An unordered list of short items
So here are random news snippets and thoughts I've had over the past few weeks. It's getting quite long! I am majorly neglecting this place.
- It snowed a bit today! As someone who has not seen snow in a while (who lives in the South), it was very exciting. Sadly, the ground is too warm and it melted away.
- I went to a Wizard Rock concert last night ( Read more... )
Yes, I am interested, that's why I asked about it. Thanks for the link. I am not self-disciplined enough, probably, to learn it on my own but it's a good resource to have, and perhaps I'll get bored one day.
That class sounds more intense assembler-wise than ours--we did several assignments in assembler, but they were just graded for correctness and the majority of our course was probably topics other than assembler. See here for our course, in case you're interested.
With respect to browsers: I will say that the advent of firefox *has* forced IE to actually compete/update, which they've been doing over the past few years.
I definitely agree with you there. IE is not (as bad of a) browser anymore. I was just not expressing my sympathy for IE coders when (as linked in Joel's articles) they find they can't make anyone happy when they update their browser.
So I think one is left arguing which browser is "more closely standards compliant" but trying to measure that is impossible.
I personally measure it by the fact that basically every browser but IE seems to have a general set of web features that they agree on, while in IE it always seems web designers have to create specific IE-only hacks.
Or for a more concrete (non-HTML, though) example, why on earth is IE JavaScript so different from EVERY OTHER BROWSER'S implementation of JavaScript? Why must I make ugly JavaScript hacks (eg: if ie, do this. if any other browser, do this) just to do stuff like add handler to something or cancel propagation of an event or to do AJAX?
But FF also runs in its own quirks mode - that is, any mode that isn't "reject any website that does not strictly follow the standards" is just another form of quirks mode.
Yes, FF has its own quirks mode, but if it detects something has a DTD at the top then it runs it in standards-compliant mode, as does IE. Now this is different in IE 8, but whatever.
So basically, if I make a site validate (which means it has that DTD), I have some hope that normal browsers are all attempting to display it in their standards-compliant mode, which is hopefully close enough things will generally work.
But I wish that respect were grounded in more substance - which is why I agree with Joel.
Eventually, I hope I will be a real web designer, who understands standards, browsers, design, etc. etc, but right now I'm just a kid who read a book and took an intro web programming class, and frankly, for me, the validators are better than nothing and at least signified I gave it more effort than the majority of people on the web (like the people who redesigned the NCSU website. Now, see, the UNC site validates now, which makes me proud. :) Not to say I dislike the NCSU website (although I haven't spent much time with it). I think it's well designed, better than many college websites. Just saying it doesn't validate.)
[Sorry for rambling. I should post about computer things on my own journal instead of yours!]
I am totally fine with you rambling about computer things here, that's what I do. :)
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