HTML is far loosier-goosier in its syntax than XML allows. There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together.
Really, I think you can trace a lot of the "XML is spooky old technology" mindset to the release of HTML 5. That was when XML stopped being directly relevant to the web, though of course it still lives on in many other domains and legacy web apps.
> There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together.
Exactly the opposite; WHATWG “Living Standard” HTML (different releases of which were used as the basis for W3C HTML5, 5.1, and 5.2 before the W3C stopped doing that) includes an XML serialization as part of the spec, so now the HTML-in-XML is permanently in sync with and feature-matched with plain HTML.
“Warning!
Using the XML syntax is not recommended, for reasons which include the fact that there is no specification which defines the rules for how an XML parser must map a string of bytes or characters into a Document object, as well as the fact that the XML syntax is essentially unmaintained — in that, it’s not expected that any further features will ever be added to the XML syntax (even when such features have been added to the HTML syntax).”
It's common practice when dealing with sites and clients that don't have fancy quoting features, going all the way back to USENET forums and probably before. It avoids just this ambiguity when you might be mixing quote and commentary.
Hmm, honestly I’ve mostly seen > used for quotations in plain-text-y environments. Not sure about USENET, but ever since email it seems to be the de-facto standard everywhere. (On HN, I mostly see >, italics, or monospace as the quotation indicators.)
This seems like the way. Why would Rustaceans bother to "argue their case" before an unwilling board if they can just do the rewrite themselves? Maybe it will succeed, maybe not, but you don't need SQLLite's blessing to test the proposition.
My hunch is that those aren't very serious Rustaceans. Even the original language developers developed Rust to interoperate with C as much as possible, and they often used to discourage the rewrite evangelism. If you are a serious Rustacean, you'd probably be worried about the safety tradeoffs in rewriting in Rust. As your parent commenter points out, a mature C codebase is already tested so well that rewriting it in Rust is likely to introduce more bugs - non-memory-safety bugs that are nevertheless serious enough. That's why I and many other Rustaceans don't recommend it. In fact, some Rustaceans even advise others to not rewrite Fortran 90 code (in order to preserve the performance advantage) and instead recommend integrating it with Rust using FFI.
I'm on vacation so don't have my copy of Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style at hand, but I'm not sure he would subscribe to this manifesto.
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
This generalization is very, very wrong. I can tell you, from my personal college network, many students had monetary constraints coming in, and many certainly had monetary constraints coming out. Some of that was choice of career path; some was not.
I don’t understand how someone coming out of Brown or Yale would have constraints coming out. Their degree is basically free, basically any degree can get them an analyst gig on Wall Street if they so choose, and at worst they can go down the law school path.
You don’t become one of the wealthy just by going to school with them. You’re still an outsider, lesser, just one of the little people, not their sort.
Also (to my mind) two of the most successful Kickstarted video game projects so far: Pillars of Eternity (a personal favorite) and Torment: Tides of Numenéra.
(He just needs to jump on a title like Numenéra: Into the Planescape to complete the cycle.)
If you think of bat as in the same category of functionality as a pager, I think it works.
Unlike cat, bat already seems deeply interested in the presentation of text on a terminal. Pagination involves several aspects of presentation of text on terminals. So, it's still arguably one thing from a conceptual perspective.
Not knowing much about bat (so I don't know how much this has already been thought of), I could even see bat and pager integrating in a way that you couldn't easily as separate programs. Supporting a feature where the opening lines of a paragraph, or a new section, are deferred to the next page, for example.
What if the great boon of AI is to get us to do all the thinking and writing we should have been doing all along? What if the next group of technologists to end up on top are... the technical writers?
Haha, just kidding you tech bros, AI's still for you, and this time you'll get to shove the nerds into a locker for sure. ;-)
It might not be that wrong. After all, programming languages are a way to communicate with the machine. In the same way we are not doing binary manually, we might simply not have to do programming too. I think software architecture is likely to be what it should be: the most important part of every piece of software.
You’ve got it wrong. The machine is fine with a bit soup and doesn’t care if it’s provided with punch card or python.
Programming was always a tool for humans. It’s a formal “notation” for describing solutions that can be computed. We don’t do well with bit soup. So we put a lot of deterministic translations between that and the notation that we’re good with.
Not having to do programming would be like not having to write sheet music because we can drop a cat from a specific height onto a grand piano and have the correct chord come out. Code is ideas precisely formulated while prompts are half formed wishes and prayers.
This is actually my theory of the future. Basically, the ability to multiply your own effectiveness is now directly dependent on your ability to express ideas in simple plain English very quickly and precisely.
I’m attracted to this theory in part because it applies to me. I’m a below average coder (mostly due to inability to focus on it full time) and I’m exceptionally good at clear technical writing, having made a living off it much of my life.
The present moment has been utterly life changing.
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