Did you know that document.getElementById wasn't around until vista!!



  • @murdog said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @murdog said:

    This will be my last post, and I will not be participating in this forum any longer.  I asked the administrator to remove my account as I will no longer be using it.

    You know what would be really awesome?  If you stopped participating in life.  Just let God know he can remove your account as you will no longer be using it.

    Nice, your a sad pathetic excuse for a human being.  When god made you, he not only threw out the mold, he shit on it, burned it and threw it in to the sun.  Keep hiding behind your computer you little piece of crap, because one day, you may have to actually be responsible for the bullshit you sling through the web.

     

    Wow did you learn that one in the third grade classroom where you stalk children?

    He did say he does web design for a living, so he is responsible for what he puts on the web, but he still has a job. How about you?



  • @murdog said:

    Nice, your a sad pathetic excuse for a human being.

    My a sad pathetic excuse for a human being what?

     

    @murdog said:

    When god made you, he not only threw out the mold, he shit on it, burned it and threw it in to the sun.

    So you believe in God but don't capitalize his name?   Not only that, but a God with well-functioning bowels?  I don't care how omnipotent you are and how much fiber you eat, after a couple of billion years things are going to get unreliable.

     

    @murdog said:

    Keep hiding behind your computer you little piece of crap, because one day, you may have to actually be responsible for the bullshit you sling through the web.

    Well, I am suppressing my laughter while a profoundly retarded child flings spittle at me in the worst job of flaming I have ever witnessed.  I'm not sure how much more I can reasonably be expected to endure in the name of responsibility.



  • @murdog said:

    Tables are LESS quirky now with browsers conforming to standards, but I am saying they are less predictable than CSS.
     

    I started making websites in 1997 or so. For that reason, I've made many websites, static and dynamic, that use table based layout, simply because CSS wasn't available then. Table based layouts are a bit quirky, agreed, but they work very predictable on any browser since Netscape 3/IE 4. I even think they are more flexible and reliable than CSS based layouts when it comes to unusual browser window sizes, users changing the font size etc. But it could be just me, because I don't have much experience with CSS layouts since I haven't done much web stuff for several years and only recently started working on a web-based project.

    Regarding stackoverflow, let's just say that this site like every other site attracts a lot of people first, but once there is a majority of people with opion A, people with opinion !A will steadily defect. It seems to me that stackoverflow is full of people who worship "best practices", i.e many rules that start with "never use ...". Obviously, "best practices" are not inherently bad, but many smart people know when it is useful to break the rules set out by best practices, so to _get things done_. It seems like people like that are a minority at stackoverflow.

    Regarding your request to have your account deleted, I propose you just do not come back. Looking at the discussion as a whole, morbus presented his opinion in a very reasonable manner. "table layouts are just another tool in my toolbox" not your opinion, but it is a valid opinion. It was you who started calling him names. IMO, you are a jerk



  • @bob171123 said:

    P.S. I hate people arguing that IE, or anything Microsoft, is a piece of shit. Like it or not, but the majority of consumers disagree with you.

    By this, you're referring to the consumers who just know that Start > Internet gets them onto the Intarwebz? (The sort who believe that the entire Internet is down if their home page won't load.)

    Or, are you referring to the consumers who have installed Opera, Firefox and now Safari and have nonetheless concluded that Internet Explorer is a superior product to all rival offerings?



  • Where did I call him a name?  hmmm?  It was only after he attacked me that I started TRYING to defend myself.  I see how it is though, since he has so many posts everyone kisses his arse.  I really don't care what you think.  So what if I am a jerk... I can live with that, the rest of you just subscribe to the mob mentality, keep on bashing me, I am sure your all having a great time... ENJOY



  • @snover said:

    One of the nice things about no longer having to support IE6 for most projects* is that, by and large, things do work the way they are supposed to.

    Where's the referenced footnote? Presumably it was supposed to explain why don't you have to support IE6 for most projects, which I'd like to hear.



  •  @murdog said:

    I see how it is though, since he has so many posts everyone kisses his arse. 

    LOL. I'm definitely the last one to kiss anybodys arse here.

    Regards, your friendly forum administrator



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @bob171123 said:

    P.S. I hate people arguing that IE, or anything Microsoft, is a piece of shit. Like it or not, but the majority of consumers disagree with you.

    By this, you're referring to the consumers who just know that Start > Internet gets them onto the Intarwebz? (The sort who believe that the entire Internet is down if their home page won't load.)

    Or, are you referring to the consumers who have installed Opera, Firefox and now Safari and have nonetheless concluded that Internet Explorer is a superior product to all rival offerings?

     

    You must not be working in web development. You must accomodate all consumers regardless of which browser they use. Either that, or you're one of those assholes who believes that anyone who doesn't see things your way is a complete idiot.



  • @ammoQ said:

    I even think they are more flexible and reliable than CSS based layouts when it comes to unusual browser window sizes, users changing the font size etc.

     

    They usually are more flexible because usually the browser determines the appropriate sizes for table rows and columns, while the typical person who uses css insists on using absolute sizes. If you use percentage sizes for elements that do not require a fixed size, and use em's instead of px or pt for font sizes, then you will have a much more fluid layout as you would with table-based layouts.



  • @Spectre said:

    @snover said:
    One of the nice things about no longer having to support IE6 for most projects* is that, by and large, things do work the way they are supposed to.

    Where's the referenced footnote? Presumably it was supposed to explain why don't you have to support IE6 for most projects, which I'd like to hear.

    Haha, whoops! Essentially, it comes down to educating clients effectively.

    First, I explain that 92-95%* of the audience could be enjoying features that were introduced after IE6’s release in 2001, but that needing to support IE6 equally means that these new features can’t be used because it’s just too old. Second, I split off IE6 support to a separate line-item on the estimate. This appears to add about 20% to the bottom line, which provides a more direct financial incentive to not support IE6. (Of course, the cost has been there all along, but now it’s staring them in the face instead of being absorbed into the total cost.) Third, I explain that even huge sites like YouTube and Facebook are discontinuing their support for IE6, and if companies like those can do it, so can the client. (An informal fallacy, but still effective.) Finally, I explain that IE6 users will not be intentionally denied access, just that the site just might not look or function as well, and they will be given information about how to upgrade.

    In my experience, clients are usually satisfied to simply throw up IE6NoMore for those few visitors that are still using IE6. Some people will disagree with this approach, but I have found it is effective, and it makes me not want to kill myself at the end of the day, which I tend to think of as a plus.

     

    @bob171123 said:

    P.S. I hate people arguing that IE, or anything Microsoft, is a piece
    of shit. Like it or not, but the majority of consumers disagree with
    you. Do you want to follow "standards" or do you want a large portion
    of the market to access your product? If you're complaining you just
    don't want it enough, so get another job.
    You can’t be serious. The whole point of TDWTF is complaining about shitty software. And, yes, IE (<8) is a piece of shit. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it isn’t rubbish, and just because lots of people use it doesn’t mean lots of people like using it. I am not a Microsoft hater, but I honestly don’t know how any halfway-competent Web developer could defend IE or Microsoft’s management thereof—all I should have to say is “hasLayout” before you acknowledge just how bad Trident used to be. And disbanding the IE team and waiting for 5 years until other browsers became a threat to market dominance before releasing a new version? That’s low.

    To refute your “the majority of consumers disagree” comment, here is one anectode for you (for whatever that’s worth). Before I became a software engineer, I worked for a mid-sized, award-winning computer repair company. As standard practise, in order to prevent people from continuously reinfecting their computers with spyware, we installed Firefox as a matter of course on every single machine that we worked on, regardless of why it came in. Out of the 15,000 or so computers that we did this to while I worked there, I can only remember ever hearing a handful of complaints—and most of those were because their banking sites only supported IE (we started doing this in early 2004—when IE’s market share was still around 90%). There were only two people in the three years that I worked there that specifically asked us not to replace IE. In fact, I think we got more complaints about removing Comet Cursor and BonziBUDDY than we did about Firefox. Given this experience, and given the fact that IE is the only browser that continues to regularly lose market share, I can safely say that people do not use IE because they think it’s awesome, they use it because it’s the default.

     

    * In North America and European markets, weekday and weekend numbers
    (respectively) from StatCounter Global Stats. I would not be surprised
    if the actual numbers of IE6 users were even 1-2% lower due to software
    that masquerades as IE6.



  • @snover said:

    And, yes, IE (<8) is a piece of shit.

    I couldn't put any of what you wrote better than you did, and I wish I were brave enough to go around replacing IE with Firefox/Opera like that!

    However, I dispute your use of <8 in the above. 8 is still painfully clumsy program to use. (The most subtle bug in 7 and 8 is how the toolbars restack when you restore from minimise if you have the menu toolbar and links toolbar in the same row -- a brief but irritating flicker.) Granted, it's nice to see that my site looks as it should at last in 8, where I've simply refused to write bad code for the sake of IE. One page, though, looks correct in 7, because I finally threw out display: inline-block and went back to a table due to poor standards support, in Firefox as well as IE. I suspect it works in both now.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    However, I dispute your use of <8 in the above. 8 is still painfully clumsy program to use. (The most subtle bug in 7 and 8 is how the toolbars restack when you restore from minimise if you have the menu toolbar and links toolbar in the same row -- a brief but irritating flicker.)
    Oh, gosh, I don’t actually mean the UI, I just mean the rendering engine. I could care less, honestly, about how they decided (for example) to completely break the Windows UI by putting the menu bar below other UI elements, for example. I just want Trident to work properly. :)

     

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Granted, it's nice to see that my site looks as it should at last in 8, where I've simply refused to write bad code for the sake of IE. One page, though, looks correct in 7, because I finally threw out display: inline-block and went back to a table due to poor standards support, in Firefox as well as IE. I suspect it works in both now.
    PROTIP: display: inline on an element that is normally a block-level element and hasLayout in IE<8 causes it to act like an inline-block. display: inline-block works as expected on elements that are inline by default. Don’t ask why, it is what it is.



  • @murdog said:

    I see how it is though, since he has so many posts everyone kisses his arse.
    You must be new here.

     



  • @snover said:

     

    * In North America and European markets, weekday and weekend numbers (respectively) from StatCounter Global Stats. I would not be surprised if the actual numbers of IE6 users were even 1-2% lower due to software that masquerades as IE6.

    I just realized that we might not be on the same page here.  I make web apps, not web sites.  A blog can certainly get away with using only CSS.  However, complex apps, like ticketing, CRM, spreadsheets, webmail and the like usually have more complicated UIs with multi-column layouts.  I just looked at the latest version of Jira and it uses tables extensively for layout.

     

    The reason this occurred to me is because you are quoting public web stats.  I've never relied on those, because it's simply not applicable to the web app world.  Most web apps are used in corporate environments where IE is the standard, and I've had the misforture of working in niche markets where IE 6 for Windows or IE 5 for Mac is still the major browser.  Believe me, I hate supporting IE5/6 quite a bit.  It's not that they are terrible pieces of software, it's that they are outdated.  When they were released, IE5/6 were the best browsers available.  The world has since moved on, though, so I'd be glad to ditch those browsers when possible.  However, I still would use tables if necessary, until something like multi-column CSS actually gets wide support.  



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I just looked at the latest version of Jira and it uses tables extensively for layout.
    Given my experience with Jira (read: slow and prone to running out of memory and crashing), I don’t know how great of an example it is. ;)


    @morbiuswilters said:

    The reason this occurred to me is because you are quoting public web stats.  I've never relied on those, because it's simply not applicable to the web app world.  Most web apps are used in corporate environments where IE is the standard, and I've had the misforture of working in niche markets where IE 6 for Windows or IE 5 for Mac is still the major browser.  Believe me, I hate supporting IE5/6 quite a bit.  It's not that they are terrible pieces of software, it's that they are outdated.  When they were released, IE5/6 were the best browsers available.
    Well, I think it’s a bit of both. I do think a lot of people forget that, in its day, IE was groundbreaking. I mean, it basically singlehandedly destroyed Netscape—not just because it was free, but because genuinely was a lot better than Netscape 4, both in stability (scary, right?) as well as in feature set. I remember spending hours tinkering with all of the new stuff they added in IE5 (omg text shadows!). Still, the fact of the matter is that it was (and is) incredibly buggy, and IE6 should never have been allowed to exist in this state for as long as it was.

    For what it’s worth, I do both Web app and Web site development. However, most of the Web apps I’ve been working on lately are designed to be public-facing, so public stats are relevant. The one application of the intranet-sort that I’ve written (so far) was for a former employer. In that case, it was a small tech business, so they were already off IE completely and I didn’t have to concern myself about it. It works in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome—and doesn’t work in IE only because DOM objects aren’t treated as native JavaScript objects, so prototype doesn’t work. (If I was writing it today, it would work in IE8 too—but this was in 2007, and I am a lot better at my job now. :))

    Anyway, I definitely don’t envy you, if you’re stuck dealing with intranet shit all day in companies where they refuse to update because either some vendor still doesn’t support IE7/8 (how!?!) or the vendor wants to charge them money for an upgrade and they’re being foolishly stingy. I suppose you could always create a xulrunner .msi for deployment on client machines, though. ;)



  • @snover said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    I just looked at the latest version of Jira and it uses tables extensively for layout.
    Given my experience with Jira (read: slow and prone to running out of memory and crashing), I don’t know how great of an example it is. ;)

    Slow?  Sometimes.  Memory hog (to the point where it should probably be restarted nightly to reclaim leaked memory)?  Definitely.  Crash?  Never seen it.

     

    @snover said:

    Well, I think it’s a bit of both. I do think a lot of people forget that, in its day, IE was groundbreaking. I mean, it basically singlehandedly destroyed Netscape—not just because it was free, but because genuinely was a lot better than Netscape 4, both in stability (scary, right?) as well as in feature set. I remember spending hours tinkering with all of the new stuff they added in IE5 (omg text shadows!). Still, the fact of the matter is that it was (and is) incredibly buggy, and IE6 should never have been allowed to exist in this state for as long as it was.

    Agreed.  I think by the standards of late-90s desktop software, it wasn't particularly bad, but that standard is quite low.  IE6 should have been updated sooner, but I don't think Microsoft anticipated the success of web apps.  Honestly, I don't blame them; creating apps in HTML and JS is ugly, although workarounds and improvements have lessened that a bit and continue to do so.  If only Java applets had been better or some better technology (Flash?  Silverlight?) had come earlier.  Actually, Flash still is pretty junky and I don't know enough about Silverlight to draw a conclusion, but it seems to have not taken off like it was supposed to.  Unfortunately, web technologies and Flash are just good enough to keep them dominant for the forseeable future.  Fuck.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Crash?  Never seen it.
    The Zend Framework JIRA, at least, crashes regularly (which I was told once was because it runs out of memory). I’m sure the server admins are at least partially culpable for letting that happen, but a mate of mine that used to work for Brightcove complained about their JIRA installation all the time too.


    @morbiuswilters said:

    Honestly, I don't blame them; creating apps in HTML and JS is ugly, although workarounds and improvements have lessened that a bit and continue to do so.  If only Java applets had been better or some better technology (Flash?  Silverlight?) had come earlier.  Actually, Flash still is pretty junky and I don't know enough about Silverlight to draw a conclusion, but it seems to have not taken off like it was supposed to.  Unfortunately, web technologies and Flash are just good enough to keep them dominant for the forseeable future.  Fuck.

    Well, this is definitely one of my huuuuge pet peeves. Aside from the fact that the next version of JavaScript still isn’t going to implement a proper class-based model (argh!), HTML is a document markup language, not a UI language, and yet we’re still trying to pack application UIs into it. XUL exists but it’s only supported by Gecko, and it’s not that good in my opinion, based on my limited experience. Flex has MXML, which is probably the best XML-based UI language I’ve dealt with so far, but…it’s still Flash in the end, which sucks for other reasons. WAI-ARIA helps a little bit by defining common roles, but in the end those roles are still attached to <div>s and <input>s, and you still have to manually implement common widget behaviours (or use a library like YUI or qooxdoo or ext.js or something else bloated and terrible).

    Sigh.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Unfortunately, web technologies and Flash are just good enough to keep them dominant for the forseeable future.  Fuck.
    Let's face facts, Ajax web apps rely on kludges stacked upon one another all the way down to HTTP itself.  Flash is only a slight improvement; it gives you a few missing features, but it doesn't manage to solve the underlying problems (and while adding some new ones).   But like, say, x86, we're too invested to change, and we'll just keep adding on more and more kludges to keep it working.



  • @snover said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Crash?  Never seen it.
    The Zend Framework JIRA, at least, crashes regularly (which I was told once was because it runs out of memory). I’m sure the server admins are at least partially culpable for letting that happen, but a mate of mine that used to work for Brightcove complained about their JIRA installation all the time too.

    As big of a WTF as ZF is, this doesn't surprise me.  I've never run a Jira instance that was exposed to the public, though, so that might be part of it as well.

     

    @snover said:

    Well, this is definitely one of my huuuuge pet peeves. Aside from the fact that the next version of JavaScript still isn’t going to implement a proper class-based model (argh!), HTML is a document markup language, not a UI language, and yet we’re still trying to pack application UIs into it. XUL exists but it’s only supported by Gecko, and it’s not that good in my opinion, based on my limited experience. Flex has MXML, which is probably the best XML-based UI language I’ve dealt with so far, but…it’s still Flash in the end, which sucks for other reasons. WAI-ARIA helps a little bit by defining common roles, but in the end those roles are still attached to <div>s and <input>s, and you still have to manually implement common widget behaviours (or use a library like YUI or qooxdoo or ext.js or something else bloated and terrible).

    Sigh.

    I agree, although I'm not sure XML is a good base for any UI.  It's fine for document layout, which is what it was meant for in the first place.  In fact, that's where all the anal-retentiveness about "light markup" comes from; it makes sense in the abstract that a hypertext document should not contain style info.  The problem is that the web blurs the line between "app" and "document" way too much, and many of the arguments in favor of light markup go out the window when you're talking about apps.  Google generally shouldn't be indexing the innards of your app, so semantic correctness is mostly a non-issue.  When it comes to maintainability, the whole thing is going to be database-driven with several layers of encapsulation and abstraction; the actual markup templates are a very small part of the code and I've never had a situation where maintainability of the markup was a big deal at all.  If you're using templating properly and adhering to DRY, it's just not a big deal.



  • @bstorer said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Unfortunately, web technologies and Flash are just good enough to keep them dominant for the forseeable future.  Fuck.
    Let's face facts, Ajax web apps rely on kludges stacked upon one another all the way down to HTTP itself.  Flash is only a slight improvement; it gives you a few missing features, but it doesn't manage to solve the underlying problems (and while adding some new ones).   But like, say, x86, we're too invested to change, and we'll just keep adding on more and more kludges to keep it working.

     

    I think the main reason for this is that everyone and their mother think they can write in javascript or Flash, just because they think that since they can write markup around text then scripting can't be much difficult. It's all just internets right? No grandma, it's not all internets. Stop learning from a non-programmer how to write web apps. Don't contribute to the mass of WTF's that is javascript on the internet.

     



  • @bob171123 said:

    @bstorer said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Unfortunately, web technologies and Flash are just good enough to keep them dominant for the forseeable future.  Fuck.
    Let's face facts, Ajax web apps rely on kludges stacked upon one another all the way down to HTTP itself.  Flash is only a slight improvement; it gives you a few missing features, but it doesn't manage to solve the underlying problems (and while adding some new ones).   But like, say, x86, we're too invested to change, and we'll just keep adding on more and more kludges to keep it working.

     

    I think the main reason for this is that everyone and their mother think they can write in javascript or Flash, just because they think that since they can write markup around text then scripting can't be much difficult. It's all just internets right? No grandma, it's not all internets. Stop learning from a non-programmer how to write web apps. Don't contribute to the mass of WTF's that is javascript on the internet.

    It goes deeper than that, though.  Consider all the muck that is relied upon to approximate state in HTTP.


  • @murdog said:

    Tables should only be used for data... using them for layouts or anything else like that is just wrong wrong wrong!

     

    Granted that MOST cases I agree with you, and not using a CSS framework like YUI CSS Grid or something like that to start off if it perfectly fits your mold is a WTF (ok at my job the same one guy has asked me the same set of questions 8 times now once per project. He runs into the same issues, wants to do the same layout, and never writes anything abstract for it, just an implementation that always fucks up in some browser like IE which he never tests and curses to hell. I tell him ALL his battles are already won using YUI css but he never uses it, and gives me dreamweaver code to debug. As a side bonus note indentation to him means using a random number of tabs for a given line, I say this literally because his code is indented as such using spaces. And he refuses to learn and understand HTML/CSS he does not understand what the structure means, how css selectors work, etc, and hes the one coding it (ok hes a designer)).

     

    However there are times when adding a table is just SO much quicker. Specially if I need more than 2 column in my layout. Also I don't claim myself to be a html/css guru and don't know layout like the back of my hand. Sorry. Also for the above guy, he could just use tables to make his layout, saves me heartache. So don't badmouth tables! Tables are my friends!



  • @bstorer said:

    It goes deeper than that, though.  Consider all the muck that is relied upon to approximate state in HTTP.

     

    Consider the inefficiencies of HTTP itself. Google is aiming to fix that by making a new protocol.

    Flash, cookies, google gears, all things used to try to solve underlying problems because of the immobility of the platform. People still use IE6. So guess what, you damn well better support it if your target audience uses IE6. IE7 is not much better, but gota support it, IE8 still not wonderfull but gota support it for a while as well. Using flash at least eliviates the pain of having to support all these browsers. Flash sucks balls IMO since running it on my netbook destroys performance (I need adblock software because a flash ad eats my small amount of CPU resources available). However until we resolve the underlying issues, we support them. 

    Think of it this way:

    Convince one person that taffy tastes good.

    Convince ten people at once.

    The second part is not 10x as hard, its eather simple because they'll feed off of each other's agreeing, OR its more than 10x harder because you now have the group to convince at once each member of which can hurt your efforts with each. Same with technology.



  •  There must some really old tutorial around that bad developers are still following, I just came across this in some code I'm refactoring:

     

        function Obj(objID) {
            if (document.getElementById && document.getElementById(objID)) {return document.getElementById(objID);}
            else if (document.all && document.all(objID)) {return document.all(objID);}
            else if (document.layers && document.layers[objID]) {return document.layers[objID];}
            else {return false;}
        }


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