While driving back from W’s parents last night I decided that my “further involvement” in the web might take the form of posting more often to my Blog… maybe more than once a day for a while. See if it generates a decent level of traffic or not.
My blog postings usually tend to be short notes about what I’m doing, but I may start to expand on the subjects I feel strongly about, and maybe start covering the wider subject of life on the net in general; almost turning the blog into a column.
I guess if I’m going to turn the blog into a column, some kind of categorisation is probably going to be needed - rather than just bunging everything in as a random pile of thoughts each day… any comments on this would be really valuable.
To start on this journey or ranting about the net in general, I want today’s guns to be pointed at Microsoft. This site uses very basic layout instructions - including tables and CSS stuff; except of course Microsoft Internet Explorer refuses to show the site properly (and yes, I am talking about the “latest” service pack of IE6).
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, if you are looking at this page in IE, the various sections probably do not align neatly, and if you’re using IE5.x, the site looks nothing like it really should. The reason behind Internet Explorer not working is down to some pretty shitty standard practice from Microsoft.
If everybody in the world uses a browser to access everything, it doesn’t matter what operating system they are using; Microsoft finally figured that out in 2002, when they halted all development of the free version of Internet Explorer. If Microsoft cannot force you to use Windows, they are in trouble - and guess what - there is now a much better browser available called [Mozilla Firebird], and it is much better than IE. The real kicker is that Firebird runs on Windows, Linux, and OS-X… goodbye good reasons to use Windows- they want your online experience to be dependent on having their operating system; which is why we can expect the next major version of Windows to have lots of goodies that only work if web pages are programmed specifically for it. This is a REALLY bad idea.
The internet and world wide web work so well because there are standards - therefore any computer that adheres to these standards can take part. It’s a GOOD thing. Microsoft on the other hand would rather set the standards, and make sure that only their software supports those standards. Idiots.
I’ll stop ranting now My cup of tea is empty, and I better get on with some work.