Do people really have such little self-control that they need to block a particular internet site via a tool like this? Just don't type news.ycombinator.com or click your bookmark for it. Simple as that.
I don't think this is a question of self-control. I noticed (only after I installed this plug-in) that sometimes when I got frustrated with a problem I would type in news.ycombinator.com by habit.
Exactly, almost like you need the endorphin so you rush to the easiest source of satisfaction. Probably similar to a smoking or eating habit, you just need an easy win so you click on the site. Same here.
My bad. I hadn't considered that for some, it was an emotional experience. My relationship with HN is purely informational: I go here daily to find some interesting technical stuff and read interesting discussion. But the names behind the submissions and comments are purely words.
There have been internet communities that I've been a part of that I have been emotionally bonded to. You get to know some people well and suddenly it's more a social experience than intellectual. That's a completely different story, and you'd need more than self-control to stop going there if it was becoming a time-suck.
In a sense, yes, it does work that way. There's no way to say "Please block all popcorn from entering my vicinity." You can keep it out of your house, but you're still going to have to consciously not reach for it in the grocery aisle or the movie theater lobby (or fair ground booth, etc.)
Sounds like you've figured it out. Just as it's easier to avoid the popcorn in the grocery aisle or theater lobby than when it's within arm's reach, it's easier to block HN than to avoid typing "Cmd-L n" in your browser.
"Basically, if some HTML/CSS works on Safari, the chances are very high it will work on Firefox 2 and higher, and on IE 6 and higher (with minor tweaks)."
I don't get it. A lot of the hardship that comes with web development is that stuff that works great in modern standards-based browsers like Safari doesn't work when you try to view it in IE. I can't count the number of times I've taken a webpage that I developed to work in Safari (or Firefox) and seen it break completely in IE. And it often takes more than "minor tweaks" to fix it.
I'm new to web development, and I keep asking this question but I've never heard and answer to it:
What's stopping us from making a tool that parses HTML/CSS and points out constructs that are known to be bad in certain browsers? Sort of like lint: "It looks like you're sending element foo inside element bar to IE6. This probably won't work right"
I personally don't have a windows box to test IE, and I'm not looking forward to the day when I'll have to test on IE. Surely there is a better solution than manually testing browsers?
I suspect this kind of thing is a lot harder than it sounds.
There are a few things you could catch, like CSS features that just don't exist in IE6, but trying to predict if your particular mix of content+HTML+CSS is going to "look wrong" when viewed in IE is not a trivial problem.
You could probably match some patterns, but things can get really complicated when you introduce javascript into the mix. All of a sudden your tool needs to test every button on a page to make sure your ajaxed data tables won't blow up your layout.
Also, web development tends to push the envelope often. I've built literally hundreds of web sites / apps and I still come across nasty unexplicable post-ajax redraw bugs in IE6 that I've never seen before (using markup that I used to consider "safe", but which turns out to break under a new novel condition).
I realise you're hoping for a better solution than manual testing and I can assure you, so is everyone else. However, if you do not have a real or virtual Windows box to test on, you might find these links of interest:
It would be cool to have HTTP proxy software that did this. So you set it as 'ie6' and it looks at your CSS and HTML and translates it into the "ie6 view" with problems annotated.
Evidently, the author got a bit carried away there. The implication that just because your HTML works in Safari means that it'll also work in IE or Firefox with "minor tweaks" is simply bogus. Anyone with any significant web development under his/her belt would vehemently disagree. I think the author is just an ardent Safari user. That's all good and dandy if you ask me. However, we should call it for what it is: that was a blanket statement. As such, it lacks verifiable, factual information.
The only way I can see this is when talking about Firefox. I have built stuff using Safari and when I test it out in FF my padding is off by like 5 px or something silly.
Using another browser like IE usually breaks the whole thing.
If anything, stuff developed to work with the restricted CSS-support in older MSIE versions (MSIE8 is actually not that bad) has a much higher chance of rendering correctly in Firefox, Opera and Safari than the other way around.
It may sound backwards but is it not. It is a broad topic and much can be said on this, but the short version is: it is always advisable to develop looking at more standards compliant browsers and then tweak it to work in IE. Usually it will take less effort.
The reason for this is that IE let's you deviate more from standards, and then fixing it for other browsers will take more time. Also, other browsers albeit having own quirks are much more consistent – that means that if it works in Safari it is most likely to work in Firefox and Opera too.
Of course IE does not support a lot of things other browsers do. Maybe it is time to weight you options there: are you sure you want site to look the same across all the browsers and is it worth the effort? Or can you live with simpler version for IE but gaining advantage of having to write and maintain less code?
While I can see your point, my approach is more of a middle way.
I use a up to date standard compliant browsers like Firefox 3.5 when developing sites, but I keep the my CSS restricted to what I expect will be supported in MSIE. If I go overboard with new CSS features, I know I will be creating a much bigger job trying to fix it for older browser (like Firefox 2.0, not just MSIE).
But they're both true, aren't they? With open source software, it's all there for you to see and use, in all its awesomeness. No pure-marketing limitations. Yet despite that advantage, it doesn't always rise over paid competitors because it's often such a pain to use.
The two opinions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
I stopped using Firefox as my main browser when I got a mac a little under 4 years ago, and started using Safari. I was using adblock prior to that switch, and while I don't have any ad blocking now, except for the fact that pop-ups are blocked, I am barely ever bothered by an ad. I'm fairly convinced that ad obtrusiveness has gone down in general over the past few years. There are some exceptions (I'm looking at you, weather.com), but in general people seem to have realized that they had to tone down the ads if they wanted people to see them at all.
The character separating the date and username (♒ if it shows up here) looks a lot like equals to me, and confused me for a while. Just a small weirdness.
I'm currently taking a web design course, and we're supposed to be using XHTML. Strict. We lose points if we don't have all our pages validate as XHTML Strict. :) So yes, some people are still using XHTML, and thinking it's better.
Congratulations on getting Cornell -- I'm graduating from there this May. Though I'm clearly biased, I'd recommend Cornell all the way. Definitely speak with the financial aid office to see what they can do for you; they're trying to get better about offering students everything they can. If you have to take some private loans not through the school, that's okay too -- just more work for you is all.
Cornell Engineering really is good, and I have nothing but good things to say about the CS department here (okay, I can criticize them on using SML/NJ for CS 312/3110, but meh. It's still a functional language). Every one of the students I've worked with has been great. Another thing is that engineering here isn't looked down upon. It's sort of looked at as one of the hard colleges to be in here. If people want a group of students to make fun of here, there's plenty of Hotelies. :)
The CS education you'll get here is great. If you can find the money to come here, it's worth it. I know someone graduating with something like $80,000 in loans, but from the opportunities Cornell has given her, it's worth it.
About the rejections from those good schools, I've heard it's possible to reject some really good students because they're literally too good. If a school thinks that you're likely to apply to a bunch of really good schools and get into some of them, they may reject you so that they don't end up extending an offer and getting turned down.
Programming is extremely interesting to me, and a lot of fun to do. In the same way, grammar is interesting to me as well. What do you think linguists study?
I think there's a certain kind of mind that would rather figure out how to do something than come up with that something in the first place. If you're interested in both, then all the better, but if you're only one, there's nothing wrong with that.
Linguists study the mechanics of creating sounds that we interpret as words, writing systems that represent language, semantic analyses of languages and the language acquisition process in humans, among other things that are not the study of grammar.
However, all of these can be related to to the study and application of computer sciences.
Traditional CS is important but you only need a small percentage of people with such skills. They would be the ones writing difficult libraries/frameworks to make implementation easy for everyone else.
It took me a while to realize that my default browser, Safari 3.2.1, doesn't support HTML 5 Canvas. I'm seeing a bowl and a logo. Graceful degradation, not so much.
You're definitely right. I'm not so familiar with Canvas at all, so I assumed that since it didn't render, it wasn't supported. My main point was about the graceful degradation.
People speak in binary on support for CANVAS, SVG, CSS etc -- "this browser has CANVAS support", "that browser doesn't have CANVAS support".
They should actually be speaking of "what level of CANVAS support", because there are different implementations among different browser brands, versions, and possibly operating systems. Whenever there's a common spec with multiple implementations, some solid conformance testing is vital before starting development.
(I'm not too concerned about the lack of "graceful degradation" here, because it's more of an enthusiast piece, "look what I can code", rather than something solid to deploy out to the general public. Different priorities.)
