Students can't live on Linux kernels alone

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, DFS wrote on Thu, 10 Mar 2005 02:29:49 -0500

I'm buttuming you're actually referring to

or perhaps

which is identifying itself as a rather old variant of Apache (1.3.33 (Darwin)) with a rather simple HTML page with an embedded style sheet. It turns out 1.3.33 is nevertheless the newest release on that branch. The page date is 28 Oct 2004, which is consistent with

which is one of the mirrors of 1.3.33.

It's mildly interesting that MIT touts this almost 5-month-old offering, as opposed to the far newer 2.0.53 (07-Feb-2005). The webpage itself offers no details but I suspect that this thing has either proven itself in battle (MIT's "hacks" are legendary) or is a personal preference for the webmaster, whoever (s)he is. The application does not appear to need a heavy-duty website, although it might engender some curiosity from non-MIT students, especially here in COLA.

(Disclaimer: No, MIT is not my alma mater. Fortunately, my college daze were spent at a university with at least half a clue, as the campus from whence I graduated has a website that also uses Apache 1.3.33. I suspect it's not alone; in fact, in a spotcheck of the more famous colleges I know about, almost all were using some variant of Apache -- with one rather odd exception: University of the Pacific

The offering proper is actually a small restaurant or eatery, or perhaps a, well, cafZ, very suitable for student "grab a snack before clbutt"-ism, or just general browsing (of the food type, that is, not the Internet type -- although I suspect an Internet hotspot is nearby as well, for those with suitably equipped portables). It's mostly organic rice and healthy stuff, priced affordably. They also want apparently to encourage the students to concregate therein, as opposed to merely snack-and-rush. (A laudable goal.)

It is not clear why Baltic birch seating blocks are of much relevance to the overall atmosphere beyond an interesting appearance. However, the webpage notes that since "opening, the space has been filled each day.", which is a good sign for an eatery.

The main website is actually just as interesting architecturally. It's running an even older version of Apache (1.3.26), and also uses an embedded style sheet, but the "flavor" is different; SteamCafZ uses upper-case tags but

seems to prefer lower-case ones. (One can get the actual websource by either "View Source" on one's browser, or by using a command such as

All in all, I'd propose that these two websites are examples of good, clean website-HTML design -- I can't say regarding such things as flexibility, throughput, and such, of course -- the tags are clear and the page is readable even without a browser, for the most part. (Of course one can also use a browser such as lynx; the pictures are mildly interesting as background color, but that's about it.) And there's also virtually no Javascript "glue glop", which can interfere with one's browsing pleasure on some browsers such as dillo, Amaya, and lynx.

The first thing that shows up is that there are very few newlines. In fact, the first line starts out

http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text-html;

where vi put in the spacings as I cut and paste; the original didn't have anything resembling line separators. This is hardly readable by those who don't know at least a bit of HTML.

It gets worse from there. It is not clear what generated all this stuff (which includes quite a few calls to Javascript's document.write()) but it sure looks like generated crap to me.

Of course kudos for consistency, as the headers clearly indicate they're using Microsoft-IIS-6.0. But this isn't a website one would want to read without a good browser, unlike MIT's.

For their part www.uop.edu shows a webmaster with about 1-2 a clue: the webpage has quite a bit of Javascript but has not been written by Microsoft Word. (It's not clear what generated the HTML, though -- it's not the cleanest stuff but the meta tags near the top are very readable).

Harvard's page has Javascript but is relatively uncluttered. Yale looks like it was designed on a Macintosh -- mostly because there's no newlines, but lots of carraige returns. Once one compensates for this oddity the page isn't horrid, though it's not good: lots of Javascript, an embedded stylesheet *and* hard styletags in the HTML proper, and rollovers on the links (the effect in a Javascript browser is menus accessing submenus, which is mildly interesting).

It's still better than Microsoft's.

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.