A Dropbox user using a Dropbox-capable iOS app for the first time has no Dropbox username, only an e-mail address. What would the user put into the username field?

And when the editor happens not to include licensed copies of installable codecs for the framework, watch people blame the publisher of the editor.

It's the server's job if the user doesn't want to have to download an ultra-high-resolution image over a metered connection. It also used to be the server's job back when web browsers insisted on using nearest neighbor resampling instead of bilinear or bicubic resampling.

You appear not to know what it's like to be stuck on the 10 GB per month cap of wireless (satellite or cellular) home Internet access.

But is that 1024 pixels wide with huge distracting white areas on both sides when viewed on a 2560 pixel monitor, or is it 2560 pixels wide with complete inability to see the entire image at once on a 1024 pixel monitor like the one in my laptop?

A tablet held in landscape orientation runs the same operating system as a smartphone held in portrait orientation, despite the latter having only about one-third the horizontal width.

So what should a designer who doesn't want horizontal scrollbars do?

And CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was supposed to be the instructions that the content formatter follows.

I imagine that as of 2014, most people would not prefer that most web pages look like Barry T. Smith's MFing Web Site. They would consider the default styling that a browser applies to the MFing Web Site to be unprofessional.

How would you prefer that a menu be opened while JavaScript is turned off? To the best of my knowledge, CSS supports only hover-to-show, not click-to-show.

Could you describe what nonstandard "ports and protocols" liveaquaria.com uses? I tried to buy a coral to test what you describe, but it required me to create a username and password before I could check out. Is the need to register before checking out part of the problem you describe? I do know that some manufacturers, such as Games Workshop, have a policy of forbidding online stores from selling their products through a standard shopping cart.

Perhaps the difference comes from limits in CSS. A menu that opens on mouseover works with CSS turned on and JavaScript turned off; a menu that opens on click requires JavaScript.

The Turing completeness disproof is actually related to recurring debates on Slashdot over the definition of phrases like "personal computer" and "general-purpose computer". I say something is a "personal computer" when the person who owns it determines what computing is done on it, and it's not "general-purpose" if specific identifiable purposes are forbidden. This includes a device running Android because of "Unknown sources" and adb install, but not a device running iOS without paying the recurring fee for the developer program. It includes a PC running Windows, OS X, or common GNU/Linux distributions, but not a major video game console.

Sort of. I've been trying to describe the rules of a few different games, and it turned out that Russian roulette and Hi Ho! Cherry-O are in the same family. I made a Russian roulette homebrew game for the NES as a quick-and-dirty test for reading the trigger switch on an NES Zapper. It lets the player pull the trigger to roll a virtual d6 and be eliminated on a roll of 1. The development process inspired me to make a pencil drawing of six figures gambling with a toy gun.

Someone else on the NESdev forum ported an NES emulator for Mac called "Macifom" to iOS so that the developer of an NES homebrew game can sell the game on the App Store by including it with Macifom in an app. My thought process might have been as follows: "Would Russian Roulette in Macifom be rejected? If so, why? What would need to be cut out? And what useful theorems can I prove from this in order to make points on Slashdot about iOS not being for everyone?" I guess the question becomes how much like Russian roulette a game would have to be in order to get rejected for violating Guideline 15.5.

AnandTech has the same problem as NCSA: the transition from three columns to two is placed too close to the 1024px mark, causing a "snapped" window on a 1920x1080 pixel display to use a jarringly different layout. I guess they had to do this because the About / Advertising / Bench line and the Trending Topics line are too tightly packed for any sort of flexibility. The Verge has distinct three-, two-, and one column layouts, but they're visually consistent and on the whole no less jarring than what you might expect if you resized an old-skool liquid layout like Slashdot classic's comment pages between the full width of a 1920x1080 display and half the width.

Yeah, I see the problems you point out with Mashable's front page in Firefox at 500-1024px, and I agree with you that Mashable is doing it wrong. But those are fixable problems if only Mashable management had the sense to correct the design. You're not claiming that the very opportunity to do width transitions wrong justifies removing the media queries feature entirely, are you?

Anyway, badly done viewport width transitions are consistent with other problems I see on Mashable, such as that damn "infinite scrolling". I think infinite scrolling is a crock of $#!+ on desktop; the scrollbar control just wasn't designed for it. Give me defined pages any day of the week. Literally. Just give me a page for each date so that I can link to the collection of stories that the site ran on a particular day (or week or month for a less busy site).

Ouch. That transition from 2 columns to 1 is so close to 1024px it sickens me. Even a browser window snapped to half of a 1920x1080 screen, or a user of a 1024x600px netbook whose scroll bars are set just wider than normal, would get the 1-column layout with a hamburger menu on the front page of NCSA's web site.

On the front page of FiatTech.com, I don't especially see what's wrong with what appears to be a fairly predictable switch from a 2-column layout to a 1-column layout around 750px. Is horizontal scrolling really better? Or should it have been using the 1-column layout in the first place for all screen sizes?

The front page of Porsche USA isn't that bad in my testing (from about 500px to 1024px wide). Things get put in more or fewer columns, but that's similar to what happens to text in any liquid layout. The most drastic changes are the layout of the "Build & Find" menus near the bottom below about 500px and the addition of a "hamburger" menu at the top below about 700px.

A progressive resolution image format wouldn't help art directors show the image with a tighter crop on devices with lower pixel density.

I detect definition disagreement, and this thread can't usefully continue until we clear this up. I'm unfamiliar with the definition of "semantic value" that you're using. Is it from a standard? If so, which?

Except they did just that. The audio element allows specifying multiple otherwise equivalent sources, each in a source element, so that the browser can choose the most technically appropriate one. This allows letting the browser choose, say, an MPEG-family format if it's an Apple or Microsoft browser or a royalty-free format if it's a third-party browser.

A single combination of web browser and operating system can be used on both low DPI displays and high DPI displays. Consider, for example, Safari on a MacBook with a Retina brand high DPI display and Safari on a MacBook with a normal DPI display.

So if the web page's style sheet specifies that a particular image shall be 50 percent of the width of the viewport, however wide the user might have chosen to make that, how should the server go about determining how many pixels that is in order to serve the correct amount of image detail?

Display aspect ratios aren't "sizes". A 24" desktop display can show a lot more than a 10" netbook or tablet display, even if they're both close to 16:9.