I wonder what these guys with 100,000+ contributions to StackOverflow are doing with their life.
Some of them are doing quite well, actually. I have been a frequent reader of Alan Storm's site, as he seems to be one of the very very few who have managed to take a large chunk of poorly documented code and literally write a book on it. He's a regular contributor to Stackoverflow (and the Magento offshoot) and I can say without a doubt, his "online presence" makes him a very sought-after developer (aside from, you know, being a good developer to begin with).
I guess it would be boring if you were terrible at fishing and never had success.
I understand why people need to cheat and have all these machines to make it easier. It indeed would be boring to be a bad angler and unable to land fish.
I start to care when I find their trash littered all over the forest. I start to care when their loud boats zoom right into my casting line in the inlet. I start to care when their efficiency affect the experience for everyone else.
But all of that is besides the point. Recreational fishing is a meditative thing. You do it on the weekends, or for a couple weeks at a time, so that you can escape the daily grind and restore part of your soul. The more machines you add to that experience... you know the rest.
It would be cool to have something like this in my fishing boat where instead of a dot on the screen I could get something that tells me where the fish are and what kind too.:-)
At what point do you stop cheating and start fishing? What's so wrong with having intuition about where the fish are? There are plenty of tell-tale signs that would give you clues to where the fish are hiding.
I admit, I don't boat fish because it's absolutely way too boring. I prefer walking up the mountain river, pickup up river stones to see what bugs are underneath. Maybe boat fishing is just too different an animal that my tactics would not adapt well, but I doubt it. With enough experience, I am positive I could do just as well with a contour map of the water's floor and my own two eyes as the guy with the expensive boat with all kinds of sonic weapons.
Recreational fishing should be low-tech. Having endless gadgets to push the odds ever in your favor defeats the purpose.
But don't you also get the service to use for yourself? It seems like a superficially fair trade-off, though, it very well may not be.
What if this technology leads to the obsolescence of the standard cell-phone plan? Why pay an additional $75/mo (or whatever you pay these days, I haven't had a cell phone in years) when you can just have your own non-cellphone Android device that can piggy back on readily available WiFi to make phone calls and sends texts with VOIP? That's basically what I do now. I have a $50/mo 4g mobile hotspot and use my Android "MP3" player for Google Voice. My internet works all around the city I live in (and is stretching to the suburbs fairly well also) so I usually have a number that people can reach me at. The latency doesn't provide the cleanest of voice calls, but then again, I don't really care. If you need to get a hold of me, leave me a voice mail and I will get back to you (from a land-line at work, etc). I don't like being expected to answer a phone call 24/7.
Ah, but in the long run, it probably is a good choice. At some point, gas stations had to stop selling leaded fuel as well. Did it affect a percentage of their users? Sure. Did it affect their revenue short-term? Sure. Was it a good decision in the long run? Absolutely.
"Richer" in this context refers to things such as schema.org data that allows users to see more pertinent information in search results before they ever arrive at your site. It means having semantic markup that is easier to maintain and develop leaving more time for bug fixes and other anomalies that make a site less usable. It means being able to push properly sized images to the user, allowing them to download the 10kb image instead of the 45kb image for presumably low-bandwidth devices. It means serving them a video that will actually play on their device without having to run through all sorts of hoops.
You reference KISS, and I agree; however, your perspective is incorrect, probably because you're not a web developer. In order to KISS for users, you have to add a number of complexities to the code to handle all the different ways a page renders on all the different environments. If you want to KISS for developers, at some point, you're going to have to abandon old technology because it simply is no longer relevant.
If your site requires "modern web technologies" to work, nothing of value was lost anyway.
"Modern Web Technologies" are not about the users, they're about the developers being given tools to build what needs to be built while at the same time meeting an unrealistic deadline.
Aside from a few nice HTML5 tricks, the majority of the "standard" solves problems that only developers are aware of. Building a site with HTML5 is simply faster and more reliable, especially when you're passing code around to a bunch of developers (some of which were just hired last week).
Does a user care that the page they are viewing is divided into sections, headers, footers, asides, etc? Certainly not. I sure as shit do, however.
You can't really blame any single entity. When it comes down to it, competition and economics are what is responsible for this mess.
You can be the safe guy and built a site that works equally in all browsers. It's going to be a little bit boring of a site, there will be some headaches here and there, but overall, you're providing what you assume your users want.
Or, you can be the not-so-safe guy that says flat out "If you're in IE8, the site is not going to work properly" while at the same time providing a much richer and usable environment for the other 90%+ users.
The decision to go one way or the other ultimately comes down to economics. What is the bottom line of this decision? Currently, the year is 2013 and going forward there is one correct choice and one less-than-correct choice. If you support IE8 now, does that mean you support IE8 until 2020? 2040? Maybe you do... but I'd hate to see the costs associated with doing so.
...now the only remaining option available to websites that can't feasibly support IE directly is to tell IE users to FOAD.
I see where you're coming from. What I am curious about (as a web developer myself that completely ignores lt-IE9) is what sites are there that "can't feasibly support IE"? Sure, there's the corporate infranet stuff that only knows about users on XP with IE8. There might even be a few niche areas where there is a significant percentage of users on ltIE9 (I'm guessing quilting sites and related things where the age demographic is high). I guess there are probably some government sites that need full IE support for accessibility reasons.
Outside of that, what sites can't feasibly ditch lt-IE9? The one's that can't afford it? As a developer, that is not your problem. If your client/employer can't afford migrating to a modern site, you, as a developer, should be seeing red flags left and right.
When a client tells me they need to support IE8, most of time they are just aping this mentality because that's what someone else told them. This is the important bit...
The only legitimate reason to continue supporting lt-IE9 is as a service to your users.
If you wish to give your users this extra feature, be prepared to pay for it and don't expect it to make you any more money. "Oh, but Bob said we still have 9% of our users on IE8! We need to support it!!!" Ok, well, that extra 9% isn't going to come for free. What if the additional costs amount to more money than the additional revenue generated by that 9%? Then you are now losing money by supporting old technology.
Yes, I totally agree with you, Chrome Frame is a great shiv that is super easy to drop in (already there for HTML5BP, et al) and it gives you peace of mind that your IE8 users of the world won't be completely confused if they load your site and the layout is all whacked; however, what it has ultimately become is one of the last crutches left holding up the rest of the development world.
In my ever not-so-humble opinion, supporting lt-IE9 is akin to rubber-rooming an incompetent union employee. It's a mess that happens when nobody finally stands up to say "ENOUGH!"
Just stop supporting it. That simple. If users complain, tell them something along the lines of,"In order to continue offering our service at a competitive price, we must stop supporting old technologies from time to time." It's not that difficult and users/clients/etc will generally understand. Besides, if they are stuck on IE8, they are probably very used to seeing sites that don't work correctly. They know it's not the site's fault, is the shitty browser they are forced to use.
Honestly, losing Chrome Frame will sting a little, but at some point or another it becomes time to move on.
Perhaps part of the problem is that there are laws that impact no one but the person breaking the law.
Nice. So how about we amend TWD laws so that if you provide proof that a driver was TWDing (photo, video, etc... NOT while you are driving yourself, and not with automated equipment) then the $50 fine the person gets hammered with goes right into your pocket instead (minus some administrative overhead).
Putting texting in the same category as DUIs is equally ignorant and stupid.
As the other two posters above have pointed out, texting while driving is demonstrably as or more dangerous than driving while impaired.
With a DUI, you get possible jail time, heavy fines, loss of driving privilege, court mandated counseling, etc. If you get a ticket for texting while driving, it's a $50 ticket and you're on your way.
You can argue that DUI penalties are too extreme all you want, but you can't do so before you consider how lax the penalties are for texting while driving.
Room 217 I believe. We knocked on that door once when I was younger. The maid answered and didn't speak much English. I wasn't too scared, and in fact it kind of cheapened the whole mystique of the room.
Not only that, but ash are a tree that does this better than others. There is a reason ash are commonly used as a 'street tree', and that is because they are effective cleaners of the particulates in the air while remaining healthy themselves.
I think an interesting extension of the study would be to look at any similar effects found in the West as a result of MPB (Mountain Pine Beetle). I'm not sure how different the loss of biomass is between MPB and EAB, but I can say I've never seen ash forests tens of thousands of acres in size be completely devastated where tree mortality is clearly over 90%.
With MPB, you have a much larger (and concentrated) loss of biomass while at the same time it is occurring in less densely populated (human-wise) geographies.
Speaking of poking out eyes, I have long known that EAB (Emerald Ash Borer) has been affecting human health, and you would too if you watch much baseball.
The death of ash due to EAB has caused a significant uptick in the amount of bats made from maple instead of ash. Maple doesn't have the same kind of durability that ash does, and what you end up with are bats that are easier to break. On any given night, you can see highlights of some pitcher nearly losing his face because a large chunk of maple is flying at him. You almost never saw this when bats where made exclusively from ash, as maple is simply more brittle and not as elastic.
You may be over-estimating the will of developers who actually intend to build something secure out of the box. Sure, you've got the chunk of folks that require fine-grained security in their day-to-day, but the rest of them that take security for granted (we're not big enough yet to make things secure, we'll wait until revenue hits $xxx and then "do it right") are just going to worry about making their stuff function according to the spec.
I have left some code lying around before that I am not particularly proud of, not that anyone important would notice, as it tends to be things only another developer would recognize. It's difficult to think of other occupations that are not affected by this type of thinking either, otherwise we wouldn't have to send the Dept. of Health around to restaurants to make sure the kitchens are clean, or the pedagogists around to the elementary school to make sure learning is happening, or aviation officials to enforce maintenance standards...
Of course there needs to be accountability for code that does important things. That is clearly obvious. There are too many people interacting with code in occupations that previously wouldn't have done so. At some point it's going to be a good idea to have a nice audit trail.
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I wonder what these guys with 100,000+ contributions to StackOverflow are doing with their life.
Some of them are doing quite well, actually. I have been a frequent reader of Alan Storm's site, as he seems to be one of the very very few who have managed to take a large chunk of poorly documented code and literally write a book on it. He's a regular contributor to Stackoverflow (and the Magento offshoot) and I can say without a doubt, his "online presence" makes him a very sought-after developer (aside from, you know, being a good developer to begin with).
I guess it would be boring if you were terrible at fishing and never had success.
I understand why people need to cheat and have all these machines to make it easier. It indeed would be boring to be a bad angler and unable to land fish.
I start to care when I find their trash littered all over the forest. I start to care when their loud boats zoom right into my casting line in the inlet. I start to care when their efficiency affect the experience for everyone else.
But all of that is besides the point. Recreational fishing is a meditative thing. You do it on the weekends, or for a couple weeks at a time, so that you can escape the daily grind and restore part of your soul. The more machines you add to that experience... you know the rest.
Indeed, fair enough. I was mostly picturing my above post in a world a few years more advanced than the one we live in now.
Better WiFi (or WiMax, etc) should allow this eventually.
It would be cool to have something like this in my fishing boat where instead of a dot on the screen I could get something that tells me where the fish are and what kind too. :-)
At what point do you stop cheating and start fishing? What's so wrong with having intuition about where the fish are? There are plenty of tell-tale signs that would give you clues to where the fish are hiding.
I admit, I don't boat fish because it's absolutely way too boring. I prefer walking up the mountain river, pickup up river stones to see what bugs are underneath. Maybe boat fishing is just too different an animal that my tactics would not adapt well, but I doubt it. With enough experience, I am positive I could do just as well with a contour map of the water's floor and my own two eyes as the guy with the expensive boat with all kinds of sonic weapons.
Recreational fishing should be low-tech. Having endless gadgets to push the odds ever in your favor defeats the purpose.
But don't you also get the service to use for yourself? It seems like a superficially fair trade-off, though, it very well may not be.
What if this technology leads to the obsolescence of the standard cell-phone plan? Why pay an additional $75/mo (or whatever you pay these days, I haven't had a cell phone in years) when you can just have your own non-cellphone Android device that can piggy back on readily available WiFi to make phone calls and sends texts with VOIP? That's basically what I do now. I have a $50/mo 4g mobile hotspot and use my Android "MP3" player for Google Voice. My internet works all around the city I live in (and is stretching to the suburbs fairly well also) so I usually have a number that people can reach me at. The latency doesn't provide the cleanest of voice calls, but then again, I don't really care. If you need to get a hold of me, leave me a voice mail and I will get back to you (from a land-line at work, etc). I don't like being expected to answer a phone call 24/7.
but that doesn't mean it is a good choice.
Ah, but in the long run, it probably is a good choice. At some point, gas stations had to stop selling leaded fuel as well. Did it affect a percentage of their users? Sure. Did it affect their revenue short-term? Sure. Was it a good decision in the long run? Absolutely.
"Richer" in this context refers to things such as schema.org data that allows users to see more pertinent information in search results before they ever arrive at your site. It means having semantic markup that is easier to maintain and develop leaving more time for bug fixes and other anomalies that make a site less usable. It means being able to push properly sized images to the user, allowing them to download the 10kb image instead of the 45kb image for presumably low-bandwidth devices. It means serving them a video that will actually play on their device without having to run through all sorts of hoops.
You reference KISS, and I agree; however, your perspective is incorrect, probably because you're not a web developer. In order to KISS for users, you have to add a number of complexities to the code to handle all the different ways a page renders on all the different environments. If you want to KISS for developers, at some point, you're going to have to abandon old technology because it simply is no longer relevant.
If you can account for the sonic properties snow, you could probably adapt this into an avalanche beacon.
...Oh, and have a look at the markup for Craigslist. Yup. That's HTML5 you're looking at (though, the tables are a bit ick).
If your site requires "modern web technologies" to work, nothing of value was lost anyway.
"Modern Web Technologies" are not about the users, they're about the developers being given tools to build what needs to be built while at the same time meeting an unrealistic deadline.
Aside from a few nice HTML5 tricks, the majority of the "standard" solves problems that only developers are aware of. Building a site with HTML5 is simply faster and more reliable, especially when you're passing code around to a bunch of developers (some of which were just hired last week).
Does a user care that the page they are viewing is divided into sections, headers, footers, asides, etc? Certainly not. I sure as shit do, however.
... I did not bother to take the time to implement support for using and recommending Chrome Frame, even though I seriously considered it.
All three lines of conditional HTML?
You can't really blame any single entity. When it comes down to it, competition and economics are what is responsible for this mess.
You can be the safe guy and built a site that works equally in all browsers. It's going to be a little bit boring of a site, there will be some headaches here and there, but overall, you're providing what you assume your users want.
Or, you can be the not-so-safe guy that says flat out "If you're in IE8, the site is not going to work properly" while at the same time providing a much richer and usable environment for the other 90%+ users.
The decision to go one way or the other ultimately comes down to economics. What is the bottom line of this decision? Currently, the year is 2013 and going forward there is one correct choice and one less-than-correct choice. If you support IE8 now, does that mean you support IE8 until 2020? 2040? Maybe you do... but I'd hate to see the costs associated with doing so.
...now the only remaining option available to websites that can't feasibly support IE directly is to tell IE users to FOAD.
I see where you're coming from. What I am curious about (as a web developer myself that completely ignores lt-IE9) is what sites are there that "can't feasibly support IE"? Sure, there's the corporate infranet stuff that only knows about users on XP with IE8. There might even be a few niche areas where there is a significant percentage of users on ltIE9 (I'm guessing quilting sites and related things where the age demographic is high). I guess there are probably some government sites that need full IE support for accessibility reasons.
Outside of that, what sites can't feasibly ditch lt-IE9? The one's that can't afford it? As a developer, that is not your problem. If your client/employer can't afford migrating to a modern site, you, as a developer, should be seeing red flags left and right.
When a client tells me they need to support IE8, most of time they are just aping this mentality because that's what someone else told them. This is the important bit...
The only legitimate reason to continue supporting lt-IE9 is as a service to your users.
If you wish to give your users this extra feature, be prepared to pay for it and don't expect it to make you any more money. "Oh, but Bob said we still have 9% of our users on IE8! We need to support it!!!" Ok, well, that extra 9% isn't going to come for free. What if the additional costs amount to more money than the additional revenue generated by that 9%? Then you are now losing money by supporting old technology.
Yes, I totally agree with you, Chrome Frame is a great shiv that is super easy to drop in (already there for HTML5BP, et al) and it gives you peace of mind that your IE8 users of the world won't be completely confused if they load your site and the layout is all whacked; however, what it has ultimately become is one of the last crutches left holding up the rest of the development world.
In my ever not-so-humble opinion, supporting lt-IE9 is akin to rubber-rooming an incompetent union employee. It's a mess that happens when nobody finally stands up to say "ENOUGH!"
Just stop supporting it. That simple. If users complain, tell them something along the lines of,"In order to continue offering our service at a competitive price, we must stop supporting old technologies from time to time." It's not that difficult and users/clients/etc will generally understand. Besides, if they are stuck on IE8, they are probably very used to seeing sites that don't work correctly. They know it's not the site's fault, is the shitty browser they are forced to use.
Honestly, losing Chrome Frame will sting a little, but at some point or another it becomes time to move on.
It might has some influence, but definitely not a "large part", otherwise Denver/Colorado Springs would also be way up there.
Perhaps part of the problem is that there are laws that impact no one but the person breaking the law.
Nice. So how about we amend TWD laws so that if you provide proof that a driver was TWDing (photo, video, etc... NOT while you are driving yourself, and not with automated equipment) then the $50 fine the person gets hammered with goes right into your pocket instead (minus some administrative overhead).
Putting texting in the same category as DUIs is equally ignorant and stupid.
As the other two posters above have pointed out, texting while driving is demonstrably as or more dangerous than driving while impaired.
With a DUI, you get possible jail time, heavy fines, loss of driving privilege, court mandated counseling, etc. If you get a ticket for texting while driving, it's a $50 ticket and you're on your way.
You can argue that DUI penalties are too extreme all you want, but you can't do so before you consider how lax the penalties are for texting while driving.
Room 217 I believe. We knocked on that door once when I was younger. The maid answered and didn't speak much English. I wasn't too scared, and in fact it kind of cheapened the whole mystique of the room.
It also helps that the hotel was the basis for a very popular Stephen King book and movie
The exterior images of which were shot on Mt Hood in Oregon. The actual Stanley hotel does not resemble anything in the movie much at all.
or that it sits in the middle of a beautiful national park.
...a park where tens of millions of trees have died in the last several years due to insects.
Not only that, but ash are a tree that does this better than others. There is a reason ash are commonly used as a 'street tree', and that is because they are effective cleaners of the particulates in the air while remaining healthy themselves.
I think an interesting extension of the study would be to look at any similar effects found in the West as a result of MPB (Mountain Pine Beetle). I'm not sure how different the loss of biomass is between MPB and EAB, but I can say I've never seen ash forests tens of thousands of acres in size be completely devastated where tree mortality is clearly over 90%.
With MPB, you have a much larger (and concentrated) loss of biomass while at the same time it is occurring in less densely populated (human-wise) geographies.
Speaking of poking out eyes, I have long known that EAB (Emerald Ash Borer) has been affecting human health, and you would too if you watch much baseball.
The death of ash due to EAB has caused a significant uptick in the amount of bats made from maple instead of ash. Maple doesn't have the same kind of durability that ash does, and what you end up with are bats that are easier to break. On any given night, you can see highlights of some pitcher nearly losing his face because a large chunk of maple is flying at him. You almost never saw this when bats where made exclusively from ash, as maple is simply more brittle and not as elastic.
Save a pitcher, plant an ash!
There's a bunch of Asian-Americans that would probably disagree.
Yes, but in his case, it's been an unfortunate effect.
Because of him third-party candidates are not going to be invited to debates because they don't meet some artificial and ever-changing requirement.
30 hours worth of work to be completed in 8 hours. Something is going to be less than ideal.
You may be over-estimating the will of developers who actually intend to build something secure out of the box. Sure, you've got the chunk of folks that require fine-grained security in their day-to-day, but the rest of them that take security for granted (we're not big enough yet to make things secure, we'll wait until revenue hits $xxx and then "do it right") are just going to worry about making their stuff function according to the spec.
I have left some code lying around before that I am not particularly proud of, not that anyone important would notice, as it tends to be things only another developer would recognize. It's difficult to think of other occupations that are not affected by this type of thinking either, otherwise we wouldn't have to send the Dept. of Health around to restaurants to make sure the kitchens are clean, or the pedagogists around to the elementary school to make sure learning is happening, or aviation officials to enforce maintenance standards...
Of course there needs to be accountability for code that does important things. That is clearly obvious. There are too many people interacting with code in occupations that previously wouldn't have done so. At some point it's going to be a good idea to have a nice audit trail.