[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:a6268ff14f1d8ccd880e8e83886 at news.digitalmars.com...
> Hello Nick,
>> I'll put it this way: what's the *point* of SO having things that
>> don't work without JS
>
> That they do work with it.
>

They're far from mutually exclusive (but, then, you already addressed that 
below...)


> Using JS alows many thing to be done without reloading the page. This is a 
> plus as far as I care. Making it work with JS *and* without is harder than 
> either by its self.

Only slightly harder. Unless you try to go completely overboard with JS, but 
that would be a bad thing anyway.


> Given the choice between a high functionality version and/or a lower 
> version, the worst choice is to do only the low version.
>

I would disagree that "JS == high-functionality and non-JS == 
low-functionality" is true in the general sense. I'm not saying that the 
reverse is necessarily true, but I think that's a false dichotomy.


> IIRC something north of 80% of SO's traffic is from Google by non or first 
> time users. What to take a guess how many of them do anything but read the 
> text and go back to there job? SO's core objective is to have good answers 
> to questions. As long as most of there user can post questions they get 
> that done. As for search, frankly, there's problems even *with* JS. If I 
> want to find a particular question, I use Google with 
> site:stackoverflow.com. If I just want an answer to a question, I don't 
> care where the answer comes from so I just Google for it. Voting? Again, 
> as long as most people can vote, stuff works.
>

But then the people who *do* have reason to participate more than that are 
pushed through the cracks. I guess I'm just real damn tired of always being 
in that 1% group that everyone always has some rationalization for not 
giving half a shit about. Story of my life.


>> 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)
>
> For me it's a 6'3" frame and kitchen sinks that are about 6" to low to 
> wash dishes in!
>

Yes! I can't do anything non-trivial in the kitchen without my back starting 
to hurt. And then there's bathroom sinks, and, of course knee-height urinals 
that you can't use without splashing. I can kind of understand some of that 
when a restroom only has one of each (accessibility for shorties), but then 
you see ones that have 2 of each and 9 times out of 10, *both* will be 
ridiculously low (what about accessibility for, umm, tallies? Heh). Of 
course they probably do that because it saves them three dollars during 
construction vs having ones at different heights, but that just gets right 
back to nobody giving a crap about poor Zathros...erm...I mean anyone who 
isn't within about one standard deviation of theoretical norm.

I really feel sorry for basketball players (and anyone else that tall). At 
least I'm short enough I never have to worry about low doorframes unless I'm 
touring a Frank Lloyd Wright building.


>
> Speed limits are a work around for people being complete and utter morons 
> (at x - 3 sigma). Capitalism is a workaround for people being greedy (man 
> I wish Mr. Marx hadn't been so wrong). Clothing is a work around for it 
> being cold (than and hormones). Computer screens and keyboards are are a 
> work around for lack of brain-computer interface. The whole darn world is 
> one hacked up kludge of a workaround.
>

Certainly true. But those are ones that can't be helped (at least not 
currently, anyway). These tech issues definitely *can* be.


>>
>> 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
>
> When your users know up front they are going to use it more than twice, 
> sure. Maybe what's needed is something that acts as a safe sandbox that a 
> web page can download a light weight client into. Oh wait, that JS or 
> Flash with the 90% that's broken removed. :b If it's worth anyone using, 
> some moron with make something annoying out of it.
>

Yea, true. But some technologies (JS/Flash) just plain encourage such things 
(and provide little-to-no recourse for the user) more than others do.


>> or as something along the general lines of Adam Ruppe's
>
> link?
>

It does seem to be surprisingly hard to google:

http://arsdnet.net/dws/

Granted, the current design doesn't put quite as much focus on sandboxing as 
would be needed to really rival JS, but that can still be done without any 
major changes to the basic idea.


> First, I don't think your nuts,

Well that just goes to show how nuts you are! (J/K ;) )


> however I think the economics are against you here. From the web page 
> writers standpoint, given that most user DO allow JS, the cheapest way to 
> deliver the best user experience to the most people is to do each part in 
> whatever way is easiest to do a good job with. It doesn't pay to spend 
> hardly any time making the site better for a few percent of your user base 
> when the same time could be spent making it better for the other 95+%.

One problem with that is that most sites that use exactly that logic end up 
using JS poorly and wind up with something much worse than if they hadn't 
used JS at all (Granted, SO isn't as bad in certain regards as other sites, 
but as a programmer, many of those other sites are a little easier for me to 
ignore than SO).

Plus, remember about ten or so years ago when there was a lot of discussion 
in the web dev world about page-loading times, and the general consensus was 
that anything that took longer than a few seconds to load and render was bad 
from a usability standpoint? Well, now it's a regular occurrence for these 
JS sites to take much more time than that, and then still act sluggish once 
you're there, and that's despite increases in computational power (even for 
low-tech me), despite the fact that we've gone from mostly-dial-up to 
mostly-broadband, despite the *claims* that it's allegedly faster (it 
frequently isn't in actual practice), despite the fact that *we knew better* 
10+ years ago.

Speaking of things we knew better only a decade ago: Animation. Back when 
animation on the web meant "GIF" and "blink tag", everyone and their 
grandmother quickly realized it was piss-poor style. But now that it's 
implemented with DHTML and Flash, common sense design has gone clear out the 
window and the people who say the *same thing* ("page animation is bad") 
just get viewed as if they're some sort of internet version of the amish 
("How dare you say anything bad about a new technology! If it were up to 
people like you we'd be using punch-cards and vacuum tubes!" I'm 
paraphrasing, of course).


> From the other end, making a better browser platform, the most bang for 
> the buck comes with improving what the most people use. A wholesale 
> replacement might happen, but not any time soon.

Yea. What bugs me even more is that we had a far better opportunity to do it 
the right way about ten years ago (all that talk about the net/web needing 
better interactivity), and the opportunity got completely squandered by 
dot-bombs who couldn't see past their nose.