COBOL FAQ *moved*

Because the Objectz site has had so many problems recently, I have gone ahea
d
and MOVED the COBOL FAQ to the following location:

http://home.comcast.net/~wmklein/FAQ/COBOLFAQ.htm

I still have NOT done any (or much) "content" updating, but have checked (an
d
corrected) many links.  I *think* all existing links (but not email addresse
s)
are currently valid.  I will go ahead and (soon) update the automated messag
e
that gets sent every two ws or so.

I use Microsoft products for creating my web pages.  These are NOTORIOUS for
causing problems for any (and all) browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Please feel free to let me (us) know which other browsers have which problem
s
<G>.

Although the content/information is QUITE out-of-date, the fact that links a
re
now valid should - I hope - allow users to find "current" information about 
some
(all?) of the listed products.

I still don't know when I'll get around to updating the information, but if 
you
have updates you want done (and haven't already sent them to me), please fee
l
free to do so - off-list.

--
Bill Klein
wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com

Suggest you use a plain text editor or an open source web page crafting
program such as Bluefish. This gets around the Microsoft problem
nicely.

Best,

John Culleton

Suggest you use a plain text editor or an open source web page crafting
program such as Bluefish. This gets around the Microsoft problem
nicely.

Best,

John Culleton

Did you have problems accessing it - and if so, what problems?

I (personally) really LIKE the Microsoft Word -> Web-page facility and will 
try
and "fix" problems that it causes (if significant), but otherwise will
(probably) stick with what works easily for me.

--
Bill Klein
wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
<john@wexfordpress.com> wrote in message
news:1124286966.416161.236000@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Suggest you use a plain text editor or an open source web page crafting
> program such as Bluefish. This gets around the Microsoft problem
> nicely.
>
> Best,
>
> John Culleton
>

On 17/08/2005 10:03 AM, William M. Klein wrote:
> Did you have problems accessing it - and if so, what problems?
>
> I (personally) really LIKE the Microsoft Word -> Web-page facility and wil
l try
> and "fix" problems that it causes (if significant), but otherwise will
> (probably) stick with what works easily for me.
>

Sure, authoring such pages in Word is easy.  However, it generates
almost completely non-standard content.  This means you have almost no
guarantee that anyone will be able to read it.  This is not just
nit-picking.  Do you intend everyone in the intended audience to be able
to read it?  What if they don't have IE?  What if they need to use a
screen-reader because of sight difficulties?

The HTML it makes is also many, many times larger than it needs to be,
and is nearly impossible to maintain with any other editor.  You are
also tied to a proprietary second-level file format.  There is no
guarantee that your document will render to HTML in a similar or
reasonable way in the future.

Woe betide anyone who takes over the editorship of your Word file in the
future.  For the skys will run red with poorly validated CSS applied
(and re-applied) to each and every HTML tag, and spurious and missing
end-tags.

The way, IMHO, the ideal way to maintain a document like this is in SGML
or some other (even simpler) markup language.  Then you generate the
text, PDF, HTML, XHTML content automagically based on a single source
document.

If you don't need the powertool that SGML is, you can always consider
one of the simpler document forms, like DocBook.  DocBook is sort of
SGML-lite, and was designed exactly for things like HOWTOs and FAQs.

Are YOU having problems accessing the FAQ?  If so, what problems are you hav
ing?

Again, I am happy to try and "fix" any problems that get reported to me.  So
 far
(less than one day in this location) I haven't heard any.  The FAQ has been
created this way for SEVERAL years now, and I haven't heard complaints about
people not being able to read it or use it.

As far as others "taking it over,"  that isn't a concern of mine.  If it eve
r
becomes so, I will be happy to consider another approach.

As far as the size of the HTML file generated, I understand that, .... and
anyone who is using a 300 or 2400 baud dial-up to read it, can feel free to
contact me (at my email address which is easily available) and I will send t
hem
a "plain text" version.

***

Sorry to be sarcastic, but, although I understand others problems with M$ an
d
its products, they do what I want to do and work fine for me.  I certainly d
o
NOT force others to use them and I am seriously interested in hearing about 
any
problems the current FAQ (or the FAQ from the last several years) causes for
non-IE users.

--
Bill Klein
wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
"clvrmnky" <clvrmnky-uunet@coldmail.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:hfNMe.7748$p5.2092@nnrp.ca.mci.com!nnrp1.uunet.ca...
> On 17/08/2005 10:03 AM, William M. Klein wrote: 
>
> Sure, authoring such pages in Word is easy.  However, it generates
> almost completely non-standard content.  This means you have almost no
> guarantee that anyone will be able to read it.  This is not just
> nit-picking.  Do you intend everyone in the intended audience to be able
> to read it?  What if they don't have IE?  What if they need to use a
> screen-reader because of sight difficulties?
>
> The HTML it makes is also many, many times larger than it needs to be,
> and is nearly impossible to maintain with any other editor.  You are
> also tied to a proprietary second-level file format.  There is no
> guarantee that your document will render to HTML in a similar or
> reasonable way in the future.
>
> Woe betide anyone who takes over the editorship of your Word file in the
> future.  For the skys will run red with poorly validated CSS applied
> (and re-applied) to each and every HTML tag, and spurious and missing
> end-tags.
>
> The way, IMHO, the ideal way to maintain a document like this is in SGML
> or some other (even simpler) markup language.  Then you generate the
> text, PDF, HTML, XHTML content automagically based on a single source
> document.
>
> If you don't need the powertool that SGML is, you can always consider
> one of the simpler document forms, like DocBook.  DocBook is sort of
> SGML-lite, and was designed exactly for things like HOWTOs and FAQs.

Bill, I just accessed it with Firefox and had no problems with seeing it. (I
found some bad links, but that was not the fault of your FAQ or my
Browser... Objectz is definitely having problems; and I found a link on the
FAQ for people who want a COBOL tutor  (without being told to do their own
homework :-)) was empty.

I honestly think too much is made of this.

I don't like using WORD to generate web pages, for all the reasons that
Clvrmnky outlined, but I am happy to let other people do it. If I intend to
publish something that has been created with WORD, I run it through
Dreamweaver first, using the tool that DW provides to 'Clean up WORD HTML'.

Although the word stuff is verbose, and a lot of it is unnecessary, it isn't
true that it can't be resolved by other Browsers.

I have been doing a lot of experimenting with Firefox lately and find it
excellent. But it still isn't my 'default Browser' and I'm still not
persuaded to drop IE in favour of it. My first ventures into Linux have been
disastrous and I have fled back to Win XP Pro with renewed appreciation of
it. I simply don't have time for the learning curve on Linux at the moment.
I'll look at it again when I have retired...:-).

Netscape 8.0 apparently emulates IE when it needs to, to resolve MS Jscript
and HTML interpretations. I have not noted any Firefox problems with stuff
developed for IE (apart from bgsound tags, which is fair enough...I have it
on my list to fix this on pages that use it...)

My server logs show that over 90% of all access is via IE. I intend to keep
using it as my target platform for web page developments, but I do check
them with Firefox now to keep IE honest... :-)

I don't thnk you are wrong to use whatever tools you have available for
this. You are not being paid for the FAQ and there is no reason you should
spend money on tools like Dreamweaver or Front Page or Cold Fusion in order
to put a few pages onto a FAQ.

The COBOL FAQ is a useful service and it is simply churlish to whinge about
it not being State of the Art, or Cross Browser friendly.

Pete.

TOP POST no more below.




"William M. Klein" <wmklein@nospam.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:JWNMe.9074$VZ6.7676@fe03.news.easynews.com...
>
> Are YOU having problems accessing the FAQ?  If so, what problems are you
> having?
>
> Again, I am happy to try and "fix" any problems that get reported to me.
> So far (less than one day in this location) I haven't heard any.  The FAQ
> has been created this way for SEVERAL years now, and I haven't heard
> complaints about people not being able to read it or use it.
>
> As far as others "taking it over,"  that isn't a concern of mine.  If it
> ever becomes so, I will be happy to consider another approach.
>
> As far as the size of the HTML file generated, I understand that, .... and
> anyone who is using a 300 or 2400 baud dial-up to read it, can feel free
> to contact me (at my email address which is easily available) and I will
> send them a "plain text" version.
>
>   ***
>
> Sorry to be sarcastic, but, although I understand others problems with M$
> and its products, they do what I want to do and work fine for me.  I
> certainly do NOT force others to use them and I am seriously interested in
> hearing about any problems the current FAQ (or the FAQ from the last
> several years) causes for non-IE users.
>
> --
> Bill Klein
> wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
> "clvrmnky" <clvrmnky-uunet@coldmail.com.invalid> wrote in message
> news:hfNMe.7748$p5.2092@nnrp.ca.mci.com!nnrp1.uunet.ca... 
>
>
>

HTML and related technologies (XHTML, CSS, etc.) are standardized by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). If you care about standard compliance, the
W3C has a page where you can validate your HTML for compliance:
http://validator.w3.org/

In my experience, when Firefox and IE differ in their interpretation of
HTML and especially CSS, I find that usually Firefox is implementing the
(W3C endorsed) standard and IE is deviating from it (or equivalently, is
implementing the "defacto standard").

An example of this is the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. The IMG tag
looks like <img src="myPicture.jpg" alt="text1" title="text2"/>. In older
versions of IE (they fixed this recently), ALT and TITLE were essentially
interchangeable and both contained the text that should be displayed when
the mouse hovers over the tooltip (i.e. mouseovers), and the text that
should display if the image cannot be displayed for some reason (e.g. the
image file doesn't exist, or the user is blind and using a screenreader, or
the user just decided to disable images).

In Firefox (and in more recent versions of IE now), the two tags have
different semantics. ALT is the text that should be displayed if the image
cannot be displayed, and TITLE is the text that should appear during mouse
overs. These semantics also happens to be the semantics that W3C describes
in their standards document for HTML.

The problem is that before Firefox came along, almost nobody knew about
the TITLE tag and everyone was using the ALT tag, sometimes explicitly for
its mouse-over behaviour. So there was a big debate about whether Firefox
should stubbornly stick to the W3C standard, or whether it should "emulate"
IE (as almost all other browsers, e.g. Opera, have been doing up till then).
It seems that they chose to go with the former.

Now there's a big argument as to whether IE should switch to using the
W3C semantics rather than its own. On the one hand, IE's non compliance is
holding back further development of HTML and related technologies. The W3C
is working on CSS3, but it's almost a big joke, because IE doesn't even
support CSS2 yet, and IE has something like 90% marketshare. So 90% of
Internet users aren't even reaping the advancements in CSS2. [*]

On the other hand, because IE has 90% marketshare, a lot of web
developers make sure their sites work in IE first, and Firefox second. As
such, if IE did switch to the W3C semantics, then a lot of web developers
would have to redesign their sites, possibly almost from scratch, depending
on how much IE-specific behaviour they were depending on.

- Oliver

[*] If you want to see some demonstrations of the truly beautiful things you
can accomplish with CSS2, check out Zen Garden http://www.csszengarden.com/
(using Firefox or some other CSS2 enabled browser). It's the same HTML
content, but with different CSS2 stylesheet applied. One of my favourites is
killer style
([url]http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://adjustafresh.com/zen/mozattack.css[/u
rl])
where I was really impressed of how the author managed to create the effect
of a blade slicing through the page as you scroll down. For those who do
some of web developing, note that this is pure CSS and no JavaScript, DHTML,
Flash, Java, QuickTime, or any other plugin was used.

On 17-Aug-2005, "Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@enternet.co.nz> wrote:

> I have been doing a lot of experimenting with Firefox lately and find it
> excellent. But it still isn't my 'default Browser' and I'm still not
> persuaded to drop IE in favour of it. My first ventures into Linux have be
en
> disastrous and I have fled back to Win XP Pro with renewed appreciation of
> it. I simply don't have time for the learning curve on Linux at the moment
.
> I'll look at it again when I have retired...:-).
>
> Netscape 8.0 apparently emulates IE when it needs to, to resolve MS Jscrip
t
> and HTML interpretations. I have not noted any Firefox problems with stuff
> developed for IE (apart from bgsound tags, which is fair enough...I have i
t
> on my list to fix this on pages that use it...)
>
> My server logs show that over 90% of all access is via IE. I intend to kee
p
> using it as my target platform for web page developments, but I do check
> them with Firefox now to keep IE honest... :-)

I know that the default setting of Opera is to lie to web sites about what
browser it is using.   This is because so many web sites have logic that is 
too
limited.

Both Firefox and Opera have decided that Active-X is too dangerous to implem
ent.

Most pages don't test against the de jure standards, only the de facto stand
ard
(does it work with IE).

Thanks Oliver,

I found this interesting and informative.

You are right about the CSS capabilities, and the Zen garden site is superb.

I checked all the designs with both Firefox and IE and saw no detectable
difference. I am using IE 6 with all updates applied, and Firefox 1.0.6 with
MacroMedia plugins (Flash 7.0) and QuickTime plugin.

I am using CSS more and more (though I haven't got to this level yet :-)...
I am inspired by the site and will study their HTML/CSS) and in some
recently published poetry on the Tauranga Writers web site
(http://taurangawriters.org.nz), I was able to offer people different colour
schemes and formats with no effort, thanks to CSS. (Oddly enough, nearly all
of them chose the same colour scheme, quite independently! I deliberately
posted one poem in a different scheme ("On hearing Segovia in Tauranga") so
they could get the idea, but nobody wanted to change their scheme...)

Pete.

TOP POST - nothing new below.


"Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com> wrote in message
news:%x0Ne.191160$HI.120930@edtnps84...
>
>    HTML and related technologies (XHTML, CSS, etc.) are standardized by
> the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). If you care about standard
> compliance, the W3C has a page where you can validate your HTML for
> compliance: http://validator.w3.org/
>
>    In my experience, when Firefox and IE differ in their interpretation of
> HTML and especially CSS, I find that usually Firefox is implementing the
> (W3C endorsed) standard and IE is deviating from it (or equivalently, is
> implementing the "defacto standard").
>
>    An example of this is the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. The IMG tag
> looks like <img src="myPicture.jpg" alt="text1" title="text2"/>. In older
> versions of IE (they fixed this recently), ALT and TITLE were essentially
> interchangeable and both contained the text that should be displayed when
> the mouse hovers over the tooltip (i.e. mouseovers), and the text that
> should display if the image cannot be displayed for some reason (e.g. the
> image file doesn't exist, or the user is blind and using a screenreader,
> or the user just decided to disable images).
>
>    In Firefox (and in more recent versions of IE now), the two tags have
> different semantics. ALT is the text that should be displayed if the image
> cannot be displayed, and TITLE is the text that should appear during mouse
> overs. These semantics also happens to be the semantics that W3C describes
> in their standards document for HTML.
>
>    The problem is that before Firefox came along, almost nobody knew about
> the TITLE tag and everyone was using the ALT tag, sometimes explicitly for
> its mouse-over behaviour. So there was a big debate about whether Firefox
> should stubbornly stick to the W3C standard, or whether it should
> "emulate" IE (as almost all other browsers, e.g. Opera, have been doing up
> till then). It seems that they chose to go with the former.
>
>    Now there's a big argument as to whether IE should switch to using the
> W3C semantics rather than its own. On the one hand, IE's non compliance is
> holding back further development of HTML and related technologies. The W3C
> is working on CSS3, but it's almost a big joke, because IE doesn't even
> support CSS2 yet, and IE has something like 90% marketshare. So 90% of
> Internet users aren't even reaping the advancements in CSS2. [*]
>
>    On the other hand, because IE has 90% marketshare, a lot of web
> developers make sure their sites work in IE first, and Firefox second. As
> such, if IE did switch to the W3C semantics, then a lot of web developers
> would have to redesign their sites, possibly almost from scratch,
> depending on how much IE-specific behaviour they were depending on.
>
>    - Oliver
>
> [*] If you want to see some demonstrations of the truly beautiful things
> you can accomplish with CSS2, check out Zen Garden
> http://www.csszengarden.com/ (using Firefox or some other CSS2 enabled
> browser). It's the same HTML content, but with different CSS2 stylesheet
> applied. One of my favourites is killer style
> ([url]http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://adjustafresh.com/zen/mozattack.css[
/url])
> where I was really impressed of how the author managed to create the
> effect of a blade slicing through the page as you scroll down. For those
> who do some of web developing, note that this is pure CSS and no
> JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, Java, QuickTime, or any other plugin was used.
>
>