Re: FrontPage 98

Subject: Re: FrontPage 98
From: "Huber, Mike" <mrhuber -at- SOFTWARE -dot- ROCKWELL -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 12:19:24 -0400

In my programming days, I learned what that "inner peace" really is: a
shorthand message from a part of your mind that handles a huge amount of
training and experience as a background process. Invariably, when I didn't
go for the "inner peace," the code would come back and bite me somewhere
down the line. I'm not talking about taking forever to make it perfect, just
trusting that feeling enough to take a closer look when something feels
wrong. I've managed to train that little voice to balance the potential for
trouble against the time it would take to make it better.


In the particular case of just going with whatever slop the software cranks
out, rather than doing standard HTML, there are a couple of things to watch
out for:

1) Re-use. If you have clean HTML, it will probably be a good start for
whatever HTML-based help system you end up with. It will probably be usable
as source material for that new XML system that you don't know about yet.
And I just about guarantee that within the next 12 months, some new web
technology will come up that none of us has heard of, and eventually many of
us will have to move the material we a producing now over to it. And it will
be much easier to move clean HTML into it than slop.

2) New and different browsers. IE and NN are very similar. They are based on
the same code, and each revision is designed by copying the other's version
and adding a couple of features. But there are other competitors out there
(Opera, for example) that are based on the W3 standard. As people lose
patience with the Big 2, other browsers may become more important. I've
taken to using Opera as my primary browser, because when a page works in
Opera, it usually also works in both IE and NN. I still check each page on
IE and NN, before I release it, but it tends to be a formality.

BUT I do use FP 98, especially for first drafts. FP 98 is a fine program and
does some things very well. Produce ready-to-use HTML ain't one of them. I
haven't had much trouble with it generating non-standard HTML, probably
because I avoid the more "interesting" features like "bots." I switch back
and forth between the WYSIsoWYG and HTML views constantly. The ease of
switching is one of the best things about FP 98. The marketing lies about
not having to know HTML are, well, marketing lies.

The two biggest problems I have with the HTML that FP 98 are the excessive
font specifications and the odd source code formatting. FP likes to add font
statements all over the place, and never removes them, even when there isn't
anything between the <font> and </font> tags. I've cleaned up HTML files
where more than half of the file was unnecessary font tags. FP has it's own
ideas as to where the lines should break (I'm talking about formatting that
is visible in the code, but does not affect what the page looks like in a
browser) inside an HTML file, and rearranges your code. I like to delimit
sections of an HTML file with comments, and I like those comments to be on a
separate line. FP embeds my comments in the middle of lines. For example, I
might write

...whatever. </p>
<!-- Start of the XYZ table -->
<table bla bla bla>
....
</table>
<!-- End of the XYZ table -->

and FP changes that to something like

...whatever. </p><!-- Start of the XYZ table --><table bla bla bla>
....</table><!-- End of the XYZ table -->

---
Office:
mike -dot- huber -at- software -dot- rockwell -dot- com
Home:
nax -at- execpc -dot- com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Posada [SMTP:posada -at- FAXSAV -dot- COM]
...
> Assuming I agree with the proposition that FrontPage does not produce pure
> HTML 3.2, let allone HTML 4.0 standard HTML code.
>
> However, let's also assume that FP produces web pages that can be read
> reasonably well in web browsers (and FP doesn't have a lock on bad
> HTML-code).
>
> Question: So what?
>
> Seriously...doing what we do...isn't it more important to satisfy the
> needs
> of the user/customer/employer than to have inner peace knowing that should
> the w3 consortium point their validator at the site, that it won't find
> any
> " border="0" " tags or unnamed image ALT tags?
>
> Case in point (nothing personal toward the specific case/author...there
> may
> be factors that we cannot/neednot know). we've seen the thread about how
> FP
> trashed a TOC code after "having spent weeks crafting a complex expandable
> TOC". Would the customer have been better served getting a product weeks
> earlier with a less-sexy TOC created in 20 minutes, and have had other
> deadlines met/additional projects initiated (and, BTW, FP can creates
> expandable TOCs)?
>
> I've seen this happen in all walks of writer-life...
>
> * A programmer spends 50% of the time making a program 5% better, yet
> rather than having a useful program generating benefits, has the perfect
> program still sitting on his HD.
> * An HTML author spends 20 additional hours on a 100 hour web site just to
> make sure than it is 100% HTML 4.0 compliant.
> * A proposal misses deadline and is disqualified because the
> AccountManager
> wanted to get the Exec Summary exactly right, even though everyone is
> pretty sure they are the low price anyway.
>
> My experience has been that sometimes we (and sometimes I) loose track of
> the ultimate goal and make the process of getting there more important.
>
> I'm interested in level-headed input to this...
>




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