Not sure if a developer should look for excuses for sticking with suboptimal design.

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've (unsurprisingly) started with echo.
>
> http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/
>
> It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

Seeing as most of the traffic I'm getting is from this thread, I thought it might be interesting for people to see some stats about where people are from, what browsers they're using etc.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/910836/Webstats_02072013-10_09072013-09.png

A lot of windows users, although that's skewed by people browsing from work. I hope that accounts for the IE contingent as well!

On Tue, 09 Jul 2013 11:35:17 +0200
"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> > I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've (unsurprisingly) started with echo.
> >
> > http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/
> >
> > It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)
> 
> Seeing as most of the traffic I'm getting is from this thread, I thought it might be interesting for people to see some stats about where people are from, what browsers they're using etc.
> 
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/910836/Webstats_02072013-10_09072013-09.png
>

Interesting!

> A lot of windows users, although that's skewed by people browsing from work. I hope that accounts for the IE contingent as well!

From the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as bad as people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much trouble with FF as I've had with IE. In fact, the only *big* problems I've had with IE7+ were in conjunction with Flash.

I've found that when you do have a problem with a browser (whether IE or anything else), then it's almost always just an indication that you're overengineering something. Just take a step back, tone down the fancy stuff (you'll almost always find you didn't need it), and the idealism (most of webdev's "best practices" are a total load of crap - and they're mostly spread by the same clowns who think PHP and JS are good languages), and everything will work out just fine on all browsers, including IE.

One thing to always keep in mind is that using newer web features and techniques will always lead you into all sorts of bugs and compatibility issues and such (it's just a natural consequence), but most of the older features and techniques have become totally rock solid (and fast) on pretty much damn near *anything* and aren't even any harder to use (heck, frequently they're easier).

On Saturday, 13 July 2013 at 23:40:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> From the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as bad as people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much trouble with FF as I've had with IE.

Personally, I found Firefox 2 to be the biggest piece of trash back in the day, I'd rather use IE6 as a user and a developer (IE6 had bugs and incomplete implementations, sure, but there were pretty easy workarounds for all of them - they were annoying at worst, rather than show-stoppers. FF2 just simply didn't offer the features I wanted at all, despite them being in the CSS standard.)

And nowadays, the #1 source of pain, by *far*, is Google Chrome. As in virtually every bug I get for my work sites is a Chrome bug in their basic html (they, I kid you not, broke <form> with multiple submit buttons in one of their releases, and <a target="_BLANK"> in one shortly thereafter). Bog simple html, worked everywhere else, failed in Chrome after one of their waaay too frequent automatic updates) or css handling. And all bets are off if you do try to get fancy, even if it works today on chrome 1337, who knows how many bugs they'll introduce in the 236 releases that will auto-update by this time next week.

but it can run DOOM..... at a frame rate similar to my old Pentium 1 computer despite being on a 100x faster processor. lol, what a joke. I can't believe so many people actually use that crap.

The #2 hassle nowadays? ipads.

On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 02:20:12 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Saturday, 13 July 2013 at 23:40:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > From the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as bad as people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much trouble with FF as I've had with IE.
> 
> Personally, I found Firefox 2 to be the biggest piece of trash back in the day, I'd rather use IE6 as a user and a developer (IE6 had bugs and incomplete implementations, sure, but there were pretty easy workarounds for all of them - they were annoying at worst, rather than show-stoppers. FF2 just simply didn't offer the features I wanted at all, despite them being in the CSS standard.)
> 

From a user perspective, FF2 is actually my favorite browser, as long as it's loaded up (or rather, bogged down) with all my usual extensions.

But you're right, from an implementation standpoint it could be much better. All sorts of bugs and leeks and inefficiencies and such (I'd *love* a modern browser with a FF2+Winestripe/NoScript/AdblockPlus interface). As an example of rendering issues, the lack of "inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete implementation of "(min|max)-(width|height)". And, maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding is that those are all old enough that they could've/should've been there even at the time. (Although I *just* now stumbled on a "display:-moz-inline-stack" that's supposed to work. I'll have to check into that.)

I even had one PITA problem where FF2 (*and* later versions IIRC) would magically fail to show any auto-resizing Flash applet if the height/width setting of all the containers up through the chain weren't exactly as it expected. *Nothing* else had a problem with it except a bunch of versions of FF.

But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables easily solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with zero non-imaginary downsides (yea, they're a bit verbose, but *HTML* is freaking verbose anyway so whatever). Sure, layout tables are web heresy, but hey, irritating the HTML dogma pushers (while sidestepping most of the compatibility troubles they face) is half the fun!

> And nowadays, the #1 source of pain, by *far*, is Google Chrome. As in virtually every bug I get for my work sites is a Chrome bug in their basic html (they, I kid you not, broke <form> with multiple submit buttons in one of their releases, and <a target="_BLANK"> in one shortly thereafter). Bog simple html, worked everywhere else, failed in Chrome after one of their waaay too frequent automatic updates) or css handling. And all bets are off if you do try to get fancy, even if it works today on chrome 1337, who knows how many bugs they'll introduce in the 236 releases that will auto-update by this time next week.
> 

Yea, if there were one browser I could eradicate from all history, it wouldn't be IE, it would be Chrome (IE actually had some good stuff: its box model and its JS interface for mouse buttons were actually sane - unlike W3C's absolute dumbshit box model and mouse interface).

In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers. I use SRWare Iron instead (it literally is Chrome but with most of the "take over your computer" shitware removed). And even that I still never touch for anything but compatibility testing because the interface is the absolute biggest piece of shit of any web browser in history...or at least it was until all the other dumbfuck browser developers decided to ape Google's moronic UI abominations (although the unified forward/back button was originally MS's abomination, and AwfulBars are Mozilla's fault, but the disregard for system settings and the whole "hide/shrink/conflate fucking everything we can" trend are mainly Google's doing).

And it's 100% Chrome's fault that there's no longer any widely-compatible way to embed non-flash media. The <object> tag had been working everywhere relevant for ages (Netscape's <embed> died a loooong time ago.) But then the assholes from Google came along, got the W3C to standardize a completely incompatible and unneeded alternative, included that in Chrome and did NOT include a working <object> tag. Why disregard standards like MS does when you can just bend the "standard" to your own whim? Yea, Google likes standards as long as Google creates them.

So thanks for all that, Chrome.

> but it can run DOOM..... at a frame rate similar to my old Pentium 1 computer despite being on a 100x faster processor. lol, what a joke. I can't believe so many people actually use that crap.
> 

Hah! I know, right? Shit, my 2005 *MP3 player* can run DOOM.

Plus playing a game in a browser is just simply bad user experience, whether good framerate or not. And yea, like JS is something we really should be encouraging anyway.

I actually wrote a little blurb on the same point some time back: https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/quake-shows-javascript-is-slow-not-fast

Although you've just said essentially the same thing far, far more succinctly ;)

> The #2 hassle nowadays? ipads.

Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the web on a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and such an orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy with whatever just happens to actually work.

I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to finally kill off Flash even if it's what would normally be a dumb design decision ("Uhh, hello, let the *user* opt-in with a big flashing 'you're about to kill your battery, security and stability' warning if they have reason to do so."). But Flash was never *really* going to start going away without some major player finally saying "Ok, you know what? That's it. No more Flash. Fuck Flash. Go screw yourself, Adobe." Ultimately though, that only means Flash gets replaced by HTML5, so it's kinda like replacing Hitler with Napoleon - technically a win, but not much.

New Opera uses chromium engine, so I don't know (like user agent detection tools too) it's still the same Opera or not ;)
IE11 maybe masks like Mozilla/gecko too (according to html 5).

Often os virtualization tools used with desktop integration (one desktop - two os; VirtualBox VMware etc).


I think that viewers number is representative only. OS number means that this platform should be supported.

On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 03:52:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> From a user perspective, FF2 is actually my favorite browser, as long as it's loaded up (or rather, bogged down) with all my usual extensions.

Eh, the UI was indeed pretty ok. Actually even modern firefox can
look pretty similar to it, so I don't hate firefox with a passion
the way I do chrome, since it is a pretty decent ui.

But I, believe it or not, have a soft spot for IE6. Its interface
was simple enough, it did separate processes for each site way
before chrome "invented" it (IE6 did it the sane way: one process
per window, something Firefox actively prevents you from doing
even if you specifically ask for it! "Program X has detected an
instance already running" should be a crime.) so while IE6 was
prone to crashing somewhat often, it at least had limited damage.

Important note though: change the security settings to disable
scripts on non-trusted sites. But that's not just an IE6 tip,
that is even more necessary today than it was ten years ago...
computers have gotten faster, javascript has gotten faster, but
websites have gotten slower. And I actually like noscript a bit
better than IE's security settings screen, it is more convenient,
but at least IE's functionality is built in.

I find news websites especially, but also other ones like
dlang.org, are completely unusable without JS blocked.
dlang.org's stupid hypenation thing drags it to a crawl. News
sites put up 1,000 bars for twitter and facebook and whatever
else that slow them brutally.

Hey, webmasters, if you have content I actually like and want to
share, I'll copy paste the link. I don't need those useless
buttons.... and if they slow the loading so much, I'll just close
the site, so you lose.

But with js disabled it isn't so bad.

> As an example of rendering issues, the lack of
> "inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete

YES. inline-block makes css useful. I'm not even really
exaggerating there, that's how important I think it is. floats
are waaay too painful to deal with.

The moz-inline-stack thing doesn't quite work the same iirc, I
remember trying it and finding it didn't make it a real block, so
you couldn't center text or something like that inside it. But
meh, FF2 is virtually dead so I just ignore it.


inline-block btw was in CSS 2.0. Microsoft implemented it
buggily, but the functionality was there. konqueror did it right
(khtml used to be really nice until Apple and Google got their
filthy paws all over it).

But the standards committee was always biased toward Netscape,
and Firefox was Netscape's successor so they inherited that bias.
This is a kinda strong charge that I can't prove, but I think the
case is pretty good: look at how many times IE did something
clearly superior to Netscape/early Firefox, the box model, the
mouse buttons that you mentioned, and there's more too.... but
the standard always seemed to prefer the NS/FF way. And when FF
didn't implement something, you could count on the standard to be
revised some time later. It happened with CSS 2.0 -> CSS 2.1,
conveniently dropping features FF never implemented (thus making
them "standards compliant"), and recently happened again with
display: run-in, which they said was unimplementable, but
Microsoft managed to do it right years ago. Firefox never did,
and instead of being lambasted for not following the standard,
the standard just got revised again to agree with FF.

(and of course, one defense is "it is useless anyway".... well
yes, but only because you idiots somehow managed to get
significant market share and never bothered to implement it!
There's been more than one time I wanted to use it, saw it
working in IE8 and rejoiced, just to see it fail in firefox 9 or
whatever the hell it was at last year when I tried this. Ugh.)

If the standard got revised to agree with IE6's implementation
back in the day, I'd be for that. IE6 was a de-facto standard
anyway. But that rarely happened. The other way around though,
common. (one thing I'll praise HTML5 for doing though is writing
down some IE implementations as the standard, finally making
something that works in practice, standards-compliant too, like
drag and drop for instance. But even then they managed to muck
some things up.)


> But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables easily solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with zero non-imaginary downsides


I can't agree with you there, I dislike layout tables and here's
why: one week, the client says 3 columns are in. Next week, he
changes his mind and wants it back to 2 columns. Not too hard
with the css things. A lot of boring work with tables. Or "add a
row there", not too hard when you can just throw it in with a
clean html file, but very difficult to find the right place in a
mess of nested tables.

(Perhaps I've just had bad experience because the html is ugly as
sin, but I've never seen clean layout table code except isolated
in specific instances. I find writing clean css based html to be
very easy.)

There *are* times when I think they are right, but usually these
are very limited places, and I actually prefer the whole display:
table thing now. Then when (not if!) the client changes his mind
again, there's a moderate chance that it can be changed: for
instance, changing a form from:

Name: ___________
Email: ___________

to

Name:
_______________

Email:
______________


With <table> is a pain. But with the css, you can change it form
display: table-cell to display:block in the appropriate place and
be done with it. (Now display: table still leaves some to be
desired, I prefer inline-block when I can, but still it is a good
step.)

> irritating the HTML dogma pushers (while sidestepping most of the compatibility troubles they face) is half the fun!

I'll agree with that though, it does make me smile to say "just
ignore the standard lol".

> In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers.

I wish I could, but one of my big clients uses it religiously so
I need to have a copy every so often to track down the bugs he'll
inevitably find.

For a while I started replying "get a better browser" whenever
this came up, but alas even if he personally did, there's enough
marketshare of it out there now that it wouldn't really solve the
problem business-wise.

> Why disregard standards like MS does when you can just bend the "standard" to your own whim? Yea, Google likes standards as long as Google creates them.

Aye, Google has really taken over from Netscape in my above rant
now.


> I actually wrote a little blurb on the same point some time back:

heh I'm pretty sure I read it a while ago too.


> Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the web on a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and
> such an orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy with whatever just happens to actually work.


Aye, but again, what the bosses use, I have to use. And he went
so far as to buy me one of those ipads so I wouldn't have any
excuses to ignore it any more too :(

(On the bright side though, I do like watching sports on it.
Almost completely useless for doing actual work with it,
touchscreens are terrible, but not bad to prop up like a little
tv and watch stuff on.)

> I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to finally kill off Flash

Blargh, I wish Flash was dead, but it keeps coming back up.
There's the ogg vs mpeg format war that is a huge hassle that
means now all my work sites are forced to write even more code:

<video>
<source mp4> (most things)
<source mp4 lower res> (the iphone refuses to play higher res)
<source ogv> (firefox)
<object> (flash fallback)
  <embed /> (i think this is useless)
    <a href="download"></a> (finally the only one that should be
there IMO)
   </object>
</video>


Blargh. And then "the ipad video UI doesn't match the Chrome
which doesn't match the Firefox which doesn't match the Flash"

Just shoot me.

On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 20:56:40 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> But I, believe it or not, have a soft spot for IE6. Its interface was simple enough, it did separate processes for each site way before chrome "invented" it

Interesting, either I never noticed that, or I had totally forgotten. Very good point.

> "Program X has detected an
> instance already running" should be a crime.

Yea, I'm not a fan of that either. There have been some cases where I felt it was sensible: sometimes there's a very resource-hungry program that doesn't make much sense to have multiple copies running anyway. For example, a lot of games. But normally it's just an asinine pain.

The one that bugs me most is actually Win7 itself. On XP, if I tell the start menu or quick launch to open a file manager window to a particular starting directory, then it just does so. Always. But Win7 is just "smart" enough to be stupid, so it'll *only* obey that command *if* it first goes behind my back and detects that none of my existing windows just happen to be showing my chosen "starting point" directory. If there is one, it'll *refuse* my command to open a file manager window and instead just switch to the one I already know damn well I already have open (Because clearly, according to my computer, I apparently don't know what the hell I'm doing).

Which means *every* time I want to open two or more file manager windows, I have fool this stupid fucking piece of shit NannyOS into doing so, instead of you know, just clicking the damn button however many times I need.

God dammit I fucking *hate* post-XP Windows.

> 
> Important note though: change the security settings to disable scripts on non-trusted sites.

Ah, good tip. I hadn't thought of that. (For me, it was just "IE doesn't have NoScript, therefore I shouldn't use IE for anything unless I have to.")

>But that's not just an IE6 tip,
> that is even more necessary today than it was ten years ago... computers have gotten faster, javascript has gotten faster, but websites have gotten slower.

Yup. So depressingly true. And what's really bizarre about it is that a LOT of that JS is specifically in the name of speeding up the site ("Because you don't have to redownload *all* 1k of HTML on every link!")

Are these people really *that* incapable of perceiving the difference between a 5-10+ second "JS extravaganza page" load and a <= 1sec static page load? You'd think that would clue them in to "Gee, maybe this shit *isn't* actually making my page faster like people are telling me it should."

And what's the extra bonus for that pessimization? Broken "back", broken "forward", broken bookmarking, and broken link sharing. Congratulations, you've just "best practiced" your website into a slow-motion garbage heap.

> I find news websites especially, but also other ones like dlang.org, are completely unusable without JS blocked. dlang.org's stupid hypenation thing drags it to a crawl. News sites put up 1,000 bars for twitter and facebook and whatever else that slow them brutally.
> 
> Hey, webmasters, if you have content I actually like and want to share, I'll copy paste the link. I don't need those useless buttons.... and if they slow the loading so much, I'll just close the site, so you lose.
> 

Yup. And speaking of: https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/we-need-browsers-with-built-in-share-on-site-x

> But with js disabled it isn't so bad.
> 

Exactly. And so much for the "Eh, it'll be fast because it's already in most user's caches anyway." Yea, well, even if so it still has to get executed. JS's bottleneck was never bandwidth.

> > As an example of rendering issues, the lack of "inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete
> 
> YES. inline-block makes css useful. I'm not even really exaggerating there, that's how important I think it is. floats are waaay too painful to deal with.
> 

Floats are good for what they were originally intended for (wrapping text around an image) and for nothing else.

I've fumbled around with layouts that involved float, and I don't think a single attempt ever made it into my local VCS commits, let alone production.

> The moz-inline-stack thing doesn't quite work the same iirc, I remember trying it and finding it didn't make it a real block, so you couldn't center text or something like that inside it. But meh, FF2 is virtually dead so I just ignore it.
> 

While I do code for FF2, I've accepted that I'm probably doing it only for my own sake. Just so I can do as much as I can without putting up with a unified forward/back, browser skin, address bar with unicorn-rainbow-vomit Fisher-Price-sized text, or all that UI over-minimalism.

But layout tables solve any issues I have easily enough, and nothing ever chokes on them, so I don't really find it to be any extra trouble.

> 
> inline-block btw was in CSS 2.0.

That's what I thought, but then I couldn't find any source for that info so I started second-guessing it. Good to hear it's not just my imagination then :)

> But the standards committee was always biased toward Netscape, and Firefox was Netscape's successor so they inherited that bias. This is a kinda strong charge that I can't prove, but I think the case is pretty good: look at how many times IE did something clearly superior to Netscape/early Firefox, the box model, the mouse buttons that you mentioned, and there's more too.... but the standard always seemed to prefer the NS/FF way. And when FF didn't implement something, you could count on the standard to be revised some time later. It happened with CSS 2.0 -> CSS 2.1, conveniently dropping features FF never implemented (thus making them "standards compliant"), and recently happened again with display: run-in, which they said was unimplementable, but Microsoft managed to do it right years ago. Firefox never did, and instead of being lambasted for not following the standard, the standard just got revised again to agree with FF.
> 

Yea, the non-IE browsers always went off doing their own thing, too. But IE's the one that gets condemned as "non-standard" just because web standards are pretty much defined as "whatever big bad MS *isn't* doing".

Not that MS doesn't deserve the "big bad" label, but standards need to be a meritocracy - there's no room for politics. Unfortunately, the W3C clearly hasn't been doing that consistently. Now I don't know, it may not have anything to do with bias against MS, maybe MS just hadn't been very active or very sensible in W3C proceedings, or whatever, but whatever the reason, W3C hasn't been a case of "the motion with the best merit wins".

> 
> > But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables easily solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with zero non-imaginary downsides
> 
> 
> I can't agree with you there, I dislike layout tables and here's
> why: one week, the client says 3 columns are in. Next week, he
> changes his mind and wants it back to 2 columns. Not too hard
> with the css things. A lot of boring work with tables. Or "add a
> row there", not too hard when you can just throw it in with a
> clean html file, but very difficult to find the right place in a
> mess of nested tables.
> [...]
> With <table> is a pain. But with the css, you can change it form
> display: table-cell to display:block in the appropriate place and
> be done with it. (Now display: table still leaves some to be
> desired, I prefer inline-block when I can, but still it is a good
> step.)
> 

I do actually see your point there, and can relate to a certain extent (particularly with "inline-block"). But my experience has been that manually re-jiggering HTML (including layout tables), while imperfect, has always been pretty minor and quick when compared to most of my other tasks.

And those minor annoyances have been more than made up for by all the times I've banged my head against the wall over some PITA HTML/CSS problem, then decided "fuck this shit, I'm using tables" and wound up with a working, ultra-compatible, (and often conceptually simpler!) solution within minutes.

YMMV, I guess. And I'll admit I have been lucky lately with minimal nitpickery from clients and armchair-expert designers.


> > In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers.
> 
> I wish I could, but one of my big clients uses it religiously so I need to have a copy every so often to track down the bugs he'll inevitably find.
> 

I use SRWare Iron in place of Chrome (as I said, it literally is Chrome), but if you have to put up with Chrome's "bug of the day" junk then yea I guess that wouldn't work. Although at that point I would reach for VirtualBox. If I ever have to run the real Chrome, it's getting its ass sandboxed.

> > Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the web on a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and such an orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy with whatever just happens to actually work.
> 
> 
> Aye, but again, what the bosses use, I have to use. And he went so far as to buy me one of those ipads so I wouldn't have any excuses to ignore it any more too :(
> 

Certainly true. I had a similar thing last year: A project I was getting involved in needed to work on iOS (for very valid business reasons that I do actually agree with), so the guy got me a loaner iPhone that I pretty much ended up having to tote around for much of the year. I don't miss that thing one bit.

> (On the bright side though, I do like watching sports on it. Almost completely useless for doing actual work with it,

Heh, I can't stand tiny TVs (I don't even like using portable game systems). They do have some nice uses (Shazam is just as awesome as its name is awful), but I've been spoiled enough by some of the best aspects of the now-dead PalmOS that I can't help seeing them as dumbed-down orwellian toy versions of what an internet-connected Palm could have been. I just don't like the iOS/Android interfaces *at all*, and the iOS lock-downs are just inexcusable.

> touchscreens are terrible,

The capacitive ones are the worst. (And they're all capacitive now.)

And it really gets me how touchscreen devices are promoted with the idealized concept of "touch" even though they *eliminate* tactile sensation.


> > I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to finally kill off Flash
> 
> Blargh, I wish Flash was dead, but it keeps coming back up. There's the ogg vs mpeg format war that is a huge hassle that means now all my work sites are forced to write even more code:
> 
> <video>
> <source mp4> (most things)
> <source mp4 lower res> (the iphone refuses to play higher res)
> <source ogv> (firefox)
> <object> (flash fallback)
>    <embed /> (i think this is useless)
>      <a href="download"></a> (finally the only one that should be
> there IMO)
>     </object>
> </video>
> 

True...There was one point on a site I was doing where [strongly against my normal design principles] we needed some pages with embedded audio. I tossed in an <object> tag pointing to an mp3 and it worked great on every browser I threw at it...except Chrome. Ugh.

The site already required Flash for some other stuff (things that JS just wasn't up to, certainly not at the time), so not wanting to deal with any browser-conditional stuff, I ended up playing the audio via a trivial flash applet. "Ugh" again.

> 
> Blargh. And then "the ipad video UI doesn't match the Chrome which doesn't match the Firefox which doesn't match the Flash"
> 

Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches (or rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player program. One of the things I loathe most about the modern web is how choice of viewer application has been stolen from the end user and given to the content provider instead. I still blame YouTube for kicking off that awful trend.

Although if you're actually creating, for example, some sort of multimedia thing where video is simply part of a bigger whole (Like the old Phillips CD-I stuff), then that's a completely different matter and UI then *does* belong under the control of the creator (aside from any matters of matching the local device's look-and-feel).

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've (unsurprisingly) started with echo.
>
> http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/
>
> It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

Turns out it got posted by some people on here: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Developer-Break-Nokla-Imaging-Perforce-QML-REST-AWS-SDKs-1916580.html
and here: http://www.heise.de/developer/meldung/Developer-Snapshots-Programmierer-News-in-ein-zwei-Saetzen-1916317.html

which has created a rather large bump in viewers :)

Second instalment is coming soon.

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 09:56:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Which means *every* time I want to open two or more file manager
> windows, I have fool this stupid fucking piece of shit NannyOS into doing so, instead of you know, just clicking the damn button however many times I need.

Yup. I've found you can get around it somewhat well by right clicking and open in new window from the parent directory. Still somewhat annoying - I think XP started the downhill trend, maybe even 2000, with changing the explorer around. I really liked it in Win95 - it just got the job done in a simple, straightforward way.

That said though, I don't have too much trouble with the newer Windowses. I actually like Vista!

> Yup. So depressingly true. And what's really bizarre about it is that a LOT of that JS is specifically in the name of speeding
> up the site ("Because you don't have to redownload *all* 1k of
> HTML on every link!")

Oh yeah, I have to deal with this a lot too. The big thing is even in ideal situations, an ajax request is likely about the same speed as a full refresh, since on most sites, it is dominated by request latency anyway! If it takes 50 ms for your signal to cross the internet and 5ms to generate the ajax and 10ms to generate the full page.... the whole ajax thing only saved you maybe 10% of the already very fast speed.

(If your site takes longer than 50ms to load, I think you've gotta spend some time in the profiler regardless.)


It just seems to be psychological, because sometimes the browser will white out the background or jump around the scrollbar while loading the full page, it feels more jarring. But they don't even always do that.


Important to get this working though is to set the right cache headers on everything. And I betcha that's where people make mistakes. I like to cache those ajax answers too when I do have to use them, because killing the server round trip latency is a huge win.

> And what's the extra bonus for that pessimization? Broken "back", broken "forward", broken bookmarking, and broken link sharing.

But you see, this is why those FB share + tweet buttons are so important! Otherwise people will copy/paste the wrong link :<

blargh.

> JS's bottleneck was never bandwidth.


Indeed, and this is one reason why I absolutely refuse to use jQuery. (The other being it isn't even significantly different than the built in DOM! IMO most of jquery is just pointless wrappers and name changes.)

If you're using it from a CDN so the browser has cached bytecode (or whatever they do), you can get it reasonably quickly, about 10ms added if you reference it.

....but that's actually pretty rare. I don't remember the number, but there was a survey of web traffic that found a big percentage of users aren't cached. And if you are slow for first time users, how much you want to bet they'll just hit back, try the next guy's link, and never return?

jQuery in file cache but not pre-compiled is brutally slow, something like 150ms on my laptop, on top of everything else it has to load. So the page is loaded, but it won't actually work until that pretty noticeable delay. (And then it still has to do whatever work you wanted jquery for in the first place! Since js is usually loaded sequentially, the other stuff has to wait for this to complete)


It has some nice things in it, but just isn't worth making my site 5x slower than it would be without it.

> Floats are good for what they were originally intended for (wrapping text around an image) and for nothing else.

Amen.

> Just so I can do as much as I can without putting up
> with a unified forward/back, browser skin, address bar with
> unicorn-rainbow-vomit Fisher-Price-sized text, or all that UI
> over-minimalism.

Let me show you what my firefox looks like:

http://arsdnet.net/firefox.png

I had to change a few settings to get it there, but I think this isn't too bad at all, and as you can see, it is a fairly new version. (I'm probably 10 versions behind again, it has been like three months!!!!! but meh.)


> And those minor annoyances have been more than made up for by all the times I've banged my head against the wall over some PITA HTML/CSS problem, then decided "fuck this shit, I'm using tables" and

Eh, I haven't that that, at least not for a long time, but it could be because I know a lot of arcane css crap so it isn't a head banger anymore.

Could also be that I'm given simpler designs too!


> Heh, I can't stand tiny TVs (I don't even like using portable game systems).

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't like *big* tvs. Too much light, weird movement just looks wrong to my eyes, and watching them for a while hurts my brain, literally, I get headaches.

Might not all be size itself, could be the high def, frame interpolation, lcd tech, whatever, but I just really prefer my old tvs. I have a 19" that I watch when I'm on the other side of the house (the room it is in is a long one, spanning the house's entire 30-some foot width) and a 13" one that is about 7 feet away from my computer desk that I watch a lot when sitting here.

Both televisions are from the 80's, but they still work quite well so like Rick Astley, I'm never gonna give them up.


Interestingly too, I had a PS3 briefly. I say briefly because the piece of shit died on my before I even owned it for two full months. Maybe that's what I get for getting a cheap one on ebay, but the new prices are just unacceptably high. Regardless, my playstation (one) was used too, and it still works. So was my super nintendo, etc. They all still work. I think they just don't make 'em like they used to.

Anyway, playing the ps3 on my friend's 32 inch high def tv hurts me horribly. My eyes get tired after about an hour. I thought it was maybe just because I'm getting too old for this shit, but then I played the very same game at my house on my little tv and was able to go 5 hours before feeling tired. It still fucked me up - lost sleep (I played an FPS for a while and started having nightmares about shooting people in real life.... that never happened playing the NES), got sore, clearly I can't sit on the video games for 10 hours a day like I used to do, but I'm convinced there's something different about the new vs old tvs that affect me physically. My score tended to be better on the old tv too!


> And it really gets me how touchscreen devices are promoted with the idealized concept of "touch" even though they *eliminate* tactile sensation.

Yup. And it is too easy to accidentally hit "buttons" and not know it. I was watching the tour de france on the ipad yesterday when the puppy had to go outside. I carried it with me figuring I can still watch it... but apparently my shirt brushed up against the screen and it interpreted that as a swipe motion that turned off the live stream!

Ugh! And there's other crap about the ipad too: changing the brightness means turning off the stream, slowly finding your way to settings, hitting that thing, sliding the bar up, then getting back to the video.

So if I go outside and want to turn up the brightness, better hope no action happens in that next minute cuz I'll miss it. Contrast to a real keyboard, where you can just put that on a hotkey. Or hell, a multitasking OS where you could still play the commentary audio in the background at least while adjusting settings.


And yesterday too, right at the finish line, it decided to pop up a MODAL DIALOG BOX saying "battery level has reached 10% [dismiss]"... and it stopped the video while it was up!

So I'm like I DON'T CARE I JUST NEED ONE MORE MINUTE COME BACK COME BACK!!!!!! But by the time it did, the first place rider had already crossed. (Of course, they replayed the finish a couple minutes later, but still.)


Anyway I could complain about the flaws in this thing all day long. But the bright side is that I can watch the sports on it, and there's a huge difference without the horribly repetitive commercials. The tour de france is like a 90 hour event, and I like to watch a good bulk of it. Now let me tell you, seeing the same dozen sponsor's commercials over and over and over again, every 15 minutes watching it on cable just kills the joy. But forking over $15 for their ipad app skips that crap. Totally worth it. (Especially since cable is $70 / month. Really, at that obscene price, do they even need commercials anymore to turn a profit? I canceled it in christmas 2011 and set up an antenna. I still get most the shows I watch over the air (higher quality too*) and can get the rest on the internet or the ipad thing, and much lower price.)


* The new digital tv over the air signal looks great, even on my old tvs, compared to digital cable. Which kinda amazes me, but it does. I guess it has to do with cable compression. The problem is if you don't get a good signal, it is unwatchable. And when it gets hot and/or windy, my signal gets crappy.

With the old analog tv, it was almost always watchable. Maybe fuzzy or ghosting picture, but watchable, even in imperfect weather.

I think digital tv, maybe the PS3 too now that I'm thinking about it, are examples of where we're going toward more more more at the peak, more pixels, more channels, etc., while ignoring graceful degradation for an acceptable average.

Yes, with a strong signal, 1080p might be great. But getting a black screen when the signal weakens sucks. I betcha if they broadcast a highly error resistant 480i (or whatever standard tv resolution used to be) on that same data stream, they could have gotten a much more reliable stream, giving a very consistent quality even in poor weather.

But then how would they sell people new high def equipment every other year?


Wow I'm getting off topic even for an off topic thread! Oh well.

> Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches (or rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player program.

Yes, I like to use mplayer for things so I can skip and speed up easily. I don't like watching videos at normal speed (most the time), it just takes too long. With text, I can skim it for interesting parts. With video, I'd like to do the same but can't. Best I can do is play it at like 1.5x speed.... mplayer can do that. youtube/html5 (amazingly though, firefox apparently *can*)/flash generally can't.

And mplayer takes like 1% cpu to play it. Flash takes like 110% cpu to do the same job. What trash.