Neil Gaiman weighs in on the flap over adult-oriented comics in a Denver Library:
It’s been twenty years, and newspaper headlines still oscillate between “Wham! Bam ! Pow! Comics Have Grown Up!” and “OH MY GAAAD THIS COMIC NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN HAS CONTENT NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN IN IT!” articles. Bizarre.
(Ironically, the people complaining don’t seem to care much about the content—they just wanted to get the Spanish-language books off the shelves.)
I just discovered that this week’s Green Arrow #53 is actually written by William Messner-Loebs. (DC’s website still says Judd Winick.)
Messner-Loebs and his wife have been in terrible financial straits for some time. An article about their plight last January led to fan mobilization complete with donation drives, benefit auctions and books, and—most importantly—a campaign to convince publishers to start hiring him again.
I’ve already ordered The Three Tenors: Offkey from Äardwolf Publishing and Heroes And Villains: The William Messner-Loebs Benefit Sketchbook from TwoMorrows Publishing. Neither has arrived yet, though they’re supposed to have come out last month.
Now I’m off to the comic store to pick up Green Arrow.
Mnemovore #5 came out this week. (For some reason issue #4 shipped twice—once just before Comic-Con and again last week.) This week’s issue, or at least my copy, has a strange quirk to it. Some of the word balloons are faded, as if a rubber stamp was pushed down with unequal force, or as if someone ran a gradient tool over the text with Photoshop. I’m still not sure whether it’s intentional or just a coloring or printing error.
This scan should be relatively non-spoilery:
At one point I thought they might be the result of coloring gradients applied above the word balloons instead of below, but I could only get a few to match up.
The thing is, it’s appropriate for the book—if maddening to try to read. The premise is that into our information-saturated world has come a predator that feeds on information, eating people’s memories and leaving them amnesiac or worse. In a story about information loss, gaps in information make thematic sense. And there was one panel with the same effect last issue: “They can make it so you can’t…”
Just one issue to go…
It occurred to me today that if you lay out the three major players in computer operating systems and the three major players in web browsers, the results track remarkably well.
It breaks down, of course. Traditional UNIX is missing from the OS wars, though it provides a nice analogy to Netscape for Firefox. The battle lines don’t quite track either, since the previous wars were Windows vs. Mac and IE vs. Netscape. And Safari’s missing entirely. But it’s interesting to see the same three roles in play.
OK, so you want a web anyone can use, whether they’ve picked Windows, Macintosh, Linux, or whatever came on their cell phone or PDA. What can you do? Here are some ideas:
Try an alternative browser. Use it exclusively for several days. Get used to what it can do, and how it differs from Internet Explorer or the browser you’ve been using.
Better yet, try two. If you already use Firefox, try Opera. If you already use Opera, try Firefox or Chrome. You can always switch back if you like the other one better. The goal is to see what’s out there.
If you find a web browser you like, tell your friends and family. Get them to try it out, or give them a demo.
If you really like the browser, and would like to spread awareness, consider joining a promotional group like Firefox Affiliates or Choose Opera.
Write about your favorite web browser. Encourage your visitors to try it out. Post links or buttons pointing to the download site.
If you agree with the Alternative Browser Alliance‘s goals, feel free to link to us.
Base your design on web standards whenever possible. Take a look at sites like the CSS Zen Garden and A List Apart for ideas. The Mozilla Developer Center and Opera Developer Community are also good resources.
Validate your code. Learn which rules are safe to break. Where you have to use proprietary features, use graceful degradation so that other browsers at least get a usable experience. Some tools for validation include:
Try not to make assumptions based on browser detection, which is often wrong by the time the next version of a program rolls around. Where you have to check, detect capabilities, not browsers.
Start a collection of web browsers. When designing a site, check the layout with as many browsers as you can early in the process. Check critical parts of the site before you go live. Sites like Browsershots or BrowserStack can help you with browsers and platforms you don’t actually have.
Do your development on Chrome or Firefox. Both have extensive tools to help you test and debug your websites.
These are just suggestions. You can do as much or as little as you want, as much or as little as you can!
This article originally appeared on the Alternative Browser Alliance in 2005. This is the latest version before I retooled the site a decade later.
The main reasons are innovation and security.
The intense competition between Netscape and Internet Explorer in the late 1990s ended with the World Wide Web dominated by one browser. At its height, Internet Explorer was used by an estimated 95% of people online.
There were many reasons IE took over: it came free with Windows, the most common operating system. Many webmasters would rely on Internet-Explorer-only features like ActiveX, leaving their sites inaccessible to people using other web browsers. As time went on, webmasters would write their web pages without checking for errors, except by testing them in Internet Explorer.
You might think this is acceptable: One vision, leading the web forward. Unfortunately, once Internet Explorer’s dominance was secure, Microsoft did very little to update it. There was almost no innovation from 2001 through 2004, either in the front-end or the back-end, until Windows XP Service Pack 2 redesigned security. Many aspects of the languages that make up the web, particularly in the core languages of HTML and CSS, remained unavailable or buggy in IE until the 2006 release of version 7—5 years later—and even IE7 still has a long way to go.
Also, not everyone could or wanted to use Internet Explorer. Die-hard Netscape fans clung to their browser or shifted to Mozilla. People using Linux-based or Unix operating systems didn’t even have the option of using IE. Macintosh users could use Internet Explorer, but their version had different quirks than the Windows version everyone used for testing.
Two things happened.
First, the smaller browsers started innovating. While the heavyweights battled for dominance, a tiny Norwegian company called Opera began to re-think the way people used a web browser. Long after Internet Explorer and Netscape were free, Opera was still shareware…and still getting paid customers. (Today Opera’s free too.) Mozilla, a spin-off of the old Netscape, made an effort to implement as much of the web standards as possible, as correctly as possible. A small project called NetCaptor combined MDI with tabs to create “tabbed browsing,” which made its way into Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari… and has finally appeared, years later, in Internet Explorer 7.
Second, the Internet ceased to be a friendly neighborhood and was flooded with viruses, trojan horses, and spyware. With a single program accounting for more than 90% of users, and a design that tied that program directly to the operating system, that meant one set of security bugs could attack most of the users on the internet. Alternative browsers and operating systems have long promoted their security over Windows and Internet Explorer. In 2004, people who used a Mac, Linux, or an alternative browser on Windows didn’t even need that extra level of protection because they weren’t even targets!
Competition keeps innovation going. If several products have to fight for market share, they have to continually one-up each other. End result: all browsers improve, everyone wins.
It hardly seems a coincidence that Microsoft stopped developing Internet Explorer when they trounced Netscape, then started again as soon as Firefox started making gains.
Security may be easier to manage when you only have one place to look, but it’s also easier for the bad guys to crack. In 2004, they could get 90% of the web just by targeting Internet Explorer on Windows. In 2008, they can still get 75-80%, still aiming at one target. Now imagine that spread out among IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari on Windows, PowerPC Macs, Intel Macs, and Linux. They’d have to settle for 10% or try to crack every combination they could. Web developers, on the other hand, designing for the common language of the web, would have no more trouble than they do today.
And who knows? You just might find yourself liking another browser better than you thought!
This article originally appeared on the Alternative Browser Alliance in 2005. This is the latest version before I retooled the site a decade later.
Today was a reminder that just having cloud cover doesn’t necessarily keep things cool. We’ve had occasional wispy clouds at evening, and at one point some serious cloud cover closer to the coast, but today was hazy and overcast all day—and it was just plain muggy.
Eh, it’s only early August. It’ll get hotter (and occasionally muggier).
