So mail is down at the office this morning. Which serious puts a crimp into what I can do.
So I’ve been noticing that the Archives section of my blog template is generating an annoying Javascript error.
So … I’ve fixed it. Woo-hoo. The old programming skills haven’t completely atrophied. Of course, since I actually created a separate archive directory (which is good practice, and which seems to be encouraged by the Blogger documentation), a lot of the relative references that the archiving processes use don’t work, so I’ve had to hardcode the blog URL into a whole bunch of the template code. Messy. Annoying.
Of course, the really annoying thing here is that, as of WinXP, Java will not be automatically available on new PCs (i.e., it is not part of the default XP installation). Micro$oft claims this is necessary due to their court settlement with Sun, which is, ah, a prevarication on their part. The goal is actually to make the C## scripting language (owned by M$, natch) the de facto scripting standard on the web. Sincek, of course, if it isn’t owned by M$, it can’t be allowed to be a standard ….
Which means that, eventually, either bits and pieces of my blog (and many, many web pages) will break, will need to be recoded in C##, and/or will require that people download a Java VM (for XP-or-newer systems) or C## VM (for pre-XP/non-M$ systems) (or both).
Bad enough that M$ and Netscape “broke” the HTML standard. Bad enough that server-side scripting is still a crapshoot depending on what sort of host you have. Now we’re breaking standardized client-side scripting. Granted that Sun has a finger in this, since they kept trying to twist M$’ arm. But the reality is, it’s yet another step forward for the MicroBorgs, one step backwards for the Web.
End of Diatribe. Time for lunch.