jmoiron.net

Every once in a while I get to disliking the code on my website, but I never dislike it enough to do anything drastic. I'm in such a state right now; its basically a Hodge podge of python scripts, none of which I care for all that much. There's nothing exactly technical about anything either; a bunch of parameterized strings with very static HTML code mixed in an inconsistent jumble. The only thing that is of particular note at this point is the design that I tweaked quite a bit to accomplish (although still rough around the edges), and finally the problem isn't that I don't like the way it looks, but I don't like the way that it works.. that it is.

I think this kind of cycle goes on a lot; I'd wager that its why so many OSS projects get a completely rewrite once or twice in their lifetime. This usually happens for me when I am in the middle of some other project that I like a lot more than my current one; last time it was a small database driven page I made for work, this time its the increasingly interesting object oriented XHTML library that I wrote. The system's advantages are very important to me personally:

* it maintains tab sanity automatically without thinking about it in logic
* the resulting code looks handwritten because tab and newline rules are easily changed on the fly
* after coding a module it is surprising when it is _not_ compliant with the validators

I only run by w3c once in a while during development, and I'm almost never greeted with a message of failure. This combined with the quality of output code have really made me dislike the ugly, unmaintainable hackery that permeates this place.

As the release of Qt4 nears, and the promise of redesigned KDE dialogs inch closely behind it, I feel more and more anticipation. Hopefully, someone (it doesn't matter who, since common sense can fix most of KDE's problems) will take a look at serious widget spacing issues in Qt applications. I never did finish treatise on KDE's UI as it was, but I hope to sort of separate that from a blog post and complete something a bit more thought out and professional (not that I claim that status, I just reach out to it).

I've come to like the ClearLooks theme quite a bit for GTK+, and am reasonably satisfied with this facsimile using QtCurve and what appears to be a quite carefully picked colorset. Johnny expressed desire to run KDE when he reinstalls linux, and I don't really fault him. It crawls along quite slowly on my underpowered laptop, but I've noticed that they're the first ones in the Linux camp to figure out that run dialogs aught to be as fast as thought. Still, I really hope they fix the spacing issue; it makes dialogs look disjoint and sloppy when they're actually quite carefully laid out.