For around the last five years my Web design job has always revolved around making things look right in standards compliant browsers, then hacking for IE. Look at the code of most sites these days and you'll see an IE-specific style sheet.
Smart people code in the browser most of their customers use, then adapt that code for the other browsers. It's a lot easier that way around.
I'm not one of those "worship at the alter of web standards" people for two reasons:
1) I'd *much* rather have browser makers add features that benefit the 99% of the population who are end-users of the web, rather than the 1% of the population that are web developers.
2) The standards seem to have developed specifically to always do the *opposite* of whatever Microsoft chose to do. No doubt out of pure geek-rage instead of actual rational consideration. Take the text version of the property "innerHTML"... Microsoft quite reasonably calls it "innerText". The standards say it should be called "textContent." Why "textContent?" There's no "htmlContent"! Oh... right, because if they had called it "innerHTML" then Microsoft would have been saved some work. I swear the standards are written by people who are simultaneously head-in-the-clouds academics ("who needs columns on a website? It doesn't matter that CSS is shit at making columns, you should use it and not tables") and at the same time petulant children ("let's do it the way that IE doesn't do it!")
Tools like this, while helpful, should never have been necessary. If MS, owner of the dominant browser, wasn't among the poorest in W3C compatibility, stuff like this wouldn't be needed.
I'm sure as soon as Microsoft perfects that time machine they're working on, they'll go back in time and fix everything. For the people who live here in reality, where we have to deal with the Internet landscape that *exists* instead of the one that should exist, this is a very useful tool and I appreciate their adding it.
People like you remind me of the uncle in Napoleon Dynamite. Please just wake up and join the rest of us in the modern world, instead of always obsessing over the past.
Web pages should render the same in any browser, on any OS. The only difference should be in resolution.
Are you saying the W3C should even be mandating monitor DPI and font smoothing algorithm? Last I checked, *nothing* looks the same on OS X compared to Windows, because OS X generally runs at 72 DPI (I'm a couple years out-of-date, OS X might have changed this...) while Windows runs at 96 DPI, and OS X uses a completely different (and much fuzzier) font-smoothing algorithm.
Heck, Windows and OS X have never even shipped the same sets of fonts.
Isn't it great how modern technology can do things like this? Back in the old days, we had to make do with defining a standard and ensuring that everything displayed things according to it.
When was this? It's never existed on the web. Hell, you can't even find to FTP clients that behave exactly the same in all situations.
But now, we don't need the stifling constraints of consistency; browsers can be creative in their interpretation, and every developer can use a tool like this to see the amount of expression browsers put into rendering.
Snark away, but the reality of the situation is that Microsoft's new focus on web standards won't make IE6 simply disappear overnight-- I have several financial clients as customers, and they *still* require IE6 on their internal networks, so that means I gotta test for it. And a feature like this makes testing for it a lot easier, so I'm all for it.
Now if you're one of those open source pie-in-the-sky people who are just going to bury your head in the sand and ignore IE6, then this isn't useful to you. Then again, by dropping IE6, you're doing the same thing that so many sites have done by not supporting FF: you've given up on double-digit percentages of audience because "it's too haaaaard!"
I use Expression Web 2 every day, it's great. If you've used the HTML editor in Visual Studio, it's fundamentally the same as that but also provides: * PHP syntax highlighting * A contextual menu item for "Find Matching Tag". (If you click the opening BODY tag, it'll scroll-to and highlight the closing tag, and vice-versa-- super handy and not in VS for some reason.)
It doesn't have the nice Auto-Format options that Visual Studio has, unfortunately.
It's really a shame that more people don't know about Expression Web, really. It's solid.
Re:Islamic groups are pushing censorship worldwide
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
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· Score: 1
Yes, but if you went into the Finnish Parliment, and said what you just typed here, would you be dragged to a trial for blasphemy? That's the point, it's not that he *said* it, it's that he's being tried in a court of law for saying it. Christians might get mad and riled up, but they're not going to abuse an old law that should have been repealed a generation ago to destroy your career and life.
He's not saying they're *wrong* about climate change, he's saying it's nowhere close to the most important problem we face as a human race. Which I personally agree with.
I'm sure Slashdot editors have some kind of automatic +5 ranking, but please at least *read* the article before spreading bullshit on your own forum.
Snohomish Times: http://www.snohomishtimes.com/ recently started up in the area I live, it's great. The funny thing is that the local *print* weekly, the Snohomish Tribune, has been operating for decades, but apparently never thought to put anything online. Here's their website: http://www.snoho.com/ -- Gee, guess where I'm going to get local news?
Meanwhile, on Windows, I'm playing World of Warcraft, using VOIP (with fellow WOW players), "watching" a movie, and receiving/sending IMs (with associated sound effects) all at the same time. Vista lets me control the relative volume of every program easily, and it's certainly not a "ear-assaulting mess." (Well, as long as you turn off the music in WOW.)
I don't know what era of computing you come from, but the situation described above is perfectly normal and expected in today's world. And it will be moreso in the near future as TVs move online.
I got pissed off with Steam when they had a fraudulent advertisement, and not only refused to sell me the game at the advertised price, but didn't even respond to my trouble ticket at all. Of course, unlike pretty much every other retailer out there, they don't even *have* a way to report pricing errors in a ticket, so you have to file it under something else. (Possibly explaining why it wasn't answered, but there's no excuse in not at least pointing me in the right direction or forwarding it to the right people.)
Oh, my post on the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic-suck is actually mostly Steam-suck as well. Strangely enough, it also had a tiny bit of Steam is awesome, when after completely failing to install from CD it actually was able to successfully install from a download.
Anyway, I'm done with Steam, too. It's a POS. I don't care about game boxes on a bookshelf, but I'd love a game download service that *works*.
Have you considered simply not buying this product when it comes out?
I don't get why people are so upset about this. Nobody's forcing you to buy this thing, holding a gun to your head. If you don't like it, just don't buy it, and calm the hell down.
Biometrics and RFID are, in terms of useful functions, marginal. It's not a feature most people want or need, and is usually a specialty use.
I'm not arguing that it's useful, or that people want it, I'm arguing that Microsoft had it first. You're responding to a point I never made, please try to stay on-topic.
There's a reason for that - a very good one, in fact. No other OS has "Fast User Switching". FUS is a Microsoft 'feature' to make up for the fact that it does not allow for multiple, concurrent logins on the same machine.
Ok, then we'll stick with the biometrics and RFID, which already demonstrated my point and you haven't rebutted.
Na, I was thinking of a feature like Shadow Copy, which actually worked in a pragmatic fashion and is not fundamentally incompatible with other products released by Microsoft. But then, I'm prone to bouts of fantasy.
VSC is almost entirely useless on XP, at that. In 2003, it's marginally useful - it helps work around some design flaws in Outlook, NTFS, and other programs that make running a Windows network a bit of a pain. So I can thank them for that, I suppose.
It's hard to "rip something off" in the event that what you offer actually works.
Ok, by pulling shit out of your ass like "in a pragmatic fashion" you're basically telling me you don't want to have a debate like a grown-up. I don't know how you define "pragmatic fashion," but the beauty of that term is that you can define it as: "the way that Microsoft doesn't do it!" WOW YOU WIN BY DEFAULT!
Look, "pragmatic" or not, buggy or not, the simple fact of the matter is that Shadow Copy existed long before Time Machine and performs the same task. Period. If you're not going to address that point, don't bother even replying-- it's a waste of our time.
For starters in order for the 360 to be a Ferrari it shouldn't die just from looking at it funny and it should host the best selection of games rather than a very narrow selection of games featuring either WWII guys shooting each other in a first person view or homo-erotic space marines shooting each other in a first person view.
Hey now! Mass Effect has homo-erotic space marines shooting each other in a THIRD-person view.
So Netflix *is* on the 360, and *may be* coming to the Wii, and therefore "MS is losing the multimedia angle?"
The Wii also has better peripheral suport and support for real keyboards by just plugging your existing USB keyboard rather than selling some ugly keyboard thing to attach to your controller.
You could just plug a USB keyboard into the Xbox, too. The "ugly keyboard thing" is optional, you know, it works fine with off-the-shelf keyboards.
The fact is Nintendo's hardware runs like a Ferrari and will last while the 360 is the cheap Yugo option that will fall apart in 6 months.;)
Ferrari's can go fast. Wiis barely beat the original Xbox, graphically.
I don't think it was even reported on slashdot, but those Microsoft job cuts in Jan/Feb included all but 6 members of the Aces Studio team that developed Microsoft Flight Simulator for about a quarter century. After creating a buggy resource hog with version 10 which required 2 service packs to make bearable (and it's still buggy by most accounts), they simply killed off one of the best educational tools they ever built.
While I agree that Microsoft is killing off their Flight Sim product (or at least retiring it for a long period of time), saying that they're "killing PC gaming" is ridiculous.
Microsoft does more to keep PC gaming alive than any other single company, except perhaps Valve. I mean, why would Microsoft spend so much time and effort on DirectX if not to directly support the PC gaming industry?
And their Games for Windows certification program is specifically designed to combat Windows games developers who do a shitty QA job and shovel out crap that drives people to consoles. Say what you want about how successful it's been, but at least if a game has the "Games for Windows" logo on it, I know it fucking *works*, regardless of what video card you have. (Which is a lot more than you can say for the typical non-logo-ed Windows game.) The quality of PC games has been abysmal for years, decades even, and Microsoft is doing their best to fix the problems.
Microsoft are the only game service provider in the world who are charging people to play titles online.
While I generally agree with you, World of Warcraft is the most popular game in the world and costs $15/month. (Of course, I have no clue how you're defining "game service provider".)
Right now, someone at Microsoft Games is reading your post and going, "wow, our console is so great that a Slashdotter, from a community that usually hates everything Microsoft, has replaced their machine fully 8 times in order to play the great games we offer!"
Heh. For what it's worth, I'm on my second 360. The first one was a day-of-launch model that lasted fine until like 2 months ago. But maybe I'm just lucky, I dunno.
You hit on the reason, Javascript used to be a trademark owned by Netscape. Now that Netscape's kaput, I have no idea whether or not the trademark is still in effect, but either way Microsoft chose to use the non-trademarked (and technically more correct) term ECMAScript anyway.
BTW the reverse also applies, since Microsoft owns the trademark on JScript, you won't see that in any Mozilla docs. (Probably, at least.)
He's concerned about vendor lock-in. He's concerned about a small group of people being able to hold the rest of the world hostage by threatening to cut them off from the infrastructure they depend on, and he's concerned about a vast group of people being abandoned by those they trusted to handle their essential infrastructure.
It's a valid concern, it's not hard to understand, and it's not easy to dismiss either. The fingers-in-the-ears-going-la-la-la tactic seems to be the standard approach for a lot of people.
And what does ANY of that have to do with Javascript?
I agree that it's a valid concern, but how does the ability to modify the Javascript that gmail runs save you from any of that stuff as long as all of your data/"infrastructure you depend on" is hosted on the server-side?
Javascript isn't the web app. It's not the data, or even really the interface to the data. It just makes the interface to the data more convenient to use.
No, Powershell is superior to bash. Reading comprehension is pretty useful, you should try it sometime. But good job writing a lengthy rebuttal to something I never claimed. Moron.
In fact, I don't think you even got the point of my post. The point was that people on Slashdot frequently express opinions on products they aren't qualified to judge, because they either haven't used them in a long period of time, or they use them extremely infrequently. For example, your ignorance of Powershell, even when replying to a post that mentions its existence demonstrates (to me at least) that you're not qualified to express any opinion, period.
He's not confused, he's just such an empty brainwashed open source shill he doesn't even bother to stop and think even a fraction of a second before writing out long articles full of vitriol. He's the opposite of intelligent conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they should have called it something really cool, like "AwesomeBar". Nobody's using that one, right...?
For around the last five years my Web design job has always revolved around making things look right in standards compliant browsers, then hacking for IE. Look at the code of most sites these days and you'll see an IE-specific style sheet.
Smart people code in the browser most of their customers use, then adapt that code for the other browsers. It's a lot easier that way around.
I'm not one of those "worship at the alter of web standards" people for two reasons:
1) I'd *much* rather have browser makers add features that benefit the 99% of the population who are end-users of the web, rather than the 1% of the population that are web developers.
2) The standards seem to have developed specifically to always do the *opposite* of whatever Microsoft chose to do. No doubt out of pure geek-rage instead of actual rational consideration. Take the text version of the property "innerHTML"... Microsoft quite reasonably calls it "innerText". The standards say it should be called "textContent." Why "textContent?" There's no "htmlContent"! Oh... right, because if they had called it "innerHTML" then Microsoft would have been saved some work. I swear the standards are written by people who are simultaneously head-in-the-clouds academics ("who needs columns on a website? It doesn't matter that CSS is shit at making columns, you should use it and not tables") and at the same time petulant children ("let's do it the way that IE doesn't do it!")
Tools like this, while helpful, should never have been necessary. If MS, owner of the dominant browser, wasn't among the poorest in W3C compatibility, stuff like this wouldn't be needed.
I'm sure as soon as Microsoft perfects that time machine they're working on, they'll go back in time and fix everything. For the people who live here in reality, where we have to deal with the Internet landscape that *exists* instead of the one that should exist, this is a very useful tool and I appreciate their adding it.
People like you remind me of the uncle in Napoleon Dynamite. Please just wake up and join the rest of us in the modern world, instead of always obsessing over the past.
Web pages should render the same in any browser, on any OS. The only difference should be in resolution.
Are you saying the W3C should even be mandating monitor DPI and font smoothing algorithm? Last I checked, *nothing* looks the same on OS X compared to Windows, because OS X generally runs at 72 DPI (I'm a couple years out-of-date, OS X might have changed this...) while Windows runs at 96 DPI, and OS X uses a completely different (and much fuzzier) font-smoothing algorithm.
Heck, Windows and OS X have never even shipped the same sets of fonts.
Isn't it great how modern technology can do things like this? Back in the old days, we had to make do with defining a standard and ensuring that everything displayed things according to it.
When was this? It's never existed on the web. Hell, you can't even find to FTP clients that behave exactly the same in all situations.
But now, we don't need the stifling constraints of consistency; browsers can be creative in their interpretation, and every developer can use a tool like this to see the amount of expression browsers put into rendering.
Snark away, but the reality of the situation is that Microsoft's new focus on web standards won't make IE6 simply disappear overnight-- I have several financial clients as customers, and they *still* require IE6 on their internal networks, so that means I gotta test for it. And a feature like this makes testing for it a lot easier, so I'm all for it.
Now if you're one of those open source pie-in-the-sky people who are just going to bury your head in the sand and ignore IE6, then this isn't useful to you. Then again, by dropping IE6, you're doing the same thing that so many sites have done by not supporting FF: you've given up on double-digit percentages of audience because "it's too haaaaard!"
I use Expression Web 2 every day, it's great. If you've used the HTML editor in Visual Studio, it's fundamentally the same as that but also provides:
* PHP syntax highlighting
* A contextual menu item for "Find Matching Tag". (If you click the opening BODY tag, it'll scroll-to and highlight the closing tag, and vice-versa-- super handy and not in VS for some reason.)
It doesn't have the nice Auto-Format options that Visual Studio has, unfortunately.
It's really a shame that more people don't know about Expression Web, really. It's solid.
Yes, but if you went into the Finnish Parliment, and said what you just typed here, would you be dragged to a trial for blasphemy? That's the point, it's not that he *said* it, it's that he's being tried in a court of law for saying it. Christians might get mad and riled up, but they're not going to abuse an old law that should have been repealed a generation ago to destroy your career and life.
I don't have to be Stanley Kubrick to know when a movie stinks.
He's not saying they're *wrong* about climate change, he's saying it's nowhere close to the most important problem we face as a human race. Which I personally agree with.
I'm sure Slashdot editors have some kind of automatic +5 ranking, but please at least *read* the article before spreading bullshit on your own forum.
They can create one if they want, but I can't see those. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
On the other hand, any site that's so poorly thought-out that it wants to use one of those, I'd probably never want to visit anyway.
Snohomish Times: http://www.snohomishtimes.com/ recently started up in the area I live, it's great. The funny thing is that the local *print* weekly, the Snohomish Tribune, has been operating for decades, but apparently never thought to put anything online. Here's their website: http://www.snoho.com/ -- Gee, guess where I'm going to get local news?
Meanwhile, on Windows, I'm playing World of Warcraft, using VOIP (with fellow WOW players), "watching" a movie, and receiving/sending IMs (with associated sound effects) all at the same time. Vista lets me control the relative volume of every program easily, and it's certainly not a "ear-assaulting mess." (Well, as long as you turn off the music in WOW.)
I don't know what era of computing you come from, but the situation described above is perfectly normal and expected in today's world. And it will be moreso in the near future as TVs move online.
I think you're just being grumpy.
I got pissed off with Steam when they had a fraudulent advertisement, and not only refused to sell me the game at the advertised price, but didn't even respond to my trouble ticket at all. Of course, unlike pretty much every other retailer out there, they don't even *have* a way to report pricing errors in a ticket, so you have to file it under something else. (Possibly explaining why it wasn't answered, but there's no excuse in not at least pointing me in the right direction or forwarding it to the right people.)
Oh, my post on the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic-suck is actually mostly Steam-suck as well. Strangely enough, it also had a tiny bit of Steam is awesome, when after completely failing to install from CD it actually was able to successfully install from a download.
Anyway, I'm done with Steam, too. It's a POS. I don't care about game boxes on a bookshelf, but I'd love a game download service that *works*.
Have you considered simply not buying this product when it comes out?
I don't get why people are so upset about this. Nobody's forcing you to buy this thing, holding a gun to your head. If you don't like it, just don't buy it, and calm the hell down.
Biometrics and RFID are, in terms of useful functions, marginal. It's not a feature most people want or need, and is usually a specialty use.
I'm not arguing that it's useful, or that people want it, I'm arguing that Microsoft had it first. You're responding to a point I never made, please try to stay on-topic.
There's a reason for that - a very good one, in fact. No other OS has "Fast User Switching". FUS is a Microsoft 'feature' to make up for the fact that it does not allow for multiple, concurrent logins on the same machine.
Ok, then we'll stick with the biometrics and RFID, which already demonstrated my point and you haven't rebutted.
Na, I was thinking of a feature like Shadow Copy, which actually worked in a pragmatic fashion and is not fundamentally incompatible with other products released by Microsoft. But then, I'm prone to bouts of fantasy.
VSC is almost entirely useless on XP, at that. In 2003, it's marginally useful - it helps work around some design flaws in Outlook, NTFS, and other programs that make running a Windows network a bit of a pain. So I can thank them for that, I suppose.
It's hard to "rip something off" in the event that what you offer actually works.
Ok, by pulling shit out of your ass like "in a pragmatic fashion" you're basically telling me you don't want to have a debate like a grown-up. I don't know how you define "pragmatic fashion," but the beauty of that term is that you can define it as: "the way that Microsoft doesn't do it!" WOW YOU WIN BY DEFAULT!
Look, "pragmatic" or not, buggy or not, the simple fact of the matter is that Shadow Copy existed long before Time Machine and performs the same task. Period. If you're not going to address that point, don't bother even replying-- it's a waste of our time.
Uh, anti-Nazi laws *are* censorship. The German government obviously has no problem with censorship, or else they'd have no anti-Nazi laws at all.
Look, the whole world culture is becoming more violent when compared to - say - the 1950s.
Hi. You have to prove this with actual evidence before I read the rest of your post. No, the availability of comic books does not constitute "proof."
You're assuming that cold fusion generators can be rolled-out all over the Earth, pretty much instantaneously. That's not likely.
For starters in order for the 360 to be a Ferrari it shouldn't die just from looking at it funny and it should host the best selection of games rather than a very narrow selection of games featuring either WWII guys shooting each other in a first person view or homo-erotic space marines shooting each other in a first person view.
Hey now! Mass Effect has homo-erotic space marines shooting each other in a THIRD-person view.
MS is losing the multimedia angle too especially with it looking like Netflix may come to the Wii. http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/21/netflix-headed-for-the-wii/
So Netflix *is* on the 360, and *may be* coming to the Wii, and therefore "MS is losing the multimedia angle?"
The Wii also has better peripheral suport and support for real keyboards by just plugging your existing USB keyboard rather than selling some ugly keyboard thing to attach to your controller.
You could just plug a USB keyboard into the Xbox, too. The "ugly keyboard thing" is optional, you know, it works fine with off-the-shelf keyboards.
The fact is Nintendo's hardware runs like a Ferrari and will last while the 360 is the cheap Yugo option that will fall apart in 6 months. ;)
Ferrari's can go fast. Wiis barely beat the original Xbox, graphically.
I don't think it was even reported on slashdot, but those Microsoft job cuts in Jan/Feb included all but 6 members of the Aces Studio team that developed Microsoft Flight Simulator for about a quarter century. After creating a buggy resource hog with version 10 which required 2 service packs to make bearable (and it's still buggy by most accounts), they simply killed off one of the best educational tools they ever built.
While I agree that Microsoft is killing off their Flight Sim product (or at least retiring it for a long period of time), saying that they're "killing PC gaming" is ridiculous.
Microsoft does more to keep PC gaming alive than any other single company, except perhaps Valve. I mean, why would Microsoft spend so much time and effort on DirectX if not to directly support the PC gaming industry?
And their Games for Windows certification program is specifically designed to combat Windows games developers who do a shitty QA job and shovel out crap that drives people to consoles. Say what you want about how successful it's been, but at least if a game has the "Games for Windows" logo on it, I know it fucking *works*, regardless of what video card you have. (Which is a lot more than you can say for the typical non-logo-ed Windows game.) The quality of PC games has been abysmal for years, decades even, and Microsoft is doing their best to fix the problems.
Microsoft are the only game service provider in the world who are charging people to play titles online.
While I generally agree with you, World of Warcraft is the most popular game in the world and costs $15/month. (Of course, I have no clue how you're defining "game service provider".)
Right now, someone at Microsoft Games is reading your post and going, "wow, our console is so great that a Slashdotter, from a community that usually hates everything Microsoft, has replaced their machine fully 8 times in order to play the great games we offer!"
Heh. For what it's worth, I'm on my second 360. The first one was a day-of-launch model that lasted fine until like 2 months ago. But maybe I'm just lucky, I dunno.
You hit on the reason, Javascript used to be a trademark owned by Netscape. Now that Netscape's kaput, I have no idea whether or not the trademark is still in effect, but either way Microsoft chose to use the non-trademarked (and technically more correct) term ECMAScript anyway.
BTW the reverse also applies, since Microsoft owns the trademark on JScript, you won't see that in any Mozilla docs. (Probably, at least.)
He's concerned about vendor lock-in. He's concerned about a small group of people being able to hold the rest of the world hostage by threatening to cut them off from the infrastructure they depend on, and he's concerned about a vast group of people being abandoned by those they trusted to handle their essential infrastructure.
It's a valid concern, it's not hard to understand, and it's not easy to dismiss either. The fingers-in-the-ears-going-la-la-la tactic seems to be the standard approach for a lot of people.
And what does ANY of that have to do with Javascript?
I agree that it's a valid concern, but how does the ability to modify the Javascript that gmail runs save you from any of that stuff as long as all of your data/"infrastructure you depend on" is hosted on the server-side?
Javascript isn't the web app. It's not the data, or even really the interface to the data. It just makes the interface to the data more convenient to use.
CMD.EXE is superior to bash!!!?!?!?!?!?
No, Powershell is superior to bash. Reading comprehension is pretty useful, you should try it sometime. But good job writing a lengthy rebuttal to something I never claimed. Moron.
In fact, I don't think you even got the point of my post. The point was that people on Slashdot frequently express opinions on products they aren't qualified to judge, because they either haven't used them in a long period of time, or they use them extremely infrequently. For example, your ignorance of Powershell, even when replying to a post that mentions its existence demonstrates (to me at least) that you're not qualified to express any opinion, period.
He's not confused, he's just such an empty brainwashed open source shill he doesn't even bother to stop and think even a fraction of a second before writing out long articles full of vitriol. He's the opposite of intelligent conversation.