Month: May 2002

Categories
Technology Web

Netscape 4.x not supported here

I have a confession to make: I’ve not always been a strong voice for standardization.

As much as I believe in the necessity of standards, I was so concerned when the Mozilla organization was strongly chastised for spending time on new innovations rather than implementation of standards that I wrote an article, The Tyranny of Standards, about this for O’Reilly.

However, there is a difference between pushing back at standards groups because of wanting to protect what I still consider one of the most innovative technology applications of this time, and pushing back because an organization or a person refuses to acknowledge that it’s time to let go of a technology that has outworn its usefulness.

With the upcoming release of Mozilla 1.0, it’s time to say good-bye to Netscape 4.x. It’s time to close this chapter in our lives. It’s time to abandon LAYER and ILAYER and BLINK and move on with our browser-based lives.

After my posting yesterday, both Allan and Jonathon wrote their own views about supporting Netscape 4.x.

Allan, who has a web development company, wrote:

Our small company, which definitely can’t afford the time, let alone anything else, to cater to the whims of an outdated browser, has explained the situation to our new clients.

And, we must have been persuasive, as they’ve all agreed to let us support web standards as far as we can for their sites.

The lavish days of the dot-com boom are gone and most development work on the web is lean and mean and pared down to the essentials. As Allan says, companies can no longer afford the amount of time and resources to expend on a browser that has been replaced by not just one but several different options — Internet Explorer, Netscape 6.x, Opera, and now, Mozilla.

And Jonathon wrote:

So why is it that Netscape 4.x users—who could easily upgrade to a standards-compliant browser—put their desire to use an obsolete browser above the needs of all other Web users? Not just above those with disabilities who benefit most from accessible sites, but above everyone who uses a modern browser. And why are they so frequently arrogant about it? As if using a tenth-rate browser is a mark of distinction.

Arrogance. Is that why Netscape 4.x users refuse to upgrade? Or are there other reasons?

I had an email from a reader who mentioned that her company can’t upgrade their browser because of security. I can see that there might be concerns about upgrading to IE, but what about Netscape 6.x or Mozilla? Or Opera?

I created an online tutorial demonstrating how to use Mozilla’s XUL that I had to remove as the browser continued through it’s many pre-release betas. With the soon to be released version 1.0, I would like to spend time with this tutorial; to update it for 1.0, to try out any new technical goodies being released with 1.0, and generally have a bit of fun with Mozilla.

I can either spend time trying to make sure that this weblog page shows equally for people using Netscape 4.x, or I can use the same time to update my Mozilla tutorial. There is no choice here — I choose to look forward, not back.

Netscape 4.x. You were a good friend at the time and you helped show us that we can do more on the web then click a hypertext link. But It’s time for you to say good-bye. And it’s time for me to post to my weblog:

Netscape 4.x NOT supported here.

Categories
Weblogging

Weblogging Community

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave responded to my earlier post with a thoughtful and considerate posting that asked a very valid question:

So anyway, here’s a question for Shelley. When I see your site update on Weblogs.Com, I usually go for a visit to see what the bird is burning about now. I think of that as a community feature. Do you think it’s valuable? If not, why do you participate?

First, thanks for stopping by Dave, always appreciated. And as a point of clarification — I dropped that silly rule about comments I had about five minutes after I originated it, so please feel free to drop in with comments.

Back to the question: Why do I participate in pinging weblogs.com, when my interest tends to be on the people aspect of weblogging rather than the technology?

Though my focus is on the participants, I also appreciate much of the technology used in weblogging, particularly the weblogging tools such as Movable Type, Radio, and Blogger. And I also appreciate community services such as weblogs.com that let me know when my favorite webloggers have updated.

To me, technology provides a framework that allows me to communicate with my weblogging community easily and without a lot of hassle. I’ll alway be grateful for the folks who create all this technology that makes my weblogging life a lot easier. Still, technology is only an enabler — the content of the weblogs is the key aspect to “community” in my opinion.

If technology could be considered equivalent to the nerves in the brain, it is the people that provide the chemistry that enables the synaptic (community) connections to be made. Without the chemistry provided by the webloggers, the technology is nothing more than bits and bytes and wires all jumbled about in a chaotic and undifferentiated mess, thrown into the ether.

Consider my own community of webloggers — the virtual neighborhood that I reference fondly and at length. Technology will tell me that Bill Simoni’s weblog can be accessed at the URL, http://radio.weblogs.com/0100111/. And technology can let me know when Bill has updated his weblog, through weblogs.com.

Bill uses technology to create his weblog (using Radio), which is accessed through additional technology (the Internet). And I read the weblog through my browser (Mozilla by preference), contained on my laptop — yet more examples of technology.

However, technology doesn’t tell me that Bill is expecting a baby any day now. And technology doesn’t tell me that Bill has a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor, is pretty excited about the baby, and has a a thing about grammar and spellchecking 😉

That’s community.

If Userland and Movable Type and Blogger were to discontinue innovating their products as of this minute, we would perhaps have less fun toys to work with. We’d miss out on better products, and more reliable hosting, and more interesting ways to post, and better ways to aggregate the postings, and more efficient approaches regarding notification…

…but we’d still have our community.

You’d have to take the Internet down to take down our community, and due to the pervasive nature of the Net, I don’t think this is even possible, now.

Ultimately, the community is not dependent on the technology as much as the technology is, itself, dependent on the community. Because without the community, why would we need the technology in the first place?

And the topic is continued here.

Categories
Weblogging

Overlapping images

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve had entries in my comments in addition to email that the images are overlapping the text when my new weblog is viewed in Netscape 4.7.

This is not an unknown problem with Netscape 4.7 and usually has to do with wrapping the IMG tag in paragraph tags. This is also further complicated by the use of the CSS attribute LINE-HEIGHT.

I’ve experimented around with one of the postings — removing the line-height attribute from the surrounding DIV block, removing automatically generated line breaks so that I can use my own formatting and so on, but from what I can see in Netscape 4.7 on my Linux box, the images are still overlapping the text.

I have the following options at this time:

  1. I can go back to Blogger and forget all about Movable Type because this problem didn’t occur with Blogger.
  2. I can change the formatting on this new blog to emulate what I had in Blogger, completely.
  3. I can stop using images.
  4. I can leave things as they are, continue to look for a solution, and hope that all the Netscape 4.7 people will:
    1. Understand these things happen when you use an old browser and
    2. Consider upgrading or
    3. Realize that they’re going to have these problems and adopt a philosophical approach to the whole thing.

At this time, I’m following the last option.

For more on Overlap Problem:

Fear of Style Sheets 2

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Weblogging Centralization/Decentralization summary

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Earlier in the week I made a statement about Radio being centralized that caused some interest and reaction from the Userland folks and others. A lot of back and forth and intense discussion in the comments associated with the postings here and here and continued at Backup Brain (here and here) as well as at Doc Searls and, of course, Userland — both John Robb and Dave.

A lot of cross-posting and cross-discussion. Some confusion. More discussion.

Other than pointing out the links I don’t want to go back and rehash the old stuff. As a point of clarification I did want to say that Radio doesn’t have a dependency on Userland’s or any other RCS (Radio Cloud Server) if you choose the FTP option to upload your files, and don’t use the Radio comments or upstreaming. That’s not to say that there isn’t connectivity between the Radio application and the server, Userland’s by default. There is a handshake that occurs when your Radio application starts, and when you shut it down, and there is no way to disable this as far as I have been able to find out by going through all the associated script. If there is a way, Userland will have to point this out.

Dave also wrote his views of the more popular weblogging tools and how they compare from a centralization point of view. And this essay is something I do want to talk about. However, I’m going to try and talk about it in such a way that I question the views not the person. I guess my comments will tell me if I’m successful in this or not.

In his essay, Dave writes that Blogger is centralized for editing and decentralized for reading. I agree with this assessment. If you host your Blogger weblog on Blogspot, then the tool is centralized for editing and reading; but you don’t have to host your weblog on this server, you can easily use your own.

I had a Manila site from Userland before I switched to Blogger and, again, I agree with Dave’s assessment that Manila is centralized from both an editing and reading perspective.

Where I disagree with Dave’s conclusion is his interpretation of Movable Type being “centralized” because the tool and the posted content rest on your own server.

If Blogger’s posts are decentralized because they can reside on your server, then the same logic must, must apply to Movable Type. And if Movable Type’s posts are decentralized then the tool, which resides in the same location, must also be decentralized.

Finally, I agree with Dave’s assessment of Radio in that the posts can be decentralized (hosted on your own server), and the tool itself for the most part is decentralized but there are some aspects of the tool that aren’t autonomous (I grabbed that from Doc, it is a better fitting word). It does communicate with the RCS — Userland by default, though this can be replaced by your own RCS if you wish to host it.

One other aspect of Dave’s Essay that I thought was interesting and perhaps explains where we have such different viewpoints is this concept of community services. In my own opinion, a weblogging tool is just that — a tool to create a weblog. Associated with this is the ability to archive postings, add other content, and faciliate comments.

To me, community enters the picture through the people rather than the technology. People link to a weblog posting, or add comments or both. Eventually, you can get a chained sequence of communication going, as was demonstrated with the postings earlier this week related to this topic.

I think, though, that Dave sees a more important role for technology in this process, through community servers providing services such as chat, technologies such as news aggregator, OPML outlines and so on.

Neither of our viewpoints are wrong — they’re just different. But they do color our perspective on other aspects of “weblogging”. However, this can add interest to the whole discussion.

After all, if we all thought alike, then we wouldn’t need weblogging, now, would we?

Update 5/5/02 Thread continued here.

Categories
Photography Places

Market Day

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Sleepless night followed by glorious dawn. Market day!

Farmer’s Market is a carefully controlled and monitored open market where farmer’s can bring their goods and sell direct to the public. Here is where you can get the best of California produce, all in season all guaranteed absolutely fresh.

Today, strawberries and asparagus were big items, as were navel oranges. The mushrooms looked good, too, and I grabbed some shiitake for a rice dish tonight. Rumor has it Morels will be out next week, and I’m contemplating making a mushroom soufflé with cranberry coulis.

My favorite olive bread was sold out — bummer! However, I picked up a nice sour dough round. And to feed the soul, flowers.

flowers