Thursday, 22. December 2005, 12:33:47
play, browser, funny
Today, I was reading a news story about a get together between the people behind Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! mail. Sorry about that "!", I don't find Yahoo particularly exciting but I guess you're supposed to include the exclamation point. I don't make the rules, I just follow them. Anyway, one thing that they all agreed on was people who use small percentage share browsers asking for support in their product were annoying. Being an relatively small percentage share browser user, I automatically assumed they were talking about Opera and I got into pissed off Opera user mode. A mode that I think all Opera users should fall into sometime. Anyway,it's not our fault, as Opera users, that they cannot write standards compliant code. On an unrelated note, here's a little play that I wrote.
Them: Hello! Welcome to YaMicroOgle. The greatest and the bestest restaurant on the net!
Opera user: Oh...that's good I guess. Can I make a reservation?
Them: Sure! What's the name?
Opera user: Opera 8.51
Them: Oh, We're sorry, but you have to speak either standard English or quirky French with a bunch of extens...I mean, words that we made up to eat here.
Opera user: Well I do speak very good standard English. But quirky French, I'm not so good at. I could possibly try it anyway?
Them: NO! YOU MUST UPGRADE! BLAH!!!!
Opera user: OK...*looks at the sign* you claim you support French as spoken by Napolean the 4.7th. You do realize that Napolean the 4.7th is from a long time ago and I speak must better French than him right?
Them: There are still one or two hardcore Napolean the 4.7th speakers out there. We have to support those two people.
*Opera user stares at him* I don't have to take this, I'm going to write an e-mail to YaMicroOgle.
Them: Go ahead! We have a form letter just waiting for people like you!
Opera user: *raises finger in protest...gradually lowers it and walks away*
Tuesday, 20. December 2005, 05:46:45
shirt, t-shirt
I won a T-shirt! Thanks Opera! But I feel like such an idiot because I made a mistake typing out W3C, I put WC3...Idiot! I'm ashamed. When the shirt comes in the mail, I'll be sure to post pics of it. So when I get it, I'll have a grand total of 3 Opera T-shirts. I already have the "rebel browser" shirt and one that just says "Opera Software". I wear them and nobody gives me a thumbs up or anything...It's sort of sad. If I saw somebody wearing an Opera shirt, I'd surely say "hey, nice shirt" and if it's a chick, I'd hit on her for sure but sadly, that event has yet to happen. I hold high hopes for the future though.
Sunday, 13. November 2005, 07:06:22
browsers, browser, language
I was watching a video on Channel 9 when I picked up on something. One of the people from Microsoft said "bookmark" instead of the Internet Explorer-ese "favorite". This got me thinking, mainly, am I free of Internet Explorer-ese? I really don't know whether or not I say "reload" instead of "refresh" so I can't say for sure but I do use "bookmark" instead of "favorite" so I guess I am 1-1. In my defense, "reload" and "refresh" mean practically the same thing while "bookmarks" and "favorites" are different.
Saturday, 29. October 2005, 18:33:54
design, internet
I usually use google as my home. I enjoy it's familar design and it's minimalistic philosophy. It's not exactly up to speed with web standards but I'll let it slide because it's google. For some reason, I decided to go out and customize my yahoo homepage. The design was bad. Who could possibly want 20 different "modules" cluttering their homepage? And there is a lot more. For the idea of being easy to customize, every module has a very thick bar where you can choose to edit or remove. I personally think this is a bad idea because if a user doesn't like that particular module, the user will remove it once through preferences, the user doesn't need a way to remove it every single time the user loads the page. Applying the same logic to google results in a different outcome. google.com/ig doesn't have a dedicated design preferences page and is not very customizable so the x in the corner of the module is a good addition. The reason this all came up was that looking at my.yahoo.com made me think about the comments towards Khoi Vin about his design of The Onion posted on slashdot a while back. What is sad is that I agreed with the comments that said that theonion.com is a victim of information overload. What's odd is that Khoi Vin's website, subtraction.com is a perfect model of beautiful minimalistic design. I don't blame him though for The Onion's design, because after all, he has to be commited to what The Onion people want. I guess what this all boils down to is that I am so used to the to the point, sequential style of blogs or faux-blogs (Slashdot/Fark) in general that anything that presents more information that is necessary gives me the bad-user interface goosebumps. It's sort of like a spidey sense but not quite as useful.
Saturday, 15. October 2005, 20:12:38
myspace
First off, I like web standards. I think that XHTML and CSS is seriously the way to go and that people should try to use them to their full potential, which is sort of an open ended statement because the possibilities are nearly endless. But people don't use XHTML or CSS. Some people use absolutely terrible HTML with many presentational tags built into it. One of these is Myspace. Myspace is a social networking website with a lot of users, mainly young people who cry a lot. I am a member. Myspace is absolutely disgusting with it's use of HTML. 43 tables are used in my profiles page alone. Myspace would be an ideal candidate for a XHTML/CSS makeover. With standards-compliant XHTML, the pages would be a lot more customizable with CSS and the pages would be a lot smaller, on the order of 1/5th the size, quite possibly even less if they redo their backend so that their links aren't 212 (yes, seriously) characters long. I'm playing around with making my profile compliant right now but it's hard to strip out everything. The original page was 70k alone with 200k of images and right now, I'm down to 40k for the page and there is a lot more to go. I'm guessing that I could design the page the exact same way for 1/3 the size. Times that by the more than 3 million Myspace users and that is a lot of bandwidth saved. If I don't give up trying, I'll make another post about it on here. I won't upload it or anything due to the legal implications to both Opera as well as myself but I'll state the savings earned using web standards versus proprietary web tag soup.
EDIT: XHTML stripped of tables: ~10k. Original: ~70k.
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