An excellent point. I'm not a linguist, but I believe these issues to be related. It is my opinion that the expressiveness of the medium (software, language) determines its success or failure. Design and robustness are key for data management but for user interaction, it is the most flexible solution that wins out. English is an unholy mix of different, completely separate languages and thousands of idioms, and growing every year. It grew from a simple street language to the third most spoken language in the world.
One could argue that the web platform is doing the same thing. Just a musing for a Friday.
I just thought I'd point out that the problems that you are ascribing to JavaScript + HTML could be leveled at the English language. And yet you are comfortable posting with it. Let's face it, as long as things work and have well-defined interfaces, complaining about aesthetics is not productive. Beautiful cathedrals are just that: beautiful. But also cold and uncomfortable.
I would play it after my daughter was in bed, and my wife would come downstairs and watch. I played on the XBox with a 48" TV and the home theatre sound system cranked up and the lights down low. My limit wasn't much more than an hour before I had to turn it off because I was starting to get freaked out. Don't get me started on those little wasp babies. When they first showed up I was backpedalling as fast as I could, blasting away with the shotgun yelling "That's sick! That's sick!".:-)
I like the dark. It heightens the effect. But it does preclude playing in the daytime, since I can't darken my theatre room enough.
There's a great podcast called "Inside Home Recording" that does software, hardware, recording equipment reviews as well as interviews with people who produce recordings for a living to get their take on it. Check it out at http://www.insidehomerecording.com/.
BTW, I am not affiliated with this site or podcast in any way. Just a happy listener.
Jeez. Three times I burst out loud laughing reading the comments in this thread. The last time almost ended with coffee sprayed on the monitor. I know it's Perl and there is lots of material for comedy, but this has been the best read in a while.
I recently deactivated my Facebook account, largely because of the flood of stupid applications and friends bugging you to add said stupid applications. Maybe if I spent an hour or more per day at Facebook I'd find them fun diversions, but as is they are annoying, annoying, annoying.
Personally, I think this is just an attempt by Google to kill the entire social networking fad. Make them ALL as annoying as Facebook, and they'll be done.
Since it is all source, you could place all of the code in a single.js file (in the right order), and then just include that. However, when you pick and choose what parts you want to use, you may not need everything. If you're using Panels or the Calendar along with the AJAX stuff, yes, it's pretty likely you'll need it all. But if you just want to use the Event or DOM libraries you only need yahoo.js, event.js and dom.js. I can handle three script tags in my HTML in return for practically cleaning out all of the hand-coded browser-sensitive Javascript.;-)
I think this came up once or twice on the yui mailing list.
The two things I like about the Yahoo! UI toolkit are that:
- it is a la carte - it represents pretty advanced, human-readable Javascript, which has allowed me to learn advanced Javascript techniques
The first, a la carte, means that the entire web application does not need to be dedicated to YUI. Recently I incorporated a YUI DHTML window (Panel, in YUI-speak) into an existing ASP.NET application. It required only a few lines of Javascript and some HTML. Ditto for another application (JSF, this time), where I added an AJAX data lookup to dynamically populate sample values in a dropdown list. I love the DOM and Event libraries: they really clean up the cruddy job of adding small DHTML things to a website, regardless of how it's put together.
The second, that YUI is a learning experience, is also very important to me. I've come late to the DHTML game, and most books and tutorials on Javascript deal with the basics, and stuff like OO programming is either glossed over or omitted entirely. However, Javascript is a language that is suited to OO programming in a unique way, IMHO. By studing how the YUI toolkit works and seeing what Javascript is capable of, it has opened the doors for new ways of tackling problems and reducing the number of lines of JS code I write.
Do you have any tips on making this work well? I started creating a fairly complex web app that used AJAX and XSLT to transform the results, following precisely the logic you present here. Where it ran off the rails for me (no pun intended) was it meant that for any data->presentation cycle, I needed to fetch two XML documents: the REST data and the XSLT transformation. Since both were asynchronous, in order for anything to happen, both requests needed to (a) resolve and (b) be able to combine their results.
Any thoughts, or links to more information on this? I would be very interested in learning more.
...ship some MacIntel hardware over to people developing Eclipse and Java Creator Studio, I'd be happy. I thought Java software was supposed to "just run"... Now I've got to explain to my wife why that really expensive iMac downstairs isn't doing what I told her it would be doing.
Somebody has got to post a screenshot of this. Otherwise I'm going to spend the time this evening trying to find that ad in the game.
For the record, I (finally) bought an XBox to run Doom 3. On the Mac side, you had to shell out for some pretty high-end hardware to get Doom 3 playable, making the $200 for an XBox look like a deal. I resisted the Halo urge for years, but now I'm happy that I've played both Halo 1 and 2. There's something cool about seeing the Marathon symbol painted on the side of the Pillar of Autumn. Makes me remember university LAN parties and making Marathon levels.
Yeah, that's the first time I've tried to do that, though I've seen it done successfully before. I guess I was waiting for someone to reference that book, and then to see it marked "offtopic"... and me without mod points.
Tom Clancy's book "Rainbow Six" involves a radical environmental group which conspires to knock the human population back to less than six figures by means of a biological agent.
My compliments on a very interesting analyst piece. Easily as entertaining and not as far-fetched as the Cringely one. I have mod points, but since you're already pegged at +5, I'll just post this instead.
Some funny comments in this thread, n'est pas? Almost worth filtering at +5 Funny...
Just what I want, a railgun-type device on the Moon designed to hurl large asteroid chunks. You don't even need a terrorist fixation to be scared of that one. Imagine a lunar railgun technician "going postal"...
My boss lives on the east coast of North America: close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and lunar railgun destruction.
I would feel so stupid if I had the opportunity to know what would kill me and not taken it and the opportunity to take steps to rectify it. Yes, MS is incurable, but "incurable" is only a measure of our current knowledge and ability, not an absolute. Also, some things such as cancer are measures of risk factors, and can be avoided by behaviour modification.
"Incurable" has a way of changing pretty quickly. Imagine, if you will, the amount of money which would be pumped into MS research if a sitting President found himself (or herself) on the road to developing it?
In other words, they talked to a guy who was a designer during Apple's "dark ages", when they couldn't pull a decent design out of their @$$, were bleeding money, and were on their way out of business. How much do you want to bet that this guy was fired for incompetence even *before* Steve came back? If he'd still been around after the Second Coming of Steve, this is what I would have sounded like during his performance review:
Steve - Hi Frank. I understand you have designed many of Apple's products, including the Powerbook 5200.
A thousand words from the pen of Mr. Gates, and not once does he make a solid case for the PC. He discusses capabilities and ubiquity, which he correctly points out has been brought by the PC. However, it does not follow that the PC will continue to be the provider of these, as new and more effective means to deliver are developed.
Every user has their own font directory, ~/Library/Fonts. These are fonts that only they have access to. The system font directory,/Library/Fonts is shared by all users.
Good post! I found it funny as heck, since I recently dusted off my old Myth:The Fallen Lords CD and have been playing it on my iBook G4 while commuting on the bus.
I still shake my head when I can play Myth on my iBook, when back in the day the requirements for that game were considered "hefty" and you needed a relatively modern Power Mac, preferably with a Voodoo card.
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent point. I'm not a linguist, but I believe these issues to be related. It is my opinion that the expressiveness of the medium (software, language) determines its success or failure. Design and robustness are key for data management but for user interaction, it is the most flexible solution that wins out. English is an unholy mix of different, completely separate languages and thousands of idioms, and growing every year. It grew from a simple street language to the third most spoken language in the world.
One could argue that the web platform is doing the same thing. Just a musing for a Friday.
HBH
I just thought I'd point out that the problems that you are ascribing to JavaScript + HTML could be leveled at the English language. And yet you are comfortable posting with it. Let's face it, as long as things work and have well-defined interfaces, complaining about aesthetics is not productive. Beautiful cathedrals are just that: beautiful. But also cold and uncomfortable.
We're a messy species of semi-evolved apes.
HBH
Fifthed. (I know, it's getting tired, but...)
:-)
I would play it after my daughter was in bed, and my wife would come downstairs and watch. I played on the XBox with a 48" TV and the home theatre sound system cranked up and the lights down low. My limit wasn't much more than an hour before I had to turn it off because I was starting to get freaked out. Don't get me started on those little wasp babies. When they first showed up I was backpedalling as fast as I could, blasting away with the shotgun yelling "That's sick! That's sick!".
I like the dark. It heightens the effect. But it does preclude playing in the daytime, since I can't darken my theatre room enough.
HBH
There's a great podcast called "Inside Home Recording" that does software, hardware, recording equipment reviews as well as interviews with people who produce recordings for a living to get their take on it. Check it out at http://www.insidehomerecording.com/.
BTW, I am not affiliated with this site or podcast in any way. Just a happy listener.
HBH
Jeez. Three times I burst out loud laughing reading the comments in this thread. The last time almost ended with coffee sprayed on the monitor. I know it's Perl and there is lots of material for comedy, but this has been the best read in a while.
Props y'all.
HBH
I recently deactivated my Facebook account, largely because of the flood of stupid applications and friends bugging you to add said stupid applications. Maybe if I spent an hour or more per day at Facebook I'd find them fun diversions, but as is they are annoying, annoying, annoying.
Personally, I think this is just an attempt by Google to kill the entire social networking fad. Make them ALL as annoying as Facebook, and they'll be done.
HBH
Okay, that was laugh out loud funny. Pity you posted as AC.
HBH
Since it is all source, you could place all of the code in a single .js file (in the right order), and then just include that. However, when you pick and choose what parts you want to use, you may not need everything. If you're using Panels or the Calendar along with the AJAX stuff, yes, it's pretty likely you'll need it all. But if you just want to use the Event or DOM libraries you only need yahoo.js, event.js and dom.js. I can handle three script tags in my HTML in return for practically cleaning out all of the hand-coded browser-sensitive Javascript. ;-)
I think this came up once or twice on the yui mailing list.
HBH
The two things I like about the Yahoo! UI toolkit are that:
- it is a la carte
- it represents pretty advanced, human-readable Javascript, which has allowed me to learn advanced Javascript techniques
The first, a la carte, means that the entire web application does not need to be dedicated to YUI. Recently I incorporated a YUI DHTML window (Panel, in YUI-speak) into an existing ASP.NET application. It required only a few lines of Javascript and some HTML. Ditto for another application (JSF, this time), where I added an AJAX data lookup to dynamically populate sample values in a dropdown list. I love the DOM and Event libraries: they really clean up the cruddy job of adding small DHTML things to a website, regardless of how it's put together.
The second, that YUI is a learning experience, is also very important to me. I've come late to the DHTML game, and most books and tutorials on Javascript deal with the basics, and stuff like OO programming is either glossed over or omitted entirely. However, Javascript is a language that is suited to OO programming in a unique way, IMHO. By studing how the YUI toolkit works and seeing what Javascript is capable of, it has opened the doors for new ways of tackling problems and reducing the number of lines of JS code I write.
HBH
Do you have any tips on making this work well? I started creating a fairly complex web app that used AJAX and XSLT to transform the results, following precisely the logic you present here. Where it ran off the rails for me (no pun intended) was it meant that for any data->presentation cycle, I needed to fetch two XML documents: the REST data and the XSLT transformation. Since both were asynchronous, in order for anything to happen, both requests needed to (a) resolve and (b) be able to combine their results.
Any thoughts, or links to more information on this? I would be very interested in learning more.
HBH
Put the sticker in the rear window. If you have tinting, it really sets it off nicely!
HBH
...ship some MacIntel hardware over to people developing Eclipse and Java Creator Studio, I'd be happy. I thought Java software was supposed to "just run"... Now I've got to explain to my wife why that really expensive iMac downstairs isn't doing what I told her it would be doing.
HBH
Somebody has got to post a screenshot of this. Otherwise I'm going to spend the time this evening trying to find that ad in the game.
For the record, I (finally) bought an XBox to run Doom 3. On the Mac side, you had to shell out for some pretty high-end hardware to get Doom 3 playable, making the $200 for an XBox look like a deal. I resisted the Halo urge for years, but now I'm happy that I've played both Halo 1 and 2. There's something cool about seeing the Marathon symbol painted on the side of the Pillar of Autumn. Makes me remember university LAN parties and making Marathon levels.
HBH
The! real! new! name! for! this! product! is...
Konfabulator!
HBH
Yeah, that's the first time I've tried to do that, though I've seen it done successfully before. I guess I was waiting for someone to reference that book, and then to see it marked "offtopic"... and me without mod points.
HBH
Tom Clancy's book "Rainbow Six" involves a radical environmental group which conspires to knock the human population back to less than six figures by means of a biological agent.
HBH
How we all recognize the truth in the parent post. We all understand the parallel. Real life is imitating art.
Maybe George knew what he was doing after all.
HBH
My compliments on a very interesting analyst piece. Easily as entertaining and not as far-fetched as the Cringely one. I have mod points, but since you're already pegged at +5, I'll just post this instead.
Some funny comments in this thread, n'est pas? Almost worth filtering at +5 Funny...
HBH
I was thinking about porting Firefox to MacOS 8.6. Who's with me????
Anyone?
{sound of crickets chirping}
HBH
Just what I want, a railgun-type device on the Moon designed to hurl large asteroid chunks. You don't even need a terrorist fixation to be scared of that one. Imagine a lunar railgun technician "going postal"...
My boss lives on the east coast of North America: close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and lunar railgun destruction.
Just a thought.
HBH
I would feel so stupid if I had the opportunity to know what would kill me and not taken it and the opportunity to take steps to rectify it. Yes, MS is incurable, but "incurable" is only a measure of our current knowledge and ability, not an absolute. Also, some things such as cancer are measures of risk factors, and can be avoided by behaviour modification.
"Incurable" has a way of changing pretty quickly. Imagine, if you will, the amount of money which would be pumped into MS research if a sitting President found himself (or herself) on the road to developing it?
Knowledge is power.
HBH
In other words, they talked to a guy who was a designer during Apple's "dark ages", when they couldn't pull a decent design out of their @$$, were bleeding money, and were on their way out of business. How much do you want to bet that this guy was fired for incompetence even *before* Steve came back? If he'd still been around after the Second Coming of Steve, this is what I would have sounded like during his performance review:
Steve - Hi Frank. I understand you have designed many of Apple's products, including the Powerbook 5200.
Frank - Yes, that's right.
Steve - You are *so* fired.
HBH
A thousand words from the pen of Mr. Gates, and not once does he make a solid case for the PC. He discusses capabilities and ubiquity, which he correctly points out has been brought by the PC. However, it does not follow that the PC will continue to be the provider of these, as new and more effective means to deliver are developed.
Meh. We'll wait and see.
HBH
Every user has their own font directory, ~/Library/Fonts. These are fonts that only they have access to. The system font directory, /Library/Fonts is shared by all users.
HBH
Good post! I found it funny as heck, since I recently dusted off my old Myth:The Fallen Lords CD and have been playing it on my iBook G4 while commuting on the bus.
I still shake my head when I can play Myth on my iBook, when back in the day the requirements for that game were considered "hefty" and you needed a relatively modern Power Mac, preferably with a Voodoo card.
HBH