Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2003 04:24:08 -0400
Subject: Re: My Students Comment on the WebTV Version of Mr. James Parry's Web Site

In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote:

TimC (tconnors+slrn@no.astro.spam.swin.accepted.edu.here.au) wrote:
>  
>  You bastard. You crashed my mozilla! I was doing serious "work" in
>  that browser too!
>  
>  
>  I've never seen an infinite loop of popups before.

That's why there's a warning page (http://www.kibo.com/webtv) saying that
the page may destroy any computer that's not as powerful as a real WebTV.
The page was developed back in the days when you could take down an entire
Mac or Windows 95 computer by just making a page too complicated.  Mac IE
was particularly flummoxed by the <IFRAME> which contained itself -- you
could scroll the little window so that it lined up with itself and create
a neat Time Tunnel going all the way into infinity, and BOOM.  (They
patched the browser so that it now doesn't recurse.)  There are all sorts
of other browser-specific tags in there, basically I just went through
the lists of what Netscape 4, IE 4, and WebTV 1.2 supported and put in
one of every goofy object, like WebTV's <BLACKFACE> (extra-bold) and
<AUDIOSCOPE> (it displays an orange and green oscilloscope squiggle of
the sounds the page is making), Netscape's <MULTICOL> (3-column text),
Internet Explorer's <IFRAME>, and so on.  And just a couple lines of CSS
to make the type terribly gigantic yet unpredictable (because, even to
this day, basic CSS stuff involving font sizes and styles comes out
differently in different browsers) and lots of moving items (the background
is a very big animated GIF -- which slides around under translucent
stuff if you have WebTV; there's a <MARQUEE> for Internet Explorer,
and <BLINK> for Netscape) which will bog down almost anything.  Oh,
and several different types of annoying sounds.

Basically, it was just an excercise to see how incompatible I could
make a page of "HTML" relative to all the different browsers, since
there was this WebTV emulator I could try out all the stupid WebTV
tricks in.  The page looks like crap in everything, but it looks
crappy in different ways in each browser, partly due to all the
proprietary tags different browsers know, and partly because the
page is so hefty that different browsers give up on different parts.

Although 2003's browsers and operating systems are far more robust than
1998's, they can still break when you look at that page, and amazingly,
it was done entirely without JavaScript or Java.  I felt that using
JavaScript to crash a browser would be cheating, as it's so trivial to
do;  If your browser breaks, it's solely because of a page structured
not all that differently from a "normal" page, just more overloaded
with gee-gaws.

And yes, sometimes the whole computer can crash (especially on systems
that don't have proper protected memory, like old Macs) which can be
a damn bad thing (Netscape 4 on a Mac would scribble all over your
system heap, which might include your disk buffers) hence my actual
serious warning.  A WebTV is one of the few things that's guaranteed
to render the page without breaking (although there still are
graphical glitches, like the way only the right side of the page
updates when you scroll in some versions of the WebTV emulator)
and of course lynx won't break, but if you want to read the text on
the page, about your only option is to look at the source (which
you can't do on a real WebTV.)

Incidentally, the single worst proprietary WebTV feature used on the
page?  WebTV's <FORM AUTOSUBMIT>.  That's right, the feedback form
on the page mails itself to me automatically if you just look at it.
What the hell was the point of them supporting that?  The original
WebTV had a lot of stupid things like that which were basically
giant "KICK ME" signs -- "Hey, our device runs entirely out of ROMs,
therefore there's no way anyone could ever cause any sort of nuisance
to our users!" -- and evil people used to exploit all sorts of these
things to make other people's WebTVs hang up the phone remotely
("wtv-client:hangup-phone") and so on, so they "upgraded" the units
to take out any feature that could be used against the customers
(meaning, they actually took OUT JavaScript support!)  <FORM AUTOSUBMIT>
is harmless (since an competent Web administrator can always just look
at the server logs to see who has been visiting the site with any
particular browser) unless you realize that a WebTV can also submit
forms via E-mail, so by putting <FORM AUTOSUBMIT ACTION="mailto:xxx@yyy">
you could make a Web page that causes random people to spam random
other people.  Idiotic idea, wasn't it?  _Everything_ proprietary in
the WebTV was that useless, like <AUDIOSCOPE> and the translucent text
and the diagonally-moving backgrounds and stuff.  But what do you
expect from a "computer" where the onscreen keyboard is in "ABCDEF"
order for people who aren't worldly enough to have ever seen "QWERTY"?

(The WebTV is a "computer" in the same way that Barbie's "B-Book"
is a "computer".  They're both shaped like computers and they both
sort of beep and stuff when you turn them on, with enough interactivity
to let you say "LOOK I AM USING A COMPUTER WITH REAL ELECTRONICS
OF SOME SORT INSIDE!")  

Next time you're in a hotel that has a WebTV in every room (about
the only place you're likely to see one unless you hang out with
people who have been 13 years old since they got their WebTV five
years ago) you can use it to look at my page and be properly
revolted, or you can just download the WebTV emulator (for Windows,
there's also a very out-of-date version for the Mac) and experience
the thrill of seeing your computer act like it has a concussion.
I actually use the WebTV emulator once in a while for testing pages
I design, because I figure if a page is readable on the WebTV, it'll
probably be compatible with everything better, and everything else is
better.  The main design limitation is that the screen is _smaller_
than 640x480 (it's about the resolution of those tiny old 9" Macs)
but all the type is displayed in GIANT LETTERS, so you have a
baby-size rectangle filled with humongous type, which will break
almost every layout which depends on text fitting into a space or
text lining up with graphics or a sentence fitting on a single tine.
(If you were reading this on a WebTV, you'd be at about page 20 by now.)

What I found most infuriating about the WebTV was that the user
interface was so awful.  They didn't understand anything about interface
design.  They thought the way to make it easy to use was to give you
the choice of a remote control with as few buttons as possible (no
pesky letter keys) or a keyboard with as many buttons as possible.
The two didn't have the same labels on the buttons they shared
(and the on-screen keyboard wasn't the same layout as the plastic one),
and the plastic keyboard (AT EXTRA COST!) was absolutely insane, with
special-purpose keys all over the place.  It took me quite a while just
to figure out how to get the thing to show the actual TV picture, and
it was so sluggish that I would hit the button, nothing would happen,
I'd hit it again, and then it would go "WHOOSH!" and the picture would
flip to the TV picture and then immediately it would go "WHOOSH!" again
and the picture would flip back to the Web because the thing had a
keyboard buffer even when it had no keyboard.  It made just watching
TV a baffling ordeal.  It was like a TiVo with a worse interface
and none of the stuff that does useful, TV-related stuff.

The WebTV is the single worst piece of consumer electronics ever
marketed as being easier to use than a computer.  The Sega Dreamcast
was a much better Web browser built to similar design constraints
(can be connected to a Radio Shack television, can be used by children,
can run with no keyboard, can be produced for the cost of a WalkMan.)

In no way was the WebTV easier to use than Internet Explorer,
or more powerful than something that could actually save files,
or easier to read than something that could display high-resolution
images that didn't flicker thirty times a second.  And yet a few
of the people who bought these boxes still insist they're better
than computers because THEY CAN SEE THE PICTURE ON THEIR PROJECTION TV!
Next time you're making a Web page, take heart to know that there
are people sitting on couches who really want to see your page
magnified so that all the letters are an inch and a half tall (and
can't figure out how to connect a cable from their computer to their TV.)

And the very best part?  The WebTV couldn't go faster than 33.6k!
The things were so cheaply-made that, to save half a penny on each
unit, the manufacturer limited them to going two-thirds the speed
of an ordinary (slow) modem!

All that is a small fraction of why I think WebTV hardware is so ridiculous
that I had to crash your computer to prove it.  THE WEBTV IS SO PATHETIC
THAT IT DOESN'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO CRASH!

                                         -- K.

                                            WebTV : the Web :: Blip : Pong