One way or another, you're going to have to define the color in hex mode.
Duh. Stop repeating that, I'm not a retard, and I'm not saying otherwise.
What I'm saying is that in a single CSS file, you should only see a particular hex color *once*. *Ever.* And that one time? You should be assigning it to a friendly human-readable name. A well-designed language would allow this, CSS doesn't.
In my job, I see tons of CSS files from tons of different web designers. Almost in all cases, the same hex color is seen 3, 4, 5, 10 times in the same document. There should be no need for that, it does nothing but main the CSS harder to maintain-- I should be able to change all 10 of those color references to a different color by changing one line, not 10. Again: a well-designed language would allow this.
Or take another example, maybe I want to put the amount of padding in a variable because I have 27 different tags that need padding-- it's always the same amount of padding, but I might want to change the amount. Right now, I have 27 different CSS rules, each one containing the same "padding-left: 15px" entry... to universally change that to 20px, I have to change it in 27 different places!
I think people who work a lot with CSS develop some kind of Stockholm Syndrome and they become completely unable to grasp it's horrible shortcomings. I find it hard to believe that people are disagreeing with my basic point: CSS should have variables in it.
Not on PC, only on consoles. And I only played it on PC. Blam! I win on a technicality! Suck it down, Anonymous Coward!
The last EA game I bought was Battlefield: 2142, on the very strong recommendation of my PC gaming friend. Being a PC gaming friend, he's developed a healthy Stockholm Syndrome about bugs and shitty quality... so while BF2142 met his extremely low standards, I couldn't stand the piece of shit.
Before that... I don't remember the last EA game I bought, I've been boycotting them since they signed the exclusive deal with the NFL and shut-out other games companies from making NFL games.
This isn't even bootleg Windows. This was the free Windows 7 preview that Microsoft released last year. You know, the one they said from day one would be disabled in March? In extremely obvious huge text on the website you downloaded it from? That Windows.
I dunno, Halo is part of the Marathon universe, and I felt Marathon was very creative and fresh from a sci-fi perspective. That's not to say that the elements hadn't been written in a book somewhere before, but I hadn't encountered them. For example, the Pfhor/Covenant being an (extremely) loose coalition of aliens instead of a single race. The Marathon concept of AI "rampancy" (which doesn't seem to appear in Halo.) Durandal's insane evil scheme to shield himself during the Big Crunch for the purpose of emerging as God in the next iteration of the universe.
That doesn't make any sense. You still have to assign the value to the variable.
Well, obviously.
The value is going to be a hex number. You don't have to use hex colors, if you want to limit yourself to the color names that css recognizes,
Again, duh. The problem is that nobody uses the built-in colors. (Which is just as well, since only like 8 of them are defined in the standard-- the rest Microsoft put in IE, and other browsers just kind of ran with IE's color list.)
In the end, you are communicating with a computer. It's not the fault of css that browsers use hex to render colors.
Yes, but the computer is there to make our lives easier. If it takes the computer 0.2 milliseconds to figure out that #113366 is the header color, and it takes me (a lousy human being) 5 seconds to reach the same conclusion, I want to assign that color a readable name, damnit.
(The assumption here is that CSS was created to make our lives easier; I'm not sure that's true.)
Look, I'm not some kind of "CSS King" with all the answers, so maybe I'm way off-base here.
All I know is that in my job, I frequently see other people's CSS files. And in almost every case, I'll see the same hex color used in a half-dozen cases in the CSS file with absolutely no indication of what that string of hex actually means from a practical perspective.
Maybe this is what I'm missing in your explanation: is it possible to assign a CSS class to CSS rule in the stylesheet itself? Like "inheriting" the other class's properties? If that's the case, then apologies-- but I didn't know that was possible.
The big problem with XHTML is that the W3C was wasting their time with this format that offers dubious benefit, made browsers more complicated, on the assumption that older versions of HTML would just... I dunno... magically go away. (At which point, browsers could be made simpler again.) Oh, and of course they didn't bother to figure out what actual websites on the actual Internet need, so it's incompatible with a ton of hugely popular tags. (For example, Atlas Universal Action Tags don't validate in XHTML Strict.)
Oh boy. I can do a XLST transform on my homepage. That gets me... what exactly?
Not that I'm really that opposed to XHTML, what pisses me off most is that they were working on this useless thing when they could have been actually working on HTML5 in the first place.
Halo 2? I thought even amoung Halo fans nobody liked that game for more than the multiplayer.
Really? It's much, much, much better than Halo 1 in pretty much every way. The story is better, too, and Arbiter is one of my favorite characters in video gaming.
Mass Effect is a deep universe, very fleshed out.
True; that doesn't make it good. Plus its universe is nothing compared to, say, The Elder Scrolls series if that's what you're after.
The story was extremely immersive.
I disagree; I found it mostly annoying. I tried replaying it a few months back, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish the extremely looong intro before you get your ship and freedom of movement. In retrospect, I'm not sure how I stood it the first time.
I've never played Sands of Time but I've also never heard it acclaimed for any outstanding writing.
Well, ok. But despite that, it's one of the best written and best acted stories in gaming. (But don't bother with the sequels.)
As a sci-fi fan Mass Effect was incredible to me. Something tells me you are not.
Actually, I am. Which is why I found it mostly predictable and cliched... I don't think there was a single original sci-fi idea in the entire game, frankly.
Ok, let's say classes solve all problems with color duplication. Wouldn't the CSS be a heck of a lot easier to read if your #5444BB had a more friendly name? Maybe you're an expert at looking at hex colors and instantly figuring out what they look like, but I sure as hell ain't. There's more than one advantage to having variables.
Ok, I consider myself a pretty sharp guy, and I've been working with the web for ages, but I still can't use CSS without running into major problems every single time. Some of them are design issues, some of them are just me not being able to wrap my head around it.
For example, CSS doesn't have variables... so you can't say something like "headerColor = #5444BB" and just use that wherever you want the header color. What were they thinking!?
CSS also can't do math, so a simple construct like "width = 10px + 5em" is impossible. (You can't do this without math because the number of pixels in an em can change based on browser/font settings.) What were they thinking!?
The first thing I need in my CSS site is columns, you know, like newspapers had in the 17th century. What? You mean CSS has no support for columns until version 3, which is only now beginning to get any browser support at all? The only way to get columns is kludgy workarounds. What were they thinking!?
Design issues aside, I usually end up with a page where there's a completely unexplainable pixel gap, or an element wrapping when it shouldn't, or some thing or another. Usually, the only way I can solve these problems amounts to, basically, guess and check... maybe I'm an idiot, but the way CSS does layouts just won't fit in my head at all.
I honestly can't think of a better story told in any video game than ME1.
Really? You haven't played Bioshock? Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? Hell, even Halo 2?
A good game story leaves you so emotionally involved at the end of the game that you're either running around the room yelling "that was awesome!" (like Halo 2) or in tears (like Bioshock or Sands of Time). When Mass Effect ended, I just said, "eh" and moved on to the next game.
Now I'm not saying Mass Effect is a bad game, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not even in the top 5 of good game stories. Maaaybe the top 10.
The problem for me is that EA bought them, and now I can't bring myself to buy their games anymore...
I know EA hasn't turned them to shit *yet*, but I also know they *will*. Plus, the last thing the Games Industry needs is more people lining EA's pocket.
I do have a copy of Mass Effect that I got before EA bought them, maybe I'll just replay that instead.
Plus Japan is pretty much fully re-armed at this point. The only difference between Japan's military and any other country's military is that in Japan they're called the "Self-Defense Force."
Yeah, those Aegis Missile Destroyers are really helpful for self-defense, you know.
The particular issue is that we rely on grammatical and syntactic norms to make ourselves understood, particularly when attempting to convey complex structures of ideas. Trying to distinguish a gold-nibbed pen from a gold, nibbed pen, is a simple example. When you substitute your own grammatical norms, then you restrict your ability to convey ideas to those who share those norms.
Is there a single person on Earth who speaks English but doesn't understand what:) means? (Or wouldn't almost-instantly grasp it if they hadn't been exposed to it?)
Frankly, I'm with the grandparent here: language evolves. Smilies are useful in writing. Let's adopt them-- why the hell not? I want to see;) in the next edition of the dictionary.
It's an extremely hilariously-worded way of saying: "the bathroom smelled like death." At least, I can't think of what else they intended with "not relevant to life."
(Assuming the saying "smelled like death" is in your native language... the bathroom stunk.)
Ditto this. I learned grammar, punctuation, creative writing, and general textual cleverness from playing a decade's worth of Eternal Struggle MUD back in the day. I also learned how to type to avoid carpal tunnel. RP-based MUDs were great for this.
That said, I wouldn't recommend that approach to anybody else. Partially because more modern games are rife with 1337-speak, but mostly because that decade of my life was completely wasted. Sigh.
Andy Kaufman (the subject of the song) claimed/pretended to be a moon landing denier. I doubt he really was one, he whole comedy shtick was pissing people off, and denying the moon landing at that particular time in history pissed a lot of people off.
I could be wrong-- another part of his shtick was it being really, really hard to tell when he was joking or serious. Watch the "Man on the Moon" movie with Jim Carrey, it does a good job of examining Kaufman. (Although, other than the title of the movie, I don't think it has any material about the moon landing...)
The people who visit the links don't post in the comments.
So you have a ton of people who visit the links, take down the server, then just shrug and do something else. Then you have an entire other set of people who hardly ever visit the links, but when they try the first group has already taken the site down, and you post a gripe about it in the comments.
Considering the quality of most Slashdot submissions, I'm guessing the people who *don't* visit and read the links are better-educated than the ones who read the comments-- especially since the first few comments usually correct inaccuracies (or plain lies) in the story.
Woe be to those who only read the summary without reading the comments *or* visiting the links, God knows what crap those people are loading their brains with.
In the Seattle area, we have this thing called "traffic." Do you know how quickly you burn through a clutch on I-5 during rush hour? And how much of a pain in the ass it is to constantly shift?
Not having to replace my clutch yet has made up for the additional cost of the Automatic transmission already, not being a giant pain-in-the-ass while in stop-and-go traffic is just a bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
One way or another, you're going to have to define the color in hex mode.
Duh. Stop repeating that, I'm not a retard, and I'm not saying otherwise.
What I'm saying is that in a single CSS file, you should only see a particular hex color *once*. *Ever.* And that one time? You should be assigning it to a friendly human-readable name. A well-designed language would allow this, CSS doesn't.
In my job, I see tons of CSS files from tons of different web designers. Almost in all cases, the same hex color is seen 3, 4, 5, 10 times in the same document. There should be no need for that, it does nothing but main the CSS harder to maintain-- I should be able to change all 10 of those color references to a different color by changing one line, not 10. Again: a well-designed language would allow this.
Or take another example, maybe I want to put the amount of padding in a variable because I have 27 different tags that need padding-- it's always the same amount of padding, but I might want to change the amount. Right now, I have 27 different CSS rules, each one containing the same "padding-left: 15px" entry... to universally change that to 20px, I have to change it in 27 different places!
I think people who work a lot with CSS develop some kind of Stockholm Syndrome and they become completely unable to grasp it's horrible shortcomings. I find it hard to believe that people are disagreeing with my basic point: CSS should have variables in it.
Not on PC, only on consoles. And I only played it on PC. Blam! I win on a technicality! Suck it down, Anonymous Coward!
The last EA game I bought was Battlefield: 2142, on the very strong recommendation of my PC gaming friend. Being a PC gaming friend, he's developed a healthy Stockholm Syndrome about bugs and shitty quality... so while BF2142 met his extremely low standards, I couldn't stand the piece of shit.
Before that... I don't remember the last EA game I bought, I've been boycotting them since they signed the exclusive deal with the NFL and shut-out other games companies from making NFL games.
This isn't even bootleg Windows. This was the free Windows 7 preview that Microsoft released last year. You know, the one they said from day one would be disabled in March? In extremely obvious huge text on the website you downloaded it from? That Windows.
You could read the books.
But yah, it's not like Elder Scrolls where the books are literally *in* the game itself.
I dunno, Halo is part of the Marathon universe, and I felt Marathon was very creative and fresh from a sci-fi perspective. That's not to say that the elements hadn't been written in a book somewhere before, but I hadn't encountered them. For example, the Pfhor/Covenant being an (extremely) loose coalition of aliens instead of a single race. The Marathon concept of AI "rampancy" (which doesn't seem to appear in Halo.) Durandal's insane evil scheme to shield himself during the Big Crunch for the purpose of emerging as God in the next iteration of the universe.
That doesn't make any sense. You still have to assign the value to the variable.
Well, obviously.
The value is going to be a hex number. You don't have to use hex colors, if you want to limit yourself to the color names that css recognizes,
Again, duh. The problem is that nobody uses the built-in colors. (Which is just as well, since only like 8 of them are defined in the standard-- the rest Microsoft put in IE, and other browsers just kind of ran with IE's color list.)
In the end, you are communicating with a computer. It's not the fault of css that browsers use hex to render colors.
Yes, but the computer is there to make our lives easier. If it takes the computer 0.2 milliseconds to figure out that #113366 is the header color, and it takes me (a lousy human being) 5 seconds to reach the same conclusion, I want to assign that color a readable name, damnit.
(The assumption here is that CSS was created to make our lives easier; I'm not sure that's true.)
Look, I'm not some kind of "CSS King" with all the answers, so maybe I'm way off-base here.
All I know is that in my job, I frequently see other people's CSS files. And in almost every case, I'll see the same hex color used in a half-dozen cases in the CSS file with absolutely no indication of what that string of hex actually means from a practical perspective.
Maybe this is what I'm missing in your explanation: is it possible to assign a CSS class to CSS rule in the stylesheet itself? Like "inheriting" the other class's properties? If that's the case, then apologies-- but I didn't know that was possible.
The big problem with XHTML is that the W3C was wasting their time with this format that offers dubious benefit, made browsers more complicated, on the assumption that older versions of HTML would just... I dunno... magically go away. (At which point, browsers could be made simpler again.) Oh, and of course they didn't bother to figure out what actual websites on the actual Internet need, so it's incompatible with a ton of hugely popular tags. (For example, Atlas Universal Action Tags don't validate in XHTML Strict.)
Oh boy. I can do a XLST transform on my homepage. That gets me... what exactly?
Not that I'm really that opposed to XHTML, what pisses me off most is that they were working on this useless thing when they could have been actually working on HTML5 in the first place.
Halo 2? I thought even amoung Halo fans nobody liked that game for more than the multiplayer.
Really? It's much, much, much better than Halo 1 in pretty much every way. The story is better, too, and Arbiter is one of my favorite characters in video gaming.
Mass Effect is a deep universe, very fleshed out.
True; that doesn't make it good. Plus its universe is nothing compared to, say, The Elder Scrolls series if that's what you're after.
The story was extremely immersive.
I disagree; I found it mostly annoying. I tried replaying it a few months back, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish the extremely looong intro before you get your ship and freedom of movement. In retrospect, I'm not sure how I stood it the first time.
I've never played Sands of Time but I've also never heard it acclaimed for any outstanding writing.
Well, ok. But despite that, it's one of the best written and best acted stories in gaming. (But don't bother with the sequels.)
As a sci-fi fan Mass Effect was incredible to me. Something tells me you are not.
Actually, I am. Which is why I found it mostly predictable and cliched... I don't think there was a single original sci-fi idea in the entire game, frankly.
Ok, let's say classes solve all problems with color duplication. Wouldn't the CSS be a heck of a lot easier to read if your #5444BB had a more friendly name? Maybe you're an expert at looking at hex colors and instantly figuring out what they look like, but I sure as hell ain't. There's more than one advantage to having variables.
Ok, I consider myself a pretty sharp guy, and I've been working with the web for ages, but I still can't use CSS without running into major problems every single time. Some of them are design issues, some of them are just me not being able to wrap my head around it.
For example, CSS doesn't have variables... so you can't say something like "headerColor = #5444BB" and just use that wherever you want the header color. What were they thinking!?
CSS also can't do math, so a simple construct like "width = 10px + 5em" is impossible. (You can't do this without math because the number of pixels in an em can change based on browser/font settings.) What were they thinking!?
The first thing I need in my CSS site is columns, you know, like newspapers had in the 17th century. What? You mean CSS has no support for columns until version 3, which is only now beginning to get any browser support at all? The only way to get columns is kludgy workarounds. What were they thinking!?
Design issues aside, I usually end up with a page where there's a completely unexplainable pixel gap, or an element wrapping when it shouldn't, or some thing or another. Usually, the only way I can solve these problems amounts to, basically, guess and check... maybe I'm an idiot, but the way CSS does layouts just won't fit in my head at all.
Obligatory link to "CSS is awesome" mug: http://www.zazzle.com/css_is_awesome_mug-168716435071981928
Dude. They're owned by EA now. Just be glad the game doesn't kick you in the nuts every time you start it.
I honestly can't think of a better story told in any video game than ME1.
Really? You haven't played Bioshock? Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? Hell, even Halo 2?
A good game story leaves you so emotionally involved at the end of the game that you're either running around the room yelling "that was awesome!" (like Halo 2) or in tears (like Bioshock or Sands of Time). When Mass Effect ended, I just said, "eh" and moved on to the next game.
Now I'm not saying Mass Effect is a bad game, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not even in the top 5 of good game stories. Maaaybe the top 10.
Where do you live where a CRT is still considered a "regular" TV? Somalia?
The problem for me is that EA bought them, and now I can't bring myself to buy their games anymore...
I know EA hasn't turned them to shit *yet*, but I also know they *will*. Plus, the last thing the Games Industry needs is more people lining EA's pocket.
I do have a copy of Mass Effect that I got before EA bought them, maybe I'll just replay that instead.
Plus Japan is pretty much fully re-armed at this point. The only difference between Japan's military and any other country's military is that in Japan they're called the "Self-Defense Force."
Yeah, those Aegis Missile Destroyers are really helpful for self-defense, you know.
The particular issue is that we rely on grammatical and syntactic norms to make ourselves understood, particularly when attempting to convey complex structures of ideas. Trying to distinguish a gold-nibbed pen from a gold, nibbed pen, is a simple example. When you substitute your own grammatical norms, then you restrict your ability to convey ideas to those who share those norms.
Is there a single person on Earth who speaks English but doesn't understand what :) means? (Or wouldn't almost-instantly grasp it if they hadn't been exposed to it?)
Frankly, I'm with the grandparent here: language evolves. Smilies are useful in writing. Let's adopt them-- why the hell not? I want to see ;) in the next edition of the dictionary.
It's an extremely hilariously-worded way of saying: "the bathroom smelled like death." At least, I can't think of what else they intended with "not relevant to life."
(Assuming the saying "smelled like death" is in your native language... the bathroom stunk.)
Ditto this. I learned grammar, punctuation, creative writing, and general textual cleverness from playing a decade's worth of Eternal Struggle MUD back in the day. I also learned how to type to avoid carpal tunnel. RP-based MUDs were great for this.
That said, I wouldn't recommend that approach to anybody else. Partially because more modern games are rife with 1337-speak, but mostly because that decade of my life was completely wasted. Sigh.
That's what they were *sold*. That doesn't mean it was feasible. Scientists don't control your funding, politicians do.
Andy Kaufman (the subject of the song) claimed/pretended to be a moon landing denier. I doubt he really was one, he whole comedy shtick was pissing people off, and denying the moon landing at that particular time in history pissed a lot of people off.
I could be wrong-- another part of his shtick was it being really, really hard to tell when he was joking or serious. Watch the "Man on the Moon" movie with Jim Carrey, it does a good job of examining Kaufman. (Although, other than the title of the movie, I don't think it has any material about the moon landing...)
The people who visit the links don't post in the comments.
So you have a ton of people who visit the links, take down the server, then just shrug and do something else. Then you have an entire other set of people who hardly ever visit the links, but when they try the first group has already taken the site down, and you post a gripe about it in the comments.
Considering the quality of most Slashdot submissions, I'm guessing the people who *don't* visit and read the links are better-educated than the ones who read the comments-- especially since the first few comments usually correct inaccuracies (or plain lies) in the story.
Woe be to those who only read the summary without reading the comments *or* visiting the links, God knows what crap those people are loading their brains with.
Well, actually, we have flying hardware,
Lemme guess, your biggest contractor is Estes? That's about all you can afford on that impressive $130 budget you've managed to raise.
and several working professionals on the team,
Professional whats? Chefs? Garbagemen?
so Yes we have hope, and we will have some victory as well.
Hey, knock yourself out. Just don't kill anybody and we're cool.
Where's the bad analogy? I feel cheated.
I'm with you, I've never seen that either.
What would be the thinking behind that? As should be obvious after reading this thread, it seems like a huge safety problem.
Were there people somehow causing accidents by accidentally dropping their car into neutral while at speed? Or something?
In the Seattle area, we have this thing called "traffic." Do you know how quickly you burn through a clutch on I-5 during rush hour? And how much of a pain in the ass it is to constantly shift?
Not having to replace my clutch yet has made up for the additional cost of the Automatic transmission already, not being a giant pain-in-the-ass while in stop-and-go traffic is just a bonus.