Cooperation while editing html
I know a person who is rather clever and can be called computer literate (he knows at least one programming language, dunno on which level, but probably medium advanced). We were doing some kind of interview, basically we had a text that we wanted to cooperatively change.
First, I saved the text from ICQ, added some very simple html tags (html, body, p and strike for the parts I didn’t like). I sent it to him, and the guy made a few changes and sent me a pdf (if you don’t think “wtf?” now, there is something seriously wrong with you 
). So I have rewritten the changes he has made in the pdf into my html and sent it back to him, with a note not to send me pdf, that it’s uneditable. Then I got html produced by MS Word. Couldn’t be much worse, could it? (if you’ve never seen it, it’s practically unreadable with the tags taking like 80%) This time I asked him to use a text editor, that it will be much easier for both of us, that the html I use is pretty easy. Next time I got html produced by mozilla… Speechless. 
[Maybe I should note that he wasn’t able to explain why he was so deliberately trying to avoid the easy way. Also, this is not the only example, many people who are usually quite normal, sometimes behave in similar ways, life is just weird…]
Why using a wysiwyg editor for easy html is stupid? You know, I’m already very sleepy, but just a few things for the few people who don’t believe me: everyone has a text editor, so everyone can read it; by writing html by hand you produce much cleaner code than (almost any, I think) wysiwyg editor even if you don’t try to, it’s much easier to further alter it; you can use advantages of your favorite text editor.
Also, we decided to make my lines bold, which took one global replacement command in vim:
:%s/<p>V:/<p style=”font-weight:bold”>V:/g
My guess is that it would be much more difficult in any wysiwyg.
Again, argh… I start writing half asleep and fall asleep while writing, all my ideas get lost and I will be too lazy to change it tomorrow… but believe me, wysiwyg mess=evil, pure&readable=good. Good night.
It was a classical conflict between a computer expert and a computer user, in fact even more funny and complicated. It remembered me my first experiences with computers when the small Jesus brought me a Sinclair Spectrum. It had 64 kB memory and a Basic language as a part of the operating system. There already existed “computer literate” persons claiming that you cannot use basic command as PRINT AT 8,10 “Hi guys” because it is completely stupid, and you have to write instead a half page in an assembler, which is much more elegant and efficient and probably more sexy too. What I want to say: why all these people hate to click on a B icon in an user friendly soft and prefer to memorising and to batter their fingers with things like %s/V:/V:/g ?? Why they are ready to torture us the whole afternoon insisting on UTF-8 character coding instead of apparently hopelessly ridiculous ISO 8859-2? Who cares how the text is coded? B icon = good, %#s//x\++c–>&^ = evil. We agreed to make another interview – I swear here, that this time I will write my comments on a piece of paper and send them to tasuki in an envelope! :cursing:
1) I don’t insist on any encoding, we just have to agree on one and use it, be it utf-8, iso-8859-2 or win-1250 (I chose utf-8 because it’s default for me, but I don’t really mind any other one).
2) The main point was keeping the file clean and readable (eg. using plain text editor). I probably shouldn’t have used html because people tend to use wysiwyg editors when editing html. Just using marks like * or _ would make it easier I guess.
3) The one command consisting of one line replaces dozens of mouse clicks.
4) Concerning the other interview - we will hopefully just use plain text files, we will not name it .html, because that leads to using wysiwyg editors