langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2005-12-28

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Mittwoch, 28. Dezember 2005

The Wall Street Programming Environment

If that's indeed an accurate description, it's no wonder that Morgan Stanley reigned supreme back in the days of A+ exclusivity.

2005-12-28-wallHit

When indefinite is really quite finite. (Update: see comments-2005-12-28.)

Sad, especially considering how obsessed a major shareholder has been with history (and especially his very role in it) lately.

2005-12-28-deinfinite

Aaron Swartz: A Brief [and Flawed] History of Ajax

So let me add my own (in all probability at least equally flawed) account.

Techniques for updating page content w/o reloading have been plentiful over the years; when I mentioned lcom-talk (the little-used chat application you can reach from the column on the right-hand side) for the first time on 2002-07-04, there already was a cottage industry of toolkits - I remember DomRS and ARSCIF, specifically.

The problem back then was that I (and obviously many others) didn't think that relying on somewhat weird browser behaviour was a terribly good idea. How many had been burned badly back in the days of the browser wars, when features came and went on a monthly basis? Better stick to the slowly-changing core of client-side presentational capabilities and do the interesting things on the server.

In the meanwhile, an extremely positive development was actually a non-development: the complete stagnation of IE on Windows, by then by far the most widely used browser, providing both a stable (not perfect, but really pretty good) platform for web users and developers and (crucially!) a stable target for developers of alternative browsers to match - the most notable of those of course being Mozilla.

When it became clear that the Mozilla folks were serious about pragmatically matching IE functionality even when it didn't have the official W3C stamp of approval (the most visible probably being XMLHttpRequest, but also many others) and Google introduced Gmail, Google Maps &c., even casual observers noted a sea change.

A second independent implementation is considered the condicio sine qua non for demonstrating the viability of protocols. In the form of Firefox, Mozilla had become the second implementation good enough to be used for reasons other than religion and lack of alternative on niche platforms. The existence of an application in the media spotlight, expected to be used by millions of people, makes it dramatically harder for browser vendors in general and Microsoft in specific to kill functionality quietly and leaving developers in the dust.

And then, Jesse James Garrett provided the right label at just the right time.

Let's hope that in 2006 the techniques become natural enough to be applied at just the right places, at just the right dosage - and that funky fading is just that: a fad.

2005-12-28-flawjax

slauti 6688 days AGO
you say it man, yeah, allright, and though in my personal distortion field when I heard and read it the first time I thought about Whitney Houston

It's not right
But it's okay
I'm gonna make it anyway and it's gonna make it anyway and I will support it anyway, cause it's gonna be ok, right dosage provided, as ever.

As to the internet archives: full of sad proves like being able to unconciously preventing being archived like we did at ORF.at and keiner von uns hat's gemerkt, lang, lang, lang.

earl 6688 days AGO
the antonym to "indefinite" is "definite" :) and (in)definite is primarily meaning "some (un)fixed or (un)determined person/thing/place/time". in my opinion (especially in the part "you've got place to host it as long as we're running it") the message was quite clear in that they do not promise (or even only intend) to host pages forever. fast forward 6 years, they are not running that service any more, the indefinite event in the future that will terminate this hosting thingie has become definite: dec 6 2005.

chris 6688 days AGO
earl, thanks for the detailed correction. also I have no idea how much work it is to keep a manila server up & running, but such things are never no work, so I'm thankful for the generosity of userland while it lasted. still, the contrast is quite curious.

slauti 6687 days AGO
You're right earl. It was an impression. And while I will correct it too, in my writing, cause, i have to admit, i read it and used it without thinking at all. Must be bad inglish, isn't it.

But well, hosting weblogs for a small amount of money is completely ok for me but it seems ununderstandable for most people, given that e.g. GOOG earns huge amounts of money by indiscriminatingly hosting an index and chaches of "very many data" and delivering services on top of that without ever asking the user for money. We used to call that a market condition. And Userland seemed to be so sure they knew how to do it and where the market was going. We're just sad and slightly disappointed, allthough unjustly maybe.

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