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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Saturday 14 February 2004 (Day View)

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14.02.2004 – Saturday 14 February – Valentine’s Day

• Yesterday was Friday the thirteenth. Lucky I didn’t notice until today when krait mentioned it, or I might have been worried.

11:47am

• I woke up quite late, just in time to find Shan messaging me to ask if I wanted to go for a swim. Shortly after he and Kylie-Anne turned up and we drove out to Home Rule, walked up to the Blue Markers, and went for a swim. It was surprisingly big, considering it hasn’t rained all that much here. I suppose it’s been raining up in the hills somewhere. I managed to bruise myself lots, smashing onto most of the rocks I possibly could. I think because it was still quite strong, but nowhere near the levels the other day, that I wasn’t as careful as usual. I didn’t nearly drown this time, but I’m going to be sore later.

3:24pm

• I stopped in here for a minute to brush my hair and get some dry clothes, then Shan, Kylie, Jade, Ella and I all headed off to town. In retrospect, I think there was some tension before we actually left – but I’m too sensitive that way, always wondering what people might be thinking. Shan and I had just begun to play Unreal Tournament 2003 (which, interestingly, we ran without installing on our computers, running it across a network from Ella’s program folder without any problems), when everyone decided to go to town. We didn’t even get to finish our game.

1:28am

• My teeth hurt, my jaw hurts, my ear hurts, my shoulder hurts, my foot hurts, my leg hurts, and my eyes hurt. My jaw hurts lots. I hate people and moths and dust, and everything else too.

Browsers

• It seems I keep getting into “discussions” about browsers recently, which end up with me defending Internet Explorer. This is ironic in some ways, because I probably know its failings and limitations better than most, but someone has to stop the hordes of rabid Linux freaks and their total lack of coherent logic!
  This reply to a forum got so long; I thought I’d include it here:
  
  “What a lot of codswallop.
  IE won the “browser wars” because it was vastly superior to the competition at the time. IE (when released) has always been more “standards compliant” than its competition. The latest version, IE6, was more “standards compliant” than its competition when it was released. IE has consistently been the first to implement the latest “standards”, web technologies, browser tags, or whatever you want to call them. In fact, this has often caused problems because IE has often supported various “recommendations”, which have then been changed to be incompatible after IE was released. This has happened on several occasions and is the direct fault of the various overseeing bodies such as the W3C.
  Check down this list of standard XHTML tags: http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_reference.asp. Note the columns showing the earliest versions of IE and NN that supported each tag and note that IE supported virtually all tags considerably before NN. The same applies to this list of standard CSS properties: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp. Suffice to say that each version of IE, when released, has been a cut above any of its competition. Many people have this, especially Linux users who seem to hate anything Microsoft, have this preconceived notion that IE is somehow bad, supporting its own crazy Microsoft standards and to hell with anyone else – in fact, IE was the first browser to support the various W3C standards, and Microsoft is an active member of the W3C. A validly coded page should render correctly in the latest versions of IE, and should render better in previous versions of IE than it will in previous versions of any other browser. Various exceptions do exist – certain code trips up certain browsers. The various bugs in IE’s rendering are well known.
  But enough history – fast forward to the present day. IE6 is getting old. Mozilla is constantly updated, and the latest versions of it and Opera therefore support things that weren’t even around when IE6 was released. People somehow confuse this with them being “better”. It would be more accurate to say they are “newer”, and if you happen to be viewing a page that uses any of these new technologies that have been incorporated into Mozilla and Opera since IE6 was released, they will obviously display it better than IE6 is will. That said, it is very rare that you will actually come across a site using such technology and there’s some very sound arguments against using that technology at all. The main aim of the various web standards initiatives was to create an interoperable web – one that was based on common standards, so that any device supporting these standards could be expected to render your content in a standard manner. This is an admirable aim, and one that was largely realised with the introduction of the version 6 browsers – IE6, NN6 and their equivalents.
  If everyone had stopped there, things might have been good. Unfortunately, more and more standards were conceived. New versions of everything were created. The very purpose of the standards was lost. What good is a standard if only the latest build of Mozilla supports it? No good at all – that is no better than the woeful “browser wars” when competing browsers introduced their own competing mark-up. Just because something is codified in some “standard” somewhere does not mean anyone should use it. I would like an interoperable web, where I can code something to a specified standard, and be secure that my code will render correctly in all browsers both now and in the future. I can now do that, provided I code to the current standards that IE6 (and all other equivalent version browsers) support. Anyone coding to suit Mozilla or Opera and any of their “bleeding edge” technologies is, in my opinion, just as bad as those who used to slap “Designed for Netscape Navigator 4” stickers on their sites that wouldn’t work in IE (or vice versa).
  I say, stick to the original idea of web standards – code to a common standard that is currently supported and forget the bleeding edge until such a time that it is commonly supported – anything else makes standards irrelevant and we may as well pick our favourite browser, introduce whatever we want, and use that, ala the infamous “browser wars”.
  So, the way I see it, it then boils down to whichever browser’s user interface and whatever added features it may have suits you best. In my experience, I have found Internet Explorer (using MyIE2) to be more stable, more efficient, and offer more and better features than any of the other browsers I’ve used. Some of this is my personal preference – I don’t like the “clunky” and featureless interface Mozilla and its kin use for example, but IE definitely loads faster (because it’s basically already running anyway), and I frequently have forty or more IE windows open at once – something I can’t easily do with Mozilla, it’s kin, or Opera. Therefore, for me, IE, using MyIE2, is “better”. People not running Windows, who use their browser differently, prefer different styles of interface, etc. may find another browser “better”.”