techy rants, techy raves
(this post is probably of interest to the developers and web designers amongst you - and perhaps the Microsoft-haters as well.)
The rant:
The payment portals at our work all use Microsoft ASP.NET as their back-end, with other bits from Borland Delphi. All proprietary stuff, the lot of it. The only things I'd consider typical open standards there are the CSS styles applied to the web pages. This has made designing for it a bit more difficult as I a) haven't got access to the back end and b) in any case, it's harder to test the ASP site directly as there are loads of other things hooked into the back-end so you can't even load the code on a bog-standard Windows PC with ASP.NET installed. I've got round the problem by saving the ASP pages as HTML pages on Firefox and Chrome and finding the CSS classes and IDs there but that's still different to changing the ASP directly.
I'm strictly a web designer not a developer, but that doesn't mean I haven't got opinions about it; I very much prefer open-source standards like PHP and MySQL to Microsoft's offerings especially as you aren't tied to a specific server operating system. You don't need Windows, OS X or Linux to test a PHP website; all you need is a text editor and a web-host - and most hosts support PHP, whilst it's a bit more difficult to find a web-host that use Windows servers.
I was also working valiantly to try and get a bit of CSS to work on ancient versions of IE. Meaning IE7 as the manager was testing the CSS on IE8! I suppose some of those parents must have relatively old computers but honestly! Older versions of IE aren't even standards-compliant. I did work out how to do it but that involved loads of googling and searching.
I'm not particularly fond of proprietary frameworks for All The Things. Yes, says the Mac user, but there's a difference between an operating system and back-end web development. I may code on a Mac but that doesn't mean I think all websites should be built on Apple standards. I couldn't care less what operating system you code with - Windows, OS X, Linux, even an effing iPhone. What I care about is using open standards for your *output*.
The rave:
I have, however, found a brilliant site full of resources! Oozled is a new site that lists resources for web designers and developers, like text-editing, typography, colour, web-hosting, accessibility & responsive design. I've been poking at it in between tasks (this week's been a bit slower than last week) and have found loads of things that will help me. ^^;; (My current favourite is PLTTS, a resource that makes searching ColourLovers a bit less tedious. I love ColourLovers but it can take *ages* to find what I want when looking for a colour palette.)
This entry (http://fascination.dreamwidth.org/292964.html) was originally posted by Kerry on Dreamwidth.
The rant:
The payment portals at our work all use Microsoft ASP.NET as their back-end, with other bits from Borland Delphi. All proprietary stuff, the lot of it. The only things I'd consider typical open standards there are the CSS styles applied to the web pages. This has made designing for it a bit more difficult as I a) haven't got access to the back end and b) in any case, it's harder to test the ASP site directly as there are loads of other things hooked into the back-end so you can't even load the code on a bog-standard Windows PC with ASP.NET installed. I've got round the problem by saving the ASP pages as HTML pages on Firefox and Chrome and finding the CSS classes and IDs there but that's still different to changing the ASP directly.
I'm strictly a web designer not a developer, but that doesn't mean I haven't got opinions about it; I very much prefer open-source standards like PHP and MySQL to Microsoft's offerings especially as you aren't tied to a specific server operating system. You don't need Windows, OS X or Linux to test a PHP website; all you need is a text editor and a web-host - and most hosts support PHP, whilst it's a bit more difficult to find a web-host that use Windows servers.
I was also working valiantly to try and get a bit of CSS to work on ancient versions of IE. Meaning IE7 as the manager was testing the CSS on IE8! I suppose some of those parents must have relatively old computers but honestly! Older versions of IE aren't even standards-compliant. I did work out how to do it but that involved loads of googling and searching.
I'm not particularly fond of proprietary frameworks for All The Things. Yes, says the Mac user, but there's a difference between an operating system and back-end web development. I may code on a Mac but that doesn't mean I think all websites should be built on Apple standards. I couldn't care less what operating system you code with - Windows, OS X, Linux, even an effing iPhone. What I care about is using open standards for your *output*.
The rave:
I have, however, found a brilliant site full of resources! Oozled is a new site that lists resources for web designers and developers, like text-editing, typography, colour, web-hosting, accessibility & responsive design. I've been poking at it in between tasks (this week's been a bit slower than last week) and have found loads of things that will help me. ^^;; (My current favourite is PLTTS, a resource that makes searching ColourLovers a bit less tedious. I love ColourLovers but it can take *ages* to find what I want when looking for a colour palette.)
This entry (http://fascination.dreamwidth.org/292964.html) was originally posted by Kerry on Dreamwidth.