Re: Re: A Little Something.

Stut wrote:

On 12 May 2008, at 09:39, Peter Ford wrote:

tedd wrote:

Hi gang: This is what I did this morning: http://webbytedd.com/bb/tribute/ It speaks for itself. Cheers, tedd

tedd, Nothing to do with the subject matter, but I noticed because it is one of your more simple pages: I get a JS "urchinTracker() not defined" error on your site, almost certainly because NoScript is blocking UrchinTracker... Perhaps you should wrap that naked call to urchinTracker() in a conditional - maybe as simple as

    if (urchinTracker) urchinTracker();

<pet-peeve> I really hate seeing JS errors on published sites (i.e. not development sandboxes) </pet-peeve> 'course, there are many sites that make the same call to urchinTracker(), and many many worse errors...

I see your pet peeve and I'll raise you one of mine... <pet-peeve> People who use Javascript blockers, especially Javascript blockers that do a half-arsed job which causes errors. </pet-peeve> If you're going to block Javascript, block it. Don't use something that tries (and apparently fails) to block it intelligently. What are you so afraid of? -Stut

Your pet peeve seems to be a rather thinly veiled personal attack - I tried to be clear to tedd that my comment was not personal, but highlighted by his page. Javascript is a very powerful but rather blunt instrument, and I prefer to be judicious in my use of power. NoScript is not causing the error. The absence of UrchinTracker is causing the error. I choose not to allow UrchinTracker into my system. NoScript is certainly not doing a half-arsed job - it's working perfectly, unless you think I should suffer extra CPU cycles while the browser parses every line of Javascript to see what will happen before running it. That would be a job for a compiler, rather than a scripting engine. What I'm most "afraid" of are assumptions that something I didn't ask for exists in the environment I use to work in. If a page features a message that says "we use Urchin Tracker to (...whatever it is that Urchin Tracker does...) and you may see errors if you block it", then I can understand. What I also am "afraid" of is that I don't know everything that I should be afraid of - using NoScript is a good way of giving me chance to research the stuff that is being pushed into my browser. Of course, in some cases I don't feel the need to research, and block unconditionally until I see a problem with that approach. A developer should not make assumptions about the existence of a feature in the target system - he should specify requirements and let the end-user decide if his product is acceptable, or check that a feature is present and work around it if not. I can even tolerate "This site requires Internet Explorer 5.3 or later" (as my credit card company does) if the providers are upfront about it... I don't consider being afraid as a weakness - but blasé indifference to danger can be a fatal weakness. -- Peter Ford phone: 01580 893333 Developer fax: 01580 893399 Justcroft International Ltd., Staplehurst, Kent