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Ei--- missed you guys so much!!!;-D ;-D ;-D
it's been like... a year i guess... hope u still guys remember me.
coz i never 4gotcha! )
the people who helped me move on when i had problems... how can i ever thank you guys 4 what uve done...
bam2x, lenny, david in thailand, heathyr, timmy & d rest of d guys!
so how've y'all been doin'?
me... m okay.::-)
just graduated from college & now m starting teaching web design soon in d same university i graduated from.
the best part is? i was finally able to come out before graduation & all my friends thought it was okay & they accepted me for who i was! wow... that was a really great feeling...
like that character, Jack from "Dawson's Creek" said,
"It's not about realizing that I was gay... it was about realizing that I was okay." ;-D
i've never been happier.
i still haven't told my parents though...:-/ guess that's another chapter.
love life? well, m still single. yeah, its tormenting, i knw:-( but at least m not in that much pain anymore. i still like stephen... same old, same old. i'll find someone else 2 get attracted to.. i hope. ei, the heart wants what d heart wants so sue me guys. ;-D
that's all 4 now! hope u guys reply!:-*
"The worst way of missing someone is to be sitting right next to them knowing you can't have them." To Stephen Tsang, wherever you are.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Missed you too. Welcome home. Doesn't seem like a year.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Welcome!
It's very gladdening (is that even a word? LOL! If not it sure ought to be!) to hear you're doing fine, except maybe on the lovelife front. Congratulations on the whole coming-out thing too, and I really hope you'll decide to stay here with us for a while.
One can never have too many friends!
(And, thank you for remembering me.  )
Hugs
-L
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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to make a long story short, you should scroll back a few posts (well more than that..) and check out the topic "it's time." or well here, i will paste the URL: http://forum.iomfats.org/w-agora/index.php?site=forumiomfatsorg&bn=forumiomfatsorg_placeofsafety&action=list
that explains what's going on with me, if you're curious.
i'm not much liked by a good portion of people here, but that's not to do with this--it's to do with me being a bitch (or is that bastard, now?) for no reason. or, reasons driven by being that unhappy with myself, which now i have figured out, but there's no one to share it with, who used to be there.
anyways, enough about that. mostly i'm just here to read and comment (and apparently kill topics) now and again. CONGRATS on your graduation -- AND coming out to your friends! maybe that'll be a good indicator of how it'll go with your family when you decide you're ready to take that step. i certainly hope it goes the same.
you will find someone, i still hold faith in that, like i did before.  hang in there. nice to see friendly people who remember me ... fondly. makes me feel a little more comfortable in this place i used to call home (well, still is .. it's just i hang out on the doorstep now, if you will).
always,
leander
(ex-heathyr)
my void does not want.
-- 2.13.61.
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Hi Michael!! YAAY!! Very glad for your update, and glad that you still haven't given up on finding good boyfriend material...keep fishing!
Here in Thailand, we're having the Hot Season...over 38 C (100+ F) every day, which makes us hefty people wilt a bit...hehe
But the Rainy Season isn't far off, and it's kind of my favorite.
Man's fine, just finished the term at his Uni, and now he's half way to his BA. I'm very proud of him to be doing this part-time cuz it takes so long, plus being one of the oldest students in his classes at age 33 (34 next month).
"Always forgive your enemies...nothing annoys them quite so much." Oscar Wilde
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saben
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On fire! |
Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537
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That is one of the reasons I am against layouts involving frames, this one is especially painful as you don't seem to be able to view the source either, nonetheless, right clicking on a link to a topic will give you the valid URL for the topic, in this case
http://forum.iomfats.org/w-agora/view.php?site=forumiomfatsorg&bn=forumiomfatsorg_placeofsafety&key=1081826009
Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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URLS copy and paste perfectly well. As you can see you have not only copied one but also pasted it. And notice that they also get interpreted as links, not just text.
This forum is designed to be simple, not for the alleged expert. It is not particularly intended that the forum shoudl link within itself. There are times whena database re-index may be necessary, thus any internal manual links would be compromised since they are not in a data table, nor can they be in a data table.
So it is nothing to do with frames. It is, instead, to do with pragmatic design, and to protect the forum from the alleged expert.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Research has also shown this to be in part browser dependent. So, as usual, blame Bill Gates.
Do you know that you always blame the webmaster of the site you are viewing and never the underlying technology?
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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saben
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On fire! |
Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537
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From experience the majority of users (usually in excess of 95%) will be using a Microsoft system with Internet Explorer, part of the responsibility of a webmaster (in my opinion) is to try to ensure that their sites not only look good, have easy navigation and the like; but also that they conform to standards, as well as being suitable for current trends and technologies. I also find that a polite webmaster will make sure that their site works on non-standard browsers and in resolutions other than 1024x768 or whatever they happen to be using.
All this said, I don't believe you programmed this forum script so this is not your responsibility, but the responsbility of W-Agora. I can't look at the source code to your forums, so I'm not sure of the actual technology behind it, I was just assuming that the top bar was frames related.
I didn't clarify very well in my original post, but in these forums, the adress bar does not change when navigating between topics and posts, for me it always remains http://forum.iomfats.org/w-agora/index.php?bn=forumiomfatsorg_placeofsafety This means you cannot directly copy a topic or post URL out of the adress bar and paste into a post or chat window because it will just send you back to the front page. In order to find the correct URL you need to right click the link of the topic you want, go to properties, then copy the URL displayed in the window that appears.
This may only be for Internet Explorer users, but that means about 95% of your users need to go through this process in order to copy the relevant topic URL. The top bar is useful for navigation around the board, but by having it exist other limitations are put on other parts of the forums. Is it worth having it? Probably. I'm not here to snipe at the forum technology (I have expressed in the past the fact that I think it is limited enough times for me not to have to tell you that again). I'm simply pointing out a specific limitation that was encountered by leander without realising in his (? uhh, now is when I hate gender specific pronouns I said leander, though, so I'll stick with 'his') original post and telling other members how they can get around the limitation without having to use a different web browser. I'm not attacking the hard work yourself and Megaman HAVE put into these forums, I'm just pointing out why leander's link didn't turn out as he expected it to.
Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Which, of course, you had no need to do. But it was kind of you to make the attempt, even if you bewildered yourself with the explanation you gave.
Now, as to standards, every area except the forum on this site is W3C XHTML compliant. The forum is not simply because we cannot declare it so. Users have the opportunity of entering their own HTML and XHTML to a limited degree. All other areas on the site have the W3C logo for XHTML and CSS.
If you are looking at standards IE is most emphatically not a standard. It is proprietary software issues by M$.
I have also explained to you, and you missed totally, the explanation about internal links from one thread to another. These are always at the poster's risk because the database, held in MySQL, may be reindexed at any time, and the internal links posted within messages cannot be accounted for.
There are very good reasons why we keep the site secure and prevent source code access. Those reasons are called experts. Experts are the reason why the server itself is firewalled securely and the access to it is heavily encrypted.
If one must use an internal link to another thread one should first right click and say "Open in a new window" and then copy that address into the message. One shoudl bear in mind that this may not be preserved when a re-index happens
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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megaman
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Getting started |
Location: Germany
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 27
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Saben wrote:
> From experience the majority of users (usually in excess of 95%) will be using a Microsoft system with Internet Explorer, part of the responsibility of a webmaster (in my opinion) is to try to ensure that their sites not only look good, have easy navigation and the like; but also that they conform to standards, as well as being suitable for current trends and technologies. I also find that a polite webmaster will make sure that their site works on non-standard browsers and in resolutions other than 1024x768 or whatever they happen to be using.
you want websites to conform to standards, but by the same token you want current trends and technologies applied. regrettably those two are usually far from being the same, at some point one has to make decisions. we for our part decided to go at great lengths to make the site compatible to as many browsers as possible, but not to break standards to accomplish that. the usual term on the net is "this website is optimized for IE" which only means "we have worked around every known IE bug, but regrettably all browsers that really are standard conform will have a problem here". we don't think one single company (esp. not M$) or one single product (esp. IE) should be able to make us bend, so we don't bend.
the major OS and browser can't be stated as simple as you did. it is very dependent on what kind of website you have and what your target audience is. on this website for example, about 12% of the users don't use M$/IE, and I think every single one of them would be (righteously) rather pissed if we introduced "current trends and technologies" - which usually means "another M$ idea to increase marketshare, control, and user dissatisfaction". and we certainly don't want to loose more than every 10th of our users just to please you.
> All this said, I don't believe you programmed this forum script so this is not your responsibility, but the responsbility of W-Agora. I can't look at the source code to your forums, so I'm not sure of the actual technology behind it, I was just assuming that the top bar was frames related.
for the source code of our forums, actually it's none of your business, but you surely have found the w-agora-link on the foot of every page, and if you had followed it you'd already possess the source code - if you understood it that is.
though I don't see why you need the source code to see if the top bar has anything to do with frames or not: look at the html code delivered by the server and you will see if it's a frame or not, there's really no magic involved.
> I didn't clarify very well in my original post, but in these forums, the adress bar does not change when navigating between topics and posts, for me it always remains http://forum.iomfats.org/w-agora/index.php?bn=forumiomfatsorg_placeofsafety This means you cannot directly copy a topic or post URL out of the adress bar and paste into a post or chat window because it will just send you back to the front page. In order to find the correct URL you need to right click the link of the topic you want, go to properties, then copy the URL displayed in the window that appears.
now I have solution for that "problem": as you undoubtedly know, one of IE's latest "features" is that it allows javascript code to put any URL in the location bar, and thus make the user believe he is visiting his bank or his email account, while in reality he is on a hacker site and about to deliver his password or credit card details directly into the hands of malicious users of such information. but then - maybe you'd rather have IE fix this bug, er, I mean remove that feature.
> This may only be for Internet Explorer users, but that means about 95% of your users need to go through this process in order to copy the relevant topic URL. The top bar is useful for navigation around the board, but by having it exist other limitations are put on other parts of the forums. Is it worth having it? Probably. I'm not here to snipe at the forum technology (I have expressed in the past the fact that I think it is limited enough times for me not to have to tell you that again). I'm simply pointing out a specific limitation that was encountered by leander without realising in his (? uhh, now is when I hate gender specific pronouns I said leander, though, so I'll stick with 'his') original post and telling other members how they can get around the limitation without having to use a different web browser. I'm not attacking the hard work yourself and Megaman HAVE put into these forums, I'm just pointing out why leander's link didn't turn out as he expected it to.
the top bar also has advantages. It has to be loaded only once, and while you may be on a highspeed connection, we still have loads of people using good old modems, and they really care about those few kilobytes.
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talk about bewildered -- i think you're the first person (and i'm talking multiple forums, not only here!) to actually respect my decision and ... to see myself referred to what is paralleled to how i feel/what i am (though gender specific pronouns ARE limiting, yes) felt very nice.
thank you for that.
also i didn't mean to cause all this confusion by pasting the link ... i just thought to save michael some work having to scroll back a couple pages for the topic in question--if he even cared to read it.
my void does not want.
-- 2.13.61.
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For one time only, I have to agree VIGOROUSLY with what both Timmy, and Megaman, have achieved here.
You should have you numbers better prepared to start making assertions such as you do.
Yes, within the continental U. S., Microsoft's Internet Explorer may well account for 95% of the installed web-browser user-base; but that DOES NOT hold true for the rest of the World, by any stretch.
The U.S., with their 300-odd millions of consumers may well be considered "the World", but they are not likely going to be holding that edge much longer, especially as lesser developed countries move on-line.
For example: In Canada Internet Explorer has less than 40% of market-share, with the balance divided between a host of other players, Netscape/Mozilla being the largest of those, and Opera not far behind.
In Asia, and I'm surprised you were not aware of this, Internet Explorer currently accounts for some 60% of the installed base, with this number falling rapidly over the past 12-months from a high of nearly 90%, and expected to number somewhere around 20% by 2006.
Timmy's web-site, by and large, is exceptionally compliant to current, and emerging, standards as defined by the . This could not have been said to be true as little as 6-months ago; but since the reworking of his site, and the marvellous efforts of "M.EH", all prior deficiencies were addressed, and with the sole remaining exception being A Place Of Safety.
Regarding A Place of Safety, For reasons of practicality and backwards compatibility, certain legacy code remains, and as Timmy explained to me before changes were effected, will likely remain for the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, I will say this, before the re-design of the Timmy's web-site, and his incorporation of recent changes to the code within the W-Agora application driving A Place Of Safety, none of the alternative web-browsers worked well, if at all anywhere on Timmy's site, and especially not at the Forum. THEY ALL DO NOW, including your much-loved Internet Explorer. Granted, not all browsers deliver the content in quite the same manner for each and every-page, but that is outside the control of either Megaman, or Timmy, and lies solely within the province of the OpenSource community, and who are the people, NOT MICROSOFT, that are setting the rules, and the coders developing the alternative web-browsers.
Get with the programme.
I have 6 Domains on-line (and another half-dozen projected for the next 12-months) one of these with two Forums, all requiring unique specifications and code to make them operate; but all with one constancy - compliance to standards, not Microsoft's.
"... comme recherché qu'un délice callipygian"
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... that it was not easy convincing Timmy to make the shift either. He's a "died in the wool" Internet Explorer aficionado, just like yo seem to be; with him arguing, and quite rightly too, that everything he'd seen and read supporting OpenSource and Standards-compliance was very amateurish, and sort of not very business-like.
Yes it largely is, and that's probably because the people behind much of the achievements of publicizing the shift to OpenSource and w3.org Standard's are people just like you and me, and Timmy, and Megaman, and nowhere are the big-bucks being made available to sponsor the "professional" look and feel that he was expecting.
But somewhere along the way, Timmy did get the message, and he has done wonderful things with his entire site, and I fully expect that more is in store for the Forum too; this being said regardless of his and mine no-longer having any dialogue what-so-ever about anything anymore.
Do you operate a web-site; and just how compliant to w3.org standards is it; or do you only use proprietary Microsoft code to render your content to your visitors.
Incidentally, one of the lesser known, "new", features of the GRE-based web-browsers (Netscape/Mozilla only being two of more than a dozen of these in development) is the capability of them to now render Microsoft's proprietary "ActiveX" ActiveServer pages. The plugin making that happen was as I understand it, written by a team of developers (who are employed by guess who dude) and whose names are not published for logical reasons.
Every effort by the alternative OpenSource community is being made to make all "legacy" content renderable by all, or any, web-browser. The same cannot be said for Microsoft, and their now defunct Internet Explorer. YOU HAVE HEARD, haven't you, that all development on Internet Explorer ceased in March of 2003, and no further code revision will be made to it at all, and there will never again be another release of it?
Microsoft, in it's greater wisdom (and in direct violation of the decisions rendered over the Anti-trust suit), and then only after having reached settlement with Time/Warner, early Autumn last year, have decided to further integrate the end-users web-browsing capabilities in their forthcoming release of the Windows OS (expected now late 2006) which will be only available on a pay-per-use subscription basis, and only delivered through the media of the Internet. It that the brave new world you want to be a part of dude?
"... comme recherché qu'un délice callipygian"
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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The only part of the site we cannot make W3C XHTML and W3C CSS compliant is the forum. We thought about it. But we can't both claim compliance AND allow users to add HTML, so we took the positive decision not to be compliant here. [Another very small area is "historical guestbooks" because I take the code directly from the dreambook source code, and it has their look and feel].
And, just so that people are aware, it is *much* harder to write compliant code than non standard. For example, what works as <BR> now has to be <br />. And that is just a small example.
When I upload a story people usually submitin Word. M$ has awful HTML from word, so I have to tidy a load of it up. I mean a load. And then I put it through a routine called "Tidy" which creates W3C XHTML from the raw crap. And then edit it more to make it work
The forum itself is a huge open source set of code. We "simply" use and configure it. And for good or ill we go for consistency with prior software. So, since we started out with "insidetheweb" and a threaded indented forum, and moved to voy with a threaded and indented forum, when we went to the last code we made a threaded and indented forum with extras. Now we have moved to MySQL and Agora, we have a threaded and indented forum, with extra extras.
For the record, Megaman HATES forums. But he creates very good ones. You see he understands what real users want.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Interesting.
The person who made this decision was Megaman, unprompted by any external influence.
I am not "died (sic) in the wool" over anything. The one reason you have for making your assertion, with which I disagree, is that the sites promoting some sort of open browser are rank amateur sites and not worth a commercial candle. And I told you this.
Stick to facts, please
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Leander. A swan I seem to recall. Who cares about Leander's gender. There is no pronoun to express it anyway. :-*
Hans Christian Anderson got it better. "A very fine swan indeed!"
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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saben
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On fire! |
Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537
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I support Open Source and I've been thinking of downloading FireFox recently, however I just think that when 88% of users are using Internet Explorer (as megaman stated the case was here) then limitations like trying to copy and paste from the adress bar should try to be rectified. That is my thoughts in their most basic form. I did spout nonsense in trying to get my point of view across earlier, I agree, I admit I have problems with getting my words to say what my brain is thinking.
IE is buggy, IE has features that are unsupported by the standards and IE isn't up to standard in a lot of ways, too, but at most English speaking websites (that aren't targetted to a specific region) the majority of users will use IE and the majority of users probably will be American, too. So what I was trying to say, I guess, is that you should try to write code that works with IE as well as code that is standardised. I had a problem with a site I made recently where I implemented a scrollbar feature that only worked in IE, I didn't even check my layout in browsers other than IE and actually found out through a friend. Since then I am trying even harder to write standard complient code, while not including features that don't exist in IE. It means you are going to have to limit certain things, sure, but we've always been bound by technology.
In regards to wanting to see the source code, I don't mean the pure server-side source, I mean that I cannot even view the HTML outputted by the server for the page for some reason, using Internet Explorer's View Source function. Maybe the limitations are IE based and like I say, I'll probably be going to FF soon anyway, but if someone isn't tech literate the chances are they'll be using IE, if they are tech literate than they problem know how to get around certain problems they may have anyway. I hope I made more sense this time.
Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
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megaman
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Getting started |
Location: Germany
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 27
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I do wonder why you blame (even if not directly) this site's webmasters for the mistakes you are doing yourself elsewhere. I also wonder how you can even try serious webdesign with having only one browser (be it IE or FF or whatever). don't get me wrong, I'm not a web designer (I very much prefer software engineering), I loathe all this web stuff because of all these standards and IE's "features" and HTML's lack of them. but when I have to do it eventually I test at least with Safari, IE and Mozilla. if I'd be serious about it, like the awesome guy who made our stylesheets, I'd know by heart the flaws of the several systems - I'm sure HE does.
and for the source code I wonder who is more limited here, IE or you. do I really have to rub in your own right-click-advise now? ok. right-click in the frame that you want to inspect and click "view source" and you will definitely see the html source code used for that frame ... well, I guess you really have a lot more to learn before giving out advises.
and how could we ever prevent the HTML code from being seen? I mean the browser HAS to see it to interpret it, it's an inherent attribute of html that it has to be public. no point in hiding it. and why try to hide it in IE, if I can get it with lynx or a simple telnet command as well. that's the reason why no-one puts anything security-sensitive in a client-side script - it's meant to be seen. and let yourself stop because IE didn't do it? geez.
maybe you shuold create that website you are talking about - standard complient and feature rich and everything (ah, well visited not to forget). maybe we can learn from your great experience then. and maybe it just silences you a bit down, because you will be for a change not standing outside the other glass houses throwing stones, but inside your own one. you can be certain we'll watch from outside. if we too bring stones? maybe...
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Saben wrote:
I am trying even harder to write standard complient code, while not including features that don't exist in IE. It means you are going to have to limit certain things, sure, but we've always been bound by technology.
>
Actually it means you have to write correct code.
Programmers have long used "undocumented functionality" whcih is planned but not always implemeneted in future releases. This is bad programming
I recommend http://www.w3schools.com/ to you
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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-- for completely making my day right there. i am not sure why that hit me so, but it did, and pleasantly.
thank you for that.
now i feel like running about and giving squishy hugs. or writing 435395 apology emails to like, everyone.
thank you thank you thank you.
:-*
my void does not want.
-- 2.13.61.
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Steve
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Really getting into it |
Location: London, England
Registered: November 2006
Messages: 465
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A propos the discussion on men dancing en pointe... There is an Israeli comedian, Tuvia Tzafir, who is a rather heavily built man, and certainly no longer in the prime of his life. I remember him dancing (in tutu) the dance of the dying swan from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Despite his age and weight it was very well done.
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A Place of Safety
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The prodigal son hath returneth! 
Shem you're talking a load of nonsense here, and you know it 
I should add here ... 
