Last Sunday, I was talking with the reverent Rungta about how Impulsive Highlighters didn't scale well to maximized windows at high resolutions, with the ulterior motive to bring up the topic of a redesign for the happy blog. To my delight, the idea immediately caught on with him and we ended up having a four-hour Skype conversation with so many entertaining digressions that we spent perhaps twenty minutes actually discussing the redesign. Still, we came up with a bunch of cool ideas, and, by the following day, I'd made a mock-up for the new design, and we ended up having another long chat doing some actual work and planning out.
Of course, all these long conversations started at around 2am in my timezone and lasted until the not-so-wee hours of the morning. For the entire past week, I ended up going to bed at very inadvisable hours between four and seven in the morning. This is what happens when you collaborate with a fellow in Australia, who's not even experiencing the right season, let alone having the right time of day. But, it was all totally worth it when I now look at what we've achieved in the short manner of a week. Not only that, but we had to give up none of the ideas we came up.
After having written some JavaScript for this Journal's redesign, I really got into the whole thing; JavaScript is, and don't kill me for saying this, simply entertaining to write and even more entertaining to watch it do things. There are no compilers, no linkers, no memory management, no type resolution and basically none of the sorrow that comes with conventional programming. Of course, it comes at the cost of having your code run within the confines of a browser but at least I am not shedding any tears on that account.
The only major sorrow of making websites, I think, is Internet Explorer and how its non-standard implementation of everything imaginable makes simple people like me want to tear my hair out. In fact, one of our coolest features, the news items flying into their correct positions, is, as of this writing, turned off for Internet Explorer because it doesn't work properly. Of course, if you're using Internet Explorer, all the websites always seem to work fine because they've all been thoroughly tested for it and have added tomatoes of code to make sure everything looks fine. If everyone wrote code that strictly stuck to the standards, Internet Explorer would show you piles of junk. Even if you look through the source code of my very simple Journal, you'll find loads of places where I've had to add code to account for the Internet Explorer's impotence.
Rungta and I were discussing this, and, we reckoned that, when god was done making the tree of life and sat down to make the DOM tree - you know, the whole CSS and JavaScript thing - he thought to himself, "Wow, this stuff is really neat. I mean, super hot. Man's going to have an awesome time writing cool scripts that seamlessly work across different operating systems and browsers." Five minutes later, as deities are usually bound to discover their errors, he realized, "Oh crap, now I've gone and freaking distorted the balance of Good and Evil!" Shortly thereafter, he cooked up Internet Explorer to restore order. Other examples of this kind of realization that he was about to make humankind a little too happy were when he introduced uncertainty in sub-atomic particles so that we'd never be able to resolve anything to our satisfaction, the speed of light so that we'd never be able to comfortably get off our own planet while living long enough to see anything else worthwhile, myopia so that people who liked computers too much would pay with their looks by having to wear glasses or stick little lenses into their eyes, obesity so that we'd never enjoy eating as much as we might have, and exhaustion so that we wouldn't be able to easily to burn off all that fat we gained from eating to satisfaction.
Still, even with Internet Explorer's annoying existence, the more JavaScript I write, the more I like it and want to write more of it. And it's also not so terribly hard to debug.
Of course, all these long conversations started at around 2am in my timezone and lasted until the not-so-wee hours of the morning. For the entire past week, I ended up going to bed at very inadvisable hours between four and seven in the morning. This is what happens when you collaborate with a fellow in Australia, who's not even experiencing the right season, let alone having the right time of day. But, it was all totally worth it when I now look at what we've achieved in the short manner of a week. Not only that, but we had to give up none of the ideas we came up.
After having written some JavaScript for this Journal's redesign, I really got into the whole thing; JavaScript is, and don't kill me for saying this, simply entertaining to write and even more entertaining to watch it do things. There are no compilers, no linkers, no memory management, no type resolution and basically none of the sorrow that comes with conventional programming. Of course, it comes at the cost of having your code run within the confines of a browser but at least I am not shedding any tears on that account.
The only major sorrow of making websites, I think, is Internet Explorer and how its non-standard implementation of everything imaginable makes simple people like me want to tear my hair out. In fact, one of our coolest features, the news items flying into their correct positions, is, as of this writing, turned off for Internet Explorer because it doesn't work properly. Of course, if you're using Internet Explorer, all the websites always seem to work fine because they've all been thoroughly tested for it and have added tomatoes of code to make sure everything looks fine. If everyone wrote code that strictly stuck to the standards, Internet Explorer would show you piles of junk. Even if you look through the source code of my very simple Journal, you'll find loads of places where I've had to add code to account for the Internet Explorer's impotence.
Rungta and I were discussing this, and, we reckoned that, when god was done making the tree of life and sat down to make the DOM tree - you know, the whole CSS and JavaScript thing - he thought to himself, "Wow, this stuff is really neat. I mean, super hot. Man's going to have an awesome time writing cool scripts that seamlessly work across different operating systems and browsers." Five minutes later, as deities are usually bound to discover their errors, he realized, "Oh crap, now I've gone and freaking distorted the balance of Good and Evil!" Shortly thereafter, he cooked up Internet Explorer to restore order. Other examples of this kind of realization that he was about to make humankind a little too happy were when he introduced uncertainty in sub-atomic particles so that we'd never be able to resolve anything to our satisfaction, the speed of light so that we'd never be able to comfortably get off our own planet while living long enough to see anything else worthwhile, myopia so that people who liked computers too much would pay with their looks by having to wear glasses or stick little lenses into their eyes, obesity so that we'd never enjoy eating as much as we might have, and exhaustion so that we wouldn't be able to easily to burn off all that fat we gained from eating to satisfaction.
Still, even with Internet Explorer's annoying existence, the more JavaScript I write, the more I like it and want to write more of it. And it's also not so terribly hard to debug.
Labels: English
6 comments
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Yes the new template is nice and I really liked your paragraph on Internet Explorer. I was a little surprised because I thought you were an atheist.
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For some reason your javascript is not working on my Safari3Beta!! I had to check it out on Firefox. Otherwise a fine makeover.
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nice post ... well written and i like this kind of non-laugh-out-loud-witty humour ...
and excellent redesign too, btw
the seggregated news bits was something i've wanted on my blog for a long time (since blogger doesnt inherently have that feature)
and yeah, me likes JS too! -
@Abhishek: I'll just ask you whether a true and faithful believer in god would (a) write his name with a small 'g' and (b) make fun of him like that.
@Souvik: That flying bit is a very complex piece of JavaScript and we have been fighting with it for a while now. However, if you check now, it should be working on Safari 2, Safari 3, the latest WebKit from webkit.org, Firefox 1.0.7 and Firefox 2. The animation is currently disabled in IE because it is not yet well-adjusted to its life on earth, and if you're on a Mac, I would recommend using Safari because, although Camino and Firefox work, the animation is hellishly slow in them for some reason. We're trying to find out why.
@Sahil: Thanks. :-) -
Oh, so god is male :)
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I could have gone with "it", but my, that would really have angered some people.
