Help me to forget today's pain
Sep. 14th, 2004 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4The problem I have with Dreamweaver is that every time I hear the bastard word I get an unshakeable earworm of Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver", accompanied by the image of Mike Myers lusting after the admittedly eminently lustable-after Tia Carrere in Wayne's World.
This, however, is not a problem that the man running the Netskills course could be expected to fix, so we concentrated on other stuff like how to wrangle the software into producing accessible, maintainable web-pages.
I'd never used Dreamweaver before but found myself in the surprising position of knowing more HTML than anybody else in the class. That is, I'd coded HTML by hand ("Brave people!" said the course tutor, only half joking) and had used CSS. Fear my scary web skills. Mind you, everybody who'd been on a Netskills course before said that there was never time to get through all the "hands-on" exercises, and even the course tutor said that nobody was expected to finish, but I got through all the homework with time to spare to read LJ and check email. And correct all the mistakes in the worksheets. Suddenly I remember why everybody hated me at school.
The impression that I get is that Dreamweaver would be a fantastic piece of software for the amateur web-designer, in much the same way that all-singing all-dancing power-tools are the secret vice (ahem) of the home DIY enthusiast. Unfortunately, at somewhere in the region of $400, the amateur web-designer almost certainly can't afford it. Which is a shame, because this particular amateur web-designer would be delighted to get her geeky mitts on a copy just to play around with. I think it's possible to create sane, well-formed web-pages with it; it takes time and care, but it allows you to use nifty short-cuts for the donkey-work. There's no inherent virtue in carving HTML out of a rock with your bare hands; why not use funky pointy-clicky interfaces if they let you get the tedious bits done quickly? I don't need to prove to anybody, even myself, that I know how to create an image link or a simple table.
Like any tool, though, it's possible to use it for the forces of evil. You can, more or less, create web-pages in an entirely WYSIWYG environment (if you never click the scary 'show code' button); which means that you can perpetrate crawling tentacled Lovecraftian horrors in your HTML without even realising you're doing it. You can be seduced by Dreamweaver's amazing templating/content-managing systems, because they are actually pretty well implemented, but only later realise that they also effectively lock you into using nothing but DW to maintain your files for ever.
Still, on the whole, the course was useful. We need to know how to use DW because our content-providers want to use it, and it helps if we know where they're coming from and know why we'd prefer them not to use it -- and know how to get them to at least set some limits on the horrors they perpetrate. The bits about accessibility issues were interesting, and DW does actually do fairly well on the creating-accessible-webpages front -- validating, checking, advising, and prompting for things like alt-tags, captions, summaries, etc. (It's just a shame it not only doesn't validate for XHTML 1.0 Strict, but lies and says it does.) The course was also a handy opportunity to consolidate previously-learned HTML knowledge, which is always a good thing. In fact, the thing that I found most interesting about DW was the opportunity it presented for learning HTML -- you can drag and drop clever bits of design, and then look at the code to see how it's done.
All in all, probably a more productive use of the day than I would have otherwise achieved. And free food, though a hint to the next people to organise a similar event: Maxwell House brown powder is NOT COFFEE.
The course was also, of course, a chance to watch STUPID PEOPLE. Who needs soap operas and reality TV when the whole world is a shimmering kaleidoscope of witlessness?
Actually, most of the participants were fine -- that is, mainstream and boring rather than actively stupid. But today's Moron Prize goes to the girl who turned up late and spent five minutes disrupting everybody by faffing with her hair, her scarf, her bag, her hair again, her coat, etc.; then when her phone went off halfway through a presentation (we'd been asked earlier to turn phones off) looked up in wide-eyed amazement, saying loudly "Nobody ever phones me!" She then went to the door, with the phone still tweetling ... and then stopped, still inside the room, to take the call. And then interrupted the presentation again a few minutes later by bouncing back to her seat saying "Sorry!" in a cheerful stage whisper.
She was the same one who, at lunch -- just after the presentation detailing the things it's possible to do to make web-pages accessible, and the things one should avoid -- whined "They're never going to let us use all the nice things, though, are they?" When asked what "nice things", it turned out that she meant -- yep, you guessed it -- things like Javascript, Flash, etc. "All the stuff that makes your website look nice." Against my better judgement (that's the better judgement that tries to preserve my blood pressure by restraining me from arguing with numbskulls) I did try to make the point that those "nice things" are exactly the things that have the potential to make the website COMPLETELY FUCKING UNUSABLE for people with last year's browser, let alone people with NO EYES, but to no avail.
And she works here, too. I'm not sure whether she or the "coffee" and stale biscuits made me more embarrassed to be part of Cambridge University.
This, however, is not a problem that the man running the Netskills course could be expected to fix, so we concentrated on other stuff like how to wrangle the software into producing accessible, maintainable web-pages.
I'd never used Dreamweaver before but found myself in the surprising position of knowing more HTML than anybody else in the class. That is, I'd coded HTML by hand ("Brave people!" said the course tutor, only half joking) and had used CSS. Fear my scary web skills. Mind you, everybody who'd been on a Netskills course before said that there was never time to get through all the "hands-on" exercises, and even the course tutor said that nobody was expected to finish, but I got through all the homework with time to spare to read LJ and check email. And correct all the mistakes in the worksheets. Suddenly I remember why everybody hated me at school.
The impression that I get is that Dreamweaver would be a fantastic piece of software for the amateur web-designer, in much the same way that all-singing all-dancing power-tools are the secret vice (ahem) of the home DIY enthusiast. Unfortunately, at somewhere in the region of $400, the amateur web-designer almost certainly can't afford it. Which is a shame, because this particular amateur web-designer would be delighted to get her geeky mitts on a copy just to play around with. I think it's possible to create sane, well-formed web-pages with it; it takes time and care, but it allows you to use nifty short-cuts for the donkey-work. There's no inherent virtue in carving HTML out of a rock with your bare hands; why not use funky pointy-clicky interfaces if they let you get the tedious bits done quickly? I don't need to prove to anybody, even myself, that I know how to create an image link or a simple table.
Like any tool, though, it's possible to use it for the forces of evil. You can, more or less, create web-pages in an entirely WYSIWYG environment (if you never click the scary 'show code' button); which means that you can perpetrate crawling tentacled Lovecraftian horrors in your HTML without even realising you're doing it. You can be seduced by Dreamweaver's amazing templating/content-managing systems, because they are actually pretty well implemented, but only later realise that they also effectively lock you into using nothing but DW to maintain your files for ever.
Still, on the whole, the course was useful. We need to know how to use DW because our content-providers want to use it, and it helps if we know where they're coming from and know why we'd prefer them not to use it -- and know how to get them to at least set some limits on the horrors they perpetrate. The bits about accessibility issues were interesting, and DW does actually do fairly well on the creating-accessible-webpages front -- validating, checking, advising, and prompting for things like alt-tags, captions, summaries, etc. (It's just a shame it not only doesn't validate for XHTML 1.0 Strict, but lies and says it does.) The course was also a handy opportunity to consolidate previously-learned HTML knowledge, which is always a good thing. In fact, the thing that I found most interesting about DW was the opportunity it presented for learning HTML -- you can drag and drop clever bits of design, and then look at the code to see how it's done.
All in all, probably a more productive use of the day than I would have otherwise achieved. And free food, though a hint to the next people to organise a similar event: Maxwell House brown powder is NOT COFFEE.
The course was also, of course, a chance to watch STUPID PEOPLE. Who needs soap operas and reality TV when the whole world is a shimmering kaleidoscope of witlessness?
Actually, most of the participants were fine -- that is, mainstream and boring rather than actively stupid. But today's Moron Prize goes to the girl who turned up late and spent five minutes disrupting everybody by faffing with her hair, her scarf, her bag, her hair again, her coat, etc.; then when her phone went off halfway through a presentation (we'd been asked earlier to turn phones off) looked up in wide-eyed amazement, saying loudly "Nobody ever phones me!" She then went to the door, with the phone still tweetling ... and then stopped, still inside the room, to take the call. And then interrupted the presentation again a few minutes later by bouncing back to her seat saying "Sorry!" in a cheerful stage whisper.
She was the same one who, at lunch -- just after the presentation detailing the things it's possible to do to make web-pages accessible, and the things one should avoid -- whined "They're never going to let us use all the nice things, though, are they?" When asked what "nice things", it turned out that she meant -- yep, you guessed it -- things like Javascript, Flash, etc. "All the stuff that makes your website look nice." Against my better judgement (that's the better judgement that tries to preserve my blood pressure by restraining me from arguing with numbskulls) I did try to make the point that those "nice things" are exactly the things that have the potential to make the website COMPLETELY FUCKING UNUSABLE for people with last year's browser, let alone people with NO EYES, but to no avail.
And she works here, too. I'm not sure whether she or the "coffee" and stale biscuits made me more embarrassed to be part of Cambridge University.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-14 05:01 pm (UTC)Ah but but but, your classes should be called things that describe what they are, either from a what-it-looks-like point of view (at work I have classes called exciting things like "greyboxout" and "redline" and "redtext") or a what-it-does point of view (e.g. "breadcrumb" and "alert" and "footer"). This is where everybody goes "blah blah logical markup" and I go "yeah, but CSS is supposed to be for display, HTML is for logical markup", and then they go "ah-hah, then you should name classes after what things look like and not what they do" and I go "but the beauty of CSS is that you can do both!" and they go "but you smell" and I go "but I've had your mum" and we all argue over who uses a more awkward text editor.
I have been in Cambridge too long.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-14 06:12 pm (UTC)The XSLT greps in loads of places in the XML source for the properties of each tag (for example you can declare a colour scheme inside each box, like "green" or "red" and the relevant shades are chosen for different things, borders, lines, and so on). It then adds to each output tag a long scree of CSS classes corresponding to its type like "box-ledger-column-nonfinal box-ledger-column-nonfinal-red box-ledger-column-tiny box-ledger-column-not-bold" and so on. Then in the CSS you can define these things as you like (exactly what shade of red in the "red" colour scheme you want the border of a ledger to be, how tiny you want tiny to be in a ledger, and so on).
It makes the css long (~20K at the moment), but it makes it static across the site, so that doesn't cost much. The problem is that it makes the tags in the HTML long. Sometimes tags can have upto a dozen of those longwinded classes assigned to them, making them over 100 bytes each! That makes the download itmes long and the HTML a pain to read. Because CSS selectors are so broken in so many browsers, I don't really have much choice but to use classes to select tags apart from the simplest of assignments (all tags and only this tag, essentially).
I could shorten the HTML considerably by using code classes like b23cf with shorter names, but that would make the HTML and CSS difficult to read (I guess I could have a big comment in the CSS, and a reference in the HTML, but even so). Doing cleverer stuff in the CSS, so I can "use the cascade" more would be nice, but I'm not sure how I could do it easily to shorten the code considerably using that, to be honest, and it would add more comlpexity. You could inherit stuff like "redness" from outer elements, but you can't say in CSS for
Another thing is that about half the CSS classes are blank, so I could save there. But there's no sensible pattern to the ones that are currently blank. I could get the XSLT to miss out those classes, but that would mean parsing CSS in XSLT (doom!) or maintaining lists of empty tags.
I guess if I had infinite time I should generate the CSS and a "not currently used" sheet, along with short tag names and documentation all from a master XML style source document. A perfecitonist's work is never done.
As I guess I've already said, my CSS tends to be half-way-between logical and layout. Afterall, there's no real dualist's border there. Saying something is the last element assumes it's being rendered temperospacially, and listing something as last can carry semantic meaning. Documents using natural texts all have connotative typographical semantics, I think, and with the demise of the supremacy of denotation, can easily by the primary payload in certain applications. There are pretty clear boundaries for a whole class of texts, particularly scholarly texts, most of which have been written in the shadow of Descartes, after all, but most of the web isn't those texts! I think that you can only hope to do your best because CSS is where the "play" is in this system.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-15 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-15 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-15 03:04 am (UTC)Then, when they change their minds two months later, one easy edit changes it all back.