Author Topic: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.  (Read 125894 times)

Offline Echnaton

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #180 on: July 11, 2012, 10:00:52 AM »
It sound to me like web design is just another way of communicating where the uses people want to make of it are changing faster than the current skills of the designers, the tools they have to use and the budget for development.  I compare it to word processing programs, back when is was a competitive developing product.  Every new version from each of the several manufacturers added an array of new features,  some of which were only partially useful and some that didn't actually work but the promises helped get boxes off the shelf.  My experience was that MS Word 2000, despite its glaring flaws,  was the first one to get close to right.  Since that program, word processing has been more about refinement and developing  increasingly marginal functionality.  Today the basics of word processing are so well developed that they are given away for free.

The WWW may get to a refinement stage at some point, but I suspect it will only minimally resemble the web we use today. 
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett

Offline Glom

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #181 on: July 11, 2012, 10:56:18 AM »
Web development.  A cesspool of chaos hobbled by a high proportion of under-qualified practitioners and undisciplined technological carcinoma.  But that's just my opinion.

Ahem

I find computer programming is like crack.  Addictive, but it screws you up.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #182 on: July 11, 2012, 11:31:52 AM »
Ahem

Indeed, the Clavius HTML is at least two major versions old, most of it having been written in 1999 and 2000.  For example, the ALT option for an image was optional for many years, required in HTML 4, and likely to be reverted in HTML 5.  And the explicit demarcation of literals is a new requirement.  But you'll notice that Clavius is just static markup.  There's no executable content.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #183 on: July 11, 2012, 01:38:52 PM »
... says the under-qualified practitioner...  :-[

Fred

No, please don't take offense.  Naturally I wrote and rewrote that statement a dozen times seeking to avoid offense.  The comments in the preceding portion of your post indicate you have some real understanding of the factors involved, so please don't think you're being spoken ill of.

My cynicism aside, let me expand on this.  The demand for web applications and software-as-a-service is growing dramatically.  To fill this need, the industry draws a little from seasoned and experienced software developers and a lot from entry-level or transplanted novices.  The disproportion arises from economic factors to be sure, but also from the response on the part of vocational schools that teach the rudiments of programming at an accelerated pace.  Unless properly mentored by experienced people with a sense of real engineering practice, the product they produce ends up being of too low a quality or of unmaintainable design.  The web development curricula in vocation schools trims out much of the "extraneous" practice (e.g., version control, design for test, requirements analysis) that actually ends up being the major determinant of a software product's commercial viability.

Sadly too few web design shops are willing to pay to have a seasoned mentor on hand.  This means the wunderkinder have free reign, and although they're doing their best, they don't know all the things they should be doing differently.  They have to relearn how to make the wheel, and this costs their bosses and clients money.  Or, worse, they have no interest in expanding their expertise.

My pet peeve about the web is the incredibly gratuitous use of javascript. Ever tried to surf with it turned off for security?

I was at Netscape as an OEM for much of the "should we or shouldn't we?" Javascript debate.  Sadly I was on the "should we" side, but only because the alternative for rich content was Java, and at the time the Sun virtual machine was a horrible, undebuggable mess.  A few people were still preaching the gospel that rich content itself was a mistake in toto, but the Netscape founding fathers had already predicted that this would be where the web would evolve.  They were correct, but unfortunately so were the static-content preachers:  client-side executable content in web pages is a major source of security failures.  Clavius.org is static content.  It won't break your browser.  It can't be hijacked to deliver malware.  It is an example of the original intent of the worldwide web from back in the early 1990s.  But even so, as others have noted, there are some new syntax compliance issues I should probably address...

It sound to me like web design is just another way of communicating where the uses people want to make of it are changing faster than the current skills of the designers, the tools they have to use and the budget for development.

Yes.  As I mentioned above, the high demand for web-based technology creates a market for people who are minimally competent.  And it also creates a market for enabling technologies that grow in an uncontrolled fashion -- the "undisciplined technical carcinoma" I described originally.

Web design merges with web development.  The former emphasizes the user experience while the latter includes the programmatic logic underlying the reason you've visited a web site.  One of the flagship graphic arts publications, Communication Arts, now includes a category for interactive design -- i.e., web sites.  What this means is that graphic artists are moving into the software space and are doing so with little relevant training, skill, or experience.  One of my major clients is a web hosting and telecommunication company (which I'm basically re-engineering from the ground up).  It's the one that hosts Clavius and now employs Kevin, the guy whose teenage prank web page motivated me to look at the hoax claim originally.  Yes, Kevin now actually reports partly to me and helps keep Clavius running.  Savor the irony.

But incidental to my work for them I see a lot of web code, and a lot of it is absolutely the worst code I've ever seen.  It's clear that many of these developers really have no clue how computers work.  So much of it has been obviously cut and pasted from unrelated projects with no thought for fit.  Certain graphic design firms ("We also do web development!") are the worst offenders, clearly marketing themselves as programmers in addition to artists, but having no demonstrable skill beyond bare functionality.

It's easy to learn enough computer skills and acquire enough helper componentry to create a visually compelling web page.  But a web application typically has program code that generates the front-end presentation and a separate set of code that implements the back-end functionality, the "business logic."  Junior programmers can do well in the front end coding, which is typically quite straightforward and can benefit most from even badly implemented code reuse.  But the back-end logic typically requires more finesse and also means interfacing with data stores in a safe and efficient manner.  It's this back-end code that ends up being poorly implemented by novice programmers or transplanted artists, and wreaking havoc in the web space.

The eagerness with which graphic artists and designers want to move into this lucrative line of work hasn't been matched by their proficiency.  Here's a client-of-a-client who typically manages to get it right:  http://wearetopsecret.com .  Check out their "careers" page: http://wearetopsecret.com/enlist/ .  Not only are these guys hysterical to work with, they have kept their software-developer position open for something like eight months now because they have been unable to find a candidate that meets their standards.  I've seen what their standards are, so I think there's hope for the web-development world.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Glom

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #184 on: July 11, 2012, 02:28:45 PM »
People have got to get experience somehow. Back when I had my website, I saw it more as an opportunity to learn HTML/CSS than what it was supposed to be.

Same goes for my baby at work, a programme I wrote in Java. It is itself uninteresting but I like the opportunity to learn.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #185 on: July 11, 2012, 04:25:04 PM »
People have got to get experience somehow.

Agreed.  In a four-year bachelor's program, such as the one I taught in, you have ample opportunity to write code.  When I was teaching computer graphics, the students were writing about twice as much code daily as they would have in a commercial software developer position.  It's still student-level code, but it improves markedly over four years.  Contrast that with a one-year "We'll teach you PHP" program.

Then yes, your first couple of jobs will give you good experience.  But a decade ago, a new hire would have been paired with a seasoned mentor, and would be assigned work where inexperience didn't matter and could be easily corrected.  These days the demand for warm-body programmers means that meaningful mentorships are rare and that new hires are expected to work on critical components from the very start.

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Back when I had my website, I saw it more as an opportunity to learn HTML/CSS than what it was supposed to be.

Indeed, because most of the regulars here are self-starting learners.  Now imagine if that site were for a paying customer.  Or handled credit-card information.  I witnessed a web-based business melt down because their one-and-only novice programmer had made some elementary errors in storing financial information.  His site was hacked, and more than a thousand credit card numbers ended up in the hands of a Russian hacker.  The owners of those credit accounts have a legitimate right to know why an inexperienced programmer was entrusted with a critical task.  And the poor business owner, who trusted his programmer, ended up paying many times more in legal defense fees than he would have for competent software development.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Nowhere Man

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #186 on: July 11, 2012, 07:09:09 PM »
... says the under-qualified practitioner...  :-[

No, please don't take offense.  Naturally I wrote and rewrote that statement a dozen times seeking to avoid offense.  The comments in the preceding portion of your post indicate you have some real understanding of the factors involved, so please don't think you're being spoken ill of.
Who's taking offense?  I'm living what you described right now, and I am under-qualified for web development -- I'm learning it as I go along.  It doesn't help that this is the third majorly different approach to web-site architecture that my company has taken.

But if we get it going, you'll be able to buy term life insurance right off our web site (blatant plug).

Fred
Hey, you!  "It's" with an apostrophe means "it is" or "it has."  "Its" without an apostrophe means "belongs to it."

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Offline Mr Gorsky

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #187 on: July 12, 2012, 06:06:58 AM »
I did quite a lot of HTML between 5 and 10 years ago building websites for my songwriting, the band and various other local projects that didn't have any money to pay a proper developer to do it for them. Then I discovered WordPress and have hardly touched web coding since ... although I do wish I understood more of the PHP and SQL underpinning so that I could troubleshoot and tweak myself rather than relying on someone else.

That said, SQL databasing, HTML5 and CSS constitute parts of some the modules in year 2 of my CS degree, so there is still some hope for me.
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The Pessimist: The glass is half empty
The Engineer: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be

Offline Glom

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #188 on: July 12, 2012, 06:14:30 AM »
I don't think there would have been much risk of that.  It didn't store credit cards.  It was more static than a petrified melon.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #189 on: July 12, 2012, 01:58:19 PM »
Who's taking offense?  I'm living what you described right now, and I am under-qualified for web development -- I'm learning it as I go along.
I hope no one takes offense.  But if I make a cynical comment that sounds like a sweeping dismissal of an entire industry, I would expect some criticism.  If on the other hand you recognize and understand your limitations, and strive to improve yourself, then you're not the kind of person I'm talking about.  The kind of person I'm talking about is a little more Dunning-and-Kruger-esque.

I do know some sharp cookies in the web development industry; they just are stretched too thin to matter.  A good friend of mine is spending the last few years before retirement as a web developer.  He was a design engineer on the B-1B bomber and as rigorous a chap as you'll find in the aluminum-and-kerosene camp.  It's cute; his PHP almost looks like Fortran.

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It doesn't help that this is the third majorly different approach to web-site architecture that my company has taken.
It doesn't help the schedule and budget, I'm sure.  And it's liable to be highly frustrating to the delivery team.  But you want to see why the direction changed.  Endemic to any engineering project is the notion that you can't often know the end from the beginning.  That is, what you learn about the problem while attempting to solve it (as opposed to what you though about it on paper) often reveals issues that are best solved by changing the high-level design before you go too far down the wrong path.  Managing uncertainty through the design process is part of what I help people do.  The dilemma of design is that the decisions you make early on have the most profound effect on the viability of the end product, but you rarely know enough at the early stages to make informed decisions.  So the architecture change may have a been a bold but defensible move.  It's often the right thing to do, even when short-term economic factors suggest making the agreed-upon design work, somehow.

Or your managers may be incompetent idiots.  That happens a lot too.

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But if we get it going, you'll be able to buy term life insurance right off our web site (blatant plug).
Good luck to you, and I hope you make it past PCI compliance testing.  Because if my client's experience is any indication, people who suck enough at web development to get out of the business seem to gravitate toward compliance testing.  If we tested airplanes the way these people test security compliance, the countryside would be littered with smoking craters.  Chalk it up to something else that's moving way too fast and habitually stumbles over itself.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #190 on: July 12, 2012, 02:29:38 PM »
Then I discovered WordPress and have hardly touched web coding since ...

The stagnation of Clavius at the moment is my waffling over what authoring system I'm going to upgrade it to.  Unfortunately despite the clear "win" of WordPress, my client invariably spits on the floor when you mention it.  That's because while it presents a fantastic experience to the web author, unpatched installations are an attractive target for hacking.  My client's attitude is "It's your virtual host, do what you want with it."  My client's customers' attitude is, "Hey, we just want to have a web site to talk about cake decorating, we expect you to handle the technical side."  Clearly I have my work cut out for me.

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That said, SQL databasing, HTML5 and CSS constitute parts of some the modules in year 2 of my CS degree, so there is still some hope for me.

Yeah, I seem to recall someone trying to teach me SQL once.  However, HTML didn't exist when I was an undergrad.  I have a whole lecture on the subject of how to do persistent storage right, but that's enough software-bashing for July.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline ka9q

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #191 on: July 12, 2012, 04:08:28 PM »
You know how I maintain my personal website?

Emacs. Directly on the HTML.

Sure, simple black text on a white background is so...1995. But hey, it works. And it's secure.

If simple black on white text with the occasional chart or picture is good enough for professional journals, it's good enough for my website.


Offline Donnie B.

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #192 on: July 12, 2012, 05:11:52 PM »
... your managers may be incompetent idiots.  That happens a lot too.

Or as we like to say in my workplace: "Dilbert is a documentary!"

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #193 on: July 12, 2012, 06:04:12 PM »
Emacs. Directly on the HTML.

Clavius.org was written mostly this way.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Glom

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Re: Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.
« Reply #194 on: July 13, 2012, 12:28:29 AM »
Emacs. Directly on the HTML.

Clavius.org was written mostly this way.

I pretty much used Notepad the whole way.  Nowadays, I'd use Programmer's Notepad.  None of that WYSIWYG rubbish.