[FFmpeg-devel] ffmpeg.org clean up

[Diego Biurrun]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:37:04PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 08:02:36PM +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:37:57AM -0800, Mike Melanson wrote:
> > > Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:16:38AM -0800, Mike Melanson wrote:
> > > >> Let me know of a plausible, cross-browser method to display 
> > > >> informational graphs (like performance vs. revision) in FATE using your 
> > > >> set of constraints. I'm still trying to solve that problem after a year.
> > > > 
> > > > Forget the cross-browser constraint.  Just make sure it follows the
> > > > relevant standards.  Browsers will eventually catch up, except maybe
> > > > IE, the use of which should be discouraged anyway.
> > > 
> > > So, adhere to standards that no one uses,
> > 
> > I beg your pardon?  The rendering engines of Firefox,  Safari and Opera
> > adhere closely to standards and even IE is catching up by leaps and
> > bounds.  This statement comes straight out of the 1990s...
> > 
> > > and that the biggest browser on the market does not care about?
> > 
> > In our "market" IE has a share of 23%, while Firefox has almost 50%.
> > 
> > http://natsuki.mplayerhq.hu/awstats/mplayerhq.hu/200812/awstats.mplayerhq.hu.browserdetail.html
> > 
> > Don't waste your time accomodating people that can fix their problems by
> > quickly downloading Firefox or upgrading their IE and make the world a
> > better place in the process.
> 
> > Back when I redesigned the MPlayer homepage I tried to make it work on
> > IE, but the pain was just too big and the code uglification too
> > enormous.
> 
> so even though the page doesnt work in IE correctly there still are 23%
> using IE?

Apparently.  Note that roughly half of them are using IE 7+, which
copes much better because it adheres more closely to web standards.

And now let's define what "work" means here.  If you point your browser
to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ you will notice the menu on the left.  Pass
your mouse pointer over it, you will see mouseover effects.  Entries get
highlighted, underlined or surrounded by a frame.

All of this is achieved with pure CSS and not a single line of
javascript.  If you try in IE 6, none of this will appear, but you can
still click on the link.  The site is fully functional, albeit less
pretty.  IE 7 can produce half the effects, IE 8 I never tried.

Back when I rewrote the site, the frames around the images were only
correctly rendered by Opera.  Firefox (or was it Mozilla) caught up in
standards support not long after.  IE might now, I haven't tested the
latest version.

> > We have no customers to scare away and no external requests to satisfy.
> > Just do the right thing, let the IE-using lamers feel the pain.  They
> > will switch browsers or upgrade if it is improtant to them.
> > 
> > I really don't know why you even want to bother...
> 
> let me as project leader say it once, hard and simple
> if whoever designs the webpage knowingly designs it in a way that doesnt work
> on a major browser. That is for example using a feature that is known not to
> be supported on a major browser in way that is mandatory to view the page,
> then i will replace that person by someone else who has the competence to
> write plain html 3.2/4.0 without weird features.

I think it's a very bad idea to help Microsoft and IE hold back the web.

I'll give you an example of a site I like a lot that makes clever use of
just plain XHTML and CSS without needing javascript:

http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/index.en.html

It has some very neat interactive elements like the image with the arrow
in the upper right corner that transforms into a menu if you hover the
mouse over it.

I think it's a textbook example of clever web programming that does not
need javascript or tables, but achieves the same with just divs and CSS.

Five years ago when the site went online, the then-current IE version
(6?) was so backwards that it failed completely.  I remember I was very
impressed by that site then and sat down with a friend to study its
source code and laugh at IE choking.

Back then this was very innovative stuff and I loved them for going
ahead with it and showcasing what could be done with modern web
standards.

Were people hurt by this?  I don't think so, the target audience of a
hacker conference does not use IE.  And I bet I was not the only one
having tons of fun watching IE fail miserably.

When I rewrote the MPlayer site I had a choice of adding hacks and
dealing with ugly and suboptimal code or adhering to standards and
create good code.  I chose the latter, it saved me time and headaches.

It's really the same thing we do with our C code.  We write it to adhere
to a common standard, C99, and compilers that are broken, like MSVC, and
do not support the standard will not compile it.  We had the choice of
accepting hacks and workarounds to make it work somehow, but we chose
not to go down that route.

Diego