davidof <david.george@g-dumpthisbit-mail.com> wrote:
> John Bokma wrote:
>> davidof <david.george@g-dumpthisbit-mail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>What I have trouble with is how you managed to use quite so many
>>>lines to produce your homepage... oh you used Microsoft products!!!
>>>This should really go in the A.I.S-E FAQ - never, ever use Microsoft
>>>products to produce web pages, serve databases or do anything else
>>>connected with the Internet unless you have a thorough understanding
>>>of the technology first.
>>
>>
>> Put above that: Never ever bash a company/product if you have no clue
>> what you're talking about and just are repeating fanboy FUD.
>
> John,
>
> I think you should read and think about what I said a bit more rather
> than making rash statements. Obviously the heat wave in Mexico has
> been frazzling your brain.
Nope, especially since there is no heat wave here (remember, Mexico is
not a small country).
> If you use Excel, Word, Frontpage straight out of the tin for building
> web pages you will end up SE unfriendly,
Recent version of Frontpage seems to be quite ok for making webpages,
not much worse compared to other so called WYSIWYG editors.
> often non-compliant,
like so many other WYSIWYG editors. It seems to be hard to do it right.
Who cares if it works in 90% of the browsers?
> horribly
> bloated sites like the one we have just seen.
Bloated doesn't mean that it's bad for SEO per se. Like I said many
times before, HTML code is parsed, and what's not needed is dropped. You
don't get bad points for making a SE parser working harder.
> If you read further down
> you will see I suggested that he indeed uses FP but makes sure that he
> uses a stylesheet and has a standards complaint template to work from
> which FP will do.
Same holds for DW etc. Oh, and standards? W3C *doesn't* publice
standards. They publish recommendations. You don't mean an ISO HTML
template :-)
> It is funny, but over the x number of years I've been reading and
> contributing to this n.g. a lot of people with problems with their
> website have been using some MS product or another
Exactly, or another: Dreamweaver, even a text editor.
> Similarly connecting an Access database via PWS to the Internet or
> even IIS is going to give you some potential major headaches.
I have more experience with Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl etc. And Apache,
MySQL, PHP, Perl, etc. is able to do exactly the same.
> Connecting a PC running unpatched versions of Windows products (or
> ones that don't have the latest patch MS is working on) can
> potentially get your PC owned or infected with virus or other
> mal/adware.
Connecting a default installation of GNU/Linux or any *nix installation
might be not smart either. Running Apache for months without patching
it, ditto. Get it right, software *does* have bugs. That's why this year
people had to update PHPbb several times.
> The number of PCs I have had to clean out of viruses
> testfies to this.
No, it shows what the majority of inexperienced people are using.
> The same is true for other OS of course but it
> doesn't make the above statement any less valid. I repeat what I say,
> if the users had understood a bit better what they were doing then
> they would not have had these problems.
Very true. The problem is the user, or better, the lack of software that
is user friendly in a true sense (which I doubt is possible). Not
Microsoft.
> Similarly for .Net driven sites, you can easily end up with an
> interface that only works with IE excluding a growing population of
> other browsers.
"Growing" is still insignificant compared to the userbase of IE. Sure,
it's nice if your product works with 100% of your visitors, but the
question for the majority of site owners is: is it really worth the
money to make it work for the last 1.03% ? In most cases the answer is
no, not even for the last 10%.
> The danger with MS products is that they hide a lot the complexity of
> what they are doing under a few mouse clicks
Is this restricted to MS products? That was the point I was trying to
make. I get very tired of all those clueless MS rants. Ever installed
LAMP? Just a few mouse clicks. Ever used Ubuntu? Installation is just a
few mouse clicks.
Ever compiled Apache and installed it? Just a few commands on the CLI.
If you don't read the manual you will do stupid things, no matter what
you are using. You will overlook functionality. That's why I do my best
to always read the manual, even if I buy something simple.
> without the user being
> aware of the horrible HTML, jaded javascript and ActivX plugins their
> site is being built with.
You think that an open source product like nvu does this better?
IT is more and more about abstraction (probably always was, but now more
code is involved when a simple mouse button is clicked). It was
certainly not invented by MS.
Ask yourself, in a business, what counts: getting 500+ pages on the web,
within 20 hours that can be used by 87% of the visitors, or having
someone work on it for 5 weeks, and it works for 97.3% of the visitors.
As for SEO, you either do it yourself, or you hire someone.
Most SEO help asked here, IMO, are people who can't neither.
Finally, there are plenty of tools available for cleaning up HTML. If I
was asked to clean up hundreds of pages created with FrontPage I
probably would check tidy first, and if that didn't do the job, I would
write a clean up script in Perl (1-2 days of work). In the end it might
be cheaper then teach someone to manually code hundreds of pages. And
for quite some companies, just ignoring the 10% might be cheaper and
less error prone.
--
John Experienced Perl programmer:
http://castleamber.com/
Fart Free Fox:
http://johnbokma.com/firefox/find-in-page-sound.html