Too much...

Q: How do you know you did too much browsing?
A: You start middle-clicking the eclipse file tabs expecting for them to close...


Actually, this is not a joke!

A break...

Well, this is what I call a cool night.
Because tomorrow I'm going to summer <Web /> (just found out these days that it's the last edition – damn it, just when I was getting the taste of it), and because today I created the 0.4 pre alpha version of the bsc (with a cool XPCOM to singleton the connection to java – long story, I'll put it in a dedicated post), I'm not working right now (I hate to start things and then abandon them unstable because I have to do something else). Just hang around on the web. Reading lifesux because I remembered he writes cool stuff, watching a short movie on youtube, saying hi to Alinuţa – the true hypertext: just go with the flow (of the links). And because I saw npunctc put a last.fm chart on the sidebar of her blog, I thought I could actually fight my wish-of-not-touching-any-tech-stuff-tonight and narrow the columns of mine to fit my blog and put it there, too (damn it, I wanted to be the first – at least of what I've seen).

Since my presentation is on Sunday (here's the program (in Romanian)) I don't even want to take a fresh, critical look at my presentation. I'll do that tomorrow night. Yes, it's my first such presentation so I haven't got a bloody clue about how I am going to talk EXACTLY 30 minutes, how I am going to adapt the presentation to the public reactions (I would really love to be able to do that), nor if somebody will understand a single thing of what I will say. I know a bunch of people who would say that I worry too much – I'm only overreacting for the effect of this post :). I probably won't find an answer to these questions tomorrow night either, I'll trust my 'professor gene' (as Mr. Ciortuz put it) and just go there and do it!

Yes, it was a post from the heart – I can do this too: of course, when I'm not talking about microformats. And I would lie if I would say that it didn't feel good writing...

Why I hate IE (#1)

Each morning I take some minutes for reading newspapers (online) and for drinking my coffee.


So I did this morning and it hit me that too many of the websites that show click-to-see-larger-version pictures at some point, enlarge them in a javascript activated popup.
It's so damn annoying: first of all, it is a popup window which carries the bad reputation of belonging to some sort of unwanted advertising; second of all it's disturbing my good desktop organization (I don't like irregular things here and there on my desktop); third, most of these popups are fixed size (which usually is the size of the picture, larger than the desktop); fourth, it shouldn't be this way: a picture is a part of the website, is not something 'additional' to pop near the website, it should be displayed inside the website, in a unitary (style-wise) frame so that when I (the user) see and memorize it I also see and memorize the frame, thus the identity of the website: it's OUR picture, the users must remember that. (This is is not even code-wise difficult!)


Naturally, I wondered why... The first reason that came in my mind was that of the need to keep the user on the picture index page: usually you have more than one picture, in thumbs, and the user wants to see a larger version of one of the pictures. Opening the picture must not navigate the user away from the thumbs page so he/she can enlarge another picture if he/she desires. A target blank is not a choice since it would launch another browser instance which is even more annoying than a popup :).
After this reasoning I realized, once again, how much I 'love' Internet Exploder (it's a pun!): their lack of tabbed browsing encouraged 'the popup solution'. In a tabbed browser it's easy: you just open the picture in a new tab (I don't know if such a thing is possible but it should be), or even in the same tab and leave it to the user to middle-click or ctrl+click the enlarging link to open it in a new tab. With firefox 2.0's new functionality of opening all target blank links in new tabs instead of new windows, this is even more simple (even if one shouldn't rely on this kind of particular browser behavior). Worse than this is the fact that IE is way to spread to just ignore your website's UI on this browser.


Since IE 7.0 was too recently released, I suppose people didn't have time to change their websites...


Eagerly waiting for the world (wide web) to turn the other way, I end here wishing you happy non-poppy browsing!