Genius Web Programming (NIU)



  • Two things to do with this brilliant page from Northern Illinois University...

    (1) Copy-Paste the page to a text editor

    (2) View the page source

    Enjoy!

     



  •  No problem.  Should be done by Tuesday.



  • @AisA said:

    Two things to do with this brilliant page from Northern Illinois University...

    (1) Copy-Paste the page to a text editor

    (2) View the page source

    Enjoy!


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    Genius Web Programming (NIU)
    Last post Thu, Apr 3 2008 1:11 PM by bstorer. 1 replies.
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      Thu, Apr 3 2008 1:11 PM 	In reply to
          o bstorer
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      Re: Genius Web Programming (NIU)
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       No problem.  Should be done by Tuesday.
      -bstorer
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      Thu, Apr 3 2008 1:06 PM 	
          o AisA
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      Genius Web Programming (NIU)
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      Two things to do with this brilliant page from Northern Illinois University...
    
      (1) Copy-Paste the page to a text editor
    
      (2) View the page source
    
      Enjoy!
    
       
      Filed under: web, NIU
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    PS: I followed the directions, what is supposed to happen?



  •  Are we missing something here? WTF are you talking about?



  • @bstorer said:

     No problem.  Should be done by Tuesday.

     

     

    Programmers!!! Sheesh!!! If I wanted it done by Tuesday, I would have given it next Thursday. I wanted it the past Tuesday. Come on. Get to it.

     



  • Sorry! Was thinking why you weren't getting it. Seems I forgot to add the URL. Now that's a WTF moment.

    http://www.dehp.net/dars.htm

    (1) Copy-Paste the page to a text editor

    (2) View the page source

     



  •  WTF is that shit! OMFG

     

    Alright, I thought this was going to be a mugged thread, but you have redeemed yourself.

    Good god! 



  • @AisA said:

    Sorry! Was thinking why you weren't getting it. Seems I forgot to add the URL. Now that's a WTF moment.

    http://www.dehp.net/dars.htm

    (1) Copy-Paste the page to a text editor

    (2) View the page source 

     

    Okay, now what's the problem?  The tons of invisible GIFs? 



  • Pssh, where's the WTF?



  • @From the page in question said:

    COPYRIGHT-MIAMIUNIVERSITY-1991



  • But I don't like </font>!



  • UHH ... The WTF is that I didn't have to log in? 

    Good to know that I have 17 hours of credit at Northern Illinois University.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    UHH ... The WTF is that I didn't have to log in? 

    Good to know that I have 17 hours of credit at Northern Illinois University.

     

    Pffft.  You get 22 hours of credit at NIU just for applying.

    </blatantly false claims> 



  • @bstorer said:

    @From the page in question said:

    COPYRIGHT-MIAMIUNIVERSITY-1991

    Ahh.  As a Miami (OH) grad, I learned to read this report while I was in college, so that part wasn't a WTF to me.  Normally, it's a fixed-width font so it's a lot more readable.


  • @AisA said:

    http://www.dehp.net/dars.htm

    Mmm.. a nice, big, juicy, steaming 600+KB pile of WTF.



  • This is what happens when web developers are paid by the pixel.



  •  WTF?!

    Is there not a SINGLE space in the entire code? It's ALL transparent gifs!?

    Holy Crap



  •  @belgariontheking said:

    @bstorer said:

    @From the page in question said:

    COPYRIGHT-MIAMIUNIVERSITY-1991

    Ahh.  As a Miami (OH) grad, I learned to read this report while I was in college, so that part wasn't a WTF to me.  Normally, it's a fixed-width font so it's a lot more readable.

    I just checked my unofficial transcript from Maryland (Why it's still available online, I don't know), and they use PRE tags, like sane people do.



  • I did the two steps out of order, however it wa still pretty funny. The first time I looked at the source I thought that the invisible GIFs were used to indent the lines... WOW was I wrong.

    The page froze up IE for a few seconds when I tried to select all the text.



  • Looks like there's been a small misunderstanding of the term "spacer image".  Contrary to popular belief, it's actually not intended to replace the space bar.



  • The additional irony is that they actually tried to save space by making the image 1x1 pixel wide and resizing it using the "width" attribute. Only that those hundreds of "width" attributes probably need more space than the additional 8 pixels in the image would have...



  • Holy crap!!  When it started to load I was like "WTF, is this server on dial-up??" because the page loaded slower than I could scroll.  For one terrifying second I thought I was trapped in 1995.  This is truly epic fail.



  • Okay, I've seen some bad websites, but this one is just insane!  I really hope that wasn't made by hand :P  I guess the challenge is to find what page generator created this mess.  If it's been done once, there's sure to be other sites with the same problem, right?

    and then there's the copyright message... 



  • @Eternal Density said:

    I guess the challenge is to find what page generator created this mess.
     

    Plz send codez.



  • I'll send teh codez to you as soon as Spectate finishes Jamming It. 



  • @Eternal Density said:

    I'll send teh codez to you as soon as Spectate finishes Jamming It. 

     

    kthxbye



  • This looks close: http://www.terrymorse.com/docs/tmgc30guide/index06.html

    When “Word” is checked, invisible images will be placed between words that are further apart than a single space character. There is no equivalent way to accomplish word spacing with CSS.



  • Slap this thing on the front page, this is truly worse than failure.  Somehow WTF just doesn't say it. 



  • The last line in the source is brillant!



  • Thewholepageisbrillant!Whoneedsthosepeskyspacesanyway?



  • Holy carp!

    My guess: some lame newbie "web developer" noticed that "five     spaces" rendered in a browser as "five spaces" and decided that HTML spaces were "buggy" so he rolled his own solution. Probably something like:

    replace(pagetext," ","(img src=inv.gif)")



  • @Eternal Density said:

    and then there's the copyright message... 
    My best gues for this is that Miami (OH) actually DID create the DARS system in 1991 and has sold the system to others.  It could even have been a capstone for some students. 

    I'll ask one of my friends who's still at Miami if they're system is just as WTF-ed.

    Course, I can never anonymize stuff from my college days ever again. 



  • @AisA said:

    http://www.dehp.net/dars.htm

     

    Wow. And people wonder why I hate web programming... 



  • Boss: "The spaces on this page look too small to me. Make them bigger. Say, 9 pixels wide."

    Going slightly off-topic but still on the subject of spaces, I really don't understand why some people have a habit of putting double spaces between sentences.



  • @gherkin said:

    I really don't understand why some people have a habit of putting double spaces between sentences.
    Because it's what was taught to us in English class.



  • Then why was it taught to you? What's the point of it?



  • @gherkin said:

    Then why was it taught to you? What's the point of it?
     

    Who cares? I don't think it is even worth the effort of talking about it.

    Do you have some kind of high whitespace sensitivity condition?

    I  really     don't understand    why       it  would      bother            you.



  • I'm a web developer of course HTML parsers ignore extra whitespace. I'm just conscious every time I'm sent copy to put into web pages and it has double spacing between sentences that it will get stripped out, and I'm afraid that one day the copy provider will notice and will demand that the double spacing is put back in. This is a recurring nightmare for me.



  •  @gherkin said:

    I'm a web developer of course HTML parsers ignore extra whitespace. I'm just conscious every time I'm sent copy to put into web pages and it has double spacing between sentences that it will get stripped out, and I'm afraid that one day the copy provider will notice and will demand that the double spacing is put back in. This is a recurring nightmare for me.

    G3t la1d m0ar.



  • @gherkin said:

    Going slightly off-topic but still on the subject of spaces, I really don't understand why some people have a habit of putting double spaces between sentences.
     

    I find it to be more readable.  It makes it easier to see where new sentences begin.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    G3t la1d m0ar.

    :'(



  • @gherkin said:

    Then why was it taught to you? What's the point of it?
    Most likely to remove ambiguity and increase legibility. Acronyms are supposed to have a period after each letter and since a single space will follow an acronym which ends in a period which may be followed by a proper name (which will be capitalised) you have no visual clue to if the sentence ended or not.



  • @gherkin said:

    I'm a web developer of course HTML parsers ignore extra whitespace. I'm just conscious every time I'm sent copy to put into web pages and it has double spacing between sentences that it will get stripped out, and I'm afraid that one day the copy provider will notice and will demand that the double spacing is put back in. This is a recurring nightmare for me.

    I agree with MPS, but I want to add this:

    Print has been around longer than web, and the standard for print (word documents, newspapers, etc) is to doublespace after a period. 

    We also have this lovely thing in html called &nbsp; ... I mean after all, it's part of your job to make it look like what they've sent you, and a global replace isn't that tricky.

    In fact, I do a doublespace in my posts, and the forum software changes one of them to &nbsp; 


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @gherkin said:

    Then why was it taught to you? What's the point of it?
    Typograpic convention. Google 'French Spacing' if you're that interested.



  • [url=http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm]http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm[/url]



  • @gherkin said:

    Then why was it taught to you? What's the point of it?
     

     Back in the day when typewritters ruled the land it was needed for one reasion or another, something about monospace typeface or something like that.



  • @bstorer said:

    Okay, now what's the problem?  The tons of invisible GIFs? 
     

    Jeeze, Louise! I can't believe you're all missing the most important thing!

    They used GIFs! They coulda used BMPs! That would have been a real WTF! 



  • A 1x1 BMP is actually smaller than a 1x1 GIF (58 bytes) in my experience.

    Also this is a great WTF. At first I thought they put in some silly Javascript to make the text appear one letter at a time for effect, until I remembered I had Javascript disabled.



  • I just noticed this: they apparently aren't using an expires header, but instead an e-tag for the image.  This means it is re-requested from the server for every instance on the page... 



  • @Eternal Density said:

    This looks close: http://www.terrymorse.com/docs/tmgc30guide/index06.html

    When “Word” is checked, invisible images will be placed between words that are further apart than a single space character. There is no equivalent way to accomplish word spacing with CSS.

     

     

    Why in the hell do you need CSS to "accomplish word spacing."  It may not be elegant, but I've never had a problem using &nbsp; if I needed a few extra spaces.   


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