Editing Site Text...

There's two versions to this story. One is things I'd like to be able to do and the other is a list of impractical things I can't do.

Browser issues are a big one. Here are a list of browsers I would like the site to work someday with in descending order:

IE6+ Win (primarily)
Safari
Latest IE for Mac, if it ever gets fixed
Latest Netscape for Wintel
Opera

Things most definitely not on this list include, but are not limited to:

- Any version of Netscape that is not their latest version. They boned themselves with crappy software and have no right to blame their problems on Microsoft. I detest whiners.

- Any version of IE below 5. No one uses these anyway.

- Anything in use by less than 2% of the population, as shown in my logs.

Logs show that IE5.5/6+ are used by something like 90-95% of the site visitors that aren't search engines. Every other browser has a low single digit scale.

There's one or two guys on Sparc workstations out there who really love us. Same thing goes for the one guy in Saudi Arabia who is a longtime fan. Quite a few Linux ppl. I think I saw something clocking in with an old SGI Indigo workstation a few months ago on a regular basis. That flight sim game on the SGIs provided many hours of enjoyment in years past. I actually had an SGI paperweight for a number of years shaped like their old logo.

Now, for practicality: diminishing returns.

This site will (hopefully) work with IE 6 because this is what I, and 90-95% of this site's audience use on a daily basis. Evil empire aside, Microsoft products are quite decent given the number of things they have to support. I have enough of a programming and software development background to field an extemp debate on why Microsoft's products are no more broken than anything else. Can they be better? Sure, but software development isn't a linear problem. Given enough time, bandwidth, and computing power, anything can be crashed, hacked, or denied. Don't let the headlines fool you. The only good code is old code.

Netscape has caused me much pain, as a developer, in the past. I hate them with a passion. I was happy to see them die a cold, brutal death. Their software didn't work for many years and the market finally decided. Microsoft didn't decide. Netscape did. Netscape's lawsuit against MS makes all the other people with legitimate suits against Microsoft look like idiots. Thanks for lowering the glass ceiling another two feet, Netscape. Even so, I'd like eventual compatibility with Netscape 7 or whatever version they're on now.

I would very much like this site to work with Safari, but I do not have a Mac. I cannot afford a Mac because I still owe the Dell cartel about a thousand bucks for the server. From my experience, I do not even like the Apple product since it is (was) far more unstable that anything to ever be engineered by MS. However, my experience is limited to OS9 and below and I hear that has changed so I'm anxious to see for myself. My next purchase from the donation box will be an old iMac that can run OSX.

Opera is nice in the way a good racehorse is nice. If it isn't win, place, or show, it's out in the cold. I appreciate good software, but the reality is that until they get something approaching 10% market share, I don't care. The difference between Opera and Safari here is that Mac people can't just load up IE if Safari doesn't work. For many Mac people, this site does not work at all. There is no workaround other than "buy a PC". That's not cool and it is entirely my fault.

Note:

I was considering this, but I think I'll just shell out the cash and get a real Mac. Very impressive, but 40x slower is not a good way to do anything productive.
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

I think Noisywalrus has a quite a few good points from a development standpoint. When you are writing software, you need to make sure it works for the 95% of your users. The rest of the 5% is the percentage that you get to if you can.

I don't think a lot of the 5% people understand the issues with development. Because you aren't in the primary users' group, you don't get the same amount of resources allocated in development. Sometimes, it isn't worth the time and effort to include features for the low percentile. That or if the code that fixes the 5% breaks part of the code for the 95% then it isn't worth implementing...

You know, I just realized that I didn't actually go back and fix that problem with not being able to select different parts of the site to edit.

I downloaded firefox and the site is indeed broken with it. It's probably because (as was mentioned before) I'm probably not using the correct script handlers to actually change the content of the box.

I'll be working on this before continuing on my other little adventure. I'll post again when I solve it.

Think I fixed it... and realized that this same bug is probably in many, many other places on this site. More fixing to do. For now, you should be able to select different pages in the drop down box that lets you pick where to upload text and images.

I really should take a few minutes to read a DHTML book instead of relying on 3-year old methods of doing things.... =/

Mac user here:

Rubberslug works fine for me with IE5 and Mozilla 1.2.1.