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September 15, 2004
Why I hate to fly these days
I have absolutely no sympathy for the plight of commercial airlines. They all seem to be having financial troubles of some kind. While they like to point a finger at 9/11, personally I think the problem is something else entirely.
When I book a flight, it's a very unpleasant experience. Why I can't simply fly from point A to point B at some reasonably-predictable fare is beyond me. There seem to be thousands of combinations of fares, flight times, flight dates, "stops", days of the week, how far in advance I book it, etc.
Hello, Airlines - time to wake up! I just want to get where I'm going. I don't want to turn the process into a part-time job. To come up with all these combinations must be millions of dollars each year for deep-thinking people, computers, and software to dream them all up. So not only are you making it hard for ME to get somewhere, you are making it hard on yourselves too.
Why is it I can fly 1500 miles across the country for $100 but to go a mere 500 miles you feel it's worth $1000?
Why is it that you want me to book weeks in advance to get a fare that's 1/2 or 1/3 the price of booking it less than 5 days before departure?
Why is it, when you insist on getting me to book a month in advance, that you won't give me a refund if my plans change 2 weeks later? What crazy logic did you use to come up with that strategy?
Here's a clue for you, Airlines: A lot of people just don't want to deal with your screwy reservation systems. And NOBODY wants to pay for a flight if there's any chance they might have to cancel. Ask around, you won't find ONE PERSON who thinks it's ok for you to keep our money if suddenly we have to cancel, even when it's weeks in advance of the departure time.
You may have "friendly skies" but you certainly don't have friendly booking policies.
Posted by donb at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2004
Hacking the CCS Templates
I finally quit using the "theme" approach to page layouts. Just too much bother and too many classes to keep up or tweak for color schemes, etc. Hate them, bad karma, bleahh!
So I routinely create things with no theme, so that all the "class=" attributes are omitted. I rely on a much simpler CSS page that has TABLE, INPUT, H1..H5, INPUT, SELECT and only a few other HTML tags declared. I can now also modularize the CSS into layout and (separately) visual attributes (color, font, etc.)
I quickly migrated to putting H1 for page headings and H2 for grids and records. This meant I did a lot of editing after creating them. Well, I went into the \components\templates\HTML folder of my CodeCharge installation and edited gridHTML, EditablegridHTML and RecordHTML.xml.
I like having the "caption" cells of my grid as TH instead of TD because they naturally are centered and bolded. So, I edited the xml files (very carefully!) to make them output the <2 and TH. This saves me lots of time and so far, has not been a problem. It will be, next time CCS gets upgraded of course because all my changes will disappear.
I hope that someday Yes will provide a supported way to alter these template xml files so that I can have any number of control layouts I care to create, with wizard-generated headings that I choose.
CCS needs to differentiate between "theme" (meaning an overall scheme of colors, fonts and graphics) and "styles" (meaning the choice of HTML elements used to construct a page). I find DIV and UL blocks frequently are more appropriate and less complex than lots of nested tables. It would be very empowering if I could define and choose alternative styles.
Posted by donb at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)