This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
1.
a (1998)
Documentary about the Buddhist sect responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway Sarin gas attack.
2.
body (2003)
Also known as Jism. No, really. A tale of passion and murder featuring an alcoholic lawyer and the wife of a travelling millionaire.
3.
canvas (1992)
Gary Busey stars as an artist who takes part in a heist to save his brother from murderous art thieves.
…
We could have had so many HTML-themed Troma Nights, if we’d wanted…
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
The
<a>tag is one of the most important building blocks of the Internet. It lets you create a hyperlink: a piece of text, usually colored blue, that you can use to go to a new page. When you click on a hyperlink, your web browser downloads the new page from the server and displays it on the screen. Most web browsers also store the pages you previously visited so you can quickly go back to them. The best part is, the<a>tag gives you all of that behavior for free! Just tell the browser where you want to go, and it handles the rest.Lately, though, that hasn’t been enough for website developers. The new fad is “client-side navigation”, where instead of relying on the browser to load new pages for you, you write a bunch of JavaScript code to do it instead. It’s actually really hard to get it right—loading the new page is simple enough, but you also have to write code to display a loading bar, make the Back and Forward buttons work, show an error page if the connection drops, and so on.
For a while, I didn’t understand why anyone did this. Was it just silly make-work, like how every social network redesigns their website every couple years for no discernable reason? Do
<a>tags interfere with some creepy ad-tracking technique? Was there some really complicated technical reason why you shouldn’t use them?…
Spoiler: good old-fashioned <a> hyperlinks tend to outperform Javascript-driven client-side navigation. We already learned about one reason for this – that adding more Javascript code just to get back what the browser gives you for free increases the payload you deliver to the user – but
Carter demonstrates that progressive rendering goes a long way to explaining it, too. You see: browsers understand traditional navigation and are well-equipped with a
suite of shortcuts to help them optimise for it. They can start rendering content before it’s all downloaded, offset (hinted-at) asynchronous data for later, and of course they already
contain a pretty solid caching engine and you don’t even have to implement it yourself.
Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:
“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”
For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.
“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:
<table>
<tr>
<td>
Top-Left Text
</td>
<td>
Top-Right Text
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
Bottom-Left Text
</td>
<td>
Bottom-Right Text
</td>
</tr>
</table>
What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This young woman has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?
Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.
Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.