Disclaimer: This is NOT a rant! :)
Well in the morning two days ago,I was commissioned to do work on a site that was in need of HTML conversion and slicing. Funny thing is that I don't know how to do it! But since I am still new in the corporate programming world, I decided that this would count as work experience anyway so I bravely dived to solved the problem! ( actually I was not brave, I was duty bound to solve it as an employee :P)
Well for one thing what I discovered was that the greatest enemy of web development when you are fixing aesthetic issues is browser compatibility. I can tell you that many an elegant solution to a problem was foiled by a simple "bug" in a certain browser. Then you have to scramble and make a hack to make it work in that specific browser. Then hope the hack doesn't create problems with other browsers. If it does, then it would be back to debugging. To prevent this, it's best if you only use features that are approved by the ECMA standard to ensure cross-browser compatibility.
Another thing is that client demands may seem unreasonable at times. Sometimes they realize how hard it is for developers to do what do want sometimes not. But since we are being paid to work ( being in a corporate world ), it is only right that we give them what they want. I just wished they knew how hard ( sometimes downright impossible! ) to design,create and debug a website in a 12 hour ( plus or minus 6 hours) timeline.
Flash is common in websites but was not enough reason to warrant me to learn about it because of its bandwidth.....until now. I was simply lost on how to fix a flash issue in the site I was working on. I have to ask a co-worker to see what was wrong and solve it for me. Well if this episode is going to be repeated, I hope I won't be caught without a single knowledge in flash.
I didn't know that applets still exists in the web. I thought they were extinct now but I was apparently wrong since the site that we were working on were still using applets. That caught me off guard and was at a loss of how to fix it until someone showed me the options toolbar that all applets have.
Well after all have been done, I can say it was tiring but at least it was enlightening. I hope the lessons that it have imparted to me would stick...or else goto Overtime!! :P
