On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Von Fugal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <quote name="Stuart Jansen" date="Wed, 11 Jun 2008 at 06:45 -0600"> >> On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 01:04 -0600, Von Fugal wrote: >> > "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." >> > >> > Words to live by. >> >> Actually, some argue that the Web has done a pretty good job of >> discrediting that theory. >> >> On the one hand, ultra-liberal browsers created a giant mess that is >> taking us years to recover from. On the other hand, some argue that the >> Web would never have become so popular if it hadn't been so easy for >> people to create Web pages without to learn how to do it right. > > Then again, things like dreamweaver weren't very conservative in what > the put out. Neither were the miriad of web "authors" nor was Microsoft. > You can't see one side of the philosophy being followed and correlate > failure with a faulty philosophy. > > I would suggest that the conservative out side would mean people were > at least careful with what they wrote, while browsers would still > forgive mistakes here and there. Microsoft would have been much more > conservative with their non-standards. DreamWeaver wouldn't give you so > many darned tables everywhere. the real problem here is there _is_ _no_ > standard way to do what people have hacked web pages to do, such as > perfect layouts and so forth. > > Seriously, all in all, I'm not sure exactly what mess you are referring > to in the first place. People can still write valid html and even xhtml > and it works. Just because "bad stuff" works doesn't mean "good stuff" > doesn't. When you refer to this big mess, the main thing I think of is > that firefox poster "Don't hurt the web, use open standards." If that's > the mess of question, then saying a unix philosophy is bad because > Microsoft didn't play nice, well... > > Changing gears, having said "words to live by" I think there's a great > non-programming side to this as well. It means to me, be tolerant of > your fellows whatever their beliefs, but hold true to your own values. > Yet here in this day we walk a very dangerous road. Activism rages in > which the tolerance side is pushed so heavily that to tolerate means to > completely endorse and abandon any opposing values you have. Again I > say, please don't truncate the second half. It is of utmost importance. >
Very well said, Von, all of it. I was about to write that all up myself, but you said every bit of it. I'm amazed and impressed. Long live Postel's Law! Bryan -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
