Sorry for the long post, but some very juicy WTF's follow.
I have always hated the Livedocs because they have been "slow," but not until recently, when I was trying to dynamically link to Livedocs pages for a school project did I look into the code and figure out the reason.
They seem to be built using Quadralay's [link=http://www.quadralay.com/ePublisher/]WebWorks ePublisher[/link], which I guess converts between many forms of documentation. To be fair, I must be no easy task shifting huge help files to a web-based medium, but the solution generated by ePublisher is horrid, to say the least.
For an example, go to:
[link=http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?href=Part1_Getting_Started.html]http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?href=Part1_Getting_Started.html[/link]
Here are only some of the things I can see are wrong...See if you can come up with any additional ones:
1) Upon visiting the page, close to a [i]megabyte[/i] of external files are loaded, most of them JavaScript files. Not only is this a ridiculous size to download for [i]any[/i] single page, the fact that most of it is source code makes me shudder to even think about what is contained therein.
2) On my 6MB/s connection with Firefox pipelining on, it still takes 20 seconds to load the page.
3) Clicking on "Search" and typing in "Movieclip" causes another [i]530[/i] JavaScript files to load, all named "search2s.js", "search261.js" or similarly, totaling another [i]4MB[/i] and 2 minutes to even get my search results. Granted, Movieclip is a pretty common term in flash, but what's wrong with a simple database query and a results page? I can't even imagine trying to use this system on a dial-up connection.
4) Looking at "files.js", it seems that a database query was asking too much--help topics are stored in JavaScript files by statically passing to a function the title and target html:[code]P.fA("Getting Started with Flash","Part1_Getting_Started.html");[/code]
5) "title.js" has only this code in it: [code]document.writeln("<title>Flash 8 Documentation</title>");[/code]
6) Looking at other JavaScripts, there is scads of hard-coded innerHTML string-building (I don't think they use createElement or appendChild anywhere). Few of the JS files are included by default, but the rest are added by document.write()ing hard-coded script tags. I found a div with a table in it, built completely with strings and variables, using about 150 lines of string concatenations (HTML += "...).
7) Oh. My. God. In "outline.js", JavaScripts, [i]themselves[/i] built with strings line-by-line, are THEN added to the page using document.write(). And to top it all off, the comment above this reads "// Define accessor functions to reduce file size". Well, they were decreasing readability and manageability ten-fold, but at least they reduced the filesize of the code to a measly 4MB.
8) Uses frames. 'Nuff said.
9) Hmm...another useful JS file: called "towwhdir.js": [code]function WWHToWWHelpDirectory()
{
return "";
}[/code]
10) A reader's comment on the page I linked to reads "Cannot open live docs, tutorials. I have Mac OS10. What to do?". The response from Adobe staff is "There is a known issue with opening LiveDocs on some Macs, which is currently being investigated by the engineering team. Please open LiveDocs using whichever method you used to comment here (either by opening a new browser in Firefox or Opera, or by fully closing LiveDocs and browsing to it manually)." You mean what they're doing isn't compatible across multiple browsers? I can't imagine why!
I could go on, but I picked out enough WTF's for one day. This is simply the worst online documentation I have ever used.
Needless to say, I failed in being able to link to Livedocs pages directly, instead opting to parse up the [link=http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/action_scripts/actionscript_dictionary/]ActionScript Dictionary[/link].
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Best posts made by boolean
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Adobe Livedocs: A World of WTF.
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RE: Fake ASP WTF
@zip said:
...browsing our entire site, saving the source of each page as its own aspx page, and then fixing up the links. I have no idea how long this took our intern, but it's a miracle he didn't kill himself.
I use Dreamweaver, which despite its bugs is fairly useful for web dev. You can open any amount of pages, and do a find/replace with all open documents, and even use regexes. And I'm sure there are plenty of other programs that will do this rather quickly.It would be a pain if the formatting of some/all pages are different, though. I, too, have felt the pain of having to do repetitive tasks because of WYSIWYG editors >=/
Latest posts made by boolean
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RE: How not to do CSS
I worked on a website that was mostly clean, but had this style set globally:
p {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}And then [i]every[/i] paragraph looked like this:
<p>Lorem Ipsum<br /><br /></p>
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Calc.exe wtf
Had the scientific view of Windows Calculator open, and started hunting for the sqrt button. Nowhere was it to be found. With buttons for functions such as factorials and boolean operations you'd think it'd be capable of performing square root. Even weirder, the standard non-scientific view has a sqrt button.
A quick search led to a humorous Knowledge Base article explaining to me that x^0.5 == sqrt(x). Since there is an x^y button, there was obviously no reason to include a sqrt button; that would be redundant. And yet there are x^2 and x^3 buttons. Along those lines, why include a multiplication button when you can use repeated addition?
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RE: How not to spend your hours
@MarcB said:
Also, there's the variable scoping business. Is there any other in-use language out there that doesn't automatically variables from a higher scope visible in the current scope?
Even more confusingly, it automatically brings variables from a lower scope (e.g., vars declared inside "if" statements) into the higher, something I haven't seen any other languages do.
Anybody have thoughts on this?
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RE: I think I want to cry - Javascript linking
@stinch said:
I guess working out how to hide the html when flash is present was too difficult.
The de-facto standard is to use Javascript to embed Flash (due to changes in IE to avoid paying Eolas), and swfobject is the most common way to do it. It's built specifically to be able to gracefully degrade Flash content—you give it where your regular, friendly HTML content is, and swfobject replaces it with Flash if both Javascript and Flash are enabled.
Ironically, they're already using swfobject, meaning that bringing the content back into the viewable area and changing one line of Javascript would allow non-Flash users to see the site without breaking the Flash "experience." This type of disregard for semantics and accessibility really reflects poorly on a studio, regardless of how impressively they handle other aspects of web development.
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RE: Realy dynamic website
@DrJokepu said:
...the website pulled every single line of text on the website from the database.
For most dynamic sites I've dealt with, it makes sense to pick chunks of text or very similar items and throw them in a database.
Every line of text, however, is a little extreme—I can see this being handy only for swapping out the language of the entire site easily. Otherwise, I would leave small bits of text that don't change in an include file.
@DrJokepu said:...before every single page load the PHP scripts pulled every single line from the database, put them into an array, and then looked them up from the array at the appropriate locations.
You're right, THIS is the WTF. The website would be running just fine if each page queried only the content it needed from the database and displayed it. This is effectively maxing out PHP's memory usage on every page load.
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RE: I think I want to cry - Javascript linking
@Weng said:
a href="#" onclick="sillyJavaScriptThatChangesTheBrowser'sLocation()
I also cry when I see forms with this:
<input type="button" onclick="document.forms[0].submit();" >Agh! There is a form element called "submit" that will do that automatically, and without Javascript!
@Nether said:There are even many sites done entirely in flash where the layout would be been perfectly suitable as simple html for a fraction of the cost.
Take a look at this piece of work: http://thinkswedish.com. The entire site (blog, comments, About page) is done in Flash. But do they use complicated UIs, fancy animations, or other forms of intense interactivity that might at least partially justify an all-Flash site? Nope. The site acts exactly like a plain old HTML page. What really chaps my ass is how much work must've gone into making what amounts to an entire layout engine in ActionScript, when it's emulating the most basic type of webpage that HTML is built for. Grr.
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Firefox Add-on Irony
Usually when you install an add-on, you can click "Restart Firefox" right after installation. There's also an add-on called "Restart Firefox." It adds a File menu item that does exactly what you'd expect. However, after installing it...
[img]http://img3.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/a9126b1fb8.png[/img]
I can't even count the levels of irony in this screenshot.
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RE: IE hack magic
@dhromed said:
...the underscore hack and the asterix hack are quite adequate to tweak things for IE6 and IE7 respectively.
I'd have to disagree. I won't say that I don't normally just slip "necessary" IE hacks into the CSS of sites, but it's more due to timelines. But it isn't a good solution. For instance, IE7 fixed a lot of the CSS parsing bugs from IE6, but didn't address some of the major rendering bugs that were the reason web devs were exploiting CSS bugs in the first place. Conditional statements at least allow you to make sure your hacks are targetting the right browser (who knows how differently IE8 will render the same hacks?), and don't rely on invalid CSS.
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RE: IE hack magic
@element[0] said:
I was using JSON to serailise some xml on the server into JSON objects...
Out of curiosity, do you have access to the server-side code that creates the XML? You could possibly just route the database result sets into a JSON object and send from there.
Just a thought.
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RE: Credit card site menu wtf
@DAL1978 said:
Let me guess, does the see fewer choices link simply remove the last two items off the list?
If anyone really cares, it's the Chase-powered Amazon.com CC (also ironic is the fact that I was scanning this menu originally looking for a way to cancel the card; there doesn't seem to be an option for it. I'll have to enter phone service hell to accomplish that task).
Clicking "See fewer choices" does this: