channonyarrow | (no subject)

You know what I want?

I want a platform that I can consistently code LJ in. I set up the layout I'm using in IE. It worked fine, except that the image map got lost somehow and I never bothered to set up the sidebar.

Then I switched to Safari. Say what you will, I like Safari. Layout was broken, though, so I reset things (I don't even want to know what it looks like in IE) to appear correct in Safari. Reset image map, still haven't finished the sidebar. It's an S1 layout, so there's no automatic tag cloud, and hand-coding my tag cloud is either scary or sub-optimal (I can get the code for a list layout by going to the tag page and viewing source, but not for a non-list version. I don't want the list version.).

Now I want to compare with my writing journal. So I dled Firefox, because it annoys me that you can't reopen Safari so that you can log into the same site under a different name. Turns out that the header image in that layout doesn't show up.

Fun!

I think it is time for a G&T and to do some sewing. Or possibly to stab something.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That kind of crap is part of the reason why I wound up running screaming from web development. The more browsers entered the fray, the more the code turned into spaghetti.

I really, genuinely, do not understand why there can't be a standardised platform. I know that people WANT there to be, and every so often people say "And now we will make the effort" but it's not showing up in my life.

It's funny, because you could always tell the people who actually developed for the client side for any length of time, versus people who simply claimed to. "But [insert pet browser here] is super-duper compliant with the standards" is a dead giveaway, because not a single goddamn browser that's ever been released has been anything other than mediocre on meeting specifications that have been around for Christ knows how many years now. It's abysmal. Every single goddamn piece of client-side programming turns into an unmaintanable labyrinth to account for the ridiculous variations in each (broken) rendering engine.

It's like the poor bastards that study object-oriented programming for a couple of years, and then dive into developing for Windows and discover that everything that made C++ elegant in the first place has been twisted and inbred into a dismal mess.

All of which just underlines something that programmers have known for a long time: there's a huge difference between programming and engineering. Very, very few programmers can legitimately claim to be engineers.