OK, I’m going to …

OK, I’m going to go into serious rant mode right now. I am becoming increasingly pissed off at the number of web applications that simply don’t work. At work we use a site called expensable.com to report our expenses. Up until now, I’ve been able to live with the silly technology decisions they made when building the site. Things like using a javascript pop-up window to contain the web application (doesn’t work if you have javascript disabled). Things like using VBscript to allow printing of an expense report (note that this only works in IE on Windows. Mac and Linux users using Netscape must print screenshots if they want a hard copy. Ugh!). Understand that this isn’t some free service. My employer pays a fee to use this service. Recently, I haven’t even been able to get into the damn site because they horked their database or something. Yeah, that’s customer service for you. I worry about the state of fee-based web applications. I really do.

Oh yeah. Good luck geting to Hotmail today. Apparently Microsoft also hasn’t a damn clue about how to run a large-scale web application service, either. Right, like I’m going to pay for a service like Hotmail when it works only half the time. Oh, and Microsoft wants to make all their software web-based with their .NET service? Good god, people. Your technologies must scale if you’re going to make them successful.

I changed the default for index.html on this site to use CSS, which is why some of you are seeing a slightly-changed layout that takes advantage of some CSS functionality, namely font-size and line-height. Also note that I changed the default color to white/red instead of grey. Let me know if you think this is a bad idea. Also note that all other pages other than index.html have a reversed cookie value regarding CSS. Hmmm, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea…

Posted by Cameron Barrett at January 24, 2001 06:53 PM

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