The lack of recent postings can be directly attributed to me doing more work. Work sucks.
Well in my readings lately I came across this gem at Salon. This article lays a pretty objective smackdown upon the RIAA. I am all for the artists getting money for their work However I will not pay $15+ for a damn CD. Make the cost reasonable or provide better channels of distribution. Also the whole usage restrictions aren't gonna fly with this brown man. If I pay for something I will want to use it as I wish. When I buy a car I don't have to sign any papers telling me how and where I'm allowed to drive it. And if the RIAA thinks they can "rent" me songs, then they got another thing coming.
Here is yet another Mozilla 1.0 review that just misses the boat again. This review from the bottom up just defends IE. It does not look at Mozilla objectively nor does it pay any due respect to the drive for more standardized web development. What really bugs me about this review is how the reviewers totally gloss over the issue of privacy protection offered by Mozilla and the huge leg up Mozilla has over IE on the issue of security exploits. Mozilla lets me block cookies from individual sites, images from individual sites, and it actually uses standard 128-bit encryption when storing data I want it to remember. When I cruise the web with Mozilla I feel like a human being, whereas cruising the web with IE I feel like a prostitute flaunting my demographic data and private information to whosoever chooses to fondle and use me electronically.
People are complacent, but that doesn't give reviewers the right to ignore major topics altogether. I won't even get into the little dig towards Mozilla's non-native GUI. I guess the author doesn't use Quicktime, RealPlayer, Norton AntiVirus, any of the utilities Creative offers to tweak their hardware, any Java based program, not to mention the odd toolbar system IE introduced that everyone now thinks is the industry standard way of doing toolbars. Does this reviewer even know what a challege writing consistent GUIs across multiple platforms is?
Also I thought it was really interesting when the review stated, "The worst problem with the current internet landscape is the proliferation of "table-based" layouts." Have a look at their source code. What do we find:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
and
<!-- CONTENT TABLE -->
<TABLE WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0">
<TR>
Also it didn't help reading this comment on the website's own discussion forum. Honestly these guys have no real business talking about, let alone reviewing HTML layout engines and or web browsers. Frontpage?!?! I wouldn't wish that upon the devil himself.
While I'm ranting about Mozilla I came across this bug checkin. I am floored. I cannot understand why Mozilla is trying do the "me too" bit with a nasty MSHTML tag. This isn't going to help when the Mozilla team is part of the CSS2 planning meeting or anywhere else for that matter. I am a huge proponent of the display it as a properly formatted string instead. It helps usability and discoverability and it doesn't make Mozilla feel like another me too IE. Come on guys, we can make better decisions than this! I'm really really happy that MPT is my hero. If only he'd be more open minded about the whole tab thing.
Posted by Mr. Keyur at August 1, 2002 12:45 AM