But Javascript or ECMAScript isn't a 'real' language, or at least not in practice, and that's the issue. Code written in it needs to run on multiple different implementations with no properly accepted standards.
You are, practically, confined to a "minimum ECMAScript featureset", but it's not like one Javascript interpreter will do something completely opposite from another. Microsoft doesn't call their implementation Javascript, they call it JScript, but as far as I'm aware it's completely in-line with the ECMA specs for all the functionality it implements. Correct me if I'm wrong.
All the *real* annoyances in web development (things like innerText vs. textContent, lack of a getElementsByClassName, Firefox's inserting empty text nodes in the DOM tree when IE doesn't) are on the DOM layer. The DOM layer would be just as crappy if you had browsers that ran another language.
(BTW, there's really nothing stopping, for example, Firefox from releasing a browser that would understand [script language="Python"] or [script language="Ruby"] or [script language="Lua"] or what-not. Javascript isn't the end-all, be-all of web languages, if a better one came along browsers could add support for it in no time at all.
Nothing has more bugs than stuff written in the 'web languages'. The current slashdot home page has 91 SGML parser errors and 1 warning, 225 HTMLTidy warnings, and 40 errors via the W3C markup validation service.
Valid HTML is over-rated. 95% of sites on the web have as many "errors", and yet they aren't losing any users over it. JCPenney.com is one of the most popular e-commerce sites on the web, and it has terrible, terrible markup. Frankly, nobody cares.
I was going to completely agree with you until you said this. Javascript is not a good language. Yes part of the problem is how browsers handle it. But if the language is going to allow people to shit all over it then it's just as much at fault.
First of all, most people I talk with agree that DOM sucks ass. But DOM has nothing to do with Javascript. (I assume you're talking about DOM when you say "how browsers handle it.)
Secondly, you should actually give reasons for Javascript being a bad language. Now, it is true that Javascript lacks some features that would be nice to have now that longer programs are being written in it (like namespaces), but that doesn't make it a bad language. Tons of languages, many of them used for applications ten times the size of the biggest JS app, have no namespaces.
But what ever happened to a web browser just being a web browser instead of a development platform with three heads breathing fire, half a dozen plugins, six months of combatability testing, and a kitchen sink?
It was a short period of about 6 months between when Netscape 1 came out and before someone had the bright idea of plugging Java VMs into it. Remember VRML? What you're griping about missing never really actually existed.
Is there ever a point where a web developer will concede that the web is not the Best Platform for Everything in The Universe(tm)?
Honest web developers will right now. But a lot of the reason that the web is being used for things like, say, timekeeping applications is that companies that made stand-alone timekeeping applications... well, they did a really shitty job. Compare Sharepoint with Lotus Notes and tell me which is more pleasant to use.
Or is it just that they were never schooled in the old temple and given a proper appreciation of a real language like C++?
Wow, you are a grandpa.
Javascript is a pretty goddamned competent language. No, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than (for example) the VBA you're required to use to script Microsoft Office applications. It can emulate a OO language or a functional language, it has reflection, a familiar and simple syntax, it's quick and the interpreter is simple... in short, Javascript's a pretty damned good language overall.
That all said, DOM sucks ass. But remember, DOM would suck as much ass if you interfaced with it using C++... you can't blame Javascript for DOM flaws.
Help me out here -- this isn't intended as a flame but an honest question
Yeah, Javascript isn't a "real" language, yet you're not intending to flame? I guess you just assumed the people reading your post wouldn't be able to remember more than one sentence at a time. Look, if you say someone's language-of-choice isn't a "real" language, you're flaming. And an asshole. You're a flaming asshole.
-- where does this attitude that everything has to be crowbar'd into a web interface to be considered modern these days?
That's not even a sentence. But let's assume you meant to put the words "come from" after that sequence of words, and the answer is: from people who were sick of using piece of shit desktop software. It's true that frequently the web applications aren't much better (witness anything from Oracle Apps or Lotus Notes webapps).
People like you who like desktop software brought this upon yourselves by making unusable, unpleasant pieces of crap for decades. Face it.
Because a lot of the problems in this article come down to programmers expanding and bloating their platform/language of choice to do something it was never designed for because That's Just What I Know(tm).
Every web developer is a retard who can't learn anything new! But I'm not intending this as a flame!!!
I cry for these languages. I know after 5pm they go home and hit the frozen dairy products hard to feel better about how fat they've become.
Yeah, but as a former elementary school computer lab volunteer, please, do not code error dialogs like, "out of fucking memory" or "something fucked up" in your otherwise kid-friendly game. I can guarantee, no matter how unlikely you think the error is, it WILL come up in a classroom setting.
The User page is still bad, and it still makes the simple task of "hey, have my recent posts been moderated?" about 20 times more ugly and annoying than before.
There's the screenshot I put in with the SourceForge bug report related to the user template change. They never read or fix any of the bugs I submit, but there you go if you're interested.
Needless-to-say, none of my bugs have ever been resolved. In fact, most of the time they're not even read. Think about it: someone actually received cash-money in exchange for making that horrible template. It makes you want to weep.
If you installed from disk, I don't get how the.torrent ended up going through your ISP?
Sorry, maybe I'm misreading what you're typing here, but I've read this whole thread and I'm still confused.
You own a game and installed it from disk. Then you somehow had a.torrent of that game? But you didn't download the.torrent, or share it? And somehow the ESA found out that you had a.torrent even though it wasn't being shared to anybody?
Firefox is quite literally netscape, you have to consider all of netscape 4 and lower's innovations as part of it.
Well, in that case, then Firefox is a commercial product (I'm considering all the Netscape versions like you suggested!) and so it's moot.
KDE is a lot more than a window manager, as is gnome. Also consider the things they had first, such widgets.
KDE started in 1996, Gnome in 1997. Macintosh had widgets in 1984. Bzzzt, thanks for playing.
Unless you're referring to those little mini-apps that run in sidebars and/or in desktop layers. In which case, Macintosh had Desk Accessories also in 1984, and Windows had Active Desktop (which is the exact same concept, but on the desktop instead of in a separate panel) in 1995. So... bzzzt, thanks for playing.
If you don't see a difference in the features and way they work, compared to windows and OSX, I'd argue that you've never used them in a serious manner either. the sheer number of custom options ensures that even KDE doesn't act like KDE. Or perhaps innovation does not apply to things being better than one another?
Shitloads of options != better, except in some warped open source mentality. Usually, products with shitloads of options are quite a bit worse than those without, actually, because it indicates that: 1) The programmers didn't seriously design the product, but instead simply slapped a bunch of features together and resolved every conflict with "we'll add a checkbox for that" 2) The combination of options is virtually impossible to test, and therefore it's buggy as hell.
From my experience, KDE is a combination of the two. Much better now than a few years ago, but it's still not as good as OS X or Windows.
Does Word 2003 have no innovations above word 3.0?
Word 2003 has more *features* than Word 3.0. To get real innovation, you need to go to Word 2007, which completely re-wrote how toolbars work in a GUI application-- and made their product much better in the process.
I've never seen that kind of experimentation or dedication to advancement in any open source GUI project, which is a real shame because open source projects have so much less to lose if it doesn't work out. Of course, open source programmers *also* hate with a passion the type of creative people, usability experts, and doing the usability testing to invent something new... which is why the vast majority of them simply follow the blueprint of a commercial product that already did the legwork.
Ok, I'm not going to go through the whole list, but...
Firefox - Netscape 4 + BeOS-inspired "tabbing" windows
KDE - Any and every GUI from GeOS to Macintosh to Windows Gnome - Ditto. I'd consider KDE or Gnome innovative if they used a different metaphor than the desktop metaphor, or really even slightly changed the desktop metaphor experience even slightly. But nope.
WINE - Er... it's just a re-implementation of Microsoft's standard libraries; how is this not a re-implementation? In a LITERAL sense!
Battle for Wesnoth - I've played it, it's all been done before. And it's not particularly good at it, either.
Reverse-engineered drivers don't count as "re-implementations of other people's ideas?" In your little fantasy-world?
Did you just compile a long list, hoping nobody would actually read it? I'm not going to claim that no open source software has ever been original (although I think it's safe to see that *no* GUI open source software has ever been original), but your list is blatantly ridiculous.
I came here to post the same thing. If they sorted a petabyte of Floats, that might be pretty impressive. But if they're sorting 5-terabyte video files, their software really sucks.
Lemme guess, you work on Lotus Notes for IBM? I know you're joking, but I swear to God that Lotus Notes' actual business plan. "Shitty software = lucrative support contracts!"
Lots of people used to ask whether FOSS could compete with proprietary software. I remember reading lots of people ask, "Will Linux be able to catch up to Windows?" I haven't seen that in a while, and for good reason.
Those people got sick of waiting and started using OS X?
Could just be a case of "too many cooks, not enough pots." I mean, all companies of decent size have one division with a goal diametrically opposed to the goal of another division. Look at Sony, for example, they make both MP3 players (and devices like the PS3 and music cellphones) and at the same time publish music. Microsoft's making a big push towards "cloud" computing, but they've not stopped development on any of their traditional server software, like MS SQL or IIS.
This is just yet another sign that Google's big enough to be just another corporation, IMO.
Yeah, but you also have to remember the parallel battle on Macintosh, where BOTH browsers were on the OS install disk, and IE trounced Netscape 4. I know Slashdotters like to completely discount it, because "MS is teh evils!!!", but the simple fact is that Netscape 3 and 4 sucked and IE was a better browser. Microsoft's bundling deals didn't help Netscape much, but Netscape's shoddy product hurt them more.
I don't use them, because I believe in giving back to the companies that provide me free content. Even if all I'm giving back is impressions that allow them to negotiate better advertising deals, that's better than nothing.
Again, you're conveniently hiding the more important point: their wish includes open and inherently interoperable standards, unlike Microsoft's wish which includes closed or at-most interoperable-via-partnership standards.
Why does it matter?
There's a benefit to web developers; they get their site done slightly quicker with somewhat (but not a lot) less testing.
For the end-user of the web, why do web standards matter? What does a site that strictly follow web standards give the end-user? Wouldn't the end-user be better served by better auto-completion, better bookmarking, better form-filling features, etc?
I see the whole web standards thing like saying, "Ford should forget any improvements for the driver of the car, they should just make it really easy to service for mechanics."
I'd love for someone to make a case for web standards more compelling than, "well, it saves the tiny minority of people who develop web pages some time. Oh and we hate Microsoft."
I know I'm not part of the whole big Slashdot "privacy" thing, but I really have a hard time seeing anything wrong with that. Maybe it should be opt-in, but what's the big freakin' deal? I'd much prefer to see targeted ads than non-targeted ones.
Slashdot Mirror
But Javascript or ECMAScript isn't a 'real' language, or at least not in practice, and that's the issue. Code written in it needs to run on multiple different implementations with no properly accepted standards.
You are, practically, confined to a "minimum ECMAScript featureset", but it's not like one Javascript interpreter will do something completely opposite from another. Microsoft doesn't call their implementation Javascript, they call it JScript, but as far as I'm aware it's completely in-line with the ECMA specs for all the functionality it implements. Correct me if I'm wrong.
All the *real* annoyances in web development (things like innerText vs. textContent, lack of a getElementsByClassName, Firefox's inserting empty text nodes in the DOM tree when IE doesn't) are on the DOM layer. The DOM layer would be just as crappy if you had browsers that ran another language.
(BTW, there's really nothing stopping, for example, Firefox from releasing a browser that would understand [script language="Python"] or [script language="Ruby"] or [script language="Lua"] or what-not. Javascript isn't the end-all, be-all of web languages, if a better one came along browsers could add support for it in no time at all.
Nothing has more bugs than stuff written in the 'web languages'. The current slashdot home page has 91 SGML parser errors and 1 warning, 225 HTMLTidy warnings, and 40 errors via the W3C markup validation service.
Valid HTML is over-rated. 95% of sites on the web have as many "errors", and yet they aren't losing any users over it. JCPenney.com is one of the most popular e-commerce sites on the web, and it has terrible, terrible markup. Frankly, nobody cares.
I was going to completely agree with you until you said this. Javascript is not a good language. Yes part of the problem is how browsers handle it. But if the language is going to allow people to shit all over it then it's just as much at fault.
First of all, most people I talk with agree that DOM sucks ass. But DOM has nothing to do with Javascript. (I assume you're talking about DOM when you say "how browsers handle it.)
Secondly, you should actually give reasons for Javascript being a bad language. Now, it is true that Javascript lacks some features that would be nice to have now that longer programs are being written in it (like namespaces), but that doesn't make it a bad language. Tons of languages, many of them used for applications ten times the size of the biggest JS app, have no namespaces.
Call me jaded, old, and behind the times...
Ok grandpa.
But what ever happened to a web browser just being a web browser instead of a development platform with three heads breathing fire, half a dozen plugins, six months of combatability testing, and a kitchen sink?
It was a short period of about 6 months between when Netscape 1 came out and before someone had the bright idea of plugging Java VMs into it. Remember VRML? What you're griping about missing never really actually existed.
Is there ever a point where a web developer will concede that the web is not the Best Platform for Everything in The Universe(tm)?
Honest web developers will right now. But a lot of the reason that the web is being used for things like, say, timekeeping applications is that companies that made stand-alone timekeeping applications... well, they did a really shitty job. Compare Sharepoint with Lotus Notes and tell me which is more pleasant to use.
Or is it just that they were never schooled in the old temple and given a proper appreciation of a real language like C++?
Wow, you are a grandpa.
Javascript is a pretty goddamned competent language. No, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than (for example) the VBA you're required to use to script Microsoft Office applications. It can emulate a OO language or a functional language, it has reflection, a familiar and simple syntax, it's quick and the interpreter is simple... in short, Javascript's a pretty damned good language overall.
That all said, DOM sucks ass. But remember, DOM would suck as much ass if you interfaced with it using C++... you can't blame Javascript for DOM flaws.
Help me out here -- this isn't intended as a flame but an honest question
Yeah, Javascript isn't a "real" language, yet you're not intending to flame? I guess you just assumed the people reading your post wouldn't be able to remember more than one sentence at a time. Look, if you say someone's language-of-choice isn't a "real" language, you're flaming. And an asshole. You're a flaming asshole.
-- where does this attitude that everything has to be crowbar'd into a web interface to be considered modern these days?
That's not even a sentence. But let's assume you meant to put the words "come from" after that sequence of words, and the answer is: from people who were sick of using piece of shit desktop software. It's true that frequently the web applications aren't much better (witness anything from Oracle Apps or Lotus Notes webapps).
People like you who like desktop software brought this upon yourselves by making unusable, unpleasant pieces of crap for decades. Face it.
Because a lot of the problems in this article come down to programmers expanding and bloating their platform/language of choice to do something it was never designed for because That's Just What I Know(tm).
Every web developer is a retard who can't learn anything new! But I'm not intending this as a flame!!!
I cry for these languages. I know after 5pm they go home and hit the frozen dairy products hard to feel better about how fat they've become.
Javascript's slimmer than most C++ libraries.
Yeah, but as a former elementary school computer lab volunteer, please, do not code error dialogs like, "out of fucking memory" or "something fucked up" in your otherwise kid-friendly game. I can guarantee, no matter how unlikely you think the error is, it WILL come up in a classroom setting.
Oh, and I just found out it fails utterly on an iPhone. As if you needed any more reasons to hate it.
The User page is still bad, and it still makes the simple task of "hey, have my recent posts been moderated?" about 20 times more ugly and annoying than before.
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/slashdot_user_template.png
There's the screenshot I put in with the SourceForge bug report related to the user template change. They never read or fix any of the bugs I submit, but there you go if you're interested.
Take a look at all the screenshots I've submitted as Slashdot bugs over the last year or so:
http://schend.net/images/index.php?path=screenshots%2Fslashdot/
(Here's the current one for the User page: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/slashdot_user_template.png )
Needless-to-say, none of my bugs have ever been resolved. In fact, most of the time they're not even read. Think about it: someone actually received cash-money in exchange for making that horrible template. It makes you want to weep.
Oh, I'm sorry. Re-reading the thread, it's obvious now... I dunno why I didn't get it before.
If you installed from disk, I don't get how the .torrent ended up going through your ISP?
Sorry, maybe I'm misreading what you're typing here, but I've read this whole thread and I'm still confused.
You own a game and installed it from disk. Then you somehow had a .torrent of that game? But you didn't download the .torrent, or share it? And somehow the ESA found out that you had a .torrent even though it wasn't being shared to anybody?
It's somewhat disturbing that they're actually monitoring Limewire for copyright infringement,
How do you figure?
Firefox is quite literally netscape, you have to consider all of netscape 4 and lower's innovations as part of it.
Well, in that case, then Firefox is a commercial product (I'm considering all the Netscape versions like you suggested!) and so it's moot.
KDE is a lot more than a window manager, as is gnome. Also consider the things they had first, such widgets.
KDE started in 1996, Gnome in 1997. Macintosh had widgets in 1984. Bzzzt, thanks for playing.
Unless you're referring to those little mini-apps that run in sidebars and/or in desktop layers. In which case, Macintosh had Desk Accessories also in 1984, and Windows had Active Desktop (which is the exact same concept, but on the desktop instead of in a separate panel) in 1995. So... bzzzt, thanks for playing.
If you don't see a difference in the features and way they work, compared to windows and OSX, I'd argue that you've never used them in a serious manner either. the sheer number of custom options ensures that even KDE doesn't act like KDE. Or perhaps innovation does not apply to things being better than one another?
Shitloads of options != better, except in some warped open source mentality. Usually, products with shitloads of options are quite a bit worse than those without, actually, because it indicates that:
1) The programmers didn't seriously design the product, but instead simply slapped a bunch of features together and resolved every conflict with "we'll add a checkbox for that"
2) The combination of options is virtually impossible to test, and therefore it's buggy as hell.
From my experience, KDE is a combination of the two. Much better now than a few years ago, but it's still not as good as OS X or Windows.
Does Word 2003 have no innovations above word 3.0?
Word 2003 has more *features* than Word 3.0. To get real innovation, you need to go to Word 2007, which completely re-wrote how toolbars work in a GUI application-- and made their product much better in the process.
I've never seen that kind of experimentation or dedication to advancement in any open source GUI project, which is a real shame because open source projects have so much less to lose if it doesn't work out. Of course, open source programmers *also* hate with a passion the type of creative people, usability experts, and doing the usability testing to invent something new... which is why the vast majority of them simply follow the blueprint of a commercial product that already did the legwork.
Ok, I'm not going to go through the whole list, but...
Firefox - Netscape 4 + BeOS-inspired "tabbing" windows
KDE - Any and every GUI from GeOS to Macintosh to Windows
Gnome - Ditto. I'd consider KDE or Gnome innovative if they used a different metaphor than the desktop metaphor, or really even slightly changed the desktop metaphor experience even slightly. But nope.
WINE - Er... it's just a re-implementation of Microsoft's standard libraries; how is this not a re-implementation? In a LITERAL sense!
Battle for Wesnoth - I've played it, it's all been done before. And it's not particularly good at it, either.
Reverse-engineered drivers don't count as "re-implementations of other people's ideas?" In your little fantasy-world?
Did you just compile a long list, hoping nobody would actually read it? I'm not going to claim that no open source software has ever been original (although I think it's safe to see that *no* GUI open source software has ever been original), but your list is blatantly ridiculous.
I'm confused, which one leads to the dark side?
I came here to post the same thing. If they sorted a petabyte of Floats, that might be pretty impressive. But if they're sorting 5-terabyte video files, their software really sucks.
Not enough info to judge the importance of this.
It's called a "joke." Relax.
Lemme guess, you work on Lotus Notes for IBM? I know you're joking, but I swear to God that Lotus Notes' actual business plan. "Shitty software = lucrative support contracts!"
Lots of people used to ask whether FOSS could compete with proprietary software. I remember reading lots of people ask, "Will Linux be able to catch up to Windows?" I haven't seen that in a while, and for good reason.
Those people got sick of waiting and started using OS X?
I started on the Internet before advertising was allowed and still have a hard time breaking the habit.
When was advertising not allowed? Or do you mean it was "frowned upon?"
Either way, join the 21st century grandpa. Lots of good things are ad-supported, there's nothing wrong with that.
You don't want to know what type of email admin in make :)
Huh?
George Bush was keeping stories like this off Slashdot. Now that Obama's elected, we won't have any politically-charged stories. ;)
Could just be a case of "too many cooks, not enough pots." I mean, all companies of decent size have one division with a goal diametrically opposed to the goal of another division. Look at Sony, for example, they make both MP3 players (and devices like the PS3 and music cellphones) and at the same time publish music. Microsoft's making a big push towards "cloud" computing, but they've not stopped development on any of their traditional server software, like MS SQL or IIS.
This is just yet another sign that Google's big enough to be just another corporation, IMO.
Yeah, but you also have to remember the parallel battle on Macintosh, where BOTH browsers were on the OS install disk, and IE trounced Netscape 4. I know Slashdotters like to completely discount it, because "MS is teh evils!!!", but the simple fact is that Netscape 3 and 4 sucked and IE was a better browser. Microsoft's bundling deals didn't help Netscape much, but Netscape's shoddy product hurt them more.
I don't use them, because I believe in giving back to the companies that provide me free content. Even if all I'm giving back is impressions that allow them to negotiate better advertising deals, that's better than nothing.
Again, you're conveniently hiding the more important point: their wish includes open and inherently interoperable standards, unlike Microsoft's wish which includes closed or at-most interoperable-via-partnership standards.
Why does it matter?
There's a benefit to web developers; they get their site done slightly quicker with somewhat (but not a lot) less testing.
For the end-user of the web, why do web standards matter? What does a site that strictly follow web standards give the end-user? Wouldn't the end-user be better served by better auto-completion, better bookmarking, better form-filling features, etc?
I see the whole web standards thing like saying, "Ford should forget any improvements for the driver of the car, they should just make it really easy to service for mechanics."
I'd love for someone to make a case for web standards more compelling than, "well, it saves the tiny minority of people who develop web pages some time. Oh and we hate Microsoft."
Unless you plug a Tivo into it.
I know I'm not part of the whole big Slashdot "privacy" thing, but I really have a hard time seeing anything wrong with that. Maybe it should be opt-in, but what's the big freakin' deal? I'd much prefer to see targeted ads than non-targeted ones.