Mon, 12 Jan 2004

Internet Explorer sucks; GNOME-Mud progress

"No shit, Sherlock!", you guys are probably thinking. Well, of course I knew, but yesterday it was the first time I did a serious webpage with CSS and stuff that is aimed at Windows users, and after my teammate and I finished it, with some nice looking results, we discovered it's completely crap when viewed on Internet Explorer. This time, the "they lose" strategy won't work, because we don't expect duathletes visiting the site will be using Firebird, so we better fix it. It sucks that 90% of the browser market is dominated by this utter crap. Come on, it's 2004... it's about time transparent PNGs were supported by software that pretends to be serious... not to talk about the random behaviour of their CSS parser. I need to ask some GNOME webmaster how they get their header IE-happy. It probably boils down to avoiding transparent png's where possible, and using jpeg's instead. *sigh*.

To make this entry a bit less ranty, I'll add that as days pass, Debian's GNOME meta packages are nearer and nearer of entering testing. Today, another dependency of the five that remain is entering testing, and Abiword, one of the tough players, is nearly ready. Again all thanks to Kamion and aj doing magic. Now, if we could get epiphany-browser correctly built...

In the more GNOMEish front, it's been a nice week for GNOME-Mud. It has gone from mostly maintenance mode, due to lack of manpower, to, suddenly, having 2 or 3 new persons poking at it and submitting patches, some very nice which close TODO items that were years old. Big thanks to Nuno Sousa, who is on hacking spree, and has already coded connection status and activity for the mud tabs, removed some old annoying behaviours of the tabs, created a nice tray icon that informs of MUD stuff and is currently finishing some rocking MUD Sound Protocol, which will bring sound support for MUDs that support it. It won't be long before 0.10.5 is out. Nuno has more ideas, so stay tuned. :) (anyway, if you think GNOME-Mud has the potential of becoming "The MUD Client" for GNOME and want to help, please write to gnome-mud-list, as we still need help to get things going. For example, we have a plan to move to libglade and do HIG cleanups, help would be very welcome in those areas.)