Drugwash wrote: ↑2021-12-28, 20:38
the vast majority of people that are not working as qualified programmers do not know squat about creating/editing a CSS sheet, let alone more complex things as javascript, Java, JSON, XML and so on.
I am not a "qualified" programmer (just a retired scientist), although I know some CSS, javascript and Java ... I don't know (nor like the smell of) JSON and XML alhough I'd had once a look to some manuals/tutorials but they did not appeal to me as something I could make use of (unlike e.g. SVG, with which I played, though I like PostScript much more).
I do like customizing my environment
for my usage, and I did for pieces of software which are designed to be customizable. For instance, the look-and-feel of my window manager, fvwm, controlled by a single .fvwmrc file, which allows also some external scripting, and quite a learning curve mainly
reading through a very long man page. Or the customization of my favourite editor, The Hessling Editor, including writing some macros in REXX (I was not familiar with REXX but its predecessor EXEC2), it also involved
reading the help pages, and inspiring to some user-released macros. Of the customization of my favourite mailer, alpine, which essentially involves reading through the single .pinerc file, clicking on the
help of each keyword to know if useful to me, and deciding which patches of a suite of available ones (by the main author) to install, occasionally piping to external scripts. Even writing procmail rules for my incoming mail (also requiring careful
reading of a few man pages). Even (not just for me but all my institute) editing sendmail.cf (again reading quite a lot of
documents).
But for a browser ? While I always did some very very low-level UI customization like suppressing some buttons, or using text buttons instead of icons, I did not know of extensions until Firefox (I was still on that) removed the status bar. I use less than 10, some of which I hardly remember why I added them, some of which look quite
intimidating (like ad blockers, or FEBE - which I disabled - or the very useful NoSquint (*). The code is
not perspicuous (to me) even for what should be a simple task like "Expire history by day", and I
feel lost in lack of a documentation comparable to the one I used for the examples quoted above. For instance if I would start to write an extension to edit the application handler associated to a file type (what for me Linux user would be "the .mailcap") where should I start (I give this example, because sometimes a file is offered a funny handler ... for instance a PNG attachment in another PHPBB forum proposed to be opened with skype !! why ?).
In addition, what is also
intimidating is all the business related to licenses and future support.
(*) by the way, I decided to celebrate the incoming new year updating Pale Moon to 29.4.3, just did, and everything is running smoothly. Thanks MC !!
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (G.B. Shaw)