Pensatorium

A few days ago a friend of mine was telling me he doesn’t get the reason for all the hype about JavaScript that has been in place recently. Even though I always considered JavaScript one of my favorite programming languages, I obviously acknowledged that it had lost some popularity after its original usage boom. And I had no ready answer to give him other than speculating about a possible fad cycle theory (many people talking about it after the first DHTML stuff, then most letting go of it simply cause they haven’t fully understood it — until someone came up with Ajax, and all the fuss was back, etc). But today I was reading an article that a contact of mine shared via Google Reader, and I think I might have found at least part of the answer:

“It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will improve IE for its cloud computing platform Windows Azure, when Firefox, Safari and Chrome already offer the technology to run JavaScript-heavy cloud services effectively.”
(…)
“The real problem with IE8 is that it completely missed the boat on the most important trend in browser development these days – JavaScript acceleration.”

in TG Daily: Firefox sails past 20% market share, IE drops below 70%

Some thoughtful opinions expressed at a DynamicDrive forum post about custom colored scrollbars using css:

rohis: I’ve heard a lot more people cumpliment how nice a website looks with a colored scroll bar than how violated they feel that their scroll bar on one specific page isn’t gray.

Twey: Yes, but it can be unpleasant: if the user is colour-blind, for example, and uses a high-contrast chrome theme, then can’t see the scrollbars, it would reflect badly on your site.

wiklendt: Goodness. If the colour blind person can’t see the scroll bar after the web designer changed it to match the colours in the website, what’s the chance they’ll see the website itself? By reason, then, wouldn’t they see nothing at all, let alone the scroll bar?

Not to mention there is a varied degree of intensity with colour blindness. some see a spectrum change, others don’t see certain colours at either end of the spectrum, some flat out don’t see certain colours in the middle of their spectrum itself.

A web designer can’t possibly cater for all these possibilities.

Am I to understand, me twey that you are so proficient and purist in your code that you cater for the blind? There is code, you know, that certain programs turn the data into speech for the sight impaired. Also, there are people who still use IE2, NS2, or 16 color monitors, or 480 x 320 pixel screen resolutions - should us designers make all of our websites black and white default non framed non flashed non coloured non css’d non interesting just so that all people in the world can view it?

besides, it’s not just the one scroll bar that’s effected in the change of colours, it can sometimes be right inside the site if the designer has chosen to use frames for that site (inline or otherwise). to have a nice lilac and purple colour scheme throughout only to be interrupted by an ugly default coloured scroll bar is almost an insult.

Pensem nisso.

“I’m a right clicka
I’m an i-Book flippa
Macs and PCs
No fight gets bigga

Surf Safari
or browse in IE
Better know what you rep[resent]
A Mac or PC!”

…awesome!

Pelas suas próprias palavras, “Test any website and see in real-time if it’s censored in China”.

www.greatfirewallofchina.org

P.S. - O Pensatorium está bloqueado, sim… vá-se lá saber porquê! 

O Gmail finalmente abandonou o sistema de criação de contas apenas por convite. Agora, qualquer pessoa pode criar a sua conta! Vê por ti próprio:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?
service=mail&ltmpl=xena&hl=pt-BR

Vale a pena, uma conta no Gmail actualmente contém quase 3 GB (2.817 MB no momento em que escrevo, e a crescer), o que é bastante útil nos dias que correm em que cada vez mais se enviam videos e outros anexos pesados por email… Bom proveito!

“When information in 2D becomes so dense that searching requirements are choked then they’ll rethink in 3D space or 4D space how to reimplement solutions that can break these enormous amounts of information into sets of uniquely grouped blocks of desired information that are more easily visualized in 3D than in 2D.”

“General utilization of 3D concepts in computing is slowly becoming more understood. Except for a few sentimental reasons, no one is arguing that 2D games are superior to 3D counterparts.

Being able to orient oneself in 3-space is a natural experience despite the fact that visual capability is limited to 2D, perception of the world is in fact 3D.”

from: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=13101

Did you know there was a “nerdcore” rapper called MC++?

Some quotes from his site:

“The new MC Plus+ album Chip Hop has finally been released”

“act now to get a limited edition copy of Algorhythms before it is no longer available.”

See also: [[Nerdcore hip hop]] in Wikipedia

“There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t…”

autor desconhecido