No, but when you haven't done any development on Windows so far you come in expecting C to work like it does pretty much everywhere else.
Yes, when you define "everywhere else" to be equal to "Unix and Linux". I coded C on a Macintosh back in the day, and I can tell you C on the Macintosh is nothing like it is in *nix or Windows. Doesn't make it bad, just different. That's also about the time I realized that all arguments that C is "portable" are complete bunk.
That's great, but the buck has to stop somewhere. It's been a dozen years now, if companies like Creative still aren't willing to work with the open source movement to create up-to-date drivers, maybe it's time for the open source movement to start thinking about what they're doing wrong when engaging companies like Creative.
But, seriously, all this tells me is that open source geeks use open source. Duh.
How about a survey of the average computer user, to find what open source apps they use? Getting data like this from Slashdot doesn't do anybody any good, and doesn't tell us anything useful.
This is the forum where, every time a cellphone announcement is made, there are hundreds of comments decrying "I want just a plain phone that does nothing but make calls!"
Every time Microsoft makes any change whatsoever (especially big ones, like with Office 2007) the knee-jerk negative reaction is intense enough to throw the earth out of orbit. Usually they taunt Microsoft by bringing up Microsoft Bob, a product that was sold for six months, 15 years ago.
A community that constantly brags that Linux distros can run shell scripts written in the 70s without any modifications?
Thoroughly panned? I think you mean thoroughly embraced. This site's full of grumpy old Luddites. Either that, or you're reading a different Slashdot than I am.
How is your solution any different than the original example? Except yours assumes the free space is on the same partition, and the original assumes it's on a different partition.
In any case, yours isn't a "live" defrag, unless you're OK with losing vast amounts of data, so I don't see why you're "calling bullshit."
How many of the 20 top grossing movies of 2007 were not adaptations, remakes, or franchise installments? How many actually involved original creative development?
For that matter, how many were over-hyped drivel titled "[adjective] Movie" or starring Will Ferrell?
Hollywood is out of ideas. Period.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but what does that have to do with "good stories, well told?" I mean, Walt Disney spent his entire career doing that in theaters and he seems to have a pretty good reputation for it. (He didn't say "original stories, well told" which might prompt your reply.)
And to be fair, there are a decent proportion of remakes that are better than the original. The Fly and The Thing both spring instantly to mind.
Anyway, saying "Hollywood is out of ideas" is a little naive. Hollywood has the same amount of ideas its always had, if anything more... the problem is that there's always twenty times more ideas than there is budget for movies, and if they can make a "sure bet" Transformers movie that they can virtually prove will make its cost back in a single weekend, they'll do it. What you're complaining about isn't a lack of ideas, but a lack of risk-taking-- Hollywood studios used to do risky, risky projects, the kind of movies that if they bombed and failed, you were out of business. That doesn't happen anymore.
(What does happen now is that indie productions can come out of left field and blow everyone away by addressing a market Hollywood hadn't anticipated. Napoleon Dynamite is a good example of this.)
If you want to criticize anybody, criticize the moviegoers who buy the Transformers ticket, thus making it a sure thing in the first place.
Despite that test's claim of "real world" performance testing, it doesn't appear to have any tests which do DOM manipulation. In the real world, DOM manipulation is something like 90% of what JS is used for.
I gave you concrete examples of actual functionality and you know it.
No, I don't know it. It sounds pointless to me.
I'm suggesting automatically providing web content as PDFs and you are suggesting print driver kludges and copy-and-paste as alternatives? I was right about you preferring to talk bollocks than admit you were wrong.
Sure, why not? It's not like your XML PDF generator machine thing can run the Javascript on the page anyway, so what's wrong with just converting it to a PDF once and uploading it to the webserver alongside the page with a download link pointing to it? What's the difference between that and using XML?
Of course, you're also missing the bigger point which is that if I wanted the data as a PDF, I probably wouldn't have put it on a webpage to start with... I would have put it in a PDF file to start with.
I think that you've dived into these specs and recommendations so deep that you've actually lost the ability to think about things from the practical viewpoint. I see this in programmers all the time... my favorite example is the programmer who advertises that his application was built with a particular API, as if any customers give a flying crap. ("Built with Cocoa!" "Built with.Net 2!" Good for you, what do you want a cookie?)
I ask for practical examples and I get a response consisting of nothing but acronyms starting with X. Buzzwords, whether you think so or not.
Browser support is irrelevant. In any case, you are wrong, there is browser support for MathML and SVG. It's not universal, but it certainly exists.
News to me. But, again, this might shock and dismay you, but I write websites in the real world. It doesn't matter how shiny the feature is, if no browsers support it, then it's a waste of my time. Here in the real world, people use real browsers, not some ethereal prototype browser W3C wants them to use.
Dell never got the choice, Microsoft made that choice for them. But Microsoft chose the slow bloated and unstable web-browser -- their own.
Oh please... have you even *used* Netscape 3 or Netscape 4? Compared to IE 4 or IE 5?
My point was that Netscape was lost anyway (yes I know Microsoft did illegal this and illegal that and we all hate them). Netscape couldn't produce a decent product to save their company, so they resorted to lawsuits instead.
I'm sorry, you have been representing yourself as knowledgeable about web development. I assumed you'd know the applications of these technologies.
I guess I'm just a total retard. But at least I'm not a total retard who's impressed with vapid buzzwords.
XSLT is a functional template language for XML. You feed it an XML document and a template, and it transforms it according to the rules laid out in the template. For instance, you could dynamically transcode XHTML to OpenDocument format or PDF
And why would I want to do that? You're supposed to be giving me *practical* examples. I could use a PDF print driver or copy-and-paste to do the same thing without the buzzwords. But, then again, if I wanted a PDF file, I probably wouldn't have been writing a web page in the first place.
Embedding data from other namespaces is an extension mechanism. You can mix and match element types from different document formats. For example, you can embed mathematical formulæ into XHTML by using MathML or vector graphics into XHTML by using SVG.
Except browsers don't support this, so what's the point?
Legacy formats and protocols die all the time. That's not stupid, that's a fact. Where's the demand for Gopher? Active channels? VRML? The bajillion file formats rendered by plugins during the 90s?
That developers have to actually spend time on this? Just because you are at the other end of the pipe sending this crap instead of receiving it, it doesn't mean the problem goes away.
Making 10 developers change their browser code is much easier than making 10,000 web developers change theirs.
As a web developer, you have a simpler, more regular markup language to use.
More regular, but not necessarily more usable.
You gain all the advantages of the XML toolchain, so you can use XSLT to transform documents
Why would I want to do that?
embed data from other namespaces
Why would I want to do that?
etc.
Yeah. So I can use XSLT to "transform documents" and I can embed data from other namespaces. And yet you haven't told me one actual benefit to it. You've just spouted buzzwords, can't you see that? Why would I even want to transform a document? Transform it into what, a car?
I don't need new buzzwords, I already have enough of those thank you.
Computers need to have code written for them by people in order to consume it. It takes longer than milliseconds to write that code. Are you deliberately avoiding the point?
No, I just think it's a stupid and invalid argument. I missed the part where I'm supposed to change every web page I've ever maintained to XHTML to make someone else's job easier... why, again, am I doing this?
Right, I get it. The W3C are at fault for not prioritising a need that you admit doesn't exist. Right.
I didn't admit it didn't exist. There's no point to me replying to your untrue statement.
I for one am happy that the Netscape delay happened because we had gotten a much better product out of it and less browser confusion. I for one am disappointed the delay in IE because they did nothing, and planned nothing. All of the developers were just funneled to other projects until recently...and it shows...horribly at that.
How-so?
IE has had three releases since Firefox has come out: 1) The additional features that came with XP SP2 (not sure what version number this release is... 6.1?) 2) IE 7 3) IE 8 (in beta)
Number one on the list is still pretty far behind Firefox's featureset, but added two of the most desired Firefox features: Flash blocking and more obvious secure site indicators. IE 7 has now added every feature that Firefox ships with, runs faster and uses less memory. I haven't tried IE 8 yet.
It seems to me that IE 6, despite being ignored for several years, has caught up remarkably quickly.
The Minority Report nightmare isn't that the ads are targeted, but that they are numerous and intrusive. Ads can be targeted without being intrusive-- Google's built an entire company on that concept.
I don't think continuing to develop their browser can truthfully be characterised as "taking their ball and going home", and I don't see what your point is. You tried to make out that Microsoft's and Netscape's actions were the same thing. I pointed out they weren't.
It doesn't matter whether or not they continued to develop it, the point is that neither company released anything browser-wise for several years. From my point of view, their actions were the same thing: no new browsers were released.
Now you are attacking Netscape again. Why? What point are you trying to make? Or are you just looking for an excuse to bash Netscape? Your further complaints about them aren't relevant to what I said, which is that Microsoft's and Netscape's actions were very different.
Yes they were. Microsoft built a fast and stable browser, while Netscape added so much crap to their browser that it could hardly run an hour without crashing, then sued when they lost marketshare.
Is it a bad thing that IE7 was so long in coming? Yes, yes it was. But I don't give Netscape/Mozilla developers much credence when Netscape 6 was equally long in coming... it just makes them hypocrites.
Circular logic. "Let's all use a complex document format because we all use a complex document format! Let's ignore planning for the future because the only thing that's important is what's happening right now!" Yes, with your attitude, we'll be stuck with HTML 4 for life. How inspiring.
It's called realism. And pragmatism.
Hell a lot of large, commercial Internet retailers have no doctype declaration at all in a jumbled mess of code. HTML 4 would be moving up for them.
And that's not even considering all the thousands of archived sites... the content of the site might still be perfectly relevant, but you can no longer view it because your new shiny browser doesn't like the version of HTML it uses? That goes against everything the Internet stands for, as far as I'm concerned.
Ditch? No. Factor out into legacy middleware to aid maintenance? Why not? And why are you judging the W3C's decisions in 1998 as if they had information available in 2008?
Either way it has to ship with the browser, so I don't understand the difference between that and what I said.
And, for the record, I think W3C's decisions were stupid by 1998 standards... they should know from the study of other Internet protocols that once something's out there on the Internet, it'll be out there until the end of time. Ignoring that fact, yes, that's stupid.
Are you familiar with how markup parsers work? It's not just the speed that matters. The complexity of the parsing code matters as well. Try comparing code to parse HTML with code to parse XHTML.
Ok, the browser can do it in.6 milliseconds instead of.8 milliseconds. Big whoop.
The "complexity" of the parsing code is set via the lowest bar, like the site above. It doesn't matter how new and shiny XHTML 1 or 2 or 10 is, you'll still need to render that site, and you'll still need all the same code you have in Firefox and IE now to handle it.
Now explain the benefit to me as a web developer or as an end-user. The W3C has never bothered to explain why I suddenly need to make my pages XML-- will you?
That only helps producers of HTML 5. The people consuming it need to deal with that crap too.
It's not consumed by people, it's consumed by computers. Computers can deal with that crap in a matter of milliseconds.
Besides, if you can use HTML 4 to separate markup and style, you can use HTML 5 to as well. If you don't like tags like FONT, simply don't use them and everybody's happy.
Now there's no denying that what is immediately visible is valuable screen real estate, but that doesn't change the fact that the width is virtually always the limiting factor in a design. Why do you think it's always
I agree that a joystick is inferior, but so is a mouse.
Try a trackball, it'll kick your ass at games.
I love all these people posting that the mouse is the ultimate game control device who act as if they've studied and critiqued every device imaginable for the role. You ask, "ever tried a trackball?" and the answer is no, even though trackballs are cheap, available, and work better for games. Just admit you like the mouse out of habit.
(If you HAVE used a trackball and rejected it, I apologize, but the vast majority of gamers have not.)
Cue the 47 "but I use AdBlock" posts that have to appear in every single goddamned Slashdot story that has anything to do remotely with web advertising. Or the web in general.
Yes, yes, we all get it, we all know AdBlock exists, now shut up and let's have an actual discussion.
To the end-user, and industry at large, both are the exact same thing. Either way, we went years without a new Netscape/Mozilla and we went years without a new IE... it doesn't matter *why* the gap was there, but denying it's there because Mozilla "was working on it" is stupid.
What did that time gain Mozilla, anyway? Firefox is, at best, neck-and-neck with IE7 (feature/performance-wise), despite being written from scratch.
I personally think that was a bad investment, but that doesn't mean they killed the browser market and stopped development.
Well, when there's no competition, there's no development. That's true in almost every industry during all of history. That's why monopolies are so bad in the first place. And by taking their ball and going home, Netscape was handing Microsoft the monopoly in this area.
(Of course, Netscape was run by absolute morons, and by the time IE was technically superior, Netscape was a lost cause. It's a pity they didn't, instead of engaging in pointless legal action, try to re-organize themselves and get some actual talent in-house.)
BTW, Microsoft's bundling wasn't the reason Netscape bought it. Apple bundled both, and Macintosh users almost universally chose IE over Netscape. IE was just plain a better browser.
Ahh yes, HTML 5, complete with the element type. Because they know what people actually use the web for.
FONT is simple and it works, and does exactly what it looks like it does. So is CENTER, for that matter. Of course the validater is going to scream and whine at you for using it, but every web browser on Earth renders it fine, so who gives a crap what the validater says?
They've spent the last decade on a pointless crusade for making web pages easier to read for machines. Except:
1) The machines can't be simplier, because they still have to render HTML 4 pages anyway. There's no reason to believe, especially in 2008, that XHTML strict will catch on to the point where browsers can ditch HTML rendering.
2) Web pages are written by human beings, human beings who aren't as good at machines at reading XML. Since the difference between XML and HTML in the browser is on the order of milliseconds, why not save the human being writing the code some time by making it easier?
XHTML is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. C++ developers almost universally agree that goto shouldn't be used, and yet somehow they still manage to use C++ without whining about it-- even though it has goto in the spec! If you don't like the FONT tag in HTML5, well, don't use it. And don't use the CENTER tag, and don't use all those other tags you think are so horrible. Be like the C++ developer and, zen-like, remain calm in the face of "stuff in the language you don't like."
Web pages have infinite vertical space. Newspapers and books don't.
This is an example of exactly what I'm talking about. The vertical space above-the-fold is many times more valuable than the space below-the-fold. (The "fold" being declared as the point below which the average user is required to scroll.) If the W3C spent 5 minutes talking to actual web designers or web developers, they'd know that.
While technically, you're correct, practically you're way wrong. Columns let a site maximize its above-the-fold space, making it more usable and more appealing to the end-user.
I think part of my problem is people are taking the word "columns" to mean "free-flowing text columns" or something which I didn't really mean... I just meant columns, like having a nav column on the left side of page content like this website.
In fact, come to think of it, when's the last time you saw a website that has zero columns? Virtually all of them have a navigation column or some other vertical division that implementing in CSS is a total hack. W3C totally missed the boat on this one, I think every rational person has to agree with that statement.
The W3C still completely and totally fails to engage businesses to figure out what people are actually using the Internet *for*, and they're off on this ridiculous "make websites XML files" tangent without ever actually explaining the benefit of that approach. Their best idea in... well maybe ever is HTML 5, and that came out of left field.
(Seriously, why do I, as a web developer, give a flying crap whether my page can be read by a XML parser or not? W3C should make an actual case for this before devoting years of time implementing it.)
I agree with your assertion that Netscape/Mozilla floundered for a few years But I certainly would'nt say that they "did'nt care" . Netscape (the company) was essentially getting squeezed illegaly by Microsoft and had bigger problems to worry about
Oh please. They couldn't stand the heat, so they got out of the kitchen. Netscape wasn't being "illegally squeezed" by Microsoft, their product just sucked and they couldn't compete. Let's assume Dell got the choice to ship both Netscape 4 and IE 4 with Windows; which one would they make the default? The slow bloated one which crashed every hour, or the slim fast one which was perfectly stable?
They made dumb decisions, like "let's stop making a browser, and start making a Communicator! With email and chat built-in!" Then they made those dumb decisions dumber, "let's sell our Communicator to corporations as a groupware solution!" All the while never fixing any of the fundamental bugs in the product.
And when they lost marketshare, they still didn't fix their product, instead they went whining to the court about how "oh Microsoft's so unfair! Waaah!" You know what other company did the same thing? SCO. Of course, SCO is hated here because it sued Linux, and Netscape is loved because it sued Microsoft, but the situation is exactly the same.
And about Mozilla I'd say they care too, because all the while that Microsoft sat idle, Mozilla managed to form an organization, develop a community and release a browser that captured double digit marketshare.
I already explained why Microsoft sat idle. It's because they had no economic or technical reason to continue development, and Microsoft isn't run by idiots the way Netscape was. And yes, Mozilla has a double-digit marketshare, but only after they *finally* (after, what, 7-8 years?) gave up on that moronic "Communicator" idea and built *just a browser*. You know, the thing Netscape should have done in version 3.
And while Firefox does happen to have a double-digit market share, barely, IE 7 is a better browser IMO. It's faster, more secure (on Vista, where it runs in a sandbox, I can't speak for XP), uses less memory, and has the same tabbed interface. Both FF and IE crash about the same amount of the time, but IE handles abusive CPU-sucking JS and Flash much better. And IE has the other 85% of the market.
Netscape/Mozilla also "didn't care" for a long period of time... that multiple-year-long slog between Netscape 4 and Mozilla 6 during which they didn't release a browser whatsoever. Of course, Microsoft does that between IE 6 and IE 7 and it's a horrible crime against humanity, but when Netscape/Mozilla did it, it's all OK.
Microsoft stopped development on IE because: 1) They weren't charging any money for it, 2) There was no feasible competition on Windows, 3) It was definitely "good enough" and in some ways superior to competing browsers. (XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft, you might recall.)
Considering that IE and Netscape were both pretty much just pulling "standards" out of their ass in the early days, the only reason Mozilla browser are more standards-compliant now is that they shredded the Netscape 4 code and started from scratch. IE is IE because, at the time this code was being written, the "standard" was "what Netscape did."
All I can say is that I hope HTML5 starts hitting browsers soon... HTML5 is the first Internet standard designed by people who know what people actually use the web for.
(CSS is supposed to be a language to describe page layout. And yet, it has no support for columns until CSS3. It took THREE VERSIONS to come up with a layout idea that's been used in newspapers for books for literally centuries?! This is a language designed by people amazingly removed from reality. And that's just one example of the idiocy of web standards.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, but when you haven't done any development on Windows so far you come in expecting C to work like it does pretty much everywhere else.
Yes, when you define "everywhere else" to be equal to "Unix and Linux". I coded C on a Macintosh back in the day, and I can tell you C on the Macintosh is nothing like it is in *nix or Windows. Doesn't make it bad, just different. That's also about the time I realized that all arguments that C is "portable" are complete bunk.
That's great, but the buck has to stop somewhere. It's been a dozen years now, if companies like Creative still aren't willing to work with the open source movement to create up-to-date drivers, maybe it's time for the open source movement to start thinking about what they're doing wrong when engaging companies like Creative.
Buck-passing gets nobody anything.
"Bouncy Castle?"
But, seriously, all this tells me is that open source geeks use open source. Duh.
How about a survey of the average computer user, to find what open source apps they use? Getting data like this from Slashdot doesn't do anybody any good, and doesn't tell us anything useful.
That was an awesome episode.
Just think, after this weekend you too can experience the heady medieval atmosphere of pre-Renaissance deep space!
On Slashdot? Are you kidding?
This is the forum where, every time a cellphone announcement is made, there are hundreds of comments decrying "I want just a plain phone that does nothing but make calls!"
Every time Microsoft makes any change whatsoever (especially big ones, like with Office 2007) the knee-jerk negative reaction is intense enough to throw the earth out of orbit. Usually they taunt Microsoft by bringing up Microsoft Bob, a product that was sold for six months, 15 years ago.
A community that constantly brags that Linux distros can run shell scripts written in the 70s without any modifications?
Thoroughly panned? I think you mean thoroughly embraced. This site's full of grumpy old Luddites. Either that, or you're reading a different Slashdot than I am.
The ONLY way you can defragment a file is to copy the fragmented file to another partition, remove it and copy it back.
I call bullshit.
Free up a lot of space, then copy every file over. Something like this:
find / -exec (cp {} {}.defrag; rm {}; mv {}.defrag {});
Done.
How is your solution any different than the original example? Except yours assumes the free space is on the same partition, and the original assumes it's on a different partition.
In any case, yours isn't a "live" defrag, unless you're OK with losing vast amounts of data, so I don't see why you're "calling bullshit."
Depends; do you buy DVDs at the box office?
(Seriously, though, box office means theater viewers. It's about the most clear and unambiguous term in the industry.)
How many of the 20 top grossing movies of 2007 were not adaptations, remakes, or franchise installments? How many actually involved original creative development?
For that matter, how many were over-hyped drivel titled "[adjective] Movie" or starring Will Ferrell?
Hollywood is out of ideas. Period.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but what does that have to do with "good stories, well told?" I mean, Walt Disney spent his entire career doing that in theaters and he seems to have a pretty good reputation for it. (He didn't say "original stories, well told" which might prompt your reply.)
And to be fair, there are a decent proportion of remakes that are better than the original. The Fly and The Thing both spring instantly to mind.
Anyway, saying "Hollywood is out of ideas" is a little naive. Hollywood has the same amount of ideas its always had, if anything more... the problem is that there's always twenty times more ideas than there is budget for movies, and if they can make a "sure bet" Transformers movie that they can virtually prove will make its cost back in a single weekend, they'll do it. What you're complaining about isn't a lack of ideas, but a lack of risk-taking-- Hollywood studios used to do risky, risky projects, the kind of movies that if they bombed and failed, you were out of business. That doesn't happen anymore.
(What does happen now is that indie productions can come out of left field and blow everyone away by addressing a market Hollywood hadn't anticipated. Napoleon Dynamite is a good example of this.)
If you want to criticize anybody, criticize the moviegoers who buy the Transformers ticket, thus making it a sure thing in the first place.
Despite that test's claim of "real world" performance testing, it doesn't appear to have any tests which do DOM manipulation. In the real world, DOM manipulation is something like 90% of what JS is used for.
I gave you concrete examples of actual functionality and you know it.
.Net 2!" Good for you, what do you want a cookie?)
No, I don't know it. It sounds pointless to me.
I'm suggesting automatically providing web content as PDFs and you are suggesting print driver kludges and copy-and-paste as alternatives? I was right about you preferring to talk bollocks than admit you were wrong.
Sure, why not? It's not like your XML PDF generator machine thing can run the Javascript on the page anyway, so what's wrong with just converting it to a PDF once and uploading it to the webserver alongside the page with a download link pointing to it? What's the difference between that and using XML?
Of course, you're also missing the bigger point which is that if I wanted the data as a PDF, I probably wouldn't have put it on a webpage to start with... I would have put it in a PDF file to start with.
I think that you've dived into these specs and recommendations so deep that you've actually lost the ability to think about things from the practical viewpoint. I see this in programmers all the time... my favorite example is the programmer who advertises that his application was built with a particular API, as if any customers give a flying crap. ("Built with Cocoa!" "Built with
I ask for practical examples and I get a response consisting of nothing but acronyms starting with X. Buzzwords, whether you think so or not.
Browser support is irrelevant. In any case, you are wrong, there is browser support for MathML and SVG. It's not universal, but it certainly exists.
News to me. But, again, this might shock and dismay you, but I write websites in the real world. It doesn't matter how shiny the feature is, if no browsers support it, then it's a waste of my time. Here in the real world, people use real browsers, not some ethereal prototype browser W3C wants them to use.
Dell never got the choice, Microsoft made that choice for them. But Microsoft chose the slow bloated and unstable web-browser -- their own.
Oh please... have you even *used* Netscape 3 or Netscape 4? Compared to IE 4 or IE 5?
My point was that Netscape was lost anyway (yes I know Microsoft did illegal this and illegal that and we all hate them). Netscape couldn't produce a decent product to save their company, so they resorted to lawsuits instead.
I'm sorry, you have been representing yourself as knowledgeable about web development. I assumed you'd know the applications of these technologies.
I guess I'm just a total retard. But at least I'm not a total retard who's impressed with vapid buzzwords.
XSLT is a functional template language for XML. You feed it an XML document and a template, and it transforms it according to the rules laid out in the template. For instance, you could dynamically transcode XHTML to OpenDocument format or PDF
And why would I want to do that? You're supposed to be giving me *practical* examples. I could use a PDF print driver or copy-and-paste to do the same thing without the buzzwords. But, then again, if I wanted a PDF file, I probably wouldn't have been writing a web page in the first place.
Embedding data from other namespaces is an extension mechanism. You can mix and match element types from different document formats. For example, you can embed mathematical formulæ into XHTML by using MathML or vector graphics into XHTML by using SVG.
Except browsers don't support this, so what's the point?
I'm not sold.
Legacy formats and protocols die all the time. That's not stupid, that's a fact. Where's the demand for Gopher? Active channels? VRML? The bajillion file formats rendered by plugins during the 90s?
I dunno, but I'd sure love to be able to view the images on this site: http://www.worldwar1.com/fracgal.htm
That developers have to actually spend time on this? Just because you are at the other end of the pipe sending this crap instead of receiving it, it doesn't mean the problem goes away.
Making 10 developers change their browser code is much easier than making 10,000 web developers change theirs.
As a web developer, you have a simpler, more regular markup language to use.
More regular, but not necessarily more usable.
You gain all the advantages of the XML toolchain, so you can use XSLT to transform documents
Why would I want to do that?
embed data from other namespaces
Why would I want to do that?
etc.
Yeah. So I can use XSLT to "transform documents" and I can embed data from other namespaces. And yet you haven't told me one actual benefit to it. You've just spouted buzzwords, can't you see that? Why would I even want to transform a document? Transform it into what, a car?
I don't need new buzzwords, I already have enough of those thank you.
Computers need to have code written for them by people in order to consume it. It takes longer than milliseconds to write that code. Are you deliberately avoiding the point?
No, I just think it's a stupid and invalid argument. I missed the part where I'm supposed to change every web page I've ever maintained to XHTML to make someone else's job easier... why, again, am I doing this?
Right, I get it. The W3C are at fault for not prioritising a need that you admit doesn't exist. Right.
I didn't admit it didn't exist. There's no point to me replying to your untrue statement.
BS. I got all my generalized computing knowledge on Mac OS Classic, and that doesn't have any CLI at all.
I for one am happy that the Netscape delay happened because we had gotten a much better product out of it and less browser confusion. I for one am disappointed the delay in IE because they did nothing, and planned nothing. All of the developers were just funneled to other projects until recently...and it shows...horribly at that.
How-so?
IE has had three releases since Firefox has come out:
1) The additional features that came with XP SP2 (not sure what version number this release is... 6.1?)
2) IE 7
3) IE 8 (in beta)
Number one on the list is still pretty far behind Firefox's featureset, but added two of the most desired Firefox features: Flash blocking and more obvious secure site indicators. IE 7 has now added every feature that Firefox ships with, runs faster and uses less memory. I haven't tried IE 8 yet.
It seems to me that IE 6, despite being ignored for several years, has caught up remarkably quickly.
The Minority Report nightmare isn't that the ads are targeted, but that they are numerous and intrusive. Ads can be targeted without being intrusive-- Google's built an entire company on that concept.
I don't think continuing to develop their browser can truthfully be characterised as "taking their ball and going home", and I don't see what your point is. You tried to make out that Microsoft's and Netscape's actions were the same thing. I pointed out they weren't.
.6 milliseconds instead of .8 milliseconds. Big whoop.
It doesn't matter whether or not they continued to develop it, the point is that neither company released anything browser-wise for several years. From my point of view, their actions were the same thing: no new browsers were released.
Now you are attacking Netscape again. Why? What point are you trying to make? Or are you just looking for an excuse to bash Netscape? Your further complaints about them aren't relevant to what I said, which is that Microsoft's and Netscape's actions were very different.
Yes they were. Microsoft built a fast and stable browser, while Netscape added so much crap to their browser that it could hardly run an hour without crashing, then sued when they lost marketshare.
Is it a bad thing that IE7 was so long in coming? Yes, yes it was. But I don't give Netscape/Mozilla developers much credence when Netscape 6 was equally long in coming... it just makes them hypocrites.
Circular logic. "Let's all use a complex document format because we all use a complex document format! Let's ignore planning for the future because the only thing that's important is what's happening right now!" Yes, with your attitude, we'll be stuck with HTML 4 for life. How inspiring.
It's called realism. And pragmatism.
Hell a lot of large, commercial Internet retailers have no doctype declaration at all in a jumbled mess of code. HTML 4 would be moving up for them.
And that's not even considering all the thousands of archived sites... the content of the site might still be perfectly relevant, but you can no longer view it because your new shiny browser doesn't like the version of HTML it uses? That goes against everything the Internet stands for, as far as I'm concerned.
Ditch? No. Factor out into legacy middleware to aid maintenance? Why not? And why are you judging the W3C's decisions in 1998 as if they had information available in 2008?
Either way it has to ship with the browser, so I don't understand the difference between that and what I said.
And, for the record, I think W3C's decisions were stupid by 1998 standards... they should know from the study of other Internet protocols that once something's out there on the Internet, it'll be out there until the end of time. Ignoring that fact, yes, that's stupid.
Are you familiar with how markup parsers work? It's not just the speed that matters. The complexity of the parsing code matters as well. Try comparing code to parse HTML with code to parse XHTML.
Ok, the browser can do it in
The "complexity" of the parsing code is set via the lowest bar, like the site above. It doesn't matter how new and shiny XHTML 1 or 2 or 10 is, you'll still need to render that site, and you'll still need all the same code you have in Firefox and IE now to handle it.
Now explain the benefit to me as a web developer or as an end-user. The W3C has never bothered to explain why I suddenly need to make my pages XML-- will you?
That only helps producers of HTML 5. The people consuming it need to deal with that crap too.
It's not consumed by people, it's consumed by computers. Computers can deal with that crap in a matter of milliseconds.
Besides, if you can use HTML 4 to separate markup and style, you can use HTML 5 to as well. If you don't like tags like FONT, simply don't use them and everybody's happy.
Now there's no denying that what is immediately visible is valuable screen real estate, but that doesn't change the fact that the width is virtually always the limiting factor in a design. Why do you think it's always
I agree that a joystick is inferior, but so is a mouse.
Try a trackball, it'll kick your ass at games.
I love all these people posting that the mouse is the ultimate game control device who act as if they've studied and critiqued every device imaginable for the role. You ask, "ever tried a trackball?" and the answer is no, even though trackballs are cheap, available, and work better for games. Just admit you like the mouse out of habit.
(If you HAVE used a trackball and rejected it, I apologize, but the vast majority of gamers have not.)
Cue the 47 "but I use AdBlock" posts that have to appear in every single goddamned Slashdot story that has anything to do remotely with web advertising. Or the web in general.
Yes, yes, we all get it, we all know AdBlock exists, now shut up and let's have an actual discussion.
To the end-user, and industry at large, both are the exact same thing. Either way, we went years without a new Netscape/Mozilla and we went years without a new IE... it doesn't matter *why* the gap was there, but denying it's there because Mozilla "was working on it" is stupid.
What did that time gain Mozilla, anyway? Firefox is, at best, neck-and-neck with IE7 (feature/performance-wise), despite being written from scratch.
I personally think that was a bad investment, but that doesn't mean they killed the browser market and stopped development.
Well, when there's no competition, there's no development. That's true in almost every industry during all of history. That's why monopolies are so bad in the first place. And by taking their ball and going home, Netscape was handing Microsoft the monopoly in this area.
(Of course, Netscape was run by absolute morons, and by the time IE was technically superior, Netscape was a lost cause. It's a pity they didn't, instead of engaging in pointless legal action, try to re-organize themselves and get some actual talent in-house.)
BTW, Microsoft's bundling wasn't the reason Netscape bought it. Apple bundled both, and Macintosh users almost universally chose IE over Netscape. IE was just plain a better browser.
Ahh yes, HTML 5, complete with the element type. Because they know what people actually use the web for.
FONT is simple and it works, and does exactly what it looks like it does. So is CENTER, for that matter. Of course the validater is going to scream and whine at you for using it, but every web browser on Earth renders it fine, so who gives a crap what the validater says?
They've spent the last decade on a pointless crusade for making web pages easier to read for machines. Except:
1) The machines can't be simplier, because they still have to render HTML 4 pages anyway. There's no reason to believe, especially in 2008, that XHTML strict will catch on to the point where browsers can ditch HTML rendering.
2) Web pages are written by human beings, human beings who aren't as good at machines at reading XML. Since the difference between XML and HTML in the browser is on the order of milliseconds, why not save the human being writing the code some time by making it easier?
XHTML is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. C++ developers almost universally agree that goto shouldn't be used, and yet somehow they still manage to use C++ without whining about it-- even though it has goto in the spec! If you don't like the FONT tag in HTML5, well, don't use it. And don't use the CENTER tag, and don't use all those other tags you think are so horrible. Be like the C++ developer and, zen-like, remain calm in the face of "stuff in the language you don't like."
Web pages have infinite vertical space. Newspapers and books don't.
This is an example of exactly what I'm talking about. The vertical space above-the-fold is many times more valuable than the space below-the-fold. (The "fold" being declared as the point below which the average user is required to scroll.) If the W3C spent 5 minutes talking to actual web designers or web developers, they'd know that.
While technically, you're correct, practically you're way wrong. Columns let a site maximize its above-the-fold space, making it more usable and more appealing to the end-user.
Thank you, Doug, I agree entirely.
I think part of my problem is people are taking the word "columns" to mean "free-flowing text columns" or something which I didn't really mean... I just meant columns, like having a nav column on the left side of page content like this website.
In fact, come to think of it, when's the last time you saw a website that has zero columns? Virtually all of them have a navigation column or some other vertical division that implementing in CSS is a total hack. W3C totally missed the boat on this one, I think every rational person has to agree with that statement.
The W3C still completely and totally fails to engage businesses to figure out what people are actually using the Internet *for*, and they're off on this ridiculous "make websites XML files" tangent without ever actually explaining the benefit of that approach. Their best idea in... well maybe ever is HTML 5, and that came out of left field.
(Seriously, why do I, as a web developer, give a flying crap whether my page can be read by a XML parser or not? W3C should make an actual case for this before devoting years of time implementing it.)
I agree with your assertion that Netscape/Mozilla floundered for a few years
But I certainly would'nt say that they "did'nt care" . Netscape (the company) was essentially getting squeezed illegaly by Microsoft and had bigger problems to worry about
Oh please. They couldn't stand the heat, so they got out of the kitchen. Netscape wasn't being "illegally squeezed" by Microsoft, their product just sucked and they couldn't compete. Let's assume Dell got the choice to ship both Netscape 4 and IE 4 with Windows; which one would they make the default? The slow bloated one which crashed every hour, or the slim fast one which was perfectly stable?
They made dumb decisions, like "let's stop making a browser, and start making a Communicator! With email and chat built-in!" Then they made those dumb decisions dumber, "let's sell our Communicator to corporations as a groupware solution!" All the while never fixing any of the fundamental bugs in the product.
And when they lost marketshare, they still didn't fix their product, instead they went whining to the court about how "oh Microsoft's so unfair! Waaah!" You know what other company did the same thing? SCO. Of course, SCO is hated here because it sued Linux, and Netscape is loved because it sued Microsoft, but the situation is exactly the same.
And about Mozilla I'd say they care too, because all the while that Microsoft sat idle, Mozilla managed to form an organization, develop a community and release a browser that captured double digit marketshare.
I already explained why Microsoft sat idle. It's because they had no economic or technical reason to continue development, and Microsoft isn't run by idiots the way Netscape was. And yes, Mozilla has a double-digit marketshare, but only after they *finally* (after, what, 7-8 years?) gave up on that moronic "Communicator" idea and built *just a browser*. You know, the thing Netscape should have done in version 3.
And while Firefox does happen to have a double-digit market share, barely, IE 7 is a better browser IMO. It's faster, more secure (on Vista, where it runs in a sandbox, I can't speak for XP), uses less memory, and has the same tabbed interface. Both FF and IE crash about the same amount of the time, but IE handles abusive CPU-sucking JS and Flash much better. And IE has the other 85% of the market.
Netscape/Mozilla also "didn't care" for a long period of time... that multiple-year-long slog between Netscape 4 and Mozilla 6 during which they didn't release a browser whatsoever. Of course, Microsoft does that between IE 6 and IE 7 and it's a horrible crime against humanity, but when Netscape/Mozilla did it, it's all OK.
Microsoft stopped development on IE because:
1) They weren't charging any money for it,
2) There was no feasible competition on Windows,
3) It was definitely "good enough" and in some ways superior to competing browsers. (XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft, you might recall.)
Considering that IE and Netscape were both pretty much just pulling "standards" out of their ass in the early days, the only reason Mozilla browser are more standards-compliant now is that they shredded the Netscape 4 code and started from scratch. IE is IE because, at the time this code was being written, the "standard" was "what Netscape did."
All I can say is that I hope HTML5 starts hitting browsers soon... HTML5 is the first Internet standard designed by people who know what people actually use the web for.
(CSS is supposed to be a language to describe page layout. And yet, it has no support for columns until CSS3. It took THREE VERSIONS to come up with a layout idea that's been used in newspapers for books for literally centuries?! This is a language designed by people amazingly removed from reality. And that's just one example of the idiocy of web standards.)
Too much junk in my hall closet.