Re: [ba-ohs-talk] (not) eating your own dogfood
A USER'S POINT OF VIEW (01)
Let me just outline the steps I go through in updating Fleabyte's front page.
I am aware the cognicenti probably are quite scornful of what's going on here,
but it is a real-life situation. Please, bear in mind thatmy primary job is to
deliver content, not to get lost in the arcana of W3C. Having said this, I am
conscious of the fact that as a companion to Doug's Bootstrap site it behooves
me to partake of "our own dogfood." The spirit is willing ... (02)
Here are the steps: (03)
1. Open a page in TextPad (running w. Win98).
2. Scan the web for potentially newsworthy material using Netscape 4.7.
3. Copy and paste URL and text from browser to TextPad.
4. [some editorial considerations about handling and timing of materials. Must
consider available personal time and attention span.]
5. Write shorts (extracts, quotations, recasts), possibly in contextwith
existing materials on the site.
6. Call up last Fleabyte home page with Netscape Composer and add the shorts
produced sub 5.
7. Netscape is associated with TextPad so this gives me a chance to do certain
manual touch-ups (URLs, article IDs, those sort of thuings), but as much as
possible I use Composer's WYSIWYG. In other words, markup is the outcome of
two approaches.
8. New articles are copied to two archive pages (right now eic-7.html and
eic-7-.html) and given Engelbartian location numbers.
9. Contents page is updated.
10. Stuff is FTP'd to website using Ipswitch. (04)
As I am trying to move my who shooting match from Windows to Linux, I am
anxious to have a corresponding procedure for my Linux side, but,
unfortunately, ran into nasty problems such as getting wrong characters - ?
instead of " etc. - copying inconsistencies. I assume these problems can be
solved, but a lot of time input may not produce results. I did take a stab at
switching to Netscape 6, which on the surface looks more promising and seems
to be "self-correcting." Tidy became a bit of a headache, but I forgot why
that is so. And I still don't have an editor like TextPad in which I can
combine lines and remove margins from blocks of text each with a single
stroke. Frankly, I have no time comparing available editors. (05)
Being concentrated on content, some of the technical arcana give me a
headache; much of it I don't understand right away - and as soon as I do I
begin forgetting already. Just as soon have someone interested in seeing
Bootstrap volunteers succeed creating a fresh "recipe" for me to follow. That
recipe should also include move to XML and application of purple-number
scheme. (06)
Wish that Doug's ideas had already taken hold such as the one where you pass
over the controls to somebody else who can then show you. (07)
Some people have given me some wellmeaning advice in the past, but I just
can't cope trying to understand it all. (08)
Hope that this user's perspective may serve a useful purpose. (09)
Henry (010)
Murray Altheim wrote: (011)
> Eugene Eric Kim wrote:
>
> > A fella in Finland decided to check the homepages of the W3C's 506 member
> > organizations for valid HTML or XHTML. Only 18 sites validated.
> >
> > http://homepage.mac.com/marko/20020222.html
>
> The big problem in web design is that almost nobody hand edits their
> markup or even pays attention to it, and the GUI WYSIWYTYG (what you
> see is what you think you get) editors in general produce some really
> ugly markup. Many sites won't work at all without JavaScript turned on.
> I challenge anyone to export "HTML" from MS Word and look at what it
> creates. Amazing.
>
> But I don't see that there's much to be done about this, given that
> the emphasis from the W3C has never been much along the lines of
> valid markup. It sometimes seems that they've done everything they
> could to kill the use of the DTD, such that as a DTD and validation
> advocate I often felt I was swimming upstream. While Tidy was initially
> produced by Dave Raggett of the W3C, it itself doesn't produce valid
> markup in many cases -- I've had to edit its output as well.
>
> My guess is that those 18 sites may be managed by a validation zealot
> like me, or had some type of company policy dictated by one. In the
> end all one can do is produce better tools, or agitate for them, such
> as this guy in Finland.
>
> With the existence of XHTML and XML tools, it's actually pretty easy
> to check one's markup nowadays, and even clean it up, so it's sad to
> see so many corporate sites with poor design under the counter,
> concentrating on flash rather than substance or interoperability.
> But that's not unusual in business, is it?
>
> Murray
>
> ......................................................................
> Murray Altheim <mailto:m.altheim @ open.ac.uk>
> Knowledge Media Institute
> The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK
>
> In the evening
> The rice leaves in the garden
> Rustle in the autumn wind
> That blows through my reed hut. -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu (012)