microsatan client apps….the frontpage rage

KXS Aug2k4

Pop's has a name for people who get rich selling junk.   I have several.

Microsoft markets their office applications as production engines that can transform any half-wit mouthbreather into a web or desktop publishing savant before the next system crash.   It sounds promising if not a tad sadistic.

Microscorn hides their application code behind visually inoffensive graphics— like point-n-click menus, help files, and cute lil’ script macros that novice's can assemble like Lego blocks, and by extension feel like some real programming is being done.   Writing a good application is tough, sometimes involving miles of complex code between the GUI and the ones and zeros.   That’s why great app writers drive nice cars and live like drug lords of the geek kingdom.   Yet not even the best code wizards can predict the results of burying an application’s guts beneath layers of polish.   Too much gloss does strange and spooky things to the application's performance, especially if the root code is known to be inherently buggy.   For Microsoft's word processing, publishing, or web-building applications, the fine levied for layers of GUI smoke and mirrors atop buggy code appears as application seizures, maybe three or eight times a session.   Users quickly learn the virtues of frequent saving, and develop the opinion that computers are hostile electronic mules, sometimes useful but temperamental, and wholly unpredictable.   Are the MS applications themselves worth this?

MS Word is a good app for anyone requiring a program to write and print a crisp letter in 24pt arial to granny every so often.   Microsack markets Word as made for professionals, but they do not make Word for professionals.   Style management elements in word are scattered all over the application—under edit, insert, format, and tools menus.   Their cute little ‘styles and formatting’ dialogue box barely scratches the surface.   And if you actually want to control character shaping and spacing, using Word is akin to writing genome-mapping algorithms with a brutal hangover and a two-dollar calculator.   Of course, if you want to learn what Word can not do for you, Microshyster encourages you to spend an extra fifty bucks on a Word bible.   Then you can confirm what you may be suspecting…that Mircoshaft’s apps are shit, and when Microschlep apps try to work together, it’s like shit on shit— fertilizer o’plenty yet nothing cool ever grows from it.  

Since we are a few years deep into the 21 st century, it’s fair to demand that a software company’s client-side applications work well together.   Adobe and Macromedia understand this, thus, whatever you may think of Adobe’s Go Live or Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, these web apps work wonderfully with desktop publishing and image-editing tools made and sold by the same company, and in fact almost always work well with apps across company lines.   Importing a Word file, as is, into Dreamweaver is a snap, and Dreamweaver will even clean the code automatically.   Microsucker mocks this concept with Front Page, which treats Word like a heart-transplant patient rejecting his new organ, instead of treating it like a client-side production application from the same goddamned company.     

Front Page is worse than shit.   The fact that Microsymbiosis has made tons of money from it speaks to the power of ignorant evil in ways I can barely fathom.   What’s worse is that our company uses Front Page for three-quarters of our web presence— because it’s bundled in with other Microscum office apps.   There is no escape.   Again, we’re not even talking Microsoft to Adobe, or Windows to Mac here; it’s Microsoft Front Page for Windows to Microsoft Word for Windows or vice versa.   It should all be seamless, but it’s not.   And, for you Microsoft defenders who say, ‘get Microsoft Publisher,’ I say shut the fuck up.   I’ve tried Microsoft Publisher.   It’s as useful as a bucket of broken condoms.  

Managing shared borders across web pages in the same directory, defining templates, and the appearance of tables, are basic nuts and bolts elements regarding web content creation.   We’re talking hammer and nail, water and bucket.   Templates are the key thing here, and Microknowledge must know templates because every bug-infested application they release is full of template wizards.   Of course the bugginess of the apps themselves can be selective.   You never know exactly when or how it’s going to bite you, nor how much time you’ll lose from your life dealing with it.   You only know that the aforementioned goal of smooth continuity will never happen without playing whack-a-mole with a shared border— defined to a tee in one file, inside the same directory, and linked the same way to all pages across the site from that one directory, yet magically appearing fourteen different ways on fourteen different pages in the same browser.   That never gets old.

I prefer to hand-code web pages because it keeps the tags and scripts short and simple—easy to read and edit, by myself or others.   This is important in a work environment, because many team members often have to edit parts of various company sites.   It’s important to keep things terse and clear.  Front Page considers brevity in code a sin and more importantly detrimental to their revenue stream.   Create a web page through Front Page’s graphical interface, or better yet, import or copy in something from Word, and then look at it in the html view; it looks like a screenshot of Matrix code.   Html and a couple script snippets need not look like that.  

If an application is going to create so much garbled noise for the sake of making the moneyed novice class happy with their GUI toys, then it ought to be great at copying and pasting (cornerstones of Microsoft’s office application wizardry) from one application to another.   Ah, no.   Copy ten tables with random data from Word to front Page, save, and open in three different browsers.   You’ll be absolutely stunned at the variant possibilities of identical WYSIWYG dysfunction.

It's a fucking table!   Why is it a challenge to copy a table of data from a Mircosoft Word processing application to a Microsoft web program, which incidentally, is filled with words?   It's a table, not a set of qubits!   The table's not unstable, Microwhore's unstable.   Rat bastards.   How does a radioactive waste-product like Front Page slide through a thousand alpha and beta tests over a half-dozen releases spanning a decade without anyone nailing the nuances of copying and pasting tables to and fro their own goddamned applications?   Is there a Northwestern crack epidemic that’s taking down engineers?   You’d have to be a rock-sucking crackhead to let this pass by every time for ten years.   This begs a question, why is Microstain hiring or retaining crackheads to write their word processing and web applications?   It probably happens like this:

Eager young application programmers, not knowing the truth about Microsatan’s dark empire, come aboard the Redmond pirate ship with a head full of ideals and new ideas. Within months, these idealistic young men and women realize that it's all true— Microsonofobitch’s client-side apps are garbage, and now their names are garbage too.   From that time forward, these poor kids not only have to walk around with the Redmond fist up deep, but their résumé’s will smell funny from that time on, and there's nothing they can do about it.   So, why not embrace the sweet caress of grinding teeth and make regular payments to Lonnie the boulder to avoid the jones roll?

Thanks a ton, MicroCock, you poisoner of souls.   Good thing for you sots that Mista n Missus Gates are saving millions from nasty diseases throughout the third world or your karmic debt would draw plagues of unsavory winged beasts to your corporate campus.   Bats and angry hornets would fly out from your air vents and toilets, applying a harsh but appropriate judgment to legions of institutional cronies lacking the collective sackpower to say, “No man, this is wrong!   We can make a better web design application that works with our other applications and still sell it for a reasonable price.   We can develop cool stuff to bundle with out required products.   We can even embrace the notion of multiple web browsers vying for dominance because we’re for innovation…not suffocation.”   Right?