Riddle me this batman. In what way is a two column grid moronic?
I'll even give you an e-cookie if you can explain, from the perspective of an end user such as your (grand)parents, why two column grids on the web are moronic.
Having an FAQ for a contract is a cruel joke played on the ignorant. The GPL is about the only legal document I've seen that thinks it needs an FAQ to explain it. Last I checked, FAQ's are not legally binding. Reading the GPL FAQ is wasting your time. If you have a question about the GPL, either seek a lawyer or don't bother using the code. I personally just recommend the latter, there are plenty of codebases out there with licenses that don't require an FAQ to explain how they work.
Without misuse, there would be no innovation. How do you think the cool stuff gets invented? Just to name a crazy one, do you think guys who invented the laser thought it would get misused as a cat toy? Isn't the potato gun a massive misuse of hair spray?
People who don't misuse are pretty damn boring, quite frankly.
PS: I actually wager the very first person who invented it thought "boy, this would really wig out my cat at home"
Clearly you aren't thinking big. THINK BIG MAN!!! BLINK generates EXCITEMENT! If you want a sale on the internet, nothing will stand out more then your price blinking! You dev nerds dont know crap! BLINK SELLS!
I really don't care what HTML stands for, quite frankly. Yes we need a language with semantic properties (even though they will be abused to shit for SEO reasons), but dammit, people want to use it as a presentational language! Make it happen!
If you sit around and be all arrogant (a recurring theme with W3C zealots, it seems) Microsoft or Adobe will create one for you.
Give the market what it wants, or kindly shut the fuck up. You people are noise.
What we really need is a GOOD html editor, so we can describe the page as : I want 2 colums this size, and the rest of the space given to the third column. Html was NEVER intended to be a format that was at large written in hand. You make my point.
Fancy pants HTML editors spitting out magical HTML so you don't have to think only means the language sucks. Those fancy pants HTML editors are still spitting out HTML and CSS that go against the grain of HTML & CSS. You've just shifted the responsibility to maintain the hackjob to somebody else.
This isn't meant to say fancy pants HTML editors are stupid - Dreamweaver is an excellent tool for static content and you'd be insane not to use it. But if you rely on Dreamweaver to sprinkle your HTML with magic pixy dust hoping it will fill in the cracks in HTML, you will be disappointed. The problem isn't that HTML wasn't meant to be written by hand, I'd argue that a good language should be easier to code by hand then by machine (XAML appears to be a good example). The problem also isn't poor tools - we have fine tools to work with HTML.
The problem with HTML/CSS is we are abusing it in ways it was never designed to be abused. The solution is a better language to express ourselves in.
Granted my comparison to netscape is weak, but it is another case of where a rewrite killed them in the market place. Their derivatives (of which I count Firefox) won. In Perl's case it could be argued the derivatives like ruby, python, or *gag* php are winning.
Like netscape when netscape released their newly rewritten application, I fear it will be too late for Perl6. All the derivatives will have taken over.
To go way off, I'd argue perl6 development quite resembles the development on the hurd. Theoretically pure, always shifting in target, but never ready for prime time.
People who dont use modern IDE's are living in the stone age. Seriously. It is primitive crap when you cannot find all references to a function. It is primitive crap when your IDE doesn't know about the heirachy of your classes and can show you all the methods you've inherited. It makes programming a pain. The more I get spoiled in Visual Studio, the more I wish I could scrap everything and do it in C#. I love perl, but I hate the tools.
If the web was the wrong medium for two columns, why does every popular website use them? Or do you think it is more important that the web be some kind of "save the whales" hippie love fest where everything is wonderful, semantic with information flowing all freely like a river.
Pull your head out of your castle. Look at how people *use* the web and give them tools to make their life easier. Right now, our toolkit for making a useful web sucks.
Bloody tag war, or a war of pens, what we are really missing is rapid-fire browser releases. Maybe it is my short attention span talking, but we need a new browser every 6 months cram packed with cool stuff.
I don't want a ten year long tag war, I want right now this instant, dammit! Give me the good ol' days when netscape pushed a new browser every month and you'd always be anxious to download the new version to see what is new.
(of course, eventually "what is new" just ment more and more buggy bloat... anybody who thinks Microsoft killed Netscape clearly doesn't remember how quickly the quality of Netscape's browsers tanked. Didn't they shove a complete IRC client in there at one time?)
IE aside, I'll argue with columnar layouts not being a hack. Floating divs and negative margins are not a direct way to say "give me a two column layout". If you want to see grid layout done right, look at XAML. Microsoft took great care in letting developers craft elegant, direct columnar layouts with almost unlimited ways to specify text flow all with zero hackish calories.
vim and emacs suck. I build for unix servers but I sure as hell don't use one for my workstation.
I want a perl editor that works like Visual Studio because quite frankly, Visual Studio is the best development tool on the market. I want a perl editor with intellense, good support for perldoc, refactoring tools, and a good enough understanding of the language that I can click on a object's method, I can go "find all references to this function". Good refactoring would be a bonus too.
Eclipse + EPIC seem to do most of this and both seem to be getting more and more stable. The problem is activeperl + mod_perl + windows = trouble, at least in my playing around.
By the way, I'm aware that because perl is a dynamically typed language, most of what I want is very hard if not impossible. I can always dream though...
That is why standards dudes all suck. The market wants 3 column layouts. The market, at large can give a rats ass about theoretical semantic web bullshit. HTML is presentational. We want presentational layout that looks like newspapers. You can scream about semantics till your face turns red, but it doesn't matter. Look how the internet is being used, not how you think it should be used.
How about a 2 column layout with a fixed column and a background that extends the page? Is that useless or obscure? Can I do that today using CSS without resorting to some kind of image based hack or is what I'm asking also something I should feel guilty about? Should I just make a black and white page that is all times new roman (er, wait, no fonts allowed, right?).
Fuck this. I'm just going to make web pages that are plain text.
As long as the baseline standards are met, who cares? Nobody sane will use proprietary tags. All it does is make the other browser maker go "those bastards! they have curvy corner tags! lets steal the thing and enhance it by add drop shadows too!". Now we've got drop shadowed DIV's with curvy corners in CSS. Each browser maker will copy the other guy's syntax, improve it a bit, and kick it back out the market.
Look at the IFRAME. You think that little fairly useful tag came from the W3C? Look at all the other tags you've got in HTML. How many of them were dreamed up by the eggheads at the W3C? I'm no historian, but I'd wager most of the useful bits of HTML and possibly CSS we have today is not because of the W3C, but a byproduct of the IE vs. Netscape wars of way back when. Shit, we even have the useful BLINK tag!!
The W3C is horrible at cranking out useful standards - those guys seem more interested in hearing themselves talk. They want you to give up tables for a grid layout (which is a good move) but provide no direct replacement. Yes you can rid yourself of tables, but you do so with a hack. Hell, wasn't the TABLE tag something from Netscape?
Bottom line? The only way we will evolve on the web is with another bloody tag war.
At least, in my opinion. I could be wrong you know:-)
You are 100% right. That is why I'm not a professional web developer and never want to be. The little web development I do is frustrating enough. Web development is hard, long, frustrating work. All you pro web dudes have my sincere kudos. Seriously.
I know that you do layout in CSS. The problem is CSS is an inadequate way to express layout. Where is my "make a three column grid that extends the height of the page" in CSS?
My point was really, there needs to be some innovation. HTML & CSS have grown stagnant and are not keeping up with what modern web applications are asking it to do. W3C is an ineffective standards body and is incapable of delivering something to meet these new demands. The only way I can see innovation now is if browser makers roll their own. Hell, even firefox has those -x-rounded-corner things. Gee. Maybe people want rounded corners huh? Why isn't this getting added to a formal standard?
The important thing though is to make sure you meet all the baseline standards first before adding cool crap on top. IE doesn't meet the baseline yet, so they aren't in a place to do cool new stuff.
I read almost all the comments from both blog entries. Aside from a few slashdotty tin-foil-hat EVIL M$ posts, I felt most were fairly well thought out. I don't think anybody was dissing the developers or managers, but more of "hey guys! we are all feeling neglected here" kind of deal.
How about this. Are the comments you read on those two posts of the same nature as, say, those from the infamous "Digg Rebellion"?
I'm only a pseudo professional. I dont do enough development to know all the ins and outs of IE*. Personally I have high props to professional web developers, but I also think they must all be somewhat insane. Web development is probably the hardest, most frustrating career path a tech-dude can take right now.
The Visual Studio crew push out community previews that are practically alpha quality for developers to chew on. Visual Studio 2008 was a classic example of this. Those guys were spinning out betas for about a year now.
Developer people like being feed little trinkets of free stuff. It makes us feel like we are being listened to and appreciated.
In this case, that "adolescent crap" is well deserved and hardly adolescent. It is the outpour of pent up rage from professional web developers everywhere.
Until you've done serious web development, you have no idea how frustrating it is to target IE. Especially when you have to explain to your client why it took a day longer than you estimated because of IE.
Meet the standards and then innovate on top of them. Remember back in the day when every browser was adding extra tags to try to outdo the other guy? I really think we need that again. Semantic web is a pipe dream, HTML sucks, CSS is largely ivory tower bullshit and the W3C is ineffective at giving developers a good language. A classic Firefox vs IE battle of layout tags is exactly what we need to stir up the pot. Just make sure you follow the current standards first.
I have no doubt that IE has cost our global economy billions of dollars in wasted time and effort. I also suspect there is a higher instance of stress related illness and depression in web developers. Developing on today's internet sucks monkey balls, and it is a large part due to IE.... And this is all comming from me, proudly running on Vista developing in VS2008. I'm practically a Microsoft fanboy!
I'm disappointed with the state of perl. I used to be a huge perl nut and have a major project that is all mod_perl. But I'm growing increasingly fustrated by the lack of modern programming tools, especially compared to other modern languages. Even PHP has a better choice of editors. Heck, I can write syntax colored, intellesense'd python in Visual Studio!
Perl6 is a text book example of why rewrites are bad. While these people are busy writing the Programming Language to End All Programming Languages,.NET has stolen the market for the very thing these people where trying to make. Pugs, or parrot or whatever, sounds a heck of a lot like.NET/Mono. By the time Perl6 gets out, if it ever does, nobody will care about it because the open source market will be dominated by Mono. At this rate, the perl crew might be better served by just compiling down to MSIL and leveraging Mono for cross-language compilation.
Wow... looks like the moderation system on slashdot is being gamed just as badly as it gets gamed on digg whenever there is a Ron Paul article. Any Ron Paul article on Digg will have anybody who badmouths "Dr. Paul" voted to into negative infinity. Who knew botnets could get mod points here?
VOTE FOR RON PAUL 2008!!!!!*... there... that ought to please those bots, er slashdot moderators * do not vote for ron paul in 2008.
Slashdot Mirror
Riddle me this batman. In what way is a two column grid moronic?
I'll even give you an e-cookie if you can explain, from the perspective of an end user such as your (grand)parents, why two column grids on the web are moronic.
Having an FAQ for a contract is a cruel joke played on the ignorant. The GPL is about the only legal document I've seen that thinks it needs an FAQ to explain it. Last I checked, FAQ's are not legally binding. Reading the GPL FAQ is wasting your time. If you have a question about the GPL, either seek a lawyer or don't bother using the code. I personally just recommend the latter, there are plenty of codebases out there with licenses that don't require an FAQ to explain how they work.
Disagree. Strongly.
Without misuse, there would be no innovation. How do you think the cool stuff gets invented? Just to name a crazy one, do you think guys who invented the laser thought it would get misused as a cat toy? Isn't the potato gun a massive misuse of hair spray?
People who don't misuse are pretty damn boring, quite frankly.
PS: I actually wager the very first person who invented it thought "boy, this would really wig out my cat at home"
Clearly you aren't thinking big. THINK BIG MAN!!! BLINK generates EXCITEMENT! If you want a sale on the internet, nothing will stand out more then your price blinking! You dev nerds dont know crap! BLINK SELLS!
(also, the BLINK thing was a joke...)
I really don't care what HTML stands for, quite frankly. Yes we need a language with semantic properties (even though they will be abused to shit for SEO reasons), but dammit, people want to use it as a presentational language! Make it happen!
If you sit around and be all arrogant (a recurring theme with W3C zealots, it seems) Microsoft or Adobe will create one for you.
Give the market what it wants, or kindly shut the fuck up. You people are noise.
Fancy pants HTML editors spitting out magical HTML so you don't have to think only means the language sucks. Those fancy pants HTML editors are still spitting out HTML and CSS that go against the grain of HTML & CSS. You've just shifted the responsibility to maintain the hackjob to somebody else.
This isn't meant to say fancy pants HTML editors are stupid - Dreamweaver is an excellent tool for static content and you'd be insane not to use it. But if you rely on Dreamweaver to sprinkle your HTML with magic pixy dust hoping it will fill in the cracks in HTML, you will be disappointed. The problem isn't that HTML wasn't meant to be written by hand, I'd argue that a good language should be easier to code by hand then by machine (XAML appears to be a good example). The problem also isn't poor tools - we have fine tools to work with HTML.
The problem with HTML/CSS is we are abusing it in ways it was never designed to be abused. The solution is a better language to express ourselves in.
Yup. But you aren't running netscape are you?
Granted my comparison to netscape is weak, but it is another case of where a rewrite killed them in the market place. Their derivatives (of which I count Firefox) won. In Perl's case it could be argued the derivatives like ruby, python, or *gag* php are winning.
Like netscape when netscape released their newly rewritten application, I fear it will be too late for Perl6. All the derivatives will have taken over.
To go way off, I'd argue perl6 development quite resembles the development on the hurd. Theoretically pure, always shifting in target, but never ready for prime time.
The whole thing is a damn shame, really.
People who dont use modern IDE's are living in the stone age. Seriously. It is primitive crap when you cannot find all references to a function. It is primitive crap when your IDE doesn't know about the heirachy of your classes and can show you all the methods you've inherited. It makes programming a pain. The more I get spoiled in Visual Studio, the more I wish I could scrap everything and do it in C#. I love perl, but I hate the tools.
Pro Tip: Get Bent.
If the web was the wrong medium for two columns, why does every popular website use them? Or do you think it is more important that the web be some kind of "save the whales" hippie love fest where everything is wonderful, semantic with information flowing all freely like a river.
Pull your head out of your castle. Look at how people *use* the web and give them tools to make their life easier. Right now, our toolkit for making a useful web sucks.
Dude, don't forget the MARQUEE tag. That poor little guy is forgotten in the dustbin of quality flair.
Bloody tag war, or a war of pens, what we are really missing is rapid-fire browser releases. Maybe it is my short attention span talking, but we need a new browser every 6 months cram packed with cool stuff.
I don't want a ten year long tag war, I want right now this instant, dammit! Give me the good ol' days when netscape pushed a new browser every month and you'd always be anxious to download the new version to see what is new.
(of course, eventually "what is new" just ment more and more buggy bloat... anybody who thinks Microsoft killed Netscape clearly doesn't remember how quickly the quality of Netscape's browsers tanked. Didn't they shove a complete IRC client in there at one time?)
IE aside, I'll argue with columnar layouts not being a hack. Floating divs and negative margins are not a direct way to say "give me a two column layout". If you want to see grid layout done right, look at XAML. Microsoft took great care in letting developers craft elegant, direct columnar layouts with almost unlimited ways to specify text flow all with zero hackish calories.
vim and emacs suck. I build for unix servers but I sure as hell don't use one for my workstation.
I want a perl editor that works like Visual Studio because quite frankly, Visual Studio is the best development tool on the market. I want a perl editor with intellense, good support for perldoc, refactoring tools, and a good enough understanding of the language that I can click on a object's method, I can go "find all references to this function". Good refactoring would be a bonus too.
Eclipse + EPIC seem to do most of this and both seem to be getting more and more stable. The problem is activeperl + mod_perl + windows = trouble, at least in my playing around.
By the way, I'm aware that because perl is a dynamically typed language, most of what I want is very hard if not impossible. I can always dream though...
That is why standards dudes all suck. The market wants 3 column layouts. The market, at large can give a rats ass about theoretical semantic web bullshit. HTML is presentational. We want presentational layout that looks like newspapers. You can scream about semantics till your face turns red, but it doesn't matter. Look how the internet is being used, not how you think it should be used.
How about a 2 column layout with a fixed column and a background that extends the page? Is that useless or obscure? Can I do that today using CSS without resorting to some kind of image based hack or is what I'm asking also something I should feel guilty about? Should I just make a black and white page that is all times new roman (er, wait, no fonts allowed, right?).
Fuck this. I'm just going to make web pages that are plain text.
(grin)
As long as the baseline standards are met, who cares? Nobody sane will use proprietary tags. All it does is make the other browser maker go "those bastards! they have curvy corner tags! lets steal the thing and enhance it by add drop shadows too!". Now we've got drop shadowed DIV's with curvy corners in CSS. Each browser maker will copy the other guy's syntax, improve it a bit, and kick it back out the market.
:-)
Look at the IFRAME. You think that little fairly useful tag came from the W3C? Look at all the other tags you've got in HTML. How many of them were dreamed up by the eggheads at the W3C? I'm no historian, but I'd wager most of the useful bits of HTML and possibly CSS we have today is not because of the W3C, but a byproduct of the IE vs. Netscape wars of way back when. Shit, we even have the useful BLINK tag!!
The W3C is horrible at cranking out useful standards - those guys seem more interested in hearing themselves talk. They want you to give up tables for a grid layout (which is a good move) but provide no direct replacement. Yes you can rid yourself of tables, but you do so with a hack. Hell, wasn't the TABLE tag something from Netscape?
Bottom line? The only way we will evolve on the web is with another bloody tag war.
At least, in my opinion. I could be wrong you know
You are 100% right. That is why I'm not a professional web developer and never want to be. The little web development I do is frustrating enough. Web development is hard, long, frustrating work. All you pro web dudes have my sincere kudos. Seriously.
I know that you do layout in CSS. The problem is CSS is an inadequate way to express layout. Where is my "make a three column grid that extends the height of the page" in CSS?
My point was really, there needs to be some innovation. HTML & CSS have grown stagnant and are not keeping up with what modern web applications are asking it to do. W3C is an ineffective standards body and is incapable of delivering something to meet these new demands. The only way I can see innovation now is if browser makers roll their own. Hell, even firefox has those -x-rounded-corner things. Gee. Maybe people want rounded corners huh? Why isn't this getting added to a formal standard?
The important thing though is to make sure you meet all the baseline standards first before adding cool crap on top. IE doesn't meet the baseline yet, so they aren't in a place to do cool new stuff.
At least, this is my opinion.
I could be wrong, so hear me out:
I read almost all the comments from both blog entries. Aside from a few slashdotty tin-foil-hat EVIL M$ posts, I felt most were fairly well thought out. I don't think anybody was dissing the developers or managers, but more of "hey guys! we are all feeling neglected here" kind of deal.
How about this. Are the comments you read on those two posts of the same nature as, say, those from the infamous "Digg Rebellion"?
I'm only a pseudo professional. I dont do enough development to know all the ins and outs of IE*. Personally I have high props to professional web developers, but I also think they must all be somewhat insane. Web development is probably the hardest, most frustrating career path a tech-dude can take right now.
The Visual Studio crew push out community previews that are practically alpha quality for developers to chew on. Visual Studio 2008 was a classic example of this. Those guys were spinning out betas for about a year now.
Developer people like being feed little trinkets of free stuff. It makes us feel like we are being listened to and appreciated.
In this case, that "adolescent crap" is well deserved and hardly adolescent. It is the outpour of pent up rage from professional web developers everywhere.
Until you've done serious web development, you have no idea how frustrating it is to target IE. Especially when you have to explain to your client why it took a day longer than you estimated because of IE.
- Dont forget SVG support too.
- A good debugger would be nice.
- Meet the standards and then innovate on top of them. Remember back in the day when every browser was adding extra tags to try to outdo the other guy? I really think we need that again. Semantic web is a pipe dream, HTML sucks, CSS is largely ivory tower bullshit and the W3C is ineffective at giving developers a good language. A classic Firefox vs IE battle of layout tags is exactly what we need to stir up the pot. Just make sure you follow the current standards first.
I have no doubt that IE has cost our global economy billions of dollars in wasted time and effort. I also suspect there is a higher instance of stress related illness and depression in web developers. Developing on today's internet sucks monkey balls, and it is a large part due to IE.I'm disappointed with the state of perl. I used to be a huge perl nut and have a major project that is all mod_perl. But I'm growing increasingly fustrated by the lack of modern programming tools, especially compared to other modern languages. Even PHP has a better choice of editors. Heck, I can write syntax colored, intellesense'd python in Visual Studio!
.NET has stolen the market for the very thing these people where trying to make. Pugs, or parrot or whatever, sounds a heck of a lot like .NET/Mono. By the time Perl6 gets out, if it ever does, nobody will care about it because the open source market will be dominated by Mono. At this rate, the perl crew might be better served by just compiling down to MSIL and leveraging Mono for cross-language compilation.
Perl6 is a text book example of why rewrites are bad. While these people are busy writing the Programming Language to End All Programming Languages,
So please, put up or shut up.
See also: Netscape.
Wow... looks like the moderation system on slashdot is being gamed just as badly as it gets gamed on digg whenever there is a Ron Paul article. Any Ron Paul article on Digg will have anybody who badmouths "Dr. Paul" voted to into negative infinity. Who knew botnets could get mod points here?
... there... that ought to please those bots, er slashdot moderators
VOTE FOR RON PAUL 2008!!!!!*
* do not vote for ron paul in 2008.
What about using a botnet? Is that okay if it is for political use?