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Oh Facebook, you so silly!

"That guy" is Eric Meyer, and his blog post might have become a "thing" because he is rather known in the field. I'm not specifically addressing this to LaurenCates, but rather those that gave Meyer some flak here on /. at the time: read both the original post and a second post. He didn't knock the developers and designers at Facebook, but after having gone through the worst that a parent can have to go through, he tried to "increase awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios" in the industry. I've been reading his posts for a long time, he's a level-headed, active guy not prone to whining.

"That guy" is Eric Meyer, and his blog post might have become a "thing" because he is rather known in the field. I'm not specifically addressing this to LaurenCates, but rather those that gave Meyer some flak here on /. at the time: read both the original post and a second post. He didn't knock the developers and designers at Facebook, but after having gone through the worst that a parent can have to go through, he tried to "increase awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios" in the industry. I've been reading his posts for a long time, he's a level-headed, active guy not prone to whining.

The guy is just stirring up drama, which may be part of the grieving process. He just posted a video of his daughter on his own blog.

1. "nested brackets" (blocks) are by definition not spaghetti. Spaghetti is exclusively the result of gotos and their control equivalents (like the early return).

Bullshit. One of the projects at my last job had a single function in C++ that was over 50 printed pages. 5-deep nested loops, not even counting conditionals. On a 1280p resolution monitor, 8pt font, 4 space-tabbing and properly indented code, the start of the deepest nested blocks were 4/5s or more across the screen. A lot of the crap was due to avoiding goto's. That is spaghetti. By using a few judicial goto's, I was able to reduce the code by a third alone. Goto's are not evil. Like any language construct, they can be abused. Just because one famous guy wrote a paper Go To Considered Harmful doesn't make it scripture. You might want to read "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful. Just because *you* don't understand when to properly use a construct doesn't make the construct evil or wrong.

Sounds like Eric Meyer's HYDESim from 2005.

Sounds like Eric Meyer's HYDESim from 2005.

Check out this nuclear blast effects "simulator". The overpressure region for a 1 megaton blast is only a bit over double the radius of a 100 kiloton blast. So ten 100 kiloton bombs would destroy (assuming no overlap) roughly twice the surface area of a 1 megaton blast.

Similar range increases are seen for the thermal effects which drop off as one over the radius squared plus a little extra due to the curvature of the Earth.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

Sorry, I had a few windows open and didn't get through them all before posting. Mirrors listed in the comments here.

Still, it's sad to think that there will be no fun, new, snarky writings forthcoming. :-(

I remember this, relatively old:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/s5-intro.html
Wen'll we have a simple GUI to create slides like this?

1) Any file can be signed, it's just a matter of hashing and encrypting such hash with a private key. PGP and such have "sign file" buttons.

2) http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/s5-intro.html

3) Why is text layout important in a letter?

True, although that wouldn't explain people having issues with plugins. The GP was talking about PowerPoint, though, where as I was thinking of S5.

I really should have said HTML5 and CSS. CSS drop-down menus, transparency and the like also some great shadow and border features etc and even different developments in CSS animationwill hopefully replace flash and javascript.New HTML tags for embedding content or applications will go a long way to making flash redundant also. I hope.

CSS is used for easy and consistent page formatting across a site...

Well, yes that is ONE use for CSS, but please remember that it is Cascading Style Sheets. Style information can be embedded in the HTML itself, or in an external file. Style information in the page itself will be prioritized over CSS in an external document. This adds flexibility. HTML is about data. CSS is about presenting that data. Flash is doing what HTML and CSS should do and will soon.

Exactly. All those XHTML 2 features that you mentioned are simply beautiful and made mark-up simpler and more semantic. I've been eagerly awaiting being able to use them for years, and now I fear that HTML is getting more complex without any of the simplification that XHTML 2 offered. I have not seen any discussion as of yet of rolling those features into (X)HTML 5, but I hope more people who care (like you) will fight for it. The only discussion I could find is from a year ago and ended up with the rejection of "href anywhere", my favourite XHTML 2 feature. Perhaps this is the right opportunity to try again.

You keep your noscript plugin, and I'll keep intuitive webUI.

'Intuitive' web UI doesn't need JavaScript -- it can be done purely with CSS.

Example

I agree with all the problems you identify, but since I have been wrestling with Impress today I want to develop on a couple of them. <rant>

2. Powerpoint fonts: Fonts are sometimes changed when going between Powerpoint and Impress.

Fonts are often changed when going between Impress and Impress -- at least, if you're copying and pasting slides from one presentation to another. This is something I do routinely, as I'm creating presentations based on older ones.

4. Alignment of bullets, and bullet characters: Bullets are often changed when converting, in terms of their positioning and the character used to represent the bullet itself.

This too is a problem within Impress: in Impress you actually cannot control the distance between bullets and content. My jaw dropped when I realised that the problem was not, after all, my fault, but a huge, gaping, blundering omission. (Go on, try it. Open up Impress and start modifying one of the Outline styles. See anything missing?)

I am going to be devoting some time this weekend to trying to learn how to do some less-obvious tricks in the S5 presentation format. (I had thought of using LaTeX instead, but I mess around with layout a lot: I don't want LaTeX to take care of that for me. With XML the gap between WYS and WYG is simply a bit briefer.) I'm not going to switch to PowerPoint because that has its own quirks, overall equal in severity to those of Impress for my purposes. </rant>

Edsger Dijkstra once said, 'the use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense,'

Dijkstra was not known for being conservative in his statements of opinion. His "GOTO considered harmful" essay did a lot of good, but it also did quite a bit of damage. To the point where we ended up with a variety of "considered Harmful" Considered Harmful essays.

(I wonder if ""Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful is soon to follow? Oh wait. That already happened in '87.)

A more conservative viewing of COBOL would show that it held a useful place in history, but is now antiquated. You'd need to be extremely conservative to think that COBOL has a place for growth in the modern world.

...

Oh snap. We got another one.

In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year.

Let's be realistic here.

1. 1997 was 11 years ago
2. Everyone was preparing for Y2K
3. Those billions of lines of code were often replacing billions of lines of coded that were removed

As someone who once worked with mainframes, I can tell you that COBOL isn't dead. However, it's not exactly thriving, either. Legacy systems do their jobs well, so there is little reason to replace them. Instead, many companies use technologies like Java->CICS connectors to bridge the gap between old and new. But that doesn't mean that anyone is going to be developing "millions of lines of COBOL".
Quite the opposite, in fact. Business moves more quickly today than in any period in history. And with business moving so quickly, companies find they need to develop new aspects to their businesses. Those new aspects often take the form of new opportunities to develop new software.

If anything, I think COBOL is still hanging on because the mindset for technology is still external facing. Remember the Dot Com Boom? Well, one of the side effects was that technology shifted from optimizing internal operations to interacting with customers directly. Which is not a bad thing, except that internal operations shouldn't be neglected. Thus I see a lot of companies with inefficient internal procedures because they have not invested in proper internal technology infrastructure. This has left a niche where old COBOL programs are nursed along despite a growing amount of manual work for employees at many companies.

Wouldn't it be nice if technology could solve their problems? Well, it can. All we need is someone to make the investment.

With the economy going bust at the moment, I have a feeling the pendulum is going to swing back the other way. Companies are going to need to tighten their belts and become more competitive on price. Which means that they need more efficient operations. With the massive advancements in technology and ensuring code quality in the last 10 years, I fully expect that companies will soon have systems every bit as solid as their COBOL mainframes. Except they will be designed with more rapid change and flexibility in mind.

If this was a question in disguise:
For the german speaking croud, I think SelfHTML with it's part about CSS is a very usable reference, apart from the above mentioned W3C specifications.

Other useful material consists of diverse articles on A List Apart and meyerweb; and many bits and pieces can be found on Listamatic, BlueRobot and Zen Garden, just to mention a few of my favourites.
Oh, and don't forget to search the web for those cheat sheets needed for IE 6 and other old browsers.

I agree.

Here's a good example of how useless ACID3 is:
http://blog.codedread.com/archives/2008/03/26/webkit-nightly-not-smiling/

Webkit gets 100/100 on ACID3, which includes SVG tests, yet webkit only gets 5/116 on SVG animation compliance.

Implementing the bare minimum to pass acid3 is a disservice to everyone.

Eric Meyer also has a bunch to say on how acid3 is a "missed opportunity"
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/03/27/acid-redux/

since you know anything entitled 'considered harmful', as they are the ones actually harmful.

Push back a little on your boss. Have him scratch out some rough sketches of what he thinks he wants to see. The problem with artistic endeavors is that everyone is a critic. If you put in the extra effort to try and come up with some nice artwork, only to find your boss doesn't like it, you will become bogged down and eventually burn out. You need your client —your boss —to give you some artistic direction on what he wants. By engaging him like this, he'll be a little more aware of the amount of effort it is going to take you — a confessed non-artist —to "pretty things up".

Someone already beat me to suggesting CSS Zen Garden. That's a very inspirational site for anyone who wants to blend esthetically pleasing with advanced technically functional. Being familiar with HTML, SQL, and PHP, adding CSS to the quiver will open up a new level of creative possibilities. My favorite approach was adding subtle variations depending on the season or holiday —even local changes to the weather. I would have the PHP output a slight variation in the colors of certain elements with inline CSS, depending on certain conditions laid out in the rules table I created in MySQL.

You can do some very effective decorative touches using just CSS and minimal graphics elements. If nothing else, it will certainly increase the speed at which your site loads. Eric Meyers offers some simple (and not so simple) examples of what you can accomplish with just CSS. His Complex Spiral demonstration is one of my favorites and was what really inspired me years ago to learn more about CSS.

Definitely go to different web sites and look at the way they look and use that as inspiration for what you would like to accomplish. But as I stated in the opening, each revision, bring back to your boss and get his input. The more you involve him (her?), the more you are likely to end up with something that he wants, and the less work you will have to do.

Yes. In fact, that is exactly what is happening at the moment. At least the vocal majority is in utter opposition. See the IE Blog.

Also:

• Eric Meyer's follow up post
• WaSP response
• Discussion which includes a disclaim of official endorsement by Andy Clarke, co-lead of WaSP

I am calling on the development community for solid alternative proposals:

Alternatives NOW!

And when IE6 finally dies, you won't even need classes for every column.

At least taking out Ishtar Bronze Bitch on the Hudson who sitteth on the many waters will put an end to fraudulent advertising. Look what has been said here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/07/25/hydesim-update/. It's near the bottom where it mentions 'interstate 287'.

All the "PowerPoint" you really need: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

(Assuming you're not trying to distract the audience from the fact you have nothing to say.)

Even if everything works 100% of the time, it is still an unnecessary layer of vulnerability, and not just from a security perspective, but from a "I can never know for sure that the experience will be the same each time I run the app." ... On my machine, I know a crap app will run poorly each and every time, and that a well-done app will most likely perform as it should each and every time.

That sounds like exactly why you can export your presentation to plain HTML. That's just common sense.

Sure, if you tried to run the presentation straight from Google's web servers, you could be in trouble. If you tried to show your Powerpoint file straight from an Exchange server you could be in trouble, too.

That's the analogy to use. The old way was, say, Outlook for collaboration and Powerpoint for presentation. The new way is Google for collaboration and HTML on your hard disk for presentation. An online presentation-specific web app is better for this kind of collaboration than email, and I think a set of HTML files is better than relying on Powerpoint. I feel safer with my data in an open text-based format which just happens to have reader apps on every machine in the world.

Of course, if you don't need the collaboration part of Google's web app, just use S5.

D'oh - I linked you to the wrong entry in the blog, sorry. (Although it is still on-topic, in that it's about this survey.) This is the one talking about the graphing.

Eric Meyer (who I suppose might count as a "cool web developer") wrote about the choices/process behind producing the graphs.

The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites.

A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.

Widgets aren't a feature of a browser (or shouldn't be, there's really no benefit and loads of better alternatives), and HTML presentations aren't anything new and isn't something that can't be done in any browser.

Also I love how because Opera did something before the "mainstream" browsers they claim they are the ones being copied. Opera wasn't the first browser to do tabs, mouse gestures, search bars, or extensions (/widgets/addons/whatever). They seem to be like Apple that way - claiming that somebody copied from them and not admitting that they copied it from somebody else in the first place. Gotta love it.

"Rich" is being able to afford to live close enough to a city to benefit from its commerce, but far enough not to be ill-affected when it is nuked (see http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html/) . "Rich" is being able to afford a nice enough house that some developer can't bribe the town into eminent domain abuse.

Q: How is combatting outsourcing like installing a timing chain?
A: Line up the dots and use the tool that goes 'click'...

Your logic for ODF is a "lame duck open source clone" is needs more justification.

I wasn't talking about ODF specifically, I was talking about OpenOffice - the file format is pretty much irrelevant. OpenOffice, NeoOffice, StarOffice and all these other free, open-source office clones are still buying in to the paradigm they have inherited from Microsoft - namely, WYSIWYG presentation-based markup. I reject that. As a writer, I do not want to markup "this is italic" or "this is 16pt bold" or whatnot, I want to markup "this is a heading, this is a paragraph etc." For me, whether it's got 1in margins or 2in is irrelevant. The design of OpenOffice is one which puts forward that WYSIWYG paradigm. I don't think in 'pages' or 'character spacing' or 'margins', I think in ideas and how they relate and are organised.

So how do you specify your "XML-based format" if you don't use ODF or OOXML?

Simple. I use an XML-based format that's not ODF or OOXML. Have you seen the size of the OOXML specification? It's like 900 pages long stretched across three different namespaces and Microsoft chose XSD as their schema langauge, even though something like RELAX NG would have been a *lot* saner.

What actual format I use is something I have yet to decide - I've tried DocBook but found it too heavy, and TEI is a little bit too backwards-facing (it's designed for archivists and librarians, it seems). XHTML is kind of light enough for my uses, but there's no good XHTML->FO stylesheets that I've seen, so you are reliant on browsers for turning it in to a PDF.

I may simply specify my own format using a RELAX NG schema and use that. That way, how I write will be determined by me, not by Bill Gates. The XML stack is quite an attractive proposition for me because it's de-facto open - RNG schema, XSL and FO are all viewable, and the document is just text with some extra guff added. Plus it's really, really well internationalized, which is something other data formats struggle with. I can also 'pull-in' other formats like MathML or XForms and embed them within my format.

I feel the same about office software quite generally - it feels inefficient to use it. For instance, I never use spreadsheets. If I have data that needs processing, I'll pop open a terminal window and write a Python script. I have control over the data that is being processed and what happens with it. If I need a graph, I'll type 'import matplotlib' and make one. If the data is not merely temporary, I'll put it up on the web as some kind of data file that others can reuse. That data file will have semantic value of some kind (the elements and attributes will describe where it means rather than just where it is on an Excel grid).

If I need to give a presentation, I'll use Eric Meyer's S5 and a generator script that makes it work with an open source outliner I use. Databases? MySQL (or eXist). The 'office' paradigm does nothing for me, and it's something to be actively worked around. I have access to both Office and OpenOffice on both the Mac and on Linux and I *never* use them. The home-grown ways are just so much more efficient for me.

Now, some idiot is going to say "but you can't expect everyone to just drop Word and Excel and use Python and/or XSL". That may be so. But for me, I'm not going to waste my life working with bad software. If the software I am using sucks, I *will* write my own to replace it. One size does not fit all. With regard to academics, I think that if you are intelligent enough to be splitting atoms or deconstructing 19th century poetry, you are intelligent enough to be able to use a piece of software that's not made by Microsoft. Journals should take the lead here. People actually aren't stupid - almost everyone, however they may fail in school, usually gets a driver's license - because there's an economic motivation to having a driver's lice

I'd like to see it use the s5 format - then it could be saved as html+css.
Take a look at the introductory presentation - it's pretty neat especially considering it's all standard html+css+js.

I'd like to see it use the s5 format - then it could be saved as html+css.
Take a look at the introductory presentation - it's pretty neat especially considering it's all standard html+css+js.

Apparently some people have some issues with the language.

Take with a grain of salt.

Uhh, he obviously doesn't know XHTML/JavaScript/CSS enough to be making those decisions. The X in front of the HTML is pretty important, as you just have a well formed document (text/image/audio/video) and want to display that a certain way.

S5 (Simple Standards-based Slide Show System) does what you are describing, and it does it for any XHTML and is fully customizable. See the example linked from the page if you don't believe me.

Uhh, he obviously doesn't know XHTML/JavaScript/CSS enough to be making those decisions. The X in front of the HTML is pretty important, as you just have a well formed document (text/image/audio/video) and want to display that a certain way.

S5 (Simple Standards-based Slide Show System) does what you are describing, and it does it for any XHTML and is fully customizable. See the example linked from the page if you don't believe me.

Until they do, I recommend S5.

There was an alternative all along: S5. It stores presentations in XHTML+CSS and uses Javascript to advance to the next slide. It's friendly even for browsers that don't support Javascript or CSS---it falls back to plain text rather nicely.

"Something Considered Harmful" is one of the more cliche ways to title an essay like this. Can't we come up with *slightly* better titles? Like, say, the one the blog post used?

When I had a need for Powerpoint-esque slides on Linux, Impress didn't.

I ended up using S5:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

It isn't Powerpoint, but it worked for me.

Please, Google, make us a presentation editor that could save the presentations in S5 (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ ). This would rock really hard.
 

Apparently, the Aliens forgot to read this security advisory: CERT(sm) Advisory CA-96.13.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

The use of DHTML does not preclude accessibility, nor does it require a separate version of the site. Google for unobtrusive javascript or DOM Scripting. Major advances have been made even within the last twelve months on accessibility of sites with extensive JavaScript enhancement (note that I say "enhancement", not "requirement"), and assistive technologies such as screen readers used by those with visual impairment are now much more capable of dealing with dynamically updated content.

Oh, and data displayed as a graph? Eric Meyer has a working demo of an HTML table of data rendered as a bar graph via CSS. Totally accessible, one page for all users, looks good.

LOL. I saw a similar Javascript terminal app that ran in the browser and sorta simulated an actual unix OS, but I thought it was just a sort of joke. Did you really think that such an idea would actually be useful?

I wouldn't be surpised if it was JS/UIX. Trying that and TiddlyWiki solidified my concept of how to resolve my UI issues as a web developer.

Anyway, don't worry about YouOS. It'll fail.

I'm not worried about it - I don't want it to fail. Competition's good for business. =)

I was a little miffed at Murphy for his timing yesterday though.

Besides, it's available under a modified BSD license. I'm learning JavaScript by writing Atomic OS; I expect I might be able to learn a thing or two from their project.

If I recall correctly, beta1 didn't have any changes to the rendering engine, but betas 2 and 3 do. Eric Meyer linked to a post about IE7 changes. The IE7 blog has the details of some of the changes.
Now, that doesn't mean that they are ALL fixed, but there are just enough to make all the expert webpage creators learn all new hacks to make pages work in IE.