Python - Web Display Technology

[SamFeltus]

Nah, the world needs more Flashy WebSites, But I do renounce my
uglier criticisms of HTML. I realize now it is just a completely
different mindset, not a bad technology.

Python is far easier than PHP IMO. Especially if there is minimal
HTML, I mostly just want to get at a database and manipulate symbols.
I know Python pretty well, PHP (or Ruby) would take some study.

 

[Roel Schroeven]

Sybren Stuvel schreef:

SamFeltus enlightened us with:

No, it isn't a myth. Pressing the back button is the action second
most performed in a browser, clicking a link being the first. People
want to go back from where they came.

I don't even use the back button very much: if there's any chance that
I'm going to want to return to the current page, I open new links in new
tabs. That way I can be sure that I can return to the page exactly as it
is now. With Flash, that approach fails too. One more minus for Flash on
the web.

 

[SamFeltus]

Don't worry, you won't have to look if it makes you feel dirty...

 

[Ben Finney]

I do find it interesting that Flash folks readily will acknowledge
that Flash has shortcomings, yet anti-Flash folks seem to have great
difficulty acknowledging Flash's positive features over HTML. Such
situations always make me suspicious Ludditism is at work.

I find it tiresome that Flash apologists believe technical advantages
can overcome a need for open, community-driven, vendor-independent
standards.

 

[SamFeltus]

"""I find it tiresome that Flash apologists believe technical
advantages
can overcome a need for open, community-driven, vendor-independent
standards. """

 

[bruno at modulix]

It's fairly simple: HTML, CSS and JavaScript have all been
standardised independent of any single corporation, and are freely
implementable, resulting in competing free software
implementations. We can choose or improve upon the implementation we
like, or make our own, and share the result with others.

Also: HTML is an easy to parse text format. I can programatically grab
infos from HTML pages. Search engines can do it to.

One that shares none of the above qualities.

indeed.

 

[SamFeltus]

""""I would. Most people would, once they realize that shiny/flashy is

information too.
High "production values" affect value-determining centers of the brain,

bypassing the linguistic and logical centers. They make you understand

that the thing you're being presented is "worth something".

Most of the time, it's only worth a fat cash profit to the person doing

the presenting, who is giving you a piece of junk at an inflated price.

But your brain doesn't care. It's got a shortcut to your wallet, and
the information on the screen is accessing that.

--Blair """"

This was the most useful comment for me. I never fully considered that
Flash was aiming at a different part of the brain. HTML is resonant
with the mindset of Python, Flash is not. Perceptual match vs
perceptual mismatch.

 

[Paul Rubin]

This was the most useful comment for me. I never fully considered that
Flash was aiming at a different part of the brain. HTML is resonant
with the mindset of Python, Flash is not. Perceptual match vs
perceptual mismatch.

I'm reminded of a passage in "Cryptonomicon", about a guy trying to
gather info about how to organize a scuba dive to investigate a
150-meter-deep shipwreck. He gets hold of a bunch of diving books and
finds that the tables in them only go down to 1/3rd of that depth and
are useless:

Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a
while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the
covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting
introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer
world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy
nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all
three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by
the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to
Doug, and one to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by
a man who is desperately in love with her. Reading it is like
moisturizing with Tabasco.

He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books
written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the
publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at
a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the
contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one
percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving,
but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even
-mention- that.

Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores
anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been
published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on
the back cover containing the words "stunning", "superb",
"user-friendly",or, worst of all, "easy-to-understand". He looks
for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered
titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes
written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

The Python mindset?

 

[Blair P. Houghton]

Here's a text-based argument.

If I search Golge for "gardener, Athens, GA" then Google's spiders
won't have recorded your contact page. So I don't find you as a local
gardener, so I don't hire you for my mansion in Athens.

Your contact page is arguably pretty, but pretty just isn't selling for
that particular sort of page.

That's why Flash often comes with a heapin' helpin' o' metadata.

--Blair

 

[Steve Holden]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
And that's a good thing? Maybe for Macromedia, not for us. This smells
like astroturf.





It dices! It splices! Flash can heat your coffee, walk your dog, and
change your baby! It's the stupendous, miraculous, fantabulous app you
can't live without!





Ugh, definitely astroturf.

The most telling thing of all is that most of the web sites with a Flash
intro find it necessary to provide a "bypass intro" button. People
quickly tire of this stuff. It's just, well, flashy

Unfortunately it's difficult to get someone who's in love with a
proprietary technology to admit that open standards are preferable.

regards
Steve

 

[Marco Carvalho]

We don't need any proprietary junk to make a nice-look website:
http://www.csszengarden.com

You can navigate in this site with any kind of browser, even graphical
or text-based, like lynx.