Archive for April 9th, 2006

A temporary test-page design

You are probably thinking “what the hell is this?” when you are looking at this updated web design I just put up. And you are right. It looks like an ass as it is very plain.

I intend to keep this design for a week or so. Then, I will put back the previous one. I wrote this design in about 1-hour’s time this Sunday to test its effects on mobile browsers. My findings so far is that by writing the whole front-end in plain cHTML (i-Mode) resulted in a 2x speed increase in Netfront, 4x in Opera and PocketIE and it didn’t freak out the Openwave client. In other words, this design works better for mobile browsers, and it is “just ok” for desktop usage too.

I tried to make it look better using some CSS and directing the output to either @screen and at the @handheld directives, but this just doesn’t work correctly with mobile browsers. They are many who say that CSS is the way to go with mobile browsers, but I can tell you, each of these browsers is using the @handheld any way they want. For example, Opera on PPC is *disabling* the @handheld directive when used in a VGA device, while when used on my QVGA Linux phone it only works when the “fit to screen” option is checked! It’s crazy! It’s just non-standard, and a HUGE headache for web developers. If the browsers themselves haven’t decided when to use the @handheld and when not, how do they expect developers to RELY on it?!?

It’s a crazy browser world, I can tell you that much for sure. This is why when I hopefully get my new work visa this year I won’t strive for a bloody IT job again. I will try to open or work at a Greek restaurant. And the browsers, consortiums and their standards, they can all go to hell.

UPDATE: I just did more changes. This new version is NOT mobile-friendly because it has nested tables, but at least it also renders faster than when using CSS.

UPDATE 2: Back to a mobile-friendly design. This one seems to be the best in terms of compatibility and speed even if the menu at the bottom of the page looks ugly.

UPDATE 3: Back to the normal design…

‘Brokeback’ screening lands prison officer in hot water

“A Massachusetts correctional officer is being disciplined for showing the gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain” to inmates at the state’s largest prison because his boss determined that the film includes content inappropriate for a prison setting.”

Oooh, yeah, the inmates have never seen such action. They would be shocked if they would watch that movie!