Bert Van Vreckem writes: | John Chambers wrote: | > [...] One of the ongoing challenges with my Tune Finder has | > been handling ABC embedded inside HTML. This is not a good idea, of | > course, but you can't stop people from doing it. One of the frequent | > ways that people do this includes indenting all the ABC to match the | > indentation of the HTML tags. It looks fine on the screen, because | > HTML renderers ignore such white space. I've found one site that has | > all its ABC done this way. (I won't name them, to protect the guilty | > - and clueless. ;-) | | Don't protect them. Educate them! ;)
Well, yes and no. When people ask for advice on how to make things work better with tools like mine, I'll make some suggestions. But one of the useful things about the web is that you are free to put your site together however you like, without regard for any stranger's advice on how to do it right. This makes for a bit of a mess, but it also allows people to invent interesting things that wouldn't have ever appeared if we all had to follow someone else's rules. And some people don't want their site indexed by a site like mine. There is even a conventional method (in the robots.txt file) for telling web searchers to stay away, which my search program honors. There's an intermediate level of people who want their sites accessible via browser but not other kinds of web software. I may not like it when people do this, but I have to admit that it's their right to do so. I've seen the this attitude from a number of site owners. A common reaction to suggestions like "The ABC tunes inside your web pages are difficult for software to extract" is to say "All you have to do is cut and paste to your ABC app's window". There's not much you can say in response to this, because it's usually true. And this makes it clear that the person really does want you to do extract the tune by hand, not by using a tool that automates the task. There are also a number of sites whose owners don't want you to download just one tune. This is basically what my Tune Finder does, of course, and I know of a couple of sites that have taken steps to explicitly interfere with this. Again, it's their right to do so. (In a couple of cases, I've given them advice on how to do it. ;-) OTOH, when you put something on the web, it's well within the rights of people like me to attempt to read it and do something useful with it. So sites that do things like putting ABC inside HTML (and maybe indenting it) can be taken as an interesting technical challenge. The growing need to include HTML parsers in every program does make life difficult for software developers, though. Especially when you consider all the bad HTML out there from some of the commercial web site development packages. Your parser has to not just handle standard HTML, but also Microsoft HTML. (Gotta get in the traditional anti-MS bash, y'know. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
