Fine, but there's a BIG difference between making sure stuff works in most browsers, and producing your HTML The Microsoft Way (tm)
The fact is that all the modern browsers' render 95% of the standards they support identically. It's just you only hear about the other 5% because it causes so many problems.
So design with standards as far as you can, using basic functionality that's well supported, and THEN test in other browsers and fix it up where appropriate.
Just because browsers are different that does not mean you have to either pick 'standards' and not support IE, or pick 'The Microsoft Way' and not support anything else, and those that suggest so are generally trying to make excuses for the fact they can't be bothered to learn properly.
You are aware that a 'dynamic' website is WAY more than just combining some text files together and spitting them at the client?
If that's all you're doing, may I suggest pre-creating all the required combinations on the server.. as you can't do anything really interesting (like connect to a database directly) from the client anyway.
See my other post for more reasons why that's a dumb thing to do..
I've used the techniques myself. Before they were made 'famous' by Gmail (and Suggest, etc..), even. You can do some very cool stuff with it, However buildinga website navigation is not one of the things you should use it for, as a simple example, you'll break the back button if you use it for your nav..
Although there is certainly an element of But-we've-been-doing-that-for-years elitism, I am utterly sick of people trying to apply exciting new functionality where it isn't required, or even sensible. (Like those people that insist on using XHTML now for no good reason [no, "because it's got an 'X' in it and Xs are cool" is not a good reason], even though they're serving it incorrectly to support IE and it's not being parsed as XHTML at all, rather as HTML-with-errors)
XMLHTTP has been available for a long time, and before that people were using tricks with iframes and images/cookies to achieve the same results, but for a long long time Javascript was frowned upon (mainly due to the stupidity of so-called professional developers, and the asummption that everyone uses IE). The really big news about "ajax" and other such client side techniques, is javascript is no longer considered a Bad Thing.
And for the record. IE7 won't change much. (even if it breaks Google's stuff, well, Google will fix it, you can bet on that) The real thing you have to worry about with IE7 is exactly what new stuff they put into it. Whatever makes it into the final version we're going to be stuck with for a LONG time (It's going to be, ooh, at least a couple of years before you can even consider stopping fully supporting IE6) so if the completely fail to put in the CSS enhancements the world is crying out for (for instance), we'll have to live with it for a good few years yet.
Nothing makes me angrier than some idiot jumping on the nearest bandwagon and suddenly deciding that their newest favorite toy is applicable to EEEEVERYTHING, Ignoring the fact that the web is supposed to be entire documents, not little tiny chunks of session-dependant XML, the bar to entry for displaying an 'Ajax' based page is much higher than that of a normal web page. And lightweight browsers are coming waaay back into fashion (who has a browser on their cellphone? does it handle javascript? how about non-standard extensions, such as xmlhttp?).
It's a stupidly named buzzword, based on a function Microsoft implemented first (which is also stupidly named)
AJAX, supposedly, stands for "Asyncrous Javascript And Xml". Well,
a) It doesn't have to be asyncrous. There's a flag on the xmlhttp function to tell it whether to run syncrously or asyncrously. In many situations it's often better to run it syncrously, if the user has to wait for whatever-it-is-you're-doing, rather than just silently sending a request and suddenly popping up with a result unannounced.
b) It doesn't have to be Javascript. You can implement it clientside in whatever scripting language your target browser supports. Not that that's a good idea. (and don't get me started on the name 'Javascript')
c) It doesn't have to be XML. In fact XML is quite a heavyweight format for a lot of things. Yes you can compress it as part of the http connection, yes it's a very flexible format, but if you're dumping, say, coordinate data, xml is 1) very bulky and 2) harder to parse than something a bit simpler
So the only part of that acronym that isn't bullshit, is the word "And".
Idiots.
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 1
No, dude, that's what it's like by default
My thinking is that putting the menu inside the tab it a quirk of a lazy implementation.. The IE API has functions for back/forward/address/stop/refresh/etc, so those could be easily removed from the embedded IE control and placed inside a container window.. but the menu itself, i imagine they'd have problems implementing that..
HAM was not the 'default'. You could have up to 32 colours from a palatte of 4096 in up to 640x400 (res's were often a bit higher as it had good overscan control). You could also have 64 colours in an interesting palette mode known as EHB, or Extra Half-Bright, where the 2nd 32 colours were copies of the first 32 but with half the brightness.. If you picked your palette sensibly, you could use it quite efficiently. (or just turn it on to make easy transparent drop shadows:))
Virtually noone used HAM, no games (maybe for the odd splash screen), it was very slow, no good for interfaces (you couldn't put a white pixel directly next to a black pixel without a few pixels of smearing in between) It worked by recording each pixel as a value relative to the adjacent pixel, meaning that providing you didn't need abrupt colour changes, it could encode way more colours with less data, it's only when you want to say put black and white together it all broke
AGA did indeed up the palettes to something akin to modern equivalents. 256 colours from a 16bit palette, HAM mode in AGA was available allowing you to use the full 16bit, but with aforementioned smearing.
Amigas also had some really interesting graphics hardware. One of the most memorable effects was using the 'blitter' chip to render horizontal lines ('raster' bars) in place of a single colour, so you could, for instance, replace the screen's black palette colour with a nice rainbow.
It also had an interesting notion that has sadly all but disppeared in modern operating systems, that of 'screens'. The OS provided a 'screen', if you wanted to load something up fullscreen (say an image viewer), it would create a new screen on top of the current one, if you pushed your mouse to the top you could then drag this screen down to reveal the one underneath (even if they were different resolutions!), and they had cycle buttons on the top right to switch between them. That was a great idea, like the multiple desktops feature you get in some OSs (or OS extensions if you're using windows), but implemented at a much lower level and with hardware support..
Great machines, quirky and interesting, elegantly designed, with a touch of humour. They taught me a huge amount about how computers work, and got me started in the world of programming. And I will miss them.
Oh yeah that's a great idea, why bother moving forward when we can stay where we are and fucking stagnate? all because you can't be bothered to remove the horrible ugly IEx.x-only code in your website and replace it with something more sensible.
It going to take about 4 years* from the release of a new version before we can even begin to think about dropping support for IE6, and probably one or two years before we can relegate IE6 to the status of 'second class' browser, and design for IE7/Moz/etc and just make sure content is accessible in IE6 - as many do now with Netscape4-, IE4-, etc.
So don't you think it's a good plan to get it done as soon as possible?
* so I recall reading, may or may not be entirely accurate. It's probably way longer.
For the record, UA sniffing is a FUCKING TERRIBLE way to make webpages work in multiple browsers. Have a look at the UA string of an average browser today:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
What browser is it? Mozilla 4? Noooo, it's our old friend IE6.
Browser UA strings are fucked up, because of badly written UA string sniffing routines that browser vendors don't want to fall foul of.
Lets see some more:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
What do you think that is? KHTML means it must be Konq, right? Safari? is KHTML based on Mozilla? 'Like Gecko'..?
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) Opera 7.54 [en]
This is not the way I want things to work, ideally people should be responsible for their own actions, they should get paid a high enough wage that they don't have to worry about being poor, and have enough control over how they do their job so they actually begin to care about it.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, this is not the case. High staff turnover, ridiculously complicated workplace rules and low level employees generally having no control over how they do their job are the norm..
If you're just hiring meat to perform a particular task, unless they did it maliciously, how the hell can it be the employee's fault?
I'm sure the publisher blames the bookshop, and does whatever they do to punish them (IE not let them have copies of the next Potter book, or whatever), the bookshop will blame the branch manager, the branch manager will blame some worthless middle manager, and the middle manager will sack a few low level employees at random to make it look like he's done something about it. When the truth of the matter is it was probably just the middle manager's fault for not informing the employee of the situation properly.
The problem here is the employee doesn't care about the latest Potter book, and isn't paid enouigh to do so, they don't even hire people to care, they just hire people to be cheap.
It IS ALWAYS management's fault, that's what they're for, to be responsible for fuckups. That's why they get paid more and why they get to sit around on their fat lazy arse all day long..
They get given some work to do, delegate the work to a lower level employee, supervise them as much as required. If they lower-level employee fucks it up then it's the managers fault for not supervising enough/giving it to the wrong person/not supplying training/employing an idiot/etc/etc/etc
Grrrr.. Buzzwords piss me right off.
"Drill down" and "Ramp up" are both examples of phrases that are used merely as placeholders for things the speaker hasn't actually got around to thinking about, but still wants to give the impression they're in charge and know what they're doing.
"Can we make this a link so they can drill down?".. Drill down to what?! you haven't thought of that, have you? you just expect me to do all your fucking work for you, don't you? Use your god damn brain, man.
"Guys we need to ramp up production" translates almost exactly to "SCHNELL!"..and they both make my blood boil. Don't even start me on "AJAX", *shudder*.
Use your brain and think you workshy money-grabbing twunts.
halo 2's single player mode was just a multiplayer game with a vague storyline. They put in level after level that consisted of nothing more than running down identical corridors shooting at various things. I'm sure the counterstrike players loved it, and I'm sure it makes a fine multiplayer game. But it's a shit single player game.
HL2, on the other hand, I absolutely loved. some of the outside scenes are amazingly realistic and fun to play. Riding the airboat down the canal system and finding random deserted buildings with huge landscapes was great.
You SHOULD have the latest drivers anyway, if they won't install or they break your system then it's either your fault, or the card manufacturer's fault. It most certainly is not the game's fault.
It worked perfectly for me, took a little while to install, but then it's a lot of data to copy (make sure your dvdrom is set up properly and you have the relevant drivers installed and *up to date* for the interface if it's that slow)
Don't be stupid, It was pretty recently that the realisation that many people connect their windows pcs directly to the internet came as a complete shock to MS. The firewall didn't even appear until the latest version, they barely even recognised the existance of the internet before win2k (save for beating netscape into submission by forcing their browser on everyone..)
I think you're getting confusing with record players.. Go burn a half-full CD then look at the disc's surface, it's quite clearly burnt starting from the inside, working it's way out
I agree, a lot of films recently do suck incredibly hard. Even the new matrix film was a pile of poop, and the LOTR films are slowly getting worse. There *still* hasn't been an action film to beat Die Hard, and i'm not even going to think about the new Star wars films too much, or i'll start crying.
They're trading off their name, and the fact that ICANN tasked them with managing the.com/.net tld's. Hopefully this will have produced enough bad press to make people think twice.. Unfortunately, as we all know, the chances of Big Business and the suits in the boardroom actually paying attention to the fact that every sysadmin on the planet was pissed off with them is pretty minimal. Unless of course we start presenting our point of view in a nice glossy brochure in a smarmy sales meeting...
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, but there's a BIG difference between making sure stuff works in most browsers, and producing your HTML The Microsoft Way (tm) The fact is that all the modern browsers' render 95% of the standards they support identically. It's just you only hear about the other 5% because it causes so many problems. So design with standards as far as you can, using basic functionality that's well supported, and THEN test in other browsers and fix it up where appropriate. Just because browsers are different that does not mean you have to either pick 'standards' and not support IE, or pick 'The Microsoft Way' and not support anything else, and those that suggest so are generally trying to make excuses for the fact they can't be bothered to learn properly.
Yeah that happens here too.. on WinXP. Absolutely no idea what's causing it tho.
You are aware that a 'dynamic' website is WAY more than just combining some text files together and spitting them at the client? If that's all you're doing, may I suggest pre-creating all the required combinations on the server.. as you can't do anything really interesting (like connect to a database directly) from the client anyway. See my other post for more reasons why that's a dumb thing to do..
I've used the techniques myself. Before they were made 'famous' by Gmail (and Suggest, etc..), even. You can do some very cool stuff with it, However buildinga website navigation is not one of the things you should use it for, as a simple example, you'll break the back button if you use it for your nav..
Although there is certainly an element of But-we've-been-doing-that-for-years elitism, I am utterly sick of people trying to apply exciting new functionality where it isn't required, or even sensible. (Like those people that insist on using XHTML now for no good reason [no, "because it's got an 'X' in it and Xs are cool" is not a good reason], even though they're serving it incorrectly to support IE and it's not being parsed as XHTML at all, rather as HTML-with-errors)
XMLHTTP has been available for a long time, and before that people were using tricks with iframes and images/cookies to achieve the same results, but for a long long time Javascript was frowned upon (mainly due to the stupidity of so-called professional developers, and the asummption that everyone uses IE). The really big news about "ajax" and other such client side techniques, is javascript is no longer considered a Bad Thing.
And for the record. IE7 won't change much. (even if it breaks Google's stuff, well, Google will fix it, you can bet on that) The real thing you have to worry about with IE7 is exactly what new stuff they put into it. Whatever makes it into the final version we're going to be stuck with for a LONG time (It's going to be, ooh, at least a couple of years before you can even consider stopping fully supporting IE6) so if the completely fail to put in the CSS enhancements the world is crying out for (for instance), we'll have to live with it for a good few years yet.
Fucking "Ajax". IT'S A CLEANING PRODUCT!
Nothing makes me angrier than some idiot jumping on the nearest bandwagon and suddenly deciding that their newest favorite toy is applicable to EEEEVERYTHING, Ignoring the fact that the web is supposed to be entire documents, not little tiny chunks of session-dependant XML, the bar to entry for displaying an 'Ajax' based page is much higher than that of a normal web page. And lightweight browsers are coming waaay back into fashion (who has a browser on their cellphone? does it handle javascript? how about non-standard extensions, such as xmlhttp?).
It's a stupidly named buzzword, based on a function Microsoft implemented first (which is also stupidly named)
AJAX, supposedly, stands for "Asyncrous Javascript And Xml". Well,
a) It doesn't have to be asyncrous. There's a flag on the xmlhttp function to tell it whether to run syncrously or asyncrously. In many situations it's often better to run it syncrously, if the user has to wait for whatever-it-is-you're-doing, rather than just silently sending a request and suddenly popping up with a result unannounced.
b) It doesn't have to be Javascript. You can implement it clientside in whatever scripting language your target browser supports. Not that that's a good idea. (and don't get me started on the name 'Javascript')
c) It doesn't have to be XML. In fact XML is quite a heavyweight format for a lot of things. Yes you can compress it as part of the http connection, yes it's a very flexible format, but if you're dumping, say, coordinate data, xml is 1) very bulky and 2) harder to parse than something a bit simpler
So the only part of that acronym that isn't bullshit, is the word "And".
Idiots.
No, dude, that's what it's like by default
My thinking is that putting the menu inside the tab it a quirk of a lazy implementation.. The IE API has functions for back/forward/address/stop/refresh/etc, so those could be easily removed from the embedded IE control and placed inside a container window.. but the menu itself, i imagine they'd have problems implementing that..
HAM was not the 'default'. You could have up to 32 colours from a palatte of 4096 in up to 640x400 (res's were often a bit higher as it had good overscan control). You could also have 64 colours in an interesting palette mode known as EHB, or Extra Half-Bright, where the 2nd 32 colours were copies of the first 32 but with half the brightness.. If you picked your palette sensibly, you could use it quite efficiently. (or just turn it on to make easy transparent drop shadows :))
Virtually noone used HAM, no games (maybe for the odd splash screen), it was very slow, no good for interfaces (you couldn't put a white pixel directly next to a black pixel without a few pixels of smearing in between) It worked by recording each pixel as a value relative to the adjacent pixel, meaning that providing you didn't need abrupt colour changes, it could encode way more colours with less data, it's only when you want to say put black and white together it all broke
AGA did indeed up the palettes to something akin to modern equivalents. 256 colours from a 16bit palette, HAM mode in AGA was available allowing you to use the full 16bit, but with aforementioned smearing.
Amigas also had some really interesting graphics hardware. One of the most memorable effects was using the 'blitter' chip to render horizontal lines ('raster' bars) in place of a single colour, so you could, for instance, replace the screen's black palette colour with a nice rainbow.
It also had an interesting notion that has sadly all but disppeared in modern operating systems, that of 'screens'. The OS provided a 'screen', if you wanted to load something up fullscreen (say an image viewer), it would create a new screen on top of the current one, if you pushed your mouse to the top you could then drag this screen down to reveal the one underneath (even if they were different resolutions!), and they had cycle buttons on the top right to switch between them. That was a great idea, like the multiple desktops feature you get in some OSs (or OS extensions if you're using windows), but implemented at a much lower level and with hardware support..
Great machines, quirky and interesting, elegantly designed, with a touch of humour. They taught me a huge amount about how computers work, and got me started in the world of programming. And I will miss them.
Happy birthday, Amiga.
Oh yeah that's a great idea, why bother moving forward when we can stay where we are and fucking stagnate? all because you can't be bothered to remove the horrible ugly IEx.x-only code in your website and replace it with something more sensible.
It going to take about 4 years* from the release of a new version before we can even begin to think about dropping support for IE6, and probably one or two years before we can relegate IE6 to the status of 'second class' browser, and design for IE7/Moz/etc and just make sure content is accessible in IE6 - as many do now with Netscape4-, IE4-, etc.
So don't you think it's a good plan to get it done as soon as possible?
* so I recall reading, may or may not be entirely accurate. It's probably way longer.
For the record, UA sniffing is a FUCKING TERRIBLE way to make webpages work in multiple browsers. Have a look at the UA string of an average browser today:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
What browser is it? Mozilla 4? Noooo, it's our old friend IE6.
Browser UA strings are fucked up, because of badly written UA string sniffing routines that browser vendors don't want to fall foul of.
Lets see some more:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
What do you think that is? KHTML means it must be Konq, right? Safari? is KHTML based on Mozilla? 'Like Gecko'..?
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) Opera 7.54 [en]
And that? IE6? Opera?
Browser UA sniffing: bad idea.
Did you even TRY that page with js disabled?
No?
I didn't think so.
Why don't you give it a go before bleating like a girl about it.
Informative? Read it! c'mon that deserves at least a 'funny'
Political correctness?
I don't think so.
This is not the way I want things to work, ideally people should be responsible for their own actions, they should get paid a high enough wage that they don't have to worry about being poor, and have enough control over how they do their job so they actually begin to care about it.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, this is not the case. High staff turnover, ridiculously complicated workplace rules and low level employees generally having no control over how they do their job are the norm..
If you're just hiring meat to perform a particular task, unless they did it maliciously, how the hell can it be the employee's fault?
I'm sure the publisher blames the bookshop, and does whatever they do to punish them (IE not let them have copies of the next Potter book, or whatever), the bookshop will blame the branch manager, the branch manager will blame some worthless middle manager, and the middle manager will sack a few low level employees at random to make it look like he's done something about it. When the truth of the matter is it was probably just the middle manager's fault for not informing the employee of the situation properly.
The problem here is the employee doesn't care about the latest Potter book, and isn't paid enouigh to do so, they don't even hire people to care, they just hire people to be cheap.
It IS ALWAYS management's fault, that's what they're for, to be responsible for fuckups. That's why they get paid more and why they get to sit around on their fat lazy arse all day long..
They get given some work to do, delegate the work to a lower level employee, supervise them as much as required. If they lower-level employee fucks it up then it's the managers fault for not supervising enough/giving it to the wrong person/not supplying training/employing an idiot/etc/etc/etc
So shut up.
Certainly:
http://brain.cx/DNS-HOWTO/
Grrrr.. Buzzwords piss me right off. "Drill down" and "Ramp up" are both examples of phrases that are used merely as placeholders for things the speaker hasn't actually got around to thinking about, but still wants to give the impression they're in charge and know what they're doing. "Can we make this a link so they can drill down?".. Drill down to what?! you haven't thought of that, have you? you just expect me to do all your fucking work for you, don't you? Use your god damn brain, man. "Guys we need to ramp up production" translates almost exactly to "SCHNELL!" ..and they both make my blood boil. Don't even start me on "AJAX", *shudder*.
Use your brain and think you workshy money-grabbing twunts.
halo 2's single player mode was just a multiplayer game with a vague storyline. They put in level after level that consisted of nothing more than running down identical corridors shooting at various things. I'm sure the counterstrike players loved it, and I'm sure it makes a fine multiplayer game. But it's a shit single player game. HL2, on the other hand, I absolutely loved. some of the outside scenes are amazingly realistic and fun to play. Riding the airboat down the canal system and finding random deserted buildings with huge landscapes was great.
You SHOULD have the latest drivers anyway, if they won't install or they break your system then it's either your fault, or the card manufacturer's fault. It most certainly is not the game's fault. It worked perfectly for me, took a little while to install, but then it's a lot of data to copy (make sure your dvdrom is set up properly and you have the relevant drivers installed and *up to date* for the interface if it's that slow)
Don't be stupid, It was pretty recently that the realisation that many people connect their windows pcs directly to the internet came as a complete shock to MS. The firewall didn't even appear until the latest version, they barely even recognised the existance of the internet before win2k (save for beating netscape into submission by forcing their browser on everyone..)
..Kaaaaaaylee
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/arnoldpad/arnold pad.htm!
I think you're getting confusing with record players.. Go burn a half-full CD then look at the disc's surface, it's quite clearly burnt starting from the inside, working it's way out
When people realize that when one slashdot user speaks, he doesn't speak for all slashdot users.
April 2004
that's because Gigli is "officially" the worst film ever
I agree, a lot of films recently do suck incredibly hard. Even the new matrix film was a pile of poop, and the LOTR films are slowly getting worse. There *still* hasn't been an action film to beat Die Hard, and i'm not even going to think about the new Star wars films too much, or i'll start crying.
like what? storing everyone's medical records at every hospital and doctor's surgery? mm, yeah, clever.
They're trading off their name, and the fact that ICANN tasked them with managing the .com/.net tld's. Hopefully this will have produced enough bad press to make people think twice.. Unfortunately, as we all know, the chances of Big Business and the suits in the boardroom actually paying attention to the fact that every sysadmin on the planet was pissed off with them is pretty minimal. Unless of course we start presenting our point of view in a nice glossy brochure in a smarmy sales meeting...
MPU, blinding idea ;)