So post the widget already, but not as an .exe file. Kind of useless for that cross-platform niceness.

Link

I find it ironic that Slashdot is worrying about offshoring of programming. These are the same folks who cheer everytime a country like Israel or China chooses to go with free software over software written in America that costs money. Nice to know they care.

At a high level, you we can state that offshoring and choosing open source software are driven by first-order optimization: it may be, in some cases, cheaper to use Linux or outsource work overseas.

However, I don’t think the comparison holds up that well.

Much of what’s outsourced is ‘commodity’ work. Even if the projects were written in C# rather than Perl, that work would go overseas.

China and Israel’s choice to use Open Source over Microsoft tools means that for those decision makers, the Open Source value proposition is better than Microsoft’s, Apple’s, SCO’s, or HP’s (to name a few vendors.)

I don’t see offshoring going away unless eXtreme Programming and other rapid methodologies are adopted by IT organizations, and are demonstrated as less expensive than outsourcing ‘traditional’ methods.

However, there’s a market for platforms, and Microsoft, Apple, and Open Source compete.

Robert, if Microsoft wants China, then Longhorn, as software you buy, has to be more compelling then good old grubby command line and scary window manager Linux. But regardless of if it’s developed in .Net, J2EE, Project Builder, or LAMP, most likely we’ll see most IT work developed in China and India.

They’re promoting the survey in response to some gloating by the Apache folks about their 63.98% share in the August 2003 Netcraft Survey.

Port80 looked at the response headers from the home pages of the top 1,000 companies. They found that 53.6% of them ran on some version of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.

What Are We Counting?

So who is right: Netcraft or Port80? I’ll say neither of them are.

Port80′s correct when they point out that a large number of Apache sites are on shared servers and may be parked, or abandoned domain names. It’s an Apache feature that it’s so easy to use the Virtual Host directive to support hundreds of domains on one server. So the Netcraft survey is flawed in that they don’t distinguish between the importance of amazon.com v. whump.com. Both sites have equal weight in the survey.

However, the 53.6% IIS share of major corporate web sites does not correspond to dominance either. The Port80 survey looks at the parent corporation home site, which may not be the main destination site for that firm’s customers. Or it may be a corporation without a major internet presence that maintains a site for communication with shareholders and the press. So there’s the weighting problem again: cdw.com v. warnco.com. Both run IIS 6.0, but cdw.com is a heavy traffic commerce site and warnco.com redirects to irpage.com

Traffic and Weight

Looking at traffic gets us towards the goal of determining which server platform ‘dominates.’

Nielsen’s site has the top ten destinations by home and business users aggregated to parent company. Again, this is flawed data, as we lose the detail of what application/property people use.

Microsoft, TimeWarner (AOL Server), Yahoo, and Google (Google Web Server) are in the top ten.

Microsoft leads both the home and business use lists, probably by virtue of hotmail.com (IIS 5.0). But how much of that work is done on IIS and how much is still on FreeBSD?

Conclusion

Port80′s right to point out the flaw in interpreting the Netcraft Survey as indicating Apache’s absolute dominance. But they cannot conclude that IIS is the dominant server by looking at raw numbers of the top corporate home pages.

A rigorous analysis must take into account traffic going to every host and what’s running on each host. I’m sure that Nielsen would love to sell you that information if you have means to pay for it.

Aside

Everyone, when you send out numbers or pointers to white papers, please don’t use HTML email. That sets off my “it’s spam” assumption.

Read the section on formatting text: WordML defines a run to represent some sequence of text within a paragraph. Inside the run, you turn text decoration on an off with semaphores. Instead of:

The markup is:

And to turn it off:

I haven’t tried writing XSLT to process this, so don’t have an opinion of how hard or easy this will be to do.

It gets more interesting when you look at the namespace Microsoft has defined for annotations. To create a bookmark within a document, you use two complete elements:

So extracting the bookmarks from a WordML document is not a trivial bit of XSLT.

The annotation language reminds me of Ted Nelson’s notion of keeping the markup out of the document. Another file contained the offsets, annotations, and markup.

Yes, You Are

Part Two

Feminism has no dress code, special diet, or secret handshake. [ thanks to Laurel ]

On the du Toitification of the the American Conservative

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The Philosopheraptor

After a comparison of du Toit’s screed to a wet diaper, an acquaintance observed that unlike Kim du Toit, a wet diaper actually served a purpose.

Susan Faludi already covered this topic, anyway.

Meanwhile, an honest comment on “Queer Eye”

Tom Coates has had enough of making gay culture safe for straights.

[ bonus round ] Do as I say, not as I do.

Apparently conservative women are allowed to have careers outside the home, as long as they involve the destruction of civil rights. [ via Crooked Timber ]

Port 80 Software’s PageXchanger is a plugin for Microsoft’s IIS that provides mod_rewrite and mod_negotiation functionality.

Back in the late 20th Century, I received an email from CSS guru Todd Fahrner asking if I’d played with IE5 for Mac yet. I had, and it was great. As others have testified, IE5 was for it’s time the best CSS implementation on the market. It was my primary browser for nearly four years until the advent of Mozilla 1.0 and Safari.

It had its problems, the usual impedance mismatches in DOM, and no support for XSLT 1.0. But it’d render XML as an outline, complete with controls, and Mozilla only included that feature recently. Thank you Tantek and the rest of the IE Mac team.

• XSLT will become even more important.
• Since InfoPath is not going to be part of the standard version of Office, the Open Source community and other Microsoft competitors have a huge opening to bring forth:
  1. their own schema driven editors,
  2. and lightweight schemas for describing everyday documents

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