Oops, sorry, I didn't even think about that. I think it's fixed now. Also, sorry I forgot to check back to this thread for so long. Looks like it's time for me to enable email notifications for replies now.

I didn't really do much prefixing in my Z80 days. One exception later on with the 85/86 was that I started naming subprograms beginning with Greek characters to keep them out of the way, at the end of the list. Other than that, I just gave them names related to what they were.

I think it all depends on how the circuit board is wired up. If the contacts where the link port have traces that are connected to the CPU in some way or another, then it's quite possible; otherwise, you're going to have to do some delicate electrical hacking to attach it to the CPU, if it's practical at all.

I can re-add the links to the files in the news articles (though it would help if someone could give me the URLs to all of the articles since I didn't keep track of them). I can't really re-add the “featured program” flag for now, though, because the interface just sets it to the current date and doesn't let me choose the proper one. I think I'd have to edit the database directly to change that, and I don't yet know how to do that (assuming I have access to do so).

Is #calcgames still active, btw?

Not really anymore. Whenever there is activity, it's usually just E-J using CalcBot to do calculations.

I always hated the spelling system. There's pretty much no logic to it, so in a way, it's kind of like writing systems like Chinese where you have to directly memorize thousands of combinations of symbols which are different for every word. The difference is that in English at least they can be built from a relatively small set of characters called letters.

A few other things I always wished we had:
* Separate words for “we”—one meaning “we including you” and the other for “we but not necessarily you”. (When I was younger I always hated hearing phrases like “we have to do this” or “we're going somewhere” and trying to figure out whether that meant I had to also or if that was just them.)
* A singular third-person pronoun for “he”, “she”, or “it”! Having to choose between something clumsy like  “he or she” or something grammatically incorrect like “they” is really getting tiring.
* Some kind of noun form for singular or plural so computer programs can stop doing stuff like “1 files” or “1 posts” or having to mess with “(s)” or having to add extra code to make the grammar right depending on the number.

But yeah, realistically, none of it is going to happen. I'm in the minority of people who don't mind (and even enjoy) learning a new system if we feel it's better. But most people don't want to have to relearn stuff when they already learned an existing system. The fact that English is so widespread nowadays makes it even harder. If the U.S. and Britain can't even agree on how to spell a lot of words already, how are you going to get everyone to agree on the details of a brand new system?

It's still fun to talk about how the language could be improved, though.

IE have the, somewhat stupid (although useful to fix its damn bugs) and probably proprietary, "conditional comments".

I think that's at least a lot better and more elegant than having to rely on IE-specific HTML/CSS parsing glitches, which is a hacky, fragile, and easily-broken way of handling the issues, though. If we ever move ticalc.org's HTML over to a more modern CSS/HTML setup we may have to end up using them to get it to work properly in all the IE browsers.

Normally, I feel that it's best to support all browsers equally whenever possible, but it's understandable that sometimes there are compromises that have to be made and it becomes too costly to support everything out there. If Omnimaga were a commercial business or something, it might make sense to support many versions of IE because that would avoid leaving out a significant number of customers, but obviously it isn't and, like ticalc.org, no one gets paid for the time and work they put into the site, let alone for supporting additional browsers.

I can sympathize with web developers when it comes to these compatibility issues. A little while after I was hired at ticalc.org, I (as an experiment) did a mock-up of the front page using external CSS and standards-compliant HTML which looked okay in Konqueror and Firefox. When another staff member tested the rendering of various versions of IE for me, it was clear that that will probably be the biggest challenge and possibly where a lot of the work will be spent if we ever tackle this project. And this was just straight HTML/CSS, without yet trying to implement any Javascript or dynamic-type stuff. But at least the conditional comments thing that even older versions of IE have will really help. (It's also unfortunate that the site wouldn't render as well in text-based browsers like Lynx as it does with the current table-based layout, even though they say you shouldn't use tables for laying out pages. However, it would at least be usable.)

Anyway, I think the best approach would be to go ahead and have the ad buttons somewhere on the page like DJ Omnimaga mentioned, maybe with a neutral message sort of like “Some parts of this site may not work properly in Internet Explorer. We recommend using [whatever]”. Having a redirection page or anything that might be considered intrusive would probably just invite complaints, but I don't think anyone being reasonable would have a problem with small ad buttons that don't get in the way.