Site unseen

Apologies: The code inside the last journal routinely said everyone was using an off-brand browser. My bad. It's fixed now.

Also, I've narrowed the column width to something more easy to read. Let me know if you like it or not.

A correspondent recently commented in an email that she felt like putting a journal on her site would be casting pearls before swine. Before you get judgemental on her, understand that she's been running this site since before everyone could get a free googol-gig sitespace on the Net, at personal cost and time, and most of her visitors only want to know if she's putting up more pictures of tits.

I don't agree with her viewpoint, but I understand it. From 1995 to 1997, I edited a SubGenius/humor zine called obloquy, putting out a grand total of five quarterly issues before circumstances interrupted. As far as I'm concerned it rocked, and I'll probably scan the pages as PDFs for this site some day.

Nonetheless, each issue took thirty hours to edit, lay out, format, inkjet print (and burn out a cartridge)... If I hadn't had a background in graphic design it probably wouldn't have taken as long, but it wouldn't've looked as good, either.

In any case it was a labor of love, and there was always the hope for some token of appreciation from those who read it. Credit is due to the fan mail I did receive. But producing a zine, like a site, is an expression first and a call for recognition second.

In the end I put obloquy on hiatus not because the warm fuzzies weren't coming in fast enough, but because I had a series of life events that forced me to redirect my energy elsewhere. The zine would have been pure crap if I'd tried to fit it into fighting an insurance company and a police department, overcoming a depressive episode, and trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life. All told 1997 felt like being Atlas.

It's better now, and I'm doing this site instead of the zine. The work is less grueling, the results more immediate, and the distribution speaks for itself. But I can still hear that voice that tells me to check the hit log, and wishes more people would contribute or at least comment.

If you trip across one of these kinds of sites, please drop the author a line, even if it's just to say "Kilroy was here" and you liked/disliked the site. It won't cost you a thing, and you might wind up making an acquaintance.

Closed due to browser incompatibility...?

Since I started working here at NAU I've had the opportunity to dive into a lot of Web technologies. Dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Java, C++, general object-oriented programming principles, CGI scripting with Perl...

It's pretty fascinating, and challenging at times. One particular challenge that's making news is the matter of crossbrowser compatibility. You're browsing this site with [ancient browser sniffer code deleted] I know this because this page sniffed your browser when it loaded, a piece of code I wrote. Visit this page with other browsers if you don't believe me.

This type of code is becoming increasingly necessary because the companies that author browsers keep "innovating" things which aren't W3C standards. (The World Wide Web Consortium encourages this by taking forever to determine standards: their team on downloadable fonts hasn't put a new paper on their site on the subject since 1996) Netscape pushed through their own version of layers which virtually no other browser supports. Microsoft duplicated Netscape's misnamed JavaScript, but rewrote the object structure of a document and the properties which refer to and control it in several incompatible ways.

The end results of that gap are as follows:

Web designers write code that sniffs the browser and follows a different codepath. More sophisticated designers end up rewriting their own version of the basic functions that compartmentalizes the differing codes and returns the same result. While elegant in its execution, it represents a tremendous waste of salaried time, and time in development. I spent an entire day debugging one such function to ensure compatibility across three browsers, and I expect to see similar roadblocks in the near future.

The EC loses its patience and announces that like HTML, there will be an international standard for JavaScript called ECMAscript, effectively taking the football away from Netscape.

Web designers are faced with the unpleasant choice of implementing proprietary technologies like Microsoft's data binding (which allows the browser, when pointed at a plain ASCII delimited data file, to display it in a formatted table), moving heaven and earth to translate them when possible, or to essentially pretend they don't exist and never use them. Since IE4, Explorer has had an impressive array of visual transition effects, almost none of which I've seen in practice and some of which are duplicated by bandwidth and memory-hogging Java applets.

I think it's great that someone like myself with a dual background in art and programming can feel both halves of the brain humming on the job. But with the increasing gulfs between browsers and lack of support for the standards the W3C can come up with in a human's lifetime, the emphasis has changed from "Look what I can do!" to "Look what I had to do to get it to work."

Some people believe that the browser "wars" are over and Microsoft's model is the de facto standard, and whether it's good or not it's the world we live in and we better get used to it. These are the same people who scrapped six thousand dollars of investment in Macintosh graphic workstations in a previous job of mine because they read something in the Wall Street Journal saying that Apple was circling the drain. Four years later, Apple is still around, at the forefront of technologies like USB and FireWire and showing no signs of slowing down. Did those selfsame people foresee Microsoft's losing struggle with the DOJ, the decline in their stock, and one of the least charismatic CEOs in America making a personal appearance on TV to put a PR spin on those events?

Just to make it clear I'm not gloating, I despised the iMac when it came out and thought it would be the final nail in Apple's coffin during a bad year, an innovation which would be remembered as "Jobs' folly." You see the extent of my oracular powers there.

Basing tactical decisions on longterm predictions of a product's viability is ill-conceived and generally smacks of self-justification for premade decisions. The mindset divides neatly along these lines: end users solely familiar with one product, and executive sheep whose collective memory chants the 1960s slogan "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." When was the last time you saw a new IBM-brand PC in the workplace?

I digress. The chief objection I have with Microsoft's contribution to the browser market is that they are not only incompatible with their competitors, and with the W3C, but with the release of IE5, incompatible with IE4, and to some extent with IE5 Macintosh (whose incompatibilities are based off a more correct implementation of those properties). Even assuming 4.0 browsers are a dim memory by the time you read this, the millions of sites based on them are still here.

Netscape's Mozilla project, as well as Opera, has chosen to focus on standards compliance, making the innovations in improving useability. Remember that the root of "innovate" is the Latin for "new." The Gecko web engine in Mozilla is potentially portable to handheld devices in much the same way WindowsCE was intended to entice developers to remain brand loyal. With the backing of America Online (and the implicit promise of bringing that technology to AOL's much-maligned browser), it's safe to say Mozilla won't have to worry about short-term returns on their long-term investment.

Which brings me back to web design. I work in academia, salaried regardless of the "market." My colleagues in the private sector are fiscally dependent on the viability of their code. Sites that stop working because of incompatibilities in a new browser (instead of the expected backwards compatibility) are sites that cost those designers' firms money, time and potentially their reputation. I leave it to you to guess their decision.

I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys 'R Us kid...

To all the people who've argued with me about my choice of computers over the last five years, I'd like to bring you up to speed on my Mac.

I bought this thing on academic discount back in 1995, I think, when a 603 was still faster than the crop of Pentiums out there. I think I paid about $1800 for it, monitor included. In the intervening years, PCs grew more powerful and Mac applications started demanding more power (like 604 PowerPCs). Having worked in several Windows-dependent businesses since then (and currently), what I've noticed is the necessity of replacing entire systems every three years insofar as Intel decided not to make Pentiums replaceable like they did the earlier x86 chips.(4.13.00: please excuse the previous brainfart. I have been corrected) A friend of mine who will go nameless has recently entreated her folks to replace hers.

In the space of ten minutes this morning, the 1995-era PowerPC became a 2000-era G4 PowerPC. Five minutes after that the 1992-era mouse (don't get me started on the crappy mice Apple makes now) is replaced by a Wacom Graphire tablet (cordless, batteryless pen and mouse included). Some months back USB capability was one PCI card installation (another five minutes). Total cost, $640, shipping included. Was your last up-to-date Windows machine this cheap?

Don't get me wrong. I like Windows. I use it professionally and NT is one of the most stable OSes I've worked with (95, on the other hand, can suck rocks from my butt). However, it's stuck on a legacy chip that still works off the idea of complex instruction sets, when everything else is using RISC for its unmatchable, naked speed. If Apple could move off the Motorola 68000 series, first by emulation and then by fiat, I can't understand why Bill Gates couldn't retool Windows for the G4--emulating Pentium IIIs at first,then slowly telling the rest of the world to catch up with the times and releasing a G4-native Windows, which would scream compared to the current PIIIs (which are, again, slower than the current Mac microprocessor).

Then again, Microsoft's got competition from Linux to contend with. End users like yourself are snickering while reading this, but Linux powers more servers out there than you'd imagine and the numbers are only rising. And it doesn't cost anything and the source code is open to systems people. Apple is not quite as shaking in their boots over the analogue, the fascinating but experimental BeOS, which still to some extent depends on Apple cooperation to exist. It's up to Mr. Gates to decide how to keep his grip.