Subject:
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Re: markup syntax for member pages
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Thu, 1 Jul 1999 04:03:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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550 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, John Matthews writes:
> I'm no genius and I learned the most basic HTML 1.0 in about 15 seconds.
> I think it is very easy to understand and completely intuitive. Why would
> I want to learn another markup language? A proprietary one at that...
If HTML were chosen, then not only would it require a full-blown HTML parser/
validator to prevent garbage like
<TABLE BORDER=8 CELLPADDING=10 BGCOLOR="#FF0000"><TR><TD>
<FONT COLOR="#00FF00" SIZE="+4"><B>
<BLINK>THIS IS MY <BIG>COOL</BIG> PAGE!!!</BLINK>
</B></FONT>
</TD></TR></TABLE>
from popping up everwhere, but there'd be no end to explaining to people
why only an extremely selective subset of HTML was honored (the rest being
discarded).
And not only that, but sometimes even a simple page of HTML isn't always
very easy to understand, even by an experienced human -- it's too easy for
people to make trivial mistakes like
<B>blah blah blah<B> Missing "/"
<UL><LI>foo<LI>foo<LI>foo</OL> Mismatched UL/OL
The LEGO® Group Missing ";"
<!-- blah -- blah --> Comment ends at "--", not at "-->"
and wonder why things aren't displaying right. Guess who they complain to
if it doesn't appear how they thought it would? :)
Even preventing JavaScript from being embedded in HTML comments is
unfortunately not a trivial parsing task. There are probably libraries out
there for helping with that, but that's a band-aid on top of unnecessary
overkill.
> Oh well, I suppose I will have to invest another 15-20 seconds of my life
> learning how to make my LUGNET page look spiffy ;)
Well, it's not really geared toward spiffiness. Boldface and italics and
headers are functional tools to help convey semantic meaning in the text.
So it's actually geared toward non-spiffiness, or, rather, simply toward
nurturing the efficient expression and exchange of useful information. And
raw HTML is just a drag (as in slowing) in that regard. Fortunately, there
are places like geocities where people can put up a full-HTML page if they
want glitz and spiffiness.
Hope that makes sense!
--Todd
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
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| Todd: Just a minor detail. (...) This one is actually legal. I think your suggestion looks fine (but it isn't much work to handle HTML if you use nsgmls[1]). Play well, Jacob 1) <URL:(URL) is generated by a _tcsh_ script that uses nsgmls for parsing (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
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| (...) heh heh, well, I guess geocities is out of the picture now, given the bad press they're getting: (URL) this whole recent Yahoo!/GeoCities stink yet another reason not to do full HTML hosting here. Not out of fear, but out of wisdom. The more (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
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| Thanks Todd for your concise explanation. It indeed makes sense. It did not occur to me that folks would use other that the most *simple* html tags. I guess that is why I am not a sysadmin type guy! Keep up the great work! John Matthews Todd Lehman (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: markup syntax for member pages
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| Regarding the comments for a markup language: I'm no genius and I learned the most basic HTML 1.0 in about 15 seconds. I think it is very easy to understand and completely intuitive. Why would I want to learn another markup language? A proprietary (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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