[OT] Re: Short forum post on REST API

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:in7fuh$2rfu$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> I know IE gets flamed for not
>> following the standards, and perhaps rightly so, but sometimes the
>> IE-classic-way just makes the standards-way look like shit.
>
> Yup. I always put some slightly inflammatory line in my signature
> over there (and my avatar is usually ironic in some way).
>
> I think the whole web standards thing is a pile of nonsense. Well,
> it's good to have, but the attitude behind them, especially toward
> IE, is just ridiculous.
>
> Virtually everything "web 2.0" is built on was invented by IE -
> hence the signature line. There's some new standards fixing
> the old standard... by making it act like old IE. (box-sizing
> in CSS is the big one.)
>
> But, noooo, IE is evil.
>
> If there's something IE started that they don't like, it's
> OH NOES PROPRIETARY EVILNESS... but if Google does the same thing,
> it's STILL IE's fault for not instantly cloning Google's
> proprietary crap!
>
> Unbelievable.
>
> And, that brings me to something else. I hate the way the browsers
> are so focused on poorly running DOOM in Javascript, but they
> all ignore basic usability issues. Take one that got me recently:
> file uploads don't give feedback.
>
> How hard would it be for the browser to put in some kind of
> progress bar over the form or something instead of just hanging
> for a few minutes?
>
> But noooo, we need WebGL.
>
> Oh, I could rant about this all day, better not get too far
> off topic again!
>

Cue sound bite of "Uh-huuh! You go, girl! (three finger snaps here)".

One of the things that gets me is the new video tag. The first time I heard 
about "this great new video tag" my reaction was "What they hell are they 
talking about? We've already has that since the 90's! It's called the object 
tag, and it works for more than video." Then later on when I needed to embed 
sound into a page (not my idea, I assure you) I discovered that the *cough* 
"good" browsers like Chrome don't support it. I had to embed the damn media 
into flash - something I'd sworn I'd never do.

About the file uploads: I bet they'd rather have it driven by JS and have a 
DHTML (or canvas tag) progress bar. And most likely driven by a Google API, 
of course. It would figure: Web people all for standards when it comes to 
protocols, no mater how bad the standard is, but when it comes to 
client-driven UI standards it's, "Hell no, we won't be having any of that!" 
Heck, when was the last time you saw a DHTML menu bar that actually behaved 
like menu bars on any real OS? The real ones dropdown on a click, always, 
never on a mouseover (and very thankfully so). Web apps make GTK apps seem 
like they're actually native (assuming a non-Gnome OS, of course).

And what makes all of this truly pathetic (as if it weren't already) is how 
it's all so blatantly trend-driven that it makes the fasion industry look 
almost down-to-Earth. God I hate the web.

>
>> If you ask me, SQL is the COBOL/VB of the DB world, except it
>> actually stuck.
>
> I don't know, it seems OK enough for the database, though it has
> issues I hate (hence my recent database.d module). But reinventing
> it is so weird.
>

Well, SQL is at least tolerable if you're just doing basic queries: SELECT, 
INSERT, UPDATE, no nested selects, no TSQL, etc. One you start getting into 
that other stuff, that's when it really gets irritating (so I avoid such 
things whenever I can get away with it, even if it is at the expense of a 
little speed - but everyone else is happily using PHP, so it's not like 
anyone even cares about speed on a web server anyway.)

Although even with those basic queries, SQL's psuedo-English syntax strikes 
me as uncomfortably COBOL/VB. And I never could shake the impression that 
INSERT and UPDATE were designed in isolation by two completely separate 
teams. Meh, at least it's statically-typed. These days, I should be happy 
just to have that.

> Facebook did it too, but they at least had the good sense of
> ditching their FQL for the most part in favor of the new graph
> api, which is far more traditional in form.... and far easier
> to use.

Yea, thank goodness for non-SQL DB APIs.