Le 3 juin 2017 à 00:33, Charlie-gm ccbibleman@gmail.com a écrit :
Compared to browser incompatibilities, bizarre rendering that experts could not figure out, security snafus, and did I mention pathetic performance
browser incompatibilities
Again, this is from the past; except very advanced HTML5/CSS3 features, all browsers now follow the standard, including IE 10+ or Edge
bizarre rendering that experts could not figure out
Your experts were in fact amateurs. Rendering is made by an algorithm based on CSS: the browser’s CSS and your CSS. Each CSS directive has a priority based on specificity and location in the CSS flow. Items can either be rendered top-down or left-right (or RTL) based on the ‘display’ directive; it may also combine with ‘float’ directive that make items flow around others, the kind of option Word offers for images. Each block has a border, a padding and a content. Dimension can be taken either from the border of a block, or for its contents, depending on the ‘box-model’ directive. Once you fully understand the CSS block model and CSS selectors priority rules, you’re able to fully control the rendering. It’s obviously not simple; too many people believe they can just ‘play with CSS’ to make it happen. In fact nothing happens until you fully understand what you’re doing. The CSS you build in fist shot is often quite complex and you need some further refining steps to make it reliable: plain debugging / refactoring, just like you'd do for a professional software. On top of that you can alter rendering using JavaScript (plain or through a framework like jQuery); this again can contradict what CSS does.
Good news: you now have (free) CSS/JS frameworks such as Bootstrap; you just need to follow a standard HTML structure, assign classes like explained and, in most cases, it displays as expected. I write ‘in most cases’ because, here again, and despite the immense quality put into these frameworks, you still need some CSS tweaks to cover all possible use cases.
That’s a classic story: HTML/CSS/JS is a Formula 1 Ferrari that you need years of experience — or having started when you were 14 — to fully master. As any powerful tool, you can do almost anything, provided you reach the suitable level of understanding. If you’re curious, Google the various CSS tricks you can find here and there: for specific situations, some guy spend days to find a simple CSS instruction (or hack), and share with others.
pathetic performance
Here is the truism; running a single application, on the single machine, for a single user, will always be faster that running an application that is shared across users, reachable through a worldwide network, through a bunch of protocols.
The real question is the trade-off between: easily access from anywhere using any device through any browser — desktop and/or handheld without any installation, almost no training, no on-site maintenance, etc. deploying on multiple workstations / synchronising databases across sites (how? security?) / installing RDP and paying for adequate servers, connections and licenses, managing upgrades, forcing users on a specific OS or develop multiple versions across OSs, etc.
Route 2 is what one we’ve practised for years and we know best. Route 1 is what younger generations expect as they’ve been in that bath since there teenage years.
Both routes impose compromises and/or adaptations to go with. Using route 1 requires a ‘lighter’ application, with less controls on each form/page, lighter lists, etc. It’s more a matter of making it smarter than more simple: instead of displaying a full client list in a grid, just add some search/filter controls on top of it (Google-like or enumerated selections) and display the list as soon as the number of records is acceptable instead of a 10-page pageframe with 100 controls in each page, build a container class out of each page and display in a child form. etc.
We need to consider the question from a high level point of view, rather than discussing what alternative desktop dev. language we could choose instead of VFP. The end decider is always the user. Each year 2.5 % new users enter the work force (and almost as many retire) — what do these people expect for the future? That we develop desktop apps in Python rather than VFP?
Thierry Nivelet FoxinCloud Give your VFP app a new life in the cloud http://foxincloud.com/
--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html ---