The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Caffeine · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Coditor:
Caffeine:

From the quoted w3c spec, it would seem that the META tag is required and if the BODY tag is present then DIV/SPAN, HEADING and ADDRESS tags are also required.
Is that right?
Those elements are not required, but if you use them the tags are (except for the META closing tag which is not even allowed). Similarly, the HTML, HEAD and BODY elements are required but their tags are not.

Thanks. Arg, below is another HTML document that validates.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<title>foo</title>
</head>
foo
</body>
</html>

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Manni:

I've come to learn how these articles work themselves out. Start out small, sprinkle a few WTFs in there like not being able to turn on the computer. Up the bar a little with her refusal to properly use <HTML> </HTML> tags. Wait for it.... waaaaaait for it....
"Gabrielle was not a student in the Web Development course. She taught it."
And there it is, the moneyshot. Well done sir, well done.

Hate to quibble but its lowercase <html> </html>. If your teaching the next gen why not be XHTML compliant in your teachings. Otherwise WTF.

ParkinT · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

Gabrielle was not a student in the Web Development course. She taught it.
Ok, you had me until that line. While I never went to uni with students *this* dumb, I saw my share of those who got into Comp Sci because it was good because it was "in demand". Those that made it past first year never made it past second year.
I've seen my share of dumb profs who said stupid things or couldn't teach worth beans. My favourite was the network prof who gave us an example with the IP address 333.333.333.333.
But in a university, a prof teaches courses in their degree at least. A comp sci course is taught by comp sci profs, even if it's a course that they're not an expert in.
How did a second year comp sci course get someone who couldn't turn on a *computer*? Or understand the basic concepts of HTML???
Sometimes I can believe that people are *that* dumb, but this one is really making me reach for that believability-o-meter. Unless Gabrielle was high on crack or took a really good bonk on the noggin, there's no way someone *that* inept would be teaching a class. No bloody way.

I don't disagree.

But I must share a personal experience:

My son (a recent graduate from The Art Institute of Washington: a school of some noteriety) was being (mis)taught HTML by a female like this.

She described HTML tables in the most bizaare way; including the TR tag OUTSIDE the TABLE tag.

I complained to the Dean (noting that most of the class was failing-that is a reflection on the teacher not the students) and was pointed to her online portfolio. It seems she was "an esteemed professional" web developer. Obviously, she knew how to use WYSIWYG tools but no understanding of the foundational principles of HTML.

So, this *does* exists sadly.

As a footnote; I coached my son (who is a gifted artist but was not a 'techie') and the only students who passed in that course were those whom he helped outside class.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

i would kill for chick teacher. who cares she knows a shit

ParkinT · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Anonymous:

I've seen my share of dumb profs who said stupid things or couldn't teach worth beans. My favourite was the network prof who gave us an example with the IP address 333.333.333.333.

Makes sense, they probably get worried about some random server getting crack attempts from inside the Uni, because they accidentally gave out a valid IP address which happened to be a real interface in area51a.mil. Many textbooks will give clearly fatuous IP addresses (or failing that, RFC1918 ones) including ones which have 555 as the second octet, which Americans seem to find amusing. In fact there's an episode of NCIS where the on-screen addresses have four-digit octets...but I'm not willing to bet against them being real servers expressed in octal ;-)

That would be the TV show "Numb3rs" !

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Those who can - do.

Those who can't - teach.

Those who never will - need tenure.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I've seen my share of dumb profs who said stupid things or couldn't teach worth beans... But in a university, a prof teaches courses in their degree at least...
How did a second year comp sci course get someone who couldn't turn on a *computer*? Or understand the basic concepts of HTML???
Sometimes I can believe that people are *that* dumb, but this one is really making me reach for that believability-o-meter. Unless Gabrielle was high on crack or took a really good bonk on the noggin, there's no way someone *that* inept would be teaching a class. No bloody way.

Wrong-o. I had exactly this kind of lecturer (lecturer != professor) in my degree six or seven years ago - didn't understand basic computing or web concepts, called writing HTML "programming", instructed us that the code for images on a web page was "<image>filepath/filename.ext</image>", stumped by even the theory of complex things like "basic Javascript"... you name it.

I complained about his teaching, and was basically told by my head of department to shut up and sit down. I complained about her, and was nearly expelled for my trouble. Got away in the end with a slapped wrist (and she lost her job), but it always left a bad taste in my mouth.

Oh, and the lecturer? Moved the next year... to teaching first-years. Less chance anyone'll spot he was making it up as he went along, I guess.

Wierenfest · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

I've read only halfway through the 190+ comments so far and cannot stop me from wondering how many "teachers" seem to be out there who can't admit they don't know much about something but have to teach it for those and those reasons. This is an opportunity for them to mount an expedition style course where the teacher is only primus inter pares and all participants can learn from each other. It is also a good opportunity for the teacher to teach a little about ways of how to learn. Such a course may turn out better than a course of a teacher who knows his field by heart but is an idiot when it comes to didactics...

In my opinion, a good teacher takes pride in students/pupils who surpass her/him. Instead, there are loads of lazy, numbed losers who don't care a penny about their students and who suck all joy of learning and all curiosity out of the students by suppressing anything that does not fit in their narrow and rigid corset of "teaching". This situation just drives me crazy. )-:

Another subject: For those of you who point out that omitting the HTML- and the HEAD-*tags* (not the necessary content, though) is valid according to the spec - this is correct, but nevertheless that was not the explanation of "Gabrielle". According to Alex, she "insisted that it made more sense that way because HTML was "the language" and not a part of "the code." Her "proof" of this was that, thanks to Internet Explorer's forgiving nature, the pages rendered just fine."

She should have said something about the spec and about good and bad style here. But she didn't. In fact she doesn't seem to know that something like a spec exists at all.

Tachyon · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

5 pages already? At least the people who taught us HTML had a clue, though writing files on the ASP server was another matter...

CAPTCHA: FrontPage (as in Microsoft FrontPage)

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

HTML is not a programming language.

Programming languages define operations. There are no operations in HTML.

Programming languages support flow-control, like if statements/JNEs and loops. There is no flow-control in HTML.

Programming languages support variables/registers. There are no variables in HTML.

HTML is a markup language. It is applied to a body of text, and is used to "mark up" the various elements either semantically (good, original intention) or for formatting purposes (bad, and not what HTML was ever originally intended for).

HTML is a list of fancy formatting codes. Unless you'd argue the RTF spec constitutes a programming language, you can't argue HTML is one, either.

There is no definition of "programming language" that includes HTML and excludes, say, the specs for the Word DOC format (in fact, this includes active elements like macros, so there's more in favour of this being a programming language than HTML).

There are, however, easy definitions which exclude HTML but include every other widely-agreed-on programming language in the world.

poochner · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Coditor:
Having laughed at the article, proceding thru the comments... I can't believe there are more WTF's in the comments than the article itself.
....
As for the teacher (back to the article) trying to proof her point by using IE - she should be banned from the internet. Allthough IE is still my favorite browser, it is by no means a good guide to whether your HTML is valid or not. A table with missing </tr>'s will be rendered fine usually in IE but it's not valid :)

Sigh. The end tag for the TR element is optional. After all this back and forth about what's valid and links to the DTDs...

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

nickfitz:
VGR:
Anonymous:
Valid HTML Document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <title>foo</title> foo
Seems the professor isn't the only one who doesn't understand HTML...
Actually, it is a WTF. You are exactly the kind of person who is responsible for bad software and bad web pages in all fields. You shoot for "close enough" instead of "correct and reliable."
I don't know what you intended when you used the phrase "Valid HTML Document," but I read it as meaning "validating HTML document." The HTML you've provided certainly will not validate.
If you are using the "strict.dtd" URI in that DOCTYPE declaration, then omission of <html> or <head> is not just lazy; it is a syntax error. The spec says that user agents are permitted to work around it, but that doesn't make it correct.
It's forgivable of someone who's just putting up a web page of some vacation photos or pictures of his cat. However, I can't forgive a college teaching half-assed practices as "correct and proper." Telling students they needn't bother with <html> is like telling chemistry or physics students they needn't calibrate their instruments before an experiment.

Wrong. The document vaidates; try cutting-and-pasting it into the validator at http://validator.w3.org/fragment-upload.html and see.

You might also want to do a Google search for "Cargo Cult programming".

Yes, it validates as a fragment, but it does not validate if you save it as a file and upload it to the validator

The uploaded document &quot;foo.htm&quot;


was checked and found to be <em>tentatively</em> valid HTML 4.01 Strict.
This means that with the use of some fallback or override mechanism, 
we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML 
Parser. In other words, the document would validate as 
HTML 4.01 Strict if you changed the markup
to match the changes we have performed automatically, but 
<strong>it will not be valid until you make these changes</strong>.

If you use CSS in your document, you should also

check it for validity

using the W3C
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/">CSS Validation Service</a>.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex Papadimoulis:

She started ever[y] page with a <BODY> tag instead of the proper <HTML> tag, and insisted that it made more sense that way because HTML was "the language" and not a part of "the code."
Her "proof" of this was that, thanks to Internet Explorer's forgiving nature, the pages rendered just fine.
This is NOT a WTF. The <html> element is implied in a html document. IE is correct in rendering pages with no html element as if they had one, Firefox does the same. It may not be the best form, but its 100% valid.
The same is true of the <head> element, the <body> element is even implied in certain situations.
Valid HTML Document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <title>foo</title> foo
Seems the professor isn't the only one who doesn't understand HTML...
Captcha: error

If you actually bothered to read what it said she did, it said she used the body tag and not the html tag. If you use what you did, but put the body tag above everything but your doc type declaration, you would nopice that it is 100% invalid. Yes you can omit all html, body and head, but you CANNOT start an html document with body and make it valid. Here is what you had but modified to fit what she did:

 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<body>
<title>foo</title>
<p>foo</p>
</body>

or if you remove the title part for syntax reasons it still doesn't work. So this is clearly WTF.

Caffeine · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

What a thread going nowhere.
Reminds me of 13 year old kids.
www.adgerlinux.com www.vintagecomputermanuals.com

We'll consider ourselves suitably chastised by the FrontPage 5.0 master.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Satanicpuppy:
Heh. Web development as part of a CS degree? Is this WTFU or is this Playskool U?
Seriously. In my world, HTML is something that graphic designers do, and when they get done with it, I attack their prettiness with my Geek fu and make it walk, talk, and infect your computer with awesomeness.

Agree... If you're into CS, you self-teach HTML in kindergarten, not wait till 2nd year... Then what? By your senior year you'll be playin' Flash??? Your thesis, tic-tac-toe with Actionscript?!?!?!

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

In a high school programming course (final year) I once had a 45 min conversation explaining to my teacher what exactly a roman numeral was so that I could then spend 30 min asking her the implementation question about the assignment she had given me regarding roman numerals. She just didn't get it... thank god for University profs having above average intelligence. Thus far in my Computer Engineering program I haven't encountered anything worse then profs who can't teach but still know their stuff.

Captcha: perfection... hehehe

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Vim? You know you should be using emacs, right? ;-)

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

<reminisce type="oldfart">

Ahhh, the goold old days again. I remember when this was an expected situation and everyone could handle it. My first (the first) high school comp sci teacher was a math teacher who seemed quite happy to learn so much from the course from those of us who could help her out.

</reminisce>

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Satanicpuppy:

Heh. Web development as part of a CS degree? Is this WTFU or is this Playskool U?
Seriously. In my world, HTML is something that graphic designers do, and when they get done with it, I attack their prettiness with my Geek fu and make it walk, talk, and infect your computer with awesomeness.

I pretty much agree. Who would need to be taught database handling, server-side scripting, DOM properties and all these things? That sound like a job for a Web Development For Dummies book for me...
Nah. Web development is something you learn fast, in one or two days. Maybe hours. HTML is teh eesee. And everyone knows that everything is done in HTML and a bunch of gif anims.
Oups, I forgot to add a </sarcasm> tag.

The </sarcasm> tag is optional. But if you have the </sarcasm> tag you must have the beginning <sarcasm> tag as well. Check it in the validator here http://thedailywtf.com/forums/AddPost.aspx?PostID=107247&Quote=True

Trust me, I programmed this post myself.

</sarcasm>

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

We've all had our own different experiences with the so-called ":educational system", but I realized in fourth grade that the purpose of school is to prevent education, not facilitate it.

As the years rolled on, I kept hoping I was just unlucky (or wrong) and that others had a better time of it. ALL evidence since then has only convinced me that my initial appraisal was right on target.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Anonymous:

This is NOT a WTF. The <html> element is implied in a html document. IE is correct in rendering pages with no html element as if they had one, Firefox does the same. It may not be the best form, but its 100% valid.
The same is true of the <head> element, the <body> element is even implied in certain situations.
Valid HTML Document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <title>foo</title> foo
Seems the professor isn't the only one who doesn't understand HTML...
Captcha: error

Nope. According to the W3C spec, a page MUST have an HTML, HEAD, and BODY element. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html

7.3 The <samp class="edef">HTML</samp> element

<snip example>

Start tag: optional, End tag: optional

. . .

7.4 The document head

7.4.1 The <samp class="edef">HEAD</samp> element

<snip example>

Start tag: optional, End tag: optional

You provided a link and din't even read the doc. It clearly states that the HTML, Body and Head elements are all OPTIONAL.

Corona688 · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
The really sad part is people actually, honestly, complain if we go "get vim, run vimtutor, use vim" in cs201 anymore. Apparently hand holding is required.

This isn't the early 70's any more. We have decent, functional alternatives to vi with less byzantine user interfaces. How about pico, or nano? If I was trained to use vi from the start, I'd probably be able to understand it for more than 5 minutes at a time, but more helpful things like, oh, edlin have spoiled me.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Alex Papadimoulis:

She started ever page with a <BODY> tag instead of the proper <HTML> tag, and insisted that it made more sense that way because HTML was "the language" and not a part of "the code."
Her "proof" of this was that, thanks to Internet Explorer's forgiving nature, the pages rendered just fine.

While the above posters are correct -- the HTML tag is not needed for validation -- neither is the BODY tag (nor HEAD). The elements are, but that's a different thing entirely.

However, best practices is (and always has been) to include all of them anyway. Note that even the W3C pages explaining this still contain HTML, HEAD and BODY tags. And from the sound of the above, I doubt that the 'professor' was aware of any of this.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I recently spoke with a local university about doing some continuing education teaching. I learned why the educational institutions are so far behind - if there is no text book they won't teach it making it hard to adopt new technology, and they are essentially controlled by the union. The unions controlled when jobs were posted and essentially who gets them (based on a seniority system). Those of us who want to throw our hat into the ring and share our experiences are essentially given a huge hurdle to jump over. If you're working a full time gig and have some spare time to teach occasionally you're pretty much deterred from it. It's such a shame, because class room teaching gives you an opportunity to connect with people in a way that virtual classrooms, blog posts, and web casts cannot.

That's why community colleges (you read that right) are usually not half bad. One of my teachers in CC was not the greatest, but almost all the rest were.

Corona688 · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Sure, there's no flow control but that doesn't make something not a programming language.

Actually, yes it does. Otherwise there's no end to what you can call a "programming language".

While the majority is just used for outputting documents, PostScript is a programming language as well, and you can call your .ps files PostScript programs and nobody should argue.

I won't argue. PostScript has flow control. It even has proceduresl.

I don't see the difference in calling an HTML file a program and calling a perl "file" that outputs text a program.

Even though you DEFINED that difference yourself? HTML has no flow control. It does the same thing every time. You could take a photo of it's output and call that the program for all the difference it makes. It cannot do anything. It's just a document, with tags for markup.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

I took a dual credit course when I was in high school with the local community college, covering the A+ exam materials. The first day of class, she told us she didn't want to teach the class, and that she wasn't very good "at the computer things"...

Fast forward to a month and a half later, I'm in the dean's office for "trying to hack the school's network". I asked why they thought that, the response was "I looked at your screen while you were supposed to be doing an assignment, and windows were just popping up all over the place!"

... I was using ALT+Tab.

I told the administrators of the school that they were wasting my time and walked out of the meeting. I went to the high school the next day and dropped the class.

Captcha: awesomeness

achille · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

VGR:
Anonymous:

This is NOT a WTF. The <html> element is implied in a html document. IE is correct in rendering pages with no html element as if they had one, Firefox does the same. It may not be the best form, but its 100% valid.

The same is true of the <head> element, the <body> element is even implied in certain situations.

Valid HTML Document:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <title>foo</title> foo

Seems the professor isn't the only one who doesn't understand HTML...

I don't know what you intended when you used the phrase "Valid HTML Document," but I read it as meaning "validating HTML document." The HTML you've provided certainly will not validate.

I just tried it and it seems to validate
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri= ... test.html

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
WTFU doesn't happen to be ITT, does it?
/* taught there for a few years. Not all of the teachers were as expert as Gabrielle.... */

Nice. I've got a computer-drafting degree from ITT and the whole time I was thinking the same thing (WTFU doesn't happen to be ITT, does it). Actual comment from the director of the computer-aided drafting department (who also happened to be our first teacher) during our first week of class, "I don't know anything about computers, and I don't plan on learning." That comment was made during a lecture by the way, not something private I overheard.

Every new class we ushered in a newly hired teacher (yes, 2 complete turn-overs of teachers in that department in 18 months--that includes department directors). I dare say most of those teachers hadn't used a computer before...and this was only 7 years ago.

No lie.

(granted, we're talking about a technical college in this case, but still...)

achille · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Satanicpuppy:
sir_flexalot:
People wondered why I changed my major from Computer Science to Fine Art... after this, I'm sure it's perfectly clear to everyone. I had "teachers" about like that. I could put up with it for about 5 seconds.
I got out of CS the first time because of a teaching language called "Scheme" which was the default language for the first 6 or so required classes. I transferred to a different school later, but never went back to CS, until years later.
In those later years, I had a 400 level class called "Principles of Programming Languages" which was 8 programming assignments in 8 different programming languages, with two midterms and a final. I struggled with the rest (mostly because I had 2 other 400 level programming courses at the same time) except for assignment #6, which was all Scheme, all the time, which I crushed...People said I was crazy for hoarding old text books, but WHO HAD THE LAST LAUGH?!?

Oh c'mon. Scheme is just glorified Lisp.

Just 'glorified' lisp? Really ?

Try running a recursive intensive application in common lisp, see what happens to the stack.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

redminds me of my networking class where the professor stated that client machines ALWAYS use ports > 1024 and servers ALWAYS use ports < 1024.

riiiiiight....

What many people don't know is that web servers do not serve requests on port 80, they only listen on port 80. When a connection request is accepted, another dynamic port is opened that will handle the actual connection (this is normal TCP). TCP-aware firewalls (which need to be stateful) recognize this and temporarily allow traffic to and from this dynamic port. On most OSes, the new port will always be in the dynamic (unprivileged) range 49152 through 65535.

FTP servers only establish the control connection in this way, the actual data transfer requires another (typically more or less dynamic) port that's used to create an outbound data connection (in the case of active FTP) rsp. listens for an inbound connection (passive FTP). This port number can typically be freely chosen by the application if it is not in use and the process has sufficient privileges.

Anonymous:

While that claim is convenient its not really correct, for instance ANSI/SQL is not turing complete, and its still considered a programming langage.

No, it's considered a query language, else it would be called SPL.

Anonymous:

I assume you are referring to Dell Precision. You will realise that this is not an idiotic design once you envision yourself accidentally bumping your knee into that large silver "switch" thingie. If it were indeed a power switch, you'll be sorry

This happened to me twice with a (non-Dell) midi-tower, so I guess it's fine that that large button actually has no technical function at all. However, its presence is still confusing. Why not just use the logo as seen on dell.com?

Anonymous:

HTML, XML, and SQL are all examples of domain-specific programming languages.

Hell, no! They are examples of domain-specific languages, without the "programming". Deal with it.

Anonymous:
And what if HTML _is_ programming language ? http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/html/html.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

While I agree there is a grey area in what constitutes a programming language, I consider the ability to implement some basic finite state automatons using it a minimum prerequisite. And neither HTML nor XML satisfy those requirements (although some XML-based languages like XSLT do). Standard SQL may, and most vendor-specific extended variants of SQL definitely do satisfy this requirement, though, I'll give you that much.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I know it's pedantic but the L in HTML stands for Language (HyperText Markup Language) so an HTML document is a program and it does run in IE.

I see that you can write one-line programs in English. That does not make you a great English language programmer like Shakespeare.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

This is completely normal. I'm in communications at some small Canadian university (I probably shouldn't name them, so lets just say they're located in Toronto and named after the location...). I had the same sad excuse for teaching several times. The funniest one is this, and it might just top yours. For our 'web culture' class, which tries to teach a little html and talk about people on the 'net, there was a section on leek culture. No, not leet/l33t culture... leek culture. She did an ENTIRE lecture on this, and every slide was entitled "leek culture". I LMFAO, at first I thought she was speaking about some strange internet cult, and then she got into it and no, it was definitely l33t. She talked about the use of numbers to substitute letters, she talked about online gaming, she talked about chat; her presentation was just... horribly wrong? Oh sweet jesus, I paid how much for this course? I went up to her at the end of class and said "you know it's leet speak right? like... elite?" "No no, I'm sure it's leek speak." "No.. really... it's pronounced 'leet'." At that point I loaded up a wikipedia article (which was of course more comprehensive than her class had been. "Oh, I guess that does make sense". Doh!

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

No, the really sad part is that elitist morons like you still think vim is the best thing since sliced bread. Ever heard of Textmate? Just as powerful, great syntax highlighting for a lot of languages...and best of all it doesn't have an obtuse syntax that you idiots force yourselves to learn...

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
HTML is not a programming language.
Programming languages define operations. There are no operations in HTML.
Programming languages support flow-control, like if statements/JNEs and loops. There is no flow-control in HTML.
Programming languages support variables/registers. There are no variables in HTML.
HTML is a markup language. It is applied to a body of text, and is used to "mark up" the various elements either semantically (good, original intention) or for formatting purposes (bad, and not what HTML was ever originally intended for).
HTML is a list of fancy formatting codes. Unless you'd argue the RTF spec constitutes a programming language, you can't argue HTML is one, either.
There is no definition of "programming language" that includes HTML and excludes, say, the specs for the Word DOC format (in fact, this includes active elements like macros, so there's more in favour of this being a programming language than HTML).
There are, however, easy definitions which exclude HTML but include every other widely-agreed-on programming language in the world.

I disagree: defining "programming languages" is inherently difficult.

For instance, look at your requirement that a programming language defines new operations. Assembly language does no such thing. You have a fixed set of operations -- the opcodes -- and a bunch of constants. Sure, modern assembly languages have things like macros and subroutines, but the early ones did not. Is assembly language a programming language?

How about your requirement that a programming language needs variables or registers? The reverse-polish-notation programs for HP calculators has no variables -- everything is stored on the stack. Likewise, there are stack-based assembly programs and virtual machines that have no variables, and you can program in subsets of Forth or Postscript without using registers or variables and still have a Turing-complete program. For that matter, a Turing machine has no variables -- just the memory strip. Is a Turing machine program a programming language?

What about flow control? Even a Turing machine has flow control, right? Well, Turing machines have been proven equivalent to the Church lambda calculus, which to my understanding has no flow control -- it's just math. Math itself can be done without flow control... Is it a programming language? How about a subset of the Mathematica programming language? Turing-complete, but no flow control. Or if this is all a stretch, how about Prolog -- a "widely agreed upon" declarative, Turing-complete programming language with no flow control.

And even Turing-completeness is not a sure thing -- it includes things that aren't "widely agreed upon" programming languages and excludes others. The term "programming languages" is not an easy thing to define.

mercurysquad · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Ghost Ware Wizard:
how painful! you can always tell when a professor type is unexperienced in the day to day world of programming. too bad they don't require professional experience before a teacher/professor is hired for say 10+ years?
I know we are all used to working/programming professionally and lament the lack of programming experience in college, but if you really believe that then I don't think you understand the science part of Computer Science. Yeah most people who major in CS go on to become software engineers but the course work itself is highly theoretical.
What you're suggesting is that quantum physicist should work for 10+ years as accountants...it's just absurd. I've had several professors in college who were pretty bad programmers, but they understood and taught the theory very well. When your in a class that involves very little programming in the first place (say, theory of computation), does the professor need to be an ubercoder?

I definitely agree.

E.g: My freshman year theoretical CS professor is a hardcore "mathematician hiding as a computer scientist" .. also teaches at Carnegie Mellon and researched at Stanford, member of MathML W3C group, what not.

In one lecture, he wasn't too sure about C++ syntax (while explaining compiler principles), used ':=' for assignment instead of just '=', before finally giving in and saying he's not sure. On the other hand, he runs out of Roman and Greek letters in lecture notes and resorts to weird symbols ("I'm gonna have to use this squiggly arrow to..."), can make StandardML and Prolog code appear out of nowhere and made us write our own compiler in 2nd semester!

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
No, the _really_ sad part is that elitist morons like you still think vim is the best thing since sliced bread. Ever heard of Textmate? Just as powerful, great syntax highlighting for a lot of languages...and best of all it doesn't have an obtuse syntax that you idiots force yourselves to learn...

The real WTF is how you think Windows/Linux users can use textmate for development. Also vim is the best editor, period, no matter how much you are obsessed with an OSX text editor.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Anonymous:
Anonymous:

<Snipped>

You provided a link and din't even read the doc. It clearly states that the HTML, Body and Head elements are all OPTIONAL.

Sorry, posted this before i got to your apology

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Anonymous:
Anonymous:

<Snipped>
You provided a link and din't even read the doc. It clearly states that the HTML, Body and Head elements are all OPTIONAL.

Sorry, posted this before i got to your apology

achille · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I just have to have fun with this one. While you're correct that 333.333.333.333 isn't a valid dotted base ten quad, you're incorrect that an IP MUST be a dotted base ten quad. That's simply the human readable format. My favorite way of obfuscating IP addresses is to take the binary value, and convert it straight to decimal.
This is a valid IP Address: 92672
In dotted quad form: 192.168.1.1

Let me take that one more step, here's proof:

% host slashdot.org
slashdot.org A 66.35.250.150

% python
Python 2.3.5 (#2, Oct 16 2006, 19:19:48)
>>> x = 66
>>> x = x << 8 | 35
>>> x = x << 8 | 250
>>> x = x << 8 | 150
>>> print x
1109654166

% ping 1109654166
PING 1109654166 (66.35.250.150): 56 data bytes

..

% wget 1109654166
--11:25:44-- http://1109654166/
=> `index.html.2'
Connecting to 1109654166[66.35.250.150]:80... connected.

As an extra, if you are using internet explorer you can simply click here: http://1109654166/

achille · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

The uploaded document "foo.htm"

was checked and found to be <em>tentatively</em> valid HTML 4.01 Strict.
This means that with the use of some fallback or override mechanism, 
we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML 
Parser. In other words, the document would validate as 
HTML 4.01 Strict if you changed the markup
to match the changes we have performed automatically, but 
<strong>it will not be valid until you make these changes</strong>.

If you use CSS in your document, you should also

check it for validity

using the W3C
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/">CSS Validation Service</a>.</p><p></div></BLOCKQUOTE></p><p>Did you bother reading the error message? You are missing the character set - nothing to do with the Html tag. try adding this: &lt;meta http-equiv=&quot;Content-Type&quot; content=&quot;text/html;charset=utf-8&quot; &gt;, I posted this <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww-static.cc.gatech.edu%2F%7Eachille%2Ftest.html&amp;charset=%28detect+automatically%29&amp;doctype=Inline&amp;ss=1&amp;outline=1&amp;verbose=1" target="_blank">link </a>earlier too.<br />&nbsp;</p>

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

JL:
I disagree: defining "programming languages" is inherently difficult.
For instance, look at your requirement that a programming language defines new operations. Assembly language does no such thing. You have a fixed set of operations -- the opcodes -- and a bunch of constants. Sure, modern assembly languages have things like macros and subroutines, but the early ones did not. Is assembly language a programming language?
How about your requirement that a programming language needs variables or registers? The reverse-polish-notation programs for HP calculators has no variables -- everything is stored on the stack. Likewise, there are stack-based assembly programs and virtual machines that have no variables, and you can program in subsets of Forth or Postscript without using registers or variables and still have a Turing-complete program. For that matter, a Turing machine has no variables -- just the memory strip. Is a Turing machine program a programming language?
What about flow control? Even a Turing machine has flow control, right? Well, Turing machines have been proven equivalent to the Church lambda calculus, which to my understanding has no flow control -- it's just math. Math itself can be done without flow control... Is it a programming language? How about a subset of the Mathematica programming language? Turing-complete, but no flow control. Or if this is all a stretch, how about Prolog -- a "widely agreed upon" declarative, Turing-complete programming language with no flow control.
And even Turing-completeness is not a sure thing -- it includes things that aren't "widely agreed upon" programming languages and excludes others. The term "programming languages" is not an easy thing to define.

Whether or not your disagreement is valid, it still doesn't change the fact that HTML is not a programming language.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

his one is really making me reach for that believability-o-meter.

Agree. this sounds like BS

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

This reminds me of a intro to web programming class I had to take for my CIS degree. I argued for 15 minutes with the teacher in front of the class having to explain to him why he was wrong is saying that GIF files were vector images. His reasoning was that raster images were for photos and vector images were for clip art therefore since JPEG files were used for photos they were raster and since GIF files were for clip art they were vector. He still didn't believe me after I explained that GIF and JPEG were just two different types of compression for raster images. Sigh...

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

p-daddy:
his one is really making me reach for that believability-o-meter.

Agree. this sounds like BS

This is the real WTF: people who cannot believe this story. What wtf-free bizzaro land do you live in? How do I apply for citizenship?

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

scary..i had an ex gymteacher for a computer introductions course at our comptech school, and she usually spoke about a zip driver when it was a zip drive, and there were lots of other dramas similair to the one above.

Thanny · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

This reminded me of a TA I had in Intro to Comp Sci, which used FORTRAN.

The professor did the lectures, and TA's (i.e. grad students) taught the smaller classes. The one I was stuck with did not know FORTRAN at all, despite having apparently acquired a BS in computer science. I had to correct her constantly in the class, and eventually the other students simply started asking me the questions instead of her.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

webzter:
Anonymous:

Okay, once more with feeeeeeeeeeeling...

According to Subsection 7.3 of the HTML 4.01 standard, both tags of the HTML element are optional. Optional means not required.

According to Subsubsection 7.4.1 of the HTML 4.01 standard, both tags of the HEAD element are optional. Optional means not required. Note that the TITLE subelement of the HEAD element is required, and the open and close tags for TITLE are required.

According to Subsubsection 7.5.1 of the HTML 4.01 standard, both tags of the BODY element are optional. Optional means, remarkably enough, not required. At least one subelement is required.

According to the normative SGML DTD in Section 21 of the HTML 4.01 standard, the aforementioned optional tags are, indeed, optional.

This is not a rendering issue. A rendering issue this is not. Rendering issue? Not this!

Have we chapter-and-versed this enough, yet?

--
Christopher Clark

I'm going to give everyone an out here. It's obviously valid HTML. It's most definately not valid XHTML.

This will never hope to validate:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<title>foo</title>
foo

Yes, I know that wasn't your point, but it'd be nice to think that enough people are using XHTML these days that they've just mentally swapped the two terms HTML and XHTML.

I should have mentioned that as well. =) Personally, I use XHTML 1.1 (yes, I've read "XHTML Considered Harmful", I just happen to think the people XHTML 'harms' deserve it), I just felt the need to vent at people who preach incorrect doctrine.

--
Christopher Clark

cconroy · 2006-12-15 Reply Admin

madjo:
And we had a Java course given by someone who only had a minor understanding of Pascal, and called "sleep" functions "slape" and a 'thread' was pronounced as 'treat'. Mind you, this was on a Dutch school, so English might not have been his best side, but still "Slape"?

Reminds of one class I had at college -- an early engineering or possibly math course. The teaching assistant was, I believe, French. As far as non-native-English-speaking TAs go, he was by no means the worst, and I wouldn't normally pick on someone's accent, but it did produce some amusing results. He would pronounced "integer" with a hard 'g', as "integrrrr" rather than the standard English (American?) pronunciation of "intejer". It was jarring at first, but we quickly got used to it, to the point where American students answering questions would use his pronunciation and then correct themselves.

I also had a DiffEq professor who consistently pronounced "matrix/matrices" like "mattress/mattresses". But everyone knew what he meant, plus he was freaking brilliant, so no one ever complained.

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

It reminds me of the time I took a class on web development. In the first class the teacher used ms word to create web pages. I only took one class, so not to pollute any knowledge I already posessed

2006-12-15 Reply Admin

cconroy:
I also had a DiffEq professor who consistently pronounced "matrix/matrices" like "mattress/mattresses". But everyone knew what he meant, plus he was freaking brilliant, so no one ever complained.

This reminds me of my Calc 3 and DiffEq professor. He was as blind as a bat .. maybe more so .. when he didn't wear his glasses (which I had only ever seen him wear when he was walking to/from his office). So when he'd go up to the chalkboard to show us examples and what-not, his face would be so close to the board, that his nose would inevitably erase everything he was writing. Luckily for me, these were cake courses that I was taking just for the easy A.

Web Development at WTFU

7.3 The <samp class="edef">HTML</samp> element

7.4 The document head

7.4.1 The <samp class="edef">HEAD</samp> element

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