What a joke this site is. For one thing it's slow as hell, and for another - while most people are happily scrolling through the mass of flashy animated gifs and sexy advertisements blithely, I am bumping up against bad code and non-standards compliant CSS which doesn't render properly in a real web browser. Yes, I don't use Internet Explorer. In fact, I don't run windows so I couldn't run it if I wanted to! Right now I'm stuck using the 'old' myspace blog form since the 'Advanced' blog editor can't handle my browser / OS. Hmmm - let's examine why that might be, eh?

A quick trip to netcraft shows us what's happening. Apparently the entire site is running on Windows Server. This may not strike you as anything strange, but suffice to say, most of the better large web sites don't run Windows. Let's look at Amazon for instance. How about Ameritrade? True, not everybody runs Linux, or BSD - but there's a reason why most serious one's do - and Microsoft is really scared. Google (runs on Linux) has started rolling out applications on their site like Google Docs which might mean we soon won't need the bloated crap code they force on everyone anyway. The point is, Microsoft does what it can to muddy up standards so that parts of the web running on their servers are less likely to work properly with anything other than their software. And vendors like myspace let them get away with it by writing sloppy IE specific code which looks like crap on anything else. The funny thing is that I can only imagine what the advanced editor is like: a WYSIWYG editor probably a lot like the Google Docs editor so you can click on a B icon to bold something. Wow, pretty advanced - we're almost up to the technology level of a 1990 Atari ST! And the argument that my FreeBSD operating system which powers a large chunk of the web, running a (relatively) standards compliant browser compiled last week can't run something that Microsoft's IE 6 written in 2001 (and barely updated till IE7 came out last month) can!? Bah!

Of course I've heard about MySpace, it's where all the degenerates hang out to meet underage girls, right? Well - it seems that more and more of my friends are using the service to post pictures and stuff so I had to join up if I wanted to see any of this stuff. Having several of my own websites, I really have no need for this added web space. Perhaps a better reason to join is to demystify the MySpace phenomenon which seems pretty much hype to me as a long time resident of the net.