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digitalmars.D - D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

reply "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
I just noticed there are a bunch of these:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/hidden-features

Someone should start a hidden features of D.
It should be free stack overflow rep for anyone who wants it.
I'll get around to doing it eventually if no one else does.

--bb
Sep 22 2008
next sibling parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.222.1222129662.19733.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...

I just noticed there are a bunch of these:
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/hidden-features

 Someone should start a hidden features of D.
 It should be free stack overflow rep for anyone who wants it.
 I'll get around to doing it eventually if no one else does.

 --bb


Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login, modal 
dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first created 
these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).
Sep 22 2008
next sibling parent "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
It's not perfect, but it's still a beta.
I'm at least curious to see if it works out long term to be a good
place to ask and find answers to programming questions.
Anyway, a lot of eyeballs are on it now, so a D presence can be a good
advertisement for D.
So far the D presence is not strong.  It doesn't help that the search
function is currently unable to search for either  "d" or "d
programming".  Doesn't even work for searching tags.

--bb

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:08 AM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> wrote in message
 news:mailman.222.1222129662.19733.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...

I just noticed there are a bunch of these:
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/hidden-features

 Someone should start a hidden features of D.
 It should be free stack overflow rep for anyone who wants it.
 I'll get around to doing it eventually if no one else does.

 --bb


 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login, modal
 dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first created
 these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).
Sep 22 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent reply BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).
 


you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. (or 
it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)
Sep 22 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. (or 
 it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)


Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to vote 
on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and disabling 
javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.
Sep 23 2008
next sibling parent reply "Jarrett Billingsley" <jarrett.billingsley gmail.com> writes:
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 9:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. (or
 it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)


 Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to vote
 on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and disabling
 javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.


I wasn't aware that disabling javascript was really a reasonable
option these days.  There goes, like, almost every site, ever.
Sep 23 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Jarrett Billingsley" <jarrett.billingsley gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.238.1222220079.19733.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...

 On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 9:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. 
 (or
 it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)


 Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to 
 vote
 on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and 
 disabling
 javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.


 I wasn't aware that disabling javascript was really a reasonable
 option these days.  There goes, like, almost every site, ever.


Which is very unfortunate in my opinion. Actually, that very fact is *the* 
single reason I've reluctantly started leaving JS turned on in my browser by 
default instead of leaving it off by default. If Firefox or IE had the JS 
(and process-orientation) from Google Chrome (I'm not about to use Chrome 
for daily browsing as it is right now), then I *might* sort of change my 
mind on my whole "JS is evil crap" a little bit (though still not entirely - 
like Flash, it's one of those things that just *begs* to be abused - and 
that's a dangerous thing considering the quality of most web developers 
these days. Shit, it used to be that you had to actually know what you were 
doing before getting hired to write code...[unintelligible old-man mumbling 
here...]).
Sep 23 2008
parent Walter Bright <newshound1 digitalmars.com> writes:
Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 Shit, it used to be that you had to actually know what you were
 doing before getting hired to write code...[unintelligible old-man mumbling 
 here...]). 


That was never true :-)

Back in the bad old DOS days, the boom was so great that if you could 
spell ".BAT" you could get hired as a DOS programmer.
Sep 26 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. (or
 it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)


 Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to vote
 on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and disabling
 javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.


I think you do need to log in to vote.  Otherwise the "reputation"
score would become pretty meaningless.  It would be too trivial to
just vote yourself up.

I agree that Ajax sucks, but in my opinion about the only thing worse
than a web app using Ajax is one *not* using Ajax, requiring 23 pages
of slow click-and-reload options just to do the simplest thing.

After having used StackOverflow for bit now, I think the biggest
problem standing in the way of it achieving its goal of being the
definitive place to find excellent answers to tech questions is the
lack of editability.  You can't edit other people's good answers to
make them great answers.  And I find I just can't bring myself to copy
someone's good answer and edit it myself to make it great.  I tried it
once and I still feel scummy for having "stolen" that guy's answer
like that.  Stealing answers and making them better is the way it's
supposed to work from what I understand, but I think most people are
too polite for that to feel like the proper thing to do.  Plus doing
that flagrantly violates the DRY principle which will make most
programmers cringe.

I think what they need to do is for each question add one definitive
"community answer" that works Wiki-style.  Anyone can edit that answer
and it should ideally reflect the union of the best individual answers
given by folks.

--bb
Sep 23 2008
next sibling parent BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Bill,



 After having used StackOverflow for bit now, I think the biggest
 problem standing in the way of it achieving its goal of being the
 definitive place to find excellent answers to tech questions is the
 lack of editability.  You can't edit other people's good answers to
 make them great answers. 


That's because you need a few K rep to edit other peoples stuff.
Sep 23 2008
prev sibling parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.239.1222221233.19733.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...

 On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. 
 (or
 it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)


 Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to 
 vote
 on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and 
 disabling
 javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.


 I think you do need to log in to vote.  Otherwise the "reputation"
 score would become pretty meaningless.  It would be too trivial to
 just vote yourself up.

 I agree that Ajax sucks, but in my opinion about the only thing worse
 than a web app using Ajax is one *not* using Ajax, requiring 23 pages
 of slow click-and-reload options just to do the simplest thing.


I guess I overstated my point a little bit. Ajax (as well as 
non-Ajaxy-JS/DHTML) is great for simple things like voting on posts 
(Provided that Ajax/JS isn't required for the feature, because there's 
really no reason for these things not to have graceful non-JS fallbacks. Or 
at least there wouldn't be any reason if it weren't for the fact that 
(X)HTML/CSS has certain appallingly-ridiculous limitations that will never 
get fixed just because everyone's fearful of changing HTML anymore and has 
gotten used to using JS-based workarounds - and that *is* what they are - 
workarounds).

But these days, web or not, you can pretty much guarantee: if there's a way 
to screw up the design of something, it will get screwed up *and* millions 
of developers will then run around all copying the same screwup after either 
not noticing it, or mistaking it for a good idea.

Examples:
- Breaking the "Back" button
- Breaking the bookmarking ability
- Flash intro pages / Intro pages, period / Flash intros on the homepage 
(Ie, the animating GIFs/blink tags of the 21st century) / Flash sites
- Loads of invisible text on any system that uses a non-default color 
scheme.
- Crapping all over established design standards (in general).
- Menus that expand upon mouseover instead of click.
- "Close" buttons that minimize instead of close (typically a non-web 
issue).
- Adding the "feature" of modal dialog boxes to something (ie, a web page) 
that has no technical or design justification for such modality.
- Forcing a custom skin upon users of an app instead of at least *allowing* 
the user to use *their own system settings* (another typically non-web 
issue).
- Screwing up the ability to work with two instances at the same time 
(*cough* Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
- Inadvertently preventing full archival for offline reference (*cough* 
Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
- Insanely slow page loading and navigation (*cough* Adobe LiveDocs and 
Joystiq/Engadget *cough*).
- Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.
- Eliminating the user's ability to make their own decisions of when to open 
something in a new tab/window or the same tab/window.

Ajax/JS/DHTML is what enables many of those problems to occur (not all of 
them, though, I kinda got carried away). Disable JS and many of those 
problems go away. Or at least they *would* go away if everyone wasn't so 
keen on throwing away the whole idea of non-JS-fallbacks.

I mean really, there is absolutely no useful functionality that 
JS/Ajax/DHTML provide that can't be accomplished in a non-JS/Ajax/DHTML way, 
either right now or with a few minor improvements to XHTML/CSS (such as 
allowing the "action" and "method" attributes to be associated with an 
"input/submit" tag instead of the "form" tag, or allowing link tags to 
perform a form submission - actually these things are the exact examples I 
had in mind when I said above that JS is sometimes used as a workaround for 
(X)HTML's limitations).

The only *real* use of JS/Ajax/DHTML is that they allow for fewer 
full-page-loads. That's really all it comes down to. And that's not a bad 
thing, but for some people, like myself, the benefit of having fewer 
full-page-loads just isn't worth the cost of having to deal with all that 
crap design that JS/Ajax/DHTML end up allowing. But unfortunately, I don't 
have the option of actually *making* that choice thanks to all of those 
yahoos that have jumped onto the "JS is now a standard feature that we can 
safely require" bandwagon. Jackasses.


 After having used StackOverflow for bit now, I think the biggest
 problem standing in the way of it achieving its goal of being the
 definitive place to find excellent answers to tech questions is the
 lack of editability.  You can't edit other people's good answers to
 make them great answers.  And I find I just can't bring myself to copy
 someone's good answer and edit it myself to make it great.  I tried it
 once and I still feel scummy for having "stolen" that guy's answer
 like that.  Stealing answers and making them better is the way it's
 supposed to work from what I understand, but I think most people are
 too polite for that to feel like the proper thing to do.  Plus doing
 that flagrantly violates the DRY principle which will make most
 programmers cringe.

 I think what they need to do is for each question add one definitive
 "community answer" that works Wiki-style.  Anyone can edit that answer
 and it should ideally reflect the union of the best individual answers
 given by folks.

 --bb
Sep 23 2008
next sibling parent reply BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Nick,


 - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.


I'll grant you everything but the thing about PDFs. PDF's are good as stand 
alone long docs or anything where layout is important.
Sep 23 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:78ccfa2d3290a8caebd75c21451a news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,


 - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.


 I'll grant you everything but the thing about PDFs. PDF's are good as 
 stand alone long docs or anything where layout is important.


Ehh, I truely hate PDFs (except for highly accurate printing, of course). 
Anything that can't be read on a screen without a bunch of zooming and 
2D-scrolling is just not suitable for being read on a screen. And that 
describes the vast majority of PDF's I've seen (For example, a common 
occurrence is a single page with multiple columns of text where the text is 
too small to be readable zoomed-out, but if you zoom in, then every time you 
finish reading a column you have to scroll *up* to the top of the page and 
then over to the right - which is just a really stupid thing to have to do). 
Plus, vertical page margins really have no business being in a screen-viewed 
document either.

XHTML/CSS (despite it's flaws) is far better suited for screen-viewed 
layouts since, unlike PDF, it doesn't force the reader to use navigation 
that's, by comparison, incredibly awkward just for the sake of preserving 
the locations of linebreaks within a paragraph, which frankly is *rarely* 
important outside of printing (also true of any other detail where PDF 
provides more accuracy).

I might be mistaken, but I don't think editing a PDF can't really be done 
with typical text editing / word processing software. You need to either use 
the expensive Adobe Acrobat (full version), or some obscure 3rd party 
program from an obscure developer. Not that editing a PDF is needed nearly 
as commonly as reading one, but it is a problem that has bitten me more than 
once.

Plus, the format itself is a bit of a kitchen-sink design. It's impossible 
for a program to fully support PDF loading without also supporting damn near 
every file format under the sun. And for something that's primarily a page 
layout format, I really see no reason for the added complexity that such 
flexibility entails.
Sep 23 2008
next sibling parent reply BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Nick,


 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d3290a8caebd75c21451a news.digitalmars.com...
 

 Reply to Nick,
 

 - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.
 


 I'll grant you everything but the thing about PDFs. PDF's are good as
 stand alone long docs or anything where layout is important.
 


 Ehh, I truely hate PDFs (except for highly accurate printing, of
 course). Anything that can't be read on a screen without a bunch of
 zooming and 2D-scrolling is just not suitable for being read on a
 screen.


I'd go the other way, PDF's are suitable for anything you'd like in hardcopy 
but are to cheap to actually print off.


 And that describes the vast majority of PDF's I've seen (For
 example, a common occurrence is a single page with multiple columns of
 text where the text is too small to be readable zoomed-out, but if you
 zoom in, then every time you finish reading a column you have to
 scroll *up* to the top of the page and then over to the right - which
 is just a really stupid thing to have to do).


OK so you can make a crappy layout, same goes for HTML.


 Plus, vertical page
 margins really have no business being in a screen-viewed document
 either.


OK point to you
 

 XHTML/CSS (despite it's flaws) is far better suited for screen-viewed
 layouts since, unlike PDF, it doesn't force the reader to use
 navigation that's, by comparison, incredibly awkward just for the sake
 of preserving the locations of linebreaks within a paragraph, which
 frankly is *rarely* important outside of printing (also true of any
 other detail where PDF provides more accuracy).
 


PDF does zoom better than HTML. With web pages, you as often as not get the 
tiny font wrapped to 1/2 the width of the screen or lines that are about 
a paragraph wide. With PDF you can zoom in without things going woonky.


 I might be mistaken, but I don't think editing a PDF can't really be
 done with typical text editing / word processing software. You need to
 either use the expensive Adobe Acrobat (full version), or some obscure
 3rd party program from an obscure developer. Not that editing a PDF is
 needed nearly as commonly as reading one, but it is a problem that has
 bitten me more than once.


I've maybe once wanted to edit a PDF. (HTML for things people might want 
to edit, docs and other book like things... Nope)


 
 Plus, the format itself is a bit of a kitchen-sink design. It's
 impossible for a program to fully support PDF loading without also
 supporting damn near every file format under the sun. And for
 something that's primarily a page layout format, I really see no
 reason for the added complexity that such flexibility entails.
 


Host Adobe and you don't need to bother.
Sep 23 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:78ccfa2d329128caebdfa6344eba news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,


 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d3290a8caebd75c21451a news.digitalmars.com...


 Reply to Nick,


 - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.


 I'll grant you everything but the thing about PDFs. PDF's are good as
 stand alone long docs or anything where layout is important.


 Ehh, I truely hate PDFs (except for highly accurate printing, of
 course). Anything that can't be read on a screen without a bunch of
 zooming and 2D-scrolling is just not suitable for being read on a
 screen.


 I'd go the other way, PDF's are suitable for anything you'd like in 
 hardcopy but are to cheap to actually print off.


 And that describes the vast majority of PDF's I've seen (For
 example, a common occurrence is a single page with multiple columns of
 text where the text is too small to be readable zoomed-out, but if you
 zoom in, then every time you finish reading a column you have to
 scroll *up* to the top of the page and then over to the right - which
 is just a really stupid thing to have to do).


 OK so you can make a crappy layout, same goes for HTML.


But the PDF phenomenon I described isn't really a case of "bad layout". 
Those PDF files, like most PDF files, are designed specifically with 
printing in mind. For a printed page, what I described is often a perfectly 
good layout, maybe even great.

A person could, of course, have their usual "for print" PDF and, in addition 
to that, make another PDF that's laid out for screen viewing, but 1. It 
wouldn't be able to readjust the word wrapping as the window is resized 
(unless there's some obscure PDF extension to do that), and 2. If they're 
going to make two versions, they may as well just make the "for screen" 
version an HTML page.


 Plus, vertical page
 margins really have no business being in a screen-viewed document
 either.


 OK point to you


 XHTML/CSS (despite it's flaws) is far better suited for screen-viewed
 layouts since, unlike PDF, it doesn't force the reader to use
 navigation that's, by comparison, incredibly awkward just for the sake
 of preserving the locations of linebreaks within a paragraph, which
 frankly is *rarely* important outside of printing (also true of any
 other detail where PDF provides more accuracy).


 PDF does zoom better than HTML. With web pages, you as often as not get 
 the tiny font wrapped to 1/2 the width of the screen or lines that are 
 about a paragraph wide. With PDF you can zoom in without things going 
 woonky.


I'd argue that's a browser issue. IE7 operates on the idea that zooming and 
layout should be completely independent, so it doesn't have that problem 
(Although I primarily use Firefox - I can't use the web without my favorite 
extensions :) ). Firefox (and probably other browsers) doesn't really have a 
true zoom. It just adjusts the text size (sometimes - it depends on the 
CSS), which is what screws up certain poorly-designed layouts. 
(Well-designed layouts also avoid that problem, even on Firefox.)


 I might be mistaken, but I don't think editing a PDF can't really be
 done with typical text editing / word processing software. You need to
 either use the expensive Adobe Acrobat (full version), or some obscure
 3rd party program from an obscure developer. Not that editing a PDF is
 needed nearly as commonly as reading one, but it is a problem that has
 bitten me more than once.


 I've maybe once wanted to edit a PDF. (HTML for things people might want 
 to edit, docs and other book like things... Nope)


I think it's more of an issue when either 1. You're working on some 
organization's web team and a bunch of yahoos (from other departments) who 
can't proofread keep sending you things in PDF to put up on the site. 2. You 
need to fill out a form that only exists in PDF (and maybe hardcopy). But, 
to save time and dead trees, they allow you to email it back to them. 
Usually these people aren't aware that PDF is capable of having user-fill-in 
fields.


 Plus, the format itself is a bit of a kitchen-sink design. It's
 impossible for a program to fully support PDF loading without also
 supporting damn near every file format under the sun. And for
 something that's primarily a page layout format, I really see no
 reason for the added complexity that such flexibility entails.


 Host Adobe and you don't need to bother.


Sometimes business reasons make it preferable not to rely on a third party 
for certain things because it can tie your hands and cause problems if the 
unforseen occurrs ("Hope for the best, plan for the worst"). If I were in 
charge of a program that needed to load PDFs, and that program and the 
PDF-loading feature were both mission-critical (for whatever reason) then I 
would make sure to have some fully in-house PDF-loading routines. Otherwise, 
the whims of Adobe could wind up endangering the whole company (The 
unthinkable does sometimes happen).

But rare scenario or not, contrived or not, my point is just that the format 
could have been designed better.
Sep 23 2008
next sibling parent "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message 
news:gbcm76$484$1 digitalmars.com...

 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message

 PDF does zoom better than HTML. With web pages, you as often as not get 
 the tiny font wrapped to 1/2 the width of the screen or lines that are 
 about a paragraph wide. With PDF you can zoom in without things going 
 woonky.


 I'd argue that's a browser issue. IE7 operates on the idea that zooming 
 and layout should be completely independent, so it doesn't have that 
 problem (Although I primarily use Firefox - I can't use the web without my 
 favorite extensions :) ). Firefox (and probably other browsers) doesn't 
 really have a true zoom. It just adjusts the text size (sometimes - it 
 depends on the CSS), which is what screws up certain poorly-designed 
 layouts. (Well-designed layouts also avoid that problem, even on Firefox.)


Also, small font sizes in HTML at the very least tend to still be fairly 
crisp (except maybe in Safari, but that's a different issue, and a whole 
separate rant). In PDF, if something's too small to read it's generally 
because it's in a reasonably-sized font that's been scaled down. Problem is, 
that scaling-down degrades the quality (Since the scaling algorithm is 
chosen for print accuracy rather than readability). Look at a small font, 
maybe 8 or 10pt, on a web page, and compare that to a PDF, say, from a book, 
that's been zoomed out so that the text is exactly the same *physical* size 
as the text on the web page. The text in the PDF will be a lot harder to 
read.
Sep 23 2008
prev sibling parent BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Nick,


 But the PDF phenomenon I described isn't really a case of "bad
 layout". Those PDF files, like most PDF files, are designed
 specifically with printing in mind. For a printed page, what I
 described is often a perfectly good layout, maybe even great.
 


Only issue there is I can't ever recall seeing a 2 column page that benefited 
from it.


Short version. PDF has it place. Things like documentation and manuals do 
well as PDFs (if they are made by someone who has a functioning brain).
Sep 24 2008
prev sibling parent "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 I might be mistaken, but I don't think editing a PDF can't really be done
 with typical text editing / word processing software. You need to either use
 the expensive Adobe Acrobat (full version),


Acrobat can only do very trivial edits.  Change a word here or there.
Crop the margins.  Add/remove pages.
If you have big edits to do, it's basically useless.

Adobe Illustrator is the app you need if you really want to edit PDF.

Doesn't change your argument.  Just a point of info.


 or some obscure 3rd party
 program from an obscure developer. Not that editing a PDF is needed nearly
 as commonly as reading one, but it is a problem that has bitten me more than
 once.



 Plus, the format itself is a bit of a kitchen-sink design. It's impossible
 for a program to fully support PDF loading without also supporting damn near
 every file format under the sun. And for something that's primarily a page
 layout format, I really see no reason for the added complexity that such
 flexibility entails.


There are free libs that do a decent job.  Probably they don't support
every ridiculous extension that Adobe has thought up, but they do
pretty good at rendering the majority of PDFs out there.

--bb
Sep 23 2008
prev sibling parent =?iso-8859-1?Q?Julio=20C=e9sar=20Carrascal=20Urquijo?= <jcarrascal gmail.com> writes:
Hello Nick,


 I mean really, there is absolutely no useful functionality that
 JS/Ajax/DHTML provide that can't be accomplished in a
 non-JS/Ajax/DHTML way, either right now or with a few minor
 improvements to XHTML/CSS (such as allowing the "action" and "method"
 attributes to be associated with an "input/submit" tag instead of the
 "form" tag, or allowing link tags to perform a form submission


Rejoice:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#extensions3

This will be available with HTML 5 in 2023 or so.
Sep 27 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter gmail.com> wrote:

 On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,



 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
 modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
 created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. (or
 it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)


 Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to vote
 on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and disabling
 javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.


 I think you do need to log in to vote.  Otherwise the "reputation"
 score would become pretty meaningless.  It would be too trivial to
 just vote yourself up.

 I agree that Ajax sucks, but in my opinion about the only thing worse
 than a web app using Ajax is one *not* using Ajax, requiring 23 pages
 of slow click-and-reload options just to do the simplest thing.

 After having used StackOverflow for bit now, I think the biggest
 problem standing in the way of it achieving its goal of being the
 definitive place to find excellent answers to tech questions is the
 lack of editability.  You can't edit other people's good answers to
 make them great answers.  And I find I just can't bring myself to copy
 someone's good answer and edit it myself to make it great.  I tried it
 once and I still feel scummy for having "stolen" that guy's answer
 like that.  Stealing answers and making them better is the way it's
 supposed to work from what I understand, but I think most people are
 too polite for that to feel like the proper thing to do.  Plus doing
 that flagrantly violates the DRY principle which will make most
 programmers cringe.

 I think what they need to do is for each question add one definitive
 "community answer" that works Wiki-style.  Anyone can edit that answer
 and it should ideally reflect the union of the best individual answers
 given by folks.


Hmm... I just noticed that you can check the "Community owned" box
when you post an answer.  I guess that's the polite way to steal
people's answers without being annoying.  Maybe that solves my
concern.  I'll have to try that option out and see how it works in
practice.

Another problem is that often you end up wanting to have a discussion
with the people interested in the question that runs along side actual
answers.  The format is not conducive to that since every post has to
be an answer or a comment tucked away underneath someone else's
answer.  I think a "discussion" tab on each question page would help
keep the answers page cleaner, and help it feel more like a community.

Kinda like how every regular thread on news.digitalmars gets paired up
with an OT thread for random discussions.  :-)

--bb
Sep 23 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent Jussi Jumppanen <jussij zeusedit.com> writes:
Nick Sabalausky Wrote:


 Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, 
 attempting to vote on anything resulted in a "you must 
 log in to vote" message


To post messages and replies does not require a logon but
voting does.

I suspect the login is required to vote to so that they can 
ensure you only vote once for any one topic.
Sep 23 2008
prev sibling parent reply BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Nick,


 and disabling javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript"
 header strip.
 


I think it says, "Site intended for use with JavaScript" or somthing like 
that. It Does work without it, just not near as nicely
Sep 23 2008
parent "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"BCS" <ao pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:78ccfa2d329078caebd27dc738e6 news.digitalmars.com...

 Reply to Nick,


 and disabling javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript"
 header strip.


 I think it says, "Site intended for use with JavaScript" or somthing like 
 that. It Does work without it, just not near as nicely


Hmm, yea I guess so. But, either way, it's obnoxious and at least a little 
bit patronizing. "Yea, I know most websites are designed with non-JS as 
nothing more than a fallback. But I disabled it for a reason, so STFU and 
get out of my way."
Sep 23 2008
prev sibling parent reply JMNorris <nospam nospam.com> writes:
"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in news:gb9gjc$3od$1 digitalmars.com:


 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login, modal 
 dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first created 
 these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax). 


Just curious, why do you hate Ajax?  (This question comes from someone who 
doesn't know enough about Ajax or web sites that use it to have his own 
opinion about it.)

--
JMNorris
Sep 25 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"JMNorris" <nospam nospam.com> wrote in message 
news:gbg3e2$1230$1 digitalmars.com...

 "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in news:gb9gjc$3od$1 digitalmars.com:


 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login, modal
 dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first created
 these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 Just curious, why do you hate Ajax?  (This question comes from someone who
 doesn't know enough about Ajax or web sites that use it to have his own
 opinion about it.)

 --
 JMNorris


Well, from a developer's standpoint, I don't like it because it involves 
using ECMAScript/JavaScript, and I consider that to be a terrible language 
(though I admit the newer versions really are are improvements. Of course, 
it's still basically a case of polishing a turd - they can polish it all 
they want, it's still a turd.)

Also, it involves DHTML, which involves using the browser DOMs and those 
things are terribly inconsistent across browsers, and even the "official" 
standard is poorly designed in places (for instance, the value that gets 
returned to indicate which mouse button(s) is/are down is *FAR* better in 
IE, but the official standard's way of doing it is both completely 
incompatible with that and is practically useless by comparison anyway). 
It's possible to get things working reliably and consistently across 
browsers, but it involves an enormous amount of the absolute most ridiculous 
and obscure trickery I've ever seen on any platform (And I've coded for the 
Atari VCS). There's a site somewhere that explains a lot of it, but it's 
(thankfully) been awhile since I've had to do much DHTML so unfortunately I 
don't have the link handy.

From a user's standpoint, I have a whole other set of reasons, which I 
mentioned in different branch of this thread. I use an actual newsgroup 
reader so I can't link to it, so I'll just quote it here:


 I guess I overstated my point a little bit. Ajax (as well as
 non-Ajaxy JS/DHTML) is great for simple things like voting on posts
 (Provided that Ajax/JS isn't required for the feature, because there's
 really no reason for these things not to have graceful non-JS fallbacks. 
 Or
 at least there wouldn't be any reason if it weren't for the fact that
 (X)HTML/CSS has certain appallingly-ridiculous limitations that will never
 get fixed just because everyone's fearful of changing HTML anymore and has
 gotten used to using JS-based workarounds - and that *is* what they are -
 workarounds).

 But these days, web or not, you can pretty much guarantee: if there's a 
 way
 to screw up the design of something, it will get screwed up *and* millions
 of developers will then run around all copying the same screwup after 
 either
 not noticing it, or mistaking it for a good idea.

 Examples:
 - Breaking the "Back" button
 - Breaking the bookmarking ability
 - Flash intro pages / Intro pages, period / Flash intros on the homepage
 (Ie, the animating GIFs/blink tags of the 21st century) / Flash sites
 - Loads of invisible text on any system that uses a non-default color
 scheme.
 - Crapping all over established design standards (in general).
 - Menus that expand upon mouseover instead of click.
 - "Close" buttons that minimize instead of close (typically a non-web
 issue).
 - Adding the "feature" of modal dialog boxes to something (ie, a web page)
 that has no technical or design justification for such modality.
 - Forcing a custom skin upon users of an app instead of at least 
 *allowing*
 the user to use *their own system settings* (another typically non-web
 issue).
 - Screwing up the ability to work with two instances at the same time
 (*cough* Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
 - Inadvertently preventing full archival for offline reference (*cough*
 Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
 - Insanely slow page loading and navigation (*cough* Adobe LiveDocs and
 Joystiq/Engadget *cough*).
 - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.
 - Eliminating the user's ability to make their own decisions of when to 
 open
 something in a new tab/window or the same tab/window.

 Ajax/JS/DHTML is what enables many of those problems to occur (not all of
 them, though, I kinda got carried away). Disable JS and many of those
 problems go away. Or at least they *would* go away if everyone wasn't so
 keen on throwing away the whole idea of non-JS-fallbacks.

 I mean really, there is absolutely no useful functionality that
 JS/Ajax/DHTML provide that can't be accomplished in a non-JS/Ajax/DHTML 
 way,
 either right now or with a few minor improvements to XHTML/CSS (such as
 allowing the "action" and "method" attributes to be associated with an
 "input/submit" tag instead of the "form" tag, or allowing link tags to
 perform a form submission - actually these things are the exact examples I
 had in mind when I said above that JS is sometimes used as a workaround 
 for
 (X)HTML's limitations).

 The only *real* use of JS/Ajax/DHTML is that they allow for fewer
 full-page-loads. That's really all it comes down to. And that's not a bad
 thing, but for some people, like myself, the benefit of having fewer
 full-page-loads just isn't worth the cost of having to deal with all that
 crap design that JS/Ajax/DHTML end up allowing. But unfortunately, I don't
 have the option of actually *making* that choice thanks to all of those
 yahoos that have jumped onto the "JS is now a standard feature that we can
 safely require" bandwagon.
Sep 25 2008
parent reply "Bent Rasmussen" <IncredibleShrinkingSphere Gmail.com> writes:
It may be that it "involves" using Javascript in the same sense that using D 
involves using assembler code, but Javascript implementations are becomming 
increasingly fast, as latest witnessed by the Squirrelfish Extreme 
Javascript VM (and V8 and TraceMonkey). There are also languages like haXe, 

nice to work with, with type inference, intellisense etc.

That said, the platform is aging and ad-hoc. But there is some new life 
being breathed into it.

Bent


"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> skrev i meddelelsen 
news:gbgo8e$2m2i$1 digitalmars.com...

 "JMNorris" <nospam nospam.com> wrote in message 
 news:gbg3e2$1230$1 digitalmars.com...

 "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in news:gb9gjc$3od$1 digitalmars.com:


 Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login, modal
 dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first created
 these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).


 Just curious, why do you hate Ajax?  (This question comes from someone 
 who
 doesn't know enough about Ajax or web sites that use it to have his own
 opinion about it.)

 --
 JMNorris


 Well, from a developer's standpoint, I don't like it because it involves 
 using ECMAScript/JavaScript, and I consider that to be a terrible language 
 (though I admit the newer versions really are are improvements. Of course, 
 it's still basically a case of polishing a turd - they can polish it all 
 they want, it's still a turd.)

 Also, it involves DHTML, which involves using the browser DOMs and those 
 things are terribly inconsistent across browsers, and even the "official" 
 standard is poorly designed in places (for instance, the value that gets 
 returned to indicate which mouse button(s) is/are down is *FAR* better in 
 IE, but the official standard's way of doing it is both completely 
 incompatible with that and is practically useless by comparison anyway). 
 It's possible to get things working reliably and consistently across 
 browsers, but it involves an enormous amount of the absolute most 
 ridiculous and obscure trickery I've ever seen on any platform (And I've 
 coded for the Atari VCS). There's a site somewhere that explains a lot of 
 it, but it's (thankfully) been awhile since I've had to do much DHTML so 
 unfortunately I don't have the link handy.

 From a user's standpoint, I have a whole other set of reasons, which I 
 mentioned in different branch of this thread. I use an actual newsgroup 
 reader so I can't link to it, so I'll just quote it here:


 I guess I overstated my point a little bit. Ajax (as well as
 non-Ajaxy JS/DHTML) is great for simple things like voting on posts
 (Provided that Ajax/JS isn't required for the feature, because there's
 really no reason for these things not to have graceful non-JS fallbacks. 
 Or
 at least there wouldn't be any reason if it weren't for the fact that
 (X)HTML/CSS has certain appallingly-ridiculous limitations that will 
 never
 get fixed just because everyone's fearful of changing HTML anymore and 
 has
 gotten used to using JS-based workarounds - and that *is* what they are -
 workarounds).

 But these days, web or not, you can pretty much guarantee: if there's a 
 way
 to screw up the design of something, it will get screwed up *and* 
 millions
 of developers will then run around all copying the same screwup after 
 either
 not noticing it, or mistaking it for a good idea.

 Examples:
 - Breaking the "Back" button
 - Breaking the bookmarking ability
 - Flash intro pages / Intro pages, period / Flash intros on the homepage
 (Ie, the animating GIFs/blink tags of the 21st century) / Flash sites
 - Loads of invisible text on any system that uses a non-default color
 scheme.
 - Crapping all over established design standards (in general).
 - Menus that expand upon mouseover instead of click.
 - "Close" buttons that minimize instead of close (typically a non-web
 issue).
 - Adding the "feature" of modal dialog boxes to something (ie, a web 
 page)
 that has no technical or design justification for such modality.
 - Forcing a custom skin upon users of an app instead of at least 
 *allowing*
 the user to use *their own system settings* (another typically non-web
 issue).
 - Screwing up the ability to work with two instances at the same time
 (*cough* Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
 - Inadvertently preventing full archival for offline reference (*cough*
 Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
 - Insanely slow page loading and navigation (*cough* Adobe LiveDocs and
 Joystiq/Engadget *cough*).
 - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.
 - Eliminating the user's ability to make their own decisions of when to 
 open
 something in a new tab/window or the same tab/window.

 Ajax/JS/DHTML is what enables many of those problems to occur (not all of
 them, though, I kinda got carried away). Disable JS and many of those
 problems go away. Or at least they *would* go away if everyone wasn't so
 keen on throwing away the whole idea of non-JS-fallbacks.

 I mean really, there is absolutely no useful functionality that
 JS/Ajax/DHTML provide that can't be accomplished in a non-JS/Ajax/DHTML 
 way,
 either right now or with a few minor improvements to XHTML/CSS (such as
 allowing the "action" and "method" attributes to be associated with an
 "input/submit" tag instead of the "form" tag, or allowing link tags to
 perform a form submission - actually these things are the exact examples 
 I
 had in mind when I said above that JS is sometimes used as a workaround 
 for
 (X)HTML's limitations).

 The only *real* use of JS/Ajax/DHTML is that they allow for fewer
 full-page-loads. That's really all it comes down to. And that's not a bad
 thing, but for some people, like myself, the benefit of having fewer
 full-page-loads just isn't worth the cost of having to deal with all that
 crap design that JS/Ajax/DHTML end up allowing. But unfortunately, I 
 don't
 have the option of actually *making* that choice thanks to all of those
 yahoos that have jumped onto the "JS is now a standard feature that we 
 can
 safely require" bandwagon.
Sep 25 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Bent Rasmussen" <IncredibleShrinkingSphere Gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:gbgoq1$2o10$1 digitalmars.com...

 It may be that it "involves" using Javascript in the same sense that using 
 D involves using assembler code, but Javascript implementations are 
 becomming increasingly fast, as latest witnessed by the Squirrelfish 
 Extreme Javascript VM (and V8 and TraceMonkey). There are also languages 

 increasinly nice to work with, with type inference, intellisense etc.

 That said, the platform is aging and ad-hoc. But there is some new life 
 being breathed into it.


That's really good to know, about compiling decent languages to JS. Thanks 
:)

FWIW, I was thrilled to see that newer versions of JS actually allow 
variables to be declared as actual specific types instead of just variant. 
So, in other words, it's finally catching up to Visual Basic ;) [/snide jab]


 That said, the platform is aging and ad-hoc.


Yea, that's a pretty good summary of my opinion on it.
Sep 25 2008
parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Nick Sabalausky:

 FWIW, I was thrilled to see that newer versions of JS actually allow 
 variables to be declared as actual specific types instead of just variant. 


Everyone is free to like or dislike JavaScript, but the point here is that all
JS and all its features are designed to be a small dynamic language with
prototype-based OOP. So bolting on it fake-static-typing plus Java-style
classes makes it a mess. That's why I was not trilled.
If you like static typing and Java-style OOP, is much better to start with a

current D2 language prototype-based OOP too and a lot of dynamic typing here
and there, and you get an image of a reversed situation.

Bye,
bearophile
Sep 25 2008
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:gbgr2h$306j$1 digitalmars.com...

 Nick Sabalausky:

 FWIW, I was thrilled to see that newer versions of JS actually allow
 variables to be declared as actual specific types instead of just 
 variant.


 Everyone is free to like or dislike JavaScript, but the point here is that 
 all JS and all its features are designed to be a small dynamic language 
 with prototype-based OOP. So bolting on it fake-static-typing plus 
 Java-style classes makes it a mess. That's why I was not trilled.
 If you like static typing and Java-style OOP, is much better to start with 

 the current D2 language prototype-based OOP too and a lot of dynamic 
 typing here and there, and you get an image of a reversed situation.

 Bye,
 bearophile


As far as I'm concerned, dynamic typing and prototype-OO are mistakes 
period. I can understand that it's good for a language to be true to itself, 
but when "itself" is just a giant pile of bad ideas in the first place, then 
shoehorning it into something more sensible, despite being messy or 
inconsistent, is at least the next best thing to the ideal action of just 
abandoning the monstrosity entirely and replacing it with what it should 
have been from the start.
Sep 25 2008
next sibling parent reply Yigal Chripun <yigal100 gmail.com> writes:
Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> wrote in message 
 news:gbgr2h$306j$1 digitalmars.com...

 Nick Sabalausky:

 FWIW, I was thrilled to see that newer versions of JS actually allow
 variables to be declared as actual specific types instead of just 
 variant.


 Everyone is free to like or dislike JavaScript, but the point here is that 
 all JS and all its features are designed to be a small dynamic language 
 with prototype-based OOP. So bolting on it fake-static-typing plus 
 Java-style classes makes it a mess. That's why I was not trilled.
 If you like static typing and Java-style OOP, is much better to start with 

 the current D2 language prototype-based OOP too and a lot of dynamic 
 typing here and there, and you get an image of a reversed situation.

 Bye,
 bearophile


  
 As far as I'm concerned, dynamic typing and prototype-OO are mistakes 
 period. I can understand that it's good for a language to be true to itself, 
 but when "itself" is just a giant pile of bad ideas in the first place, then 
 shoehorning it into something more sensible, despite being messy or 
 inconsistent, is at least the next best thing to the ideal action of just 
 abandoning the monstrosity entirely and replacing it with what it should 
 have been from the start. 
 
 


I've got to disagree with you here.
prototype OOP is a sensible and much *much* more flexible than your
plain old class based OOP. for small scripts and little snippets the
flexibility of both the prototype OOP and dynamic typing is much better
than the the respective opposite. for those use cases (for which
javascript was initially intended) js is perfect. the problem was never
in the language itself.
WWW was designed to be a platform for mostly static _documents_.
when people started to create those god-damn awful web-apps they broke
that design. they use the browser for use-cases it was never meant to
do. js is used too for large code-bases. it's like trying to build a
house in the sea with a screwdriver.

what we really need is a suitable platform with different protocols (not
http which is stateless and not suitable for applications), a different
client software agent (what does it really mean to press the back button
in gmail, or take a bookmark? that UI is wrong for the app. the browser
is the wrong place to put a mail program in) and different languages.
for a real app you'd want to use a statically typed class based OOP
language such as D and not js.
Sep 25 2008
parent "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:gbh1dl$d1m$2 digitalmars.com...

 Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> wrote in message
 news:gbgr2h$306j$1 digitalmars.com...

 Nick Sabalausky:

 FWIW, I was thrilled to see that newer versions of JS actually allow
 variables to be declared as actual specific types instead of just
 variant.


 Everyone is free to like or dislike JavaScript, but the point here is 
 that
 all JS and all its features are designed to be a small dynamic language
 with prototype-based OOP. So bolting on it fake-static-typing plus
 Java-style classes makes it a mess. That's why I was not trilled.
 If you like static typing and Java-style OOP, is much better to start 
 with

 to
 the current D2 language prototype-based OOP too and a lot of dynamic
 typing here and there, and you get an image of a reversed situation.

 Bye,
 bearophile


 As far as I'm concerned, dynamic typing and prototype-OO are mistakes
 period. I can understand that it's good for a language to be true to 
 itself,
 but when "itself" is just a giant pile of bad ideas in the first place, 
 then
 shoehorning it into something more sensible, despite being messy or
 inconsistent, is at least the next best thing to the ideal action of just
 abandoning the monstrosity entirely and replacing it with what it should
 have been from the start.


 I've got to disagree with you here.
 prototype OOP is a sensible and much *much* more flexible than your
 plain old class based OOP. for small scripts and little snippets the
 flexibility of both the prototype OOP and dynamic typing is much better
 than the the respective opposite. for those use cases (for which
 javascript was initially intended) js is perfect. the problem was never
 in the language itself.
 WWW was designed to be a platform for mostly static _documents_.
 when people started to create those god-damn awful web-apps they broke
 that design. they use the browser for use-cases it was never meant to
 do. js is used too for large code-bases. it's like trying to build a
 house in the sea with a screwdriver.

 what we really need is a suitable platform with different protocols (not
 http which is stateless and not suitable for applications), a different
 client software agent (what does it really mean to press the back button
 in gmail, or take a bookmark? that UI is wrong for the app. the browser
 is the wrong place to put a mail program in) and different languages.
 for a real app you'd want to use a statically typed class based OOP
 language such as D and not js.


I'll grant that dynamic typing and prototype OO are perfectly *usable* for 
the things JS was originally intended for, although I'm still not convinced 
it was necessarily the right thing to do.

Other than that though, I completely agree with the rest of what you said 
110%, you've completely hit the nail on the head there.

I suppose some people might argue that Ajax helps alleviate some of the 
problem with using http for applications, but it's only a bandage-fix at 
best. The root problem is still there.
Sep 25 2008
prev sibling parent reply JMNorris <nospam nospam.com> writes:
Thanks for the responses.  I guess I was more interested in what's wrong 
with Ajax from an end user's point of view than a programmer's.

From the programmer's end:  I know enough about Javascript and DOM to know 
that the first is decidedly a mediocre language and both are frustratingly 
inconsistent across browsers.  I guess that's what we get paid 
(insufficiently well) for. :-)

From the user's end:  If I understand you correctly, your problem with Ajax 
and it's base technologies is not that they inherently require bad design 
but rather that they enable or at least encourage bad design.  (And that 
Ajax and friends would be mostly unnecessary with a few simple fixes in 
HTML/XHTML.)

The real reason for asking this is that I'm applying for a job where the 
employer will want me to use Ajax.  From the desciption of the project in 
the job posting, I can't imagine why they think it would be useful.  
They'll also want me to use ColdFusion which suggests that the grown-ups 
are not in charge.  But I promise I'll try not to break the "Back" button.  
And if they insist on a Flash intro page, I promise I'll try very hard to 
vomit on the employer. :-)

I've seen enough horribly designed web sites to be quite sympathetic to 
complaints about various tools encouraging bad design.  But I guess I tend 
to blame the designer more than the tool.  Bad designers will always be 
with us no matter what tools we have.  I guess I think that the only thing 
wrong with Comic Sans is that people use it. :-)

-- 
JMNorris
Sep 25 2008
parent "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"JMNorris" <nospam nospam.com> wrote in message 
news:gbh7mk$ob2$1 digitalmars.com...

 Thanks for the responses.  I guess I was more interested in what's wrong
 with Ajax from an end user's point of view than a programmer's.

 From the programmer's end:  I know enough about Javascript and DOM to know
 that the first is decidedly a mediocre language and both are frustratingly
 inconsistent across browsers.  I guess that's what we get paid
 (insufficiently well) for. :-)

 From the user's end:  If I understand you correctly, your problem with 
 Ajax
 and it's base technologies is not that they inherently require bad design
 but rather that they enable or at least encourage bad design.  (And that
 Ajax and friends would be mostly unnecessary with a few simple fixes in
 HTML/XHTML.)


Yes, that's an accurate summary. Also, I'm rather sore about all of the 
sites that require JS - that prevents me from using my old trick of avoiding 
many of the irritations by switching JS off.


 The real reason for asking this is that I'm applying for a job where the
 employer will want me to use Ajax.  From the desciption of the project in
 the job posting, I can't imagine why they think it would be useful.


Ajax is the latest trendy buzz-word in web development circles these days. 
Probably more often than not, managers (and especially HR) consider "doing a 
good job" to essentially be "follow the buzz: what's popular *must* be 
right".

Another possiblity though is that they want to decrease the load on their 
servers. Ajax is basically just using JS/DHTML to do partial page loads 
instead of full page loads, which I'd imagine *can* decrease the load on a 
server (at the cost of increased processing on the client's end - especially 
with the more common, less cuttong-edge JS implementations).


 They'll also want me to use ColdFusion which suggests that the grown-ups
 are not in charge.  But I promise I'll try not to break the "Back" button.
 And if they insist on a Flash intro page, I promise I'll try very hard to
 vomit on the employer. :-)


Ha ha, yes :)


 I've seen enough horribly designed web sites to be quite sympathetic to
 complaints about various tools encouraging bad design.  But I guess I tend
 to blame the designer more than the tool.  Bad designers will always be
 with us no matter what tools we have.  I guess I think that the only thing
 wrong with Comic Sans is that people use it. :-)

 -- 
 JMNorris
Sep 25 2008
prev sibling parent reply Don <nospam nospam.com.au> writes:
Bill Baxter wrote:

 I just noticed there are a bunch of these:
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/hidden-features
 
 Someone should start a hidden features of D.
 It should be free stack overflow rep for anyone who wants it.
 I'll get around to doing it eventually if no one else does.


http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?EasterEggs


 
 --bb
Sep 23 2008
parent "Bill Baxter" <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Don <nospam nospam.com.au> wrote:

 Bill Baxter wrote:

 I just noticed there are a bunch of these:
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/hidden-features

 Someone should start a hidden features of D.
 It should be free stack overflow rep for anyone who wants it.
 I'll get around to doing it eventually if no one else does.


 http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?EasterEggs


Here's the topic if anyone feels inclined to add their 2c, or pluck
some of the gems from Don's list above.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/125008/hidden-features-of-d

--bb
Sep 23 2008