From jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Fri Jun 15 09:30:44 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jimc@math.ucla.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 15 Jun 2001 16:30:43 -0000 Received: (qmail 4331 invoked from network); 15 Jun 2001 16:29:35 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 15 Jun 2001 16:29:35 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO simba.math.ucla.edu) (128.97.4.125) by mta3 with SMTP; 15 Jun 2001 16:29:35 -0000 Received: from localhost (jimc@localhost) by simba.math.ucla.edu (8.11.2/8.11.2/SuSE Linux 8.11.1-0.5) with ESMTP id f5FGTYm00922 for ; Fri, 15 Jun 2001 09:29:34 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: simba.math.ucla.edu: jimc owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 09:29:34 -0700 (PDT) To: Subject: Re: [flamewar] HTML arcana (was: [lojban] Attitudinals) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT From: "James F. Carter" On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 pycyn@aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 6/14/2001 12:46:20 AM Central Daylight Time, > rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org writes: > > > and all the rest of the useful critters an ordinary word processor > > > provides? > > > > Because you're not talking about an ordinary word processor, you're > > talking about proprietary bullshit. > Hey, an "ordinary word processor" is a word processor ordinary people > ordinarily use, which amounts MSWord. Point well taken, but I personally resent the feeping creaturism of that piece of bloatware that tries to be all things to all people and ends up polluting the whole mess (even a spreadsheet! Not OLE but actually doing the computation itself; I made good use of the feature in one large and important project but it's an abomination anyway, rant, rant, rant...) > > One keystroke to set in a fixed number of   Gakk! The width of nbsp, as with space, is implementation defined, according to the specific font, and also potentially is context dependent, e.g. wider after a period, like TeX does. If you use repeated nbsp to make fake tables, your viewers will see the columns misaligned since most likely they will be viewing with a different font, or a different edition of the same font. A similar comment applies to using empty

elements for vertical spacing. It's the same issue as using repeated spaces and empty paragraphs in Microsoft Word. You need to use the more complex feature: tables. About this time I expect to hear Bob Chassell chime in about users who can't handle 2D graphic presentation because their eyes are inoperative or are busy with something else. Also, to all you webmasters out there, PLEASE don't force a font or a size on people; use the CSS generic fonts and let the browser wrap it in whatever screen space is available. Several people in my department have awful vision and the first thing they ask is "how do I get large fonts on my computer?" > Quotes are what they do. ASCII 34 is a double apostrophe, usable for quotes, > if need be, also for seconds and Lord knows what else. ldquo and rdquo > (8220, 8221) are specifically quotes -- not seconds, etc. and are clearly > acceptable for printed work, as 34 barely is. According to the standard, the browser should render the HTML tag according to the conventions of the document's language, i.e. correctly oriented comma-like thingies for English, or correctly oriented guillemets in French, and the correct number of them. The user shouldn't be typing quote marks at all. Of course not every browser follows the standard on this point. I have actually paid money for one that does. Perhaps a good generic summary is this: Interoperation is Good. For example, Microsoft has done a pretty good job of making MSIE 5.x follow the HTML 4.1/CSS standard, and it means MSIE users and everyone else can view web pages constructed to those standards. This isn't the case with the word processor. I can't read your MSWord documents. Period. Though you may be one of the majority, anyone in the minority (due to other hardware, or disabilities, or...) is locked out unless you export them from the proprietary format into a standards compliant one, such as HTML or flat ASCII. Which you regularly do, for just that reason. > pc, who was formatting printing in Fortran 1 when Kennedy was President. jimc, who learned programming on an IBM 704, who can make a 407 accounting machine sit up and beg, and who was also formatting text when Kennedy was president. :-) James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Email: jimc@math.ucla.edu http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)