Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 25,727 visits in November 2022 from 17,687 unique visitors.
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. Ranks in parentheses are from October 2022. Faded titles are just index pages which I presume are viewed only or mainly on the way to others, especially while moving from one Table of Contents (TOC) to another. One of those index pages is just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction, which I likely never will get round to. The TOCs are omitted entirely, as is the banner page, since none of these are meant to be seen independently of a document page.
Since I write this website myself and many of its pages have tables, some with columns of numbers that would ideally be right-aligned—oh, like the one on this page—I derive no small personal satisfaction at seeing the increasing readership (229 this month) of my grumble about the mess that two decades of standards committees have made of the CSS styling HTML columns. I might better finish that page!
Also very pleasing, just personally, is that several of the pages from last year’s retrospection now make the arbitrary cut-off of 100 views per month and several more are bubbling under. These are about MS-DOS and the Windows that ran on MS-DOS. There’s little chance that I’ll return to finish them, but they’re not too bad as they are.
I will eventually find how it is that 155 readers (or maybe one 155 times) were directed to my old write-up of what Microsoft got away with in its supposed compliance with a settlement that was widely understood as requiring documentation of all Windows API functions that were used by Internet Explorer. The latter, in competition with other web browsers, was supposed to be programmed with no special knowledge of Windows, the monopoly product. But of course the Internet Explorer programmers had all sorts of special access. Back in 2004 when my write-up was fresh, I hadn’t scraped the surface. Since Windows 8 in 2012, symbol files have shown convincingly that URLMON, a DLL that was introduced for Internet Explorer and still has Internet Explorer version numbering, is built with access to the same headers that Microsoft’s kernel-mode programmers use for building Windows but which Microsoft doesn’t publish for everyone. Nobody cares now, I suppose, but the lesson to take away is that technology long ago got far too complicated. Now that governments make noises again about regulating technology, they would better remember to keep to the levers of economics and policy. Try enforcing anything about the technology and you’ll get rings run round you.