[OT Web 2.0] Do you think free ad's might help advance D?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff14f148ccd857550de288 at news.digitalmars.com...
>
> Your not countering any point I tried to make. Let me be more explicit, 
> you, Nick, maybe have good reasons to not allow scripts, but I don't think 
> SO is a good example of why you don't. If every site did JS as well as SO, 
> I suspect you wouldn't hate them in the first place and you would never 
> have seen what it looks like with them turned off.
>
> As I see it, you don't like JS etc. because it can and is abused in ways 
> if you used JS etc. would cause you problems, so you don't use them (a 
> legitimate choice). SO is painful to use without JS etc. (not under 
> depute). SO is at fault; doesn't follow. Blame, JS etc., blame the people 
> who abuse them, blame the people who designed them. But unless you can 
> show how SO would cause YOU a problem using it the way it was designed to 
> be used, I don't think you can get away with blaming SO for the problems.
>
> OTOH, given that there are people out there that don't allow scripts, I 
> will grant the point that a site that is hard or impossible to use without 
> them is being stupid (or has decided that they are willing to loose some 
> segment of the population and, BTW, I think SO has explicitly stated they 
> are in the second camp)
>

I'll put it this way: what's the *point* of SO having things that don't work 
without JS and forcing that always-present nag banner? There is no real 
legitimate reason. Ease-of-implementation sure as hell doesn't count, 
because JS and DOM implementations are notoriously lousy to work with. The 
biggest reason that could be realistically argued is that they're attempting 
to force it on the very people who obviously don't want it. Saying that such 
a move is downright arrogant and disrespectful would be putting it mildly. 
Such a site shouldn't be encouraged.


>> And besides that, there is one, and only one, *good* way to use JS in
>> a site: Create the site completely non-JS. Then add in optional JS in
>> the few places where it could actually improve responsiveness and
>> usability.
>>
>
> I'll grant the point with some (significant) restrictions: the sites core 
> feature set should be usable with JS.

It should be usable either with or without JS. (Did you mean "without" 
here?)


> For SO the core feature set IMHO (and I suspect not in yours) is being 
> able to read questions and answers from pages Google feeds me. If that can 
> be done without much pain, I think that's all you can expect to demand.
>

Last I checked (admittedly a while ago, maybe it's changed?), there were 
issues with posting, searching and voting without JS. Not only are those 
fundamental parts of what makes SO SO, but on a technical level, those are 
absolutely trivial things that have absolutely zero valid excuse not to work 
without JS.

If the site was doing DHTML games, ok, it would make sense for that not to 
work without JS. If there was some sort of functionality that had an 
optional drag-and-drop interface (assuming it made good UI-design sense), 
then it would make sense for that optional drag-and-drop not to work without 
JS. Etc.

But the restrictions SO does have? No. They're like a coffee-machine that 
refuses to work properly with decaf: It's idiotic and pointless, and it 
doesn't matter one bit if 99% of coffee drinkers drink regular: it's still a 
pointless, useless restriction with absolutely no valid reason.


>>>> and forces that OpenID crap,
>>>>
>>> What's wrong with it? Really, I want to know.
>>>
>> It's a phisher's wet dream - it makes ordinary logins look like Fort
>> Knox. If a person *tried* to design a system that maximized
>> phishability, I don't think anyone could have done a better job.
>
> So you have no spesific objection to SO using OpenID but rather the 
> exsitance of it in the first place?

No, I object to it being the *only* registration system supported by SO. I 
don't give a crap how much OpenID-supported stuff is out there as long as 
I'm not forced to use it. And even in SO's case, I still wouldn't mind them 
forcing it if it weren't for the facts that:

1. There is no other service comparable to SO. (There have been sites that 
attempted to fill the same goal even before SO, before they're all so 
terrible, even compared to SO, that they may as well not even exist.)

2. Even if a comparable site did pop up that didn't force OpenID (or JS), it 
wouldn't matter because SO has 90+% mindshare and all of the content. So a 
site that did things right wouldn't have a chance of making a dent because 
SO has too much momentum for anyone else to realistically be able to make a 
foothold regardless of merit. Hell, look how much trouble D is having at 
overcoming C++'s mindshare and marketshare. And the improvements D has over 
C++ are enormous and practically speak for themselves. With that power SO 
has over their market, comes responsibility...which SO has been more than 
dropping the ball on.


> And even then you object because it makes it *easy* to screw the pooch big 
> time rather than *forcing* you to risk doing so?

As I said, SO effectively does force it. (Unless something's changed?)


> (You can always open a different OpenID per site and you will be no worse 
> off than without OpenID and might even be beter; at leat one of the 
> providers has to be implemented competently...)
>

Perhaps. But between throw-away email addresses to protect against spam and 
worthless spam filters, Haxe to work around PHP and ActionScript, AdBlock 
and NoScript to work around flash-ads that literally make it impossible for 
me to read the actual page content (don't *anyone* ever try to tell me that 
ADD doesn't exist - when you can't read code because the cursor is 
blinking - yea, you *know* those armchair neurologists are full of shit), 
DownloadHelper to work around idiots deciding for themselves that the video 
player *they* choose to directly embed videos into is better for me than 
whatever the fuck player *I* choose to use for *myself*, KatMouse to work 
around Window's crappy handing of scroll-wheel focus, Windows to workaround 
the lack of a decent Unix file manager, FF2 to workaround the lousy UIs of 
every other browser in existence, and a million other fucking things, and 
frankly even as trivial as 3-foot-high public restroom hand-dryers that my 
6-foot self has to damage my back bending down to use (over years of 
repeated use, of course), I'm just really, well, pardon my tone here, but I 
really am just goddamn fed up with trying to work around idiotic shit 
every-fucking-where I turn. I've had enough, and the last thing I need right 
now is yet another goddamn workaround (again, pardon my anger, it's not 
directed at you), this time because it's getting to the point where every 
single time I want to find an answer or give an answer to something, I have 
to deal with SO, simply because that's all anyone ever uses anymore.


>
> Look at the blog, they have tried about 5 or 6 different ad system and 
> haven't made enough money off any to worry about. As far as I can tell, 
> they are running on VC and revenue from the jobs site.
>

VC funding won't run a company forever. But yea, hopefully the jobs site 
will end up being all they really need.


>> It's more like calling "sagging" a fad. That moronic "fashion" has
>> been around since I started junior high (a loooong time ago, and I
>> thought it was idiotic and ugly as hell even back then) and by some
>> bizarre twist of fate it's still going (though I honestly can't
>> imagine why - other than an epidemic of brain damage).
>
> I wouldn't bet on either side of that one. :b
>

Heh :)


>> I still
>> consider it a "fad" though, because that's precisely the category it
>> belongs in. Same with mandatory-JS, overuse of JS, misuse of JS, and
>> JS-nagging. I know I'm breaking the literal definition, but as far as
>> I'm concerned, a fad still deserves to be labeled "fad" even if there
>> just happens to be enough morons out there to keep it going well
>> beyond the lifetime it deserves.
>
> What would you replace it with? Static HTML is good for showing static 
> content and filling out (simple) forms: basic I/O. If that's all you are 
> doing, by all means, make it work with JS. But what about the other 90% of 
> the stuff out there? Anything that is more than minimally interactive. 
> From where I sit, the choices are JS, a thick client, Flash (Yuck!!) or 
> something else that will have 90% of the problems of at least one, it not 
> more, of the above.

In many cases JS doesn't need to be replaced. It just needs to be used (if 
at all) as a supplement to server-code and static-HTML. Many uses of JS 
should outright disappear, of course, like slow choppy unnecessary 
animations, or opening new windows while tricking HTML validators into 
thinking you're compliant.

Anything that can't be reasonably implemented with static-HTML doesn't 
belong on the web in the first place. It belongs either, yes, as a think 
client (very much underrated these days - crazy thing is, most people who 
sneer at them don't even know why - they just blindly follow trends), or as 
something along the general lines of Adam Ruppe' s DWS (which is a 
technology that *should* have been created 10 years ago by the people who 
instead wasted their time creating crap like JS, DHTML, Applets and Flash - 
and that's *not* hindsight, I had that opinion back then too, but well, 
"nobody listen to poor Zathros", and I was just finishing hish school and 
starting college, so I didn't have time for it myself, plus I was busy with 
gave dev) or OSX's Sherlock and Watson (which were a major reason I bought a 
Mac in the first place...which I ended up hating 2 years later for other 
reasons, but that's another story).