• Daniel Colascione (unregistered) in reply to ronabop

    Your comment makes no sense.

    So what if there's an abstraction layer? Abstracting something that doesn't need abstraction usually qualifies for a WTF in itself. In this database, you have an internal name, on one hand, and a mapped name that can be used for (I imagine) queries and such on the other. What if the mapped name changes? You're back where you started, only now you have a bunch of incomprehensible internal table names as well as the higher-level table name that you need to modify.

    Why not simply give your tables decent names to start with?

  • IMSoP (unregistered)

    I think what a lot of people here are forgetting is that HTML wasn't primarily used for storing structured data - the <head> maybe, but the <body> is basically one block of formatted text ("HyperText").

    It's not actually all that meaningful to consider something like the following as a data structure:

    This sentence contains emphasis and an anchor; which is nice.
    There are no "nodes" in that data stream, only formatting markup.

    So all this talk of ASN.1, EDI, etc is completely missing the point. Only later did people start using HTML for layout (using things like

    s); and then, later still, to denote abstract structure (using things like
    s) and pushing the visual layout into a different layer (CSS).

    So, sure, stricter rules on things like tag closing and nesting might have made things easier further down the line. But make it too strict and machine-oriented, and no-one would have got round to writing any browsers - or content!

  • argh! (unregistered)
    in order to meet the well known XML limitation of only allowing 5 characters per tag name.
    if thats true, how exactly is xhtml valid xml?!

    textarea select option ..

  • Murkish (unregistered) in reply to An apprentice
    Excuse me, but how exactly can a series of tubes help in software development?

    Every programmer is technically a series of tubes...

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