WYSIWYG message board?

[CoreIssue]

Java is NOT JavaScript. They are completely different technologies. Look, I hate to be a dick, especially when Sam has been so civil about it, but it's clear that you don't know anything about the technology involved with this discussion (which you stated at the beginning but seem to have forgotten...), and your repeated calls for screwing over a large portion of users simply because their browsers actually follow web standards is absolutely ridiculous.

And standards are being developed for both. So get over it.

SamG did not want javascript in phpBB but it is already there in the Standard Editors in both 2.0.X and Olympus. As in bbcode.js and editor.js files.

AND if you had done your research better you would know javascript is used in such as HotEditor. As in example files on my server for HotEditor are
editor.js
editor2.js

But that does not mean they cannot be improved upon. Or that HotEditor rules the roost.

This conversation has never really been about adding js scripting. It has been about preferred browers.

As for screwing over large portions of users is pure garbage. Portions is a semantical escapism to avoid the term percentage of users. And only about 2% use the related browsers Opera and Safari.

So that argument is false and all I am seeing is a resistance to switching browsers as needed.

Fine. You prefer your brower but stop pushing issues that don't need pushed.

You would STILL have the Standard Editor you are using now to continue using. You loose NOTHING.

Your argument is that if you cannot use it no one else can. And that is personal, not technical choice.

My points illustrated by the % of users, post examples I gave and so on are totally valid. The tech is out there and being used by far more than the 2% of users you keep aluding to.

There are a lot of CMS, Portals, Boards, sites and other such that will not display properly or at all in your preferred browser. So are they all to but shut down to accomodate you?

And I have been civil to SamG. Disagreeing with him does not make me uncivil.

Wish I could say you have been civil, but you have not. So to answer in the tone you have posted it; Tough! Get over it. You are not going to wipe the Internet clean of what you don't like.

Get the developers of Opera and Safari on the stick and get them to fix their problems.

NO one is living up to the standards because the tech is evolving faster than the standards. The standards will always lag behind.

And be far more honest than you have been. 2% is an extreme minority in any frame of reference or endeavor. Especially when the have the ablitity to switch to what works as need with a click of their mouse.

Have at it. This has descended into a loop argument. Say something new and I will respond. Other wise you can have the last word.

[SamG]

What this has descended into is a pooling of ... misinformation.

The next time somebody makes me spit Coke into my keyboard by posting something like "This conversation has never really been about adding js scripting. It has been about preferred browers," I'm going to sue.

'Night, all.

[Roberdin]

Get the developers of Opera and Safari on the stick and get them to fix their problems.

NO one is living up to the standards because the tech is evolving faster than the standards. The standards will always lag behind.

The standards are in many cases ahead of the technology offered by leading browsers. Just because many browser creators refuse to comply with standards that they helped to draw up out of their own stubborn pride is no reason to follow their example. Opera and Safari have fewer problems than Internet Explorer.

If you don't buy this argument... then I look forward to seeing the International Food and Cuisine Taste Standards, as drawn up by McDonald's - standards by popularity.

[CoreIssue]

Get the developers of Opera and Safari on the stick and get them to fix their problems.

NO one is living up to the standards because the tech is evolving faster than the standards. The standards will always lag behind.

The standards are in many cases ahead of the technology offered by leading browsers. Just because many browser creators refuse to comply with standards that they helped to draw up out of their own stubborn pride is no reason to follow their example. Opera and Safari have fewer problems than Internet Explorer.

If you don't buy this argument... then I look forward to seeing the International Food and Cuisine Taste Standards, as drawn up by McDonald's - standards by popularity.

Hmmmm. So the standards create the technology and it is not the evolution of technology that develops the standards?

Nope. Bad argument there.

Why? Because standards come from research and development that show what will and will not work. Thus standards are born.

You take what you have and innovate to what you do not have thus evolving the standards. The failures weed themselves out as you go.

To me your argument is cart before the horse argument.

Yes, rigidity does have fewer problems when one refuses to move beyond what works. But risk taking is progress and where the gains are.

What good is a foundation if there is no house upon it?

I work in a very technical industry. And the standards of tomorrow come from the innovations and experiments of today.

Those McDonald developers gave us computers and moved us from the DOS of my first PC to Windows and on. You don't start out with a stable tech. You begin badly and develop it to stable.

By your declarations here we should have crashed and burned a long time ago. But we have not. It has gotten better.

We just have to remember the computer field is still extremely young with a long way to go. And growth means change, clumsiness and so on.

By what you are saying phpBB would not exist because it uses non standards in its architecure. Such as BBCodes.

Extremes are death in these areas. The true guide is balance.

Keep your standards pure browsers. Then when the broken ones fail miserably you can happy tell the rest of us how wrong we were. But don't tell us we have to comply to you when what we are already using does not comply.

But of course the only ones that really have a say are the developers. This is their baby.

[cyberCrank]

Hmmmm. So the standards create the technology and it is not the evolution of technology that develops the standards?

Nope. Bad argument there.

Why? Because standards come from research and development that show what will and will not work. Thus standards are born.

You take what you have and innovate to what you do not have thus evolving the standards. The failures weed themselves out as you go.

To me your argument is cart before the horse argument.

Yes, rigidity does have fewer problems when one refuses to move beyond what works. But risk taking is progress and where the gains are.

What good is a foundation if there is no house upon it?

I work in a very technical industry. And the standards of tomorrow come from the innovations and experiments of today.

Your argument is mostly true for the scientific and technical world where our technologies are mostly evolutionary with "leap frog" advances, and the same is mostly true with standards. Standards can at times be good to advance the implementation of new technologies conforming to existing standards, but standards can become limiting and slow the progress of technology too as often happens, which is the way it mostly has to be to have some stability and still make progress. Most agree that we "stand" on the "shoulders" of "giants" who precede us in science and technology, but there are some rogue minds and advanced thinkers that can actually develop "standards" (blueprints, ideas, thoughts, patterns, prescriptions, etc.) before related and specific technologies arrive, but these are rare IMO. But I have to agree that in most cases there is some related technologies that advance and become new standards...

So to strike a balance and compromise in our delimited thought processes, maybe we could strike an analogy and say that some scientists and technologists understand that the "egg" does not always come first. Hence, in the not-too-distant future, a new standard will be beamed down to us, hidden in the side-bands, but it will describe how to construct and develop a new time machine transcending special and general relativity and coupling string theory, tachyons, and worm-hole navigation channels. Then we construct that new technology and we'll be good to go. But in order to capitalize on this new standard and way of thinking and to progress along these lines, we must embrace the dark side, because modern scientists understand that the speed of darkness exceeds the speed of light...

[SamG]

We use -- in fact rely on -- standardized technologies like TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, CSS, PHP, Perl, PPP, PPPoE, MIME, ASP, JSP, CGI, .NET, SSL, and about a billion others every single day on the Web, and, oddly enough, I don't see much fuss made about it all.

The point isn't to make things static, but to make them uniform. If it weren't for the uniform standard we call HTTP, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Period.

All this (selective) resistence to the idea that uniform technologies invariably comply with a standard somehow, somewhere, is really painful to watch. And quite unnecessary, to boot. Even regional technological standards (NTSC, for a random example) are still standards that provide uniformity. To believe otherwise seems rather a stretch.

Even outside technology, we live with standards every day. When we buy a bolt, we know that we can also buy a nut that fits that bolt.

So let's forget this almost complete fabrication that somehow standards are our thorn in the flesh. There's no future in it.

[CoreIssue]

Even outside technology, we live with standards every day. When we buy a bolt, we know that we can also buy a nut that fits that bolt.

So let's forget this almost complete fabrication that somehow standards are our thorn in the flesh. There's no future in it.

You are completely missing the point I am saying then.

You cannot quote me anywhere as saying there are no need for standards. That is a very bad assumption you have made all on your own.

I work with your example industry. I am in the tooling end. Both standard and design cutting tools.

So please knock off the arguments I don't understand these issues. Because I do.

You say bolt. But obviously you do not understand there are many kinds of threads that go on bolts and related usage. And one that works for one will not work for the other.

A bolt in an adjusting mechanism has very tight tolerance so it will not jam or rattle. A bolt to hold something on has a loose fit so it will jam. The jam is what keeps it locked.

So that is one example of what most think is bad is actually good. And varying the jam determines if the bolt is breakable (removable) or not.

Same with fitting components together. There are slide fits, press fits, minimal pressure fits and so on.

Such are the standards. But anyone working in that field knows they are not the end alls of how it is done. The application determines if you use the standard or have to tweak off standard to get the results.

Cutting tools are far more complex and I won't even venture to try to fit examples in here because now you are working with 3D and multiple fields of application that must combind to produce a functional tool.

But I will say you can take 2 cutters that look identical and vary a component on each and you get two completely different applications.

And that is the point I am trying to present here that you are not seeing.

Yes. Standards are important. Everything is built around them.

No. By the book standards will not always give you the applications or results you want because to try to define all into a book of base standards is impossible.

Every application, even wysiwyg, has standards in it because without them it won't work.

What we are arguing is the tweaking here. You don't want tweaking. I do.

I use tweaking in my work all the time and get superior over the standards' results because I am not telling the end user you must use pure standards to get what you want because that is a lie.

I compete with those who use pure standards in tooling. I win, they loose, because my tweaking produces a superior end product.

That furniture in your house is built upon standards that are tweaked to enable to manufacturer to produce the product. Standards say you combine lamello with mitre cutter x to give the joint. But tweaking mitre cutter x to include an extra dimension produces a stronger joint in that application.

Standards say house x must have feature y. But put house x in another zone than where those standards were developed and watch house x fall apart because that standard now becomes a guaranteed disaster by climate.

Anti freeze standard is 50/50 blend. But in certain areas you will freeze up because 50/50 is too low and there is no danger of boiling.

And on and on.

So my point is standards is the starting point in an application, not the product end point.

So using your own example of everyday life who knows what they are talking about here? Me or you?

My customers would laugh at what you are declaring here. Neither or they would be in business trying to do it your way. And a lot of everyday life products would not exist.

wysiwyg functions because of the standards and does more than the standards because they are built upon and from the standards, not that they can be found in the standards book.

Inovation takes the standards, tweaks, adds to and otherwise evolves them into new applications nor foreseen when writing the standards. The standards then evolve to add or change to absorb the the applications.

The Standards you are talking about came from applications development.

In all things it is theory to law/application.

[CoreIssue]

And I forgot one point.

When there are no standards for new areas of tech you don't say forget the tech.

You develop the tech which develops the standards.

That is how all those things in your list came into being. Tech first with standards developing in parallel.

[SamG]

Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I am really tired of all this hair splitting.

I work with your example industry. I am in the tooling end. Both standard and design cutting tools.

So please knock off the arguments I don't understand these issues. Because I do.

You say bolt. But obviously you do not understand there are many kinds of threads that go on bolts and related usage....

You work at the tooling end, and I happen to have years of experience at the production end. I've very possibly made more threaded parts than you have, so while you think it obvious that my knowledge of threads is limited, I actually do know something about them.

You don't want tweaking, you want to make a Class 2 thread out of bar soap when you could be using brass, or steel, or stainless, or even plastics (from my point of view).

I never said you said there is no need for standards. What I said was, you fail to appreciate the value and purpose of the standards which are the Web. You don't "tweak" HTTP. You revise it, or you layer it. But HTTP remains HTTP, and for good purpose. You take my simple illustration of hardware and try to take it into all kinds of directions I never included in the illustration itself.

My "customers" would laugh at your attempt to make manufacturing methods and Web technologies parallel. I can "tweak" a diehead to get the thread I'm after, but I don't "tweak" XHTML or CSS or JavaScript in the same way. Your attempt to argue that I can is simply additional misinformation. At best.

You fail to appreciate the purpose of the technical discussion at hand. That's fine. Nobody knows it all. But you still are failing to follow it. You seem to think that anybody who doesn't want to do WYSIWYG via the JavaScript cobble is some kind of obscurantist. If there are better ways to do WYSIWYG than via JavaScript, and if phpBB is going to employ a WYSIWYG editor one way or another, then how about we let the standards help us choose the most uniform method? Why not do it "right"?

I'm leaving this discussion before I say anything more that I might regret. This exchange has gone well beyond the point of no return, so far as I am concerned.

[CoreIssue]

I have worked both production, repair, custom machining, carbide, diamond and high speed tooling and own my own small company.

So while you are manufacturing I am out their trouble shooting, designing solutions the standards do not address and coming up with solutions to ways to do new things the standards do not even anticipate.

So I understand the fundamentals and also understand one can become so entrenched in them they get their heads beat in by others who innovate.

Repetitively making what others design does not mean you automatically become an expert on the application end. Any more than repetitively using what others design for web use makes one an expert, which I fully concede I am not.

All I am saying is nothing progresses by only applying the standards and fundamentals. They are base issues never intended to be anything but kick off points to create applications. A commmon denominator necessary for functionality but not the sole determinate of functionality.

When one becomes too entrenched in the old way new ways never evolve.

By golly! There was a day a lot of those scripts you talk about as standards were the new boys on the street and those determined to stick with the old ways howled about standards.

Just look at the howling that went on when windows changed basics. And Longhorn is suppose to do it again.

I, for one, appreciate the non standards that gave us windows and moved us away from non windows platforms. I hated those.

But I agree with one point you said. Time to end it.

I really think we have said our piece and positions and not much else to add.

There is no point in moving any debate to personal or anger. Just corrupts to whole point of debating an issue.

Bye on this issue.