Bottom line is that these companies have come to the conclusion that having these annoying 'fancy' sites provide more value to potential customers.
It's not unusual, many dial-up have lower income and/or live in rural areas.. not exactly the target demo for the vast majority of companies and sites.
Well, you certainly don't 'need' it. But web designers/developers less and less put out sites and applications with dial-up users in mind (depending on the target audience).
For example, I certainly have noticed that I lean a lot more towards image quality than image size than I did five years ago. So over time, just browsing the web on dial up might get slower and slower.
RTFA. The interview ends with a discussion about how they may be implement JS 2.0 with or without the support of IE through Screaming Monkey, and if it rolls out with Firefox 3.1 then the normal cycle of waiting years for the majority of browsers to support it shouldn't apply.
I agree with the parent. I think it's obvious that email isn't the ideal solution here. Scale this up even a little more (say 25 people) and it's obvious that a shared email account isn't the answer. A forum, as noted, might be appropriate or even looking into to other solutions like 37signal-esque stuffs like Basecamp and Backpackit, might work.
I don't understand point #2. I would agree that if you're using tables for layouts Dreamweaver is better than handcoding. But if you're using tables as they should be used, in the display of tabular data I don't see any difference in speed and if you're doing things right and semantically, while leaving appropriate CSS classes to style the table later it's going to a much bigger pain to do it in design view.
If you know how to do things properly it always comes out better, and usually quicker, by hand.
The only times I've switched into design view is when working on a site that was poorly coded by someone else and I just need to modify some content and don't want to wade through hundreds of lines of whatever proprietary tags were left in there by whatever MS product they exported it from.
Or in rare occasions when I'm entering content, sometimes it's more convenient to start, say, an unordered list in code view then switch over to enter the content because I know DW wont much up the code.
I really am curious as to how much a company like Xpress Web could possibly dedicate to this, from the looks of the web site I'm assuming the proprietor operates from the dumpster behind the quik e mart.
Too lazy, unobservant, or overworked? Many lower level courses consist of a professor and one or more TAs responsible for reading through hundreds of papers in a span of a couple days to a week, moreover the writing assignments in these basic classes (Think "Into to International Relations", "Intro to Ethics", etc) the paper assignments are pretty run of the mill and it is very unlikely that one would even recognize a particular student let alone their writing style.
When I taught these kinds of courses, if a paper contained phrases that were a little too well constructed I would generally type part of the paper into Google and see if it was pulled from Wikipedia, a news story or from some other source, but using this method, each time I was suspicious of a paper would set me back 10 - 15 minutes, which quickly added up. I've never used an anti-plagiarism service but I think that there would be a lot of value in doing so as a first run to flag possible offenders for me to then investigate more fully.
This was at the University of Florida and while I don't believe there to be much educational value in these classes with hundreds of students, classes of that size are common at most major universities. In these kinds of underclassmen classes plagiarism and all sorts of other methods of cheating is rampant. I agree that you would likely be able to tell a plagiarized paper in a upper division course with less than twenty students where papers are expected to be more original and nuanced but those types of courses only account for probably less than half of the courses at any large university.
By government checks I assume you mean food stamps, which cannot be used to buy either cigarettes, lottery tickets, alcohol, or pre-made food (i.e. a sub at public). So either the gas station you go to is acting illegally or you're just one of those 'all poor people are poor because they're living it up off of government money' kind of bitcher without any real knowledge of government programs, poverty, and economics.
I was brought in by a small web design and development company to refine their methodology and process while increasing the overall quality of the work. The owner is essentially a sales person and has no knowledge of the technology beyond (often false) sales sound bites. This has completely undermined almost all my work as the owner makes commitments to clients that are unrealistic given the scope and budget of a given project and as a result client expectations are consistently unmet.
I believe anyone who is in a position to discuss a project with the client should, at a minimum, know the technology to the point where they have a realistic understanding of the cost and time frame of a project and changes to that project.
Now because of the difficulties my company is facing the owner is clamoring to begin using and purchasing templates, outsourcing more of our coding overseas, spending less time understanding what the clients want and beginning production almost immediately. Because he has no understanding of the technology I have had a difficult time convincing him of the value of slowing down the process, understanding client expectations before production, and coding with standards from the ground up.
A personal example of how a lack of technical knowledge can kill a project: the owner oversaw the outsourcing and development of a application using SQL Server 2005 that was to be hosted on one of our shared servers despite that we run 2000 and do not have any 2005 licenses, oops.
That's why you don't confuse 'How to Cook for Forty Humans' with 'How to Cook Forty Humans' as a reference text for AIs, overloads, robots, or NES Gyromite ROB units...
Design of the Book's site
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.
I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you don't pronounce the 'T' though, so phonetically it's "Inter-Knee"..
Bottom line is that these companies have come to the conclusion that having these annoying 'fancy' sites provide more value to potential customers. It's not unusual, many dial-up have lower income and/or live in rural areas.. not exactly the target demo for the vast majority of companies and sites.
Well, you certainly don't 'need' it. But web designers/developers less and less put out sites and applications with dial-up users in mind (depending on the target audience). For example, I certainly have noticed that I lean a lot more towards image quality than image size than I did five years ago. So over time, just browsing the web on dial up might get slower and slower.
RTFA. The interview ends with a discussion about how they may be implement JS 2.0 with or without the support of IE through Screaming Monkey, and if it rolls out with Firefox 3.1 then the normal cycle of waiting years for the majority of browsers to support it shouldn't apply.
I agree with the parent. I think it's obvious that email isn't the ideal solution here. Scale this up even a little more (say 25 people) and it's obvious that a shared email account isn't the answer. A forum, as noted, might be appropriate or even looking into to other solutions like 37signal-esque stuffs like Basecamp and Backpackit, might work.
I don't understand point #2. I would agree that if you're using tables for layouts Dreamweaver is better than handcoding. But if you're using tables as they should be used, in the display of tabular data I don't see any difference in speed and if you're doing things right and semantically, while leaving appropriate CSS classes to style the table later it's going to a much bigger pain to do it in design view.
If you know how to do things properly it always comes out better, and usually quicker, by hand.
The only times I've switched into design view is when working on a site that was poorly coded by someone else and I just need to modify some content and don't want to wade through hundreds of lines of whatever proprietary tags were left in there by whatever MS product they exported it from.
Or in rare occasions when I'm entering content, sometimes it's more convenient to start, say, an unordered list in code view then switch over to enter the content because I know DW wont much up the code.
I really am curious as to how much a company like Xpress Web could possibly dedicate to this, from the looks of the web site I'm assuming the proprietor operates from the dumpster behind the quik e mart.
Great, now we're all going to be sued
seconds / 12 parsecs = internet time that's how fast the Millennium Falcon is!
Too lazy, unobservant, or overworked? Many lower level courses consist of a professor and one or more TAs responsible for reading through hundreds of papers in a span of a couple days to a week, moreover the writing assignments in these basic classes (Think "Into to International Relations", "Intro to Ethics", etc) the paper assignments are pretty run of the mill and it is very unlikely that one would even recognize a particular student let alone their writing style.
When I taught these kinds of courses, if a paper contained phrases that were a little too well constructed I would generally type part of the paper into Google and see if it was pulled from Wikipedia, a news story or from some other source, but using this method, each time I was suspicious of a paper would set me back 10 - 15 minutes, which quickly added up. I've never used an anti-plagiarism service but I think that there would be a lot of value in doing so as a first run to flag possible offenders for me to then investigate more fully.
This was at the University of Florida and while I don't believe there to be much educational value in these classes with hundreds of students, classes of that size are common at most major universities. In these kinds of underclassmen classes plagiarism and all sorts of other methods of cheating is rampant. I agree that you would likely be able to tell a plagiarized paper in a upper division course with less than twenty students where papers are expected to be more original and nuanced but those types of courses only account for probably less than half of the courses at any large university.
By government checks I assume you mean food stamps, which cannot be used to buy either cigarettes, lottery tickets, alcohol, or pre-made food (i.e. a sub at public). So either the gas station you go to is acting illegally or you're just one of those 'all poor people are poor because they're living it up off of government money' kind of bitcher without any real knowledge of government programs, poverty, and economics.
I was brought in by a small web design and development company to refine their methodology and process while increasing the overall quality of the work. The owner is essentially a sales person and has no knowledge of the technology beyond (often false) sales sound bites. This has completely undermined almost all my work as the owner makes commitments to clients that are unrealistic given the scope and budget of a given project and as a result client expectations are consistently unmet.
I believe anyone who is in a position to discuss a project with the client should, at a minimum, know the technology to the point where they have a realistic understanding of the cost and time frame of a project and changes to that project.
Now because of the difficulties my company is facing the owner is clamoring to begin using and purchasing templates, outsourcing more of our coding overseas, spending less time understanding what the clients want and beginning production almost immediately. Because he has no understanding of the technology I have had a difficult time convincing him of the value of slowing down the process, understanding client expectations before production, and coding with standards from the ground up.
A personal example of how a lack of technical knowledge can kill a project: the owner oversaw the outsourcing and development of a application using SQL Server 2005 that was to be hosted on one of our shared servers despite that we run 2000 and do not have any 2005 licenses, oops.
That's why you don't confuse 'How to Cook for Forty Humans' with 'How to Cook Forty Humans' as a reference text for AIs, overloads, robots, or NES Gyromite ROB units...
Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.
I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.