[Petal] OT: Re: Javascript and things (was: Another rewrite problem with Petal)

[William McKee]

On 29 Aug 2002 at 17:32, Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
> I replied directly to you because this is off topic...

Yes, indeed it is OT. However, I'm all for a good debate and some of this 
stuff may be relevant to other subscribers who would like to chime in on 
this issue, so I've bounced my reply back to the list.
 
> Here is what I think about javascript, popup and things. Don't take it
> badly, it's just a personal view. I wrote that on ___my personal website___, at
> http://www.webmatrix.net/about/.

I highlighted with underscores the keywords in the sentence above. That's 
the difference--we're dealing with different contexts. I'm developing 
sites for clients who have customers--you're developing a site for 
visitors interested in your personal info. 

The site I pointed you to earlier looks and functions fine in IE, 
Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla with or without Javascript enabled. Yeah, it 
looks better at 800x600 or 1024x768 than it does at 1600x1200 but it 
doesn't break at those resolutions. I gear the sites I build towards the 
average visitor. 

One of the great things about Petal is that I can begin to hone the output 
even better depending on the client accessing my site. I can now build my 
content once and distribute in the best format to multiple clients--cell 
phones, PDAs, or standard desktop browsers. 

In the meantime, me and my clients would rather the sites to look good on 
the majority of platforms (i.e., desktops with modern OSs and modern 
browsers) than to look bad under all.


> In other words, I think that the less shit you have in a page the
> better, but that's only a personal view. I'm sure your site looks great in
> IE on a 800x600 desktop, but on my 1600x1200 desktop with mozilla it kinda
> looses its appeal :-)

Have you even looked at the site I mentioned with Mozilla? Except for the 
friggin' Java applets in the header which are outside of my control, it 
looks and functions just the same as it does on IE. Sure the table is 
built for an 800x600 screen but that's the majority. I didn't design that 
page format either, but do you really open web browsers in full screen on 
an 1600x1200 screen? What's the point of all that screen real estate if 
you're still using it like a 15" monitor? Point is that most people are 
looking at web pages like a piece of paper. If/when screen sizes become as 
large as newspapers, I bet we'll see more columns on websites (as we saw 
when the avg size jumped from 640x480 to 800x600). In the meantime, I find 
most designers build sites in the same style as magazines.

> I suppose I am not very sensitive to "eye candy"...

Me neither. I typically find it annoying. I was just making the point that 
I don't use JS in my pages for anything of consequence. It's never the 
only route to do something important. However, I prefer to use JS to do 
something like an image slideshow than a proprietary product such as 
Flash. I'd hazard to guess that JS has a larger support base than any 
proprietary web-based product (other than HTML).
 

> Yeah, as long as they limit CSS to presentation and don't start putting
> programming controls that let you open fixed width popup windows or shit
> like that that's fine.

I don't follow CSS developments that closely. I've only been using ver 1 
styles but find them very effective.
 

> > Actually, IE and Opera don't appear to care about the standard tags. It's
> > some custom code I use to format phone fields, etc. which is having
> > problems with case. I've changed all the tags to lowercase as a
> > workaround.
> 
> Yes. Besides XHTML attributes are supposed to be all lowercased.

Well, there's the answer then. In building the workaround, my Javascript 
has now been properly modified to support XHTML. I think 
that's a fine answer as long as you document it for those of us not as 
familiar with the X* standards <g>. If you decide to support case-
sensitivity in attribute names, perhaps that should be an option that by 
default is turned off for XHTML output since it's not truly valid. I like 
the idea of Petal enforcing proper syntax although that does create more 
work for you. Not to mention that it'd be nice to tell Petal *not* to 
enforce syntax in some cases.

Touche!
William

-- 
 Lead Developer
 Knowmad Services Inc. || Internet Applications & Database Integration
 http://www.knowmad.com