Today I’ve stumbled upon one Croatian news portal, actually an “e-version” of TV produced news. I was positively surprised to see the little RSS icon in my Firefox light up, signalling that the site has set up a feed. Finally, I thought, someone involved in ever-so-popular (we have them like 5 or 6 nationwide, which is like 6 or 7 too much) news portals in Croatia has tried to catch up with The West.

Yeah, right. Closer inspection revealed this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-2"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:tagdnevnikhr="http://rss.dnevnik.hr/" >
<channel>
<title>dnevnik.hr</title>
<link>http://dnevnik.hr/</link>
<description>dnevnik.hr RSS feed</description>
<language>HR</language>
<pubDate>Thu, 31 Aug 2006 04:22:31 +0200</pubDate>
<ttl>300</ttl>
<image>
<url>http://dnevnik.hr/furniture/images/dnevnikhr/backgrounds/hr_printlogo.gif</url>
<title>dnevnik.hr RSS</title>
<link>http://dnevnik.hr/</link>
</image>
</channel>
</rss>

Very informative. Maybe it’s an indication of the site’s overall worth…

It seems that Mono has been accepted as a dependancy for GNOME 2.16 components. I think it’s a good step forward, because C#/GTK# allows easier, faster and better development than mucking around in C for most usual desktop applications. That means we could see a boom of great (as well as not so great :) apps for GNOME in the following months or years.

This decision was carefuly worded, though – no existing modules can start depending on Mono (so it won’t spread like a virus through the entire GNOME system); I think that’s a wise choice; if nothing else, just to placate the nay-sayers, and of course, just in case the worst (about MS having submarine patents waiting to fire upon Mono).

For a new project I’m embarking on, I have to use Microsoft’s web stack, which means Windows / IIS / ASP.NET / MSSQL. As I usually use free software for web (and other) applications, I’m new to ASP.NET and I’ve spent a couple of hours researching the technology.

I’m used to (or spoiled by) agile stuff one can find in today’s modern web frameworks (I personally like TurboGears), so the next sentence isn’t much of a surprise: ASP.NET sucks enormously compared to these “scripting” guys. Consider the following ASP.NET example, for creating a custom web “control” which outputs some bar charts:

output.WriteBeginTag("table");
output.WriteAttribute("bgcolor", BackColor.Name);
output.WriteAttribute("border", "1");
output.WriteAttribute("cellspacing", "0");
output.WriteAttribute("cellpadding", "0");
output.WriteAttribute("width", Width.ToString());
output.WriteAttribute("height", Height.ToString());
output.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar);
output.WriteFullBeginTag("tr");
output.WriteBeginTag("td");
output.WriteAttribute("colspan", BarCount.ToString());
output.WriteAttribute("align", "center");
output.WriteAttribute("height", "10%");
output.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar);
output.Write(Title);
output.WriteEndTag("td");
output.WriteEndTag("tr");
output.WriteFullBeginTag("tr");
output.WriteBeginTag("td");
output.WriteAttribute("colspan", BarCount.ToString());
output.WriteAttribute("align", "center");
output.WriteAttribute("height", "90%");
output.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar);
DrawChartTable(output);
output.WriteEndTag("td");
output.WriteEndTag("tr");
output.WriteEndTag("table");

This is just for displaying the border (actually, a just table with two cells), without really drawing the charts. If you haven’t closed this page in disgust already, you might’ve noticed what the above code does. It’s an extremely verbose way of outputting a table. Even PHP’s dreaded echo is more readable than this cruft, not to mention Rails’, Djangos or TurboGears’ templating systems…