Well. After grousing for a grand total of about 48 hours I was certified as a 'Journeyer'. That's ok by me. I think with respect to the standards here I AM a Journeyer. Imagine that. Thanks to the guys that jumped in to certify me.

I got to post my reply about the voting stuff and due to breaking news, I even had an excuse to post an article about it. Mmmmm.

I also posted an article about making forge-proof bills from plain paper. I would love it if some geek actually did the legwork and printed a few. <rant>

Am currently slugging away with code for my websites. It is just drudgery right now as I attempt to 'beta-ize' hacks for session management, table management, etc. PHP is a thing of great beauty, but it does not really have a client-side counter-part. I am trying my best to minimize the java code needed on the client, but it keeps growing anyway. Why can't the browser guys get together and make SIMPLE standards that work everywhere and do what you actually need. Do you think the stinking browser could send a little RELEVANT information to the server???

I am currently trying to work my way around a nasty hack to resize the page without destroying the automatic 'printability' of my pages. It's a joke.

Realistically speaking, a modern page should be a document that reformats for different media like screen and print. I have CSS that deals with some of this, but obvious document stuff is missing from the HTML specs and the browsers implement these fine points differently.

The code I am currently working on is supposed to allow you to put up a set of presentation pages that can be viewed as a presentation but then go through a few filters to produce a reasonable printed document. Why do I have to code the GD filters??? This should be standard out of the box stuff, but instead the people working on this stuff have gone off into outerspace producing plugins for everything under the sun and extending things like java to the point where the browser is becoming an operating system. Meantime, some of the obvious stuff (like pagination in a printed document) is missing.

This diary is a case in point. There is no way to specify that a new body of HTML code has started or ended. That means that all these editors have to restrict the HTML tags you can use. Blah!

As a programmer of long standing, I can tell you the reason that things are like this: Programmer's do not use their own code as extensively as users do. If they did, they would fix the bugs in the vanilla stuff instead of constantly hacking in new features. Mea Culpa as well, but still... As a user, I object. </rant>