On Sat, 14 Jun 2003 14:33:21 -0400, Carol Spears wrote:

Wilber is the name of the computer housed at berkeley.

Looks like we will be planning what will become of Wilber tomorrow.

I apologize as this is short notice for something that is long overdue, but there you go.

What does that mean? There was no discussion and no announcement about that. Before anything is done, can we have a bit more information (and discussion, if possible) about what is going to happen?

Sorry about the weekend notice also, probably i followed the WrongMethod like they did to notify poor Arthur Dent of his homes demise in the first of the hitchiker books.

Yes, sending an unexpected announcement during the week-end is probably not the best way to communicate with those who are usually not on the 'net at that time.

Please send your ideas or needs to this list or any other.

But what is planned exactly? It is difficult to send any ideas or needs if there is no information about what is going to happen, why and when...

Lets call this 24 hour notice.

This is definitely too short, especially since there was no early warning nor discussion on any of the mailing lists (AFAIK).

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 02:41:02 -0400, Carol Spears wrote:

we are moving things around on wilber. if you have a directory there, perhaps you should back things up.

I won't be able to back up anything before Wednesday due to lack of time and disk space, so I hope that nothing is going to happen today.

Anyway, what is going to happen to Wilber? What is going to happen to the web site? In the last few days, I spent some time updating several pages, including the release notes for 1.2.4 and 1.2.5, the list of mirrors (web and ftp) and the pages describing how to install the GIMP. Do you mean that you want to remove the current web site without any discussion and without any planning? The last discussion on the gimp-web list was in April (except for two messages that I CCed to the list in May, but that was not a discussion). What is happening now, all of a sudden?

if you have any ideas, perhaps you should pipe up with them.

What does this mean?

-Raphaël

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 09:40:10 -0400, Carol Spears wrote: [...]

one thing that i didn't mean was to ruffle any feathers. sorry. i am going to go crazy if the newish site doesn't get moved. There is a whole bunch of disc space (right now) and if we wait and plan and work through what will be done with it, it will never get done.

I understand and I would also like to replace the old site by the new one. But I have some concerns about what will happen to the useful information that is still available on the old site and has not been included into the new one. Also, the compatibility with Netscape 4.x is a big showstopper from my point of view: there is still a significant number of people visiting www.gimp.org who are using NS4 and who may not be able to switch to another browser (this last point is quite important IMHO). It would be acceptable for the new site to look bad in NS4, as long as the users could see most of the information and follow the links. But currently, the new site is not usable with NS4. I will post some screenshots showing the problems.

Anyway, I think that it is better to discuss this on the gimp-web list, so I will post a more detailled reply to your message on that list.

-Raphaël

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 09:46:30 -0400, Carol Spears wrote:

On 2003-06-17 at 1448.17 +0200, Rapha?l Quinet typed this: [...]

Anyway, I think that it is better to discuss this on the gimp-web list, so I will post a more detailled reply to your message on that list.

well, this seems like anarchy to me. perhaps i should just stop mucking around with it and see what happens to it.

mutiny on the bounty?

Rapha?l, you can call it volunteering or mutiny. i will only accept one of the these two descriptions of this totally audacious email you are sending lately.

Woah! I didn't mean to offend you. And this is certainly not a mutiny or anarchy or whatever. Regarding Netscape 4, I was just repeating what I wrote a while ago on the gimp-web list. I pointed out some problems and suggested a way to solve them (using tables instead of CSS positioning). So this problem is not new and you should not be offended by that. I also mentioned in my last message that I would like to get more information about what you plan to do with wilber because your announcement came as a surprise, did not explain what was planned and sounded like wilber would disapear on very short notice. I am sorry if the tone of my message has offended you, as that was not my intention. Maybe I wrote my first message a bit too quickly because I was both surprised and worried.

do i need to see about giving you permission to commit to the gnomecvs server so this mutiny can be more than just talk?

I have commit access to gnomecvs since a while. And I would certainly be glad to contribute to the gimp-web module, if you are not afraid of letting me change things. As promised, I have posted a more detailled reply to both of your messages (you replied twice to the same message) to the gimp-web list. It contains a paragraph in which I explain some of the things I would like to update in order to support older browsers. I have also included some screenshots of mmmaybe.gimp.org viewed in Netscape 4.79 (see http://www.gimp.org/~raphael/web-gimp/). I am sorry that it took me a bit longer than expected to post my reply, but I could only write it during breaks at work and it took me so long that I decided to finish it after work.

I suggest that we continue this discussion on the gimp-web list because it is a bit off-topic for the developers' list.

-Raphaël

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 02:48:17PM +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

Also, the compatibility with Netscape 4.x is a big showstopper from my point of view: there is still a significant number of people visiting www.gimp.org who are using NS4 and who may not be able to switch to another browser (this last point is quite important IMHO).

Are there any real numbers on this? Last time I checked the sites I'm administrating, the NS4 share was down to _0.25%_. Is really gimp.org that much higher up?

(BTW, is the site viewable in NS4 with CSS support turned off?)

/* Steinar */

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 21:55:03 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson" wrote:

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 02:48:17PM +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

Also, the compatibility with Netscape 4.x is a big showstopper from my point of view: there is still a significant number of people visiting www.gimp.org who are using NS4 and who may not be able to switch to another browser (this last point is quite important IMHO).

Are there any real numbers on this? Last time I checked the sites I'm administrating, the NS4 share was down to _0.25%_. Is really gimp.org that much higher up?

Probably a bit higher, but not that much. I don't have the time to count that right now, but I can try to do that tomorrow if you want. But here is something that I posted in April to the gimp-web list:

For those who like statistics, I had another look at the stats for today. In the last 6 hours, there were 103 unique IP addresses using Netscape 4 and visiting www.gimp.org. I excluded the user-agents containing "MSIE", "compatible", "Opera" or some strings commonly used by agents faking their identity (such as those using only the string "Mozilla/4.0" without any other attributes). In the last two days, there were more than 300 unique visitors using Netscape 4.

I hope that the number of Netscape 4 users has decreased since then, but it is likely that there are still more than a couple of them visiting www.gimp.org. I had a quick look at the logs without making a full analyzis and I only saw 15 unique IP addresses using Netscape 4 yesterday (excluding my own requests when I took the screenshots). But this seems to vary very much from day to day.

(BTW, is the site viewable in NS4 with CSS support turned off?)

If you turn off CSS, the layout is still completely broken, but at least the images are not displayed on top of the menu. The menu itself is displayed in the middle of the page with all links side-by-side instead of being displayed in a column (a valign="top" and some s would solve that problem). So the pages looks strange and sometimes the column with the menu is wider than the contents of the page, but at least I did not see any image or text covering other useful parts of the page.

-Raphaël

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 10:24:51PM +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

I hope that the number of Netscape 4 users has decreased since then, but it is likely that there are still more than a couple of them visiting www.gimp.org. I had a quick look at the logs without making a full analyzis and I only saw 15 unique IP addresses using Netscape 4 yesterday (excluding my own requests when I took the screenshots). But this seems to vary very much from day to day.

Then, is it really worth it to keep kludging backwards compatibility for a five year old, not-at-all standards compliant, fading browser? Given that it can even be made to work with CSS turned off? :-)

/* Steinar */

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 10:24:51PM +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

Are there any real numbers on this? Last time I checked the sites I'm administrating, the NS4 share was down to _0.25%_. Is really gimp.org that much higher up?

Probably a bit higher, but not that much. I don't have the time to count

There are also other considerations... the site could be designed to be more ns4 friendly, and not everybody has 50MB of ram and a whole CPU to waste to still have much slower rendering (and very broken rendering with respect to i18n'd sites). Ok, the last one only pertains to mozilla, and links &c slowly become really useful, but the point is that excluding people from a site without good reasons is always wrong. Doing it for good reasons is fine. Are there good reasons?

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 22:49:44 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson" wrote:

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 10:24:51PM +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

I hope that the number of Netscape 4 users has decreased since then, but it is likely that there are still more than a couple of them visiting www.gimp.org. I had a quick look at the logs without making a full analyzis and I only saw 15 unique IP addresses using Netscape 4 yesterday (excluding my own requests when I took the screenshots). But this seems to vary very much from day to day.

Then, is it really worth it to keep kludging backwards compatibility for a five year old, not-at-all standards compliant, fading browser? Given that it can even be made to work with CSS turned off? :-)

Doh! I'm really stupid! I said that I had a "quick look" at the logs and I found only 15 unique IP addresses. But I was wrong. I missed 211 of them, bringing the total to 226. That makes a difference... Yesterday, I ran grep on the access log, then a grep -v for the strings containing "MSIE", "compatible" and other stuff in order to exclude the browsers (and some robots) claiming to be NS4 but that were not really NS4. Unfortunately, I made a big, stupid mistake: instead of doing a grep for "Mozilla/4", I did a grep for "Mozilla/4.0". In other words, I only counted the requests using version 4.0, but not any other 4.x version. Oops! That's what I get for doing something quickly before going home without thinking too much about it. :-(

I just re-counted now: the current access log for the last 18 hours contains 140 unique IP addresses using NS4.x (not 4.0, doh!). For the day before, 226. For Monday, 152.

To get an overview of the last week (excluding yesterday, which may be biased), I merged the logs from the 10th to the 16th of June and found 1084 unique IP addresses using NS4.x.

-Raphaël

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 09:36:18 +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

I just re-counted now: the current access log for the last 18 hours contains 140 unique IP addresses using NS4.x (not 4.0, doh!). For the day before, 226. For Monday, 152.

Out of how many in total?

Best regards,

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:04:46 +0200, spamtrap@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 09:36:18 +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

I just re-counted now: the current access log for the last 18 hours contains 140 unique IP addresses using NS4.x (not 4.0, doh!). For the day before, 226. For Monday, 152.

Out of how many in total?

I didn't check for all days, because doing a "sort -u" for all IP addresses from the logs takes longer and consumes more resources than if I limit the query to the NS4 users first. Also, I don't know if the traffic statistics are supposed to be published at all. But I had a look at the current log file for today and I counted 10192 unique IP addresses in total. In the meantime (since the last message that I posted 2 hours ago), the number of visitors using NS4 has increased from 140 to 165.

But does the total really matter? If we have more than a thousand visitors using NS4 in the last week, does it matter if this is a thousand out of 10,000, a million or a billion? We are not a commercial site counting the visitors to see how many of them get banner ads or anything like that; we are counting how many GIMP users can get help from the GIMP web site. See also Marc's message.

-Raphaël

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:50:25 +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

But I had a look at the current log file for today and I counted 10192 unique IP addresses in total. In the meantime (since the last message that I posted 2 hours ago), the number of visitors using NS4 has increased from 140 to 165.

Okay, thanks.

But does the total really matter? If we have more than a thousand visitors using NS4 in the last week, does it matter if this is a thousand out of 10,000, a million or a billion?

It does put the figure into perspective.

I won't be arguing for ignoring those however-many users stuck with Netscape 4 - but I do think when it comes down to making a/the tough decision it does matter if it's in the vicinity 50% of the users or more like 0.1%.

We are not a commercial site counting the visitors to see how many of them get banner ads or anything like that; we are counting how many GIMP users can get help from the GIMP web site. See also Marc's message.

Usually commercial sites will cater to bad browser for _longer_ that non-commercial sites, because otherwise their sales will suffer (the bosses think).

In my experience non-commercial sites have been a lot quicker to adopt standards-compliant practises - sometimes alienating Netscape 4 users, sometimes not.

Best regards,