'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Peter Flynn]

On 15/10/18 18:07, Liam Proven wrote:
[word]
> I guess. Not sure the price was worth it. Zipped XML with embedded BLOBs? Yuck.

Yes to yuck, but no more embedded BLOBs, and at least it's easily
accessible to mortals: no more binary formats. Mind you, there are still
problems: four different and mutually-incompatible ways to do hyperlinks?

> I have rescued many word processor documents from disk corruption.
> With all these compressed formats, data is indistinguishable from
> noise.

Yes, if the zip file itself gets corrupted. I haven't seen one of those
in many a long year, fortunately. But a tiny price to pay for a document
in a logic-based format.

> I think Google is semi-accidentally doing a home-run around the whole
> thing, and I'm amazed that nobody is copying them.

Doing no evil?

> First came Gmail. Webmail that was good enough it was _better_ than a
> local client.

Loathsome to me, but I have unusual needs (like Redirect)

> Then came Google Contacts and Google Calendar.[...] and by the time I
> picked up the phone to text, it was there in the phone's address
> book.

Those are essentials.

> [...] works better than anything I've seen in the FOSS arena.

That's the key (devs, if you're reading). It's got to be not just a
little bit better than commercial software but HUGELY better.

> It does the important stuff Exchange Server plus Windows Server 

I've never tried Gmail for that. I'm using Hiri for Exchange and Tbird
for the rest (and it's all replicated in mutt just in case). I just hate
the web mail interface...stuff just disappears and can't be found again,
and it takes up soooo much space.

> *THAT* is what the FOSS people didn't even fail to do -- they didn't even try.

They didn't know if was a thing. It's one of the brakes on FOSS
development: we don't have the money to do real LARGE-SCALE user
surveys, so we don't actually know for sure what people want/don't want
or like/hate. It's all guesswork

> But now, I could probably work on one.

I'm looking at it. Cloud-dependency is a problem, though: I have clients
in areas with no Internet access and a poor phone signal.

> A few months ago, I took the plunge and bought my first tablet. 

I bought a big phone and it does me fine for the little I need.

> [...] we've passed the Pareto Principle now. Most people don't use
> the famous 20% of Office's functionality. They use 2% or less.

You wouldn't have a source for that, would you?

> [...] all those maintenance and support issues just go away.

My inner sceptic says wait :-)

> And neither Ubuntu nor Red Hat has anything like it, and I'm not sure
> that they've realised that they _need_ anything like it yet.

Not achievable the way things stand in both those fields, either.

> I regard it as a bit like HTML. In 1996 I said this was something
> that humans shouldn't need to fiddle with, like Postscript.

Exactly, although it would be closer to say that HTML is a bit like XML
:-) Moot anyway, now that the W3C has washed its hands of HTML, XML, and
CSS.

> I stand by it. Where I was wrong is that I didn't realise it would 
> all be generated on demand...and by something as ugly as PHP. :-(

Serious backends use rather more reliable software than that, fortunately.

>> And I'm still learning DocBook's oddities :-)
> 
> :-D Thank you! I am relieved...

I also abuse it shamelessly. In an environment where content and format
are kept separate, and there is no visual baggage attached to any of the
elements, using DocBook to write a book about typography and formatting
meant inventing one of the missing wheels.

///Peter