Microwave with door open

That's very like Microsoft-generated HTML. Crappy and bloated.

You can generate or hand-write either XML or HTML to be neat and readable. Microsoft doesn't bother.

I write HTML documentation for my employer using a text editor, and I code all of the formatting by hand.

Cindy Hamilton

With the exception of Visual Studio for some projects, if I can't do it with Gvim it ain't getting done. Some sites are still using plain text returns but many are moving toward the NIEM standards. There was the Global Justice XML Data Model that everybody ignored and NIEM arose from the ashes. Of course the standard changes periodically.

Whether XSLT is a language or not, it sure as hell isn't one of my favorites. The XML isn't as hideous as Microsoft's but it still isn't something you dump to a terminal and say "Here's the return for that license plate you just ran."

Simply add a killfile entry to kill any post containing the phrase "Rod Speed". Since most people begin with "Rod Speed wrote", that would trigger the rule. I do that for everyone I killfile. I have no interest in any replies they may generate.

Could you run that through a grammar checker, it's completely incomprehensible.

Or maybe they don't care? I don't class Northern Ireland as part of Britain/UK/whatever you call it. I've actually seen some people write "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".

You're unusual.

All he needs to know is anyone in the UK that ain't in England is weird.

Well when nobody wants to have anything to do with the EU, they'll realise they're a sham.

I didn't upload the docx file, I copied and pasted from within the Word application to the webpage form. Somewhere it lost the blank lines between paragraphs.

Their slogan "think different" went a bit too far.

I'll try that next time. So why does it have to insert what's already there?

Indeed. When (insert the name of whatever M$'s web page editor was at the time) produced a 15kB file for a webpage with a single word on it, I gave up.

I really, really want to believe that was faked but... I'm vague on a lot of Africa and might stumble in the Baltics and Balkans. It's not like the exact position of Latvia and Estonia comes up often.

Then there are gotchas like Isle of Man, the Hebrides, and the Faroes. At least the Faroes have Eivor Palsdottir. I know where the Shetlands are from the TV show.

I can probably name about 50% of countries. But not the ones that keep splitting and joining like what used to be the USSR and I just call Russia.

What really made me laugh was the Merkins that didn't think of naming their own country!

That should read, "The United Kingdom of (Great Britain and Northern Ireland)". The brackets are implied.

We just say Britain. Where "we" means those without autism, OCD, or other such ailments. Get help immediately.

It is simple: The Kingdom of England actually consists of England and Wales. Great Britain (the Great is to distinguish it from Brittany) consists of England, Wales, Scotland and various islands. The United Kingdom consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The British Isles refers to Great Britain and the whole of Ireland.

SteveW

That's what I see if I cut'n'paste into a plain text editor. Word is rendering the data and handling the formatting, but that's just how it's going to appear in Word. At least I see a paragraph as one long text line and not the underlying markup.

Back around the Apple I time there was a good deal of argument in the techie circles. Wozniak treated a floppy sort of like a smashed flat cassette drive. Most people were using the Western Digital 2791 floppy disk controller that handled the sector sizes, sector read order, tracks, and modulation. It wasn't clear if Wozniak had achieved a brilliant design with a minimum parts count or if he just didn't know what the f*ck he was doing. As a bonus nobody could read Apple floppies.

Apple has had some good ideas like FireWire. Then they turned around and made such a mess of licensing and royalties that it never took off.

They aren't the only ones. Qt is a very nice cross platform GUI framework but reading Trolltech's licensing made you wish you had a team of corporate lawyers. Potentially get involved in something like the Oracle/Google pissing contest over Java patents or look for another GUI toolkit? No brainer.