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Mark_Wallace wrote: "If you want to play this game, you have to open this page in [browser
name]" wouldn't confuse anyone.
Good point.
The same with video games and consoles -- not all games are available for all consoles.
And apps and phones/tablets.
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But do you have one dishwasher for cleaning pots, and another dishwasher for cleaning pans?
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Stryder_1 wrote: do you have one dishwasher for cleaning pots, and another dishwasher for
cleaning pans?
Only the polygamists have those.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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Stryder_1 wrote: But do you have one dishwasher for cleaning pots, and another dishwasher for cleaning pans?
No, but if a pot doesn't fit into the dishwasher, or if the dishwasher can't clean it, I clean it with something else.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I think the analogy kinda breaks down there. Both are supposed to clean both. But if push comes to shove you can always clean by hand. But you can't render a HTML page in your head. 
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It wasn't supposed to be a major, definitive, profound analogy; it was just something I threw into a forum posting.
If you want to extend it along sensible lines, try looking at the pans -- why do you need more than one? People all over the world manage with a single pot or wok, so why should your kitchen have over a dozen?
The point is that there is no "best" browser, and certainly nothing that comes close to being the best for everything, so encouraging people to install multiple browsers is preferable -- certainly preferable to the current situation, where browser-lovers are still acting like schoolboys/d1ckheads over their personal browser preferences.
It's not just HTML, any more. Expecting browsers to handle everything will result in their needing a gigabyte of memory to function at all.
Oh. It already has.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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That's not even a relevant comparison. Of course you can't wash clothes with a dishwasher or watch TV on a microwave. They're different tools for completely different problem spaces, but that's not whats being discussed. A closer comparison is you *can* open any text document with any text editor, you can open any RTF document with any RTF editor, and you can open any GIF with your choice of image editing program. You only run into "you can only open this with MS Word" when you get into MS's proprietary formats, and surely you're not advocating the web get splintered amongst proprietary formats.
This is also the argument against silverlight and flash. Giving that much control to one commercial company to control the standard is suicide. MS starts gaining grown and suddenly if they don't want to adequately support other users/browsers, tough **** for the user. Have we forgotten IE's dominance just a decade or so ago? Have we forgotten that because MS didn't want to go forward, everyone else was held back? The web was littered with "Site best browsed in FF" or "Site best browsed in IE" tags. And I know you aren't ignorant of the fact that not everyone is on, or can run, an MS browser.
There should be a central standard, different products should implement that standard and bring their own flavor of features. But the standards organization has to move faster than the current snails pace they operate at. One step toward that will be when the major browsers are all supprting auto-update cycles so the standards can move at a faster pace and the users will move along with it. No more lagging IE 6 users preventing the dollar-conscious big sites from upgrading.
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Jadoti wrote: Giving that much control to one commercial company to control the standard is suicide
Whatever is it that makes you think that it is so important that you bring in the idea of people taking their own lives?
For one thing, making a tool that works with stuff that you have developed is not "taking control" of anything other than the tools that you develop.
For another, forcing everyone to make programs that work exactly the same way and that are capable of exactly the same things is ridiculous.
Ever heard of competition? Ever heard of innovation? Your "Final Solution" of central standards will send them both to the gas chamber.
Having an external committee decide how companies and innovators should make their products is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, not to mention that such a committee will immediately turn into a vipers' nest (which it has), that will yet further stifle any creativity and innovation.
If you want everyone in the world to view your web pages, don't use Flash, don't use Silverlight, don't use HTML5, etc. Problem sorted.
However, anyone who wants everyone in the world to view their web pages probably needs psychiatric attention, so this "connecting everyone to everyone" concept for browser design should not be taken seriously, and the focus has to be that of connecting content providers to content consumers.
Once you get back to the demesne of supplier > customer, the whole standards argument starts to look a little childish and ridiculous, and rightly so.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Suicide wasn't literal. I'm sure you got that, though.
I didn't say force everyone to work the same way, I said a standards board and everyone implements the standards with their unique features. What your advocating is the exact opposite of competition and innovation, it's pushing for a dominant company to monopolize because of their position.
You might like have 20 browsers and choosing between them for their unique characteristics, most other people don't. If Google, being the dominant search engine, decided that they were just going to write for Chrome, then practically overnight users would end up switching to chrome because who in their right mind would want to search in one browser and switch to another browser to use the site they're going to? Who in their right mind wants to have to remember "this site uses this browser, this site uses that browser"? Once users switch to chrome, developers will switch to chrome (because yes, public facing websites DO want wide reach), and you'll have a defacto monopoly. If Google then decides to not support certain platforms with chrome, those users are hosed. Look at early Flash on Linux days, it wasn't supported (and when it was, it wasn't supported well) and the users were left out from sites dominated with Flash.
The web is not the only place that uses this concept. Could you imagine if auto manufacturers did what you propose? Every car having it's own features, roads designed for the cars that the designer likes? Apologists like you would say "I use this car for driving down this road, and I use that car for that road, my truck for this dirt road and my bike for this narrow road... who needs standards?!"
No one mandates that steering wheels go on the left side of the car, gas on the right, brake on the left, but they all adopt it because it works best for the consumers. No one mandates the size of the cars, but there's a standard, and therefor almost all vehicles can drive down almost all roads. Motorcycle manufacturers tried breaking from this many years ago, too, putting gas where they wanted, brake and clutch where they wanted, and it was chaos. They too standardized, and it didn't kill innovation.
There has to be standards, or the web gets splintered. The slow-moving W3C might not be the right group, but it doesn't mean the model is wrong. They don't have to dictate the end product, just promote and evolve the standard. Doesn't stop browsers from doing their own thing, but given browser A that supports feature X, developers can still develop to the standards and know it will work, still know that users who use browser A will be able to view their site, as well as browser B, provided they don't use the special features.
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Jadoti wrote: If Google, being the dominant search engine, decided that they were just going to write for Chrome, then...
... No board of self-appointed experts would be able to a damned thing about it, so your argument is ridiculous.
Jadoti wrote: Apologists like you would say "I use this car for driving down this road, and I use that car for that road, my truck for this dirt road and my bike for this narrow road... who needs standards?!"
Unfortunately for your argument, that is Precisely what people do -- "I use a bike for cycle paths, an off-road machine for off road, a town car for driving around town, a limo for weddings, and a tank for invading Poland".
If cars were the same price as Internet browsers, you could bet your life that each family would have a dozen, for different purposes.
Jadoti wrote: No one mandates that steering wheels go on the left side of the car, gas on the right, brake on the left, but they all adopt it because it works best for the consumers.
Wrong.
The pedals are positioned because that is what consumers Want. No-one has decided "what is best", at all; although if some idiot decided to put the pedals in different positions, accidents would happen, and safety standards would be established -- but no-one in the industry wants yet more standards, so no-one rocks the boat (my wife spent a number of years as a project manager on high-end German cars, so she can tell you how much they desire and look forward to new standards).
How you think you can get away using that as an example to show that standards are wanted, I don't know -- the reality, in the real world, is that no-one wants standards, so they avoid doing anything that might make someone create them.
Jadoti wrote: There has to be standards, or the web gets splintered.
Say what?
What you're saying is that everyone must be able to view every web page, no matter its content, in every browser, otherwise the Internet is "splintered"?
Think hard on that concept, and try to include the real world in your thinking.
If one person predominantly uses a browser for comms (e-mail, etc.) then why should that person use a browser that is loaded down to five times its weight with libraries that optimise it for watching videos?
Etc. Etc. Etc.
What you appear to want is for all browsers to be optimal for all possible uses.
Given that a lot of idiots making browsers seem to think the same thing, the day when a browser's memory drain reaches 4Gb is probably not far away -- exceeding 1Gb is relatively normal already.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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This will never end you know. We knew.
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Who cares anymore?
The web is a burning wreckage filled with the decomposing bodies of various "seemed like a good idea at the time"-'technologies'.
Offline programs are the only way forward for anything that isn't explicitly meant to be a website. Just say no to silly web "apps".
And elephant Weight's "look at how cool this is oh wait it isn't it's just an offline webpage", too.
Yes, I mad.
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harold aptroot wrote: Offline programs are the only way forward for anything that isn't explicitly meant to be a website. Just say no to silly web "apps".
Amen and hallelujah!
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
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harold aptroot wrote: Offline programs are the only way forward for anything that isn't explicitly meant to be a website. Just say no to silly web "apps".
That is rather reassuring particularly since my work in in offline apps and I am currently training myself in WPF which incidentally I think is the bees knees 
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Just wanted to point out that Chrome isn't banning plugins.
It's banning a plugin architecture. There are other architectures, and if Microsoft ports Silverlight to use the newer (more secure) architecture, then Silverlight will continue to work on Chrome.
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Flash and Silverlight? This goes much further back than that. Java applets were, I think, the first general-purpose solution to the problem that every round of people seems to think we don't need a solution for and then realizes we do, after all.
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To be fair the vast majority of standards started with a proprietary product or something else that was restricted in some way.
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I don't see what the problem is. Google are releasing a plugin into the market and whether it becomes adopted will depend entirely on user take up, there is little they can do to force users to use it. Microsoft has added lots of extensions to IE over the years in the hope the world would all migrate to using them, this seems no different. MS mostly failed because their browser was, IMO and continues to be, very poor compared to the competition. If users move to chrome in droves, this interface will become standardised and all browsers will either support it or die.
Silverlight was introduced as a reaction by Microsoft to Flash taking over the web, with the fairly widely understood aim of killing off Flash. This fragmented the market which hurt Flash, then Apple's refusal to allow Flash on mobile devices killed it off. The job done, Microsoft IMO fairly cynically pulled Silverlight.
The point I am making is that in the sphere of web browsers, Darwinism is what decides what flourishes, with success being defined by user take up, in turn driving web developer support.
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M Towler wrote: The point I am making is that in the sphere of web browsers, Darwinism is what decides what flourishes, with success being defined by user take up, in turn driving web developer support.
That is the point.
Why does Microsoft keep giving up on successful projects just to cater to the open source/standards crowd?
Sure, make Visual Studio pump out mounds of steaming HTML 5/JavaScript for people who carp about standards - but keep making an awesome IE plugin (Silverlight) for those who actually want to provide their users with a better experience. Microsoft has the cash to do both very well.
That way Microsoft Developers can continue to make a living providing great solutions while the rest of the world is still in a tizzy about the excrement the W3C is pumping out.
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I know this is rough on a lot of developers but I had to chuckle. I just LAST NIGHT decided to stop trying to write web-based stuff as I really don't care for it and don't have any call for it. (Let the "kids" do it). I find HTML in general to be a real kludge when it comes to the front-end for software. It takes 3 times (if not more) effort to do EVERYTHING. (I have tried to sell myself on it it for about 13 years so it's not like I haven't tried). I write desktop apps that handle databases. My clients are small, they don't care for all their data to live out on the web anyway.
I'd much rather focus on getting my clients their problems solved than spending 70-80% of my development time maintaining all the stuff associated with trying to target all these web browsers and their kludgy implementation. Yuck.
Yes, there is a lot of really slick stuff being done on the web (and I use it ) but I've been at this for 37 years and I keep seeing developers get jerked around by stuff like this. The hell with that. I'll just spend the rest of my career writing stuff that no one else can "lower" themselves to do anymore. (and have a life) I make six-figures doing that. Just breaks my heart that Google is jerking everybody around. 
modified 26-Sep-13 6:37am.
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Okay, but now I'm wondering - what's the difference between having a webpage just boot an offline program via a "a href" link? Skype does that if you go skype:someuserid in a href attribute iirc. And the fact that chrome is using chrome:// is kinda the point, too. Arguably, you wouldn't even need to make a custom URL prefix like that, if you forced a certain path and just did file:///... but no one sane likes forcing paths.
As a second suggestion - I know there's a lot of libraries for making webpages possible, but if people want "webapps", why doesn't someone just simply write something that can convert how a browser presents a webpage to the plugins, so the different browsers have multiplatform plugins?
I actually use the IE Tab for Chrome extension. I'm not wasting half a minute waiting for IE to start up, and the ActiveX is a good amount faster. (and does better on the Acid3 test too)
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MehGerbil wrote: I want to program using tools by a company that isn't afraid to win.
Microsoft is not afraid of win, but every time it does it, it gets a nice letter from an antitrust regulator.
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It was crazy enough to create Australia. This is nothing!
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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