Worus

The weekend was good. The funniest thing that happened this weekend was when we were at Best Buy to get my weekly Neon Genesis Evangelion DVD.

Both Dean and I had gone our separate ways in Best Buy, as we usually do. I got my DVD, and I saw a Red Octane Ignition pad with DDR MAX 2 on it. I was excited, because I hadn’t danced in a long time. No one was around, and it was a superb pad to dance on, so I decided to dance Break Down and see how the pad worked.

I saw two sales people next to me as I was dancing, but later found out that Dean had come to find me. He said that he saw this large crowd forming by the display and then he saw me dancing. Oops. Apparently, I drew more than the two sales clerks over. Once I finished the song, I realized this and left the machine.

Anyone who has seen me dance knows that I am not the greatest dancer, but I at least know how to play. I am totally not all that when it comes to Dance Dance Revolution. These people need to get out and see some of the crazy Dance Dance Revolution kids in the arcades. Wow. Now those kids are good!

I called for phone service today. I should be able to get DSL with it. I’m very excited to have the Internet at home again.

This morning, I woke up at 10:00 A.M. Looking around for a minute, I thought, “This isn’t a holiday.” Yeah, I was almost three hours late for work this morning. Dennis was pretty cool about it, though. He just said that he’s done it as well. Damn it. There was more to this story, but I’ve lost whatever train of thought I had.

I’ve noticed that with the weather getting nicer how pretty it is in my area of town. I’ve heard lots of birds lately, and there have even been squirrels in my yard. Having the wildlife around is nice. I’ve never felt as if I wanted to spend all of my time outdoors, but it’s nice to have it around as opposed to just large cement structure.

We had a training at work today on Revation Communicator. Basically, we were shown how to do instant messenging. I was glad that when the question of who was proficient in instant messenging came up, I could raise my hand and not be a moron. The system looks remarkably similar to Jabber. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just encrypted Jabber with a closed-source client and server administration.

A web developer asked which browsers certain features worked with. The sales guy told us that it worked with 98% of the browsers out there, but that they had been having some trouble with Firefox.

What he meant to say was that it worked with what 98% of computers had available. Firefox is more than two percent of the number of browsers out there. It’s also used by more than two percent of users. I’m not claiming that everyone’s using Firefox, but I know that it’s had some pretty impressive uptake. Most people I know use Firefox to at least some degree, which couldn’t be said for, say, Opera (another fine browser).

What irritated me more was that the sentence came up that, “Yeah, we’ve been having trouble with some of our stuff on Firefox as well.” As if it was the browser’s fault that some of the things that we’ve written aren’t cross-browser. That is a design issue, not a Firefox issue. It’s not as if someone is trying to break a lot of things by simply failing to implement functionality.

Instead, functionality that isn’t recognized as a standard isn’t implemented because then we fall into the trap of the browser wars again and have separate versions of web sites for each browser and some that don’t work at all in certain browsers. No one wants that. So, instead, software developers and web designers meet in the middle: standards. The software developers know what to develop and the web designers know what to expect to work in all browsers.

Of course, a web designer always makes a reality check that a certain feature really is a standard and really is supported in more than one browser.

I admit to sometimes not following with this statement perfectly. On personal works, I adhere to standards. If something doesn’t work, I don’t lose anything if other people can’t see it. On professional things, I’ve tried to stick to standards, but if a specific feature is requested by a client (say, AJAX functionality), I implement it in the widest range possible; in this case, the client has requested it and visibility is important.

That is all I have to rant about standards today.