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 Administrative / General / 1998
1997  |  1999
Subject: 
Re: markup syntax for member pages
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Thu, 1 Jul 1999 21:24:32 GMT
Viewed: 
383 times
  
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 <lehman@javanet.com> wrote in message
news:FE6BAI.xL@lugnet.com...
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&reg 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



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: markup syntax for member pages
 
(...) 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> (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)

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