Sinful Browsing

October 28th, 2004 • 3 comments Rants

So now standard-compliant browsers are sinners?! What happened to all the talks?!

A while ago there was a long debate about whether to be strict or loose when it comes to invalid markup, both camps had their points, and the problem is there is no right or wrong here, it’s all relative. Strict parsers have their advantage, namely making developers play by the rules, obey the standards, and make life easier. The catch? The user gets it, if a parser finds invalid markup that it won’t display, then it’s absolutely useless to the user. Users (oh great users) don’t care what the word markup means, what a parser is, or what’s with all the W3C hype; they expect results, and results they should get.

So does this leave us with loose parsers? After all, they deliver results too. But we’ve seen how Microsoft’s IE let all site-hell break loose, developers and designers started depending on IE being too forgiving, and now browsers like Opera and Mozilla bust their butts off in trying to understand the crappy markup of most IE-dependent site. Do we want that to happen all over again?!

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The Sound of Windows

October 23rd, 2004 • General

I bet you anything this is the last thing that Microsoft had on it’s mind. The sounds of Windows! ‘Nuf said.

That’s What They Think

October 23rd, 2004 • 1 comment PHP

Just downloaded J2SE 5.0, and turns out here’s the reason why they think PHP isn’t enterprise-ready:

Lessons Learned

October 22nd, 2004 • 1 comment General

After finally redesigning Codeflakes to make look at least a bit more professional, here’s a couple of lessons I learned, some things you might already know, but it’s never harmful to be repetitious:

• Floats are evil, long live floats.

  Well my only gripe on floats is that they’re too difficult to maintain, but with some effort, they can do wonders.

• Cross-browser transparency can only be achieved with PNG (GIFs are almost dead you know). Opera doesn’t support either propriety or standard CSS opacity attribute. However, if you don’t care much about Opera, transparent layers in IE and Gecko can be easily done like this:

  #div {
      /* Propriety IE. This line causes your CSS not to validate */
      filter:alpha(opacity=80);
      
      /* Standard W3C, should work in Mozilla 1.7 and up */
      opacity: 0.8;
      
      /* Gecko propriety, for earlier versions of Mozilla */
      -moz-opacity: 0.8;
  }
  

• When you use position:relative for a parent layer, children layers’ positioning becomes dependent on the parent’s position rather than the page, so top: 0; positions a child layer at the very top inside the parent, not at the top of the page.

  Yeah, I know it’s an old one, but I thought it’s worth mentioning.

• This really depends on personal preferences, but I think Bitstream Vera Sans looks much better than Verdana on the screen. Verdana has harder edges and isn’t as smooth as Bitstream. But that’s probably just me.

• Use XHTML Strict whenever possible, you never when you have to XSL-transform it. Plus, it sounds cooler.

PHP, Enterprised!

October 18th, 2004 • 3 comments PHP

I’m sure we’re all bored with all these discussions about PHP being ready (or not) for enterprise computing; I know I am.

I think we’re all missing the point here, like Marco Tabini said, it doesn’t really matter if PHP is enterprise-ready or not, an enterprise-level company doesn’t care if you’re using PHP or mashed potatoes to get the job done, if the budget allows it then by all means use whatever you want. Nobody’s interested in hearing three-letter buzzword-like acronyms, nobody cares what you’re doing underneath, just as long as you make sure a patient’s heart doesn’t stop, or tons of money aren’t transferred by mistake to Nuke-The-World organization.

Yes, PHP is enterprise-ready, if you want it to be. It can do whatever you want it to do, from messaging, to RPC, to persistence, but are you willing to invest?! Are you willing to develop modules, extensions, APIs and standards? PHP is a monolithic monster, it’s not easily extended, but it still has lots of advantages, lots of potential, but are you willing to invest?!

Developing any project with PHP implies many costs, this includes the learning curve, integration, interoperability, deployment and obviously speed of execution. Each comes with a certain cost, each impacts a project in a different way, and each contributes to moving PHP further into the enterprise market.

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