Webdesign

[Tormod]

Originally posted by: Freethinker

 

FYI, I had my first internet e-ddress in 1987. it was at symbolics.com. Do you know the relevance of that? ftp/Archie, Gopher/ Veronica... ?

 

My first venture online was in 1991, at the Augustana College computer lab...using lynx. I did not get an e-mail address until I was back in Norway. As a journalist at the university radio station I was one of the lucky few (imagine!) who got an account in 1994.

 

I remember Netscape 0.9 beta...it showed the university of Oslo homepage with a beautiful grey background with shining blue links.

 

 

actually. my company's website is completely browser independant, including original Mosaic and text only browsers. It's very plain and boring, but that is all we need right now.

 

Well - if I made this site very plain and boring...

 

I will disagree completely that we need to pander to IE and Microsoft.

 

Well, my point was that since over 90% of my visitors use IE it is hard to dismiss them. But rest assure - all new browsers can use this and all future versions of this site.

 

 

 

It is the browser makers who should be responsible for implementing the standards

 

That is my point exactly. And ALL browsers companies EXCEPT IE do so. To code to IE at the cost of EVERY OTHER STANDARDS COMPLIANT BROWSER is the wrong thing to do.

 

Well...frankly...all browser have their quirks and different ways to do things. Safari is different than Konqueror which is different from Firefox which is different from Netscape which is different from IE...and Opera...and, well it goes on and on.

 

It's not only HTML/CSS but also how they use the operating system's built in functions like buttons etc.

 

BUT I think we agree on most of this so I think this is getting a bit academic now.

 

By the way - I wouldn't call ColdFusion a "non-compliant" server. It serves what it is told to serve,

 

While Coldfusion can SERVE standards compliant html, it, like IIS/ Frontpage exstensions, has hooks that are INTENTIONALLY non-compliant. IOW , all standards compliant sites can be served off of a Coldfusion server. But it is not conversely true, that all sites designed for Coldfusion can be server off of standards compliant servers.

 

Actually, that is only partially true. There is a product called BlueDragon which is a free server solution which can run lots of ColdFusion websites.

 

http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/bluedragon_basics.cfm

 

And you can still use ColdFusion to produce sites that are completely standards compliant, use a page sucker and get a static website out of it. But that is of course a bit like building a robot to paint a picture when all you need is a camera.

 

Tormod

[Tormod]

Sorry for all my mispellings...I am working long days and I see that I almost constantly write "browser" when I mean "browsers". Sometimes I tend to forget that English is not my mother tongue...

 

To anyone who would like to help out with betatesting the new version of Hypography, head over to the "Announcements" category in these forums and respond to my post there. I could do with more than the 5 who have signed up so far.

 

Tormod

[special j]

Tormod:

 

Flash is a bandwidth heavy program which hinders the load time obviously and, most-often, the usability of sites -- especially when users come from dial up connections which all sites should still factor in in my opinion, unless they are design sites.

 

Flash is a good program in the right hands, in the wrong hands and especially in new hands -- it ruins a web site. I've worked with probably a dozen top-notch flash designers who would agree but if you feel different, that is cool... no offence intended...

 

i would reiterate though to people looking for what to start off with on a site to stay away from Flash. If you really are interested in flash, trying doing conceptual things until you are sure you've got load times under control and any cheesy design ideas are worked out of your system before you subject regular folks to em At that, maybe give yourself the basics of animation using something like animation shop if you are really new to it all. Just to get a feel for animation, and what works & doesn't -- in it's web use. Somethings just don't turn out well on a computer screen and the marketability of a site relies heavily on it's flow which 99% of animation on the net is very much a barrier to.

 

As for Textpad... yes it is one HTML editing program. just so happens to be the one which i recommend over homesite. no offence intended... but did you have a point there?

[Tormod]

I agree that Flash is not the right program to build entire sites in for beginners. Hell, even experienced web designers should probably stay away form building entire sites in Flash...

 

There are exiting things on the horizon, however, with the new Macromedia Flex, which will let people build Flash apps with a minimum of code. But I agree, this is not for beginners.

 

No, I probably didn't have a point about Textpad - I just remembered that I actually used it many years back but went over to Homesite because it offered native ColdFusion tag support.

 

Tormod

[alexander]

was clickong through the forum, and just accidentally stumbled across this post.

I dont see to many people on this forum getting really excited about websites, especially the entire point of creating them.

Ok,

Scubawuba said:

 

Quote

 

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i see all this php stuff and the asp stuff. and i see java and flash. what should i use to get started. well what should i learn too. im planning on having a little bit of e-commerce on the site but yeah

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

PHP would be my answer. There are a number of reasons why, so here:

PHP vs ASP vs Java vs Flash vs ColdFusion

PHP's main advantage is that it is FREE, and free is good. PHP supports all plartorms, and can be installed on any platform that being windows, linux, mac, unix, bsd, sun os and every server unlike ASP and flash. PHP does not have to be compiled, unlike ASP, Java, and Flash you can at any time change any part of your code in a matter of opening the file in a text editor(any), modifying it and saving your changes and your code and page is updated.

Lets go through the process that you have to go trough with ASP, find a computer with asp compiler, find your code file, modify it, compile it and then put it on the server overwriting the previous file.

ASP.net is junk, in fact all .net based programming languages are (except maybe for VB.net which the entire .net thing was made for), you cant run the programs compiled in .net unless you have a .net platform installed on your computer, as to webpages, as freethinker said you can't view them in Mozilla, Opera or any older version of Netscape.

The problem with flash seems to be in that anybody that does not have flash player installed on their computer can not view your website, hense you loose potential customers.

ColdFusion Lacks standard and security and Java is great, but it is a hard language to learn, and there is nothing you can do in java, that you cant do in PHP which is not as strict on its synthax. People when speaking of java seem to talk a lot about applet programming and script, Java and JavaScript are two totally, and entirely different programming languages who'se only similarity is in synthax. Main difference being Javascript is a client side programming language and Java is a server side one, big, big difference.

JS's problem is in that it is client side scripting, means all your code is visible, + if you use a browser that does not support JS, you cant see any contents; so browsers like Opera and XWeb are automatically out and if i go into my IE oprions or Netscape options I can always turn JS off, beacause you can use JS to automatically download a virus onto your system. Java is a totally different story, i wont discuss it here, but it is one of those languages that comes close to PHP.

So out of all main contestants 2 remain: PHP, ASP so here:

 

________________PHP4________PHP5__________ ASP

Software Price ____ free ________free __________ free

Platform Price _____ free _______ free ___________ $

Speed ___________ fast _______ fast __________ slow

Efficiency ________ very _______ very ________ not efficient

Rescources Needed_ few _______ few __________ lots

Security _________ secure ____ secure _______ secure

Platform __________ all ________ all ______ win32 IIS mainly and Apache recently

Open Scource _____ yes _______ yes ___________ no

exceprion handling _ no _________ yes __________ yes

OOP support ____ not strong ____ full ___________ full

 

Another thing that you might consider is Database, and although I am not a specialist in that area, but PHP's uniqueness is also in that PHP is almost a part of a database, if in other languages Database support is written in addon functions, PHP's is written in the engine itself, Database almost feels like PHP is a part of it, and thus the speed of their communic

[lindagarrette]

As and active member of the IWDA-HTML guild, I can tell you that most web development does not start happen from start to finish. Mostly bits of existing code, models, templates, even entire apps are pieced together. The hardest thing about the effort is design. There are volumes of source out there to be plundered for goodies. And lots of creative artists who are coming up with more all the time. Pandora

[alexander]

lindagarrette said:

As and active member of the IWDA-HTML guild, I can tell you that most web development does not start happen from start to finish. Mostly bits of existing code, models, templates, even entire apps are pieced together. The hardest thing about the effort is design. There are volumes of source out there to be plundered for goodies. And lots of creative artists who are coming up with more all the time. Pandora

 

I think that the term used for that in programming is "Reinventing the wheel".

That is compleately true. Although sometimes it is easyer to write your own code, most of the time in big projects it is easyer to piece together someone elses code. That is where OOP comes in, in its high code reusability. Instead of writing your own functions (reinventing the wheel) when someone else has already written them, you can use someone elses code, sometimes modified for your own use (depending on what you are going to use it for). Although real programmers most of the time would wite their own code vs. having to figure out someone elses, and reuse their own code vs. anyone elses.

[Freethinker]

Regardless of whether you highjack other's code (which I admit to doing regularly) or code from scratch, one of the major issues I find RE web site design is the growing number of sites that ignore industry standards. There are published standards that assure that any standards based browser can properly utilize all of the features of a web site. The biggest abuser of this is Microsoft (What a surprise eh?). With Frontpage and Frontpage Extensions. Ya it's simple to create a web site with WYSIWYG point and click coding, where you don't have a clue as to what the actual underlying code is anyway. But being lazy is no excuse for a web site that stops some growing percentage of potential visitors froom utilizing some features of, or in some case even see anything of the site.

 

And yes, Tormod knows I feel the same way about Coldfusion.

 

I will no longer load up IE just so I can see a streaming video on a site that is so poorly designed that it will not allow it with other, standards based browsers. The statards can be found at:

 

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

http://www.w3.org/

 

A site can be run thru a validation checker, to see if the code is valid or not, at:

 

http://validator.w3.org/

[katesisco]

My computer ability is about 2 but I have a great idea--or what seems to me like a great idea---and it may not be implementable right now but maybe later......

In the sites with chat forums, such as this, it is not convenient to have to run the list of replies, clicking, clicking, clicking. My thought is to have your forums on one page with just a round dot representing each comment, lined up in rows and as your mouse passes over each dot, it would enlarge into a biggger dot, such as a magnifier and allow you to read what is under the lens at the time, would give a good idea of what the commenter is saying without having to go to the trouble of clicking, clicking........And you could just pass on, pausing over each dot, reading the magnified comment and then going on. You could look at each comment with out leaving the page, without leaving the line of dots really. So are we there yet? Can it be done?

[Freethinker]

Hi Katesiscon:

 

Welcome to our little party. Hope you have a good time, and help us all learn something along the way.

 

A trick regarding navigating the chat threads here. Note that at the top of this page you will see:

 

Topic Title: Webdesign

Topic Summary:

Created On: 03/25/2004 06:04 PM

Pages: [ 1 2 3 >> Next ]

 

OK, this is not exactly what you will see. This was from the first page of this thread.

 

Notice the >>

 

If you click on this, you will go to the last page of the thread you are on. NO matter how many pages there are.

 

Hope this makes it easier.

[Tormod]

Originally posted by: katesisco

So are we there yet? Can it be done?

 

Welcome katesisco!

 

Don't know - I think it can be done but I don't know if it's worth it. I have seen lots of attempts to "visualise" data and frankly none of them have worked for the web because you'd need some sort of plugin which would make things work slow, be unavailable to lots of people who use other browsers etc. Plus people would have to learn to navigate the thing, reply to it, and feel at home with it - it's a matter of usability.

 

One good thing about the current format is that it is indexed by search engines so people find us.

 

But I think you have a good idea there, though.

[alexander]

So are we there yet? Can it be done?

Again, welcome Kateiscon!

Yes it can be done, but no most web developers won't do it and for a really good reason.

 

Tormod said:

 

I have seen lots of attempts to "visualise" data and frankly none of them have worked for the web because you'd need some sort of plugin which would make things work slow, be unavailable to lots of people who use other browsers...

You dont really need a plugin, not to an extent anyways, not unless you want to make it 3D or if you need a graphics engine. You see katesisco in order to, as you said

...your mouse passes over each dot, it would enlarge into a biggger dot, such as a magnifier and allow you to read what is under the lens at the time, would give a good idea of what the commenter is saying without having to go to the trouble of clicking, clicking...

You would need to use one of two things:

1)Either Java programming for database and content with JavaScript for the client side actions such as moving your mouse over the dot and having it enlarge, along with Gif animation or little flash for the process of the visualization of enlarging and JS again in order to display the text in a right place.

2)You can also use, if you are good enough to do so, straight flash with any server side language for content database retrieval and it's manipulation. Flash will deal with all visualization, and SSL will deal with data.

 

Ok, why not use the methods described earlier.

In #1 you have to use JS which is a client side language that has to be supported by the user's browsers, and quiet a few browsers don't support JS as i said in my post earlier

... if you use a browser that does not support JS, you cant see any contents; so browsers like Opera and XWeb are automatically out and if i go into my IE oprions or Netscape options I can always turn JS off, beacause you can use JS to automatically download a virus onto your system.

In addition to that Cello, iCab, Firefox and ChiBrow all, at least to my knowledge, do not support JS. So as i said many people would not be able to see the content the way that you envisioned it kateiscon so you are loosing potential users and/or customers (and that means you are loosing up to about 25-30% of people).

In the second method, again as i said you have to really know what you are doing with flash, your pages will be immensely heavy (they will take up a lot of space) thus the pages will take very long to load on 56 and 28k and take fairly long on DSL and CABLE (128k to 3M) so thus again you are loosing people, this time a lot more. And not all aperating systems have programs such as Flash MX or Shockwave that provide the base for your computer to play flash files and if flash can't be played the page can't be viewed the way you invisioned it.

So most web programmers that have a job and manage a few sites to manage and forums to attend probably won't do it, but there is always people that have some free time on their hands and that have the necessary knowledge to create a 3D engine to work with a web browser. I had an idea for creating a 3D website and i started doing some work on it, but soon got a job and had no more free time on my hands, so i dropped the project. (and no i wasn't going to use flash)

I agree with Tormod though that it is a good idea, and it is certainly doable

[Freethinker]

OK, there actually is a web site that is similar to what Kate (will she ever come back to see us again?) has suggested.

 

http://www.milwaukeewebworks.com/commdev.asp

[Freethinker]

OK. since we are "sky pie'ing"...

 

My ultimate web browser would be completely free formed. It would be an object oriented "icon" or other graphical element/ image/ document/ ... that would not appear in a fixed window. It would float on the desktop. Its shape would be completely free form. Such as the various physical display arrangements you can get out of Winamp with various skins.

 

Say it is for a fish store. It could be just the exact shape of a fish (or car for auto dealer, ...), not bounded/ surrounded by a window, but just the contour shape of a fish. Like an ActiveX object.

[Tormod]

Yeah...I think you could do that with Flash and ScreenWeaver. It lets you create executable files (for both MAC and PC) which can be any shape you want, without the standard window shape. I think it has a browser component.

 

Tormod

[alexander]

Or you can get a code of a browser already created and working (such as Mozilla) specifically their code reading and text displaying functions, add an existing 2d engine to it or even 3d if you want and rewrite the GUI part of the browser to show the information the way you invision it, even in 3D if you crave it. The only problem I see is debugging, and OS since Mozilla was created for Linux, you would need to "tweak" the code to make it work with Windows...