Add border, all is good, no border, everything breaks

If you’re looking to avoid jQuery but have reservations about addressing cross-browser compatibility, you might find Mike Foster’s X Library worth a look.

Depends on what you mean by cross-browser… when they don’t work in 46% of users machines (IE8-), that’s not cross-browser… and we’re not saying IE9 adoption is slow, but I’ve got people already asking me how to go back to IE8. (and no, they don’t want to try an alternative and get hostile when you suggest it – #DDD users. If you are a Dee, please don’t marry a Dee, it’s genetics don’t you see, the kids will be Dee Dee Dee)

Or you end up having to leave them in indefinately depending on the upgrade rate. See FF4 being out for over a month and still only a fraction of the userbase has moved over – hell I’m staying with 3.5 as my primary FF install here because none of the tools I use it for (like the web dev toolbar) work properly in 3.6+

THOUGH, I’m more open to CSS3 than I am HTML 5. To me the latter is 90% pointless garbage and 10% stuff that has nothing to do with or should have nothing to do with the actual markup – all the USEFUL bits (Excepting maybe one or two form elements) are Javascript, NOT HTML. One of my ‘issues’ with HTML5 – all the NON markup crap thrown under it’s umbrella.

I’ll even use a few CSS3 properties – but when I do it’s generally just the ones that already existed in IE for over a decade… like word-wrap:break-word; or using Filters. Even then I do so sparingly as I cringe every time I ‘have to’ use something that’s not part of at least 2.1.

Though it’s funny how people focus on the stuff I consider silly like border-radius… I’m actually looking forward a whole lot more to border-image.

… and there are so many people still vomiting up HTML 3.2 and slapping a HTML 4 tranny or HTML 5 doctype on it – doesn’t mean it’s good practice. I SHUDDER to think of the train wreck Wordpress would turn into as HTML 5 given it’s already bloated/pointless markup.

When it’s little to no extra effort, why not? Why alienate ANY potential visitors especially when many people “stuck” on legacy browsers like IE6 are FORCED to by their workplace (due to legacy crapplets), OS, or even bandwidth. Someone in the Dakota’s or Coos county NH where 33.6 dialup is a good day isn’t all that interested in downloading a multi-megabyte browser update.

seletivzr is just pointless bloat – by the time you incorporate it you could have just written the page without the stuff it implements…

jquery, mootools and pals are far more insidious as yes, that’s what the people using it CLAIM these libraries do – speed up development time; but really the opposite is true as it makes the code needlessly cryptic, and what it does falls into two categories; useless animooted garbage that just interferes with the user actually USING the page (aka stuff I wouldn’t put on a website in the first place) or bloated slow library functions that generally result in little to no graceful degradation, and LARGER scripts than the same code would be without the stupid library.

As I mentioned, it reminds me of the old days where Cobol and Fortran coders would rely on giant libraries whether the code in said libraries were even being called or not, filling up their pages with comments and long names on everything JUST because they were being paid by the K-Loc. (Thousand Lines of Code).

This is particularly true when I see pages with one to ten k of plaintext as their only real content on MEGABYTE sized websites… and why I still maintain that 70k total for a page is the ideal, with 140k being the upper limit I’ll generally allow.

Which throws using “libraries” right out the window since they can chew half my ideal size in one fell swoop.

Tell that to the places here in the US where 33.6 is a good connection – tell that to people on cell phone connections that are narrow band throttled and pay as you go; Tell that to the people of Canada where the red menace government has forced everyone into being metered…

Canada, the new red menace. Time for John Candy to lead an invasion of Toronto.

Another of the claims I’ve never found any real proof of – maybe I’ve just been writing code for too long (over three decades now) but to me jquery just makes it HARDER to create and maintain code. But then, I’m a Wirth Tanguage type, so even AT&T (aka C dialect) languages like .js, php, etc are needlessly/pointlessly cryptic at times. Taking an already cryptic language and making it even MORE cryptic – starts to sound like the bit from the “C and Unix are a hoax” joke, where:

We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P(“n”),R-;P(“|”))for(e=3DC;e-;P(“_”+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years.

Which looks an AWFUL lot like jquery to me… and that’s coming from someone who still writes x86 ASM and has even hand compiled his assembly to machine language.

Don’t feel put down by my or anyone else’s comments - we all have to start somewhere and draw our own conclusions… my conclusions, mostly thanks to decades of programming pretty much every dialect there is, are often radically different from the mainstream.

Well, ask yourself what it is you want the page to do? Who do you want the page to reach? Ask yourself “is the technology I’m proving interfering with that?”

That last question is where a lot of the “gee ain’t it neat” nonsense needs to get the axe – but again YMMV.

Don’t ever take anything I say as an attack – we may disagree and I’ve got some radically different conclusions from the “mainstream” – But again, when the mainstream just vomits up code any old way…

You are going to come across a LOT of conflicting advice – there’s a WONDERFUL mix out there of web rot, people who’ve never embraced STRICT, people who throw javascript at EVERY problem whether it’s the right tool or not, etc, etc…

The key is to take in ALL the advice, conflicting or not, and make your own decision.

… and keep in mind one of my favorite quotes:

If everyone is thinking the same, somebody isn’t thinking" – General George S. Patton Jr.

We may disagree – oh well

If this add-on is the one you talk about:

you should be fair to the ones making it. It works. In FF4 even.

I’m a FF user, converted from Ch. I’ve used FF4 since beta, and I’m saying is better then Opera. Opera it’s like a child with many good ideas that doesn’t quite manage to see them through till the end.

Using libraries like jQuery does help build a better interface, it’s not about animation and just animation. jQuery is modular, you don’t have to take the whole cow for the little milk you need.

Finally, it’s less kilobytes than dotNet or Java and it’s cacheable. If so many use it, let’s be fair and say it has its uses. Denying the obvious doesn’t make you cool, it makes you extremist.

HTML5 and/or Fred worth a shot. It may have hidden benefits, not just hidden flaws. A wider range of tags can also help you achieve a faster CSS, if you care to look at CSS from this point also. Or if you have to, like in you have no choice but to through away all those slow generic tags and descendant selectors.

Standing crooked but judging fair, those who have things to say against HTML5 and/or Fred are doing all us a favor by forcing the specs improve.

The web dev will evolve. Testing and embracing new stuff can help you get ahead, while keeping just one old way may cripple your abilities in the near future. Or vice versa. It never hurts to try new stuff though, that’s for sure. And use it in real projects. After all, HTML is live now!

Uhm… Not quite!!! Most of it’s functionality is broken in anything newer than 3.6, even if the menu part itself runs!

It RUNS, does NOT mean it works. The only thing I really ever used it for was the “view document size” – which has what? five things broken on FF 3.6+? 90% of the stuff on the “issues” page works just fine in FF 3.5.

The code base for that has basically been “rotting away to uselessness” with every new FF release.

Funny, since IMHO FF doesn’t do anything useful out of the box for me, there are things Opera does that I STILL can’t find plugins/mods/extensions/userscripts/“whatever you want to call them this week” to implement… and once you start applying all those extensions you can kiss stability goodbye.

With FF4 seeming to be about as stable as FF2 – and that’s NOT a compliment. In testing I’ve already seen it go off to never-never land sucking 100% cpu on image saves; probably a code regression. It’s like back to the days when I couldn’t understand why ANYONE was using FF to begin with as I could crash it so hard that it would lock up an entire CPU core (great on single core systems) and have to be killed in less than 20 minutes.

Which apparently was related to the memory use/cache issue, which we were told wasn’t a bug, but a feature. 256 megs of RAM in use with 100% cpu use locked indefinately was a “feature”.

I wouldn’t even HAVE that trash INSTALLED if it wasn’t for browser testing. I can’t imagine trying to use FF as my daily use browser with it having ZERO out of box functionality, no way to put the tabs to one side in portrait, no drag and drop favicons, no easy way to make custom buttons… It’s a buggy/bloated/broken TOY of a browser.

Yous should learn JS not for the reason of not using jQuery, but for the reason of customizing and improving your own version of jQuery. Programming is about productivity. Building from the ground up each and every time is not productive. Using libraries is the way to go.

If size matters, be smart. jQuery is modular, take what you need from it, if not all. Use it, it’s cacheable, you won’t spend more bandwidth on it than on a medium size image.

jQuery is a community effort and hard work. Respect that. jQuery’s code can be contributed. Don’t stand on the side lines complaining, contribute if you think you can make it better.

If you have enough scripting for “building from the ground up” to qualify as a complaint – you are probably using too much javascript on your page for stupid annoying garbage.

Javascript is an interpreted language, so giant function libraries are the equivalent of a static fortification; a monument to the stupidity of mankind.

Or just don’t use it as it’s a completely unnecessary waste of time, bandwidth and effort for things that either shouldn’t be done on a website in the first place, or can be done faster/simpler/easier without it.

Sun Tzu said “Know your enemy”.

You need to do that.

First off, Opera’s default page is a bug. A serious PITA bug.

When I right click a html document and choose “Open with Opera” it will display two tabs, instead of just one, as any other good browser does: one for the Speed dial, or whatever page you choose from the General -> Startup/Homepage options, and finally, one for the html document I want to open in Opera.

FF4 “seems to be a buggy unstable repeat of that” is laughable at best. Seems does not equal Proof. You need solid proof in order to be able to end your attack at FF4 with something like this: “are like a trip in the wayback machine to IE3”.

Which is by far not true, since Opera is the one pretty much bloated with everything you never wanted, every step of the menus, tabs, option bars, status bars etcetera.

As far as jQuery (not Jquery; remember, “Know your enemy”) being a GIANT library, it’s another stretch, ds60 style. Like, when you boldly categorize code you don’t even know as being “stupid annoying garbage”.

And yes, use it if it means reusability and productivity. Too bad you deny it’s of use. Denial doesn’t prove a thing. You should “Know your enemy” better, again.

You should be able to see the good parts too, if you were to be truly cool headed and well intended. It’s used because it offers cross browser support. The biggest gain. Which is not animations, as you try to trivialize it.

And it offers a richer UI. Another thing that’s a big gain for usability.

And it offers a community effort to cut down the time you spend trying to find what others have already found out: JS engines in UAs nowadays are far far far…far better then what you seem to think. Libraries = Reusability = Productivity.

Funny, I was about to say the same – marvelous how two people can look at the same things and come up with entirely different conclusions, no?

Funny, for me it displays ten, the ones I left open when I closed it last… which to borrow from Mozilla is a feature, not a bug. Hang on, let me actually close all the tabs, something I almost never do… Impossible, I can’t close it with no tabs showing… Aha, so you’re closing all your tabs and then wondering why it’s “restart where you left off” is restarting where you left off? That’s a good laugh.

Of course, I rarely close my primary browser, use my primary browser to launch pages in other browsers while testing, don’t tend to close all my tabs when I shut the browser down so I can continue where I left off – so I never even notice that behavior.

The difference in our usage habits leading to radically different perspectives on it.

Out of the box, does it HAVE any MODERN browser functionality? Flip navigation? Gestures? Positionable tabs? No… that’s a trip with Mr. Peabody to me. Same problem I have with Safari and IE9, the user interfaces are a rinky outdated joke… Though at least unlike Safari with FF there’s the choice to TRY and change it… though really it seems like all the browser makers except Opera are either in copypasta mode, or backpedalling on the UI functionality to 1997!

As to buggy/unstable proof – it going to 100% cpu core and my having to kill it because it’s “not responding” in three major OS is all the proof I need of it being a buggy unstable mess – and again it appears to be EXACTLY the problem I had with 2.x

Remember this from 1.x and 2.x?

It’s BAAAAACCK!

With the only tab open being google and it never EVER finishing whatever the devil it was doing? I once let it sit there for 40+ hours just to see if it did anything. If it wasn’t for the fact I’m on a multi-core system, FF4’s current “off to never never land” behavior would lock up the system completely.

I was actually surprised given what a train wreck FF was prior to 3.0 that it became as popular as it did – it was completely unusable for me having to kill it every 20 minutes like clockwork – which is WHY I wouldn’t even have had that trash installed if not for browser testing.

Bloat huh, so why is it able to include all that AND a robust mail client and still be the same size or smaller than it’s competition? That’s not bloat – that’s good coding.

How big is that oversized pig known as Thunderbird again? Lands sake firefox doesn’t even DO anything out of box more than wrap the renderer in a 1998 level UI functionality, and has what, a 12 megabyte download?

Bloat, thy name is Mozilla.

I actually know enough jquery to say it’s garbage – I have this NASTY habit of not badmouthing things until I give them a try – and it’s pointless rubbish that results in bloated cryptic code. Most of my experience with it has been stripping it OUT of people’s websites for things that CSS can do better with no code, or stuff that was contributing to the sites in question’s bounce rate.

I have yet to see a site using jquery for anything meaningful, useful, or that should even be done on a website in the first blasted place. It’s made worse by people now using it to do CSS’ job, server side scripts job, or simple things that end up being 20k of code before you even talk the size of the linked library, that could have been done as 4k WITHOUT IT. (just peruse anything jquery related on dynamic drive for proof of that)

Show me a site that uses it for something MEANINGFUL… I’ve NEVER seen one.

Which I still don’t entirely get – the ajax wrapping is cute, but single function that usually I’d have to rewrite ANYWAYS to get the proper handling on it… Element loaders are cute, but if you need that many of them you are likely using script for something you shouldn’t be wasting your time trying to do in the first place…

Waste of time.

… and again I’ve never seen anything out of jquery that didn’t GET IN THE WAY of the user experience.

In the majority of cases it’s either “Scripting for nothing”, “scripting to cover coding ineptitude” or “scripting for ‘gee ain’t it neat’ animooted nonsense”

Jquery is a BLIGHT upon the Internet flushing thousands of potentially useful websites right down the accessibility, usability and functionality toilet!.

Hell, even the main page for jquery is a broken bloated mess leaving you asking “266k in 34 files for THAT?!?”

No, not quite so. I’m not choosing from the Startup “Continue from last time” and I wish I didn’t have to choose any other crappy options in that list. (You seem to know less about Opera customization then me?!)

But I can’t, 'cos Opera thinks I need a Startup absolutely. The only laugh is from Opera in the face of its users, which makes it for the 2% it has.

The place Op has is by merit alone. Again, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just the way it is: Opera is crappy, unintuitive, bloated.

This is my proof: FF4 going with 9 tabs, as oppossed to Op 11.01 1190 with JUST ONE TAB!!!

Nothing unusual about the web page in the tab, just a little common JS slideshow somewhere in it. And it’s not that JS code fault, believe me!

And Op is the only browser chocking with these slideshows, lagging and never quite getting to display them properly. A little down for the “fastest JS engine”, don’t you think? When FF4 doesn’t even blinks when properly displays that page. And so is IE8, IE9. And so does Saf 5.03. And so does Ch 11. ONLY OPERA BLOCKS THE PAGE INDEFINITELY!

And it’s not “Look how I can block Opera” kind of page. It’s a normal page.

The rest of your views are way over board for me to even try. They lack the balance between good parts and bad parts:

“I have yet to see a site using jquery for anything meaningful, useful, or that should even be done on a website in the first blasted place.”

“… and again I’ve never seen anything out of jquery that didn’t GET IN THE WAY of the user experience.”

The reality is the one fighting you, not me:

Opera is at the bottom, no matter how much you try to make it look like it’s a diamond in the mud, it’s still just a kid playing. And this before you start talking about HTML5/Fred and CSS3!

jQuery is successful despite you trying to point to some anonymous bad uses to paint it all black. I’ve also seen some atrociously written HTML strict pages, hell, even XHTML strict pages, but that doesn’t say HTML and XHTML strict specs are “a BLIGHT upon the Internet”.

Would you care to link to that “one page with just a slideshow?”

NOT that I think slideshows should be on websites in the first place.

Really I think it comes down to a differing opinion on what bloat means. Of course, did you notice that Firefox even reports physically impossible memory sizes now? Oh you missed that since version 3.0 it incorrectly reports it’s memory usage to windows because it’s no longer all stored in private memory?

Check it, simple to look for. Open a 1280x800ish jpeg and watch FF’s memory use from a clean startup. If it goes up LESS than a 4 megabytes, it’s incorrectly reporting it’s usage by hiding it in unreported processes. This is another of the ‘tricks’ they’ve been using to look better than they are… or at least something it’s fanboys constantly miss.

Which you can check in Process Explorer… where an examination will show that it’s “virtual” memory use is around 200 megs when it is only showing the “private” memory use under the normal task manager.

Clean start Opera and FF with just… eh, let’s use this image:
http://battletech.hopto.org/images/samplePage.jpg

Firefox:

Task Manager
Memory (private working set) - 27,864 bytes.

Process Explorer
Private Bytes - 31,644 bytes
Virtual - 164,664 bytes

Opera:

Task Manager
Memory (private working set) - 92,484 bytes

Process Explorer
Private Bytes - 95,720 bytes
Virtual - 104,516 bytes

Who’s using more memory again? Honestly, they’re about the SAME! Also though, flush your history as opera pre-loads it’s allocation of history/cache during startup, while FF does not. In fact, 40 megs of that private bytes IS opera’s cache, which is done so that the caching can be handled faster. (private is faster than virtual)

The memory reported in task manager is just the private working set information… basically code + heap. Virtual bytes is more like a stack. FF uses the stack more, Opera uses the heap more and allocates a larger heap. (though you probably don’t know old-school memory management where those terms applied… ah the days when you could hard-code heap and stack limits during linking)

[ot]

Just to spite you, I went to Computer Science Faculty between 1992 and 1997! [/ot]

Let’s agree you’re a fanboy for Opera, while I’m a normal user for FireFox. A slideshow will always have a place right there where there’s a need for one. Again, denying doesn’t change the facts. Pick any page with a slideshow that has user controls, don’t let me point you at one so you can have “reveal reasons” on why and how.

Just so you know, I wouldn’t mind using Op more than FF in the future, if Op would somehow appeal more to me. Like I switched from Ch to FF. It’s all about a browser proving it self, it’s not about fanboys banging heads.

Like there is the case for jQuery. If it proves useful for 2% of the web devs, and the web pages using it are successfully loaded on 2% of the machines, it has the right to exist, much like Opera exists. And so is the case for HTML5/Fred and CSS3.

No, Opera has plenty of faults too – you’re just going after it for the wrong ones

It just happens to have a bunch of UI elements I’ve not only grown accustomed to but actually expect and am disappointed when I can’t find them or even work-alike extensions in anything else.

I’d kill for Opera’s UI… or at least what Opera ends up with for a UI by the time I’m done customizing it (since out of box I don’t like it all that much either)-- with webkit as the renderer.

Have you tried flip navigation? Usually you can get that on FF with the same extensions that give you gestures (though I turn gestures off)… Some people call it rocker navigation.

Drag and drop of favicons from the address bar to any toolbar for a instant quick-launch?

http://battletech.hopto.org/images/myOpera.jpg

pic from three years ago, but not many changes on my current install. Hold on, let’s do one of the current install:

Notice the custom favicons for more frequently accessed sites? The ones to launch the current page in another browser? The ones to send the current page for CSS or RSS validation? See the two close buttons – Drag and drop from nontroppo – “close current tab and go to previous” and “close current tab and go to next” – makes tab navigation/control faster/simpler letting me get rid of wasting space on every tab with a close box… Tabs to one side in portrait lets me see their full titles for easier navigation, (also showing how superior vBull and SMF are compared to phpBB in that department), the simple panels pane on the left for easy access to those…

Tabs across the top – much like a taskbar as a stripe across the top/bottom has ALWAYS struck me as USELESS – with so many websites and documents relying more on height than width, why not put the extra unused width on widescreen displays to work for you?

I also axe the stupid “search bars” since I can call a custom search in the address bar by simply prepending the letter of the engine I want to use. “a objective c” will search amazon for “objective c”, “g tandy 1000” will google “tandy 1000”, etc, etc… so why waste screen space on something the address bar can already do. It’s this level of customization that makes me choose Opera over other browsers – To be honest their “fancy skins” make my skin crawl which is why I set it back to “native” and out of box I’m not wild about a lot of the default UI elements. If I could get all of that working in Chrome I’d switch in a heartbeat. If I could get a STABLE version of Firefox where I could have all that, I’d give it a serious look.

Well, that and I also use M2, it’s built in mail client.

If you don’t customize your browser a whole lot, I can understand how you might miss the point of Opera or what I’m talking about with other browsers being like a trip as “his boy Sherman”…

I’m just sick of website after website I no longer have any interest in even visiting and developer after developer effectively kicking themselves square between the legs all thanks to jquery. There may actually be a practical use for it, but I’ve never seen one.

Again, care to link to a site using it that isn’t trash? Or more specifically, wouldn’t be better without it? Literally, I’ve never seen one!

Don’t make me get the hose to you two.

[ot]

<Georg Festrunk>Hosed? Count me in…</Georg Festrunk>[/ot]
Though yes, a wee bit heavy on the thread drift.

This probably is the general conclusion. But it goes both ways.

You said “I’m just sick of website after website I no longer have any interest in even visiting”. Well, since you point the finger to jQuery and FireFox, let’s take a look at Opera on the web.

Opera Home Page is far from being a good, properly coded web page, by your very own standards. If I was to take the same approach you did with jQuery’s Home Page, I could easily say “is a broken bloated mess”.

Here are a few observations:

Opera Home Page uses jQuery.

Opera Home Page uses a CSS grid. What’s that saying about their web dev expertise?

Opera Home Page uses a font-size: 12px; for body.

Now, how can I value a browser made by people who are telling me these things are OK? How can you? I think I have an answer to that.

You are probably valuing Opera for all the wrong reasons.

And you probably despise FF, jQuery, HTML5/Fred, CSS 3 for all the wrong reasons too. Despite your observations, some of them being fairly legitimate, if they wouldn’t prove to be useful, they all be dead. It’s not like somebody is pushing them down web devs and users throat.

Without continuing the drift (too late) – I’ve complained about that on the Opera forums many MANY times – It’s always bothered me that one of the browsers with the best in accessibility and standards promotion has a website that’s an accessibility /FAIL/ and is so poorly coded.

Which is why I stopped going there except for the blog system, which I’m really only on because I’ve used it longer than I understood how such things work. (>6 years)

Well, that and I make blog entries what, once every three months?

Really I wouldn’t say “the wrong reasons” – we just have different experiences and different needs – FF doesn’t meet mine, apparently Opera doesn’t meet yours. As I said it’s fascinating how two people can look at the same thing and come away with the exact opposite conclusions.

Which is a good thing – again if everyone is thinking the same, somebody isn’t thinking.