callum85

Those devs were debating what the best practice is, not refusing best practices. Saying stuff like "Learn to do X properly" in an argument is disingenuous and weak.

The Chinese woman?

> 1. Rename the project.

OK.

> 2. Shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain, and don't redirect it.

Don't redirect it? Seriously?

> 3. Apologize.

This guy is actually a prick.

EDIT: OK that was unfair. If I was in Gruber's position, maybe I'd be angry, and maybe I would have demanded an apology; it doesn't make him a prick. But the "don't redirect" thing seems petty.

Standardisation doesn't lock it down, it just establishes a central flavour. It doesn't force Github to use the standard. Github can keep using GFM. It still benefits Github and others for there to be a well-defined standard which they can use as a base for defining their own variations against.

Documenting your own Markdown flavour will be easier if you can say "It's Standard Markdown, plus/except these features...", instead of "It's part of the soupy world of 'Markdown', but here are the features that some/all other implementations don't have...".

> He did copyright everything. Explicitly.

I didn't realise that. In that case he can force them to change it if he doesn't like it, right? I don't get why people are talking about honour/decency.

People are definitely aware of the name. It would be a complete non-starter to have a name that didn't reference "markdown" in some way when the project is an effort to standardise markdown.

I hadn't read the stuff about Gruber not wanting them to use the same name before I wrote my comment. But I still don't think it's 'fucked up' in the slightest. It actually sounds like Gruber is being irrational and a bit of a dick, from his comments that I've just read. His behaviour seems weirdly lame for someone capable of such good design. If he wanted to, he could have trademarked it, but he chose to give it free to the world and just sort of hoped that it would stay roughly in a shape he would like. Resisting standardisation is a weird thing to do. His notion that ambiguity is a feature is a dumb one. I think this is all relevant to the discussion about whether it's decent/honourable to use a similar name against his wishes. If his wishes are anti-progress, then tough luck, people are going to progress things if they can. He chose not to copyright/trademark anything. He can't have it both ways.

I think you've got it backwards. It would be less decent to give it an new name and forget its origins. Calling it Standard Markdown waives any claim to have created anything new. It makes it clear this is merely an effort to standardise the language Gruber famously invented. It gives all credit for origination to him.

Ha good point :) I don't think it's a joke, I think he is falling into the same fallacy himself. To be fair, the article acknowledges it's a difficult trap: "We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism." He would probably agree, if someone pointed it out to him, that his phrasing here was an example of exactly what he's talking about. I think it is just a fault of phrasing though; it doesn't really undermine the sentiment of the article. It almost vindicates it!

What are the use cases for this?

My comment earlier was a bit strong; there are obviously cases when you just need to get the job done, and if jQuery UI covers your use case with an acceptable perf hit then go with it.

If you want a halfway house, I've just remembered this little jQuery plugin, not well known at all, but it is the best thing available:

http://threedubmedia.com/code/event/drag

For me this plugin was a bridge between using DnD libraries and writing raw mouse listeners. It basically just fires off events at key points during a drag sequence, and it's up to you to update element styles to move them around... ie, you can't see anything physically happening on the page unless you update the DOM yourself (not difficult). It's basically sugar around mouse events to make them a lot less intimidating, eg, on each move it gives you the mouse position relative to wherever the drag started, so you don't have to keep track of this yourself.

Compared to any regular DnD library, it's better performing and miles more flexible. It's almost as good as doing it with raw mouse events. Look at the demos and view the code, they are impressive. It's old though. Hope it still works with modern jQuery.

From experience writing an app with loads of complex DnD, I strongly recommend giving up on DnD libraries if you are doing anything beyond some generic sortable list thing. You will never get the library to do what you want it to do, and even if you get close, the performance will be fucking abysmal, for reasons that become obvious when you've programmed your first DnD interaction by hand. It's just not something a library can reasonably handle, because to cover multiple use cases they have to put loads of conditional logic inside a mousemove listener, which kills performance. DnD interactions are very application-specific; to me the term DnD refers to a class of problems and a corresponding skill set, not a feature that you can delegate away. And as you have discovered, the HTML5 DnD API is a pile of shit.

Do not fear making your own drag interactions from raw mouse events. I avoided it for ages, then discovered it is easier than I expected, and satisfying because what you produce is so much better quality. It's just combinations of mousedown, mousemove, mouseenter, mouseleave, and mouseup, and the confidence to attach/detach listeners for those events on the fly during the interaction. Also by thinking about the whole event sequence on a lower level you will often realise a better way to design the UX of the interaction.

That's the whole point of Genius. I get that you highlight for reading (me too), but it's like asking Wikipedia to ban editing.

Faranheit only for heatwaves. For blizzards they always use centigrade. Without fail.

UK tabloid front pages about heatwaves are almost always in Fahrenheit.

"fails to explain" is a bit harsh. It's a cheat sheet for people who already know about layout thrashing.

'hostile' is a pretty hysterical choice of word

Yeah it will confuse some but it'll probably pique some people's interest too. People like memorable little oddities sometimes.

Beautifully said

Yes it's ridiculous you paid that much if those features are crucial to you. You're very wrong if you think those features are crucial to everyone. I definitely want the track pad in the middle more than having page up/down etc.

I'm pretty sure people prefer thin laptops because they're lighter and less clunky and easier to slip into a bag etc. Not everything is a corporate conspiracy for lock-in and adapter sales.

It seems like no one here shares my opinion on this: I really like comments, even if they just restate, in English, what the code does. I don't think that's pointless. There is big value in it. I can scan and mentally process English sentences much faster than code. With a heavily commented file you can just skim through the comments until you locate the part you need to work on (then slow down and read the code around it and edit it).

Look at the Backbone.js annotated source [1] (the stuff on the left is just the comments pulled out from the original source JS). The comments make it much, much quicker to grasp what's going on, even though many of them just state exactly what the corresponding code does, which according to the Haskell docs' advice is pointless and to be avoided.

[1] http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html

I can't tell if this comment is a joke or not.

I have seen various complaints and 'studies' about this, but I don't agree at all, as a user. Of course the functionality hidden away in menus is not 'obvious' or immediately accessible, that's the whole point. It's for stuff you don't use very often. With most apps I use, there's a handful of features I don't want to have on show all the time because it would be distracting, but I want to be able to find it when I go digging for it.

Of course lots of designers make the wrong decisions about which functionality they have openly on display vs. which functionality they hide away in menus. They often lazily shove a new feature in a menu, rather than find a way to properly integrate it with the design of the app. But that's not the same as saying "menus=bad".

Nate Silver stops making adjustments to the model as soon the results fit the headline.

Where does it proclaim "UX expert"?

Pretty much everything? What exactly? I can't see much different

Explaining it by comparison to something the target audience already knows about is just practical

That's easy to say. If you were actually living in that situation, the solution would be less obvious. People have home, roots, family. A situation like that is not black and white. Life is complicated and things are difficult. Be kind.

What is NSFW about it?

I've got no problem with people talking about themselves. My comment was a little more specific than that.