It’s a whole new learning experience!

Grr.  Okay, so here’s the confession:

For the past eight-plus years, I have been working in a sealed greenhouse environment of web development, a veritable Biosphere II of HTML and HTTP.  I’ve been writing a web-based front end for a single product, working with a limited number of graphic designs handed to me by the marketing department, using a limited number of Javascript libraries and exactly one web development platform: Webware.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with Webware.  I like it.  But it’s an archaic design, based on the transaction model first published with WebObjects back in the mid-1990s.  I have had some opportunities in that time to work with other tools, deploying several PHP and Rails applications: the Journal Entries publishing toolkit is Django, these blogs are Wordpress,  I’ve done two freelance gigs involving Rails and Django,  I’ve done three “interactive” brochures in Wordpress and Joomla, and one wholly static brochure in plain ol’ HTML.  We did some in-depth analysis of what it would take to move off Webware to Django, and the results were sobering, but I’d actually made a significant first stab at creating a Django dispatcher that would correctly and succinctly manage a Webware applications, by analyzing the Django transaction model and comparing it to the Webware Emulation Layer in Pylons.

Compared to my Webware experience, everything is pretty shallow.  In the past nine weeks, I’ve been sucking down web development and design at a rate I can’t recall.  My brain hurts.  For this week, I’ve been working on a freelance job which has been an absolute blast, as it combines two of my favorite things: event-driven Javascript with realtime customer-facing updates, and an obscure programming language (if x86 assembly qualifies as “obscure”).  I did it in Django, which I’d definitely grown to love over the past year, much more so than Rails.

But one thing kept bugging the hell out of me: floats didn’t work well.  If at all.  And now I know why.

A long time ago, for miscellaneous reasons of ideological purity, we decided to go with a Strict DTD in the DOCTYPE header over at Isilon.  Our assignment was to code to IE7, Firefox 2, and Safari.  It turns out that if you don’t put one of those in the header, IE7 interprets some things in an IE6-ish fashion, including floats and margins.

How annoying.  For the first time in my life, I actually have to learn what “Quirks Mode” means. Well, now I know.

The funny thing is, we never had to worry about this at Isilon.  We’d set it once in the heirachy header, and that was that.  That was all we needed.  Even better, it was XHTML pure because we used a python-sided templating engine that made it impossible to write improperly closed HTML.

Live and learn.  One more thing for the developer/designer checklist.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

It was too long with source code, but...

I just posted my latest lesson from my latest freelance gig, Bog-stupid roundtrips with Django and Prototype, in which I document how Ajax.Request() works, how Django responds to the simplest of all requests a client-side Ajax toolkit might send, and how to show that response using javascript.

The week, weakly...

It has been a week. Isn't it always a week? This week contained some very good notes, and a few very annoying notes. At the high end of the week, I had a freelance job that the contractor seems to be reasonably happy with, doing fascinating things with javascript and X86 assembly language (no, really!). I had to resurrect my memories of living without Ext-JS, doing Ajax round-trips with Prototype, so I blogged about it.

In other news, I had a fabulous interview on Tuesday and haven't heard anything since. Bummer that, I really did want that job. I sent the interviewer a thank-you note anyway. I did a lot of job searching Monday and Thursday, and got the requisite three contacts out of the way. I had to postpone two interviews and have a lot of recruiter emails that suddenly sprang up Thursday afternoon to plow through before Monday morning.

I haven't been writing at all. I don't know why. It's not as if story ideas don't keep happening to me, but I just haven't had the time to develop anything the way I'd like to. I feel only a little bit guilty about that.

Friday, Kouryou-chan had her "flying up" at her school, a Montessori tradition where she's applauded for passing up from one class to another, being handed off from one educator to another. We also got her ITBS scores today, and she's just amazing: her reading and composition skills are the equivalent of a grade eight, and her math skills were in the sixes, two grades above where she is right now.

Maybe someday I'll write about the jaw-dropping arrogance and miscalculation I had to deal with this week. The response has been entertaining. I am Wesley from the Princess Bride, and giggle there are two cups in front of me. Hmmm.