The guy in the article about "What code doesn't do" really needs to take a deep breath. Anyone, of any specialised field, will always see their field represented in a movie as silly. Doctors the first, engineers, whatever. Some fields are better represented than others, but still.
I'm a professional software engineer, have been for almost a decade, and I can still enjoy these movies:) Leave work at home.
That being said, number 10 cracked me up, because thats true, expert in programming or not (I found these things silly when years before I had ever seen a line of code, because it really doesn't make sense):
10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I'd be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.
This is getting to be a bit of an old topic, but oh well, i enjoy the discussion.
The main issue is that the XHTML/CSS specs really seem to be made in a totally deconnected way of the industry. Web page design, while commonly done by "web designers", is also used daily by thousands of -programmers-. XHTML itself is very close to what programmers are used to: CSS however, is not.
To make matter worse, even something like the Firefox project, or a semi-commercial browser like Opera, STILL can't get the specs in 100% (Opera is like 99.9% by now, but how long did it take to get there?). Its completly rediculous.
In opposition, you have something like Flash, or the soon to be released WPF framework, which already have implementations (not necessarly open source, but still) accross platforms and run circle around XHTML/CSS. Yes Flash is abused to hell and beyond to make garbage stuff, but the technology itself can do most everything we want the web to do, across browsers and platforms, and it is there -today-. WPF when it is released will also have cross platform plugins (I do not know to what extent though). These technologies are relatively intuitive, are amazingly well documented, and "they just work(tm)". They're just not accepted enough.
So it IS possible to make something that works. Now, look at one of the semi-recent articles on Slashdot about RELAX as opposed to XSD. Again, the W3C is simply disconnected from the real world. They have some good people and companies supporting it, I don't understand how come they release such crappy specs. The W3C is simply failing us. Plain and simple. It has been a LONG time since specs for mainstream technologies have been this horrible. We have to admit that its simply not working, and go back to the drawing board. Once WPF is out (I'm a.NET programmer), for all internal web apps, HTML/CSS will be going to hell, simple as that.
Hahaha...lets send a few batches of Wiimotes to reinforce the suits of soldiers at war. A couple of Wiimotes strapped all over should garentee they come back alive.
If you look at a wiimote from the more recent batches (especialy if its one that got sent by nintendo because of a defect or another, as a replacement), and compare the straps, the newer wiimotes have much, much better straps. So its already fixed in the newer batches, as far as I can tell.
That being said, there are already games announced/in development with ideas of such attachments. Since the Wiimote itself can do most of the things one might need, you just need the attachment to make it more immersive, thus making said attachments incredibly cheap (as opposed to, let say, Light Gun games of old that required a full fledged light gun to be bundled in in many cases, etc).
Just having it as standard on the roof of 80% of the houses of the metropolitan areas of the world probably would cover a large chunk of the energy requirements. Then build a couple of "solar plants" here and there over the world to sell it like we do with hydro-electric dens right now. Then finish it all up with a few hydrogen or whatever "factories" that use this as power, and you should cover 95%+ of energy needs of the world.
Because no solution fits everything, cover the last 5% with the good old fashionned ways (dens, fossil fuel, etc). Even if this is just a pipe dream... if we could only lower fossil fuel use by, let say, 5-10%, that would already have extreme benifits.
I have a feeling its mostly for integration more than anything. For all practical purpose, Excel, Word, Access, Visio, Power Point, are all one and the same. For the use the big payers make of them, it has to be that way.
So integrating all of them means integrating the features. Obviously its easy to think of a reason to have VBA in Excel, Access and Visio. But you might integrate Excel stuff in Word...
Beyond that, Word also gets used as a kind of RAD tools for forms to fill out, such as an internal test. Though in the current world a quick web app probably would do the job better, it wasn't always that way, and there's probably a lot of legacy code to support, etc.
The second reason is kind of obsolete now, and really should be avoided like plague, but the integration between the different Office products do make sense, so....
Definately. Colleges, even top ones, have to catter to the lowest common denominator, on top of spending way WAY too much time (but no real choice on the matter) testing their students.
That means that over a 4 year BAC, honestly, you don't learn much. At all. And the world of IT, sadly, (as opposed to a lot, but not all,of other fields) is incredibly huge, and you need to stay current. A student straight out of one of the best of the best school, but who did nothing beyond learning what he needed to get straight As, is totally useless, even worthless to most employers. Students to get used to the fact that they'll have to learn a LOT on their own. I can already hear a lot of them, again especialy in the top rated schools, crying "But we have so much work, no time for that while in school!".
To that, all I can say is: "sucks to be you, and be happy a lot of large corporations hire in those top schools and offer to finish your training on the job, because the rest of us didn't have that chance".
It IS a critical feature. Like how CSS support is a critical feature for the web. But in both cases, no one has all the critical features, and its annoying as all hells.
Of course, using the extra stuff the databases support (PL/SQL, T-SQL, etc), we manage. But for example, the "workaround" for the window functions are not only ugly, but often quite misunderstood, on top of being difficult to use through dynamic sql (if thats your cup of tea). I keep seeing people using inefficient paging methods in SQL Server 2000 for example, when (while not supporting the actual function to do it "right") there are a few extremely efficient ways. So those features are indeed critical.
A bit like a certain quite popular database engine that shall remain nameless didn't support stored procedures for like ever. People work around it just fine, but...
Database engines are almost consistantly -behind- user's needs, even the fancy commercial ones, nevermind the incomplete ones.
God i know the feeling. I was back in my younger days hired as a junior programmer at 17$/hour and eventualy was expected to do that, and if I didn't have results by the end of the DAY, i'd get yelled at.
Needless to say, I told my boss to find someone else. Last I learnt they had hired someone who had just graduated to replace me. A graduate straight out of school to do full scale software architecture. Thats looking good::cough::.
I see where you're getting from, and I agree. Trust me, I hate all this web standard garbage, but since for the time being its what we have to deal with, I try to make the best of it.
When i said XHTML 1.1, I meant it as the "street definition" (so to speak): "It validates on the w3c validator as XHTML 1.1 compliant".
No, it doesn't have the advantages of real XML served this way, but its clean and streamlined, thus for now, it gets the job done.
Sorry for the confusion
That seems to be semi-common among programmers (I'm one myself).
We already separate our model, our engine (controller), and our presentation layer. Each of these are separated in more stuff, and you end up with like 10+ separations for an average sized app.
Then we get to the UI, and if its in web, we're told to again separated it. HTML for the structure, CSS for the formatting, script for the behavior. It starts feeling like overkill, as that adds 3+ layers to an app thats already split up to death, and doesn't quite fit the architecture, either...
Add that in an average ERP system, basically every single page will be totally different from the other, except for "theme" (color, fonts, borders, basic formatting), which is perfectly done in CSS. Its hard to justify then spending as much time making the presentation layer as you did coding whats behind to make it all by the book.
Even worse, there's nothing wrong in using "tables" in desktop clients (like Java Swing), but its wrong in CSS. So honestly, what it feels like, is that the -idea- behind the whole separation of style and structure in XHTML/CSS is a good one, the implementation is garbage. Im really starting to consider these things like Flex or WPF for web app, and be done with it...
If it wasn't for IE, yeah. What I had in mind when i made my exageration was vertical centering, which depending on your needs tend to take 3 div tags to make it perfectly cross-browser and working peachy in pure CSS.
I've looked for some trick that I could be missing, but everywhere I looked, it tend to be that. Of course, you can lower the amount needed by using, as you send, the inside elements, but often its still required to have quite a few too many divs. Being able to use display:table-cell in IE would probably shave these occurences by a lot though.
My gripe so far though is almost purely with 3 things. #1: positioning of elements that do not have fixed sizes (if you fix sizes, then things are a total joke), #2 vertical positioning (mostly fixed once the browser installed based support of table-cell is higher), #3 positioning/sizing of elements that are not tested, relative to each other.
All of this is definately possible. Its just not as clean as it should be, in my opinion. If javascript is a possibility (let say for an internal application), then all problems can be fixed in 5 lines of code and be 100% cross browser, but thats not always possible.
And hey, i'm not the guru among gurus, if there are tricks I haven't been able to find to handle all this over time (very possible), i'm always open minded to learning more stuff. But I spent quite a bit learning all the quirks I could with no easy solutions.:)
Honestly enough, there's some wisdom in that approach. I mean, other environments do tend to use both tables and styling "rules" together to get the desired result...take Java Swing for example.
Sometime a very limited and careful use of tables (not a bunch of nested tables garbage) can make the site easier to maintain, and::gasps:: use less markup. Doesn't help rendering speed though.
And obviously, if the site is supposed to be accessible, its not an option...
If you can use javascript to help with some more complex positioning (especialy relative resizing and such), XHTML 1.1 really isn't bad at all. Then you reduce the extra "just for CSS" divs that wouldn't normally be there to a minimum, and keep your HTML page squeeky clean. Not always possible, but often a nice alternative. Especialy since afterward your page can still be accessible (since the page structure is preserved), it still renders faster than html, and its often easier to maintain, and it makes cross-browser a total joke. Obviously, major drawback is that if your users don't have javascript on, this degrades like garbage, but if you're going to use javascript -anyway-...
The problem I see is that CSS in its current form (even if it was fully supported), still has certain things that aren't quite doable. Or they ARE doable. With 15 nested div tags. Not much better than table layouts.
Mind you, table layouts suck bad, but you do have decent tools that can help a tiny bit. Pure CSS layout tools are -just- starting to come out. Mind you (before I get flamed for daring mention using anything beyond notepad/vim/emacs to do HTML/CSS) these tools are just helpers, and should never be depended on, but when in a rush, it really helps, at least with the debugging part.
Now, even if CSS was 100% supported, and it was better than table layouts (which it is, even in its current, IE-butched up form), it still has limitations. Parts aren't intuitive (a lot of stuff is plain learning by heart how each rules affect each other and how they stack. Learning crap by heart died over a decade ago, if you ask me), lots of stuff can't be done cleanly (if my HTML page is supposed to be my structure, and my CSS the style, how come do I have to add a bunch of sections that have nothing to do with my structure, just to deal with CSS limitations?), and so on and so on.
So tables suck hardcore. CSS suck less, but still suck. So obviously, it is hard to convince someone to switch from one evil to another. The web really needs a new standard that is built in parallele with a reference implementation, with people using it at the same time as it is being built, so that usuability issues can be found as it goes. If possible, something that can be validated on more than just syntax to catch as much errors as possible during validations, with some mild programmatibility (expression support anyone?), etc. As it is now, CSS is being developped by people with too much ideals and visions, and not enough grasp on reality, with only, like, 1 browser successfully implementing it (along with other web standards) in a usuable way, and it did so only semi-recently.
And before I pass for an old table hacker like last time i posted something like this, all my current web sites are in XHTML 1.1, with most previous ones validating peachy as XHTML 1 strict, so no, no frustrated table layout designer here.
There's no light to see. Just more shades of gray.
Good point. I was only thinking about the whole "users are not encouraged to run as root in Linux" deal, but yeah, normal users have all they need, so I guess it only stops the more complicated malware.
Well, considering that #1 if Linux had the market share Windows has, it would be a bigger chunk, the fact is most Windows viruses are probably caught by users -willingly- installing crap on their computers.
If you're a retarded user, and you see a "L33t KDE icon package!" and follow instructions that tell you to login as root and run an executable, your box will get owned either way. Sure, Linux takes more steps to prevent this, but still.
ecause "gameplay" and "plot" still meant something
Honestly, its not even that. Games with "lesser" graphics that are newly released, be it on the DS, on GBA, what have you, are still of very close quality to what we used to get.
The thing is, on higher up consoles that are capable of high end graphics, people expect high end graphics. High end graphics cost a lot of money, and take a lot of time to make. That time cannot be used to enhance gameplay. SOME companies manage to balance both, but they are far and few in between.
Thats half the reason right there that Nintendo made a console that -forces- developers to give up on the fancy graphics. Hopefully it works, then we'll have games worth playing.
No, its not. Or at least, its not supposed to be. Its just that most browser vulnerabilities come from errors in Javascript. Assuming a "perfect" browser, Javascript is safe. Of course, no browser is perfect, but the odds of getting owned while using, let say, Opera, are pretty god darn low.
That being said, the NET without javascript is one damn boring beast. The only interaction you can then have with your page are links and submit buttons. Might as well read a book.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a professional software engineer, have been for almost a decade, and I can still enjoy these movies
That being said, number 10 cracked me up, because thats true, expert in programming or not (I found these things silly when years before I had ever seen a line of code, because it really doesn't make sense):
Definately, I agree with what you're saying, too.
My personal philosophy is this, when it comes to hiring IT personal: Technical tests first. Background check on whats leftover after that.
Oh blah, sorry for the wall of text. This was supposed to be "plain old text" formatted, but i selected HTML by mistake >. Talk about the irony...
This is getting to be a bit of an old topic, but oh well, i enjoy the discussion. The main issue is that the XHTML/CSS specs really seem to be made in a totally deconnected way of the industry. Web page design, while commonly done by "web designers", is also used daily by thousands of -programmers-. XHTML itself is very close to what programmers are used to: CSS however, is not. To make matter worse, even something like the Firefox project, or a semi-commercial browser like Opera, STILL can't get the specs in 100% (Opera is like 99.9% by now, but how long did it take to get there?). Its completly rediculous. In opposition, you have something like Flash, or the soon to be released WPF framework, which already have implementations (not necessarly open source, but still) accross platforms and run circle around XHTML/CSS. Yes Flash is abused to hell and beyond to make garbage stuff, but the technology itself can do most everything we want the web to do, across browsers and platforms, and it is there -today-. WPF when it is released will also have cross platform plugins (I do not know to what extent though). These technologies are relatively intuitive, are amazingly well documented, and "they just work(tm)". They're just not accepted enough. So it IS possible to make something that works. Now, look at one of the semi-recent articles on Slashdot about RELAX as opposed to XSD. Again, the W3C is simply disconnected from the real world. They have some good people and companies supporting it, I don't understand how come they release such crappy specs. The W3C is simply failing us. Plain and simple. It has been a LONG time since specs for mainstream technologies have been this horrible. We have to admit that its simply not working, and go back to the drawing board. Once WPF is out (I'm a .NET programmer), for all internal web apps, HTML/CSS will be going to hell, simple as that.
Hahaha...lets send a few batches of Wiimotes to reinforce the suits of soldiers at war. A couple of Wiimotes strapped all over should garentee they come back alive.
If you look at a wiimote from the more recent batches (especialy if its one that got sent by nintendo because of a defect or another, as a replacement), and compare the straps, the newer wiimotes have much, much better straps. So its already fixed in the newer batches, as far as I can tell.
Ok, that just owns.
That being said, there are already games announced/in development with ideas of such attachments. Since the Wiimote itself can do most of the things one might need, you just need the attachment to make it more immersive, thus making said attachments incredibly cheap (as opposed to, let say, Light Gun games of old that required a full fledged light gun to be bundled in in many cases, etc).
So expect to see them semi-frequently.
Just having it as standard on the roof of 80% of the houses of the metropolitan areas of the world probably would cover a large chunk of the energy requirements. Then build a couple of "solar plants" here and there over the world to sell it like we do with hydro-electric dens right now. Then finish it all up with a few hydrogen or whatever "factories" that use this as power, and you should cover 95%+ of energy needs of the world. Because no solution fits everything, cover the last 5% with the good old fashionned ways (dens, fossil fuel, etc). Even if this is just a pipe dream... if we could only lower fossil fuel use by, let say, 5-10%, that would already have extreme benifits.
I have a feeling its mostly for integration more than anything. For all practical purpose, Excel, Word, Access, Visio, Power Point, are all one and the same. For the use the big payers make of them, it has to be that way.
So integrating all of them means integrating the features. Obviously its easy to think of a reason to have VBA in Excel, Access and Visio. But you might integrate Excel stuff in Word...
Beyond that, Word also gets used as a kind of RAD tools for forms to fill out, such as an internal test. Though in the current world a quick web app probably would do the job better, it wasn't always that way, and there's probably a lot of legacy code to support, etc.
The second reason is kind of obsolete now, and really should be avoided like plague, but the integration between the different Office products do make sense, so....
Definately. Colleges, even top ones, have to catter to the lowest common denominator, on top of spending way WAY too much time (but no real choice on the matter) testing their students.
That means that over a 4 year BAC, honestly, you don't learn much. At all. And the world of IT, sadly, (as opposed to a lot, but not all,of other fields) is incredibly huge, and you need to stay current. A student straight out of one of the best of the best school, but who did nothing beyond learning what he needed to get straight As, is totally useless, even worthless to most employers. Students to get used to the fact that they'll have to learn a LOT on their own. I can already hear a lot of them, again especialy in the top rated schools, crying "But we have so much work, no time for that while in school!".
To that, all I can say is: "sucks to be you, and be happy a lot of large corporations hire in those top schools and offer to finish your training on the job, because the rest of us didn't have that chance".
It IS a critical feature. Like how CSS support is a critical feature for the web. But in both cases, no one has all the critical features, and its annoying as all hells.
Of course, using the extra stuff the databases support (PL/SQL, T-SQL, etc), we manage. But for example, the "workaround" for the window functions are not only ugly, but often quite misunderstood, on top of being difficult to use through dynamic sql (if thats your cup of tea). I keep seeing people using inefficient paging methods in SQL Server 2000 for example, when (while not supporting the actual function to do it "right") there are a few extremely efficient ways. So those features are indeed critical.
A bit like a certain quite popular database engine that shall remain nameless didn't support stored procedures for like ever. People work around it just fine, but...
Database engines are almost consistantly -behind- user's needs, even the fancy commercial ones, nevermind the incomplete ones.
Considering McAfee is nowhere close to the bottom, that says something about that list :)
God i know the feeling. I was back in my younger days hired as a junior programmer at 17$/hour and eventualy was expected to do that, and if I didn't have results by the end of the DAY, i'd get yelled at.
::cough::.
Needless to say, I told my boss to find someone else. Last I learnt they had hired someone who had just graduated to replace me. A graduate straight out of school to do full scale software architecture. Thats looking good
I see where you're getting from, and I agree. Trust me, I hate all this web standard garbage, but since for the time being its what we have to deal with, I try to make the best of it.
When i said XHTML 1.1, I meant it as the "street definition" (so to speak): "It validates on the w3c validator as XHTML 1.1 compliant".
No, it doesn't have the advantages of real XML served this way, but its clean and streamlined, thus for now, it gets the job done.
Sorry for the confusion
That seems to be semi-common among programmers (I'm one myself).
We already separate our model, our engine (controller), and our presentation layer. Each of these are separated in more stuff, and you end up with like 10+ separations for an average sized app.
Then we get to the UI, and if its in web, we're told to again separated it. HTML for the structure, CSS for the formatting, script for the behavior. It starts feeling like overkill, as that adds 3+ layers to an app thats already split up to death, and doesn't quite fit the architecture, either...
Add that in an average ERP system, basically every single page will be totally different from the other, except for "theme" (color, fonts, borders, basic formatting), which is perfectly done in CSS. Its hard to justify then spending as much time making the presentation layer as you did coding whats behind to make it all by the book.
Even worse, there's nothing wrong in using "tables" in desktop clients (like Java Swing), but its wrong in CSS. So honestly, what it feels like, is that the -idea- behind the whole separation of style and structure in XHTML/CSS is a good one, the implementation is garbage. Im really starting to consider these things like Flex or WPF for web app, and be done with it...
Until then, XHTML it is...
If it wasn't for IE, yeah. What I had in mind when i made my exageration was vertical centering, which depending on your needs tend to take 3 div tags to make it perfectly cross-browser and working peachy in pure CSS.
:)
I've looked for some trick that I could be missing, but everywhere I looked, it tend to be that. Of course, you can lower the amount needed by using, as you send, the inside elements, but often its still required to have quite a few too many divs. Being able to use display:table-cell in IE would probably shave these occurences by a lot though.
My gripe so far though is almost purely with 3 things. #1: positioning of elements that do not have fixed sizes (if you fix sizes, then things are a total joke), #2 vertical positioning (mostly fixed once the browser installed based support of table-cell is higher), #3 positioning/sizing of elements that are not tested, relative to each other.
All of this is definately possible. Its just not as clean as it should be, in my opinion. If javascript is a possibility (let say for an internal application), then all problems can be fixed in 5 lines of code and be 100% cross browser, but thats not always possible.
And hey, i'm not the guru among gurus, if there are tricks I haven't been able to find to handle all this over time (very possible), i'm always open minded to learning more stuff. But I spent quite a bit learning all the quirks I could with no easy solutions.
Honestly enough, there's some wisdom in that approach. I mean, other environments do tend to use both tables and styling "rules" together to get the desired result...take Java Swing for example.
::gasps:: use less markup. Doesn't help rendering speed though.
Sometime a very limited and careful use of tables (not a bunch of nested tables garbage) can make the site easier to maintain, and
And obviously, if the site is supposed to be accessible, its not an option...
If you can use javascript to help with some more complex positioning (especialy relative resizing and such), XHTML 1.1 really isn't bad at all. Then you reduce the extra "just for CSS" divs that wouldn't normally be there to a minimum, and keep your HTML page squeeky clean. Not always possible, but often a nice alternative. Especialy since afterward your page can still be accessible (since the page structure is preserved), it still renders faster than html, and its often easier to maintain, and it makes cross-browser a total joke. Obviously, major drawback is that if your users don't have javascript on, this degrades like garbage, but if you're going to use javascript -anyway-...
The problem I see is that CSS in its current form (even if it was fully supported), still has certain things that aren't quite doable. Or they ARE doable. With 15 nested div tags. Not much better than table layouts.
Mind you, table layouts suck bad, but you do have decent tools that can help a tiny bit. Pure CSS layout tools are -just- starting to come out. Mind you (before I get flamed for daring mention using anything beyond notepad/vim/emacs to do HTML/CSS) these tools are just helpers, and should never be depended on, but when in a rush, it really helps, at least with the debugging part. Now, even if CSS was 100% supported, and it was better than table layouts (which it is, even in its current, IE-butched up form), it still has limitations. Parts aren't intuitive (a lot of stuff is plain learning by heart how each rules affect each other and how they stack. Learning crap by heart died over a decade ago, if you ask me), lots of stuff can't be done cleanly (if my HTML page is supposed to be my structure, and my CSS the style, how come do I have to add a bunch of sections that have nothing to do with my structure, just to deal with CSS limitations?), and so on and so on. So tables suck hardcore. CSS suck less, but still suck. So obviously, it is hard to convince someone to switch from one evil to another. The web really needs a new standard that is built in parallele with a reference implementation, with people using it at the same time as it is being built, so that usuability issues can be found as it goes. If possible, something that can be validated on more than just syntax to catch as much errors as possible during validations, with some mild programmatibility (expression support anyone?), etc. As it is now, CSS is being developped by people with too much ideals and visions, and not enough grasp on reality, with only, like, 1 browser successfully implementing it (along with other web standards) in a usuable way, and it did so only semi-recently. And before I pass for an old table hacker like last time i posted something like this, all my current web sites are in XHTML 1.1, with most previous ones validating peachy as XHTML 1 strict, so no, no frustrated table layout designer here. There's no light to see. Just more shades of gray.
Its called being relative. Technology evolved, development techniques and tools evolved too.
Gamecube was quite the powerful console compared to the rest, while Wii is quite weak now.
Making a game for the DS is a joke, relatively speaking. But back in the SNES day, making a game for it was considered quite hardcore.
Thats not taking into consideration that the gamecube had a LOT of other issues, both technical and not.
Good point. I was only thinking about the whole "users are not encouraged to run as root in Linux" deal, but yeah, normal users have all they need, so I guess it only stops the more complicated malware.
thanks for the correction.
Well, considering that #1 if Linux had the market share Windows has, it would be a bigger chunk, the fact is most Windows viruses are probably caught by users -willingly- installing crap on their computers. If you're a retarded user, and you see a "L33t KDE icon package!" and follow instructions that tell you to login as root and run an executable, your box will get owned either way. Sure, Linux takes more steps to prevent this, but still.
The thing is, on higher up consoles that are capable of high end graphics, people expect high end graphics. High end graphics cost a lot of money, and take a lot of time to make. That time cannot be used to enhance gameplay. SOME companies manage to balance both, but they are far and few in between.
Thats half the reason right there that Nintendo made a console that -forces- developers to give up on the fancy graphics. Hopefully it works, then we'll have games worth playing.
Lol, Sonic was able to become "Super" since Sonic 2 on the genesis, and has been able to in (almost) all of the titles since then...
No, its not. Or at least, its not supposed to be. Its just that most browser vulnerabilities come from errors in Javascript. Assuming a "perfect" browser, Javascript is safe. Of course, no browser is perfect, but the odds of getting owned while using, let say, Opera, are pretty god darn low.
That being said, the NET without javascript is one damn boring beast. The only interaction you can then have with your page are links and submit buttons. Might as well read a book.