[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Bill Baxter" <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.239.1222221233.19733.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>> "BCS" <ao at pathlink.com> wrote in message
>> news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae at news.digitalmars.com...
>>> Reply to Nick,
>>>
>>>
>>>> Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
>>>> modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
>>>> created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).
>>>>
>>>
>>> you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. 
>>> (or
>>> it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)
>>>
>>
>> Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to 
>> vote
>> on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and 
>> disabling
>> javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.
>
> I think you do need to log in to vote.  Otherwise the "reputation"
> score would become pretty meaningless.  It would be too trivial to
> just vote yourself up.
>
> I agree that Ajax sucks, but in my opinion about the only thing worse
> than a web app using Ajax is one *not* using Ajax, requiring 23 pages
> of slow click-and-reload options just to do the simplest thing.
>

I guess I overstated my point a little bit. Ajax (as well as 
non-Ajaxy-JS/DHTML) is great for simple things like voting on posts 
(Provided that Ajax/JS isn't required for the feature, because there's 
really no reason for these things not to have graceful non-JS fallbacks. Or 
at least there wouldn't be any reason if it weren't for the fact that 
(X)HTML/CSS has certain appallingly-ridiculous limitations that will never 
get fixed just because everyone's fearful of changing HTML anymore and has 
gotten used to using JS-based workarounds - and that *is* what they are - 
workarounds).

But these days, web or not, you can pretty much guarantee: if there's a way 
to screw up the design of something, it will get screwed up *and* millions 
of developers will then run around all copying the same screwup after either 
not noticing it, or mistaking it for a good idea.

Examples:
- Breaking the "Back" button
- Breaking the bookmarking ability
- Flash intro pages / Intro pages, period / Flash intros on the homepage 
(Ie, the animating GIFs/blink tags of the 21st century) / Flash sites
- Loads of invisible text on any system that uses a non-default color 
scheme.
- Crapping all over established design standards (in general).
- Menus that expand upon mouseover instead of click.
- "Close" buttons that minimize instead of close (typically a non-web 
issue).
- Adding the "feature" of modal dialog boxes to something (ie, a web page) 
that has no technical or design justification for such modality.
- Forcing a custom skin upon users of an app instead of at least *allowing* 
the user to use *their own system settings* (another typically non-web 
issue).
- Screwing up the ability to work with two instances at the same time 
(*cough* Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
- Inadvertently preventing full archival for offline reference (*cough* 
Adobe LiveDocs *cough*).
- Insanely slow page loading and navigation (*cough* Adobe LiveDocs and 
Joystiq/Engadget *cough*).
- Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.
- Eliminating the user's ability to make their own decisions of when to open 
something in a new tab/window or the same tab/window.

Ajax/JS/DHTML is what enables many of those problems to occur (not all of 
them, though, I kinda got carried away). Disable JS and many of those 
problems go away. Or at least they *would* go away if everyone wasn't so 
keen on throwing away the whole idea of non-JS-fallbacks.

I mean really, there is absolutely no useful functionality that 
JS/Ajax/DHTML provide that can't be accomplished in a non-JS/Ajax/DHTML way, 
either right now or with a few minor improvements to XHTML/CSS (such as 
allowing the "action" and "method" attributes to be associated with an 
"input/submit" tag instead of the "form" tag, or allowing link tags to 
perform a form submission - actually these things are the exact examples I 
had in mind when I said above that JS is sometimes used as a workaround for 
(X)HTML's limitations).

The only *real* use of JS/Ajax/DHTML is that they allow for fewer 
full-page-loads. That's really all it comes down to. And that's not a bad 
thing, but for some people, like myself, the benefit of having fewer 
full-page-loads just isn't worth the cost of having to deal with all that 
crap design that JS/Ajax/DHTML end up allowing. But unfortunately, I don't 
have the option of actually *making* that choice thanks to all of those 
yahoos that have jumped onto the "JS is now a standard feature that we can 
safely require" bandwagon. Jackasses.

> After having used StackOverflow for bit now, I think the biggest
> problem standing in the way of it achieving its goal of being the
> definitive place to find excellent answers to tech questions is the
> lack of editability.  You can't edit other people's good answers to
> make them great answers.  And I find I just can't bring myself to copy
> someone's good answer and edit it myself to make it great.  I tried it
> once and I still feel scummy for having "stolen" that guy's answer
> like that.  Stealing answers and making them better is the way it's
> supposed to work from what I understand, but I think most people are
> too polite for that to feel like the proper thing to do.  Plus doing
> that flagrantly violates the DRY principle which will make most
> programmers cringe.
>
> I think what they need to do is for each question add one definitive
> "community answer" that works Wiki-style.  Anyone can edit that answer
> and it should ideally reflect the union of the best individual answers
> given by folks.
>
> --bb