Subject: Re: [flamewar] HTML arcana (was: [lojban] Attitudinals)

From: "James F. Carter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 09:29:34 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 [email-masked] wrote:
> In a message dated 6/14/2001 12:46:20 AM Central Daylight Time,
> [email-masked] 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...)

> <A one character tab!  What the hell are you talking about?>
> One keystroke to set in a fixed number of &nbsp;

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 <P> 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 <quote> 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: [email-masked] http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)