I moved into web development soon after my divorce and decided my daughter came first so I've always been freelance. I pick her up Mondays and Wednesdays from school and stay with her 'til 7.30pm. I also spend every Saturday with her. Money has been very hard but I can honsetly say I have a much better relationship with my daughter than most stressed-out 9-to-5-ers making loads of money. London property prices can squeeze every drop of energy out of people so I also decided to forget that and rent. I've had to fight to be able to see my daughter 3 times a week but I'm basically hard-up and happy that I have plenty of time with my daughter. It's something you just can't attach a monetary value to.
Without the free time I might not have been able to learn as much about Linux/OSS either.
From what I heard Debian Sarge won't be stable 'til 2005. So you're telling me that a distro which only releases once every 3 years is better than one backed by a major vendor, releasing several times a year, with IBM as a backer, contributing freely to the community? Did I miss something?
My initial argument was aimed mainly at the XHTL 1.0 strict or "no layout tables" crowd.
The best example of CSS use I've seen to date is Chapter 1 of "Eric Meyer on CSS" where a single layout table is used to generate 3 columns. Everything else is CSS. This seems to be the best compromise. To me the whole CSS-P spec is badly thought-out. It seems it was hacked onto CSS1 but it has become the hobby-horse of the "no layout tables" movement which is quite puzzling since it is the weakest link in CSS implementation.
Ever tried horizontally aligning elements within the left and right columns of a 3-column CSS layout? It's a no-brainer with tables but a PITA with CSS. How about a photo gallery? Yes, it can be done but just look at the CSS code and the table-based code. I know which one I think is more intuitive
Take a look at CSSzengarden.com [csszengarden.com] if you are not yet convinced in XHTML with CSS is artistically pleasing enough
Come off it. CSS Zen Garden has NOTHING to do with real world web development. The contributors to this site are CSS gurus who have laboured over endless hacks just to achieve what can be done with tables easily. Few will admit that CSS was badly conceived, IE domination or not. CSS looks simple but then so does the alaphabet. Once you try combining a few things to do basic stuff - float, div widths, inheritance - you hit the real flaws within CSS. No, it's NOT all down to implementation. The CSS standard is crap. That's half the reason we're in such a mess. How many browsers do you know that implement the CSS2 standard FULLY after all this time? How many years ago was the CSS2 spec finalised? The fact that many OSS browsers are only "almost there" suggests one thing to me - that the standards is a pile of crap.
A good example of the futility of working with the CSS standard is Jeffrey Zeldman's site www.zeldman.com. This site has been through so many redesigns yet inevitably each new redesign breaks in some major browser or other. If the godfather of web standards can't get it to work I ain't gonna waste my time duplicating his pain.
If you wanna master CSS make sure you don't have anything else useful to do with your life 'cos you're gonna be up 'til 4 in the morning each night trying to tweak some hack to get a div to align properly.
... getting perl to run as a scripting language required spawning perl processes for each request made to the server.... Now, that's not the case with perl any longer,
Are you referring to the current Perl 5.8 or the future Perl 6? As far as I'm aware Perl CGI, ie. without mod_,is still the dog it always was, which is why PHP has taken root so quickly. This would never have happened if something like FastCGI or PersistentPerl had been marketed better along with a CPAN Bundle to handle web development templating.
Re:Already in use
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Regardless of Apache versions mod_perl is still a much bigger risk because it exposes the Apache API. By contrast mod_php exists, it seems, merely to give PHP its speed boost. This is what Perl needs.
Re:Already in use
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Case in point. I started with Perl, learnt mod_perl then had to switch to PHP for most of my client work because most of them were using hosts which didn't provide mod_perl. This is the biggest drawback with Perl. Great language but brain-dead in the marketing department. Perl has lost ground in the web development sphere because it depends on mod_perl to compete with mod_php for performance. Perl templating engines (Mason, Apache Template, Embperl) allow you to do what PHP can do (and much more) but you're saddled with finding a host who will "risk" offering mod_perl.
The authors of O'Reilly's "Practical mod_perl" even went so far as to advise explicitly against offering mod_perl in a shared hosting environment. Hence PHP replaces Perl in shared hosting environments.
Mention this on comp.lang.perl.misc and you get flamed for referring to Perl as a web developmnent tool. Well, if the Perl community only sees Perl as a tool for large web projects then so be it but they're making a big mistake. There should be a decent Perl templating engine which can run as an Apache module without exposing the Apache API, so that it would just do the one job well. Until this happens PHP will simply wipe Perl off the map
in shared hosting environments.
Hopefully Perl 6//Parrot/Ponie will come up with something to break the inertia as bog-standard Perl CGI is irrelevant these days. Hell, many hosts don't even allow you free reign with installing CPAN modules.
Why consider it subversion? I'm arguing for Google simply going with the flow of web standards, ie. valid XHTML/CSS markup = separation of content = easier to find the message = more easily rankable.
In an all-other-things-equal scenario, ie. identical content in 2 web pages - one "optimised for IE" and the other XHTML/CSS validated, why shouldn't the good guy win if he supports the ethos of the internet better?
I especially agree regarding number 3, which a lot of people easily overlook.
Can I add another. Search engines. I've heard that standards-compliant/validated websites are favoured above their IE-only counterparts.
Aren't we overlooking a wide-open opportunity here? All it takes is for Google to be persuaded to give standards-compliant sites a significant listing edge over IE-only sites and IE suddenly becomes bad news. Mozilla and Opera accelerate widening of the standards support gap and corporates start to demand standards-compliant sites indirectly to get better Google rankings.
Many users attempting to migrate from M$ Office to Open Office complain that the native Open Office file format, '.sxw', does not always retain its formatting when opened in M$ Word. Well, how about '.rtf' (Rich Text Format)? Save as '.rtf' in Open Office and open with everything intact in M$ Word. Better still, if your M$ Word user at the other end will only accept '.doc' files you can change the extension of your '.rtf' file to '.doc' and no-one will be any the wiser!
If you're on NT/2000 use the 'Robocopy' utility which creates exact, mirror-image backups so you don't have the chore of cleaning-out old files on the backup server. My copy came with the Win2000 Pro Resource Kit but I think you can download it from the M$ site. It allows you to write simple batch files using drive mapping which can then be scheduled to run using the Task Scheduler. All you need then is a central repository on the server for copies of user directories. It's an old NT4 utility so you shouldn't have trouble finding a copy.
The Mouse book is OK once you've spent half a lifetime pencilling-in the errata from the O'Reilly site. I have never, in my book-buying life, seen so many errata for a book with such a high reputation. Many of the errata are basic coding errors, too.
As an open source/free software devotee I'd love to believe that Mozilla 1.0 is ready for prime time so that I can recommend it to everyone.
Let's stop pretending. It's still buggy as hell. On Windows 2000 Pro I can't even enter an e-mail address manually within composer sometimes. The Open Web Location box often opens malformed with no entry box and the browser always loses focus when opening a web page, which means you have to keep clicking the page before you can scroll with the down arrow.
The versions for Linux are, in my experience, even buggier. On Mandrake I have trouble getting any of the Mozilla keyboard shortcuts to work reliably.
Typical ignorance of basics by Flash designers. For *** sake take your eyes off the neon lights and try reading the text. It's virtually illegible. There's no colour contrast and the font size is ridiculous.
How come a company which is ostensibly trying to distance itself from UNIX chose a name for itself which sounds like a UNIX clone? 2 possible scenarios:
1. Hoping for a spelling error on the order form since not targeting "experts".
2.Get me a machine with that system everyone uses... you know, UNI-sys or something like that.unisys
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
If KDE has the option of a Windows XP theme in addiiton to its own default this can only aid the cause of transitioning Windows users who want to try Linux. Surely the advantages of open source software are freedom & multiplicity so there's nothing lost and everything to gain from having a 'Doze GUI for potential converts.
It may even give Billy Boy one more thing to worry about.
Slashdot ain't such a shining example of web design, when you think about it. Using 3 different link colours (green, dark grey and black) is totally confusing and black is about the worst possible choice, ie. no contrast with text.
Slashdot's worst web design sin, however, is the abandonment of visited link colour. Navigating vast tracts of nested threads without this feature is a royal pain in the **** .
Surely Slashdot, of all sites, could have done better on the basics.
Yes, exactly. I just had to bite the bullet and advise a client to have me develop his new LAN with Windows 2000 Server and Office XP simply because he needs an office suite which has an integrated database. Although I'm developing a web database for him with Perl/MySQL on Apache/Linux, MS Office with Access is presently the only real option for the LAN. Open Office will never get beyond the starting line until it gets itself a decent database. Furthermore, if the database isn't as good as, say MySQL, it will fail to solve the problem web developers face when trying to build a web databse which integrates with the office suite.
If the Open Office team could reach some kind of deal with MySQL then we could start talkinhg about a REAL alternative to MS Office.
Yeah. Sure. Maybe we could all have our accounts managed by Bill's Impenetrable Passport Service at the same time. Since.Nyet is heading this way anyway it's hardly an innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
I moved into web development soon after my divorce and decided my daughter came first so I've always been freelance. I pick her up Mondays and Wednesdays from school and stay with her 'til 7.30pm. I also spend every Saturday with her. Money has been very hard but I can honsetly say I have a much better relationship with my daughter than most stressed-out 9-to-5-ers making loads of money. London property prices can squeeze every drop of energy out of people so I also decided to forget that and rent. I've had to fight to be able to see my daughter 3 times a week but I'm basically hard-up and happy that I have plenty of time with my daughter. It's something you just can't attach a monetary value to.
Without the free time I might not have been able to learn as much about Linux/OSS either.
If it isn't accepted in Europe why did the EU draft legislation to regulate the sale of certain homoeopathic treatments off the shelf?
From what I heard Debian Sarge won't be stable 'til 2005. So you're telling me that a distro which only releases once every 3 years is better than one backed by a major vendor, releasing several times a year, with IBM as a backer, contributing freely to the community? Did I miss something?
My initial argument was aimed mainly at the XHTL 1.0 strict or "no layout tables" crowd.
The best example of CSS use I've seen to date is Chapter 1 of "Eric Meyer on CSS" where a single layout table is used to generate 3 columns. Everything else is CSS. This seems to be the best compromise. To me the whole CSS-P spec is badly thought-out. It seems it was hacked onto CSS1 but it has become the hobby-horse of the "no layout tables" movement which is quite puzzling since it is the weakest link in CSS implementation.
Ever tried horizontally aligning elements within the left and right columns of a 3-column CSS layout? It's a no-brainer with tables but a PITA with CSS. How about a photo gallery? Yes, it can be done but just look at the CSS code and the table-based code. I know which one I think is more intuitive
Take a look at CSSzengarden.com [csszengarden.com] if you are not yet convinced in XHTML with CSS is artistically pleasing enough
Come off it. CSS Zen Garden has NOTHING to do with real world web development. The contributors to this site are CSS gurus who have laboured over endless hacks just to achieve what can be done with tables easily. Few will admit that CSS was badly conceived, IE domination or not. CSS looks simple but then so does the alaphabet. Once you try combining a few things to do basic stuff - float, div widths, inheritance - you hit the real flaws within CSS. No, it's NOT all down to implementation. The CSS standard is crap. That's half the reason we're in such a mess. How many browsers do you know that implement the CSS2 standard FULLY after all this time? How many years ago was the CSS2 spec finalised? The fact that many OSS browsers are only "almost there" suggests one thing to me - that the standards is a pile of crap.
A good example of the futility of working with the CSS standard is Jeffrey Zeldman's site www.zeldman.com. This site has been through so many redesigns yet inevitably each new redesign breaks in some major browser or other. If the godfather of web standards can't get it to work I ain't gonna waste my time duplicating his pain.
If you wanna master CSS make sure you don't have anything else useful to do with your life 'cos you're gonna be up 'til 4 in the morning each night trying to tweak some hack to get a div to align properly.
'Esc-x doctor'
Are you referring to the current Perl 5.8 or the future Perl 6? As far as I'm aware Perl CGI, ie. without mod_,is still the dog it always was, which is why PHP has taken root so quickly. This would never have happened if something like FastCGI or PersistentPerl had been marketed better along with a CPAN Bundle to handle web development templating.
Regardless of Apache versions mod_perl is still a much bigger risk because it exposes the Apache API. By contrast mod_php exists, it seems, merely to give PHP its speed boost. This is what Perl needs.
Mention this on comp.lang.perl.misc and you get flamed for referring to Perl as a web developmnent tool. Well, if the Perl community only sees Perl as a tool for large web projects then so be it but they're making a big mistake. There should be a decent Perl templating engine which can run as an Apache module without exposing the Apache API, so that it would just do the one job well. Until this happens PHP will simply wipe Perl off the map in shared hosting environments.
Hopefully Perl 6//Parrot/Ponie will come up with something to break the inertia as bog-standard Perl CGI is irrelevant these days. Hell, many hosts don't even allow you free reign with installing CPAN modules.
Why consider it subversion? I'm arguing for Google simply going with the flow of web standards, ie. valid XHTML/CSS markup = separation of content = easier to find the message = more easily rankable. In an all-other-things-equal scenario, ie. identical content in 2 web pages - one "optimised for IE" and the other XHTML/CSS validated, why shouldn't the good guy win if he supports the ethos of the internet better?
I especially agree regarding number 3, which a lot of people easily overlook. Can I add another. Search engines. I've heard that standards-compliant/validated websites are favoured above their IE-only counterparts.
Aren't we overlooking a wide-open opportunity here? All it takes is for Google to be persuaded to give standards-compliant sites a significant listing edge over IE-only sites and IE suddenly becomes bad news. Mozilla and Opera accelerate widening of the standards support gap and corporates start to demand standards-compliant sites indirectly to get better Google rankings.
In the East crisis = danger + opportunity
Many users attempting to migrate from M$ Office to Open Office complain that the native Open Office file format, '.sxw', does not always retain its formatting when opened in M$ Word. Well, how about '.rtf' (Rich Text Format)? Save as '.rtf' in Open Office and open with everything intact in M$ Word. Better still, if your M$ Word user at the other end will only accept '.doc' files you can change the extension of your '.rtf' file to '.doc' and no-one will be any the wiser!
If you're on NT/2000 use the 'Robocopy' utility which creates exact, mirror-image backups so you don't have the chore of cleaning-out old files on the backup server. My copy came with the Win2000 Pro Resource Kit but I think you can download it from the M$ site. It allows you to write simple batch files using drive mapping which can then be scheduled to run using the Task Scheduler. All you need then is a central repository on the server for copies of user directories. It's an old NT4 utility so you shouldn't have trouble finding a copy.
The Mouse book is OK once you've spent half a lifetime pencilling-in the errata from the O'Reilly site. I have never, in my book-buying life, seen so many errata for a book with such a high reputation. Many of the errata are basic coding errors, too.
As an open source/free software devotee I'd love to believe that Mozilla 1.0 is ready for prime time so that I can recommend it to everyone.
Let's stop pretending. It's still buggy as hell. On Windows 2000 Pro I can't even enter an e-mail address manually within composer sometimes. The Open Web Location box often opens malformed with no entry box and the browser always loses focus when opening a web page, which means you have to keep clicking the page before you can scroll with the down arrow.
The versions for Linux are, in my experience, even buggier. On Mandrake I have trouble getting any of the Mozilla keyboard shortcuts to work reliably.
Typical ignorance of basics by Flash designers. For *** sake take your eyes off the neon lights and try reading the text. It's virtually illegible. There's no colour contrast and the font size is ridiculous.
How come a company which is ostensibly trying to distance itself from UNIX chose a name for itself which sounds like a UNIX clone? 2 possible scenarios: 1. Hoping for a spelling error on the order form since not targeting "experts". 2.Get me a machine with that system everyone uses ... you know, UNI-sys or something like that.unisys
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
If KDE has the option of a Windows XP theme in addiiton to its own default this can only aid the cause of transitioning Windows users who want to try Linux. Surely the advantages of open source software are freedom & multiplicity so there's nothing lost and everything to gain from having a 'Doze GUI for potential converts.
It may even give Billy Boy one more thing to worry about.
Slashdot ain't such a shining example of web design, when you think about it. Using 3 different link colours (green, dark grey and black) is totally confusing and black is about the worst possible choice, ie. no contrast with text. Slashdot's worst web design sin, however, is the abandonment of visited link colour. Navigating vast tracts of nested threads without this feature is a royal pain in the **** . Surely Slashdot, of all sites, could have done better on the basics.
Yes, exactly. I just had to bite the bullet and advise a client to have me develop his new LAN with Windows 2000 Server and Office XP simply because he needs an office suite which has an integrated database. Although I'm developing a web database for him with Perl/MySQL on Apache/Linux, MS Office with Access is presently the only real option for the LAN. Open Office will never get beyond the starting line until it gets itself a decent database. Furthermore, if the database isn't as good as, say MySQL, it will fail to solve the problem web developers face when trying to build a web databse which integrates with the office suite. If the Open Office team could reach some kind of deal with MySQL then we could start talkinhg about a REAL alternative to MS Office.
Well, I've been trying all evening (UK time) to access this site but without success. Doesn't say much for their Linux hardware does it?
Yeah. Sure. Maybe we could all have our accounts managed by Bill's Impenetrable Passport Service at the same time. Since .Nyet is heading this way anyway it's hardly an innovation.