Posted by Chris Gunn on 06/03/06 16:03

On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 09:30:31 -0600, www@probertencyclopaedia.com (Matt
Probert) wrote:

>Wow Chris, some controversial arguments put forward there! This should
>set the temperature rising!

Howdy Matt,

Lots of people are confused about what W3C is advocating. If they had their
way, every web page on the Internet would have to be rebuilt at least once a
year. Not a very good attitude on their part.

They are the knights in imaginary shining armor tilting at windmills and I
prefer being a hard nosed business man and programmer. I build profitable
web sites that sell products and I hand code every web page. I don't have
time to type a bunch of surplus characters when a tag like <TH> gets the job
done.

>When viewed through Lynx the "Basic web Page Account" s listed twice.
>I guess this is because one is "Windows 2003" and the other "Trustix
>Servers", but this difference is not clear using a character-based
>browser.

Thanks, I missed that ALT tag. Fixed now!

>From a business perspective, with an increasingly global market,
>should not US-based companies start recognising the global nature of
>their prospective clients and display their telephone numbers in
>standard international notation, rather than assuming US and local?

I prefer "(505) 586-1225", which is easier to read. I suppose you could run
it together as "1(505)586-1225" so it's still clear. What I really hate are
programmers that insist it be typed as "15055861225" because they are too
lazy or unskilled to parse out the punctuation. Similar for credit card
numbers that are easier to type and read with the spaces retained.

The prejudices against "foreign" languages is rampant in many places in the
way our computers and keyboards were originally designed. The original
ASCII character set covered things pretty well but far too many programmers
refused to support the upper 128 characters and didn't know what to do with
the lower 32. Even today, when you try to transfer quotes and apostrophes
from MSWord to web pages, you get square boxes.

Some things we're stuck with. Like the attempt to convert our inches, feet,
and gallons to metrics. It flopped completely.

Thanks, Chris www.bizynet.com and www.bizycart.com
BIZynet Coordinator cgunn@bizynet.com - (505) 586-1225
Moderator of biz.ecommerce, biz.general, biz.marketplace.discussion,
biz.marketplace.web-design, biz.marketplace.international & others

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