On 02/27/2015 02:17 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
but in the webdev world, sometimes it's
all about unreasonable deadlines and shipping it as fast as possible.
Well, that's not just webdev, that's true in just about any commercial
software development. "Hey, the sales guys just sold (nonexistent)
feature X and promised it by (absurd) time Y, so go do it."
When Opera ditched Presto, I died a little inside. Back in the day,
Presto was the only serious alternative to the other major offerings (I
even introduced Opera to my non-techie cousin and she liked it!), and
was the only one that offered the level of configurability that I liked.
In the early days it was also slim and fast, though it started bloating
up toward the final days. But then Opera died and went the way of
Chrome and now we're stuck with the IMO inferior choices.
Yea, choice is good. Can't say I was surprised by what happened to opera
though. I was more surprised (impressed) that a paid web browser managed
to stay afloat for as long as it did, in the face of free browsers
packaged with every OS.
And "content" does NOT mean "A barely-meaningful slogan or two and a
vaguely related image tossed onto a mostly-blank page. Scroll down to
get a few more slogans and clipart." (*cough* mobile-first design
*cough*)
I've already given up that fight. I used to think time machines were
fictitious, but clearly *somebody* has invented one and is seriously
screwing with our timeline, it's now the 90's in 2015 and contentless
splash pages are all the rage. Only, instead of Flash or Java like in
the real 90's, it's now CSS and HTML5 canvas. I don't know where all the
lessons learned in the 90's went -- y'know, all those webpage design
tutorials advising against contentless splash pages and recommending
delivering oh, y'know, actual content? And sane navigation? -- but
clearly the guy with the time machine has seriously screwed things up
and nobody remembers the past to learn from its mistakes. Except users,
whose memories were left intact so that they'll suffer for it
needlessly. Sigh...
Hah! :) You're right of course.
Another part of the time warp: Remember how developers used to actually
*care* about from-click-to-fully-rendered page loading times? My how I
miss that.
My library's (off-the-shelf) web inventory system, when viewed on my
phone, takes about a full minute to respond to clicks (erm, "taps") -
even just on ordinary form fields. 'Course, that's an extreme example,
but more generally, devs don't pay one bit of attention to page loading
times. The theory is that AJAX's partial-page loading speeds things up
because, well, you decrease the page download size by half of a
kilobyte, and that's automagically faster than downloading a partial
page, downloading a JS script, executing the JS script which then
performs one of more AJAX requests to download other parts of the page
separately, and then the browser finished piecing it together. Yea,
brilliant "optimization". Sites loaded and performed faster back when I
was on 56k. No exaggeration. And forward/back/bookmarking *always*
worked correctly.
Not too long ago, when discussing page load times, I actually had one
web developer try to tell me that none of time spent executing onLoad JS
and such actually counts because page loading is different from onLoad
processing. I'm amazed that anyone could convince themselves that
technical distinction would actually matter to the user.
But I'm convinced the time warp extends back to the 80's (or more).
Remember when content used to be inseparably tied to the specific
application it was created with? Then we got standardized data formats
and interoperability. It was an ENORMOUS improvement. And now that's
nearly gone. I can install any of a hundred different video players,
music players and image viewers. But they're all nearly useless because
(without hacking) YouTube videos only run on YouTube's player, NetFlix
videos are only viewable on NetFlix's player, Spotify is only playable
on Spotify's player, Flicker images are only viewable through Flicker,
etc., and they all actively PROTECT their lack of interoperability. This
allegedly "modern" shit has sent us straight back to the computing stone
age before there was such a thing as widespread interoperability. But
the extra bitch of it is: All these wonderful B&D services are BUILT ON
and RELY ON the interoperable stuff (like mpeg4, SQL DBs, etc) as their
base! They couldn't realistically EXIST without taking advantage of
interoperability!
And TBH, I also despise the word "content"... because it makes it sound
as if there's anything else that matters. Back in the day, the whole
point of going online was to get what people nowadays call "content", or
more accurately, "information". The 'net back then *was* primarily just
"content". Nowadays, however, "content" is a rare commodity, a mere tool
to be hogged, controlled, and exploited to lure hapless netizens to
Yea. Like how there used to be article titles, but now links to articles
will be truncated, making it look like they just ran out of space to fit
the whole title. But the fact that it happens on literally *every* link,
and that there obviously *is* enough space had they simply choosen to
use it, proves it's a completely deliberate tactic to feign innocence
while attempting to fool people into a click-thru to another ad-filled
page because "Huh? Wait, what's the rest of it? 'Masquerada's gay
characters are defined by...' By WHAT?!? Guess they couldn't fit
something a short as a title, but I must know! I must click and find
out!!" (ie, See the "See also" links at the bottom of every post on
Joystiq or Engadget. It's every freaking link on... (see what I did there?))
poorly-designed sites and keep them there so that they can suffer
needlessly by being force-fed eye-candy, pointless animations, and
lately, the ever more trendy Empty Space. Keep those 0x20's coming, Bob!
Fight the good fight! ^W^W^W^W^W^WI mean, those U+00A0's...
Heh :)
