This Week's Insanity Is:
 
html
  once upon a time, sombody had the gaul to call html a programming language. it is indeed merely a markup language, as its name clearly states: hypertext markup language. however, its status as a markup language is what makes it simultaneously riculously easy and sumblimely annoying. take for example the markup to make something italic: this is very simple --- merely enclose the targeted text between the italic tags, <i></i>. however, this tends to get very messy when things geet complicated, asin the delineation of the acronym html above: 
<i>h</i>per<i>t</i>ext <i>m</i>arkup <i>l</i>anguage
you notice that the tags start and end with the greater-than and less-than symbols. all very well and good... then again, if the tags start and end with < and >, how did i get these symbols to show up? oh, it gets better!!! there are special characters, each starting with the ampersand, that can be used for this purpose, such as the copyright symbol © denoted by &copy, the ampersand & by &amp;, and so on. this means that the bit of code shown above for demonstration purposes had to be written like this: 
&lt;i&gt;h&lt;/i&gt;per&lt;i&gt;t&lt;/i&gt;ext
 &lt;i&gt;m&lt;/i&gt;arkup 
 &lt;i&gt;l&lt;/i&gt;anguage
and then taking into account that every one of those ampersands above had to me defined as well, we see that html reall sucks for highly formatted documents.

this problem doesn't really make itself apparent when you're just writing a simply formatted text page (like most of the previous ranting and raving i've done in the current insanities but can be a royal pain when you're working on something complex. the pretty much ramdom array of tables on this page is an example, but the highly fussed-over and framified page i've been making for the IEEE SouthEastCON 99 hardware design competition takes the cake. actually, i've put together the whole site, but the hardware one is my main responsibility... and with the frames comes an added bonus --- almost no web-authoring utilities have extensive frame support. netscape's page composers won't do it, a whole slew of freeware html editors have never heard of frames, in fact, only advasoft's asWedit has been my frames teacher/helper, and really all i use it for is to check my syntax everynow and then with its syntax highlighting and html mode. in actuality, 95% of the webpages i've ever created have been madeby some combination of pico, vi, and nedit... all unix-based plain text editors. in fact, rigth now i'm in vi in hp-ux 10.20. and let me tell you, this week, i'm feeling my hatred for html....

if it's so easy, why is it so difficult to make anything that looks interesting?

   
Wed Nov 26 14:49:43 EST 1997