I guess I am the lazy one - I just use an IDE web designer in design view, then switch to code view as needed. Benefits from both worlds.
Don’t Make Me Write HTML
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#12Use a WYSIWYG? I mean if you seriously can't wrap your head around HTML/CSS maybe you're in the wrong business...
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#13The closing tags of HTML and XML are a nuisance. In SGML (their common predecessor), named closing tags were optional (you used ), but were deliberately made mandatory in HTML and XML, to improve readability of long documents. It was contentious at the time, and it still is. But we must at least accept the data points that both HTML and XML have been phenomenally successful, without knowing for sure whether this particular feature was for or against.
One thing about dumb, regular, symmetrical formats is that their redundancy makes them less scary and easier to understand. Perhaps, this is accessibility is crucial for adoption.
EDIT I guess indentation enables you to match up start/end tags even better than named close tags... and it's certainly become more familiar to developers since Python's success. But maybe not so good when you have many levels of indentation, and terrible if you want to insert/delete a nested element, because the indentation of the elements within it must also be changed.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#14That is so funny: Programmers, that don't know what to do with their time, develop an api so the don't have to read documentation. Or programm a framework, or another abstraction layer on top of all the others or some meta-something to simplify the easy 80% of a job.
Sadly, creating things totaly disregarding the environment seems to have so much more sexapeal than just using what's at hand.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#15Oh please. The time you spend learning HAML or Markdown (and all their potential intricacies) could be better spent learning to write clean HTML. I'm sure that both of those "alternatives" have their own quirks that must be worked around, not to mention the fact that you don't know exactly what HTML the parsers will spit out (yes, you can learn the output, I suppose, but why?). I can see these tools being useful in c…
Markdown is for writing content. Content creators shouldn't need to write their content (blogs, news, whatever) in HTML. Markdown is for that and only that.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#16Is this link a recursive joke?
All I got is a grey page with "Click here to skip this or wait 15 seconds.". The link does not work.
I have JavaScript disabled with NoScript FireFox extension.
Judging from the HTML code of the page it seems that the authors of linux-mag.com don't know how to use noscript or meta redirect tags.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#17The closing tags of HTML and XML are a nuisance. In SGML (their common predecessor), named closing tags were optional (you used ), but were deliberately made mandatory in HTML and XML, to improve readability of long documents. It was contentious at the time, and it still is. But we must at least accept the data points that both HTML and XML have been phenomenally successful , without knowing for sure whether this par…
I think you'd be surprised at just what you're allowed to omit in HTML. For example, the following document is valid HTML 4.01 Strict:
Once upon a time on my personal blog, I used minimal HTML 4.01 Strict (omitting tags and other bits of syntax whenever and wherever possible -- I had a Markdown fork that knew how to do this within the constraints of the spec); my one concession was a longer DOCTYPE declaration to deal with anything that didn't know how to resolve the public identifier. Browsers actually handled it just fine, but some other systems (in particular, OpenID autodiscovery) failed, because they weren't actually doing HTML parsing.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#18Oh please. The time you spend learning HAML or Markdown (and all their potential intricacies) could be better spent learning to write clean HTML. I'm sure that both of those "alternatives" have their own quirks that must be worked around, not to mention the fact that you don't know exactly what HTML the parsers will spit out (yes, you can learn the output, I suppose, but why?). I can see these tools being useful in c…
I would agree with you if you were talking simply about Markdown, but it seems you don't understand the point of HAML. Markdown is a complex syntax that loosely translates to half of HTML. It's good for user-input, because it's designed to be written like users already write stylistic formatting when the result will be plain ASCII, but it's not HTML. HAML is HTML—it's a one-to-one conversion—but it's simpler and more…
Amen brother! Preach it. Sing out the good word across the land. Over the hill-tops and down to the valley below.
Everybody who knows HTML knows HAML. Actually learning HAML would have still given you time to write a paragraph complaining about it.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#19The closing tags of HTML and XML are a nuisance. In SGML (their common predecessor), named closing tags were optional (you used ), but were deliberately made mandatory in HTML and XML, to improve readability of long documents. It was contentious at the time, and it still is. But we must at least accept the data points that both HTML and XML have been phenomenally successful , without knowing for sure whether this par…
I think you'd be surprised at just what you're allowed to omit in HTML. For example, the following document is valid HTML 4.01 Strict: The 'html', 'head' and 'body' elements -- opening and closing -- are inferred at the correct points by a compliant parser, as is the closing of the lone 'p' element. Once upon a time on my personal blog, I used minimal HTML 4.01 Strict (omitting tags and other bits of syntax whenever…
You're right, I'd forgotten about omitting the closing , but I think that's the only one (omitting a whole element - both open and close - is something different).
Of course, in practice, most HTML parsers will do a wonderful job of interpreting malformed HTML.
Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML
#20I've spent so much time dealing with needlessly complex, over-engineered web applications who's primary architectural goal was to allow the primary developer to never code HTML that this article makes me sick.
An HTML form is the simplest representation of a form's presentation you're going to get. Suck it up, use HTML templates.