Rogue-Developer.com

I'm always trying my hand at new technologies, to at least see what new ideas the bring to they table. Lately I have put a little effort into understanding the emerging technologies that power the web. Languages such as PHP, or perl have always seemed slightly ad hoc, often obscuring important data flows or blending stateless, and stateful programming in incomprehensible ways. I am a programmer, and as such, I view my profession as an art, and bad practices affect me in a guttural sense. Good code is instantly understandable, I don't have to go crawling through the entire source tree before I can see how the various parts interact.

Nothing prepared me for how arbitrary and loose web programming is. EMCAscript can often fail, and when it does fail it often does so quietly. All well and good from the users standpoint, but for a developer it makes debugging impossibly difficult. Coding to particular browsers is another travesty. Literally every procedure, as well as stylistic css issues must be cross checked against not only different browser, but different revisions. I don't know what these standards bodies such as the w3c are doing with their time, but it certainly isn't worth a jot.

I have been a longtime fan of SVG, I remember hearing about the technology years ago, and since then I've been of the belief that it can cure a great many issues. But again, we see 'standards' rearing their ugly head again. Committee standards have a dark side - generally one of two things happen, over specification, and underspecification. With the majority of web formats we see underspecification - often important details are left in the hands of the implementers. With SVG the opposite has happened. The SVG standard is a monstrous thing, encompassing features that while useful to certain groups make the library very difficult to implement. My prediction is that a fully compliant display engine is a great distance away (like truly compliant C++ compilers have been for the past decade), and implementers will focus on a subset of the full standard. I do remember something about multiple implementation levels built into the standard, but they exist to breakup functionality (i.e. motion, non-motion, etc.) rather than reduce complexity. I genuinely hope that that SVG does not go the same road as mpng.

I was riding in to work this morning, listening to the radio, and got to thinking about the phrase 'barbarians at the gate'- it is always assumed that the barbarians are on the *other* side of the gate. The espoused beliefs of the red state revolution make me wonder. Will the civilized world fall to barbarians in the whitehouse? Odd thought.

On a more positive note, since the last week has been so stress inducing, I figured, hey why not talk about what I have to look forward to. Okay, first it looks like my boss has disappeared to Japan for a few weeks, leaving me to my own devices. On the cool-o-meter that ranks pretty high (he literally didn't mention that he'd be gone). The book I ordered from the Laurier bookstore nearly a month ago finally came in. Yay. The module stuff I had been working on may continue, based upon how well it holds my interest. I've got another project that I'm keen to get to work on, but details will have to wait for another time.

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