Comments on: Confessions of an Eccentric Web Developer II

By: Jason Jaeger

Jason Jaeger — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:14:36 +0000

Nice article. But IE6… really?!?
I will take slower but works (mostly) over faster and broken any day of the week. The ability to used advanced CSS selectors, min-width/height, max-width/height, fixed positioning, and semi-transparent PNGs, trumps the speed issue for me. Not having to make sure sites work right in IE6 would cut down on development time as well.
That being said, IE7 does need to be faster.

By: david

david — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:04:33 +0000

@Janko: IE7 is bloated, “heavy”, and slow. IE6 is very quick.

By: Janko

Janko — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:52:34 +0000

What a great post! By why, on earth, you prefer IE6 over IE7? When I see IE6 I feel as if I’m back to ’90!

Besides that – awesome!

By: William

William — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:34:26 +0000

About #12
It’s true, some of the “new features” of HTML5 and XHTML 2.0 does not surprise as it should. Most of them was made to “free” divs (since nowadays we use it a lot), and some others are the very same elements we already use, but with native CSS applied (like the NAV tag).
But there’s one thing I think it would really help: layout (like Java and ExtJS). Imagine if, to make a layout, we just had to create a container (could be body) and the regions? And the regions would adjust itself by the container. Something like this:

No more CSS frameworks and JS workarounds. Just plain HTML.

By: keif

keif — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:05:15 +0000

With #2 – I’m onboard, except it’s kind of a caveat – I mean, we’re talking about opening “filetypes” in new windows vs. what most people think of as links (html, php, jsp, etc.).

With #3 – That’s horrible. I refer to a lot of stuff you write for reference (and am slowly trying to document it all down so I can quit referring myself). I use mootools on a lot of client sites.

With #7 – isn’t that the point of being a developer though? No one is perfect out of the gate, it’s a continual improvement experience. Every day I think I get a little bit better.

With #13 – That’s a huge misconception. Valerio never helped though, he was quite an ass on the message boards and probably should’ve delegated his moderator tasks to someone else. He got pretty aggressive pretty quickly.

With #14 – I sadly agree.

I’ve talked to a few people about the MooTools book, and it’s like the book gives MooTools “credibility” or “relevancy” to those outside of the tech area. When a PM/MGMT has a book in hand they can refer to, it becomes “more enterprise” and less “free open source.” Political bullshit, basically.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:31:26 +0000

@david – I didn’t mean to suggest you were hating on php, just that your suggestion could further degrade it’s credibility within the community. As far as your example, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that variables in PHP are not objects and such do not have those built in properties. This is also a subject of huge debate and I believe it may be on the verge of changing in the next couple of major versions.

@Jeremy – I absolutely agree with you. PHP’s flexibility is a true feature and does allow you to get things done quickly. However, there is a time and place for that and a lot of people code that way 24/7. There is a point where procedural code must stop, and objects begin. When people hate on PHP, I believe they’re knocking the fact that PHP allows you to write in several ‘styles’ no matter the situation. It’s up to the coder to decide what the best style is for the situation.

btw, keep it up David.

By: Jeremy Martin

Jeremy Martin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:28:00 +0000

@/dev/null: I think “quick and dirty” is fair to some extent. For example, if I wanted a server side script to simply print out a random quote, PHP is “quick and dirty” in that I don’t have to deploy a .war or go through the headache of configuring IIS for a .net application. 10 lines of code and any old LAMP configuration and I’m done. I do agree, however, that it’s not fair to “constrain” PHP to quick and dirty applications. There are certainly enough real world examples out there to demonstrate that it is, as you stated, a powerful, flexible web development language.

Regarding PHP being more “powerful” than JavaScript, I would have to contend that you’re comparing environments, rather than the language itself. JavaScript is purposefully limited due to browser security concerns, but these limitations are not inherent in the language itself.

By: david

david — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:29:51 +0000

@/dev/null: As long as I’ve known PHP, it’s been considered the “quick and dirty” server side language. Also, my main point was that I wish its syntax was more like javascript, like my example above.

By: /dev/null

/dev/null — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:21:41 +0000

Wow, interesting opinions there. However, I disagree about PHP. PHP is not meant to be quick and dirty, I have no clue where you people get that stuff. PHP is supposed to be a powerful, flexible web development language, and it does that well. Javascript can’t do half the things PHP can (password authentication, database connection, anyone?)

Oh, and I disagree about emotes. What’s wrong with them? I only hate the ugly ones.

By: Jeremy Martin

Jeremy Martin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:03:33 +0000

@Mike: I can understand your point. I will definitely admit that languages such as PHP and JavaScript do lend themselves to “quick and dirty” code (sometimes the emphasis being on dirty). However, I would also have to suggest a stronger separation between “too flexible” and “flimsy”. The lack of design/compile time type checking, or other enforcements found in many other languages, are actually an empowerment and are true “features”, rather than signs of a lazy language. And upon re-reading my comment, I apologize for coming off as too ornery – I did not intend to respond at a personal level….