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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
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<TITLE>The Answer Guy 36: TAG suggestions</TITLE>
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<H4>"The Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"</H4>
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<H1><A NAME="answer">
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<font color="#B03060">The Answer Guy</font>
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<H4>By James T. Dennis,
<a href="mailto:answerguy@ssc.com">answerguy@ssc.com</a><BR>
Starshine Technical Services,
<A HREF="http://www.starshine.org/">http://www.starshine.org/</A>
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<!-- begin 40 -->
<H3 align="left"><img src="../../gx/dennis/qbubble.gif" height="50" width="60"
alt="(?) " border="0">TAG suggestions</H3>
<p><strong>From john on Thu, 26 Nov 1998
</strong></p>
<P><STRONG><IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" ALT="(?)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
I think that the way you are laying out TAG right now makes it a little
hard to navigate. It would almost be better if you ran them all together
on one big page, a la $.02 tips. The one word descriptions of other
solutions at the bottom of each page are also pretty tough to figure
out. How about an onMouseOver window.status() description for each, or
something to the same effect? Great job, by the way!
<br>--
<br>John
</STRONG></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" alt="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
Heather (my wife) does all of the markup.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
She's spent many hours, for the last several months refining
a script that does the bulk of the conversion from e-mail
(adjusted for the quirks of how I format my responses) to
HTML.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
However, one of the things that we both refuse to do is to
rely about non-standard, browser dependent, and particularly
upon JavaScript, features.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<blockquote><em>
[ Actually, this is not specifically because I have anything
against javascript, though the abuse of certain features
on the open web does annoy me considerably; nor because
I don't write usable javascript code, for there's certainly
a world of tested scripts at
<a href="http://www.developer.com/">http://www.developer.com/</a>
to go with the old Gamelon archives of Java applets; but
rather, because I have no interest in making the folks
with "modern" browsers lose more memory to a feature that
they probably won't use.
</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>
and the very idea of shipping someone 90+ full titles of
messages, every time they read one of them, is insane.
Don't even go there. I'm getting off this soapbox before
I scorch it. -- Heather ]
</em></blockquote>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Originally all I wanted was for the URL's that I embed in my
text to be wrapped with anchors. However, Heather and
Marjorie (my editors) like to have the TAG messages split
and like to over some navigation between them. Heather
doesn't like sites that only offer "up, next, previous"
options in their page footers, so she's implemented the
scheme that you're describing.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<blockquote><em>
[ Also, at least one querent begged to be able to go to
seperate messages without having to go back up to the
index. Others thanked us for switching to an indexed
format, as it was much easier to read the index alone
and decide what messages they wanted to read.
</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>
As for the "tough little words"... I thought it would
be nicer than numbers, which is what my script
actually generates. The good thing is that they can
be figured out at all. They are short so that I can
format the table at the bottom so it doesn't look
lame and cost more space than the message bodies.
As it is, there's so many this time, they're staying
numbers. They'll probably go back to words next
month, but I won't say for sure. -- Heather ]
</em></blockquote>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
One problem I used encounter when TAG was "all one big page"
was with search engines. I'd get a new question that
correlated a couple of different concepts (IMAP plus
Netscape Navigator/Communicator) and I'd get all sorts of
spurious hits pointing to my own previous TAG articles.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
So I'm glad that we don't still smash all my articles into
one page.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<blockquote><em>
[ However, masochists are encouraged to read 'The
Whole Damn Thing'... the streamed version of the
Linux Gazette. And if I see more than this one
request, I may link 'The Whole Damn Answer Guy'
(that is, the version I turn in to our Overseer
for inclusion to TWDT) as an option off the
Answer Guy index. But we're certainly not going
back to the old format. Too many people like
it, and I've put too much effort into the scripts
I use to convert it, to go back.
-- Heather ]
</em></blockquote>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
However, Heather and Marjorie will see this message (along
with other LG readers). I leave the details of formatting
for publication entire up to them. Indeed when I first
started answer these questions I didn't even know that
they'd be published. (I just offered to take on technical
questions that were misdirected to the editors). So, I'll
focus on providing technical answers and commentary.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<blockquote><em>
[ I make a sincere effort to keep the resulting message
looking as close as HTML allows to what the email looks like.
When you only see it on the web, it could be hard to recall
that it was a plain slice of mail. I feel it's important to
keep that feeling. Real people use this software,
real people have ordinary problems with it, and real
people give a shot at answering them.
</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>
Which is the last tack in the coffin of using browser-specific
features... real people aren't going to change browsers
just to read a webazine, and they're not gonna be happy
if it crashes their browser because someone went a bit
overboard on the HTML.
</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>
So, I've kept changes minimal. I did all the graphics you
see here, but except for color, and the split messages, I
feel it's still pretty close to the original effort. (The
astute reader, or especially the reader without color support,
will note that I use EM and STRONG to support color usage,
so the color is gratuitous, but does make for more comfortable
reading if you have it and there's a lot of quoting.)
You can look at the older Gazettes if you'd like to see what
they used to look like... I think they look a lot better,
but I'm biased <img src="../../gx/dennis/smily.gif" alt=";)">
Still, if Jim keeps getting messages about the formatting that
I'm really responsible for, I'm gonna have to draw my own speak
bubble. I still have the blank bubble so it'll be easy. Gimp
is cool, when it doesn't crash. Maybe some month when the load
isn't too high I'll write an article about the script and how I
did the gifs.
-- <a href="mailto:star+tag@starshine.org">Heather</a> ]
</em></blockquote>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
(Personally when I'm browsing through a series of related
pages I prefer to bounce back up to the upper/dispatch
page and then down to the next. This keeps my current
"depth" a bit shorter when I want to back out of my browser
completely. (Since I get interrupted and sidetracked
frequently while browsing I like to make sure
that I'm "done" with each page that's still on the "stack"
by backing completely out to the "first document").
</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<P> <hr> <P>
<H5 align="center"><a href="http://www.linuxgazette.com/ssc.copying.html"
>Copyright ©</a> 1999, James T. Dennis
<BR>Published in <I>The Linux Gazette</I> Issue 36 January 1999</H5>
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