I was doing stuff like this before XMLHttpRequest, and I'm sure many others were too.
BY IMAGE SWAPPING - use javascript to dynamically construct a URL and assign that as the source for an existing 1x1 px blank gif, passing information to a cgi in the process (cgi returns same blank gif)
This is very interesting to run every second or two on a large text field; later you can watch a "movie" of people typing, erasing, spellchecking, etc. Very interesting to see the stuff they decided to erase rather than sending:-p
Of course, the image swap method isn't much good for getting data back from the server (though there are some kludgy ways), so -
Use frames (see? they're good for something!) - where one frame is hidden (zero height or width) and is full of scripts that monitor the main page and talk to the server.
For output to the user, I used textareas or (shudder) Netscape 4's layers, and had much of the same functionality that "AJAX" "invented".
1) Beer is _______
a. a fermented beverage
b. a leading cause of motor vehicle accidents
c. nature's most perfect food
2) Brad Pitt is _______
a. to die for
b. a blend of small nails and fruit seeds
c. not all that
3) When lost in an unfamiliar city, you should:
a. ask a local for directions
b. consult a map
c. insist that this is a short cut
4) Perfect breasts are ____
a. abundant with milk for feeding babies
b. bilaterally symmetrical
c. really friggin' HUGE
5) A visit to the doctor is necessary when:
a. you feel ill
b. he's really cute
c. to be resisted at all costs
6) Lesbians are:
a. women who are attracted primarily to other women
b. at low risk for STDs
c. all shapely blonds who want me to watch them get it on
7) PMS stands for:
a. Pre Menstrual Syndrome
b. Post Menstrual Syndrome
c. three or four days that you have to be at the office by 8am and stay until 11pm
EXTRA CREDIT: Write your name in the snow using only your body fluids.
("c" is the correct answer to all numbered questions.)
...who is about to rush out and buy this game that's supposed to be so intense as to trigger PTSD?
And here's a bizarre comparison; I was home in Brooklyn on 9-11, with a view of the towers out my bedroom window. I was into flight sim at the time and I flew jumbo jets around Manhattan just to see the towers still standing. Somehow, it made me feel a little better at a time when I (like most NYers) was more or less bonkers with PTSD.
Certainly there are abuses involving cookies, but the level of paranoid BS out there is deafening.
The average non-techie now believes that cookies are active programs which will peer into the deepest recesses of his life and possibly erase all his MP3s. The same people religiously wiping every cookie (and complaining about the NYTimes login hassle) are typically infected with a dozen types of REAL spyware and a virus or two.
In an age where an American citizen can't get on the friggin' Greyhound bus without providing zee papers and the government has lifted all our traditional privacy protections, worrying about having your banner-clicking habits tracked is more than a little silly.
Most American adults' bicycles are shiny, new, and used to hang laundry for drying. Occasionally they are used as a makeshift ladder to reach that last 3-liter Pepsi on the garage shelf.
People in Scandanavian countries, on the other hand, actually use their bicycles, exposing them to dangers such as theft and weather.
I'm sure Stockholm has its crime, but I wandered the streets all night there and never felt the slightest bit unsafe. That doesn't happen here in NYC, where I've lost 4 properly locked bikes. Compare statistics in OUR main city against Stockholm's, and be grateful you're there.
Except during the Winter or when you're on line for liquor:-p
1. used properly, vector graphics enable you to create images in a few kb that would take mb of gifs
2. yes, the entire web should be black times new roman on #cccccc backgrounds
3. umm, more like every year or so, unlike the browsers which are more like every week anyway
so flash gets misused...you sound like one of those ban-the-guns people who never considered that murderous psychos could give a shit about the law anyway
Hmm...my Linux and Win2k boxes do fine with Flash, as does the Mac I keep for testing...what is this platform that doesn't support flash? Vic-20? TRS-80?
That said, I do agree that Flash is badly abused and I have constant battles with 'creative' dept. to keep this from happening, but it's great for some things. NOT navigation, NOT presenting text...but I have a quiz thingie for a client where their questions/answer pairs are kept in text files and can be pulled in by HTML or Flash pages and the Flash version is way cooler and a million times easier to maintain.
I'm responsible and sniff for flash and serve an alternative page to people that can't view it, it's not Flash's fault if not everyone is equally professional.
Yeah, that JavaScript and Flash is terrible stuff! And anyone who isn't using Lynx is a traitor to the Great Self-Righteous Techno-Luddite cause!
What the f is up with people who hate flash and JS so much? Yeah, it gets overused and misused, but so does HTML, XML, gifs, C, English...
I have found that most of the people who whine so much about flash and JavaScript are back-end guys who are skilled at their thing but have no clue how to make a web page, or dilletantes who thought they could just cruise through life knowing nothing but HTML
Re:nyc sucks now that times square is cleaned up
on
H2K2 Conference
·
· Score: 1
Sounds like Joe Dirt here lost all his money in the big city and is now resentful and scared of NYC...well Anonymous Coward, our plan succeeded! Your dumb inbred ass won't be coming back here because you just can't hack it in the big city. Stick to yer little lego towns when you feel the need to get out of the trailer park!
Uhh, if you tourists would go somewhere other than Times 'Disney' Square, you'd know that this is the world's leading party town.
On second thought, stay in the little corrals we've built to suck your money out of you, you're mostly too slow and goggle-eyed to walk down a sidewalk without crashing into everyone anyway.
As the world center of financial, artistic, and intellectual activity, we really aren't that dependent on the ameoba-like globs of mullet-bearing, j-crew wearing, Walmart shopping, inbred trogdolytes that come from places like Nevada, anyway.
I wasn't responding solely to your comments, there's a ton of silly IE bashing in this thread is all.
That said, pages of the complexity corporate clients (unwisely) demand ALWAYS require plenty of tweaks and workarounds to look the same in all the major browsers. I'd be perfectly happy if 99% of the web was times roman text flowed around the occasional gif, but they want the bandwidth-hogging complicated crap their competition has so I do it.
The "part I don't understand" is how you can write strictly to the standards when NO BROWSER conforms perfectly. To say nothing of the result of resizing a prefectly valid CSS-using doc in NS 4.0 and waiting for the reload.
You're right if he's referring only to Moz/NS6, but you, me, and about twenty other people actually use it.
Most Netscape users are using the excremental v 4.x, and there are *scores* of well documented problems in this browser with positioning, borders, css, javascript, etc. When you have to deal with a creative dep't that doesn't understand the web and wants designs to be pixel-for-pixel perfect on all platforms, this is a big issue.
- their browser is generating well over 90% of hits on my clients' servers
- their browser _actually works_, unlike piece of shit NS4...as for NS6, it rocks - why? BECAUSE IT CAN RUN FORMERLY IE-ONLY CODE and doesn't crash as often as fuckwad NS 4.x
- pages don't forget their css and take all day to re-render (incorrectly) when you resize in IE and NS6...DHTML works much better allowing me to avoid Flash...
None of this means I ignore NS4; it means I have to write *double* the javascript and sometimes double the HTML to support a dead piece of shit, but I do it. Though I'm making fortune 500 sites on increasingly tight budgets, nearly everything I make is usable in Lynx.
So get off the IE-hating trip, it's irrational. And ferchrissake, what's worse, MS or AOHell?!?! Remember folks, Nutscrape is AMERICA ONLINE now. Are you AOL users?
Whoop-dee-doo. I bought a biofeedback machine at radio shack twenty years ago for about ten bucks. If I hooked it up to a video game I would've been considered an "inventor"?
Hmm, yes...but it doesn't even say THAT...it says that computer users have about the same rate of RSIs. It's more about HOW you type; I've got a huge 500+ pg site I'm building now with the usual stress from late assets and last minute architecture changes, and I know I pound the keyboard harder and squeeze the mouse too much when this happens. *That's* when the wrists start to really hurt.
I just hope they're right and it's mundane fatigue...
We humans already breed like fucking rats -- as long as there are huge rotting piles of dead, unwanted babies lying around, infertility ought to be considered a blessing.
There is no environmental problem that couldn't be solved by reducing our population to reasonable levels.
With the crossover between the Neo-Pagan community and the geek community, I think it's impossible to separate...that said, I've been in polyamorous/open relationships for the past decade, though I'm tired of it and now dating just *one* amazing woman - so I don't know whether I'm a yes or no....
Slashdot Mirror
I was doing stuff like this before XMLHttpRequest, and I'm sure many others were too.
:-p
BY IMAGE SWAPPING - use javascript to dynamically construct a URL and assign that as the source for an existing 1x1 px blank gif, passing information to a cgi in the process (cgi returns same blank gif)
document.images['spy'].src = "http://site.com/trade_data_for_gif.cgi?name=" + document.forms['daform'].elements['name'].value;
This is very interesting to run every second or two on a large text field; later you can watch a "movie" of people typing, erasing, spellchecking, etc. Very interesting to see the stuff they decided to erase rather than sending
Of course, the image swap method isn't much good for getting data back from the server (though there are some kludgy ways), so -
Use frames (see? they're good for something!) - where one frame is hidden (zero height or width) and is full of scripts that monitor the main page and talk to the server.
For output to the user, I used textareas or (shudder) Netscape 4's layers, and had much of the same functionality that "AJAX" "invented".
Sample questions and answers
1) Beer is _______
a. a fermented beverage
b. a leading cause of motor vehicle accidents
c. nature's most perfect food
2) Brad Pitt is _______
a. to die for
b. a blend of small nails and fruit seeds
c. not all that
3) When lost in an unfamiliar city, you should:
a. ask a local for directions
b. consult a map
c. insist that this is a short cut
4) Perfect breasts are ____
a. abundant with milk for feeding babies
b. bilaterally symmetrical
c. really friggin' HUGE
5) A visit to the doctor is necessary when:
a. you feel ill
b. he's really cute
c. to be resisted at all costs
6) Lesbians are:
a. women who are attracted primarily to other women
b. at low risk for STDs
c. all shapely blonds who want me to watch them get it on
7) PMS stands for:
a. Pre Menstrual Syndrome
b. Post Menstrual Syndrome
c. three or four days that you have to be at the office by 8am and stay until 11pm
EXTRA CREDIT: Write your name in the snow using only your body fluids.
("c" is the correct answer to all numbered questions.)
...who is about to rush out and buy this game that's supposed to be so intense as to trigger PTSD?
And here's a bizarre comparison; I was home in Brooklyn on 9-11, with a view of the towers out my bedroom window. I was into flight sim at the time and I flew jumbo jets around Manhattan just to see the towers still standing. Somehow, it made me feel a little better at a time when I (like most NYers) was more or less bonkers with PTSD.
Certainly there are abuses involving cookies, but the level of paranoid BS out there is deafening.
The average non-techie now believes that cookies are active programs which will peer into the deepest recesses of his life and possibly erase all his MP3s. The same people religiously wiping every cookie (and complaining about the NYTimes login hassle) are typically infected with a dozen types of REAL spyware and a virus or two.
In an age where an American citizen can't get on the friggin' Greyhound bus without providing zee papers and the government has lifted all our traditional privacy protections, worrying about having your banner-clicking habits tracked is more than a little silly.
No kidding, so am I =)
Manhattan at 2AM
:-|
Yep, reputation definitely undeserved, but how about a nice hike down Ave. D or through East NY at that hour?
I've had 4 bicycles stolen in NYC, all properly locked and left for a short time in broad daylight
Most American adults' bicycles are shiny, new, and used to hang laundry for drying. Occasionally they are used as a makeshift ladder to reach that last 3-liter Pepsi on the garage shelf.
:-p
People in Scandanavian countries, on the other hand, actually use their bicycles, exposing them to dangers such as theft and weather.
I'm sure Stockholm has its crime, but I wandered the streets all night there and never felt the slightest bit unsafe. That doesn't happen here in NYC, where I've lost 4 properly locked bikes. Compare statistics in OUR main city against Stockholm's, and be grateful you're there.
Except during the Winter or when you're on line for liquor
>> has backtracked on all the article's major claims.
Umm, bullshit. source?
1. used properly, vector graphics enable you to create images in a few kb that would take mb of gifs
2. yes, the entire web should be black times new roman on #cccccc backgrounds
3. umm, more like every year or so, unlike the browsers which are more like every week anyway
so flash gets misused...you sound like one of those ban-the-guns people who never considered that murderous psychos could give a shit about the law anyway
Hmm...my Linux and Win2k boxes do fine with Flash, as does the Mac I keep for testing...what is this platform that doesn't support flash? Vic-20? TRS-80?
That said, I do agree that Flash is badly abused and I have constant battles with 'creative' dept. to keep this from happening, but it's great for some things. NOT navigation, NOT presenting text...but I have a quiz thingie for a client where their questions/answer pairs are kept in text files and can be pulled in by HTML or Flash pages and the Flash version is way cooler and a million times easier to maintain.
I'm responsible and sniff for flash and serve an alternative page to people that can't view it, it's not Flash's fault if not everyone is equally professional.
Yeah, that JavaScript and Flash is terrible stuff! And anyone who isn't using Lynx is a traitor to the Great Self-Righteous Techno-Luddite cause!
What the f is up with people who hate flash and JS so much? Yeah, it gets overused and misused, but so does HTML, XML, gifs, C, English...
I have found that most of the people who whine so much about flash and JavaScript are back-end guys who are skilled at their thing but have no clue how to make a web page, or dilletantes who thought they could just cruise through life knowing nothing but HTML
Sounds like Joe Dirt here lost all his money in the big city and is now resentful and scared of NYC...well Anonymous Coward, our plan succeeded! Your dumb inbred ass won't be coming back here because you just can't hack it in the big city. Stick to yer little lego towns when you feel the need to get out of the trailer park!
Uhh, if you tourists would go somewhere other than Times 'Disney' Square, you'd know that this is the world's leading party town.
On second thought, stay in the little corrals we've built to suck your money out of you, you're mostly too slow and goggle-eyed to walk down a sidewalk without crashing into everyone anyway.
As the world center of financial, artistic, and intellectual activity, we really aren't that dependent on the ameoba-like globs of mullet-bearing, j-crew wearing, Walmart shopping, inbred trogdolytes that come from places like Nevada, anyway.
Friggin radicals! I mean, what next? Are we going to start enforcing the rest of the constitution? Not under the Bu$h junta!
Do a google search for "Streambox VCR 1.0 Beta 3.1"
Find the copy with the crack that keeps it from calling home and slurp up all the realmedia you want.
(There are many streambox progs out there but only this version dependably grabs realmedia for me)
I wasn't responding solely to your comments, there's a ton of silly IE bashing in this thread is all.
That said, pages of the complexity corporate clients (unwisely) demand ALWAYS require plenty of tweaks and workarounds to look the same in all the major browsers. I'd be perfectly happy if 99% of the web was times roman text flowed around the occasional gif, but they want the bandwidth-hogging complicated crap their competition has so I do it.
The "part I don't understand" is how you can write strictly to the standards when NO BROWSER conforms perfectly. To say nothing of the result of resizing a prefectly valid CSS-using doc in NS 4.0 and waiting for the reload.
You're right if he's referring only to Moz/NS6, but you, me, and about twenty other people actually use it.
Most Netscape users are using the excremental v 4.x, and there are *scores* of well documented problems in this browser with positioning, borders, css, javascript, etc. When you have to deal with a creative dep't that doesn't understand the web and wants designs to be pixel-for-pixel perfect on all platforms, this is a big issue.
I have no love of M$, but:
- their browser is generating well over 90% of hits on my clients' servers
- their browser _actually works_, unlike piece of shit NS4...as for NS6, it rocks - why? BECAUSE IT CAN RUN FORMERLY IE-ONLY CODE and doesn't crash as often as fuckwad NS 4.x
- pages don't forget their css and take all day to re-render (incorrectly) when you resize in IE and NS6...DHTML works much better allowing me to avoid Flash...
None of this means I ignore NS4; it means I have to write *double* the javascript and sometimes double the HTML to support a dead piece of shit, but I do it. Though I'm making fortune 500 sites on increasingly tight budgets, nearly everything I make is usable in Lynx.
So get off the IE-hating trip, it's irrational. And ferchrissake, what's worse, MS or AOHell?!?! Remember folks, Nutscrape is AMERICA ONLINE now. Are you AOL users?
Jesus fucking christ.
Whoop-dee-doo. I bought a biofeedback machine at radio shack twenty years ago for about ten bucks. If I hooked it up to a video game I would've been considered an "inventor"?
You wouldn't mind? Fine, fuck off to some shithole place like Afghanistan where people accept such gov't intrusion.
What could possibly make you doubt that they would/could do that? Are you a natural born moron or just drunk on the flag waving?
OK, so 50% of what people look at is corporate crap, does that == the end of free democratic etc internet?
Sure, if you'll accept that books are now useless because People magazine outsells the classics......
Hmm, yes...but it doesn't even say THAT...it says that computer users have about the same rate of RSIs. It's more about HOW you type; I've got a huge 500+ pg site I'm building now with the usual stress from late assets and last minute architecture changes, and I know I pound the keyboard harder and squeeze the mouse too much when this happens. *That's* when the wrists start to really hurt. I just hope they're right and it's mundane fatigue...
We humans already breed like fucking rats -- as long as there are huge rotting piles of dead, unwanted babies lying around, infertility ought to be considered a blessing.
There is no environmental problem that couldn't be solved by reducing our population to reasonable levels.
Uh, the first person who had eyes? What they're talking about isn't nearly as powerful as, say, the CRT you're probably staring into to read this.
With the crossover between the Neo-Pagan community and the geek community, I think it's impossible to separate...that said, I've been in polyamorous/open relationships for the past decade, though I'm tired of it and now dating just *one* amazing woman - so I don't know whether I'm a yes or no....