"By your logic, it would be perfectly acceptable for someone to learn CF by
simply asking one question on this list about each tag and function, I
suppose. I'd further suppose, after that, that this person would be a good
CF programmer, right?"
Actually, I didn't say anything even remotely similar to that. I think that
by my logic, someone could ask a question in the list and get an answer, I
believe that's all I referred to wasn't it? Yes, you did answer his
question, and perhaps your closing remarks were misconstrued, it just seems
like a lot of help comes with the baggage of belittlement in this (and most
programming-related) lists. A small price to pay, I suppose, for the value
of the knowledge.
Nothing personal, I understand you're a pillar of the CF Community and I do
appreciate your contribution to the list, just sometimes those of us
less-CF-enabled feel like we're being talked down to.
Joshua Miller
Web Development::Programming
Eagle Technologies Group, Inc.
www.eagletgi.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 5:32 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: Uses of CFContent? (warning: long & boring)
> Amen, there's nothing wrong with asking a question just for
> the sake of knowing the answer.
Not to be argumentative, but I never said there was anything wrong with
that. Well, I guess I will be argumentative. In fact, I was happy to provide
a brief explanation of what you use CFCONTENT for. In exchange, I thought it
worthwhile to point out that the original poster might have better success
using a different problem-solving methodology.
> - Not exactly the case here - since the screw and the
> screwdriver would have obviously been designed at relatively
> the same time. Who would use a screw when there's nothing to
> drive it with? And technically, the screw its self is a tool
> as it is designed to solve a problem. Furthermore, I think the
> "screw" here is deploying web applications and he obviously
> does that - thereby knowing what the "screw" is and making this
> whole argument moot.
I think you're missing the points of my analogy. It's probably not worth
explaining in detail, but the screw, in this analogy, is any individual
problem, and the screwdriver is the solution for that problem. Obviously, if
you just distilled "deploying web applications" as the only problem you
face, I don't know what the solution for that problem would be. To date, I
don't think anyone has asked "how do I build a web application" on this
list.
> When I discovered what CFContent was, I immediately had a use
> for it, alas, I'd been pounding nails with a board all too long
> when the hammer suddenly appeared.
Yes, I imagine so, but again, your problem (serving non-HTML content)
predated your solution (CFCONTENT), no? Were you never faced with the
problem of using CFCONTENT, would you have been interested beyond simple
curiosity?
> Why did Galileo want to know that the Earth revolved around
> the Sun? Did that solve a particular problem for him at the time?
> No, I think some people just enjoy the act of learning.
I would hardly compare the act of discovering scientific truths previously
unknown to humanity with asking "what does x do" on a mail list.
> Tell you what, I have a tag called <CFSOMETHING> as soon as
> you need it, you let me know and THEN you can find out what
> it does.
Well, thank you for your kind offer. Instead, though, if I need to do
something, I'll ask "how do I do x". Then, some kind soul on the list will
pipe up with "use CFSOMETHING" and all will be well with the world. In the
meantime, if I'm interested in this new CFSOMETHING tag, I'll look in the
documentation, I guess. It won't matter, because I won't remember it until
I've had to use it once or twice - at this point, I'm forgetting things
faster than I'm learning them.
My point was this - as a programmer, you don't learn solutions, then find
problems on which you use the solutions. It's the other way around. You have
problems, then find solutions to those problems. You are, of course, free to
disagree with this point.
The original poster said:
"hey guys, I always wanted to use this tag ..."
On its face, this struck me as odd, and still does. Why would you want to
use the tag, if you didn't already know what it did? And if you did want to
use it, just to say you'd used it, why wouldn't you simply play around with
it to find out what it does? Or, read the documentation (freely downloadable
in PDF form from
http://www.allaire.com/developer/documentation/coldfusion.cfm, or within CF
Studio, or with CF Server)? Or, search the archive of this list itself
(http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/htsearch?method=and&format=short&config
=cf-talk_houseoffusion_com&restrict=&exclude=&words=CFCONTENT_?
By your logic, it would be perfectly acceptable for someone to learn CF by
simply asking one question on this list about each tag and function, I
suppose. I'd further suppose, after that, that this person would be a good
CF programmer, right?
Now, this isn't intended as an attack on you or the original poster.
However, I think it's a sensible defense of my original statement.
Finally, to cap this off, I've slightly updated the CFCONTENT example I've
posted before to this list, so that it includes an example of serving a
static file:
http://www.figleaf.com/demo/mimetest/
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
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