Ketchup
Various things have happened to me, and to Epistula, while I’ve been away. Also to the blogroll. So once more, it’s time for:
While You Were Out
- Epistula got Textiled so I can write all my entries in english and the computer does the hard part. Yay.
- Aqcom got a new Projects section. It’s currently a flat HTML thing mainly as a list (As much for my benifit as yours) as to what I’m working on. Eventually it’ll become fully Epistulated.
- I got a new project, or more accuratly a reactivation of an older idea. It’s a full Geek Thing review system, which I’m building as generic as I can, and exploring all the things I learnt while doing Epistula. Plus the kind of detailed cookie-based login system I haven’t done since StoryVille (Ex fiction project. Died of code-deletion). Interesting thing about it right now is that users select a licence for user-submitted reviews & comments to be released under. This allows – for example – someone to licence all their reviews under a CC(Creative Commons) thing. The two things I would like to happen to this idea would be for reviews to be editable based on licence (So if someone releases a GDL review, someone else can edit it), but that could get too complicated, and also lead to the possibility of someone going though and replacing all GPL‘d reviews with a string of spaces. So, Freedom of Information verses Fuckwittery Of Idiots. Round one, ding ding.
- Funcom have announced a sequel to the game I was raving about last month: The Longest Journey
- I applied for jobs. I got phone calls from recruiters, I still haven’t had a single interview. I wait patiently.
- And then there is the World of Ends stuff. My response is somewhat like Stavros wrote, only less amusing. The internet is* complicated. Not in spite of, but because the idea is so simple. ”[T]he Internet was designed to hold smaller networks together, turning them into one big network” lies up there with “They’re only words written down, how much damage can they do?” in tales of “Points, Missing thereof”. The thing isn’t that the idea of The Internet is complicated, it’s that the consequences are quite so far-reaching. The document appears to be doing the classic thing of arguing about what it originally was, as opposed to what it means now. Because the internet *isn’t the simple network of networks that once it was, not in the public mindset. It’s the far more complicated idea of the people using the network of networks. From granny on AOL though to Luke The L33t Hacksaw burning though a 1024 bit/sec connection. We need a new name either for this new thing, or for the old one. Then we can have this discussion without terminology getting in the way.
- Cam returned with a well formed rant about Americanism. The US Administration still scares me, even more so now it appears to be running England as well. Blessings of any deities listening to anyone caught up in this fucking mess. That’s all of us, by the way.
- Still not king yet.
![[RSS Icon]](/assets/images/buttons/rss2.gif){kind=small}
![[ESF Icon]](/assets/images/buttons/esf.gif){kind=small}
![[CDF Icon]](/assets/images/buttons/cdf.gif){kind=small}
gilmae:
mate, you’ve been on the List so long, you ain’t ever gonna excise the stain. You might as well start calling yourself Lady Macbeth now.
A Nameless One:
This has really puzzled me. Why do people feel the need to reinvent HTML (and reinvent it badly)?
Seriously, what is the difference between text, [strong]text[/strong ], and text? I can see a few:
Only one is formally defined in a specification – HTML
Only one has massive amounts of mindshare behind it – HTML
Only one has clear and unambiguous escaping rules – HTML
So really, wtf is up with all these different systems, when HTML does the job much better than any of them?
Aquarion:
As Tom says, it’s partly because I don’t want to do the gymnastics involved with making HTML clean for the use of people who I can’t trust.
For the Textile thing, the difference is a lot more simple, it’s correctness. The difference between “text” and “text” is limited, but the difference between “this is a sentance – subclause – that has a subclause” and the full HTML way (“this is a sentance &emdash; subclause &emdash; that has a subclause”) is that I have to pause while the words are flowing to get the syntax right, and I don’t want that, it acts as a barrier between my words being written and them appearing. This way I can just type as I’m used to and textile will get it (mostly) right.
The third is future-proofing. Parsing HTML is ikky, parsing Textile is less ikky. I want the ability to export any given page as LaTeX – for example. Having a meta-format I control that I can then transform into something I like is nice.
beaneater:
Burning through a 1kbit connection? Riiight.
As for text input (comments etc.) I’m still undecided. It’s nice to do things to people’s comments, rather than just dumping them in a , but there are always problems. (1) It doesn’t always do what you first expect. (2) How do you over-ride the default behaviour when you know what you want?
For the first, consider Texile. The translation of hyphens is a good idea, but turning a double hyphen into an em-dash breaks my mind. As any good LaTeX user knows, a double hyphen is an en-dash. And a hyphen surrounded by spaces for an en-dash? In ASCII, I always used to use that for an em-dash.
The second often means second-guessing the translation. For example, automatically turning links into ’s, or the equivalent, is done wrong so often. How do I override an incorrect “guess”?
A third problem: trying to reverse engineer somebody’s mark up to find out how to use it. For example, the list I had above was meant to be an unordered list, but prefixing the lines with stars simply removed them. Using a line (or paragraph) for each item with a number in front munged them up together somehow. Whatever I try, I cannot work out how to seperate paragraphs in Aquarionics comments.
I’ve never had that problem with a .
Aquarion:
Double-newline creates new paragraphs.
For some reason, lists are broken unless there is nothing after them. Working on this.
beaneater:
Sometimes.
In other words, that was the impression I got, but in some cases a double newline appears to fail to start a paragraph.
Not entirely sure under what conditions, but the second paragraph in my previous comment should have been four (notice the newlines where paragraph breaks should be). Adding a short paragraph (such as “Foo”) after this one merges this and the previous one, in your preview at least.