Rivals Mock Microsoft's 'Native HTML5' Claims 211
CWmike writes "Mozilla and Opera are mocking browser rival Microsoft's use of the term 'native HTML5' to describe Internet Explorer 9 and the in-development IE10 as an oxymoron, an attempt to hijack an open standard and a marketing ploy. On Tuesday, Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, the executive who runs the IE group, used the term several times during a keynote at MIX, the company's annual Web developers conference, and in an accompanying post on the IE blog. Hachamovitch claimed in his keynote that, 'The only native experience of the Web of HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9.' Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, replied mockingly in Bugzilla: 'I'm pretty sure Firefox 5 has "complete native HTML5" support. We should resolve this as fixed and be sure to let the world know we beat Microsoft to shipping *complete* native HTML5.'"
MIcrosoft has gone native... (Score:5, Funny)
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Really. I'm not making this up. He specifically mentions "avoiding abstractions, layers, and libraries".
Leave it to Microsoft to herald the same old archaic non-portability we used to suffer in the bad old days as a posit
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Of course Microsoft means native in the sense of using the Windows APIs. This is of course to be expected from them. They have been eating their own dog food for a long time now. I fact, I would argue that this is the default meaning of the term "native" regardless of whether or not the actual API set is cross-platform in nature.
A native Gnome application uses GTK and other Gnome based interfaces. A native KDE application uses native KDE APIs, and so forth.
Then you have something like Plan 9 or Inferno
Great, now implement 3 and 4 properly. (Score:2, Informative)
Still grumbling about pages that passed the w3c validater, looked beautiful in Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror and I had to redo them because of IE.
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No don't destroy the true native HTML 5 experience!
The native experience you can only feel while surfing the web with IE9 on Windows 7.
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You are accurate. At the time I chose to fix them because so many people were on IE. Now IE users can just suck it. Of course newer versions of IE actually work better, so whatever, if I write something I'm not testing it in IE but it will probably work now.
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Plus, IE is still leading in browser market share.
This really isn't the case. IE6 is not IE7 is not IE8 is not IE9. They are each very different browsers. IE9 will never surpass Firefox's latest browser in market share.
IE9 will top out around 20-25% in two years if their historical trends of browser and OS upgrades continue. Firefox 4/5/6/etc (the latest available version) is ahead of IE9 today and will stay ahead for the foreseeable future making Firefox 4 the most widely used browser in a month or two wh
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Counter attack.
I said Mozilla, as in the suite, so I wasn't referring to "in this day and age".
Also, I was writing my website in VIM, and I was using Cascading Style Sheets, I had the W3 site up and was referencing it constantly to make sure I was writing my HTML properly. It's probably been 8 years since the time I was talking about, doesn't mean I don't still hold a grudge against IE for that and other reasons.
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Well, IE will stop being so bad when they release IE 10, and everyone upgrades to it. Otherwise, I have a list of things that are holding us back or wasting tons of development time because we still need to support IE 7. On the other hand, I also have a list for firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome, but they aren't nearly as long.
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I suspect thats mostly because you're bad at web development. ... In no way is this a defense of Microsoft, its just an attack on you.
Actually, you are wrong and misdirecting your attack. If a browser vendor wants to boast HTML5 compliance then it is completely fair to ask about compliance with previous iterations of the HTML standard.
And yes you can have w3c compliant html that fails miserably in IE. Competent web developers can/will, and do cajole their code to work correctly in IE. That doesn't mean as you state, that the code in its original incarnation was wrong or the developer was incompetent. It simply means he had to tweak his/he
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Would it blow your limited mind less if I would have wrote "rewrote tags and lines on pages" instead of "rewrote pages"?
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Honestly, I'm not the greatest. I haven't wrote pages in quite a while, that was mostly a learning exercise that I did it all in Vim using W3C. I edit a little source from time to time, but when I have to bust out a static page for whatever reason, which isn't often, I usually download SeaMonkey and use the editor in that. (Last time I used it there was beautiful compliant code)
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Clearly you've never done any real web development, or you would have never said something so asinine. When you make a website, you have to make two: One for IE and one for everyone else. This was especially true with ie6. IE7 and IE8 are somewhat better but they still don't come close to being on par with the other browser makers.
The only 'quick little work around' is to use a tool that deals with these problems on your behalf. The parent was (rightfully) bemoaning the fact that you are adding a minim
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If you think all there is to making browsers work is to use different CSS files, then you haven't done much work. CSS!=HTML. Take for example HTML button [w3schools.com]:
Always specify the type attribute for the button. The default type for Internet Explorer is "button", while in other browsers (and in the W3C specification) it is "submit" . . .
Important: If you use the button element in an HTML form, different browsers will submit different values. Internet Explorer will submit the text between the and tags, while other browsers will submit the content of the value attribute. Use the input element to create buttons in an HTML form.
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That isn't a very good example, as the obvious answer (which you quoted) is "Use the input element to create buttons in an HTML form." In other words, just don't use <button>.
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If you're browsing the web, and you're using IE, you're doing it wrong.
Nobody should have to use any sort of workaround. Code to the spec and it should work. If it doesn't that is the browser vendors fault period.
Native? Complete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there's no such thing as complete HTML5 either since it's still a draft.
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And neither FF nor IE implement enough to pass the HTML5 [html5test.com] test "completely".
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Once again, I didn't claim "complete HTML 5 support". I claimed "complete native HTML 5 support". There's a joke there, see?
Not supporting other OS is cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Web sites and HTML5 run best when they run natively, on a browser optimized for the operating system on your device," said Hachamovitch. "We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows".
Translation: IE only runs in Windows, so it's better. In fact, IE is so native that it doesn't support Webgl. Take that, Firefox and Chrome!
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Firefox uses D3D on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft has no exclusive access to D3D and in some well documented cases Firefox's architecture makes Firefox's employment of D3D even more effective in pushing graphics operations off of the CPU and onto the GPU than does IE's. Firefox accelerates scrolling, for example, where IE falls on its face.
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Or IE runs natively on the OS, no sandboxing going on here.
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So you're saying it's not just native, it's savage?
Mission Accomplished! (Score:2)
Meanwhile, Firefox remains the red headed stepchild to Microsoft because money talks.
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Sorry you are wrong. Firefox wins the contest and the others do not even finish the race. For the simple fact that vimperator only exists for firefox. Sure they are some VIM like keyboard input plugins for chrome, but they do not make the browser modal nor do they remove all the menus and such.
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While I'm also a Firefox (Iceweasel) and Vimperator user, you might want to try uzbl [uzbl.org], it supports VIM and Emacs-like UI/keybindings but uses the Webkit engine.
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It's true, the key requirement for mainstream success for a Web browser is vim keybindings. The public demands them.
In fact, my grandmother was just asking me which browsers offered vim keybindings so she would know what to use to browse her favorite scrapbooking site. That meant I had to beat her to death with a table lamp, of course. People should know better than to ask questions like that to an emacs user.
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The ranking of browsers should be Chrome first, then Opera, then Safari, then Firefox, then IE8+, then all other browsers.
Fixed that for you.
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Sorry, I would rank them Firefox, IE 9/10, Safari, Chrome, Opera, then IE 7, with IE 6 so far down the list that fails to continue existing.
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Chrome light on resources? Is that the same Chrome that insists upon having a completely separate process for each tab, rather than just the portions necessary to keep the tabs isolated?
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They use different Javascript engines, though. V8 and Nitro, respectively.
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Chrome and Safari are only based on *some* of the same underlying technology. They share some rendering code. They don't share a JavaScript engine (one of the hottest areas of browser development of the last three years) and they don't share the same graphics pipeline (where hardware acceleration, another hot topic of the last few years, is a critical differentiator) and they don't share security and networking and various other critical underlying technologies either.
It is a myth that they are the same exc
Um, wtf? (Score:2)
How can anyone, whether Mozilla or MS claim their product has or will soon have complete support for HTML5 when HTML5 is still a draft (subject to change) and it will remain a draft at least for a couple of years?
Who are they trying to fool? (Score:2)
When they say stuff like this, what's the point?
Consumers don't know what html5 is and even if they did they wouldn't care. And developers, etc. know what they're saying is lies. So it's a lose-lose type of comment.
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Where the presentation was made, it was pointless, or even a "lose".
But for the average web-goer, if they saw a chart like:
IE___________| Other__________
Native HTML5 | No Native HTML5
They go "ooh" the background in that box is green, the other is red... go with green, doesn't really matter if it's factual or not.
Sales weasle speak 101 (Score:5, Funny)
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You are my new favorite writer, and "gibblity gobbilty goo" is my new favorite phrase.
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seems like kids who are forbidden to watch star trek go into marketing then?
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So what do I win?
Native HTML5 (Score:2, Funny)
Reminds of this set of speakers I purchased a while back. It says right on the box, "Now with enhanced MP3 support!".
Sad thing is, I saw someone reading the box who got all excited because all they had were MP3s.
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Reminds of this set of speakers I purchased a while back. It says right on the box, "Now with enhanced MP3 support!".
Maybe it has a muffled high end so you don't hear the squishy mp3 artifacts so much?
A good marketer can turn any weakness into an asset!
Microsoft's choice of words was silly... (Score:3)
Factual (Score:5, Funny)
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Clearly this was not intended to be a sensical statement.
FTFY.
Meanwhile back at the MS Cave (Score:2)
Dean Hachamovitch puts on his favorite trollface and giggles to himself at the riot he's received in response to his comments, while his market speak does its magic on the laymen PC users who think it actually has some legitimate meaning.
Marketing has been dishonest since marketing has existed, and while we scoff at what he has said, he hasn't said it for people who really understand it. Why is everyone so hung up on it now?
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Marketing has been dishonest since marketing has existed
See, I don't think most marketing people are smart enough to _deliberately_ be dishonest. It's just the way they see the world.
I feel left out. (Score:2)
I've been mocking them too and I'm not a rival!
A large portion of the web development community has been mocking them. It is a terrible idea to let marketing try to write technical jargon without filtering it through technical people.
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It is a terrible idea to let marketing try to write technical jargon without filtering it through technical people.
What's sad is how any good reputation earned by the effort of developers who actually did implement large parts of HTML5 for IE9 (and keep doing more for IE10) - and there actually was quite a bit of that, if you look outside Slashdot - was instantly destroyed by one clueless blog post that not only bragged of something not worth bragging, but worded it in such a way as to make the entire project the laughing stock of web developers everywhere.
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But shutdown, it wasn't just one careless blog post. It was infused through out the entire campaign around IE9 and the IE10 developer preview. It was in the stage presentations, the press briefings, the blog posts and more. This wasn't some silly little slip. This is Microsoft's well-reasoned attack on the other browsers.
Maybe the engineering team for IE doesn't deserve this but they are the ones that chose to work for a company known for this kind of dishonesty. There are several other organizations out t
Firefox HTML 5 complete? (Score:2)
My app has INDIGENOUS HTML5 support. (Score:2)
Re: goat link, don't click (Score:3)
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Who found a way to monetize goatse at this late date?
If we got half the effort of that campaign on real stuff we'd all have better software by now.
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Edge cases are what allows a vendor that says "we support X" to validate they support X. Deprecated stuff should also be tested, but perhaps in a different suite. Incompletely supported standards mean more edge cases for the implementers; standards should be small enough to manage a simple yes/no answer to "do you support X?"
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whatever happened to the Java killer? wasn't it called J# or something like that? I think that microsoft needs to fall in line with the rest of the world. lol
It's called C#. It's not killing Java, but it's certainly doing well. And why does one platform have to "kill" another to be successful?
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You should ask M$ that question.
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You guys talking about J++ [wikipedia.org], maybe?
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J# was actually a stopgap to migrate existing J++ code (little as there were) to .NET. It appeared much later than J++; in fact, by the time it appeared, J++ was already a dead project (after the Sun lawsuit).
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It looks like VMware is using it. I installed their client software yesterday and part of the installer routine had to install J# first.
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No, they extended it to make it not interoperability with the real Java, with the intention of removing any sort of portability. They then had to settle with sun and using the patents they licensed as part of this settlement created C#.
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You realize you just said the same thing just with a different spin. If they made it work more natively with Windows, that automatically implies that it would limit portability if you used those extensions. So they created C# so they would no longer be limited to doing exactly what SUN did (and absolutely no more than that). Which is why well written C# apps will always out perform java apps.
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My understanding is that the wrote J++ with the specific intent to not allow JVM compatibility, but only with their own JVM implementation. That's a fair bit more than just adding language extensions, y'know? From the EU's research on this stuff [www.ecis.eu]
“[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more
advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java
apps.”
—Microsoft’s Thomas Reardon
And from the NYTimes article on this [nytimes.com]:
Micr
Re:yeah (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser [basschouten.com]
I would say Firefox has hardware rendering, and has it for a while (that blog post I linked to is from 2009 and they were far enough to get performance stats). "Firefox doesn't have such at all" is totally incorrect...
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Yes, but they - Firefox, mind you - only added it for Windows 7/Vista.
Any other OS doesn't get any hardware rendering, and never will, as Firefox uses DirectX to do it.
And IE will support any other OS at all? They haven't supported a Mac version since IE5, not long after Safari, which doesn't work on many corporate sites. I don't know who I'd slap first for that, Gates or Jobs, for making all my Mac users walk to a different department to do something as simple as clock in for work.
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You can make up your own opinions but you cannot make up facts. You are entirely wrong here. What is it that gives you the confidence to just post lies when there are plenty of people around that know better? Seriously?!
Firefox usesvarious DirectX APIs on Windows7 and Vista and XP and uses OpenGL for Mac and Linux. Where it's incomplete it WILL be completed in upcoming versions.
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Uh you know you can change any tinyurl.com/whatever link to preview.tinyurl.com/whatever to see where it's going right?
You're washed up. A has-been. Go home with what dignity you have left.
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... what the heck does "native HTML5" even *mean*?
Well, I took it to mean the obvious: IE9's HTML-rendering code is written in machine code. Not java, not C#, not C, not even assembly language; they wrote it as a string of hex bytes.
I wouldn't be surprised ...
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Obviously, native means that it comes with the computer and you don't have to download it...
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... native means that it comes with the computer and you don't have to download it...
So "native HTML5" is HTML5 that comes with the computer? But I'd think you'd mostly want it to be able to handle non-native HTML5, that is, HTML5 in docs that you download from the Web.
Maybe this is a truly new development: an HTML renderer that only handles HTML5 that comes with the computer, but misinterprets HTML5 that comes from "foreign" sources. If that's what they mean, it could truly qualify as an "innovative" implementation of HTML. (Nah; IE6 did that pretty well. ;-)
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You've just described all currently shipping browsers.
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So 64-bit IE9 isn't native by that definition, right (no JIT there)?
Whereas Firefox 4 and Chrome dev builds are?
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> They [upper management] need to be marketed to since they don't know how to read.
More accurately, they don't know how to read past the headline.
Geeze, someone left a magazine in the executive washroom. Now we have to switch everything over to cloud storage. (I am not kidding.)
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That's embarrassing given that they presumably get points for supporting h.264 and mpeg-4, as well as some of the other codecs that they presumably expose for IE to use.
By comparison my Firefox 4.0 install got 255 out of 400 without the benefit of those free points.
Re:ACID-moment for HTML5! (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with that is that it's just testing specific features, and it tends to spend a lot of time (and points) on things that aren't typically relevant, but may (or may not) even make it into the final HTML 5 spec. The more important features are simply glanced over, giving them 1-2 points, while stupid things are given 20+ points that the vast majority of sites will never use. That site is nice as a checklist, but terrible at determining how well a browser is fit for today's and tomorrow's web pages.
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Microsoft already tried the embrace, extend, extinguish tactic on HTML standards. Back in the IE6 days they even had the standards guys on the ropes. However, instead of just extending HTML in incompatible ways Microsoft tried to really push home their advantage by switching web development from being browser based to being based on Silverlight. It would have worked too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids...
Oh wait, wrong show.
Knowing Microsoft it is going to try again. However, for that tact
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I thought the exact same thing. Mozilla has been a bit petty recently and their PR has been nothing except bad.
Mozilla needs to tout their innovations. I am tired of them claiming betas are somehow the real deal. Firefox 4 was no different.
Firefox is a good browser, but compared to IE9 and Chrome especially, it is not a great browser. It's slower. It crashes. And when it does, it takes down the whole browser.
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I am on firefox 6 you are one version late ;)
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I liked Firefox 6 before it got signed. I even have it on vinyl.
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I used to pal around with Firefox 6 when we were in high school.
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I used to pal around with Firefox 6 when we were in high school.
Meh, Firefox 6 let me fuck his sister.
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to play with his trumpet winsock ?
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I'm pretty sure that's not true. Firefox uses Direct2d where available.
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I'm pretty sure they mean they're the only browser to use native hardware acceleration APIs, like DirectX.
Probably, except for s/DirectX/Direct2D/. But that, of course, would still be incorrect, because Firefox also uses Direct2D.
The blog post seems to say that IE9 is somehow magically better by virtue of using those APIs directly, and not via any platform abstraction layer that is otherwise needed for cross-platform UI. But it seems to be a very silly argument to me, almost like a marketing guy trying to come up with a technical explanation that sounds plausible (to him)... oh, nevermind.
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Firefox, at least, also uses Direct2D. And I've no idea what "directly on top" means - what, did they count the number of stack frames between renderPage() and drawLine(), roughly speaking?
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If this is what they are claiming then they are not being stupid, they're lying. Firefox 4 on Windows 7 uses the exact same Direct3D and DirectWrite APIs that IE 9 uses. And in some cases we use them *more effectively* than even Microsoft does. And in most cases we did it *before* Microsoft.
Maybe you're thinking of Mac and Linux where we are using different solutions. Or maybe you're just ranting without the facts and offering your guesses (in which case you should say so up front.)
- A
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Vendor makes up nonsense technical jargon in an attempt to co-opt the Web and other vendors call them on it with humor. No need for follow-up stories.