I find the preponderance of AI topics pretty dull myself. Doesn't interest me. Tell me about markup languages, weird science, fun games, interesting presentations, old programming languages, new programming languages, accessibility ...
And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.
Microsoft is not just no longer supporting publisher, the application will be just plain gone. It's extraordinary to me that a huge number of files representing many hours of human labour will suddenly become unopenable.
I'm not saying Microsoft Publisher is necessarily good, but at work I run into a layout problem that Word won't handle, and there's nothing else available to me there.
Are you forgetting the bad neighbor that keeps attacking most of its other neighbors, even while under ceasefire agreements? And then moving onto the land and saying "this is ours, time to redraw the border again.".
Linux has this myth of being "community software", and if it really, truly is, then it should have better accessibility than Microsoft Windows.
As far as I can tell from following various people on Mastodon, reading blogs like this etc, is that it really falls short.
And it hurts to see more cool and interesting accessibility technologies become unusable and unsupported because people are chasing "shiny" and "modern".
It's still a lousy "spec", and, again, I often see people wishing for a Markdown web browser, but I don't see anyone implementing such a thing. You'd think it would be an instant success!
Yeah, I am a jaded techie. I wanted to like Markdown and used it extensively for a little while and wound up utterly loathing it for anything other than jotting down a quick, ephemeral note.
But, back to my original response: if you want a usable alternative to HTML, right now, a simple XML grammar + style sheet will deliver that. Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari will render it nicely. Heck, even Docbook would work (which is overkill, but has vast and mature tooling available).
There's a difference between push and pull for images.
If you have to manually click a link to an image, and it's advertising, then there's a loss of trust with the rest of the links on the page.
If the page includes adverts that render automatically, you just say "meh" and try to read the content in a sea of increasingly intrusive and repetitive advertising.
Text advertising is not as successful or intrusive as image advertising.
You can spin up a HTML-but-restricted XML grammar (with extra stuff even, like footnotes and stuff) and a CSS file in maybe half an hour, and it'll render in your browser just fine.
(Yeah, it'll be missing all the accessibility provisions, but you know, the base to build on is there, whereas "MarkDown in the browser" rendering has been often suggested and never implemented).
Gemini is cool for many reasons, but it fails in being able to encode complex documents, or use semantically or visually useful structures common to many documents.
There is:
- No metadata.
- No emphasis.
- No citations.
- No way to mark up nouns like a person, or a company.
- No way to present documents with a complex heading hierarchy past level 3 (for those who argue that more is not necessary, please consider that headings are basically cognitive sub-directories. Do you want to work on a file system that only lets you go two levels below "/"?).
I'd personally favour (but not advocate for) something like a super-lightweight Docbook grammar which is standardised, and already has great tooling available for it.
Very interesting. I've never had occasion to learn Lua, but it seems like it can do some neat things. I really like the JSON-esque template language there.
Not just Charlie Brown. The entire cast of the comic.
* Charlie Brown will never talk to the Red Haired Girl. His kites will always be eaten by a tree. He'll never win a baseball game. He'll never kick the football. He has abominably low self-esteem.
* Lucy's infatuation with Schroder is clearly one-sided; likewise Peppermint Patty / Charlie Brown; also Sally/Linus.
* Snoopy will never get the Red Baron, nor enjoy publishing success
* Linus will never stop believing in The Great Pumpkin and is disappointed every year.
Probably loads more. The comic is about losers, and losing.
And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.