Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 10/06/06 12:40

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, dorayme wrote:

> [btw. Alan Flavell has a philosophy behind the idea of hard rote
> work, that it offends against human dignity...

[ warning, off-topic ]

I don't care whether it's hard or easy - *rote* work that can be done
with the computer is inappropriate to be done manually.

I guess you're referring to my postings which rebuke posters for
asking help on web pages which don't even pass validation. I stand by
the principle that it's demeaning to ask others for help when the
validation could and should have been done before asking for help.

When I'm tasked to do something new for which I don't know a good
solution, I'll tend to do a lot more manual work the first time
around. But while I'm doing it I'll be thinking of ways to automate
what I'm doing, on the principle that if I produce a successful result
first time, I'm very likely to be asked to do the same kind of thing
again.

Quite some years ago I was suddenly asked (about 2 weeks after the
final deadline!) to produce a webified version of the student handbook
of our department, which was available only in an MS Word format.
Back then the results from any MS product which purported to produce
HTML were significantly worse even than the mess that today's MS
products generate. But I found a package called rtftohtml, from
Sunpack software, which was highly configurable and produced pretty
much the results I wanted. Then I was asked to make some changes, so
I said OK, give me the updated Word file and I'll do it (they seemed
to think that the solution would be to apply updates separately to the
Word file and to the HTML file, but that's a mug's game). Then I
tossed the new Word file into the conversion procedure that I had set
up, and hey presto.

Needless to say, a year later I was asked to webify the new edition of
the handbook. I simply tossed the new edition into the processing
chain and the result came out nearly as good as the last time. The
only thing wrong was that the Word file incorporated some Mac-coded
scientific content from one of the academics (which already displayed
as garbage in Win MS Word), so I needed an extra stanza in the
converter to deal with that.

This is all some years ago now - I haven't done this task for a few
years now, and Sunpack rtftohtml has transmogrified into something
else. But I think this case is quite a good illustration of the
benefits of using the computer. If one had done that only with point
and shove every time, just imagine the wasted effort.

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