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Posted by robert maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t on 02/17/07 17:44
> From: John Hosking <J...@DELETE.Hosking.name.INVALID>
> you sound like a home construction contractor who wants to build
> homes for a living, but doesn't own a power saw, ...
Your metaphor is wrong on several counts:
- I'm not trying to get a job as the contractor, the "top dog" in
the construction company. I'm just trying to get a job as a
worker, somebody who contributes to the project. The contractor
supplies all the tools. I don't need to bring my own power saw.
(Construction = computer programming in the metaphor. I'm just
trying to get a job writing software, not managing a whole
software development company.)
- Even if I were the contractor himself, the fact that I write out
my bills longhand, or use a manual typewriter, or edit them as
plain text and print them, shouldn't give the customer a reason
to refuse to pay their bill for my company's work just because I
don't submit the bill in MicroSoft Word format. Why should a
constructor need MicroSoft Word? It's irrelevant to the work.
(Several recruiters/agencies require I submit my resume in
MicroSoft Word format before they'll consider referring me to a
job. I think they're being unfair and should get into another
line of work.)
- I'm not charging money for what I'm doing on the Web. Except for
the CGI applications I'm not even asking somebody to hire me. If
your next door neighbor wants to build you a bookcase, for free,
and then stock it with autographed books he wrote himself, you
shouldn't complain that he didn't use a power saw to build it,
and that his books weren't prepared with MicroSoft Author.
- As somebody pointed out later in this thread, I'm just trying to
organize information in a novel way, and satisfy the validator
so that I won't get harassing posts about how my Web pages
aren't even valid HTML because they fail validation, so because
they aren't valid HTML then their content and organization can
be rejected without even looking beyond the validation failure.
I'd also like really basic stuff like the location of blank
lines to be basically correct, so they don't detract from the
flowing text. After all, if you saw a blank line in the middle
of what you thought would be a contiguous block of floating
text, wouldn't that sort of distract you from reading the text?
(Inappropriate blank line added above deliberately to demonstrate my point.)
Anyway, I got the answers I needed about what I was doing wrong
that caused validation to fail on line 1353 (shit, I have that
number memorized now, and sounding out the decimal digits as
musical notes it's like the theme of some spooky science fiction
program), namely that the instructor's advice to use non-container
tags <tag/> or <tag /> was totally wrong because per SGML semantics
they start NETs, which I never heard of before because they are
never actually used in HTML, because there aren't any commonly used
browsers that support that stupid trick that saves a few keystrokes
at the expense of obscuring the syntax.
So now, as I the neighbor try to build your bookcase for free, I
notice I have a slight difficulty, that my manual saw has no way to
get into a certain crevice, so I ask a couple people if they have
any ideas how I might chip off that blank line sticking out of one
end of the bookcase, looking sort of ugly, but nobody has any idea
how, one person (later in the thread) says it's *impossible*, but
if we look at the bookcase from a different angle, the MicroSoft IE
angle, we won't see the blank line sticking out, so never mind
about it. Maybe I'll just do that.
> When you say, "I have no way to see how it might look in some
> other browser," you're following in the footsteps of so many
> folks who designed only for IE (or earlier, only for Netscape)
> because that's all they had. Such pages are a plague on the Web
> still today.
There's a certain risk of that perhaps, but those people were
taking advantage of subtle differences between IE and other
browsers to make things look "just right" in IE, sometimes using
features that aren't valid HTML markup at all, but "work" in IE
because IE supports the extra markup. AFAIK I'm not doing any such
thing in lynx. I'm writing plain vanilla HTML, not doing anything
that is lynx-specific. (In fact I don't know *any* markup that lynx
supports that isn't standard HTML, unless you count *ignoring* some
things that are supposed to be proper SGML, such as NETs, or being
sloppy about invalid HTML such as non-closed <li> elements within a
<ul>. But thanks to the validator, and actually thanks to that
cruddy "Web Design" class 2.5 years ago, I've purged non-closed
<li> elements long ago, and thanks to the help in this thread I'm
in the process of removing containerless tags, that are really
supposed to be starts of NET in SGML, even if they aren't really in
HTML, as fast as I notice them.
I do have one present worry. With the "loose" DTD (I'm not using the word
"transitional" more in discussions about it
because it causes too much confusion), it allows the following trick:
Text that introduces a list:<ul>
<li>First item</li>
<li>Second item</li>
</ul>
The effect is that the text that introduces is immediately adjacent
to the first list item, no blank line between them. Is that
guaranteed behaviour, or is that only in lynx where that's the
effect achieved?
Now at the *end* of a UL element, there's always a blank line, just
like with a PRE element, but I never have running text that I want
adjacent to the bottom of a UL element, so that's not the problem
that it is with PRE, in fact I always *want* the blank line after a
UL element. But I'm worried about the line just before the UL
element, which is supposed to introduce or act as a title for the
list items. Do all browsers present it without blank-line gap?
> Coding for Lynx only won't get you many friends,
Given that nothing I've ever done in my entire life has gotten me
even one friend, that's pretty much moot/par.
> or technical support.
I assume you're talking about free technical support from other
users, such as the folks on this newsgroup, not formal professional
paid technical support from the vendor of lynx. Am I the only
person in this entire newsgroup who has access to lynx and has
experience matching the HTML with the the way lynx renders it? Is
there nobody who has figured out a lynx problem I haven't yet
figured out, who could help me get past an obstacle? Is there any
other newsgroup with a larger number of lynx users where such
questions might find better answers?
> My recommendation is that you write the content and forget the
> publishing part.
I'm not sure which aspects of the HTML you consider "the publishing
part".
> When your work is done, somebody else can mark it up or help you
mark it up, and then publish it, or help you publish it *once*.
An online reference like this will never be **done**. There will
always be little improvements and/or additions I think of from time
to time. I'll re-interpret your word "done" to mean "substantially
complete". I have no idea how to find somebody else to help me mark
it up for free, and I have no money to pay for somebody's help.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "and then publish it". It's
already "published", in the sense of Web accessible, from the
start. Do you mean like actively promoting it, advertising to get
more readers, or what?? Do you mean I should at some point when I
have some spare cash, get a brand-new throwaway account on some
spam-friendly ISP, and blast an e-mail advertisement to six hundred
million victims worldwide, which will cause cancellation of that
account but I have to do it only once?
> I hesitate to mention the tool at http://www.browsershots.org/ ...
I didn't notice any hesitation. You seemed to jump right in and
mention it without any prodding. It submits my Web page to several
different browsers, and posts screen shots to their master index. I
suppose then I go to the public library to view their screen shots?
But the public library already has recent versions of IE and
Mozilla, so I'm not sure how that would help me. Explain?
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