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Call me old fashioned, but in my
opinion, you really shouldn’t
need to count the hyphens in a comment! What am I blathering
on about, you may ask? I’ll tell you – Firefox.
That sainted web browser so beloved of all those champions
of ‘web standards’ and Anything That Is Not
Microsoft. Well, I’m sorry, but any browser that
screws up thanks to a hyphen is not a browser that gets
my vote.
Standards, be damned! Why are all those people who rabbit
on about standards so in awe of W3C the ‘world wide web consortium’? This is,
after all, just a self-appointed committee of faceless
bureaucrats – a stodgy, top-heavy talking shop. When
was the last time innovation came out of a committee?
Standards, Who Needs ‘Em?
Standardization – when people keep banging on about
how great it is I cringe. Does anyone here remember ISO
Pascal? ISO – now there’s another great organization
whose sole aim in life is to enforce conventionality. ISO
is not just a committee; it’s a committee of committees.
By their
own account “ISO
is a network of the national standards institutes of 156
countries”. Does this sound like a good, fast, flexible
and responsive way of dealing with the rapid changes of
modern technology?
As I said, who remembers ISO Pascal? My recollections
of it are so vague that I had to look for more information
in Wikipedia . Apparently it was standardized in 1983. Ha! And much
difference that made!
The only Pascal that made any impact was a totally non-standard
version called Turbo Pascal which later went on to become
Delphi. That version of Pascal was created by Anders Hejlsberg – the
same man who later on developed another new language called
C#. The C# language certainly wasn’t a standard anything
- though it has now been ‘approved’ by ISO
and ECMA (the European
Computer Manufacturer’s Association). Gee, I bet
it really made Bill Gates’ day when their seal of
approval came through!
Attack Of The Clones
Which brings me back to W3C. My blood runs cold when I
come across a web site that has one of those “WC3
compliant” buttons on display. It’s no more
than a badge of conventionality. The Borg Collective would
be proud of it. 'Bring on the Clones,' I seem to hear them
cry!
Don’t be fooled. While all these evangelists of
standards talk about the importance of universal accessibility,
they don’t really mean it. What they mean is that
they don’t like Microsoft. A W3C compliant logo on
a web site is another way of saying “this site hasn’t
been tested in Internet Explorer so of that’s what
you are using, the folks round here don’t want your
type!”.
Firefox is the favoured browser of many of these W3C compliant
sites. Heaven knows why. As far as I can see, Firefox is
an entirely unremarkable piece of software. As I’ve
said before, Opera is by far my personal favourite but
I really don’t get too worked up one way or the other
about mere browsers so if you prefer some other one that’s
fine by me.
Dash It All!
I don’t know if the Firefox hyphen bug is defined
as a WC3 standard (in which case, no doubt someone will
write to inform me that it’s not a bug, it’s
a feature). I really don’t care. For all I know it
may have been authorised by two dozen different committees
and rubber stamped in triplicate. As far as I am concerned,
it’s still a bug.
Same HTML first (above) in Internet Explorer then (below)
in Firefox
Try it yourself. In HTML a comment begins with these characters ‘<--‘ and
ends with these characters ‘-->’. Everything
inside the comment should, in theory, only be visible when
you are looking at the source code. It should never be
displayed in the browser itself. However, Firefox has decided
that if it comes across two or more extra dashes at the
start of the comment, it will treat the comment as text.
So if you enter this…
<body>
Hello world
<!-- --This is a comment -->
</body>
…Firefox displays this:
Hello world <!-- --This is a comment -->
Whereas Internet Explorer and Opera simply display “Hello
world” and keep the comment to themselves. Pah! Standards!
You can keep ‘em!
It makes You Want To Spip!
My battles against HTML (not to mention bloody CSS – ah,
but I’ve already had my say
on that so I’ll
try to bite my lip for now) came to the fore this month
due to the fact that I’ve been setting up two new
sites using the SPIP CMS system. What a great piece of
software this is. I don’t often wax lyrical about
open source projects but for SPIP I shall make an exception.
The SPIP site (above) shows the W3C compliant button.
The
Uzine site, created with SPIP (below) has a radical alternative.
Guess which one I prefer...
My first SPIP site was www.sapphiresteel.com – the
home of the Steel IDE for programming Ruby in Visual Studio.
The second one (still under construction) is BW2, the Bitwise
colour supplement. I have to admit that it took me a week
or two to get used to the SPIP way of doing things. While
it isn’t hugely complicated to create a SPIP site,
I would say that at least a basic familiarity with some
kind of programming would be an advantage.
SPIP constructs pages by iterating over data inside loops
(or ‘boucles’, this being French software)
and you can apply various criteria to select and filter
specific elements. For example, this is how I create a
loop to display a list of the ten most recent articles
{0,10} by date {par
date} ordered inverse order – the
most recent first {inverse}:
<BOUCLE_article_un(ARTICLES)
{par date} {inverse} {0,10}>
Don’t be put off by the slight Gallic accent of
the syntax, by the way. You don’t have to be a fluent
French speaker to use SPIP. Moreover, the English
language documentation is excellent. Simple
loops like this are pretty easy to set up but you may need
to experiment when you use loops within loops – say
an outer loop to get the names of the authors of an article
and an inner loop to get the names of other articles written
by the same authors:
// Outer Loop
<BOUCLE_auteurs(AUTEURS) {id_article} {par nom}>
// ….more
HTML here
//
Inner Loop
<BOUCLE_articles_auteur(ARTICLES)
{id_auteur} {par popularite} {inverse} {0,5}>
//… more
HTML here
</BOUCLE_articles_auteur>
</BOUCLE_auteurs>
The layout and content of SPIP pages are defined by templates
which are written as ordinary HTML peppered with special
bits of SPIP code similar to the above. There are special
problems posed when trying to design pages containing tags
(such as <BOUCLE>) which do not form a part of normal
HTML. Dreamweaver, for example, blows the proverbial gasket.
It really screws up the visual display of the layout and
reports coding errors which aren’t really there.
Now I can edit my SPIP pages complete with little graphics
for the non-standard tags, in Dreamweaver...
Fortunately, there is a way of fixing Dreamweaver which
(unfortunately) I only discovered rather late in the day.
What you need to do is create an XML file in which you
define any special tags. This XML file can be saved in
the \Configuration\ThirdPartyTags directory beneath your
Dreamweaver installation directory. You create a series
of tagspec definitions and, optionally add an icon to be
displayed in Dreamweaver when the matching tag is found.
You also have to create a graphic image (for example, using
Fireworks) for each icon. This is my definition of the
BOUCLE tag which I saved in the file, spip.xml:
<tagspec tag_name="Boucle_1" start_string="<BOUCLE" end_string=">"
detect_in_attribute="true" icon="spip.gif" icon_width="30"
icon_height="12"></tagspec>
<tagspec tag_name="Boucle_0" start_string="</BOUCLE_" end_string=">"
detect_in_attribute="true" icon="spip.gif" icon_width="30"
icon_height="12"></tagspec>
You can find more information on defining custom tags
in ‘Extending Dreamweaver’ which is available
from the Dreamweaver Help menu.
Ah, this stuff is all wonderfully non-standard. I love
it…!
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