Tag: web

Scary definitions

When one dotcom is acquired by another dotcom, the most worrying part is seeing corporate language instead of casual human language. Recently Flickr was acquired by SmugMug (who?). They say if you use our products today, in the middle of slaky chatty language which is expected to calm users down.

For me it does the opposite. That ‘products’ is like something gruesome they try to hide, but spill out accidentally. Like a guy in business attire with a neck tattoo slightly hanging out of his short collar saying ‘KILLER’.

 

Nostalgia

I love ID Software website for being unchanged for as long as I remember it. It looks vintage nowadays, but it’s a good vintage, the same kind as old city districts in Europe.

I made a screenshot of Q2 system requirements for additional nostalgia to the rest who do no enjoy the design alone as much as I do.

id_website

On web design

A well-designed and strictly written page about web design practices

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

WWW’s first web page.

Eventually, the first ever web page is known. Here it is. The story.

It all has started 30 April 1993

This post’s subject is recursive.

DokuWiki and Syntax

I have tried Dokuwiki for a personal wiki. It’s ugly. It forces me to edit pages as a plain text files, using it’s own wiki syntax format. It also stores articles in a format of wiki text. Every time somebody wants to view a page, Dokuwiki parses wiki-formatted file and produces HTML. Every time. That’s how article looks in a wiki format.

====== HiPath 4000 Backup destinations: ======
  - MO/CF
  - Server
    - NFS
    - FTP

====== HiPath 4000 HDD Layout ======

^Name	^Purpose	^Contents^
|:PDS:	|program disk	|RMX|
|:DBD:	|Debug disk	||
|:AMD:	|Administration and maintenance disk	||
|:CGD:	|Call change disk	|tarification files|
|:TMD:	|Traffic metering disk	||
|:PAS: 	|Miscellaneous usage	|REGEN file|

Looks ugly. That is a how your data is seen by both editor and application. Both editor and dokuwiki have to be able to understand wiki syntax in order to see the formatted data. Both are negatively affected. Editor has to learn a new syntax for writing an article, Dokuwiki has to translate article to HTML every time user requests it (many times).

The third victim is data itself. It gets transformed to an ugly format, compatible with the only software which is wiki engine you use. In other words, if you let a wiki engine take care about your information, the information would most likely stay in there forever. If you want to extract a document from a wiki engine, you have to render a page, using the engine.

Why do we need to have wiki-formatted intermediate presentation? The official answer is to help users who lacks HTML+CSS knowledge to develop a document structure. It probably worked in 2000, when there was no technology for creating interactive applications in a browser. Nowadays things changed. We have Google docs, which allows a document to be edited in WYSIWYG mode, and, moreover, to be stored and exported in any format. Some might say WYSIWYG editors corrupt formatting when used in a wrong way. It applies to documents where we need a style. In a Wiki we do not aim to create a document with style. We do aim to develop a document with structure. Style has to be generated by a wiki engine.

Hence, the best approach for wiki architecture is: editing documents in WYSIWYG, storing documents in a structured format without styles, presenting them as-is.

It is very important not to let WYSIWYG editor to define styles. It’s a common user mistake to apply styles to an articles. Styles has to applied by an application. An editor should define the structure of the document only: Headings, paragraphs, tables, code, bold, italic, etc. Editor needs no colours, no browser compatibility nothing extra.

Let the approaches be compared:

Stage Wiki-approach Correct approach Best approach
Editing Using ugly wiki format, which is neither a
document, nor a pure data
Using WYSIWYG editor, which allows editing
structure, but not styles.
Using WYSIWYG editor, which allows editing
structure, but not styles.
Storing Using ugly wiki format, which is neither a
document, nor a pure data
Using a structured document format, like (X)HTML,
XML, OD>
(X)HTML with no styles
Presenting Parsing wiki format, restructuring it to a
document (HTML+CSS)
Presenting a stored document as is+ applying some
predefined styles to it.
(X)HTML + CSS style
Engines MediaWiki, DocuWiki, pmWiki Almost there: WordPress, MoinMoin, Sharepoint wiki module… ???

Currently there is no Wiki engine in the market who does the job right.

3 Things Web Can Not Do in 2011

There is no way to share files between end-users without a server. You have to share a file somewhere on a server. Even torrents require a tracker. I want to have an opportunity to let someone download a file I have. in a current situation I have to either share it somewhere, either email it, or my PC a server. Every way is too complicated.

There is no standard on RSS feed entries formatting and rendering. It’s somehow HTML and CSS, but since there are many kinds of feed aggregators, they all render HTML-in-XML differently. Also, there is no way to apply proper JS to RSS entry, because there is no proper DOM support and no specification for a RSS reader opportunities as well as rendering rules.

There is no way to download several files by a single click. You have to either click every file’s URL, either download a single archive with multiple files inside. URL does not support including several files in a single hyperlink. This architecture lays in an architecture of a very first designs of web.

If you know any desired feature, web does not yet support, feel free to share your thoughts.

T1 logo in JS+PNG

Initially, my logo was 105K GIF. Now it’s transparent PNG+JS. As easy as:

            //
            var color = 0;
            var interval = 60;  /* time msec, after which color changes */
            var clrInc = 4;     /* HSV degree increment */
            function chcolor(){
                var t1_logo = document.getElementById("t1_tl"); /* div_to_animate */
                color < 360 ? color = color + clrInc : color = 0;
                t1_logo.style.backgroundColor = "hsl("+color+", 100%, 50%)";
            }

            function stchcol(){
                var logoChCol = setInterval(chcolor, interval);
            }
            window.onload = stchcol;
            //-->

and

Main page

Benefits are smaller page size, smaller prcessor load. Eventuall, animation in JS consumes lees resources than a GIF rendering. 35% losad with GIF animation vs 15% load with JS animation. At least, in Fedora 16 with nouveau.

The idea was given to me by fiskus, but it was quite a long ago, so I feel I had the same idea at the moment he suggested it to me. Nevertheless, he desrves a credit.

Inventions of The Egypt Revolution: Web-based Riots Coordination

I am continuing to share my impressions about the current revolution in Egypt.  Another invention of it – online riots coordination. It has been originated in Tunisia, where riots were coordinated via Twitter. In Egypt it went a step forward. As I understood from the public information sources, all kinds of social web services were involved into the information exchange.

Previously, proper coordination was available to an army and a governments only, but now with Web 2.0 it became available to everybody. It is a big step forward towards expansion of the ordinary people’s power, bringing more possibilities of delegating a power to people and cutting power from a government. More precisely, it’s a big possibility to make a big step towards democratic society.

Currently the importance of the Web is seen by the governments all over the world. Hence, I expect more control over the Web. The authorities are taking over the Web for a while already, and they’ll continue. Currently web became a subject of a real hazard to public authority, hence I expect raising degree of control over the Internet. I do not even know in which way yet.

Talking about web in this way, It is hard not to mention that Internet and Web particularly are greatest tools of providing freedom to people. Everybody has to protect the freedom of the Web as his own freedom.

NO to RSS subscriptions

I got rid of all my RSS subscriptions. The reason is amount of feeds always expands and reading them fills all the free time I have. It literally enslaved me. One might say it’s not a technology’s fault – it all depends on a way of using the subscriptions and he is right. However, It’s not an argument in my case. I have had quit RSS twice and I have returned back to using it twice. I failed to tame my passion to stupidly read feeds on my free time. My subscriptions have always grown until all time of mine consumed, and grew a bit more. I had enough zombie-like reading weekends and I want no more.

RSS has similarity with a TV way of fun delivery, in other words you do nothing to get a content – it arrives itself, and it’s really bad. You are passive. It means you are consuming a content without any desire to consume it – you are getting addicted to a content flow, conveniently given you by RSS reader. You end up with reading the feeds neither to learn something, nor to read something you want to read, but to fill a free time gap when you do not know what to do. It’s passive way of information consuming and it’s wrong.

The right way of information consuming is active way. In order to know something, even to let something pay your attention, you have to have desire to learn that. You have to intentionally dive into information flow and discover the subject. Only this way brings satisfaction and makes you to truly learn something. It’s harder indeed, requires more brain cycles for determining what you want, typing query, filtering information, etc. But it’s active, man. That is you satisfying your demands. It’s not a zombie before RSS reader.

Moreover, if you are not using any passive way of information consumption (actually it’s mostly entertainment. I call it information consumption to satisfy those who lies to himself that he consumes information, instead of truly entertaining himself) frees tons of time. Having free time makes you bored and forces to develop a task to do. let me repeat. Forces you to develop. It means you are deciding what you are going to do. You can decide to entertain yourself, but you should never decide it. Real nerd, real human been decides to learn something new, to create something new.

Eagle eyed reader would notice article appears to be posted under self management. It means I did the above to myself and happy about it. I do not miss any of my 150+ subscriptions. I have simply forgotten about all of them, what proves none of them were needed.

ICQ is dead

Эпоха сменилась. Молодые наивные девушки больше не говорят “привет” в аське. Не говорят совсем, давно. Разговаривают только роботы, которым почему-то нужен парень для секса. Где эти девочки? Куда они делись? Восьмидесяточки подросли, девяносточки сидят во вконтакте, в одноклассниках, в фесбуке. В ICQ сидят старые матерые юзеры. Длинный контакт-лист из старых знакомых, которые молчат. Дела, взрослая жизнь, ответственность. Разговаривать уже не о чем. Все темы выговорились в молодости, когда было интересно разговаривать, когда было что обсуждать. когда хотелось обсуждать. А чего сейчас обсуждать? Дела, обязанности, ответственность, информационная перегруженность. Об этом не хочется разговаривать.

ICQ умирает вместе с людьми, пользующимися им. Становится таким же динозавром, как и фидо. Считаеся, что фидо мертво, хоть оно до сих пор как-то существует. Фидо есть, а людей почти нет. Та же судьба постигает аську. Нет в ней больше жизни, нет наивных вопросов и восторженных диалогов за полночь. Осталась только тишина и контакт-лист в напоминание о бурлящей когда-то жизни.