AltME groups: search

I asked a broad question because I didn't know what answer I need 
... ;-)


Specifically, this comes out of Opera and when I parse it to HTTP, 
I don't know if I should make a Request of:

Host: sitecheck2.opera.com
Path: /
Target: ?host=www.rebol.net&hdn=SDbXzuPvK4tsiGnHOia5dA==


or some other way, like perhaps Path: none ? and Target: /?host=www.rebol.net&hdn=SDbXzuPvK4tsiGnHOia5dA==

...and at a qualitative level, I think this might be used as a referer...Opera 
does this from the Home Page button.  I don't get it from other browsers.

The message about tables in here at 31-Jan-2005 2:42:06 AM wrecks 
the AltME tables when it sends its output the the Web Browser.  I 
have seen this before. (press the Print icon in AltME and look at 
this message group in the browser, table lines are missing)

Anyone have experience using Oliverier Auverlot's Magic! I have tried 
several times to get it up and running but never got there...

Thanks, I've tried about 4 times over the last few years and keep 
giving up. The config files keep screwing me. tried under XP, 98, 
using WAMP and under Ubuntu...

Did you manage to make rebol cgi works?
I mean, is the webserver able to run .cgi script with rebol?

Rebol/core need to be installed on the server, chmoded and you must 
have put the right sheeband at the beginning of the .cgi script.

A simple .cgi script like this one is a good test :

I have to say, that I don't get that MVC concept at all. It seems 
to me, like some academic head came with that model some time back, 
while reality might be elsewhere. Do you really desing your apps, 
that its fits MVC model? E.g. that famous Ruby and other DB "automatic" 
schemas which are supposed be so cool have to be rudiculous to someone 
who actually knows SQL. Soon after you start reading docs you find 
out, that when you get to more complicated DB schema, they only provide 
you with excuses that you can't have everything. Sometimes frameworks 
work against you :-) Not that I would not understand their advantages 
otoh, hence I am asking, if QM is really so usefull? The thing is, 
that I tried to give it a try several times, and I did not know what 
to do actually, but maybe I am extremely stupid for such stuff, and 
am only able to work with plain cgi/fcgi ...

You´re mixing up MVC and Active Record, and I vaguely remember discussing 
this before

I do agree it takes time to figure out MVC, and I think the terms 
are too much inspired by a technological point of view. It´s really 
about separating the concerns of the usual stakeholders working on 
websites, or applications in general: the programmer/database designer, 
the consultant designing the business logic, the graphics/UI designer 
and the secretary maintaining the content

Yes, but Active Record is just an implementation of the Model and 
can be swapped out for something else

Basically always when someone thinks this separation is too complicated, 
he is thinking from his own perspective assuming he would have to 
maintain the whole site and hop between tasks

Once you start thinking from the perspectives of very different people 
having to maintain very different aspects of systems, it makes perfect 
sense; and coincidentally also explains many of the problems with 
existing systems through lack of separation of concerns

Would you write 20.000 similar web pages for a web store, or would 
you write one template and store the properties of the goods in a 
database, for example?

QM´s Controllers read and write data from Models and plug it into 
View templates, so there you have it

Best MVC example: OSX. The thing is not the separation all speak 
about (Model = Date, View = GUI, Control = App logic) but how to 
get it to work together. And this is (normally) done by passing messages 
between these three.


Like you click a button and a "loadrecord" message is sent to the 
Data part. IIRC the nice thing is, that more than one "function, 
object, ..." can react on such a message.

I usually test new features starting there.  That's where the flow 
is and you can do everything within the Controller context.

Even if you chuck the View and Model parts, my Controller whips plain 
CGI : )

I now use Piwik. Free and Ok.

Has anyone written a web-shopping cart system using Rebol? So a simple 
CGI api to add/remove stuff to a shopping cart? Felxible enough so 
that it can be integrated with existing web-pages and shopping cart 
content can be forward to different check-out system?

Robert I don't know of any and ask this same question long ago which 
is why I came up with the idea of Rcommerce which would be a REBOL 
based solution similiar to oscommerce.  Many here were vocal about 
it not being something that anyone would trust so I let it the idea 
die.

I do have experience using oscommerce and it worked very well but 
again not a REBOL solution but is at least an open source solution.

Robert, if you just going to forward your items to another check-out-system 
then I thing that is something rather simply to implement via REBOL 
and CGI.  It is when you want to use REBOL to handle the check-out 
system also with the interface to the payment gateway system is where 
I think many people had reservations about using a REBOL solution.

Well that was my main problem.  I didn't like the layouts they presented 
either.  In fact this is one reason why I got out of the business. 
 It was costing me to much manual efforts to do the updating and 
I didn't have the time.

I had 14,000+ items on sale and couldn't put another 6000 plus that 
I wanted to put online.  And of the ones I did have online, I didn't 
have my best distributers content and pricing.

I made the mistake of enabling my entire inventory on Shopzilla once. 
 Needless to say I had a LOT of traffic to mysite.  I had a lot of 
order but I had my competative pricing on and ended up losing money 
in advertising costs because of it.

Ok, thanks for all this input. I will think about this a bit and 
see where to go. For me an online-shop system has to be made of independent 
modules.

Only book I had on REBOL was the Official Guide Book and they used 
my review for rebolpress.com back in the day.

do you have a domain name assigned to your computer? if it is then 
you can access it as anybody else ... I am not sure I understand 
... if you have a virtual host set and you want to test if it works 
(and are on windos) you can add www.yourdomain.com  to hosts file 
in winnt/system32/drivers

I have small tag editing tool for one portal, but something has changed. 
Few of subsites now are full of iaccute strings. I wonder when and 
how it happened, if during hand editing of some html files, but is 
there any easy way of how to decode it back to Czech codepage? I 
just checked, and all files have correct headers specifying charset=windows-1250. 
Or could it be some internal header problem? (BOM, Unicode related?)

btw - browser displays (escapes) it correctly. But our REBOL tool 
just parses it, and puts it into fields, so I need to decode it back 
...

shouldn't you just spawn another process to do the work and then 
return?

It would be much cleaner for me to be able to flush the output back 
to the browser and then do my housekeeping.

And if you called a shell script that ran the rebol process?

Thanks for the tip Doc; I'll try it and report back.

I'm now not sure if flushing the html to the borwser is necessry. 
I tried with a simple test. Firefox displayed the page immediately 
but the connection to the server was kept open. Safari didn't display 
the page unitl the connection to the server was closed.


I dug a lttle deeper into Apache Docs and it seems that Apache doesn't 
buffer simple html output.


It seems that the "problem" is getting the browser to display the 
html before the connection to the server is closed.

And, is there a REBOL version for something like PHPMailer?

With QM, I use QuickTags (integrated into RSP or standalone) to build 
the form elements, and then wrap common constructs in functions.for 
data-driven forms.  It's not as pure as say, Henrik's HTML dialect, 
but perhaps has the flexibility of being at markup level.

http://www.ross-gill.com/page/QuickTags


Alternatively I have a make-doc dialect (somewhat rough) that I use 
for forms on my site wiki.

http://2008.rebolconf.info/on/!Edit_Form?format=raw

Is QM integrated into RSP pages? I think I need to take a closer 
look (and hope I will get it).

I'm trying to find out what's the "best practice" process for forms 
is. But after a bit of research I think it's: Do it by hand. Forms 
are not very complicated. All the generators, tools etc. are quite 
limited when it comes how to process a form. I use MooTools as AJAK 
lib and it has some very nice validator things.

I don't know what it is about doing table-free designs, but I personally 
think it's damn hard to do. You have some parameters that you can 
adjust for CSS that are cryptic and difficult to guess how the layout 
will be. With a table, you have cells, adjustment, width and many 
predictable elements. I think it's because CSS is underpowered for 
what it's meant to do, and the ability to separate design from content 
(desktop vs. phones) is a tad overrated, if it just makes site design 
and construction that much harder.

Agreed with Henrik.  If you aren't expecting the site to be on mulitple 
end-user hardware platforms and not expecting drastic user customizable 
styles, I don't see the need to avoid tables for the layout.  CSS 
just for the fine-tuning.

There have been close to holy wars between the CSS purists and those 
who use tables for everything. The best position is one that balances 
the needs and priorities of your website and development team's aptitudes.

Here'ssome arguments for as few tables as possible for layout purposes 
(it's taken for granted that tables are good for tabular data):

http://www.chromaticsites.com/blog/13-reasons-why-css-is-superior-to-tables-in-website-design/

Of all these points, perhaps accessability is the only valid reason 
for not using tables. If you know how to use CSS and DIVs to produce 
table-like results, fine. But it's ridiculous to assume that CSS/DIVs 
are the main bandwidth hogs for webpages. Sorry, not buying that.

I use tables to presend data that belongs into tables and where it 
makes sense. I didn't use tables for general layout in a long time. 
I am not any purist but I find other ways much better than tables 
for this. It can make quite messy code and they don't degrade well 
to smaller screens.. etc..

I'll go with table free design for layout. I talked to few ppl and 
most don't use table for layout anymore ...

the web is a good distibution system... its just about all it really 
does pefectly... and that's the only thing it was designed to do.


I don't agree that web programming itself is easier, unless you really 
are doing easy apps.  


IMHO Rich clients are the best of both worlds combined into one seamless 
experience

I use mix of tables and CSS for layouts:) I don't remember exact 
cases now, but I had problems to do some layouts with just CSS (working 
not just in one browser).

welll all browsers render stuff differently, chrome FF and safari 
included.

(webkit is the engine powering chrome and safari, if you wonder)

I've once worked with this process of first having a designer building 
mockups in photoshop, then they were moved to Dreamweaver and I had 
to "graft" javascript on top of it, and whenever the designer made 
a change, I had to start from scratch. The customer demanded to see 
the site in full function. We moved so slowly, the project was dropped 
after a few months. 


Another time, I finished the project, but it took so long to do, 
because the design was nearly impossible to convert to HTML/JS. That 
was 5 years ago.

And people are just realizing this now?

Isn't the WHOLE thing simply insane?  After all these years, there 
is not a tool that allows both programmers and artists to work on 
the SAME data?  All strange...

Many of the problems arise, because designers/developers/programmers 
try to make html do, what it wasn't supposed to do in the first place.


When making a movie, one might start out by drawing a storyboard. 
Later in the process, a camera is used to shoot some film, and in 
the end a story is told, that may or may not be close to the original 
storyboard. But it works, because the final output (images within 
a frame) is the same kind of thoughts that goes into creating the 
storyboard (images within a frame).


Designers think in the line of the final output, but html isn't wysiwyg, 
and the html technology might not be well suited for the ideas, the 
designer has. So problems arise. ... Or something. ;-)

I use Balsamico for my mock-ups. I like the tool a lot. And it can 
convert mock-ups to code via emitters.

Yes, it's an ARI tool. Very nice and simple to use.

a better web is coming, just got this from google:

Dear Google Apps admin, 


In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated 
features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements 
in web browser technology. ÊThis includes faster JavaScript processing 
and new standards like HTML5. ÊAs a result, over the course of 2010, 
we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 
as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own 
manufacturers.


We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the 
Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. ÊAfter 
that point, certain functionality within these applications may have 
higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. 
Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers 
for Google Mail and Google Calendar.


Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, 
Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 
and above.


Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message 
in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change 
and asking them to upgrade their browser. ÊWe will also alert you 
again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.


In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements 
to enhance your product experience. ÊWe are aiming to beat that in 
2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration 
products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

I'm creating a forum and using R3 CGI to output a page.  How do we 
send the Doctype to page?

Yeah I couuldn't figure out why I couldn't get the main container 
div to center on IE8.  Kept messing with it and then read where you 
had to declare the DTD for it to center.

and obviously you can have all the image data in a javascript file 
as well (for which you probably already have a longer cache expire 
set up)

Is there anyway to delete wiki spam off rebol.net?  If you just revert 
the page, the spam is still accessible to search engines and still 
gets indexed so the spammer still gets what they want.

and they have `<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />` 
in their head to that effect, so simply reverting the change should 
be fine

And if so, we need a permanent host for it

Anyone want to do some comparison searchs between google, and this?

I looked at the html source and it should clearly float to the top. 
 strange... 

its got everything needed to be scored high (title, H1, and many 
counts of construct in the page).

Last crawled  	31 December 1969 16:00:00.000 PST
Crawler status 	760 - Excluded by crawl space definition

Parser and index status 	0 - The document has not been added to the 
index.

If you can get to them from the root, then they are fair game, unless


.....they have a rel=nofollow......We have that on a few simply because 
they duplicate content (eg viewing a script, viewing a script in 
color, downloading a script


....Mailing list -- best to index either the individual posts (http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-message.r) 
or the complete threads (http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r) 
but not both.


....you may get a __lot__ of duplication when spidering the AltME 
archive as every post has a URL, but we display in batches of 50.....So 
perhaps only spider URLs like
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?post=r3wp291xNNNN
when NNNN is 1, 51, 101, 151, etc....


....I think You already have indexed the ML as on REBOL.,net and 
Carl's latest 300 AltME messages, eg
   http://mail.rebol.net/cgi-bin/mail-list.r?msg=45305
   http://host4.altme.com/altweb/rebol3/chat771.html

It would be better _not_ to have index those; it just creates duplicates 
once you have indexed the equivalents on REBOL.org (especially as 
the AltMe last 300 goes out of date so quickly).

Tell me what is unclear there!

I've already indexed the mailing list on rebol.net so I guess I should 
avoid ml-display-thread.r and display-message.r

Interestingly this search engine has a REST interface so you can 
wrap your own custom search around it.  95k pages and still going 
...

http://www.diigo.com


Looks like an interesting way to add annotations to rebol.com etc 
and share them with others without actually altering the pages

In my approach, the mapping between the data and the "view" is defined 
by a dialect. I guess, one might want to make at least part of that 
mapping part of the view; this does not change the fact that the 
template file can then be simple HTML.

Formatting

 to me does not seem a templating issue though. It's about localization 
 and customization (different users will want different formats for 
 dates, and almost everything else). So, this is a completely separate 
 axis. As Carl often says... the problem is multidimensional, reducing 
 it just to "model" and "view" is not really going to work.

Is anyone here familiar with the current state of WYSIWYG web designers? 
Are there any decent current free ones? I'm only familiar with Kompozer 
(the new Nvu) and have heard good things about WebMatrix. This is 
for a person familiar with Frontpage, but I'm trying to disuade them 
from using it (for all our sakes), and don't want to encourage piracy 
of Dreamweaver or Expression Web.

I haven't used Nvu or Kompozer for years, and only use code editors 
for my web work (or don't do web front end stuff at all).

If Frontpage is the alternative, WebMatrix looks a lot better. However, 
it's focused on developers and complex backends. If the goal is simple 
web pages for a common user, KompoZer is probably better, and more 
in the ballpark of Frontpage

Yes, I'm using it to generate web sites for clients ... but I want 
to add support for mobile devices (via jQuery Mobile) and solve the 
"one website for desktops, another for mobiles" problem (via "Responsive 
Web Design" techniques - see http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design

Steve Jobs made a good point in an interview not long ago: "PC's 
are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this 
is going to make some people uneasy."

Exactly, and there's the opportunity as most people (and tools) are 
still stuck with a "mywebsite.com for desktops and mywebsite.com/m 
for mobiles" model.

I'm not sure that there will be a distinction between mobile browsing 
and desktop browsing for too much longer (no longer than a decade, 
IMO). Just a few more tech advances in battery life will allow for 
practical pico projectors to be included into any mobile device. 
An alternative that increases viewable area is foldable displays 
- they exist already in prototype form - just need to be commercialized. 
HUDs and retinal displays are others. These are not sci-fi anymore. 
But if you're just talking about the next couple of years or so, 
I agree.

Between prototype and cheap commercialization, it can be decades.

I remember having seen large flat screen TV proto in the early 80's 
(plasma).
We had to wait until 2005+ to be able to buy them at low prices.

yeah the first not crappy plasma screens where 60000$  and they didn't 
come down for a long time.

and of course it has to be released

I'm using jQuery, becuase I'm lazy to write own stuff (which I consider 
better in most cases, because I usually need only minimal functionality 
provided by the jQuery) and want to spend as less time working on 
web as possible so I do not examine other frameworks.

I recently used Kompozer to build a quick site to fix a friend's 
site that was so bad I figured I could at least spend a few hours 
and take it from a 1 to a 6 (scale one to ten).

There are a few variations of Kompozer.  But Kompozer is the best 
of them.


It still sucks though.  When you do view source it does not put your 
cursor where you expect it to.  It is nightmarish to figure out how 
to edit tables. 
But, over all, if you keep things simple, it works well enough.

mobile browsing expected to outpace desktop access in 3-5 years.

Most of the world lives on their cell phones.


As to JavaScript Frameworks to fix the biggest human fail in computer 
history (that being that we use HTML+JavaScript to build UserInterface), 
having headed the creation of a complete UI system that is delivered 
through the web, I will say the following:


- Find something that handles Tables (grids, lists) well.  Make sure 
it does verything you need.

- Make a list for yourself of widgets you care about, and confirm 
(assume nothing) about the level of detail with which they operate. 
 For example, Imagine 3 radio buttons, on the web they have no default 
state, and some interfaces allow them to operate like checkboxes, 
not radio buttons.  Again, assume nothing!

- Confirm, for yourself, they work on the platforms you care about. 
 Nothing works on everything, even when they claim it.


I did not want to build Quilt, but we still don't know anything that 
comes close other than Tibco's crap, and I'm not sure they even sell 
it anymore. (I recall it was like $100K).

a good resource I found to start using HTML 5 and help make those 
pages work somewhat backwards compatible on non html5 browsers.

http://diveintohtml5.org/

it has a nice retrospect of HTML and tackles a single question... 
"why do we have an <IMG> tag in html?"... the answer is surprisingly 
simple and evocative:
The ones that win are the ones that ship.

funny... the leading OS is called WINdows   ;-)

about JS libs:

I don't use jQuery .. it's oweblown for what I want (I don't need 
it to reinvent javascript). If I need any complex components like 
datepicker (which I don't want to reinvent) I use mootools usually 
(because you can use just needed parts of it). jQuery UI modules 
(which has this) are very very slow and CSS is so complex I don't 
even start to get it how to customize it.


Dojo always seemed this mega lib that I don't want either. If I go 
to their demos (at least last time I looked) everything is slow and 
unresponsive. I want my things to be slim on code and snappy.


Prototype (mootools does this also, but I think a little less) is 
first generation JS lib (that started it all). I think it heavily 
monkey patches the core JS/DOM objects.. thats why I don't like it.


I also neve use css3 selectors in my JS code (that is a major part 
why people use jquery and likes). I always move relative to an element 
with seekFwd, seekIn, seekOut, seekBack fuctions I have or just use 
ID of element (and then seek if needed).

UsrJoy and InvoiceFox generate 90% of html on client side. I have 
few weird (functional-ish (as in functional programming)) ideas how 
to do this: I use http://code.google.com/p/jsgoo/http://refaktor.si/demos/jsgoo/
 for this

Janko: we tried http://angularjs.orgrecently. it also does client 
side html templating BUT in 2 ways. the merged data can update itself 
inside the template and also if some input fields change, the corresponding 
model variables reflect this change automatically.

the best framework i've seen so far & u can mix it easily with jquery 
or mootools

jQuery is imo typical example of another so called standard the world 
has choosen, and yet again the wrong one :-) Even MS suggests it 
to use with SharePoint ....

and yes, i have a site using angular, but it's a work in progress, 
so i can't show it publicly. privmsg me if u r interested

So, angular is a DSL that is compiled into JS client side to handle 
all the dom manipulation and other stuff that you would normally 
have to write JS to do ...or use Jquery functions.

angular is a js library which interprets special tags, attributes 
and element values in the dom and sets up an event handler system 
behind the scenes which keeps model objects in sync w the dom content 
(back and forth)

wow, the new FF really is annoying  :-)


what is it with browser makers... they just keep making their stuff 
more and more aggravating to use.

finally i dont have to start with turning off the bookmarks bar on 
a fresh install. most ppl dont use it anyway... and probably FF maker 
have *measuered* this. and giving more space for the content worth 
more than bookmarking

bah, I've learnt so many keyboard shortcuts in my life (with a past 
in vfx and innumerable 3d & fx softwares ;-) that my memory for such 
things is pretty full.

I did just quick look at the site and it seems it uses this service 
http://fontdeck.com

it would however look cryptic and wouldn't empasize what is that 
page about, so we were thinking about attaching a slug to it, to 
help human usage and search engines too.

Q1: im not very sure about how much more effective from a SEO point 
of view to have a slug in the URL as opposed to keywords in meta 
tags and the same description as in the title of the page for example.

it's not a news site, so there might be issues with the unqueness 
of the slug and other things like, i might need to display the nominal 
size of the part which is a fraction in many cases, lile 1-1/4" which 
wouldnt read nice at all if i have to replace the slash. the dbl 
quote might be okay to omit though

set-net [[tim-:-mydomain-:-com] mail.mydomain.com mail.mydomain.com none 
none none [tim-:-mydomain-:-com] '*******'] where 'mydomain' replaces my 
domain and asterisk obfuscate the password, if I send a message I 
get the following : connecting to: mail.mydomain.com

** User Error: Server error: tcp 503 AUTH command used when not advertised
** Near: smtp-port: open [scheme: 'esmtp] 
either only

got it Kaj and been there. Will use.

And thanks Henrik. I see the pencil. Any ideas anyone?