I just spent an hour writing a blog post. Only to have my connection drop as I hit “Submit”. When the connection came back up, “Refresh” would not resubmit my entry. “Back” restored all of the form field entries EXCEPT the article itself.

This is why hosted solutions stink. This is why on-demand stinks. This is why thin clients stink. This is why AJAX stinks. Because a desktop application would have been performing an automatic save to disk every few minutes. And none of those other applications get write to local disk priviledges, because that would be a gaping security hole. It has been well over ten years since I used a desktop application that could lose more than a few minutes worth of work in the event of system failure, network disconnection, etc. It was five minutes ago that an online “application” did this to me. What a complete and utter bummer.

I have to remember to write these blogs in a plain text editor then copy/paste into this form to make this thing work right. It’s bad enough that every character I type, every single keystroke causes JavaScript (save me from JavaScript, please, the interpreters are slower than my aunt’s driving) to reevaluate the entire article and try to WYSIWYG it. which means that the more I write, the longer the delay between me hitting the key and the key affecting what is on my screen. All of this for a totally of 7 dinky buttons that do bold, italic, link, unordered list, ordered list, image insert, and “switch to code mode”, and a drop down that lets me choose a block type for the current paragraph. This is stupid. How about if instead, the system have a little timer, and wait until I either key a command key for the function, click the function button, or have stopped typing for a few seconds to evaluate it. Whould that be too much? Is it necessary for it to re-download 14, that’s right, FOURTEEN images everytime I type a letter? Thankfully I’m not on dialup, and as it is I feel like I’m trying to type via telnet on a 2400 connection. Heck, old BBS’s on a 2400 modem would do a screen refresh faster than this junk.

AJAX, thin clients, etc. is is like going back to 1989 without the cool ANSI/ASCII art by ICE, The Jargon File, 256 color GIFs of women in bikinis, the DOOM 1 shareware installer, The Bastard Operator From Hell, Legend of the Red Dragon, 2600 magazine, Phrack, music in MOD format, and all of the other fond memories of my youth.

J.Ja