A number of earlier, one-line, 5-star reviews -- expressed in a similar style -- sound suspiciously like astroturfing.

Meanwhile, one of our upright citizens took the initiative and created a user account on Sothink's forum today just to post a link to this very article on /. On behalf of FOSS users everywhere, let me congratulate you on helping to enforce those negative stereotypes about us that hang like an albatross around our neck. Thanks a lot, bud.

Sure books are good, but I'm not willing to stop using the Internet. Sure the Internet is OK, but I'm not willing to burn all my books just yet. There are legitimate uses for each, and each have their problems. The Internet has the advantage of immediacy of information delivery, but even with Google's help you often have to dig through a lot of dirt to get to a nugget of useful info. Signal-to-noise is lower with books, but by the time you buy the book the information it contains is obsolete. Turning the Internet off is unlikely, but still possible. Books don't require electricity for their use, but you do have to cut down some trees.

My point is, I wonder how Ray feels about people buying his books through Amazon.com.

I wonder what would happen if someone were to publish a cartoon making fun of Apple owners?

Probably, the same thing that would happen to someone who published a cartoon making fun of Linux users.

All very nice if it were true. I remember using Dreamweaver in the late '90s, and it certainly had CSS functionality. Not so much the positioning functionality we expect from CSS today, but cascading style sheet functionality none the less.

I never said it didn't. I said CSS wasn't around when the people the GGP was vilifying made websites.

And BTW, I first started learning html by viewing the source of pages saved locally, then modifying that source to see what changed. Who today could be bothered to start from basics like that ? It would be pretty difficult to divine the purpose of all that CSS markup unless you already had a clue, which makes the net somewhat less democratic IMHO.

You mean the specs for HTML and CSS were unavailable? There was nothing at all on the Internet about them? Those bastards! :) Seriously, looking at code is a good start to learning anything, but you still need a reference of some kind to make sense of it all.

Using something and considering it a good solution aren't necessarily related, specially when as you say it's the only solution that exists. In fact, I remember many web devs admitting that using tables for layout *was* an ugly hack and one they regretted having to use, despite not having CSS at the time.

Maybe, but criticizing those same web devs for using what they had to work with only shows ones ignorance, which was my point and still is.

Cute insult at the end,

It's an insulting language, just like its fanboys, but that's irrelevant and redundant. :)

...but the rest of your post is so irrelevant to the topic at hand I can only understand it if you ignored that CSS is not, in fact, a programming language nor has anything to do with the backend. CSS deals with the presentation of a webpage, which I might add *also* has no business in the webpage per se, a problem CSS seeks to solve and one that pure, vanilla HTML has in spades.

You can make a website without CSS. I can't really put it any more plain than that. Before someone complains about plain HTML, they should learn how to use it properly.

So go, learn CSS, use it, then come back and criticise it if you can.

Been there, done that, cried the same tears. I have never criticized it. I said, contrary to the GGP, it wasn't necessary to create a website, and you should learn HTML, first. So, go, re-read my comments, then come back and criticize them, if you can.

CSS is not a "flavor-of-the-hour" technology. It's a core part of absolutely any well-formed website.

Sorry, but that's bullshit. CSS is not the least bit necessary to make a website, well-formed or otherwise. It's nice to have, if done correctly, but it's certainly not a core part of anything. If you have a website that simply does not work at all without CSS, then you have problems, my friend. Learn to code proper HTML, first, before throwing in CSS.

No, it's not. In fact, it didn't really cope well with CSS at all, last time I checked. Dreamweaver was designed back when everyone was using tables to build sites. For that, it worked, because it's hard to screw up something that's all wrong from the beginning.

People used tables because that's all that was there. There were no DIV or SPAN tags, and CSS was still a pipe dream in somebody's bong. It's hard to make the claim that something was wrong from the beginning when what was right didn't exist, but I guess you don't need any real education to make revisionist history.

Basically, if you don't know at least CSS and HTML (preferably object oriented programming, MVC, database, design patterns, accessibility etc. too) then you've no place messing with web design, except for doing mockups in an art package.

CSS isn't really necessary for web design. People really need to learn to use HTML correctly, first and foremost, before starting with these flavor-of-the-hour technologies. Some of these things you mention have no place in web design. Business logic should never, ever be in a web page. A web page shouldn't give an unwashed rat's ass about what database or programming language, style or paradigm is being used on the backend. I'm sure that it doesn't even matter whether you use tabs or spaces in indenting code, unless you're using Piss-on (pronounced with a lisp) :).

I wouldn't have said it if it weren't true. Like it or not, I have to read and fix Perl code all of the time, and I wish nothing more than that that code were readable and reasonably well-written. It's not. Maybe I'm just really unlucky.

That's not necessarily because it was written in Perl. You have problems with Perl in the same way I have problems with Japanese. I wish I could read and understand Japanese, but I can't. Maybe I just don't know Japanese well enough. Maybe I'm just really unlucky.

If the issues are justified, they're hardly irrelevant, no?

If the issues are because I don't know the language well enough, or because I don't like how someone else wrote it, or because it's not in my preferred language, then yes, it is irrelevant.

This is exactly why I don't find myself using Python much. It's not so much the language, but the attitude of its fans, or to be more precise, fanboys. Most utterances from Python fanboys seem to be about pissing on other languages with Perl being the frequent target. The perceived issues with Perl, justified or not, are irrelevant. You can write spaghetti code in any language. The fact that these people can't seem to promote their favorite language without trying to tear down another is what keeps me away from it.

That said, there's not that much wrong with using indentation for scoping because you're going to indent your code anyway. You might as well make it worth your while. As far as tabs vs. spaces are concerned, that's what coding standards are for. Define them, and enforce them. By the way, that works for all languages, not just Python.

This from someone who works for a website that believes they can actually "unpublish" something. Can I "unpublish" this comment after submitting it? No.

Yes, it's their website. Yes, they can do what they want with it. That's not the point. Anyone who believes they can just "unpublish" something after they've already put it out on the Internet for all to see isn't someone I would listen to about things like this.

Hilarious how they'll say that now, when they refused to sell the OLPC to anyone that actually wanted one in the US or Europe.

I'm pretty sure their G1G1 program applied to the US and Europe.

If they had marketed the OLPC to everyone...

If they were only interested in selling laptops, you would be correct. Their goal, however, was bringing "educational" tools to "underdeveloped" countries. That being said, I equate the whole OLPC project with missionaries bringing Christianity to the natives by giving them bibles, hence the aforementioned words in quotes.

The best thing we can do for these people is to leave them the fuck alone. If we had done that a long time ago, we wouldn't have everybody else, and their family pets, hating us now.