ttj - Tom Jones

Blogger is not a tool that can be ameliorated into something good; it would be better to start from scratch.  One quirk: to add a picture for illustration, a lot of back and forth is required between the web page and their service.  Since picking a file, or picture, is a standard form control, the amount of back-and-forth needed is zero.  Unless the internet connection is fast, consistent, and with no packet loss, blogger fails to bring up the over-complicated dialog that is the next step in selecting your picture.  This is silly.  And the connection here is not that bad -- it's been fine, even fast, for browsing a variety of other web sites. This does bring up a serious point, which is that web (and other) software should explicitly state the connection parameters it targets, and it should then be tested with those parameters, instead of just over the LAN from the office next door.  You don't have to actually go on the train, you should be able to set up a...

 There used to be a web design principle "graceful degradation".  The idea was that web sites could be made so that a richly-functioning web site, should it find itself on a user agent not supporting every aspect of the platform it wanted, still worked well, doing the best it could with the features available.  No web site was ever created that adhered to this principle.  The weak thinking behind the "principle" was representative of everybody involved in creating the edifice of shit passing for the "architecture" of the web. There followed a related design principle, "progressive enhancement".  The idea with this one was that a web site should function correctly on a minimal set of platform componenets (not that anyone would or could know what that minimal set consisted of, in general or per site).  If the user agent happened to support additional features, the web site was allowed to use these to enrich the experience. Neither design principle ...