The ice Stone Has Melted!



  • The ice Stone Has Melted!

    WoW bug - The Ice Stone Has Melted!



  • TRWTF is that site, popping up a big "enable Javascript" message centred on the page, overtop of the content, and darkening everything else. Why? I can read the text without Javascript just fine, right there under your message (which fortunately just misses covering it on my resolution). Now piss off.



  • @WoWHead said:

    There appears to be a bug on live realms—or at least, any live server that's running the "Love Is In The Air" event. Apparently people are getting spammed with a world event emote, saying "The Ice Stone Has Melted". WoWWiki indicates that the "Ice Stone" has something to do with the Midsummer Event, so this appears to be a simple bug.

    There's a blue post on the official forums which indicates it's being looked into. We'll update this post when more info get's posted. :)

    Edit: Another blue post on the issue here. (Thanks, Arendis!)

    Edit Again: Kisirani has posted again on the subject. Looks like the fix is in progress. :)

    Quoted for those without Javascript enabled.
    Sorry, wowHead is a tool whose's nature requires javascript to be of any use.





  • @lolwtf said:

    TRWTF is that site, popping up a big "enable Javascript" message centred on the page, overtop of the content, and darkening everything else. Why? I can read the text without Javascript just fine, right there under your message (which fortunately just misses covering it on my resolution). Now piss off.

    And if you visited the site and couldn't use certain features then you'd complain about it not telling you you need JS... 



  • @Someone You Know said:

    http://hastheicestonemelted.com

    a site with 1 word on it in big bold letters, "yes". how interesting.


  • @lolwtf said:

    TRWTF is that site, popping up a big "enable Javascript" message centred on the page, overtop of the content, and darkening everything else. Why? I can read the text without Javascript just fine, right there under your message (which fortunately just misses covering it on my resolution). Now piss off.

    I put this:

    #noscript-text, #noscript-bg { display: none !important; } 

    Into stylish for the whole of wowhead and it went away.

    Also @morb: I'm more bothered that some pages require javascript to work even though they behave identically to plain old html. And secondly, but not so much, at not having any plain old html fallback. One day, when my death ray disables javascript on every computer in the world simultaneously, they'll be sorry.



  • @ComputerForumUser said:

    Also @morb: I'm more bothered that some pages require javascript to work even though they behave identically to plain old html. And secondly, but not so much, at not having any plain old html fallback. One day, when my death ray disables javascript on every computer in the world simultaneously, they'll be sorry.

    Are you also bothered when their site doesn't fall back to HTML 2.0 and work in NN4?  Seriously, JS is a standard feature of the web now.  Nobody would try to install a brand new desktop app on Windows 95 and be like "I don't get it, the app doesn't even use any Vista or XP features!  This should fallback and work just fine on a 15 year old OS!"  It's surprising to me that so many techies can be utterly irrational Luddites when it comes to Javascript...



  • @Steeldragon said:

    a site with 1 word on it in big bold letters, "yes". how interesting.
    How original!



  •  Melting ice stones? I'd expect better from a company called Blizzard!



  • @Zecc said:

    @Steeldragon said:

    a site with 1 word on it in big bold letters, "yes". how interesting.
    How original!

    Take a look at the source - they give credit to the original.


  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @ComputerForumUser said:

    Also @morb: I'm more bothered that some pages require javascript to work even though they behave identically to plain old html. And secondly, but not so much, at not having any plain old html fallback. One day, when my death ray disables javascript on every computer in the world simultaneously, they'll be sorry.

    Are you also bothered when their site doesn't fall back to HTML 2.0 and work in NN4?  Seriously, client-side security holes are a standard feature of the web now.  Nobody would try to install a brand new desktop app on Yggdrasil Linux and be like "I don't get it, the app doesn't even use any Vista or XP features!  This should fallback and work just fine on a 15 year old OS!"  It's surprising to me that so many techies can be utterly irrational Luddites when it comes to fundamental security holes...

    I've been silent on this, cuz I know you love arguing, but... FTFY.

    For what it's worth, my primary beef against IE is ActiveXploit.

    The principle of Keep It Simple, morbiuS should apply: When the simplest technology you are using is able to handle 100% of your needed functionality, you should use it to do that functionality.  I'll also point out, it's not just about security, but also about performance: my computer renders HTML using fewer resources than it takes for javascript.  Yes, I know you can buy a nice, big, fast quad-core processor for cheap.  I don't see why I should need to buy a new processor and thus pay higher electric bills just because someone else doesn't know how to code worth frass.

    Of course, by that same token, if you're actually trying to do something that can't be done with simple HTML, then using something more complicated is fine, even if HTML is one of the components of the total solution, and I perfectly understand that not working without support for all of the components.

    And, yes, I'm bothered about all the web sites that don't work with Lynx and its various clones.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @ComputerForumUser said:

    Also @morb: I'm more bothered that some pages require javascript to work even though they behave identically to plain old html. And secondly, but not so much, at not having any plain old html fallback. One day, when my death ray disables javascript on every computer in the world simultaneously, they'll be sorry.

    Are you also bothered when their site doesn't fall back to HTML 2.0 and work in NN4?  Seriously, JS is a standard feature of the web now.  Nobody would try to install a brand new desktop app on Windows 95 and be like "I don't get it, the app doesn't even use any Vista or XP features!  This should fallback and work just fine on a 15 year old OS!"  It's surprising to me that so many techies can be utterly irrational Luddites when it comes to Javascript...

    Most of the sites I browse work absolutely fine with it switched off, and when I come across a site that doesn't, I either surf somewhere else or switch it on if I really want the feature it provides.  So for 99% of just random mindless websurfing, the cost-benefit analysis goes:

    Cost - some minor risk of getting pwnd by a JS exploit in a banner ad

    Benefit - access to some mindless crap I don't really care about anyway

    and my rational decision is to not bother with the site.

    And "luddite" is just another word for someone who's decided they don't want to install any point-zero releases ever again!



  • @tgape said:

    The principle of Keep It Simple, morbiuS should apply: When the simplest technology you are using is able to handle 100% of your needed functionality, you should use it to do that functionality.  I'll also point out, it's not just about security, but also about performance: my computer renders HTML using fewer resources than it takes for javascript.  Yes, I know you can buy a nice, big, fast quad-core processor for cheap.  I don't see why I should need to buy a new processor and thus pay higher electric bills just because someone else doesn't know how to code worth frass.
     

     

    I'd hate to fan the flames, but there's another arguement to be had against JS-based sites...

    Fans of the "pull an HTML skeleton and use JS (and likely AJAX) to load everything in" camp of web design still have one fatal flaw...

    People who leave the web site when it's still loading, but their loading bar says "Done".



  • @tgape said:

    When the simplest technology you are using is able to handle 100% of your needed functionality, you should use it to do that functionality.  I'll also point out, it's not just about security, but also about performance: my computer renders HTML using fewer resources than it takes for javascript.  Yes, I know you can buy a nice, big, fast quad-core processor for cheap.  I don't see why I should need to buy a new processor and thus pay higher electric bills just because someone else doesn't know how to code worth frass.
     

    Did you do performance benchmarks to arrive at this conclusion?  Because I'm willing to bet that you would never notice the difference if not for disabling scripts.

    Your sound bite is wrong anyway.  Anything that's Turing-complete can handle 100% of your needed functionality.  That doesn't mean I use QBASIC to write web server apps.  Although, technically assembly language would be the "simplest".



  • @ComputerForumUser said:

    I'm more bothered that some pages require javascript to work even though they behave identically to plain old html

    OMFG.  I'm cleaning up a club's web page in my copious spare time and the original developer has the e-mail addresses being generated by JS as the page is rendered.  The output is identical to just putting the frappin' HTML in place.

    My guess is that this is either some primitive attempt to spoof the address scrapers or he found the code somewhere and thought it was 'cool'.

    Don't even get me started on the lame attempts at CSS.



  • @Aaron said:

    Did you do performance benchmarks to arrive at this conclusion?  Because I'm willing to bet that you would never notice the difference if not for disabling scripts.

    When the difference is the HTML page comes up in 5 seconds, and the JavaScript version loads in 3 seconds and then locks ones web browser for two minutes1, as some JS varient pages I've been subjected to have done, no stopwatch is necessary.  Note that I never made the stipulation that the comparison was necessarily between well-written HTML and well-written JavaScript.  Other than nested tables, there's not a lot in HTML I've seen people mess up *that* badly, from a performance perspective.  The same is not at all true for JavaScript.

    @Aaron said:

    Your sound bite is wrong anyway.  Anything that's Turing-complete can handle 100% of your needed functionality.  That doesn't mean I use QBASIC to write web server apps.  Although, technically assembly language would be the "simplest".

    HTML is not Turing complete, nor is it anywhere close.  Words nearly fail me.  HTML has no logic operators.  It has no control structures.  It has no function or procedure definitions2.  HTML has no variables, and no variable equivalents3.  But, probably most importantly, HTML processes no input, and produces no output.  It is mere data, to be processed by an actual program as input, to be converted to some more meaningful form.

    Further, I dispute your definition of 'simple'.  The language cannot be judged in isolation with use of the language.  From a maintenance perspective, SmallTalk (or any other 4G language) would be far simpler than your assembly language for just about any but the simplest of tasks.  Whether SmallTalk would be simpler or more complicated overall depends upon what you're doing with it, and how you're doing it.


    1 the technique in question is "have a stub page with JavaScript to connect to a database and pull all of the various details of the page", usually complete with an obvious database security hole which could be exploited to hijack the site.

    2 custom functions and procedures are not required for Turing completeness, but are used by "functional" languages to compensate for a lack of looping constructs.  Note that "functional" languages *still* need 'if' or its equivalent in order to make use of custom functions and/or procedures to pull this off.

    3 some "functional" languages lack variables, but get around this lack via custom function and/or procedure parameters.



  •  Just for the record, the page loaded fine in ELinks 0.11.1. As an added bonus, it discards all of the worthless comments people have made about the article.



  •  @_moz said:

    Just for the record, the page loaded fine in ELinks 0.11.1.

    Well, that's a relief. How does NCSA Mosaic handle it?



  • @tgape said:

    For what it's worth, my primary beef against IE is ActiveXploit.

    Where did anyone say anything about IE?

     

    @tgape said:

    The principle of Keep It Simple, morbiuS should apply: When the simplest technology you are using is able to handle 100% of your needed functionality, you should use it to do that functionality.

    Which doesn't address what I was talking about at all.  The "plain text" of the article loads just fine, it simply has a semi-transparent overlay telling you to enable JS for most of the features (which would not work with plain HTML).  The same people who bitch about this would also bitch when they visit the site and links don't work because they have JS disabled and there is no message at all.  In fact, I think this is one of the better methods of handling disabled JS I have seen on a website.  The primary functionality (the article text) is still usable but there is a clearly visible error message informing the user that the site makes extensive use of JS (which you don't seem to be against).  The page is not replacing HTML with JS.

     

    @tgape said:

    I'll also point out, it's not just about security, but also about performance: my computer renders HTML using fewer resources than it takes for javascript.  Yes, I know you can buy a nice, big, fast quad-core processor for cheap.  I don't see why I should need to buy a new processor and thus pay higher electric bills just because someone else doesn't know how to code worth frass.

    Any halfway modern computer should be able to run the JS on that site just fine.  Yes, there are horrible sites out there that use shitty JS but there are also sites that use divs to emulate table cells and all other sorts of badly-written HTML that can lock up a browser as well.

     

    @tgape said:

    Of course, by that same token, if you're actually trying to do something that can't be done with simple HTML, then using something more complicated is fine, even if HTML is one of the components of the total solution, and I perfectly understand that not working without support for all of the components.

    Then what's the problem?

     

    @tgape said:

    And, yes, I'm bothered about all the web sites that don't work with Lynx and its various clones.

    This seems to be the opposite of everything you've just stated.  Adding advanced features to a website is almost always going to break compatibility with Lynx or other technologically-inferior browsers.  True, there are ways to dump out the plainest HTML possible and then use JS to adjust the DOM and all that, but why should anyone go to all that trouble just to support Lynx?  In fact, such techniques often result in sluggish JS on any modern browser because all of the advanced stuff has to be hidden from crappy browsers.  Why punish non-Luddite users (the vast majority) with a junky experience just so 1 dude with Lynx can browse your site?  Coding for the lowest common denominator often results in a mediocre experience for advanced platforms so you have to ask yourself is it really worth it just to maintain compatibility with Lynx users.  I don't think there is a single sensible reason to do that.



  • @MrsPost said:

    OMFG.  I'm cleaning up a club's web page in my copious spare time and the original developer has the e-mail addresses being generated by JS as the page is rendered.  The output is identical to just putting the frappin' HTML in place.

    My guess is that this is either some primitive attempt to spoof the address scrapers or he found the code somewhere and thought it was 'cool'.

    It's almost certainly the former and it most likely works well in that regard.  Most address-scrapers don't execute JS so this can be an effective way to hide email addresses from spiders.  I would not recommend changing it to plain HTML.



  • @sootzoo said:



     @_moz said:
    Just for the record, the page loaded fine in ELinks 0.11.1.


    Well, that's a relief. How does NCSA Mosaic handle it?

    I haven't a clue. But, for the less perceptive readers of this thread, my point was simply that complaining about a badly written web page here isn't always the most efficient way to deal with it.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    http://hastheicestonemelted.com

     

    That's the best laugh I've had all day.   My wife would not touch an MMO with a 10 meter pole, but was also much amused.



  • @sootzoo said:

     @_moz said:

    Just for the record, the page loaded fine in ELinks 0.11.1.

    Well, that's a relief. How does NCSA Mosaic handle it?


    It's nicely readable, although the site does spew about a page and a half of javascript between the article and the page footer. Mosaic's black-on-grey color scheme is far more readable than the site's native grey-on-grey, and there are far fewer distracting elements floating around.



  • @tgape said:

    And, yes, I'm bothered about all the web sites that don't work with Lynx and its various clones.

     

    Ah right, Lynx and Links. Someone once tricked me into thinking Slackware would be a great way for me to learn to use Linux with no prior experience. Ended up sitting in Links most of the time because X didn't like my video card and either wouldn't run, or would run and then crash. That was a great first impression. For being text-based, I did quite like Links though.



  • @Deiwos said:

    Someone once tricked me into thinking Slackware would be a great way for me to learn to use Linux with no prior experience.

    Ha ha ha!  You, sir, got seriously trolled.

     

    @Deiwos said:

    Ended up sitting in Links most of the time because X didn't like my video card and either wouldn't run, or would run and then crash. That was a great first impression.

    Honestly, Links is probably a good representation of Linux: it's bitchy and ugly.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @tgape said:

    For what it's worth, my primary beef against IE is ActiveXploit.

    Where did anyone say anything about IE?

    I did, right up there.  I think you noticed it, too - you quoted it.  In prior conversations on this topic, people have responded to comments about JavaScript being insecure by claiming partisanship, due to other products not being mentioned.  So, I mentioned what I perceive to be the worst of them.  Note that I also say no to Shockwave and Flash, on a case by case basis (like with JavaScript.)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @tgape said:

    The principle of Keep It Simple, morbiuS should apply: When the simplest technology you are using is able to handle 100% of your needed functionality, you should use it to do that functionality.

    Which doesn't address what I was talking about at all.  The "plain text" of the article loads just fine, it simply has a semi-transparent overlay telling you to enable JS for most of the features (which would not work with plain HTML)

    wowhead uses simple HTML links in many places.  These would work just fine without JavaScript, except for the semi-transparent overlay.  In fact, having NoScript disable the 'noscript' tags makes most of wowhead work just fine, so long as one doesn't care about user comments.

    Rather than taking the rest of your response point by point, I'll just make the general comment that, while I cannot know all of the functionality that wowhead is attempting to provide without spending far too much time looking at this, it feels to me they have more dependence on client-side processing than they need to accomplish their goals, and possibly more than is healthy for their site security.

    Client-side dynamic generation has its own costs, and while there may be potential to do this efficiently and securely, I've personally not been exposed to web code that manages both of those at the same time.  In particular, back in the day when I played WoW, and therefore used wowhead, I did note that while it was sometimes the only place for certain bits of information, it was also one of the more browser intensive sites - the only one I used which I could not reasonably navigate while playing WoW in windowed mode.  In fact, wowhead was slower for me while I had nothing else running than others were with WoW running.

    Also, one probably should not put too much weight on subtext.  You may otherwise find it may not have enough strength behind it to bear that weight.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @ComputerForumUser said:

    Also @morb: I'm more bothered that some pages require javascript to work even though they behave identically to plain old html. And secondly, but not so much, at not having any plain old html fallback. One day, when my death ray disables javascript on every computer in the world simultaneously, they'll be sorry.

    Are you also bothered when their site doesn't fall back to HTML 2.0 and work in NN4?  Seriously, JS is a standard feature of the web now.  Nobody would try to install a brand new desktop app on Windows 95 and be like "I don't get it, the app doesn't even use any Vista or XP features!  This should fallback and work just fine on a 15 year old OS!"  It's surprising to me that so many techies can be utterly irrational Luddites when it comes to Javascript...

    Haha, nice one morb.  Make sure you tell him he should be deleting his cookies because the INTERNET IS TRACKING HIM!


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