from.)
Now that we both know what we're talking about, how about addressing the actual points I made, namely that interpreting instructions for the mouse are typically more difficult than "text mode" instructions, an exclusive reliance on the mouse-only method yields few (if any) benefits in the long term,
Only if you utterly ignore discoverability, and the ability to make use of spatial memory. (Which for normal non-Slashdot people is much stronger than the rote memory used for remembering CLI commands.) Oh, and the fact that GUIs enable you to perform tasks virtually impossible on a CLI, for example, doing color-correction on a bunch of photos.
There's no debate over whether GUIs are superior to CLIs. None. Zip. Zero. It was settled long, long ago.
But the good news is if you like CLIs, you can run a CLI *inside* your GUI! Amazement in the mouth!
How do you know there's not using an auto-balancing centrifuge? I mean, I don't watch the show myself, so maybe I'm way off base, but it sounds like a dumb complaint to me.
That's built-in to the legislation. They can broadcast an analog signal that's nothing more than "hey where's my TV program?" for 30 days, I believe... maybe 60.
It is automated, Mr Snark, even the updates are automated. The only problem here is that the updates for some areas weren't pushed out in time for the switchover. Where I live, in the Seattle area, my DTV channel list has been updated for ages. I dunno where the non-updated areas are.
People are more likely to see/read the post if I put a little sarcastic humor in it. And it's almost certainly more likely to get modded-up if it's written in an entertaining fashion instead of a boring snooze-fest.
Besides, the grandparents suggestion that "this car would be fine if all other cars on the road disappeared somehow" is so ridiculous that it deserves a bit of ribbing.
If I know my CSS, you could do that by assigning a class to each individual A tag, and then writing out a much longer style tag which has a different A:visited background for every single class. That would reduce the "clickiness" of IE, at least, but you'd have to give the browser more time to go through and load every background image.
What he's doing is setting your CSS A:visited property to a image URL, which is defined based on your browser session. Something like: a:visited { background-image: url( http://scansite.com/image.gif?s=yahoo_com&c=45353535 ); } Then he's coded up a PHP script that'll log the code at the end of the image URL, and track it in your PHP session variable, or a database.
So, the flowchart looks like: 1) User visits page 2) PHP script generates session ID for the visit 3) PHP script writes an invisible iframe to the page, which includes
- a link to an Target URL (the URL you're trying to find in the history)
- a CSS rule defining the A:visited image to be a particular URL + a code for the Target URL + your session ID
- a meta-refresh tag that instructs the server to refresh the iframe with the next Target URL on the list 4) When the iframe refreshes, the PHP feeds out a list of which Target URLs your session ID has been seen at
Ironically, IE's dubious "click on reload/redirect" feature is (currently) the most effective defense against this technique, as the user isn't likely to notice the constant clicks emanating from their browser while this attack is taking place.
Clever stuff. Someone let me know if I'm off-base on this explanation, but if it's not exactly what he's doing, I'm sure this would work as well.
Can you perhaps explain the non-Javascript version in simpler terms than what's on the story's webpage? The explanation on the page is either very vague, or over my head. (Or both.)
I fully understand how you can use Javascript to grab the computed style of the A tag and figure out if it matches the ":visited" style you have defined, but what I don't get is how he's grabbing the style using only server-side technologies. Since when is it possible for a web server to tell the computed style of an element?
Slashdot Mirror
Please. In the entire first GENERATION of netbooks, it was much easier to find Linux ones on the shelf than Microsoft ones. In fact, IIRC, first-generation netbooks didn't even have enough storage to run XP if they wanted, except maybe an exclusive few.
Why don't you see Linux on netbooks now? The main reason is that the minimum netbook hardware spec can easily run XP now. A healthy proportion of them have HDs, and those that have SSDs have much larger SSDs than the first generation.
I'm sorry to break this to the Linux fans, but the netbook industry only embraced Linux long enough to keep their product lines alive until they could ship the OS that their customers actually want.
Actually he's a special combination of blowhard and attention-seeking whore that's becoming rapidly more prevalent lately.
Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.
Could you possibly be more vague? Tell me what specific behaviors constitute "being secure" via whatever definition you're using, and I'll check off which ones IE8 does. Without that, this is a complete non-answer.
It's hard to take your FUD-spreading accusations seriously when your only criticism is more FUD.
(Oh wait, you used the weasel-words "if not", so I guess you're simply admitting here that you have absolutely NO idea what you're talking about.)
Take your pick. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.
Add-ons aren't part of Firefox. Firefox does not have a feature equivalent to InPrivate browsing.
They are not valid test cases because there are no tests.
Uh, wha? So the 3,221 test cases don't even exist now?
There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).
Ok, so basically, you have absolutely no clue whether or not the test cases (which may or may not exist, according to you) are accurate or not... but you're just going to assume they're not because Microsoft is so evil. Is that basically it?
You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality.
And you've been countering facts with nothing but a steady stream of vagueness and bullshit. At this point, I'd wager you've never even used IE8 and, in fact, have absolutely NO basis in fact for anything you've said in this thread. You've lost the small amount of confidence I had in your opinion when this discussion started.
IE is less secure
PROVE it.
offers less privacy protections
PROVE it.
and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari
PROVE it.
conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".
Possibly; but at this point I'm more likely to trust them than you. At least they pretended to be unbiased in their comparison table; you've been foaming at the mouth about how evil Microsoft is so much that you barely even know what product you're talking about-- just any excuse to rant, huh?
These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.
By saying Microsoft's comparison table is lies, then offering "IE is less secure" as your rebuttal makes you a hypocrite. I hate hypocrites.
That's not "Firefox", that's a third-party re-packaging Firefox. It would be unfair to include that on the feature grid.
As for developer tools - the visual studio tools doesn't help much, sometimes you need to analyze the end result in the web browser, and Firefox with Firebug will help a lot. And the source view in Firefox is a lot better since it's color-coded.
The developer tools in IE8 aren't the "visual studio tools" you refer to.
(I don't even know what you mean; presumably you're referring to debugging JS in VS? The "classic" way of doing web development in IE is to use the DOM Inspector Toolbar, which is virtually identical to Firebug except for the lack of a JS debugger.)
Anyway, in IE8, the tools (DOM Inspector, CSS Inspector and Javascript Debugger) are integrated directly in the browser. It's really quite slick.
Please at least spend a fraction of a second actually *using* IE8 before presuming to critique it. You'd make the world-in-general a much less stupid place.
Security - IE8: * FF: CR: - Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.
A lie.
Want to elaborate on that? Care to provide any evidence?
Like it or not, IE8 does include a lot of security features that other browsers do not, or do not to the same degree. Terms like "better phishing and malware protection" might be vague, but they're not necessarily inaccurate. And, don't forget that IE8 runs in a sandboxed security environment.
Privacy - IE8: * FF: CR: - InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering help Internet Explorer 8 claim privacy victory.
A falsehood.
I'm using Firefox right now; please point to me where the private browsing feature is. I don't see one. Yes, I can clear personal data when I'm done browsing, I can even automatically clear personal data every time I close Firefox, but neither of those is the same thing as InPrivate Browsing.
(The only thing misleading here is that Microsoft left Safari off the feature grid-- and Safari does have this feature. But Firefox does not.)
A barefaced, shameless, utterly false lie. For you see, there is no W3C CSS 2.1 test suite. There is a Pre-Alpha CSS 2.1 Test Suite, but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases, or at least that was the case last August 18th.
Are they valid test cases? If so, it's not a lie.
I think you might be fuzzy on the term "lie" here. If IE8 passes the test cases, that's the truth regardless of who wrote the test cases.
If, in fact, the IE8 term wrote the vast majority of test cases, and those test cases are valid (and you've provided no evidence that they aren't), then you're actually arguing that they're going FAR above and beyond other browsers in the realm of CSS 2.1 compatibility!
All three conclusions are false. These are lies.
By my count:
Security: may or may not be true; hard to judge without more historical data IMO
InPrivate Browsing: IE and Safari have this feature, Firefox does not. (I'm not sure about Chrome; I don't have it installed to check). Not a lie.
CSS 2.1 compatibility: Not a lie.
Yeah. Because union officials are SO trustworthy.
I get what you're saying, and it's logically correct, but you have to consider the human element here. That's why it's called "human resources." People who mostly deal with software (including myself) should space themselves 10 miles away from anything to do with HR, except for just implementing the extremely precise spec.
Yeah, right. I'm assuming at least some of their employees are union-- BOOM, that's the complexity right there. Those contracts are insane.
One thing I'd love to see is for a console to open up their development process and create an App Store similar to the iPhone. There would be an explosion of freeware, indie games, and assorted applications.
Microsoft's getting real, real close to that with XNA: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
I mean think of mario the game as a concept, imagine you tried to sell it today: It's a game about a plumber that runs around stomping on turtle-beings called koopa's and these things called goomba's, and there's this dragon-turtle esque thing we call koopa who's invades the mushroom kingdom.
No weirder than Katamari Damacy, which was a big hit recently.
I think Prince of persia is one of the only games that doesn't try to take the whole movie thing to far and be a game first. The original Prince of persia: Sands of time was one of my favorite games,
Ok, wait a minute.
First of all, Sands of Time wasn't the first Prince of Persia game. It's the third, by my reckoning. (Prince of Persia, Prince of Persia: Shadow and the Flame, Prince of Persia 3D).
Secondly, are you seriously trying to tell us that Sands of Time was good because it "wasn't trying to be a movie?" You're in opposite-land. Sands of Time is one of the most cinematic games ever made, in fact. I agree that it's a masterpiece, but your argument makes little sense here.
A - I'll give you. But if your GUI is any good, this should never be needed anyway-- GUIs are supposed to be discoverable, if you have to explain in great detail where something is, the GUI has failed at its job. Remember, when you compare GUI (as a concept) to the CLI (as a concept), you need to pick a GUI that isn't full of fail. Obviously a godawful GUI is worse than a really good CLI, but that doesn't tell us much.
B - You obviously never used AppleScript on a Mac Classic computer. (I'm not sure if Automator in OS X is comparable; but AppleScript definitely met all your requirements.) This is certainly possible on a GUI-- the question you need to ask yourself is why most GUI makers (other than Apple) don't do it. Hint: there's no demand for this feature.
C - Mac Classic let you print any window on the computer, including file listings. (Well, obviously third-party applications could neglect to add a Print command, but the OS had them.) I'd really argue that if you ever actually *need* to do this, your GUI has failed... I could imagine wanting to print, say, image previews from a list a files, but why would you ever need to print just a list of file names?
OTOH I wouldn't want to be doing waveform editing or (as you mention) photo editing without a gui. But to state that gui is always superior is just plain wrong, even when you are talking about non-nerds (e.g. see a/ above).
The problem with having this debate with Linux users is:
1) The general contempt for users, the "if you can't figure it out, you're dumb" attitude.
2) The geek-like disdain for spatial memory, something that the vast majority of people find easier than rote memory.
3) The fact that none of them, being Linux users, have experience with a really killer GUI. They assume all GUIs are as crummy as the ones used in Linux. This is really what's fueling your points, since they've all been addressed by at least one GUI in the past. (Mac Classic.)
There's also the hypocrisy that even the most hard-core "CLI RULES!!!" type user runs their CLI *in* a GUI.
Who's responsible for the guide data? Microsoft?
I dunno. Presumably.
Are Tivo or Sage users having similar problems?
I dunno, I use Media Center.
This goes triple for a product that you're paying for.
Except Media Center is a free add-on to Windows, so you're not really paying for it. No more than you are for, say, Windows Movie Maker or Paint.
That doesn't work with the Javascript-using version, though. Just this particular non-JS version.
Since Javascript can still query for the computed style, it knows whether the browser determined that it should have the ":visited" background-- in fact the Javascript version doesn't require images at all, you can simply pick a unique color, or some other CSS property. (There are hundreds to choose from.)
Now that we both know what we're talking about, how about addressing the actual points I made, namely that interpreting instructions for the mouse are typically more difficult than "text mode" instructions, an exclusive reliance on the mouse-only method yields few (if any) benefits in the long term,
Only if you utterly ignore discoverability, and the ability to make use of spatial memory. (Which for normal non-Slashdot people is much stronger than the rote memory used for remembering CLI commands.) Oh, and the fact that GUIs enable you to perform tasks virtually impossible on a CLI, for example, doing color-correction on a bunch of photos.
There's no debate over whether GUIs are superior to CLIs. None. Zip. Zero. It was settled long, long ago.
But the good news is if you like CLIs, you can run a CLI *inside* your GUI! Amazement in the mouth!
But isn't each assignment of image.gif sending a new request to the server because it has parameters after it?
Yes, of course it is.
If it isn't, then i would probably view this as a bug in browser caching.
But it is, so that's irrelevant. (Rest of post ignored, since it's also completely irrelevant.)
How often do you really boot either XP or Linux?
XP? Once or twice a week, maybe. Linux? 3 or 4 times a day.
So who really cares whether it takes 20 seconds or 10 minutes to boot either operating system?
Those of us using portables and working at multiple locations every day, perhaps?
You know, if you used Windows, your portable's sleep mode would work and you could go back to zero times a day. /flamebait
How do you know there's not using an auto-balancing centrifuge? I mean, I don't watch the show myself, so maybe I'm way off base, but it sounds like a dumb complaint to me.
That's built-in to the legislation. They can broadcast an analog signal that's nothing more than "hey where's my TV program?" for 30 days, I believe... maybe 60.
It is automated, Mr Snark, even the updates are automated. The only problem here is that the updates for some areas weren't pushed out in time for the switchover. Where I live, in the Seattle area, my DTV channel list has been updated for ages. I dunno where the non-updated areas are.
Never mind that I type and edit all day, editing a configuration file or typing
What they type all day is English. What you're trying to get them to do is type in some weird computer-ese language that they don't understand.
People are more likely to see/read the post if I put a little sarcastic humor in it. And it's almost certainly more likely to get modded-up if it's written in an entertaining fashion instead of a boring snooze-fest.
Besides, the grandparents suggestion that "this car would be fine if all other cars on the road disappeared somehow" is so ridiculous that it deserves a bit of ribbing.
If I know my CSS, you could do that by assigning a class to each individual A tag, and then writing out a much longer style tag which has a different A:visited background for every single class. That would reduce the "clickiness" of IE, at least, but you'd have to give the browser more time to go through and load every background image.
Oh wait, I think I just got it.
What he's doing is setting your CSS A:visited property to a image URL, which is defined based on your browser session. Something like:
a:visited { background-image: url( http://scansite.com/image.gif?s=yahoo_com&c=45353535 ); } Then he's coded up a PHP script that'll log the code at the end of the image URL, and track it in your PHP session variable, or a database.
So, the flowchart looks like:
1) User visits page
2) PHP script generates session ID for the visit
3) PHP script writes an invisible iframe to the page, which includes
- a link to an Target URL (the URL you're trying to find in the history)
- a CSS rule defining the A:visited image to be a particular URL + a code for the Target URL + your session ID
- a meta-refresh tag that instructs the server to refresh the iframe with the next Target URL on the list
4) When the iframe refreshes, the PHP feeds out a list of which Target URLs your session ID has been seen at
Ironically, IE's dubious "click on reload/redirect" feature is (currently) the most effective defense against this technique, as the user isn't likely to notice the constant clicks emanating from their browser while this attack is taking place.
Clever stuff. Someone let me know if I'm off-base on this explanation, but if it's not exactly what he's doing, I'm sure this would work as well.
Can you perhaps explain the non-Javascript version in simpler terms than what's on the story's webpage? The explanation on the page is either very vague, or over my head. (Or both.)
I fully understand how you can use Javascript to grab the computed style of the A tag and figure out if it matches the ":visited" style you have defined, but what I don't get is how he's grabbing the style using only server-side technologies. Since when is it possible for a web server to tell the computed style of an element?
So... you posted just to brag about the extreme efforts you go to to support your irrational paranoia?
Thanks, I guess?