Erik de Castro Lopo skrev:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:43:17 +1000
> Erik de Castro Lopo <ocaml-erikd@mega-nerd.com> 

<snip>

> which means that the server is OK and that the
problem must be in my
> browser.

Might be, might be. But it's a problem you share with
each of the 3 Internet Explorer copies (ie 3 windows
machines) I've tried to use to access the site. If the
problem is specific to me, please tell me and ignore
what I've written below.

The site works fine in Opera and Mozilla, and is a lot
nicer than the old, but it doesn't work in IE. The
fact that Windows isn't the no 1 priority of the OCaml
team, or the community, is both obvious (witness the
lack of 3.08.3 binaries for Windows) and
understandable. But I am still surprised that it was
even considered acceptable to release a site which
entierly excludes the 80+% majority browser (figure is
likely to be lower in the dev community, but no way
less than 50%). I always thought OCaml at least wanted
to grow, I sure do want it to, a popular language
brings many desirable advantages, and that a new site
would help in this regard (image is important, after
all). But while the new site looks (and more
importantly, works) better it can only be viewed by
those who already know to look for substance over
flash (gross generalization) and often prefer sparse
sites. The young and impressionable ones will miss it
entierly and the more market oriented ones will not be
interested in something which looks practically dead
(or completly oblivious to marketing, which is much
the same). In what way this situation is to be
considered an improvement in general, and for whom, I
don't know.

I know you are all overworked and not web design
people. I know promotion and popularity are fairly low
priority items, which is part of the reason you've
been able to bring us this extremly versatile
language. But the now practical lack of a real web
presence for OCaml denies the language, you, and us
all, to even have a shot. I really prefer not to
whine, and this post came out a whole lot more
negative than I wished, but I want to use OCaml a lot
more in the future. Thanks.


Martin









__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com