Brettia

I found a website today detailing the structure and proper use of German toilets. Supposedly they have a kind of porcelain “tray” that the stools fall onto. Germans say they like their toilets, though it requires talent and a bit of luck to urinate in them standing up. This is a good example of why Germany failed twice at taking over the world. Now we know…

A possible scenario:
Hitler goes to the bathroom at a Bar Mitzvah as a young man. His stool hits wrong and splatters all over him. He must then suffer the humiliation and unhappiness of being publicly ridiculed by dozens of fellow children. He becomes a social outcast, shunned through high school and college, the story following him everywhere he goes.

Years of personal pain and suffering drive him to tape a comb to his upper lip for a mustache and form a radical political group. And you know what happens after that.

But seriously, why have a tray to catch the feces? It just doesn’t make sense. And they’re found only in Germany. Weird.

Er…anyway, in other news, I’ve been hard at work on my various web design projects, and this had pushed Bloop onto the back burner for now. So far I’ve made about $150 off of my various clients. Not bad for about 10 hours’ work. You won’t ever see me slaving in a restaurant as a waiter or busboy. And I’ll get paid more, though I think the extra pay is more of a kind of compensation for the horrible things I must view to complete my jobs.

No, I’m not editing pornographic websites. But they might as well be. The code is so…so…indescribably terrible! This is not the fault of the designer who first coded the page, but the fault of the person charged with maintaining it that never did. About two to three years ago, the code I’ve seen recently would be perfectly acceptable, if not cutting-edge. Now…it burns.

For example, when I first started HTML, the best way of organizing a website was to put it in a table, with one cell for the header, one for the body, one for the footer, one for a side panel, and so on. In fact, due to my own laziness, this very blog has a table-based website. Oh great Zeldman, I have failed thee.

Actually, time constraints mean that this site’s template hasn’t been updated since I learned how to do layouts the correct way, and by “correct” I mean standards-compliant as per W3C and WaSP guidelines. Now I use DIVs instead of tables, with CSS (cascading stylesheets) to position and float them. Then, if you happen to go to one of my more recent pages with a text-only browser like Lynx or with one of the ancient relics of the past, like Internet Explorer 3, you will see all the content in perfect markup and position, just without the prettier features that come with CSS, like, say…fixed background attachments.

Someday I’ll start publishing articles on correct web design, but currently I just don’t know enough about it myself to even be worthy of publishing such things. But really, if I’ve learned XHTML, CSS, PHP/MySQL, and a bit of JavaScript in two years, think where I’ll be in another two.

Most programmers start with PHP or Perl and move on to write programs in C++
or VisualBASIC .Net. Frankly, I’d like to stay away from anything related to Microsoft, so I’ll probably end up developing Linux applications. I really don’t want to get away from Internet work, though, so I might stay with PHP for quite a long time. There are still many ideas that I’ve never tried and many things that I haven’t yet done. PHP might as well be C++ for the Internet, it’s so useful. Sure, other languages have many of its features, but PHP is just…better.
And I hate seeing corporations using JSP (Java) and ASP (eeew…Microsoft Active Server Pages) just because they had to pay for them. It’s like they trust ASP and JSP more because they’re expensive to install and maintain. Macromedia has a package called JRun 4 that (I believe) is a server for running JSP applications. Why pay thousands of dollars for something like that when PHP, Apache, and MySQL are all free? And not only that, but they’re better than the commercial options: the usage statistics for the Apache HTTP Server and mod_php are evidence of that.
PHP is on over 14.7 million servers, and Apache has a 70% market share in the HTTP server software market. There’s just nothing better out there. MySQL lags as a database softare solution for corporations because Microsoft and Oracle have salespeople to market their products. MySQL AB probably does as well, but not like the larger companies.

Why then, are companies so stupid? Personally, I think they just can connect better with a major brand or company name. Microsoft Windows is on 90% of all desktop computers in the world, so its preprocessing server-side language must be good, right? It’s just about which software company can lie to brick-and-mortar firms the most convincingly.

This comes back to my discussion of web standards. People assume that all HTML is the same, and that web pages are like Word documents, with a standard format. And for me, this can be a problem. One client of mine, the one who runs a golf company, wants me to use up more of the free space I left in the margins on their new website. I told him, “Using up more space would limit your audience because people with an 800 x 600 screen resolution wouldn’t be able to see all of the page without scrolling horizontally.” His answer: “But there aren’t very many people out there with 800 x 600 resolution, anyway.” Wrong.
According to this survey, 50% or more of computer users have their display set to 800 x 600. So proper web design is geared toward that resolution. That is not a web standard, but it is an accessibility standard, one which states that anyone should be able to easily view a page, from any device. Of course, there are people out there with 640 x 480 resolutions out there–what about them? They’re screwed. Designing with a resolution that low in mind would make a site look really small in all othe resolutions. 800 x 600 is just a happy medium.

This is just one of many things. Some people just don’t understand that there are other users out there other than them, and that other people don’t necessarily have their computers configured the same way as they do. And there are even more people who just don’t know how to change those settings or don’t have permission to, like at my school or at my parents’ workplaces. For this reason, layouts must be elastic, DIV based, 800 x 600 optimized, built with consideration for older browsers, and so on and so forth. This article is a good example, a story of how a web design guru and his team revamped Inc.com and FastCompany.com and saved those sites thousands of dollars in server lease fees because the code was smaller and more compact.

The problem is, small businesses, the kinds of clients I would cater to, don’t care about server load because they get little traffic, so they pay a small monthly fee and nothing more. This makes them harder to convince.

Eggplant.

1.1 million keystrokes!