I'm pretty happy having a powerless figurehead, especially if the alternative is presidential elections.

Browsers should e.g. allow tables to be sorted by clicking column headers. They can't, because tables aren't always tables.

How about an opt-in attribute to enable ordering then?

<table sortable >...</table>

> Like, why do we still use plain text in flat files for source code

Information density. Images and graphs are exceptions to the general rule that text can contain a lot more information on one page than graphics can.

Well... if you look at things like (colour)forth (and highlighting in IDEs/editors) -- most people don't actually code in "plain" text (there's colour/typographic hints that indicates meaning). Other than that -- we do tend to still use text to represent mathematics, so I don't think it's that strange that we usually represent code as text. For another exception to the rule: see graphical editors for UI layout, as seen in many IDEs (ie: using graphical programming for representing graphics) -- or 3d modellers like Blender (when you add bones etc, you could argue that you're "programming"). Then there's of course spread sheets -- but they tend to be pretty text-focused -- even if they use layout to great effect.

We're not talking about crossing the street, which is pretty unavoidable.

We're talking about an expensive gadget that introduces new risks, for a questionable return.

This is a pretty amusing way to document a bug.

In Canada the banks provide this service, and it's used very widely.

zerop posted a comment with links to many different HN clones here, but it's marked dead. Maybe because it included too many links?

> The article listed the speed of a scud at "1,676 meters/second"

Which looks suspiciously like a rounded "3750 mph to meters per second" conversion. Indeed, "scud 3750 mph" turns up a lot of hits.

There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English

Thanks, I read that article. Do you think Indian English is strictly colloquial similar to the dialects of English we have in the US? Or does it have its own accepted grammar enforced by proofreaders and copy editors?

For example African American Vernacular (aka ebonics) and Southern American English both have their own Wikipedia pages as well, but you would never find the Washington Post or New York Times using them in an article.

> Thanks, I read that article. Do you think Indian English is strictly colloquial similar to the dialects of English we have in the US? Or does it have its own accepted grammar enforced by proofreaders and copy editors?

I'd suggest that's a distinction without a difference. Or to be more precise, it's a distinction whose difference - the level of official ossification built up around the dialect - isn't really relevant to the question because it has more to do with external factors, and little to do with the language's actual developmental status.

For example, American and British English have crossed the boundary that you propose despite being so similar that native speakers are often hesitant to even regard them as different dialects. But they do have separate rulebooks, because at some point in the past few centuries Americans of high social rank decided that England's culture was no longer the ideal to which they should continue to aspire.

On the other hand, take Haitian Creole and French, which are so different as to not really even be mutually intelligible. But up until very recently Creole did not have an official grammar (or even spelling) enforced by proofreaders and copy editors. How come? Well, Creole's spoken by poor people, and French is spoken by rich people. Rich people set up the social institutions you propose, and for a long time they had a strong interest in maintaining French as the only official dialect.

The example is extreme, but I hope it does illustrate that there are actually two different continua at play here, and while they may be correlated they aren't closely tied together.