The Forum editor

What is this 'please upgrade to Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater' nonsense? My Mozilla 1.7.2 is far better (less buggy and more secure) than any Internet Explorer ever released. I have no intention of using any Microsoft products. It is the Forum editor that needs to be upgraded to deal with Standards compliant browsers.

How do I quote from the article I'm replying to?

Post 1

Monday, August 30, 2004 - 9:21pm

Rick Pasotto writes: "What is this 'please upgrade to Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater' nonsense? My Mozilla 1.7.2 is far better (less buggy and more secure) than any Internet Explorer ever released. I have no intention of using any Microsoft products. It is the Forum editor that needs to be upgraded to deal with Standards compliant browsers."

Aha! Didn't you know that everything that Microsoft does is 'good'?:)[Hey, but don't ask 'by what standard?'] I use Mozilla Firefox for browsing and Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail. And, of course, my computer runs Slackware Linux. Label me evil, if it pleases you:)

Seriously, I have always considered that remark below the text box as a symbol of arrogance rooted on ignorance. Something not worth debating.

coaltontrail

Post 2

Monday, August 30, 2004 - 11:55pm

Ha ha - I am the arrogant and ignorant one to blame. I will say that the cool functionality that allows the WYSIWYG editing of your posts from Explorer is simply not supported by the other browsers. The choice was to 1) learn Java 2) Give everyone the plain basic low-functionality text-box or 3) Give the Explorer users the cool high-functional text box and the less than 10% non-compliant hold-outs the default less-functional one. I can get very frustrated sometimes trying to make a web site, especially one as complicated as SoloHQ, work in both Netscape and Explorer. It takes about 10 times as long getting some things (like the html that makes the top of the page) to work in both as it does just getting it to work in Explorer. Hence the word 'gimpy' as a small swipe at a non-standardized world that made a lot of the work that I did developing SoloHQ way harder than i wished it was. I apologize for the arrogance -- it was meant in jest -- who uses 'gimpy' seriously?

Post 3

Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - 10:50am

If you want to quote a post that you're replying to, you can use the "Quote" button if you're using IE, otherwise, you must do your own HTML tage - use <blockquote>quote</blockquote>

But in general, please no long quoting of other people's posts. A summary is always better.

Post 4

Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - 3:46pm

How does the quote button work? Do you still have to manually copy and paste the text in?

Thanks

Post 5

Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - 11:09pm

Rick Pasotto, Coalton Trail

I run Firefox on Linux and I share your frustration at a MS world. But I've got to hand it to Jeff. He's done a remarkable job. And because HE did this remarkable job, I say he's more than entitled to the odd quirky remark. Arrogance to me is your demanding that Jeff, who provides his services free of charge, cater for the demands of less than 10% of the market, just because YOU chose to be pioneers and benefit from new Linux/netscape-based technologies.

Thank's Jeff, I wear my "Gimpy Netscape text box" with pride :-).

Post 6

Wednesday, September 1, 2004 - 12:43pm

David Bertelsen wrote: "Arrogance to me is your demanding that Jeff, who provides his services free of charge, cater for the demands of less than 10% of the market, just because YOU chose to be pioneers and benefit from new Linux/netscape-based technologies."

Amusing! I didn't know that I demanded something.

As to the services of Jeff, I know very well what his difficulties are, and how thankless a job he is doing. Let there be no doubt about how much I appreiciate the work.

However, in the absence of his posting, there was no way I could have inferred that the statement was made in a 'lighter vein.' So the immediate conclusion I drew was that it is an advice to 'switch to a better/superior' browser, which, obviously, is presumptuous.

coaltontrail

Post 7

Wednesday, September 1, 2004 - 8:06am

David, I made no demands. I objected to being told to *upgrade* to a clearly inferior product. I suspect, though I don't know since I haven't seen the code, that browser type is being querried rather than browser capabilities. There are sites on the net with that sort of message that *would* work perfectly fine in Mozilla/Firefox but their checking logic is faulty. The Opera browser has the ability to pretend to be IE so that it will work with such sites.

It's not a matter of cattering to a small segment of the market, rather, for me, it's a matter of being standards compliant. IE, in addition to having proprietary, non-standard features, is *broken* in the way it does many things. The real situation is that web coders have to make allowances for the errors in IE.

Besides, IE is a security hazard. Many companies are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to avoid those security problems because they have apps that rely on broken, non-standard IE mis-features.

Coding for standards compliance is coding for the future.

Post 8

Wednesday, September 1, 2004 - 9:41pm

Rick Pasotto wrote: "Coding for standards compliance is coding for the future. "

I don't think it is as simple as that.

On paper this is a great idea. But the problem is this: you can't develop practical standards without having some experience. For that you need something, say a primitive language, to work on. By the time standards are established, there would be far too many applications that use pre-standard features incompatible with the standards. So you need backward compatibility. Compromises are often made, because most often standards are written by committees formed by different organizations with conflicting requirements. The result? Messy or too hard to implement standards.

A classic example is the ANSI C++ standard. Even though the standard has been around for the last three years or so, none of the compilers is fully standard compliant. As a result, porting a product from one OS to another is a nightmare. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in 'fixing' porting issues.

In addition, very often technological innovations cannot wait for the standards to evolve. Standard compliance can, in such situations, stiffle innovation.

On the other hand, there are situations when standards are a necessity. A few years ago, I was developing a distributed memory algorithm to solve a class of electromagnetic problems. One of our objectives was to write it in such a way that the code would run from 'single workstations to heterogeneous clusters to massively parallel supercomputers,' to quote something that I wrote in a paper. The project was a great success, but the most difficult part was not in constructing the algorithm, but in making the code portable!! The solution was to use a minimalist approach: avoid anything that was even remotely inconsistent across platforms.

Standards would have helped me there. In fact there was one, MPI, that made it a lot easier. But if there were better standards, I could have spent a lot more time perfecting the algorithm instead of chasing platform dependent bugs!

So my point is that the project and its objectives should dictate the design, not a blind standard compliance.

coaltontrail

PS: FYI, Mozilla/Firefox has an extension (prefbar, I think) that lets you change the user agent string. Try mozdev.org.

Post 9

Thursday, September 2, 2004 - 10:11pm

Thanks David!

Jonathan - yes, you have to copy what you want to quote, and then use the quote button on it while highlighted to make it look like a nice quote. There is no automatic way to just quote a whole message, because I hate it when people do that! Concentrate on the point, and don't argue every minutiae, please. :-)

Post 10

Saturday, January 29, 2005 - 11:33pm

Jeff:

Kindly remove my profile from your site and close my account. Thank you!

Post 11

Sunday, January 30, 2005 - 10:58am

Jeff,

It's not a thankless job (Thank you!), but it is a very difficult one and many don't appreciate this, especially (as you point out) with today's technology. I'm a cross-platform developer myself, and I know how difficult it is (and it always seems about 10X more difficult on the Microsoft platform). You deserve a lot of respect for being able to pull all this off in your "free" time.

However, you are being presumptuous in calling anything other than IE "Gimpy" and telling people to "upgrade." And I disagree with David - no one is entitled to a little irrationality, and leaving in a quirky remark on purpose just because one feels entitled is irrational (not saying you've done that, just disagreeing with David).

You have no reason to feel the need to blame other browsers for the fact that Solo is not technically finished, if that what that sort of comment stems from. You have limited time and resources and can only do so much. It's not a failing, it's a great success that you could do so much with so little. But it doesn't change the facts.

Post 12

Sunday, January 30, 2005 - 1:21pm

As long as we are on the topic ...

If you sign up for email delivery and you want to read the text version of the posts, I have noticed that a pair of break codes (the gimpy interface will not allow me to enter them here!) in the HTML is being translated into non-breaking space followed by a space. This causes multiple paragraphs in the HTML to be run together in the text version.

I would suggest that no HTML codes such as the non-breaking space code should be included in the text version and that the break pair should be translated into a blank line (i.e., two newline characters).

Also, I have written a filter at my end to reformat the text portion of all email messages to have lines no longer than 79 characters so that they can be conveniently viewed on an 80-column screen. It would be nice if this formatting was done on the originating end rather than having paragraphs appear as one very long line. Breaking them around column 75 would be a good idea. Also note that there is some limit to how long a line will currently be produced by the system that produces the textural output and sentences are being broken at arbitrary locations.

Despite all of this, I want to also thank Jeff Landauer for his work on maintaining this site.

Post 13

Sunday, January 30, 2005 - 2:18pm