well, that and driving around strange cities. And making rational decisions. Oh, and blowing stuff up! Women will never do *that* very well.
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously
on
Front End Drupal
·
· Score: 1
"Deployment and change management for content and configurations in particular has been a weak point of drupal to this point"
I'd agree, and that in itself makes Drupal a real pain for any kind of real development shop (dev, test, prod servers which should be more or less in sync after a release.)
"You will need to wade into the community to get the most out of drupal, IMHO."
Another thing I dislike. I like community, don't get me wrong. I have been working with a few developers of some popular Drupal modules, and they have been very helpful. But to someone who is evaluating Drupal, why would they want to jump into a community if they aren't going to go with Drupal? Drupal needs some decent "How to get started..." documentation. By that, I mean not just how to install it. I mean a more condensed version of the book "Pro Drupal Development". I should be able to read up on how to implement a hook without having to read API documentation that makes too many assumptions on what I know about Drupal. You'll probably provide a link to counter my last statement, but I think you know what I mean here;)
Personally, anytime a CMS needs a few books dedicated to it, that means that it's grown too large. Don't you think it'd be better to do one or two (or three or four) things really well, and leave the rest alone? Honestly, comparing Drupal with other CMS packages, I think Drupal's strength isn't that it's great at anything. It's more of a matter that it does some things reasonably well and doesn't do anything remarkably horrid like roam the countryside at night eating babies like some other CMS do. That's not a good way to be the "best"; it's called being the tallest midget.
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously
on
Front End Drupal
·
· Score: 1
I am a LAMP developer who was kind of thrown into doing Drupal development. Maybe I can offer some insight.
If you don't have *Drupal* developers, forget it. Drupal's famous learning curve will prevent your guys from working for a while (its been frustrating for me). Documentation isn't great. There are a few books, but...it's *very* complex.
Drupal is more than a mere MVC. It does some cool things, like Inversion of Control (via its hooks) and it does some things I feel a pretty lamebrained (it's so modular you lose performance, sort of like what happens when you over-normalize database tables. Or the way it handles error messaging, forms, and stuff that could be a LOT simpler) Personally, I think in software design simplicity should almost always win out over complexity. Drupal isn't simple. Many will say that's a result of it's flexibility. It is flexible, but that's a cop out. Plus, in spite of it's flexibility...you'll still hit limitations of some kind. Guaranteed. Why? Cause the Drupal developers aren't a bunch of omniscient galactic entities. Yes, they cannot possibly foresee every use case. Drupal is often painted as the panacea for all of your website needs. Shocking as it may seem, it's not quite that.
If you have a blog or some kind of news site that will allow you or others to publish stories and comment on the stories, go for it. If you need something else, you'll be busy cajoling Drupal into cooperating. If you have a LOT of data and you requires users to manage data in bulk fashion (or some other data-heavy operation), forget it.
If you don't fit neatly into that box, here's how you find out if Drupal is for you: install it. Find modules that do roughly what you want. Make them do what you want without doing any coding, and be prepared to make concessions on functionality. If you have the features you need, load your data. If this doesn't kill Drupal (or the modules, to be precise) then bang on it for a while. Any features you cannot make work via the admin panels you should probably forget about unless you want to 1) write your own modules, or 2) make code changes which will probably render your site unable to be easily patched. After all that, replicate the site you set up on another server. If after all of that, it still works, then it might be a good solution. That sounds like a lot, but one sharp person can probably get a good feel for it in a month or two.
If you like all that, then make a decent theme for yourself. All of the existing ones I have seen (and I have looked at the most touted ones) have had serious usability and accessibility issues, as well as a very generic and unimaginative looking design.
Have fun. After I leave this job, let's just say I won't be putting Drupal on my resume. If one day I decide to set up a blog, though, I'd give Drupal a go. But I hope to never have to deal with it again at work. It's way too amateur in too many places, it's convoluted, it's frustrating, and for all it buys you out of the box, there are a lot of limitations to deal with. The more you customize, the denser of a web you weave and it can get really really bloated and complex really fast.
Oh, and totally with you on the user page here on/.
Re:The community isn't really vibrant.
on
Front End Drupal
·
· Score: 1
which is another way to say what I said above: Drupal is fine as a blog or a news site. For everything else, look elsewhere.
um...right. That's why I spent all that time trying to get simple stuff working. Did you even read the post, dude?
Re:Tired of crappy CMS'
on
Front End Drupal
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ah the ever popular Request for Citation, the easy but ultimately ineffective method of deflecting anecdote.
What, do you expect someone to have some case study that considers which percentage of all websites ever created outgrow their CMS? Argh, as if! Anecdote is the best you'll get in this type of discussion. Guess what? IT pros get paid based on their knowledge of anecdote; it's called experience.
I agree with OP. Many of these CMS have fairly limited use cases. As soon as you outgrow that you have to hack its core, which often produces less-then-stellar results. Then you have to learn the (in the case of Drupal) byzantine and poorly documented API.
Use Drupal if you want a blog or some kind of a news site where content is published for people to read and comment on. If you want something more, then creating software to fit your need IS NOT reinventing the wheel. It's building for your particular use case. Don't use a hammer when you need a sawzall.
If you want a skyscraper you wouldn't make the mistake of piling prefab houses on top of one another to reach the desired height (after all, the walls are built! Why, it'd be reinventing the wheel to build walls!) If you want an eCommerce site or some other relatively complex or specialized app, then don't make the mistake using an overgrown blog site. The time you save doing things that *are* wheel reinvention (authentication, user profile, other plumbing functions) will be lost when you need to kludge something together to stay withing the framework and still fit your needs, and then have to support said kludge.
That was my experience with Ubuntu also. After install, most of my devices just worked. No drivers installed, nothing. It just worked. Awesome!
My wife took a look and said she thought it was ugly. Let's be honest here...the UI is a step backward from even ugly XP. It's more Windows 98 than most of us want to admit. It just is, sorry. Ugly, pretty is subjective though.
Then my wife wanted to play music. Then a DVD. Ok, so I fixed that pretty easily by installing some plugins. Music worked, but totem just crashes whenever you put in a DVD. I have no idea why. Honestly, I don't know where to go to check for diagnostic info. I went into the admin panel and found something that looked like an error log, but had no idea what to do with the info I found.
Then she wanted a music player that didn't look like it snuck off a windows 95 box (she uses iTunes, which I detest but also haven't found anything better). I got Songbird as somewhat of a compromise. But then she wanted to burn a CD with Songbird. No can do, gotta use Brasero.
Then she wanted to use her Hauppage Capture card. I did find some library that supposedly installs some drivers for this thing. I am a software developer, and can ususally figure stuff out. But I had no idea what to do with this thing. No idea. The documentation was awesome, and by awesome, I mean nonexistent.
Then our children wanted to play some of their games. I got crossover games edition, and that sort of worked. Except for the graphics don't look right. Now I gotta use the CLI to get the right xorg driver or something like that. In other words, more work than I wanna do during my leisure time.
See, here's the thing: I work with linux servers all day long. I know my way around the CLI. I also really really wanted to have a go at finally replacing my windows machines with Ubuntu (been trying since Dapper.) I was excited cause I had heard so many good things about Feisty. So I wanted to make this work. A month later, though, and I find myself having to concede defeat yet again. And I am not happy about it, because I had such high hopes AND because of my wasted time.
So if a motivated geek (but perhaps not an OS geek) cannot get linux to work for VERY NORMAL use cases...how on earth do you expect normal users to do it?
Sad part is that the fanbois will probably jump all over me. If the stupid zealots would stop for a sec and see the flaws, maybe someone would work on fixing them.
Linux is great for servers. Starting a new job soon, and I chose to get a desktop with Ubuntu installed. For a developer's box, for a server, or even for someone who just wants to surf the web or check eMail, linux is a GREAT option. But for the vast majority of users, who want multimedia, want games, want to use special hardware, or need to use certain pieces of software, linux is and probably never will be a viable choice. After trying for years to make the switch to Ubuntu, I am starting to come to this conclusion. It makes me sad, cause I really wanted to see it work. But I don't know if I'll go through the headache of trying to make the switch again for a couple of years now.
I think the guy who wrote the article is right on, as are all the other articles constructively criticizing Linux. The linux zealots need to pull their heads out of their collective anus, stop it with the lame-brained flamefests over articles like this, and square up to reality.
I created a Facebook profile just to see what all the hype was about. I was amazed at how many people sent me quizzes and so forth. It really is a pointless waste of time. Just for fun, I took one just to see...and when it asked for my phone number the mission was aborted.
The people who sent me quizzes are smart people, too. I don't know what it is about finding your IQ, or which Star Wars character you are, or whatever. It obviously gives people some kind of fulfillment that makes it worth surrendering so much personal info. I don't get it.
I guess facebook has to make money somehow, but the quizzes seem more slimy than just using the regular old ads we are all used to.
I dunno, I mean perhaps one piddly server isn't good enough for your "bloated" code (note my use of quotation marks around bloated, please don't flame me for calling your code bloated.) But with distributed computing coming of age, why not get five or ten commodity (read: old) boxes and string them together with something like hadoop? At least for web development. For a project I am working on now we are looking at this very thing, and so far, it's looking good. I can get ten commodity servers for less than I can pay for some monster of a web server, and I get redundancy and load balancing as a bonus.
I take this article to mean that the $50,000 server with liquidN2 cooled processor array is, in many cases, going the way of the mainframe. The power is still there, it's just how do you get there?
That is, from a server perspective. I think the popularity of netbooks makes the case well enough for "Good enough" desktop computing.
There will always be a need for the fastest, most powerful stuff you can get. But not everyone has that need.
I see what you are saying and I agree. Having a "kewl" interface and geek cred are not the same thing.
I think we are saying the same thing just from a different angle. I liked Slashdot's UI of five years ago. Today it's trying too hard to be all modern and web 2.0 and failing miserably. Personally, I write web code to standards. I care about that. I also like to design simple clean user interfaces. Slashdot has never had either, and that's OK, I don't come to/. to admire the HTML. But when a lame UI gets in the way of enjoying/., that's when I complain./. doesn't need a cool user interface. It just needs one I can use without having to deal with sliders and weird buttons that do strange and unpredictable things, lightbox style dialogue boxes, and other useless chrome. Dammit! Just give me news, let me read and post comments, and maybe metamod once in a while without having to deal with mystery meat navigation. I come to slashdot precisely because it's NOT digg. So stop it with the stupid UI tricks already.
Oh, and I couldn't help but notice you are standing on my lawn. Could you kindly remove yourself from the premises at once? Jeeves, release the hounds!
Yes, I remember the contest. So what if standards compliance wasn't a requirements. A good usable design should have been a requirement. Not the steaming pile of crap that is Slashdot now.
"Most geeks are lazy, no?" No! I'd say a defining characteristic of being a geek is having a curiosity about how something works and then expending the effort to understand it. Intellectual laziness is how you stop being a geek.
I don't think you meant to reply to me...but if you did you are a fool. If there has been anyone railing loudly against IE in this discussion, that would be me.
My critique of/.'s design has nothing to do with IE. *I* certainly don't use IE. It's that the design sucks, is hard to use, loads too slowly, tries to do too much and does nothing well, and really just looks like a complete mongoloid threw it together in Frontpage. I'd take the sucky but somewhat predictable and usable design of five years ago to the garbage that is here now. I don't even post on/. that much anymore; it's just a pain to use and look at. Slashdot, look! your irrelevance is showing!
Every time I come here I wonder what kind of totally pointless misfeature I'll find next.
If MSFT wanted to, they could do it. It's just not a top priority. Making money by selling features and entrenching their own technology is a top priority, and reasonably so; they are a business after all. But other entities have developed reasonably compliant browsers, so it's not impossible.
MSFT can do what they want, I don't care unless I have to support their laziness. And since I am a web developer I have to support their laziness. Which is why I encourage people to switch away from IE every chance I get.
Yes, I'd like to know who the devs are for the/. UI. I like slashdot a lot, but one has to wonder: if slashdot's own code is this bad and the interface is this bad, just how much geek cred does/. have anymore? A geek site should set the standard. Looks like they got some MBAs to redesign this site.
Innovation is back, but not in IE's trailer park. Innovation is being driven by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
I have been using IE8 since an early beta, and there's nothing at all to see there. I actually really tried to give it a shot because face it, most people will eventually be using it on my sites. It was actually frustratingly disappointing. But only a little frustrating. If they keep this up, even normal users will tire of IE.
You even had to ask? Who cares about standards when you've gotta push Silverlight and Webslices onto everyone in the world? MSFT doesn't care about the progress of the web except for trying to lock people in.
Anyone who thinks IE add ons are anywhere near Firefox's add-ons is a tuber. Totally clueless.
It's not about the tech (activeX vs XUL+js), it's about the usefulness.
What it's really about is that IE uses the MSFT model, where Firefox used the community based model. There is no community with MSFT. The Add Ons look like the byproduct of an afternoon of IE devs brainstorming about what kind of add ons to create. Nothing user-driven, just a bunch of marketing crap designed to push silverlight and webslices and so on. Firefox's add ons, on the other hand, server real purposes and are community developed. I can think of a few Firefox plugins that make Firefox my most important web development tool. IE does nothing of the sort.
First, I see the IE Add-Ons site is better than when I last visited.
But it goes to show how with IE8, MSFT continues to thumb its collective nose at developers.
Piss-poor standards support being a given, look at the page you linked to. See the development add-ons? No? Me either. Nothing to provide developers with any real tools or insight into a page.
Now, look at the plugins. Mostly all of them are just search providers and web slices. NOTHING AT ALL like Firefox's plugins, which add REAL functionality. Yes, you can get search providers for Firefox, but they don't dress search providers up as bonafide Add-Ons.
Now, installing one of the plugins...I picked Oomph microformats toolbar. Installed easily, but I had to step through about ten dialogue boxes including a license agreement. Then a window popped up explaining the toolbar. But then after restarting IE, where is the tool bar? I go to the Tools menu to look for it, then the OTHER Tools menu (btw, how dumb is that? two tools menus that do different things). Nothing. I honestly have NO IDEA how to use the toolbar I just installed.
If you are comparing that to Firefox's community developed set of Add Ons, you are totally clueless.
Honestly, I can't even believe you trundled out the link to that POS website.
From what I can tell from reading about them and experimenting with IE8, Webslices are just MSFT attempts at creating a dumb and quasi-open replacement for RSS. I won't be putting web slice code in any of my sites anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
well, that and driving around strange cities. And making rational decisions. Oh, and blowing stuff up! Women will never do *that* very well.
"Deployment and change management for content and configurations in particular has been a weak point of drupal to this point"
I'd agree, and that in itself makes Drupal a real pain for any kind of real development shop (dev, test, prod servers which should be more or less in sync after a release.)
"You will need to wade into the community to get the most out of drupal, IMHO."
Another thing I dislike. I like community, don't get me wrong. I have been working with a few developers of some popular Drupal modules, and they have been very helpful. But to someone who is evaluating Drupal, why would they want to jump into a community if they aren't going to go with Drupal? Drupal needs some decent "How to get started..." documentation. By that, I mean not just how to install it. I mean a more condensed version of the book "Pro Drupal Development". I should be able to read up on how to implement a hook without having to read API documentation that makes too many assumptions on what I know about Drupal. You'll probably provide a link to counter my last statement, but I think you know what I mean here ;)
Personally, anytime a CMS needs a few books dedicated to it, that means that it's grown too large. Don't you think it'd be better to do one or two (or three or four) things really well, and leave the rest alone? Honestly, comparing Drupal with other CMS packages, I think Drupal's strength isn't that it's great at anything. It's more of a matter that it does some things reasonably well and doesn't do anything remarkably horrid like roam the countryside at night eating babies like some other CMS do. That's not a good way to be the "best"; it's called being the tallest midget.
I am a LAMP developer who was kind of thrown into doing Drupal development. Maybe I can offer some insight.
If you don't have *Drupal* developers, forget it. Drupal's famous learning curve will prevent your guys from working for a while (its been frustrating for me). Documentation isn't great. There are a few books, but...it's *very* complex.
Drupal is more than a mere MVC. It does some cool things, like Inversion of Control (via its hooks) and it does some things I feel a pretty lamebrained (it's so modular you lose performance, sort of like what happens when you over-normalize database tables. Or the way it handles error messaging, forms, and stuff that could be a LOT simpler) Personally, I think in software design simplicity should almost always win out over complexity. Drupal isn't simple. Many will say that's a result of it's flexibility. It is flexible, but that's a cop out. Plus, in spite of it's flexibility...you'll still hit limitations of some kind. Guaranteed. Why? Cause the Drupal developers aren't a bunch of omniscient galactic entities. Yes, they cannot possibly foresee every use case. Drupal is often painted as the panacea for all of your website needs. Shocking as it may seem, it's not quite that.
If you have a blog or some kind of news site that will allow you or others to publish stories and comment on the stories, go for it. If you need something else, you'll be busy cajoling Drupal into cooperating. If you have a LOT of data and you requires users to manage data in bulk fashion (or some other data-heavy operation), forget it.
If you don't fit neatly into that box, here's how you find out if Drupal is for you: install it. Find modules that do roughly what you want. Make them do what you want without doing any coding, and be prepared to make concessions on functionality. If you have the features you need, load your data. If this doesn't kill Drupal (or the modules, to be precise) then bang on it for a while. Any features you cannot make work via the admin panels you should probably forget about unless you want to 1) write your own modules, or 2) make code changes which will probably render your site unable to be easily patched. After all that, replicate the site you set up on another server. If after all of that, it still works, then it might be a good solution. That sounds like a lot, but one sharp person can probably get a good feel for it in a month or two.
If you like all that, then make a decent theme for yourself. All of the existing ones I have seen (and I have looked at the most touted ones) have had serious usability and accessibility issues, as well as a very generic and unimaginative looking design.
Have fun. After I leave this job, let's just say I won't be putting Drupal on my resume. If one day I decide to set up a blog, though, I'd give Drupal a go. But I hope to never have to deal with it again at work. It's way too amateur in too many places, it's convoluted, it's frustrating, and for all it buys you out of the box, there are a lot of limitations to deal with. The more you customize, the denser of a web you weave and it can get really really bloated and complex really fast.
Oh, and totally with you on the user page here on /.
which is another way to say what I said above: Drupal is fine as a blog or a news site. For everything else, look elsewhere.
um...right. That's why I spent all that time trying to get simple stuff working. Did you even read the post, dude?
Ah the ever popular Request for Citation, the easy but ultimately ineffective method of deflecting anecdote.
What, do you expect someone to have some case study that considers which percentage of all websites ever created outgrow their CMS? Argh, as if! Anecdote is the best you'll get in this type of discussion. Guess what? IT pros get paid based on their knowledge of anecdote; it's called experience.
I agree with OP. Many of these CMS have fairly limited use cases. As soon as you outgrow that you have to hack its core, which often produces less-then-stellar results. Then you have to learn the (in the case of Drupal) byzantine and poorly documented API.
Use Drupal if you want a blog or some kind of a news site where content is published for people to read and comment on. If you want something more, then creating software to fit your need IS NOT reinventing the wheel. It's building for your particular use case. Don't use a hammer when you need a sawzall.
If you want a skyscraper you wouldn't make the mistake of piling prefab houses on top of one another to reach the desired height (after all, the walls are built! Why, it'd be reinventing the wheel to build walls!) If you want an eCommerce site or some other relatively complex or specialized app, then don't make the mistake using an overgrown blog site. The time you save doing things that *are* wheel reinvention (authentication, user profile, other plumbing functions) will be lost when you need to kludge something together to stay withing the framework and still fit your needs, and then have to support said kludge.
That was my experience with Ubuntu also. After install, most of my devices just worked. No drivers installed, nothing. It just worked. Awesome!
My wife took a look and said she thought it was ugly. Let's be honest here...the UI is a step backward from even ugly XP. It's more Windows 98 than most of us want to admit. It just is, sorry. Ugly, pretty is subjective though.
Then my wife wanted to play music. Then a DVD. Ok, so I fixed that pretty easily by installing some plugins. Music worked, but totem just crashes whenever you put in a DVD. I have no idea why. Honestly, I don't know where to go to check for diagnostic info. I went into the admin panel and found something that looked like an error log, but had no idea what to do with the info I found.
Then she wanted a music player that didn't look like it snuck off a windows 95 box (she uses iTunes, which I detest but also haven't found anything better). I got Songbird as somewhat of a compromise. But then she wanted to burn a CD with Songbird. No can do, gotta use Brasero.
Then she wanted to use her Hauppage Capture card. I did find some library that supposedly installs some drivers for this thing. I am a software developer, and can ususally figure stuff out. But I had no idea what to do with this thing. No idea. The documentation was awesome, and by awesome, I mean nonexistent.
Then our children wanted to play some of their games. I got crossover games edition, and that sort of worked. Except for the graphics don't look right. Now I gotta use the CLI to get the right xorg driver or something like that. In other words, more work than I wanna do during my leisure time.
See, here's the thing: I work with linux servers all day long. I know my way around the CLI. I also really really wanted to have a go at finally replacing my windows machines with Ubuntu (been trying since Dapper.) I was excited cause I had heard so many good things about Feisty. So I wanted to make this work. A month later, though, and I find myself having to concede defeat yet again. And I am not happy about it, because I had such high hopes AND because of my wasted time.
So if a motivated geek (but perhaps not an OS geek) cannot get linux to work for VERY NORMAL use cases...how on earth do you expect normal users to do it?
Sad part is that the fanbois will probably jump all over me. If the stupid zealots would stop for a sec and see the flaws, maybe someone would work on fixing them.
Linux is great for servers. Starting a new job soon, and I chose to get a desktop with Ubuntu installed. For a developer's box, for a server, or even for someone who just wants to surf the web or check eMail, linux is a GREAT option. But for the vast majority of users, who want multimedia, want games, want to use special hardware, or need to use certain pieces of software, linux is and probably never will be a viable choice. After trying for years to make the switch to Ubuntu, I am starting to come to this conclusion. It makes me sad, cause I really wanted to see it work. But I don't know if I'll go through the headache of trying to make the switch again for a couple of years now.
I think the guy who wrote the article is right on, as are all the other articles constructively criticizing Linux. The linux zealots need to pull their heads out of their collective anus, stop it with the lame-brained flamefests over articles like this, and square up to reality.
heh, that's assuming I actually put in my real phone number!
I created a Facebook profile just to see what all the hype was about. I was amazed at how many people sent me quizzes and so forth. It really is a pointless waste of time. Just for fun, I took one just to see...and when it asked for my phone number the mission was aborted.
The people who sent me quizzes are smart people, too. I don't know what it is about finding your IQ, or which Star Wars character you are, or whatever. It obviously gives people some kind of fulfillment that makes it worth surrendering so much personal info. I don't get it.
I guess facebook has to make money somehow, but the quizzes seem more slimy than just using the regular old ads we are all used to.
Well, you know what they say: A banana in the tail pipe is worth two in the poop chute!
I dunno, I mean perhaps one piddly server isn't good enough for your "bloated" code (note my use of quotation marks around bloated, please don't flame me for calling your code bloated.) But with distributed computing coming of age, why not get five or ten commodity (read: old) boxes and string them together with something like hadoop? At least for web development. For a project I am working on now we are looking at this very thing, and so far, it's looking good. I can get ten commodity servers for less than I can pay for some monster of a web server, and I get redundancy and load balancing as a bonus.
I take this article to mean that the $50,000 server with liquidN2 cooled processor array is, in many cases, going the way of the mainframe. The power is still there, it's just how do you get there?
That is, from a server perspective. I think the popularity of netbooks makes the case well enough for "Good enough" desktop computing.
There will always be a need for the fastest, most powerful stuff you can get. But not everyone has that need.
And then you get to live in the Shire and change your last name to Baggins!
Actually, he does. It's 666. Try it: Make AC a friend
also
Make AC a foe
I see what you are saying and I agree. Having a "kewl" interface and geek cred are not the same thing.
I think we are saying the same thing just from a different angle. I liked Slashdot's UI of five years ago. Today it's trying too hard to be all modern and web 2.0 and failing miserably. Personally, I write web code to standards. I care about that. I also like to design simple clean user interfaces. Slashdot has never had either, and that's OK, I don't come to /. to admire the HTML. But when a lame UI gets in the way of enjoying /., that's when I complain. /. doesn't need a cool user interface. It just needs one I can use without having to deal with sliders and weird buttons that do strange and unpredictable things, lightbox style dialogue boxes, and other useless chrome. Dammit! Just give me news, let me read and post comments, and maybe metamod once in a while without having to deal with mystery meat navigation. I come to slashdot precisely because it's NOT digg. So stop it with the stupid UI tricks already.
Oh, and I couldn't help but notice you are standing on my lawn. Could you kindly remove yourself from the premises at once? Jeeves, release the hounds!
Yes, I remember the contest. So what if standards compliance wasn't a requirements. A good usable design should have been a requirement. Not the steaming pile of crap that is Slashdot now.
"Most geeks are lazy, no?"
No! I'd say a defining characteristic of being a geek is having a curiosity about how something works and then expending the effort to understand it. Intellectual laziness is how you stop being a geek.
I don't think you meant to reply to me...but if you did you are a fool. If there has been anyone railing loudly against IE in this discussion, that would be me.
My critique of /.'s design has nothing to do with IE. *I* certainly don't use IE. It's that the design sucks, is hard to use, loads too slowly, tries to do too much and does nothing well, and really just looks like a complete mongoloid threw it together in Frontpage. I'd take the sucky but somewhat predictable and usable design of five years ago to the garbage that is here now. I don't even post on /. that much anymore; it's just a pain to use and look at. Slashdot, look! your irrelevance is showing!
Every time I come here I wonder what kind of totally pointless misfeature I'll find next.
If MSFT wanted to, they could do it. It's just not a top priority. Making money by selling features and entrenching their own technology is a top priority, and reasonably so; they are a business after all. But other entities have developed reasonably compliant browsers, so it's not impossible.
MSFT can do what they want, I don't care unless I have to support their laziness. And since I am a web developer I have to support their laziness. Which is why I encourage people to switch away from IE every chance I get.
Yes, I'd like to know who the devs are for the /. UI. I like slashdot a lot, but one has to wonder: if slashdot's own code is this bad and the interface is this bad, just how much geek cred does /. have anymore? A geek site should set the standard. Looks like they got some MBAs to redesign this site.
Ok, troll...I'll bite. Re-read the summary. Reads like a MSFT press junket. Plus, "leapfrogged" Firefox? Um, no. Not even close.
Innovation is back, but not in IE's trailer park. Innovation is being driven by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
I have been using IE8 since an early beta, and there's nothing at all to see there. I actually really tried to give it a shot because face it, most people will eventually be using it on my sites. It was actually frustratingly disappointing. But only a little frustrating. If they keep this up, even normal users will tire of IE.
"They're attempting to adhere to standards, as best they can"
Total BS. If MSFT wanted to adhere to standards, they would. Trouble is, they don't care.
You even had to ask? Who cares about standards when you've gotta push Silverlight and Webslices onto everyone in the world? MSFT doesn't care about the progress of the web except for trying to lock people in.
Anyone who thinks IE add ons are anywhere near Firefox's add-ons is a tuber. Totally clueless.
It's not about the tech (activeX vs XUL+js), it's about the usefulness.
What it's really about is that IE uses the MSFT model, where Firefox used the community based model. There is no community with MSFT. The Add Ons look like the byproduct of an afternoon of IE devs brainstorming about what kind of add ons to create. Nothing user-driven, just a bunch of marketing crap designed to push silverlight and webslices and so on. Firefox's add ons, on the other hand, server real purposes and are community developed. I can think of a few Firefox plugins that make Firefox my most important web development tool. IE does nothing of the sort.
First, I see the IE Add-Ons site is better than when I last visited.
But it goes to show how with IE8, MSFT continues to thumb its collective nose at developers.
Piss-poor standards support being a given, look at the page you linked to. See the development add-ons? No? Me either. Nothing to provide developers with any real tools or insight into a page.
Now, look at the plugins. Mostly all of them are just search providers and web slices. NOTHING AT ALL like Firefox's plugins, which add REAL functionality. Yes, you can get search providers for Firefox, but they don't dress search providers up as bonafide Add-Ons.
Now, installing one of the plugins...I picked Oomph microformats toolbar. Installed easily, but I had to step through about ten dialogue boxes including a license agreement. Then a window popped up explaining the toolbar. But then after restarting IE, where is the tool bar? I go to the Tools menu to look for it, then the OTHER Tools menu (btw, how dumb is that? two tools menus that do different things). Nothing. I honestly have NO IDEA how to use the toolbar I just installed.
If you are comparing that to Firefox's community developed set of Add Ons, you are totally clueless.
Honestly, I can't even believe you trundled out the link to that POS website.
From what I can tell from reading about them and experimenting with IE8, Webslices are just MSFT attempts at creating a dumb and quasi-open replacement for RSS. I won't be putting web slice code in any of my sites anytime soon.