Web Tech/Personal - UI

A lot has been written on the topic of developing web applications, some of it by A-list bloggers. I do not wish to rehash this beaten topic. But I have to vent. You see (or rather, you don’t see, because it’s not ready yet¹), I’m building a grid widget to display fic data. I want it to have some pretty nifty features. I also want it to work for as many users as possible, while degrading gracefully for people stuck with less sophisticated UAs (*coughoperacough*). And I also want to finish it before the next Harry Potter book comes out. If I were developing for the corporate WAN, I could’ve made assumptions that would’ve completely eliminated the need to do any work. I could’ve declared right from the start, that, for example²: the user has Windows 2000 with Explorer 5.5 or 6 on a brand-name PC bought in the last 48 months. The user has typical-to-LAN bandwidth to the server. The user has Microsoft Office installed. The user does not have any disabilities that would prevent him or her from normally using a browser, to the full extent of the audiovisual experience I choose to provide. The user will click “yes” if asked about trusting my domain to install third party software. The user is of legal age and literate. All kinds of stuff. Then, I would’ve loaded the data into an XML Data Island, opened Excel as an ActiveX control, told it to load the data into a spreadsheet, color it according to some rules and — voila! — instant data accessibility, do with it whatever your heart desires (e.g. pivot it and look for average word count per month per author grouped by preferred ship that would mean the slashers are more prolific than the canon thumpers — but of course finding supporting evidence for predetermined conclusions is a bit of bad science...). But I'm not, and I can’t. Because unlike on the nice clean corporate WAN, the people on the big scary internet have Camino on OS X on a G5, Netscape 3 on VMS/HPUX/SunOS/Tru64/AIX/IRIX/BSD/Win3.1, and Lynx/Links/W3M on an X-less Linux-based NAT firewall/router (with a 9” monitor, stuck in a utility closet). They speak many different languages, some are eight-year-olds, some are blind, and not many would install third-party untrusted software just to browse fanfic, or already conveniently have MS Office installed. So what can I do? Either give the user non-rich, static content, or reinvent the wheel. As you realize, I chose the later, because otherwise I wouldn’t be ranting about it. If I didn’t love doing this, I know I would've hated it. P.S. Every time I try to write more than one sentence, I realize how hard it is to write conformant documents in English. I mean, of course writing well is hard, as it’s an art that takes skill and talent, but just writing something that’s grammatically correct… Let’s just say I’m glad computer languages have much simpler rules. People, treasure your betas! 1 - Please leave a comment if you want a preview, wish to offer help beta testing it or wish to be included in random hallway usability tests. 2 - The described environment does not neccessarily represent the conditions at my workplace.