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Re: Pirillo: Internet Explorer 7 UI Will Suck

B Gruff wrote:

> On Friday 21 April 2006 12:15 Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> 
>> "My guess is that when IE7 goes gold, more people will be driven to start
>> using Firefox"
>> 
>>         http://chris.pirillo.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/10/1875069.html
> 
> I really can't comment on IE7, not having tried it.  However, I do get the
> impression that there are signs of MS "reforming" to some extent.  By
> that, I mean that various articles which I have read seem to imply that
> that IE7 will "break" a good many web sites, in that sites which were
> written to "exploit" IE's foibles (thereby making them "IE only" sites)
> will break, and need to be modified to make them "standard" as it were.
> 
> Is there any truth in this?
> If so, to my mind IE7 will be A Very Good Thing indeed.  In itself it
> would not necessarily promote Firefox or any other browser, but it would
> level the playing field and remove what is for all practical purposes
> "vendor
> lock-in" in the browser market.  Sure, IE will still be bundled with
> Windows (but so is Firefox here - by Dell!), but the equivalent of
> "proprietary formats" would be removed, would it not?

If Sharepoint is anything to go by in MS future strategies then they fully
intend to nip out other browsers as best they can. I set some of my users
on a Sharepoint, their choice not mine, the idea of sharepoint is good, I
wasn't too struck on its implementation.

I first had struggled to login in at all, because my clients are Linux. So I
faked being an IE and the site worked fine, which of cause means that they
is nothing in the code that is IE specific, it is just a way to keep people
on MS browsers.

Then I had a go at uploading a spreadsheet of an addressbook, it seems you
have to have a specific version of MS Office, it isn't enough that your
spreadsheets are compatible. Here is an odity, if you search MSSQL5.0 and
'import data', you will find that unless you happen to have the tools that
come with a MSSQL server, then you will not be able to import. They have
made their own database incompatible with their own data. Behind Sharepoint
is a MSSQL server, it can not actually import data, thats why they have to
use a an object linking approach, their code reads the data line by line
and uses an SQL insert to put the data into a table. Which is also why my
import of 4000 addresses took several milleniums to import.

Who would be stupid enough to make all of their tools incompatible with
their new database application? No one would be that stupid, you would only
do it in the hope of selling the New versions of those tools.

I suspect that MS will continue to try this lock out system with their
browsers and other applications. But don't worry, Sharepoint is ok but like
I said not well implemented. They are many php written applications that
work better and are much more able to do what users were hoping for from
this. They have had Sharepoint for a month, after the initial 'wow this is
great', only one of them has logged into it in the last two weeks, because
it isn't 'great' it just looks pretty.

.NET, I had a serious look at that because despite the work going on in
sourceforge in this area, I really did believe that .NET2 could be a
serious threat for us and I still do. It is a very very good engine and the
free tools they give to make use of it are also very good. The MSSQL5.0
side of things is pure crap, but you can use any database engine you like,
you are much better off using MySQL with .net2.

So after a few tutorials and study, I set off on a full blooded application,
built around an application I did for our company database. It was quick
and easy to create the views, and reasonably easy to work with the way MS
has set the code/view seperation. That is an area that I will always claim
is essential to any programming, you must be able to fully seperate
implementation from view and connection. MS has done that part well in this
case.

They are mistakes in there, battles between view handling by html and view
handling from code. Horrible though it sounds you will find yourself using
absolute possitioning just to stop things overlapping. Code that according
to documentation and tutorial you have made public that can't be accessed.
Many niggling things in fact, but nothing that couldn't be fixed by .net2.1

So I am worried about this, .net2 is in my view the best thing for not only
the Internet but for internal company applications for many years. It
really is a major step forward in fully fledged web based applications.

I don't enjoy working in 'basic', I'm not a C snob, I just don't enjoy
working in basic and I suspect that side of it will generally not be
attractive to programmers, but attractive to hobbyists. But because asp.net
is meant to be language independant, we may well have to get used to
php->net2. But as it takes off, and it will, that for the first time puts
Linux servers at risk from MS servers, because internal applications can
then be created very quickly and easily. The hope is that iis comes good,
then we would only need an XP pro as the host, I can't see us wanting that
though, a company application hosted on an XP? Too risky, we will end up
buying an NT.




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