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Re^3: Web forum markup language and the Monastery ([[...]])
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Jan 16, 2005 at 02:31 UTC
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Oh, and if you dislike headaches, let ancient browsers be the problem of their users instead of your problem, because it will only get worse as time passes.
I cannot agree with this more. Given that Firefox is a free download, installs quickly, and is a minimal impact on the system ... there is no excuse to not have a CSS-capable browser. Period.
And, if you're complaining that you may not be able to install it at work - what're you doing reading Perlmonks at work? :-)
Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.
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I've got a $40 computer with a 28.8 modem. It fit my budget, and my needs when I bought it last summer.
To use the web as it was originally designed (ie. just download text and images), it works just fine. On web pages with excessive amounts of Java or Flash, it slows down a lot.
I don't see what CSS adds to the web that's so useful. It's not making anything more efficient, and it breaks the model of content independant presentation that made the web useable in the first place.
Firefox is nearly 5 MB, and I don't want to fight with painstakingly downloading it (probably a 1/2 hr to 1 hr download), finding out it assumes some stupid ultra-modern convenience feature, and then trying to de-install it again without mucking up my system.
I could spend several thousand dollars on a new computer; but my past experience tells me that six months later, there would be someone on the web ranting about how there was "no excuse" for not buying the latest and greatest widget X.
If I need to buy new hardware just to view a normal web page (you know, without special video feeds, or holograms, or VRML), well, to me and to the average person, that web page isn't buzzword-compliant: it's just plain broken.
--
Ytrew
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Actually, what CSS generally adds is faster downloads (CSS markup is generally smaller than HTML markup), and faster rendering (following CSS is generally cheaper than trying to calculate table widths). Most of my webpages dropped in size considerably when I went to the XHTML/CSS paradigm from the HTML4 tables-are-for-layout. That means you could download them faster (if you cared about my pages, I mean ;-}), and you could actually have the new pages displayed (rendered) usually before you could have had the old pages downloaded.
And, actually, CSS creates content-independant presentation that HTML largely lacks. When you use <b> tags, for example, you're saying, "present this content in bold format." But what if I'm visually impaired and using an audible browser? CSS allows the page designer to say "on the screen, make this bold, on a printer, make it italics, and when spoken, surround the text with these words." That, Ytrew, is content-independant presentation.
Other than that, I agree - Firefox can be considered quite large (get a friend who has hi-speed access to download TheOpenCD from http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/, burn it to disk, and then give it to you, assuming you have a CDROM in your $40 computer), and buying a computer to view web pages that are not important to you is crazy.
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Given that Firefox is a free download, installs quickly, and is a minimal impact on the system...
If you think the bloatware known as Firefox is minimal, might I suggest taking a look at something a little more svelt? Maybe a nice graphical browser like Links? (That's what I use on my P-120 laptop).
-- All code is 100% tested and functional unless otherwise noted.
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You consider something that runs under Cygwin/X to be minimal. Riiight. So, you have the overhead of Win32, your own X-server, and then you get to your program. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'll bet that if you compare total resource usage, you'll find that Firefox and Links are going to be comparable.
Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.
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