Xah's Edu Corner: Tech Geekers and their Style

[Xah Lee]

Sometimes you want your text to flow into multiple columns, as in
newspaper's layout. However, as of 2005-12 this is not yet possible.
One can make-do by hard-coding it into HTML TABLE using multiple
columns. It is a pain because when you change your text, you have to
manually cut and paste to justify each and every columns by
trial-n-error.

A proposed solution is in CSS3 “Multi-column layout”, drafted in
2001 but not yet in any mainstream browsers as of 2005-12. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-multicol-20010118/

With all the whizbang of styles and features in CSS2, a basic,
necessary, functional layout feature as multi-columns is not there yet.
This is a indication of the fatuousness of the IT industry's
technologies and its people.

 Xah
 xah at xahlee.org
 ∑ http://xahlee.org/

--------------------------------------
Xah Lee wrote:

sometimes in the last few months, apparently Microsoft made changes to
their JavaScript documentation website:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/1e9b3876-3d38-4fd8-8596-1bbfe2330aa9.asp

so that, one has to goddamn press the "expand" button to view the
documentation, for every goddamn page.

What the fuck is going on?

And, good url before the change are now broken (giving HTTP error 404).

Many of the newfangled buttons such as "Copy Code" doesn't goddamn work

in Safari, FireFox, iCab, Mac IE.

And, in any of these browsers, the code examples becomes single
congested block without any line breaks. e.g.

«Circle.prototype.pi = Math.PI; function ACirclesArea () { return
this.pi * this.r * this.r; // The formula for the area of a circle is
r<SUP>2</SUP>. } Circle.prototype.area = ACirclesArea; // The function
that calculates the area of a circle is now a method of the Circle
Prototype object. var a = ACircle.area(); // This is how you would
invoke the area function on a Circle object.»


There are two interpretations to this Microsoft's JavaScript doc
problem:

1. They didn't do it intentionally.

2. They did it intentionally.

If (1), then it would be a fucking incompetence of inordinate order. If
(2), they would be assholes, even though they have the right to do so.

On the other hand, in terms of documentation quality, technological
excellence, responsibility in software, Microsoft in the 21st century
is the holder of human progress when compared to the motherfucking Open
Sourcers lying thru their teeth fuckheads.