Re: OT: HTML (WAS: MF having issues?)

Oliver Wong wrote:

"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:46o0i6FbssfnU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Today I was grabbed by an enthusiastic person in my workplace who had used SharePoint to build an Intranet site. It looks totally professional and he is rightly proud of it. It is the sort of thing we couldn't even dream of in 1995. Even though he is only serving up static HTML pages and has no idea how they work or the fine points of the language, he has a very professional looking site that he built in about an hour. It is shared on the intranet and will be very useful for teams to share information and news. He is thrilled and the technology has empowered him. (I looked at some of the code and it is like what happens when you write HTML in MS Word... Horrific! but who cares? It does what he wants and he did it easily without any special knowledge.)


This is a minor gripe of mine, so feel free to ignore this post if the issue of standards-conformance and HTML does not interest you.

Bad HTML versus good HTML might be subjective, but I dislike invalid (non-standard conforming) HTML.

Oliver, I can't address HTML but as a golden rule, regardless of which language/tool you use there MUST BE a STANDARD - otherwise you finish up with those inconsistencies you cited. 'KNOWN' and publicized extensions to a Standard are a different thing all together.

As an example, while OO COBOL was still in the embryonic stage, Micro Focus produced their version of OO which, to the best of my knowledge, was consistent with the standard we now have. One slight difference - M/F came up with the following syntax :-

Class-id. MyClass inherits from.........

Class-Control. ThisIsClass1 class is "class1"
ThisisClass2 class is "class2".

The eventual standard used the syntax 'Repository' instead of 'Class-Control', which Fujitsu had from Day One. Net Express V 4.0 will accept both 'Class-Control' and 'Repository', (one of them but not both in the same program). Now that's a known difference and given a source using 'Class-Control' it wouldn't compile in Fujitsu - an error would be highlighted and you change the source to 'Repository' syntax. If you are an F/J user taking code from somebody else you may not be aware of 'Class-Control'. No big deal - the compile is going to red flag it for you anyway.

As part of their design M/F added additional syntax to the line :-

Class-id. MyClass inherits from.........

I wont go into the details but a nifty feature was that you can code that to indicate that the Global Data in the first class can be referenced by sub-classes. I don't know, but in all probability M/F submitted this feature to J4 - sour grapes or bureaucracy, J4 didn't pick up on it - even though the chairman was an M/F employee ! Now as of V 4, M/F is consistent with the standard but still retained their additional features which are EXTENSIONS. In this particular case, definitely a problem if a developer using N/E includes them and re-thinking if picked up by an F/J developer - although again they would be flagged as F/J compile errors.

I mentioned recently a review of Table Syntax in COBOL which is 'occurs x times' or 'occurs from a to b depending on c'. John Piggott - I met him only once at Newbury (M/F UK HQ), for a J4 meeting in 2000, sat next to our Robert Jones who used to trundle up from Gloucester, not as a member, but as a developer contributing ideas. John runs a software house in Wimbledon where he also travelled from, for his sessions. His major interest back then was the Report Writer. I also assumed, from his knowledge that he was a J4 member. Not so. Only recently Chuck Stevens advised that John was a visitor just like Robert.

Perhaps it's because I was born a Brit that I sense 'Anglo' feelings, bearing in mind most of the 12 at the meeting were from this side of the Pond. John was the one who submitted a very detailed paper about flexible tables (in PROCEDURAL syntax) to attain the changeable 'sizing' as already exists in OO lists/collections/maps, regardless of language. As the nit-picking brigade got busy on his paper, probably not for the first time, my antennae went up, 'John is getting real pissed at this nonsense'. I was totally disinterested in the topic, (not being OO), don't know what significant changes they made to his proposal, and possibly John went home with the thought, "Yeah, I proposed a horse and they come up with a bloody camel !'.

Above is not totally germane but shows the other side of the coin when determining standards.

Fortunately with Java it is still largely down to Calgary-born and educated James Gosling and the Sun team. Woe betide anybody who upsets Mr. Gosling - word is he has an extensive vocabulary of expletives !

If you and I go into Tim Hortons for our coffee and doughnut - that's what we expect. If some other jerk opens another franchise down the road 'Krispy Kreme' perhaps, and we order a coffee and danish - we will not be thrilled with the thought that the lidded coffee container has orange juice, when we take our first sip !

It is absolutely BLOODY RIDICULOUS that somebody would design a version of HTML which screws up on :-

> "Bla bla bla" - <em>some guy</em>

Taking COBOL as an example :-

ADD A TO BE GIVING C

That's *exactly* what we expect to happen - and unless he is a space cadet, a developer does not expect the result in variable C to contain the Square Root or a Factorial ! Want to 'enhance' the language/tool - don't *substitute* but come up with an *extension*.

Don't try and control people from making extensions, PROVIDING they are documented - at some future date a standards body might see the efficacy of incorporating that into an updated standard.

However there is a downside with a product like HTML as you illustrated - how does your Browser get around identifying standard entries and extensions ?

Jimmy
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