I had intended to make a series of posts on standards and ignoring the same, but frankly I’m exhausted, and it’s me holidays tomorrow…
Kate and I had our biggest gig yet last night - we demoed and taught a workshop at a posh wedding. Kate borrowed a little black number from our salsa teachers and looked stunning. She was terrified of course but stayed relaxed and followed wonderfully! She has a heck of a job to do, since we don’t do choreographed routines, I lead and she follows…
Coupled with planning our holiday for tomorrow and a couple of late evenings at work when a 6 day job due in mid September turned into an 11 day job due in next Friday, I’ve scarcely touched the floor.
I seem still to be able to work my arms and legs. Hopefully my lungs and heart will keep going at least till I get to Linköping. Unfortunately I’m going to need my brain before then, and it seems to have run out.
Loisintheforest commended me on my restraint at only calling Microsoft “cheeky buggers” in my last post. This is because I think MS have a legitimate case for building non-standard products. If they have an idea they consider to be better than the standard, they are ideally placed to simply implement and roll out their software and, hey presto, it’s the defacto standard. For example, if I want to write a bit of Javascript to move a paragraph 10 pixels to the left, this is how I do it by the standards:
document.getElementById("myelement").style.left= ((substr(0,document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(document.getElementById("myelement"), "").getPropertyValue("height").length-2) + 10) + 'px';
Whereas in Internet explorer I would go:
document['myelement'].pixelLeft -= 10;
Are you starting to see it Microsoft’s way? (Note: neither of these is tested, but for the purposes of illustration they are close enough) .
You’re Microsoft. 80% of the world browses the web with your browser, which admittedly is a bit shonky, but it had to be out there on time and fit with dozens of different teams’ technical and strategic goals. Your customer service, marketing, business relations, product sales, internal procedures and development projects are all supported by internet technologies including browser scripting. Then some bunch of academics start declaring standards, working with no deadline and no financial risk if they get it wrong. Are you going to rip out all your infrastructure and threaten the stability of a world-dominating piece of technology in order to play by their rules? Or are you going to continue to play by your rules… I know what I’d do.
… there are so many to choose from. (sometimes credited to Andrew Tanenbaum)
I have been labouring under the misapprehension that browser technology was at long last reaching maturity. The w3c (World Wide Web Consortium) has standards on the representation and presentation of documents, and on the ways for a programmer to access elements on the page and their size, colour, etc. I don’t think the standards are right, but they do nearly everything I want them to do, and - which is more important - they are standard.
When I worked in the intermerweb, in the days of the dot-com hysteria, it was an inordinate amount of effort to make a simple thing happen like changing an image when you moved the mouse over it. The problem was that you wrote the code for your site, but the thing executing the code could be any browser. How internet explorer chose to refer to the filename of the third image in the document would differ from how netscape did it, so you ended up having to write a piece of code that first worked out what browser it was being run in, then jumped to a piece of the program that was meaningful to that browser.
This is why you saw lots of “Best viewed in Nestcape Navigator 3+” badges and the like all over the net.
Well, for some time I’ve been using firefox, and very nice it is too. I won’t try to convert you because this is one of those “religious” topics where it’s “whatever works best for you but if THAT’s what works best for you you are wrong and deserve to die”… but suffice it to say, I switched to firefox, grumbled about it for about 3 weeks, and then never looked back. When someone gets me to help fix their computer, they sometimes find internet explorer has disappeared and firefox has taken its place…
I just tried looking at my oldyorksalsa page in IE6. Oops. Also this page: Oops again. Microsoft are STILL not playing ball and supporting published standards. Cheeky Buggers.
Kate has a pile of stuff to burn at the allotment nearly as tall as her, and our previous attempts to put a match to it have resulted in smouldering and disappointment. I figured what was needed was a chimney shape and was thinking about making it out of the pile of grass and other cut stuff, a sort of grass version of an earth kiln, that would burn from the inside out.
Boy am I glad I didn’t try that.
I bought a “furnace” from B&Q, which amounted to a metal bin with holes in and a lid with a chimney, and some firelighters. I chucked some wood and dry grass in the bottom of the bin and chucked a firelighter on top, and put a flame to it.
Dry grass burns rather well.
I think it’ll take weeks to burn all the stuff off. It’s a bit sad because if it had been cut before it went to seed it would have been good compost, and there is rather a lot of it! Still, Kate has her scythe now. Next I have to work out whether or not I’ve destroyed the blade with my sharpening method, as a sharp blade will be vital if we’re to avoid going to seed again next year.
My hard drive’s making nasty noises again. Oh dear. It sounds a lot like my iPod did just before it stoped working altogether. Of course I have a full back up of all my important and cherished documents (or will have, when I get round to buying a second drive, and copy it all over, assuming the old drive doesn’t die during that process… ahem…)
So the practical upshot of this is that I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of that annoying scroll effect on the navigation any time soon, since I dare not power up my PeeCee until I’ve replaced the drive and I’m far too busy to replace same in the forseeable future (i.e. in the next three weeks)