Posts tagged with “annoyances”

Techniques for Clean Markup

Posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 8:07pm by Rob Wilkerson

It’s exceedingly rare that I read an article on code techniques and agree with absolutely everything that’s being espoused, but this article by Chris Coyier for Smashing Magazine is just that. In my opinion, this is a must read for all web developers that have to work in and around X/HTML code. My personal favorite: Eliminate unnecessary divs.

Sometime during the learning stages of Web design, people learn how to wrap elements in a div so that they can target them with CSS and apply styling. This leads to a proliferation of the div element and to their being used far too liberally in unnecessary places.

Oh yeah. And the example provided could not be more illustrative.

The others are spot on, as well, but this is my favorite because it’s less obvious and the single biggest source of code bloat, in my experience.

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Windows Date and Time

Posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 3:06pm by Rob Wilkerson

Why is it so hard for Microsoft (or an enterprising Windows developer) to create a useful freaking date/time display? It looks there won’t be one in Windows 7 either. I’ve had one on my Mac (provided by a third party) and Linux (built right in) machines for a long time now. It just shouldn’t be that difficult, you know? Is Microsoft making it difficult?

I can’t believe there’s no audience for this.

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Nick Saban, LSU and Myopic Fans

Posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 12:27pm by Rob Wilkerson

After leaving the military, I spent three years or so at LSU and I’m a huge fan, follower and supporter of the football team. That said, I’m really tired of listening to other fans bitch, moan and whine about Nick Saban and question his integrity. I think it says more about them than it does about him.

Look, I wasn’t happy when he left either. I suffered through the DiNardo years. There were more bad years before that. Nick Saban did something for LSU that no one had done in a very, very long time. He turned the program into a winner. Not only did we win a national title with him at the helm (and two SEC titles, I believe), but we were competitive every single year. You can’t ask for much more than that. While his exit was unfortunate for the program, at least at the time, I think it’s absurd to blame Nick Saban. He had an opportunity. Maybe he thought it was his dream job, maybe he considered it a promotion, maybe it was just something he felt like he needed to do so that he never had to ask, “what if?”, maybe it was more money than he ever dreamed of. All of those are valid reasons to leave a job and many of us have taken other jobs for similar reasons (even if the compensation wasn’t even close).

If the reason he left is any of those, can you honestly blame him? When the NFL didn’t work out for him and he wanted to come back to college, what was he supposed to do? The LSU job wasn’t open any longer. Moreover, the school had managed to replace him with pretty decent coach in his own right who had maintained that same level of competitiveness. The Alabama job was open and it too is a fantastic program with a rich history. Why the hell would he not take that job?

Get over it LSU fans. He was our coach and not he’s not. Feel free to cheer for the Tigers kick the Tide’s ass all over the field, but drop the bitterness. It’s petty, it’s stupid and it makes us all look bad.

Rant complete. Now back to College Gameday, live from Baton Rouge.

Geaux Tigers.

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The Fundamental Problem with Digg

Posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 3:59am by Rob Wilkerson

Jeff Atwood said it better than I ever have:

I mean, seriously, when has a digg page EVER contained anything useful on it other than the article link? There’s the prob with Digg.

This is why I’ve never stayed with “aggregation” services like Digg, Reddit, etc. There’s far too much noise and it completely overwhelms whatever really useful signal may be present. I also hate that the service’s feed link is the link to the service page itself – which offers no value to me often at the expense of a long load time – and then makes me click it’s link to get to the useful content.

Too much noise, too much effort. It’s just not worth it.

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Evaluating Internet Explorer 8

Posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 3:04pm by Rob Wilkerson

I spent last Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo in New York and, though I was disappointed in the show as a whole, I did go to one interesting session. I went to see Pete LePage, an Internet Explorer product manager, speak about Internet Explorer 8. Though I’ve long since given up on IE as my primary browser (even before moving away from Windows as anything more than an occasional-use operating system), it’s still an animal that I have to deal with as part of my daily life and I was looking forward to hearing about what to expect in the next version.

The presentation didn’t disappoint. Pete did a nice job of presenting a lot of features in very limited time and I found myself surprised, pleased and impressed at the effort the team has made to catch up in some areas and to innovate in others. I have to admit that I liked what I saw and, being a trained professional, I was looking forward to trying it at home. Today I finally got around to doing so and I wanted to write about my impressions.

I have none. In spite of all of the good things that IE 8 seems to offer, it still doesn’t offer the ability to install alongside IE 7. Full stop.

That’s it. That’s the only impression I have. I still need to access IE 7 on a regular basis for testing and I don’t have (or want) 12 separate licenses for Windows XP on which to test each browser version. IE 8 has to go. If it’s worth mentioning, maybe I’ll provide my impressions of the uninstall process. But I doubt it.

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