Re: [FRIAM] Yet Another, Tower of Babel, Cambrian Explosion
I don't do much web development, but it seems to me that it would be better to treat HTML/CSS (and maybe even JavaScript) as the assembly language of the web. Let the browser digest it, humans shouldn't have to look at that cruft. Write your web content in whatever you're comfortable with (Python, JavaScript. and dare I say it - Lisp or Clojure), and have whatever web server/plugin you deploy to do the translation. If the web hosting service doesn't accommodate your preferred language, then find another web hosting service. Of course, some web content is already this way - most people who use WordPress or Blogger don't end up writing that much HTML - they use a GUI builder to customize it, and/or change its appearance with themes. ;; Gary On Mar 20, 2013, at 10:24 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Well, here's the puzzler for me: Why is CSS an entirely different syntax than JSON or even HTML? Fail! I guess Sass/Less may get close, as well as CoffeeKup http://coffeekup.org/ which just sez: WTF, lets just mash them all up, no prob. I would like a markdown equivalent to CSS. Seriously. Could anyone think about it a bit and suggest how it'd go? JSON is the closest I can get. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Yet Another, Tower of Babel, Cambrian Explosion
CSS is an extension of HTML and is confined to HTML element attributes. JSON is a generic data interchange format (DIF) LESS and SASS are preprocessors that programmatically generate 'static' CSS but PHP, etc. can do that too if you care to write it. Perhaps to answer your question they were all developed by different inhabitants of the Tower but you knew that. It seems to me that a) extra layers or preprocessors just make development and debugging harder and b) JSON is a rebellion against XML as a DIF. BTW why are all serious coding languages and tools written in English? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages. Robert C On 3/20/13 9:24 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: Why is CSS an entirely different syntax than JSON or even HTML? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Yet Another, Tower of Babel, Cambrian Explosion
Well, here's the puzzler for me: Why is CSS an entirely different syntax than JSON or even HTML? Fail! I guess Sass/Less may get close, as well as CoffeeKup http://coffeekup.org/ which just sez: WTF, lets just mash them all up, no prob. I would like a markdown equivalent to CSS. Seriously. Could anyone think about it a bit and suggest how it'd go? JSON is the closest I can get. -- Owen On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Josh sed: Also surprised Owen hasn't brought Markdown into the mix here. Seems like the perfect ASCII/monospace style for meaningful formatting. The nice thing about standards is we have so many to choose from! - Andy Tanenbaum ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/**Andrew_S._Tanenbaumhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum) Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/**projects/markdown/index.texthttp://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/index.text It strikes me as somewhat less awkward than HTML for *reading* and just about like Wiki markup and not that different from the more-specialized formats that support Javadoc or Doxygen. I'd love to see a taxonomic chart of the myriad formal language specs out there. If not the tower of Babel then perhaps the Cambrian Explosion? Here we go on the rant! There is a reason that the CS/CE community has the idiom Yet Another. Nothing (anyone else has done) is ever good enough for us, so we analyze what has been done down to the gnats ass, pick a couple of distinguishing characteristics and then conjure a *whole new system* that meets this slightly different set of requirements. Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said 'Oh what a good boy am I!' Referencing the Cambrian Explosion, this might very well be what is going on both with text formatting and Google. Evolution seems to depend more on draconian *pruning* than on speciation, though I guess they go hand in hand. Google's aggressive pruning of it's own services (up to and including the Nexus 4 and it's more demanding bleeding-edge fans, now fondly known as Dougs?) is just part of the froth of life itself climbing the entropy gradient, expelling sub-optimal designs as reaction mass to maintain steady acceleration up that slippery slope. I guess I consider minimally formatted (caps, punctuation, spaces, LF/CR) a pidgen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Pidginhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin) lingua franca ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Lingua_francahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)... and the additional markup like my own favorite *bold* and _italics_ or scare quotes and SHOUTING just a little extra color and spice in the lingo, dontcha kno mon! My understanding/belief of culture and language is that the interfaces between peoples of different cultures where such pidgen languages thrive represent a great deal of richness and complexity *because* they are so simple and context-dependent. It seems as if most of us here are yearning for our favorite _pidgen_ to become a proper _Creole_ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Creolehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole). Of course I could be wrong, that's just my opinion! - Steve ==**== FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/**listinfo/friam_redfish.comhttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] Yet Another, Tower of Babel, Cambrian Explosion
Josh sed: Also surprised Owen hasn't brought Markdown into the mix here. Seems like the perfect ASCII/monospace style for meaningful formatting. The nice thing about standards is we have so many to choose from! - Andy Tanenbaum ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum ) Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/index.text It strikes me as somewhat less awkward than HTML for *reading* and just about like Wiki markup and not that different from the more-specialized formats that support Javadoc or Doxygen. I'd love to see a taxonomic chart of the myriad formal language specs out there. If not the tower of Babel then perhaps the Cambrian Explosion? Here we go on the rant! There is a reason that the CS/CE community has the idiom Yet Another. Nothing (anyone else has done) is ever good enough for us, so we analyze what has been done down to the gnats ass, pick a couple of distinguishing characteristics and then conjure a *whole new system* that meets this slightly different set of requirements. Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said 'Oh what a good boy am I!' Referencing the Cambrian Explosion, this might very well be what is going on both with text formatting and Google. Evolution seems to depend more on draconian *pruning* than on speciation, though I guess they go hand in hand. Google's aggressive pruning of it's own services (up to and including the Nexus 4 and it's more demanding bleeding-edge fans, now fondly known as Dougs?) is just part of the froth of life itself climbing the entropy gradient, expelling sub-optimal designs as reaction mass to maintain steady acceleration up that slippery slope. I guess I consider minimally formatted (caps, punctuation, spaces, LF/CR) a pidgen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin ) lingua franca ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca )... and the additional markup like my own favorite *bold* and _italics_ or scare quotes and SHOUTING just a little extra color and spice in the lingo, dontcha kno mon! My understanding/belief of culture and language is that the interfaces between peoples of different cultures where such pidgen languages thrive represent a great deal of richness and complexity *because* they are so simple and context-dependent. It seems as if most of us here are yearning for our favorite _pidgen_ to become a proper _Creole_ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole ). Of course I could be wrong, that's just my opinion! - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
