Where has all the good information gone?

It seems that anymore a lot of us dive into books or search the Internet till we fall asleep on our keyboards for more knowledge. Mostly I do this in terms of understanding programming better. Have you ever searched for something and got something so complex it was out of your league, or was going to take days to understand or was too badly wrote to understand or was just so simple it didn't even come close to answering your problem? I seem to have these issues all the time. A lot of the time I end just writing it all my self with some help from the too complex version of the code. Really there needs to be a website that answers your programming problem in a relent manner. Today I tried using a newly redone search engine called ask.com for information regarding tabcontrols and painting them in C#, ask.com doesn't even process the C# for search results.. one more headache provided by a search engine. Google and yahoo usually handle these well. I've just come to the idea there needs to be a site out there that will deal with programmer's problems in a better way. Do you have any ideas? It would be a rather large job to create one.

Web broswers Rants And Raves

mainly this post is about Firefox and Internet Explorer. Opera and Netscape I have never really found useful. Firefox is Netscape reborn anew, but the user interface designers have done a 10 times better job. I will list a small amount of rant and raves about the two browsers. Netscape I always felt the interface was/is too big and bulky, of course so was Mozilla until it split off into Firefox.. Netscape always seemed slow and just plain not user friendly. Opera I find not user friendly because it just seems too complex. That doesn't mean the interface is better. it just means that the user interface designers didn't simplify it enough. They all have done a massive amount of work on their browsers which is amazing but that doesn't mean it felt useable enough.

Now on to the main course, Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. Some of this information will be about Firefox 1.5 and some of it will be about older versions.

USER INTERFACE
User Search
Internet Explorer has always had a reasonable usable interface, but Firefox has taken this to the next level. I for one have always hated dialog boxes. They pop up and just shout use me only, all eyes on me. Where in Firefox they have a nice neat bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you use it as needed. This is a nice change from the rather disturbing yell of a failed interface.

Alerts
when it comes to alerts both Internet Explorer and Firefox have got this one right, it has a nice non disturbing yellow bar that quietly sit at the top of the screen and says look there is something you should pay attention too but you can get back to me when you can. I applaud both the User Interface professionals of the Internet Explorer 6 and the Firefox teams for this design.

DESIGNING CSS
The move on the web is to use CSS for all your design and thus separate content from display. If some items are much harder in CSS this won't promote the use of CSS. My first annoyance is positioning

Positioning
In trying to align an element to the right or left inside of a container element proves to require more thought than just align=”left”. If you read a few websites they state you should just use float to move an element to the right or left in a container element.. Firefox adds extra space to the top of the element being floated and the container element. I find this both annoying and frustrating. Next you could try using margin to set it to the right side of the container element. I think Internet Explorer has it right, that when you push something all the way over it shouldn't shove the element out of the container element. So if you set a left margin to 100% then you just get your element placed to the right side of the container element. However in Firefox this would shove the element out side of the container element. Where in Internet Explorer it just makes the container element wider. This makes sense. A lot of the times I end up just using relative positioning and use something like margin 50%. That is if I don't want to absolute position everything.

Height
one of my biggest rants for a while was that Firefox wouldn't do height 100%. The work around was just a tiled background but in some cases you couldn't. When the background is already tiled for an effect, you can't just tiled the background for a work around. As of Firefox 1.5 They have fixed that issue and I for one am very happy with that. Internet Explorer never had this issue.

Pixels
Why can't pixels be the same size in both Internet Explorer and Firefox? This just gets on my nerves. Enough said.

GENERAL RANTS
HTML
Two elements that have some of the greatest uses are the div and the span. The div creates a divisor from another element and the span is something like a text span. If you use the span text it doesn't cause a new line but you can colour the text, etc. The limiting factor is that you can't set its width and height and if you use the div tag then you get a new line. What if you just want a set of text a precise width but not a new line? In this case a span or a div tag is not useful and since I'm trying not to use tables anymore, this seems to prove a less than easy task. You can always redesign your interface but this just seems to be a factor that proves annoying on many occasions.

For now this is it as far as it comes to rants and raves regarding browsers, maybe next time we'll cover Javascript.

Do we need the FCC anymore?

We live in a digital age, with electronic ideas that empowers us, then we do we still give the power away? The digital age really has given us the ability to make more things respond to individuals. Most members of any television audiences know that you can go to the FCC and file a complain when you feel the TV show you are watching is indecent. Also the FCC gets the ability to tell broadcasters what they can and can not show and at what times. This made sense in the 50's and 60's and even until the mid 90's but now we are in the 2000's. I'm not stating that we are more immoral. I'm stating that we have more technology that allows us to make decisions about what we want to watch. As audiences members we can block out anything we wish not to view. We can include a password to make sure the kids don't see these indecent things when the parents aren't around. The most widely known technology that provides censorship for TVs is the v-chip(http://www.v-chip.org/) but yet the FCC leaves higher fees each year to make a point of what they want and don't want on TV, why should they have this right? Maybe I want to sit down at 7pm, get a cold coke and watch some violent TV, but instead you are often forced to watch just what the FCC wants. I realize it is suppose to be for the good of families, but can't they change the channel or block it out? Yes, I know there are DVDs, I have many of them. Yes, I know there are cable and other paid services. This isn't the point. the point is why are we letting a group make decisions instead of the individual? Some parents doesn't even let their kids watch PG-13 movies until they are 17. These parents should have that choice. Currently they have that choice with the v-chip, but why do we need the FCC doing the same thing? The FCC seems like they are just taking extra money and fines that could have gone to better government programs and much better TV shows. The other thing I don't get is when I hear people complaining how much violence is on TV. We live in a consumer society, if you don't like something don't buy or watch it. When you buy, or watch something you are helping to promote it. No matter how much money the station has it won't keep on a show if there are no viewers. If you are truly against a show that most people watch and enjoy. Why should you get the right to complain and have a heavy fine, just to make the statement “you need to tone down the TV show.” Maybe most of the viewers don't want it toned down. If you dislike some content on a TV show do us all a favor block it out with the V-chip and change the channel, so that the rest of us can enjoy the TV show and not have it changed to fit your personal tastes of what you or your kids should or should not see. Indecency fines are for the 1920's, not for the 2000's.

http://www.filmratings.com/ (go to rating guide)
http://www.v-chip.org (censorship of TV viewing)

The Latest of the high fees by the FCC