Re:It's nice for little things.
on
Rails Recipes
·
· Score: 1
I tried ruby on rails, although I didn't give it much of a chance. Here's why I didn't like it. If your building a small project, the model-view-controller thing can get really annoying, with the needing of 3 files for a single web page thing. Because it's not compiled, it seems like it's not a good idea for really large projects either. What is the big draw of ruby on rails? I really couldn't find any reason why I'd want to use it above PHP, and it doesn't really have the qualities needed to take on something like Java or.Net.
Read the documentation and tutorials of Rails. Read the opinions people leave on various forums. You'll notice something frequently recurring: they keep talking about "magic" and "magical features" (literally).
Rails became popular since the MVC architecture it enforces allows you to feel you're using a "more professional" paradigm for developing web applications, and lots of newcomers were attracted by the promise for "worry free development" that Rails promotes.
In fact, Rails has very little real world usage. Trying to adapt it to an existing database schema can make you cry, and their entire "convention over configuration" idea falls completely.
Lots of the "magic" it does, like Active Record and routing / route generation, add significant overhead to each page request, for the sake of abstracting and keeping things flexible that don't need to be flexible in the first place (especially with modern refactoring tools found in modern IDE-s).
RoR is and WILL remain a niche, since there are already too many attempts at people employing it for large sites with very poor results.
It's a popular fact that the official site of Rails itself runs on PHP, to which the excuse is that RoR is "for web apps and not for web sites"... which of course is a very poor excuse when the difference between both nowadays is only superficial.
What I like about Rails is that it resulted in a huge movement towards MVC in plenty of other languages and frameworks.
What I don't like is that those same languages don't try to apply MVC in a smart, efficient, light and performant way, but just rip Rails' features one by one, with routes and all.
People assume Rails and "web MVC" are the same thing, but they are not. A lot of the architecture in Rails is poorly conceived, and takes huge amount of resources to run abstractions of questionable use in real world application.
I suppose this will auto-correct itself as the "Rails fad" passes, but one thing's for certain: after Rails, web development will never be the same.
You know, I'm sick of "but Linux has this: see Gnome, see Vim" talk.
I'll acknowledge your attempts at proving Linux a viable desktop alternative, has any connection to reality, when you get a small-to-medium firm of lawyer consultants, for example, to use Vim and Tex for all their document related work.
Otherwise what exactly are you doing telling you that you use Vim? Why should we care? How is it related at all to the subject in discussion?
Are "simpler" folks supposed to look up to Those Skilled in The Vim and spend billions training their staff in the intricacies of running a Linux OS and software for casual daily activity?
Read this: NOONE CARES Gnome has "same or better" GUI than Windows. NOONE CARES they can save $500/computer while rendering their staff incapable of handling their machines, NOONE CARES that you use Vim.
AOP is largely mysterious and confusing because...
I never said its mysterious and confusing however. I just said it's poorly conceived and wrecks maintainability.
AOP solves the N times problem nicely. For instance, if you wanted to take an object with N methods and add a call x() to each of them, if you used ordinary OOP, you'd have to override every method, then call x() from each method. What's the elegance of that? I don't see how "proper" OOP can solve this sort of problem better than AOP.
You see, the thing is, if I override every method and call a piece of code in OOP, I can only do it to a class I extend. And when you instantiate the child class, you know it runs the code defined within it.
With AOP, you can have some piece of code affecting code in some completely different place, other class package, and classes which instantiate it wouldn't have the slightest idea this is happening.
Your "N times" issue solved by AOP is a nice example of what I said: it's an excuse for poorly designed OOP packages.
Of course, a problem defined as "I need to run x for every method in those classes" is also not well defined enough so I could tell you how to solve it.
The two pervasive example where AOP makes sense that I've seen so far are:
- logging - validation
Logging is best solved via the debug utilities inside the language, or via common functionality inherited by a common class. It's also quite a specific issue solved by AOP, you can't claim logging is a generic case of "N times problem", whatever meaning you put in this phrase.
Equally odd is the validation example. Would you trust validation to run via "stealth" code injections produced by AOP? What are we exactly saving here? Time? File size?
The AOP advocates give examples like:
int getXYZ(Data data) { ... looooots of validation code repeated in every method...
.. code processing data...
return dataProcessed; }
and explain how you have to "copy/paste" this for all your get*() methods, for example.
then go on to say how the magic of AOP solves this by injecting code on all your get* methods.
What if I have a get* method that is so called but I need different processing for it? What if I have otherwise named method that should also run this validation code? Just few questions popping up. And suddenly AOP is not so easy except in few tightly specialised cases.
Not to mention you can shorten the above example to just this, using strictly OOP facilities:
int getXYZ(Data data) {
validate(data);// throws exception if not valid
... core data processing...
return dataProcessed; }
suddenly the huge problem AOP solves is making this single line invisible, and you need special magical IDE functionality to hunt it down where in the source code tree it is.
Let's even be more extreme and ask: if your get* (in this case) methods are SO generic that they ALL can reuse the exact same validation code injections, why have separate methods at all?
int get[PROPERTYNAME](Data data)
suddenly becomes:
int get(String propertyName, Data data)
.. and now you have to type the validation code just once. And it's all visible and no need for special tools.
FTFA: I hope you didn't put too much money on it! I don't see aspect-oriented programming escaping the "academic ghetto" any day soon, and if it does, it will be less pervasive than OO. When it works, aspect-oriented programming is elegant, but it's not clear how many applications significantly benefit from its use.
Totally agreed. AOP is a strange form of "dynamic" insertion of code at special "cut points" of execution within the code and represent a very very lazy way to avoid good OOP structure of your applications.
In a bigger framework AOP can be totally unpredictable and wreck otherwise locked and working code.
When AOP started to pick some speed in the beginning I was naturally both interested and slightly annoyed that so short after OOP here's yet another concept for programming I have to learn and implement in my software.
Not so fast though, since as much as OOP provides useful abstractions that makes your code more readable and predictable, AOP does exactly the opposite except in few very limited cases.
IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument.
This piece of information is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
What this professor invented, as many others notices is in fact NaN. You can add NaN to anything and you get NaN. So this is really just a form of error handling and no use of "nullity" exists beyond detecting errors as I see it.
This is since his definition is wrong. If we want to make some use of division by zero we need to define a workable set of rules that don't conclude with "everything is nothing" and "10 = 20" conclusions which leads us to little use.
What if we do it like with imaginary numbers. We define "zero divided" numbers in a completely new dimension, and hence we can not sum, multiply or divide "nullity" with anything by definition, except "0" which then produces 1.
Then we will at least not get non-nonsensical outcomes from it, and further exploring it it may actually be useful. I'll use "N" for nullity in few examples.
First few axioms:
number / 0 = N * number;
0*N = 1;
N / 0 = N^2;
-------------------
10 / 0 = 10N;
10N*0 = 10; -> there we go, the result now makes sense
10N / 0 = 10*N^2;
10*N^2 + 20 = 10*N^2 + 20; -> i.e. you can't just "add" 20 to N since they are in different realms, this is consistent with complex numbers.
Intel and Microsoft are big corporations. Big corporations:
1. can't afford to take chances when there's even slight chance a startup may become a viable competitor 2. can afford money-wise and resource-wise to react to even the silliest of those potential competitors
I'm not saying OLPC is silly, but I'm just saying: don't make a big deal of it. Intel/MS just want their options covered.
Let's not forget that cheap computers for poor countries were made long before OLPC (and all failed) and will continue to be made. The least thing: it'll be fun to watch the development in this "market".
And best of all, a huge percentage of spam is now images that circumvent traditional text analysis.
Now look at that statement and think a little. How would we filter this? Gee.. a tough one... hmm...
Let me think about it...
(41 years 6 months 10 days later)
We'll filter e-mails with images! Who needs friggin images in e-mails anyway. They are used for few purposes:
1. newsletters (aka "nice spam"), but newsletters can learn to be leaner. 2. pointless (and huge) "image signatures" showing off your latest company logo. This practice should be shot anyway.
Some time ago, a M$ exec say, they can write better code than Open Source. After so many years, and so many programmers and so many billion dollars we did not see any better code than open source.
You never saw any Microsoft code since it's not open source. So your whole point is moot. But people who have seem Microsoft source through their programs are speaking of very well designed and written code, except for hacks required for backwards compatibility, but this is another topic entirely.
That's a pretty serious oversimplification. EA bought Maxis, and then tried to kill The Sims. Any "highly experimental" game that comes out of EA is an accident, not an experiment.
Actually mine was the right oversimplification, and your is putting a human face on a corporation, which we know it's not.
The momet Maxis was purchased by EA, it's part of EA corporation and that's all. From that point on, it's business as usual. If EA's strategy is wrong, they won't profit, won't be on the market. They don't cut strange deals on blank CD media, consoles and don't sue 80 year old grandmas for pirating Need for Speed.
They profit in only one way: people like and buy their games.
he developers who are creative and try to build new, interesting games every time in the interest of having fun and helping others have fun.
And the developers who are in an 'arms race' to make the most flashy eye candy possible in the name of capturing market share.
Gosh, wonder where EA fits in?
EA fits both categories, they have highly experimental games coming from studios they own like Maxis. Don't forget Spore as well.
But a big business can't run their entire operation, for years, based no the premise "hey let's risk everything and hope our experiments have commercial success".
They are doing what they need to be doing to stay in business: and they are staying, until now.
FTFS: Techworld is one of many that is already looking at Xandros as a possible challenger to Windows Vista
What a bold statement, and supported by nothing. What do you know, marketeers and reporters STILL have no problem spewing BS that makes no sense, as long as it attracts attention.
This sounds like just another one of these "Linux Is Read and Poised To Overthrow Microsoft on the Desktop!" articles that Slashdot sees every couple months (especially around the end of the year, when next year just might be the Year of Linux).
The sad part is we actually had better reasons to believe this before, when Linux was making big steps towards the desktop computers. Now, people just seem to throw this out without even some shred of credibility, just to make the news of the day, if possible.
If nothing else, from past and current articles like this, we know what competitor features will NOT throw Windows out of the market:
- Free - Ooooh shiny! - Open Source - Can work with NTFS (sorry, Windows can work with NTFS too...heh) - Souped up alternatives for Exchange and Active Directory
So you mean, M$ do this IE6 sh*t because of someting else ?
Yes, because of.NET
You see according to their strategy Longhorn (now Vista) is built upon, if they wouldn't have completed this iteration of.NET technologies and in a reliable, easy to use manner, they could as well lose the entire market.
They deemed it was crucial to present the next iteration of their desktop/net platform as soon as possible, and that it should be better than anything out there created before. So they concentrated on this.
I wouldn't blame them, I and my team only recently were in a somewhat similar situation though of course on a much smaller scale.
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.
Of course there is, I hope you sense my irony. I don't sweat if I have to use a simple 2-3 cell table to achieve a layout that is ridiculous to achieve with CSS.
The only reliable CSS layout technique in terms of main page sections is now faux columns. It only works with fixed width (adaptation for flexible width are ugly like death itself and involve 3000px wide GIF images with 2000px wide transparent sections and other such monstrosities).
As you know: some things can be done with CSS floating or absolute/relative pos and margins. For everything else, there's tables tm.
Don't make me laugh. Microsoft still haven't come anywhere close to finishing their CSS 2 implementation, the specification for which was published over eight years ago. The same goes for other specifications - for example, they've only just finished PNG, and that specification was published over a decade ago. You simply can't call the W3C too slow for Microsoft when it's Microsoft that can't keep up with the W3C.
If you think Microsoft has problems implementing rendering engines and image parsers/manipulators, you should check that section on.NET and base your judgement on that.
And I assure you, IE7 will be replaced with an ever better version of IE ~Q1 2007.
Microsoft did start adhering to the standards. They just stopped long before they were done.
They actually *created* a noticeable chunk of said standards. Microsoft employees were part of the CSS, XML, XHTML creation committees and had significant contributions to those standards.
You can however understand that a commercial company where time is money and money is matter of survival in a market developing with a furious pace would be disappointed at the speed at which W3C works.
IE6 was abandoned for no other reason but the creation of what is today known as.NET 3.0 (a.k.a. WinFX a.k.a.NET 2.0 + Avalon + Indigo etc), XPF and other standards which would've taken decades to produce at W3C.
You gotta applaud Microsoft that for all crap they spew at times, they are brave enough to stand on their own versus copy verbatim what their competition produces (no I'm not being sarcastic)..NET 3.0 is an amazing achievement and I'm sad to admit that despite Microsoft's ambitions to turn it into a cross-platform environment it may remain mostly a novel (and exciting) way to produce great looking and functional Windows applications.
But Microsoft's work is what caused Macromedia (now Adobe) to produce the gem Flex 2, which is viable alternative for web applications running on all major platforms.
Anyway not to get carried away, now that Microsoft have realized their strategy and "vision" with.NET 3 (and partially with Vista, though it's apparent this is not their final word on what Windows should work like), they are catching up at full speed with the standards, and IE7 is a huge step in the right direction.
Their (public domain) extensions to RSS are also creating incredible new ways for people to interact with web content.
By definition, there are no trusted sources on an untrusted network. As long as I'm on a network where I can fake being you, there is almost nothing anyone can do to verify with 100% certainty that you are really you.
If I were you, I'd pack some food, water, cash and run far away, as VeriSign and Thawte just sent a team of hitmen after you.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried ruby on rails, although I didn't give it much of a chance. Here's why I didn't like it. If your building a small project, the model-view-controller thing can get really annoying, with the needing of 3 files for a single web page thing. Because it's not compiled, it seems like it's not a good idea for really large projects either. What is the big draw of ruby on rails? I really couldn't find any reason why I'd want to use it above PHP, and it doesn't really have the qualities needed to take on something like Java or .Net.
Read the documentation and tutorials of Rails. Read the opinions people leave on various forums. You'll notice something frequently recurring: they keep talking about "magic" and "magical features" (literally).
Rails became popular since the MVC architecture it enforces allows you to feel you're using a "more professional" paradigm for developing web applications, and lots of newcomers were attracted by the promise for "worry free development" that Rails promotes.
In fact, Rails has very little real world usage. Trying to adapt it to an existing database schema can make you cry, and their entire "convention over configuration" idea falls completely.
Lots of the "magic" it does, like Active Record and routing / route generation, add significant overhead to each page request, for the sake of abstracting and keeping things flexible that don't need to be flexible in the first place (especially with modern refactoring tools found in modern IDE-s).
RoR is and WILL remain a niche, since there are already too many attempts at people employing it for large sites with very poor results.
It's a popular fact that the official site of Rails itself runs on PHP, to which the excuse is that RoR is "for web apps and not for web sites"... which of course is a very poor excuse when the difference between both nowadays is only superficial.
What I like about Rails is that it resulted in a huge movement towards MVC in plenty of other languages and frameworks.
What I don't like is that those same languages don't try to apply MVC in a smart, efficient, light and performant way, but just rip Rails' features one by one, with routes and all.
People assume Rails and "web MVC" are the same thing, but they are not. A lot of the architecture in Rails is poorly conceived, and takes huge amount of resources to run abstractions of questionable use in real world application.
I suppose this will auto-correct itself as the "Rails fad" passes, but one thing's for certain: after Rails, web development will never be the same.
When yelling, please use words that exist. It's NO ONE. As in, no one single person.
I hope the post didn't result in you crashing, erring or otherwise disrupting your brain activity while reading my poorly written rant.
Thanks for your correction.
You know, I'm sick of "but Linux has this: see Gnome, see Vim" talk.
:q!
I'll acknowledge your attempts at proving Linux a viable desktop alternative, has any connection to reality, when you get a small-to-medium firm of lawyer consultants, for example, to use Vim and Tex for all their document related work.
Otherwise what exactly are you doing telling you that you use Vim? Why should we care? How is it related at all to the subject in discussion?
Are "simpler" folks supposed to look up to Those Skilled in The Vim and spend billions training their staff in the intricacies of running a Linux OS and software for casual daily activity?
Read this: NOONE CARES Gnome has "same or better" GUI than Windows. NOONE CARES they can save $500/computer while rendering their staff incapable of handling their machines, NOONE CARES that you use Vim.
"but the Google Docs & Spreadsheets product does much of what Microsoft's second-most important product, the Office suite of software, does."
I'm glad the articles we're reading are written by well informed, competent journalists.
AOP is largely mysterious and confusing because...
... looooots of validation code repeated in every method ...
.. code processing data ...
// throws exception if not valid
... core data processing ...
.. and now you have to type the validation code just once. And it's all visible and no need for special tools.
I never said its mysterious and confusing however. I just said it's poorly conceived and wrecks maintainability.
AOP solves the N times problem nicely. For instance, if you wanted to take an object with N methods and add a call x() to each of them, if you used ordinary OOP, you'd have to override every method, then call x() from each method. What's the elegance of that? I don't see how "proper" OOP can solve this sort of problem better than AOP.
You see, the thing is, if I override every method and call a piece of code in OOP, I can only do it to a class I extend. And when you instantiate the child class, you know it runs the code defined within it.
With AOP, you can have some piece of code affecting code in some completely different place, other class package, and classes which instantiate it wouldn't have the slightest idea this is happening.
Your "N times" issue solved by AOP is a nice example of what I said: it's an excuse for poorly designed OOP packages.
Of course, a problem defined as "I need to run x for every method in those classes" is also not well defined enough so I could tell you how to solve it.
The two pervasive example where AOP makes sense that I've seen so far are:
- logging
- validation
Logging is best solved via the debug utilities inside the language, or via common functionality inherited by a common class. It's also quite a specific issue solved by AOP, you can't claim logging is a generic case of "N times problem", whatever meaning you put in this phrase.
Equally odd is the validation example. Would you trust validation to run via "stealth" code injections produced by AOP? What are we exactly saving here? Time? File size?
The AOP advocates give examples like:
int getXYZ(Data data) {
return dataProcessed;
}
and explain how you have to "copy/paste" this for all your get*() methods, for example.
then go on to say how the magic of AOP solves this by injecting code on all your get* methods.
What if I have a get* method that is so called but I need different processing for it? What if I have otherwise named method that should also run this validation code? Just few questions popping up. And suddenly AOP is not so easy except in few tightly specialised cases.
Not to mention you can shorten the above example to just this, using strictly OOP facilities:
int getXYZ(Data data) {
validate(data);
return dataProcessed;
}
suddenly the huge problem AOP solves is making this single line invisible, and you need special magical IDE functionality to hunt it down where in the source code tree it is.
Let's even be more extreme and ask: if your get* (in this case) methods are SO generic that they ALL can reuse the exact same validation code injections, why have separate methods at all?
int get[PROPERTYNAME](Data data)
suddenly becomes:
int get(String propertyName, Data data)
FTFA: I hope you didn't put too much money on it! I don't see aspect-oriented programming escaping the "academic ghetto" any day soon, and if it does, it will be less pervasive than OO. When it works, aspect-oriented programming is elegant, but it's not clear how many applications significantly benefit from its use.
Totally agreed. AOP is a strange form of "dynamic" insertion of code at special "cut points" of execution within the code and represent a very very lazy way to avoid good OOP structure of your applications.
In a bigger framework AOP can be totally unpredictable and wreck otherwise locked and working code.
When AOP started to pick some speed in the beginning I was naturally both interested and slightly annoyed that so short after OOP here's yet another concept for programming I have to learn and implement in my software.
Not so fast though, since as much as OOP provides useful abstractions that makes your code more readable and predictable, AOP does exactly the opposite except in few very limited cases.
The cons outweigh the pros.
What has Yahoo done for the past 5 years to stay alive?
Planning for the future: beginning 2007, they will start charging for pings to their domain.
Their revenue is guaranteed for decades to come.
IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument.
This piece of information is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
10*N + 10*N = 100*N;
:P
... :P ).
Euh.. oops, that'd be 20*N, it's late here
Also we could think what N^2 would be.. Hmmm...
(1/0)*(1/0)
Maybe that could be simplified (but not to 1/0 since then we lose "nullity precision" or something
What this professor invented, as many others notices is in fact NaN. You can add NaN to anything and you get NaN.
... :P
So this is really just a form of error handling and no use of "nullity" exists beyond detecting errors as I see it.
This is since his definition is wrong. If we want to make some use of division by zero we need to define a workable set of rules that don't conclude with "everything is nothing" and "10 = 20" conclusions which leads us to little use.
What if we do it like with imaginary numbers. We define "zero divided" numbers in a completely new dimension, and hence we can not sum, multiply or divide "nullity" with anything by definition, except "0" which then produces 1.
Then we will at least not get non-nonsensical outcomes from it, and further exploring it it may actually be useful. I'll use "N" for nullity in few examples.
First few axioms:
number / 0 = N * number;
0*N = 1;
N / 0 = N^2;
-------------------
10 / 0 = 10N;
10N*0 = 10; -> there we go, the result now makes sense
10N / 0 = 10*N^2;
10*N^2 + 20 = 10*N^2 + 20; -> i.e. you can't just "add" 20 to N since they are in different realms, this is consistent with complex numbers.
However:
10*N + 10*N = 100*N;
There we go. Now rip it apart
Intel and Microsoft are big corporations. Big corporations:
1. can't afford to take chances when there's even slight chance a startup may become a viable competitor
2. can afford money-wise and resource-wise to react to even the silliest of those potential competitors
I'm not saying OLPC is silly, but I'm just saying: don't make a big deal of it. Intel/MS just want their options covered.
Let's not forget that cheap computers for poor countries were made long before OLPC (and all failed) and will continue to be made. The least thing: it'll be fun to watch the development in this "market".
And best of all, a huge percentage of spam is now images that circumvent traditional text analysis.
Now look at that statement and think a little. How would we filter this? Gee.. a tough one... hmm...
Let me think about it...
(41 years 6 months 10 days later)
We'll filter e-mails with images! Who needs friggin images in e-mails anyway. They are used for few purposes:
1. newsletters (aka "nice spam"), but newsletters can learn to be leaner.
2. pointless (and huge) "image signatures" showing off your latest company logo. This practice should be shot anyway.
What a major plot twist.
If Google is "too smart for it's own good", I suppose same people would say "Microsoft is too dumb for its own bad".
Then suddenly it all makes sense. Right? Nope. But still good 'nuf for Slashdot, start the presses!
Some time ago, a M$ exec say, they can write better code than Open Source. After so many years, and so many programmers and so many billion dollars we did not see any better code than open source.
You never saw any Microsoft code since it's not open source. So your whole point is moot. But people who have seem Microsoft source through their programs are speaking of very well designed and written code, except for hacks required for backwards compatibility, but this is another topic entirely.
That's a pretty serious oversimplification. EA bought Maxis, and then tried to kill The Sims. Any "highly experimental" game that comes out of EA is an accident, not an experiment.
Actually mine was the right oversimplification, and your is putting a human face on a corporation, which we know it's not.
The momet Maxis was purchased by EA, it's part of EA corporation and that's all. From that point on, it's business as usual. If EA's strategy is wrong, they won't profit, won't be on the market. They don't cut strange deals on blank CD media, consoles and don't sue 80 year old grandmas for pirating Need for Speed.
They profit in only one way: people like and buy their games.
he developers who are creative and try to build new, interesting games every time in the interest of having fun and helping others have fun.
And the developers who are in an 'arms race' to make the most flashy eye candy possible in the name of capturing market share.
Gosh, wonder where EA fits in?
EA fits both categories, they have highly experimental games coming from studios they own like Maxis. Don't forget Spore as well.
But a big business can't run their entire operation, for years, based no the premise "hey let's risk everything and hope our experiments have commercial success".
They are doing what they need to be doing to stay in business: and they are staying, until now.
FTFS: Techworld is one of many that is already looking at Xandros as a possible challenger to Windows Vista
...heh)
What a bold statement, and supported by nothing. What do you know, marketeers and reporters STILL have no problem spewing BS that makes no sense, as long as it attracts attention.
This sounds like just another one of these "Linux Is Read and Poised To Overthrow Microsoft on the Desktop!" articles that Slashdot sees every couple months (especially around the end of the year, when next year just might be the Year of Linux).
The sad part is we actually had better reasons to believe this before, when Linux was making big steps towards the desktop computers.
Now, people just seem to throw this out without even some shred of credibility, just to make the news of the day, if possible.
If nothing else, from past and current articles like this, we know what competitor features will NOT throw Windows out of the market:
- Free
- Ooooh shiny!
- Open Source
- Can work with NTFS (sorry, Windows can work with NTFS too
- Souped up alternatives for Exchange and Active Directory
So you mean, M$ do this IE6 sh*t because of someting else ?
.NET
.NET technologies and in a reliable, easy to use manner, they could as well lose the entire market.
Yes, because of
You see according to their strategy Longhorn (now Vista) is built upon, if they wouldn't have completed this iteration of
They deemed it was crucial to present the next iteration of their desktop/net platform as soon as possible, and that it should be better than anything out there created before. So they concentrated on this.
I wouldn't blame them, I and my team only recently were in a somewhat similar situation though of course on a much smaller scale.
42. Have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?
:D
I figured that putting a reference to a clown and "punching a guy with glasses" would remind at least one guy for the first Batman movie
Ever experienced a table with a screen reader or braille display?
Yes, JAWS and HAL.
True tested and used in moderation tables can be accessible but how many do the testing?
Your point being?
And obviously, if the site is supposed to be accessible, its not an option...
Oh and that's a myth haunting us from 1995-6 by the way. Tables are as accessible as they can be nowadays, especially if used in moderation.
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.
Of course there is, I hope you sense my irony. I don't sweat if I have to use a simple 2-3 cell table to achieve a layout that is ridiculous to achieve with CSS.
The only reliable CSS layout technique in terms of main page sections is now faux columns. It only works with fixed width (adaptation for flexible width are ugly like death itself and involve 3000px wide GIF images with 2000px wide transparent sections and other such monstrosities).
As you know: some things can be done with CSS floating or absolute/relative pos and margins. For everything else, there's tables tm.
Don't make me laugh. Microsoft still haven't come anywhere close to finishing their CSS 2 implementation, the specification for which was published over eight years ago. The same goes for other specifications - for example, they've only just finished PNG, and that specification was published over a decade ago. You simply can't call the W3C too slow for Microsoft when it's Microsoft that can't keep up with the W3C.
.NET and base your judgement on that.
If you think Microsoft has problems implementing rendering engines and image parsers/manipulators, you should check that section on
And I assure you, IE7 will be replaced with an ever better version of IE ~Q1 2007.
Microsoft did start adhering to the standards. They just stopped long before they were done.
.NET 3.0 (a.k.a. WinFX a.k.a .NET 2.0 + Avalon + Indigo etc), XPF and other standards which would've taken decades to produce at W3C.
.NET 3.0 is an amazing achievement and I'm sad to admit that despite Microsoft's ambitions to turn it into a cross-platform environment it may remain mostly a novel (and exciting) way to produce great looking and functional Windows applications.
.NET 3 (and partially with Vista, though it's apparent this is not their final word on what Windows should work like), they are catching up at full speed with the standards, and IE7 is a huge step in the right direction.
They actually *created* a noticeable chunk of said standards.
Microsoft employees were part of the CSS, XML, XHTML creation committees and had significant contributions to those standards.
You can however understand that a commercial company where time is money and money is matter of survival in a market developing with a furious pace would be disappointed at the speed at which W3C works.
IE6 was abandoned for no other reason but the creation of what is today known as
You gotta applaud Microsoft that for all crap they spew at times, they are brave enough to stand on their own versus copy verbatim what their competition produces (no I'm not being sarcastic).
But Microsoft's work is what caused Macromedia (now Adobe) to produce the gem Flex 2, which is viable alternative for web applications running on all major platforms.
Anyway not to get carried away, now that Microsoft have realized their strategy and "vision" with
Their (public domain) extensions to RSS are also creating incredible new ways for people to interact with web content.
By definition, there are no trusted sources on an untrusted network. As long as I'm on a network where I can fake being you, there is almost nothing anyone can do to verify with 100% certainty that you are really you.
If I were you, I'd pack some food, water, cash and run far away, as VeriSign and Thawte just sent a team of hitmen after you.