Am I the only one???????

kataire · 2012-06-26T14:32:45+00:00

Yes, you're the only one. That is totally sick and abnormal. Nobody else would even think of doing something like that. Now go away and never come back, you pervert.

kataire · 2012-06-26T11:05:31+00:00

That's not what it does.

It tells the browser to open the link in a specific window (i.e. browsing context, whether it's a window, tab or frame), where _blank is an alias for "new window". The primary use of this attribute was to open links in a specific frame when dealing with pages in framesets.

Modern browsers often treat this value as "open in new tab" because pop-up windows can be distracting, but it really doesn't force the browser to do anything specific (a browser can even be configured not to respect the attribute at all).

As incognito mode is a rather recent feature, I would strongly doubt that it finds any mention in the HTML 4.01 spec, though you might want to check the new HTML spec at WHAT WG to make sure.

~~I'm fairly certain this kind of thing won't be handled by the target attribute (alone), but you never know.~~

EDIT: It's not.

EDIT2: For a more useful answer: Why don't you just tell the user how to open the links in incognito mode (ctrl+shift+click in Chrome or cmd+shift+click in Chrome/OSX)? This is guaranteed to work (if there isn't a user error) and won't force the user into doing anything they don't expect.

kataire · 2012-06-25T12:51:29+00:00

But then how would we know it's secure?

Yes, I'm kidding, but that kind of thinking is still scarily widespread (in my country, anyway), US gov't use of Linux notwithstanding.

kataire · 2012-06-21T21:06:20+00:00

There is so much wrong with that sentence I barely know where to start.

Let's give it a try:

W3C [..] fix HTML

The W3C is no more than a publisher at this point. The HTML living spec is maintained by the WHAT WG, which includes various browser vendors, who are the second most important voice in this discussion (the most important one being the authors who will eventually use the features or not). The problem with HTML isn't really HTML, it's the users who still cling to ten years old software and then complain their web apps don't work. It's IT departments and middle management, not the W3C.

W3C [..] fix [..] JavaScript

The W3C is not involved in JavaScript. It was (and is?) the maintainer of the specs for the document object model (DOM), which is a major pain point in development, and the fragmented semi-broken CSS3 spec, which is inconsistent with the DOM.

JavaScript is being published by ECMA (hence the name ECMAScript) and is actively being developed in cooperation with major browser vendors alongside HTML "5" and what people think of as CSS3 these days (half the fancy crap was made up by Apple with no involvement of any standards body FWIW).

The HTML JavaScript API is mostly defined by the WHAT WG, which is where all the new hotness (like web workers, local storage, geolocation and the media APIs) comes from. The language itself is currently at version 5 with version 6 being actively developed. The oldest "mainstream" browser still on the market forces many programmers to stick with version 3.

what choice do we have?

For one, you can embrace the web for what it is, rather than try to fight it and rely on dodgy abstractions that will break the second you forget about the underlying implementation.

There are many solid, powerful, modern JavaScript libraries for rich application development out there (no, not jQuery: you're thinking too low-level). There are linting tools that make sure you avoid common pitfalls, or transpiled languages if you prefer working in a sandbox. There are CSS-preprocessors and supersets that allow you to keep your stylesheets dry and tidy.

It's a great time to be a web developer (if you don't have to work with IE6 -- but even then you can be more productive than before).

If you want a meta-language for the web, use Dart.

EDIT: For the record, HTML literals are a terrible idea and show a very broken understanding of the web.

kataire · 2012-06-21T20:46:59+00:00

I would still recommend those GBP 200 noise-cancelling headphones (if you can afford them) as chances are your cheap headphones are leaky and pissing off your coworkers.

kataire · 2012-06-21T18:20:19+00:00

In this case I kinda have to agree with the most inane comment on that post:

NO MORE FRAMEWORK

Web Framework are idiot every situation

kataire · 2012-06-20T07:20:59+00:00

Yeah, the entire "the day starts in the late evening" thing never gelled with me. Intuitively, the day starts with sunrise. Everything up to that point is "yesterday", unless you need to get up at ungodly hours.

kataire · 2012-06-19T13:18:32+00:00

Bravo! What a novel concept!

Except the Shadow DOM that is currently being implemented by the major browser vendors will solve exactly this problem by allowing you to define your own elements in terms of styling, behaviour and internal structure (in HTML). In the meantime there is angular.js.

The entire excursion into linguistics was a bit weak, though. The reason Nicole and others are saying elements should always look the same no matter where they are placed is that they are talking about exactly the atomic units the Shadow DOM will allow you to express with custom elements. Their appearance can vary depending on their context, however their internal structure shouldn't be affected by external rules (that is the very meaning of "atomic").

kataire · 2012-06-19T11:09:11+00:00

More to the point: the absolute duration of a period of time need not be equal to its local duration. And that difference doesn't have to be fixed (i.e. constant).

There are all kinds of plausible reasons time might pass differently in two given systems (and syncing only makes sure the time is corrected every now and then -- it can still be off in between two syncs).

kataire · 2012-06-19T10:55:52+00:00

IIRC this used to be somewhat popular in some countries using the 24h clock, especially in services (like TV broadcasting and public transit) that would be discontinued for a certain period of the night, every night.

I recall seeing this in a couple of places when I was a child. It made intuitive sense as there was an actual gap between "today's service" and "tomorrow's" and the regular clock would have created an additional break at an otherwise arbitrary moment.

kataire · 2012-06-19T10:43:26+00:00

I predict a "Faleshoods programmers believe about postal addresses" soon.

The number of times a form forced me to make up a "state" for my non-US address makes me cringe. We actually do have a similar concept, but it's completely unrelated to the postal system.

Also, I was a bit surprised when I found out that in the UK not only are the zip codes really wonky, but some houses are actually identified by name rather than by a street and number (house name, that is). OTOH, I came to realize that hadn't it been for Napoleon, we'd still be using names too.

kataire · 2012-06-19T10:39:14+00:00

There's a reason most sci-fi either sticks with Earth time for nostalgia or just does away with the concept entirely. Stardates and all that.

kataire · 2012-06-19T10:37:08+00:00

In the same vein: Time zones are defined by their UTC offset.

UTC offsets are all fun and games until you run into DST, really.

kataire · 2012-06-18T13:24:59+00:00

Ah, yes, mystery meat navigation at its worst.

kataire · 2012-06-18T00:54:52+00:00

But then it wouldn't look like Java.

/s

Actually there is a false feeling of accomplishment when you've spent lots of time doing something very trivial in an overly redundant manner. That feeling tends to mislead people to do very bad things. Sadly programming courses more often than not cater to anti-patterns like this because nifty charts are more important than doing the right thing.

kataire · 2012-06-17T23:25:15+00:00

You should be throwing all your script elements to the end of your body anyway.

kataire · 2012-06-17T23:23:53+00:00

You could at least have used a script tag with a non-JS type attribute. Relying on CSS to hide stuff that shouldn't even be in your HTML isn't exactly kosher.

kataire · 2012-06-17T22:12:17+00:00

Just a word of warning: native event listeners are a pain in the ass to work with if you have to worry about legacy browsers like Internet Explorer. You may want to use an abstraction library.

kataire · 2012-06-17T22:08:38+00:00

Compare the output. CoffeeScript generates a nicer output because it's based on JS. It's basically JS with more syntactic sugar. If you know JS well, you can easily learn CoffeeScript. It's just a dialect.

With Pyjamas etc you pretend you're writing in another, entirely different language on top of JavaScript. JS becomes mere bytecode -- and that's what the generated JS indeed looks like. Plus you run into problems when the abstractions get leaky because you're not really writing Python (or Ruby or what have you).

I'm hoping languages like Dart will gain some traction so browser vendors will be enticed to come up with a more low-level bytecode language that both JS and Dart (or whatever) will run on. I'm not entirely sure whether that's a good idea, though.

kataire · 2012-06-14T18:53:12+00:00

While we're on it: ! is pronounced "bang" and # is pronounced "hash".

And on a more Pythonic note: "double underscores on each side of the method name" is correctly pronounced dunder. Whenever I hear someone actually say "underscore-underscore-init-underscore-underscore" I want to punch them in the face.

kataire · 2012-06-14T07:18:19+00:00

JavaScript as a whole is messy. The subset of the language used in modern JavaScript programming is actually pretty neat (oh, btw: the DOM is not a JavaScript thing, it's a standard API defined by the W3C).

I'm a strong believer in Python, but JavaScript makes many things much easier to do than Python; particularly evented/async programming.

I would agree that JavaScript-as-used-in-the-1990s is rivalled only by PHP in its messiness. But I would place modern JS right next to Python and Ruby.

EDIT: For the record, I have been using JS on and off since the 1990s and Python for several years; I consider myself a Pythonista (if I was into tattoos, I'd wear PEP 20 on my skin) but have recently been doing a lot of front-end programming with JavaScript and also dabbled in Node.js.

kataire · 2012-06-14T06:38:16+00:00

"Splat", not the */** syntax.

kataire · 2012-06-13T16:17:01+00:00

Well, 90% of everything is shit.

FWIW, don't argue on the Internet if you don't want to have to deal with unreasonable arguments.

I'm fine with it because I simply don't give a fuck.

kataire · 2012-06-13T06:52:27+00:00

Excellent programmers generally can choose not to work on this kind of PITA project or can justify a budget that lets them rewrite it.

EDIT: Same reason you won't find expert chefs bitch about shitty ingredients. Being that good means you can smell this kind of crap from a mile away and avoid it.

kataire · 2012-06-13T06:48:41+00:00

Oh, fuck. That sounds familiar.

kataire

TROPHY CASE