Editing in HTML -> Docfail

Exec Summary:

I like Wikis. I don't mind Wiki markup so much. Recently I had to investigate using the Sharepoint 2007 Wiki, and found that it goes directly to HTML. This led me to formulate the following rule of thumb:

Any documentation system that forces you to edit HTML is a failure.

Involved Discussion:

True, Sharepoint has a limited WYSIWYG editor that you can use, but the data is stored largely in HTML format (Wiki words being the exception). For many tasks, or to get a consistent appearance across documents, you'll have to work with the HTML tags.

Why is this a bad thing? Googling around, I found a few people who actually thought this was a strength of Sharepoint. Total control of the output, right?

Three points:

• HTML is verbose
• HTML is exceedingly error-prone
  
• HTML is not 100% portable

Say you want to create a level one header on Sharepoint, I see two alternatives:

1. In the WYSIWYG editor, type in the text, select it, bold it, enlarge it.
2. In the HTML editor, bracket the text with

   …

   tags.

With the first technique, everyone could build the header differently, leading to inconsistent appearance. And it gets ugly if you do have to drop into HTML mode:

<DIV align=center><STRONG><FONT size=4>This is a Title</FONT></STRONG></DIV>

(Don't even think about documenting HTML in the Wiki page!)

The second technique gives a consistent appearance, but you have to work in HTML, which can become a major distraction from getting work done.

In the Media Wiki, the text is bracketed with “==”.

==This is a Title==

All the nested tags in HTML leads to endless problems with unbalanced or mismatched tags. Complicating this is the way different Web browsers will handle those errors. Some will render the text the way you expect, others are less forgiving.

And having brought up different browsers, there's always the possibility that as you add a greater variety of HTML tags to your document, your page could render very differently for users of Safari vs those using IE.

Another Benefit of the Health Care Crisis

I've recently come down with a case of asthmatic bronchitis. This is worse than acute bronchitis, but not as bad as pneumonia (meaning I don't think it will kill me).

"So what is asthmatic bronchitis?" you ask, or google. I had asthma as a child, but had forgotten what that was really like until this hit me. It's a combination of an asthma attack and a powerful cough reflex. It's like someone is simultaneously giving you a punch in the solar plexus and a swirlie.

This goes on for a minute, while a detached voice at the back of my mind says, "Perhaps I will finally get to see an inverted lung." That hasn't actually happened, and I'm betting if it did, it would be a disappointing sight, what with all the inflammation, mucus and blood.

But aside from these intense moments, the rest of the time this illness is pretty boring. I'm usually too worn out to focus on anything more intellectual than say, a bad SF novel, or a bad SF show on Hulu. Which I did for a while. But eventually I couldn't even concentrate on that.

And that's when I started missing TV. I do own a TV, it's just not connected to anything besides an XBox and a DVD player. No cable, no antenna. I don't like television programming. "Cable" means "hundreds of channels with nothing to watch". But then I got to thinking about this correlation between me feeling sick and stupid, and wanting to watch TV. Maybe this is an indicator of a larger trend, that one of the other beneficiaries in the growth in chronic diseases is the television industry. There are few chronic diseases that rob you of the ability to watch TV, and they often give you time to do not-much-else, because of the effects of the illness and the side effects of many drugs.

So this leads us to an explanation for the popularity of the Jerry Springer Show. You'd have to be sick to be on the show, and you'd have to be sick to watch it. The crisis in health care ensures that there are plenty of people who now qualify.