The night of the day of the dawn of the OSDaB
A story about expensive cars, girls in bikini and… ratts!… a website.
Monday, 29th January 2007, 10.32pm U.T.C. (one hour later here in Italy, several hours later or earlier on Omicron Persei 8…).
I won’t forget this date so easily. Well, ok.. I will forget it pretty soon, but I won’t forget the time spent to write the new website for The OSDaB Project. To be honest, I’m one day late as to my schedule, but I am not going to change the date in the news page or in the 152143 file releases I’ve uploaded to sourceforge.
If you really want to know what The OSDaB Project is about, just visit the website or google.
Easy, what? Almost as easy as voting Bush just because you like driving your SUV in the city. Because that’s what SUV’s are for, right? Driving on nice straight plain and clean city roads.
Now back to the bikinis.
My top three reasons for updating the website:
- fun with ajax
- the old website was hard to mantain
- bikinis
- I was looking for a cleaner design and the old home page was a bit too messy
There are many ways to write a website of course:
- a one million dollar framework from Macromedia
- a CMS if you love acronyms
- template engines
- genetic manipulation
- Microsoft DesignYourInternetExplorerWebsite Vista extreme professional ultra PNGAlphaChannel edition with Service Pack 13.5
- aliens
Too easy. I had to choose the worst one: a text editor.
The only 3rd party tools I’ve used are a few javascript libraries: prototype, a slightly modified version of nifty corners cube and Andrew Tetlaw’s table sorting script.
Prototype needs no comments and the table sorting script is just a table sorting script.
Nifty Corners Cube (NCC) is just another JS and CSS rounded corners generator (no images are used). It’s quite nice and it seems to have no big platform issues. I had to fix a few things (no big issue) but i managed to get it working. It has some problems with inline contents but again, nothing that cannot be solved.
It has the same problems as all the CSS based rounded corner scripts of course: it bloats the page with DIVs making it somewhat harder to manipulate the DOM and the corners are rounded after the page is loaded. You won’t notice any delay most of the time, but those times you do it looks quite ugly.
Next topic: Uma Thurman
The main problem when writing websites is always the same. It’s called Internet Explorer and it’s sold (or rather they stick it in their amazing not-so-well-operating system and ehm.. “persuade” people to buy it) by one of the world’s biggest and lamest corporations.
And no, this is not another “Microsoft is lame and their developers are sick ’cause it took them 11 years to support PNG alpha channels” post!!
And no, I wasn’t really going to talk about Uma! (Oh dear!! I will admit it! I love Uma!)
I am not going to talk about IE’s shameful CSS support, nor about its weak rendering engine or its complete lack of developer support tools. I am not going to talk about IE at all.
One exception: it took me some years, but I finally realized that IE has some kind of javascript debugger. Or at least there is one in IE6. Quoting this post on the IEBlog:
Script debugging is turned off by default you can enable it by going to: Tools->Internet Options…->Advanced->Disable Script Debugging
Prior to XPSP2 the above will turn script debugging on for all applications that host the WebBrowser control (Outlook for example).
Sorry Microsoft guys, but you are SICK!
Btw. the debugging support requires you to use an external debugger like Visual Studio.Net, Microsoft Script Debugger or Microsoft Script Editor. Sick.
I’ve only tried using VS and it’s quite disappointing. The only good thing is that you can inspect the script using the VS interface you might already be used to. Anyway, this is (as far as I know - PLEASE let me know if I’m wrong! I really hope I am!) to do some serious script debugging with IE.
Well, that’s still better than Opera, that comes with no javascript debugger.
Firefox’s FireBug extension remains my best friend. The latest version (1.0) is simply amazing! It has everything a web developer needs (or at least in a world with no sick IE browsers): DOM inspector, script debugger, CSS inspector (and real-time editor), HTML inspector (and real-time editor), some kind of network monitor and much more! I’m really enthusiastic about the 1.0 release.
One last comment and this meaningless post is over (I know it looks like a.. wrecked train of thoughts).
(hold your breath please) Microsoft announced a new developer toolbar for IE!!
Now, if you want to read the announcement, just cross your fingers (and your feet and your ears and whatever else you manage to cross, because you will definitely need it!) and hope that the above MS links are still working.
We should really donate some storage space to the guys at Microsoft, I am sick of finding more “Page Not Found” errors than actual contents on their websites!
In the wait for the amazing IE developer bar (do you think that we will be able to inspect all the IE bugs in a tree like structure? That would be sooo great, man!) I will be watching some sci-fi alpha channel powered mass destruction PNGs with my silly little open source fire fox.
That’s all and thanx for all the fish. And for the bikinis. Please donate more bikinis!!!