HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

[David Cuthbert]

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Gary Thorpe wrote:
> How about paragraphs and subheadings? Unless it is tabular data, it 
> should not be tabularized. The only reason people do it is to get a 
> magazine-like side list os links: its too bad a web page isn't a magazine.

Ugh.  Without an enclosing table, every web browser on my systems will
render the page at 200-300 characters across each line.  Completely
unreadable.

Dave Cuthert wrote:
>> Easier to keep the document separate from HTML completely and 
>> preprocess it, bypassing buggy CSS implementations completely.
> 
> You are ignoring the time spent developing the scripts in PERL or 
> whatever that will have to do this preprocessing as well as increased 
> time to serve the page, increased server load/memory/disk/cpu, increased 
> network load due to larger documents, and increased rendering time for 
> the client (things like lynx can just ignore stylsheets taht are not 
> embedded in the document an not even fetch them).

You're ignoring the time spent debugging buggy CSS implementations.  I
can rat off a Tcl or Python script in minutes.  The last time I used
CSS, I spent hours trying to "fix" it.

And preprocessing imposes no server load.  I preprocess the page once,
store the html file on the server.  Keep the original content and the
script in CVS.  Voila!

>> Yeah, but manually inserting tabs/spaces becomes almost WYSIWYG in 
>> emacs. :-)
> 
> WYSIWIG sucks. Thats why latex is still used widely for articles/papers 
> and not MS-Word.

Only in CS journals.  LaTeX never caught on much in the IEEE community.

For IEEE, we usually use FrameMaker.  Though I had to use Word for my
latest paper (because my collaborators didn't have Frame).  Ouch.  I had
a hard time believing it, but Word XP is *worse* than Word 2000 at
handling figures.

WYSIWYG only "sucks" if you misuse it, i.e., apply explicit formatting
instead of styles.

> How about...using paragraphs, lists, blockquotes, etc? They are directly 
> defined in HTML for your convenience.

Heh... so are tables and frames, to fix the rendering problems with
plain old paragraphs, etc.

I suppose I could reduce my screen resolution to 640x480, but I'll pass,
thanks.  (hugs his Xinerama setup at 2880x1024...)

> You got a readable layout yes, but what happens when you add to it?

I'll let emacs' M-x auto-fill-mode fix the word wrap, and with the pre
tags, I'll be done in under 2 minutes.

> Oh, and trying to control how it renders is pointless as you have 
> realized, so why bother trying to in the first place?

I thought gopher lost out to HTML+HTTP?

> And what is 
> readable for you, may not be for everyone else, especially if they use 
> some tool to automatically convert your page into another format (think 
> text-to-speech). In these cases, a logical use of markup will probably 
> be much better.

What on that page could possibly be improved for text-to-speech?  Or a
braille reader?

>> And it's viewable in lynx, too!  Heck, it almost looks the same in 
>> lynx as Mozilla!
> 
> Do you think you can try the many different web browsers to check how it 
> "looks"?

If a browser can't render <pre> text, I neither care nor want to hear
about it.

Dave