Category: Technology

Today I was asked why one should follow W3C (WWW Consortium) standards and I why I try to do so as well. Well, it seems like I found a nice analogue to this: following w3c standards is like following grammar and spelling in general language. There is an HTML (or CSS or whatever) language and there are rules that describe it pretty much the same way it happens with natural language.

Not following w3c standards causes browsers to interpret things in the way they like more, some just can even ignore things they don\’t know. The only problem here is that not all browsers know/follow w3c standards themselves, but this, according to my thought is the same as they didn\’t study well at school and don\’t know how to interpret the language :)

I see more and more people are starting to do web programming (including HTML, JavaScript, PHP/Perl) in kind of IDEs like Dreamwaver, Frontpage, Nvu and so on. It looks a bit weired for me. First of all coding in proper text editor (like Vim) gives you all kinds of features like text highlighting, tags auto completion, multi-file editing and so on. Second, while writing your code directly in editor you specify proper names of styles/classes/whatever from the beginning instead of your IDE assigning some stupid names like style1, id15 and similar and than you going over to correct them (or sometimes navigating through 100 GUI menus to change them or even leaving them like that). Third, you can write all-browsers-compatible code from the start instead of dropping elements here/there which will perfectly work in let\’s say Internet Explorer and then trying understand what code was generated by IDE and adjust it. Finally, coding with text editors makes you think more and thus make better code then just letting things go as they done automatically and then correct a bunch of problems and not taking into consideration other bunch of problems because your IDE couldn\’t do it well and you haven\’t thought about it since you even haven\’t seen the code.

I got too addicted to SciTalks, especially vids related to OpenSource :)

I am buying few servers these days (HP branded) and I was very surprised to find that in order to reduce the initial offer price, one of the offers had 1 year carry-in warranty instead of standard 3 years on-site support. This dropped the price of the offer by approximately CYP300 (USD 700) on each server. The 3 years on-site support was included in the offer as an option. From this time I will be checking the warranty terms (especially from new suppliers).