While the original Ardent Tool was void of any Javascript crud (well,
almost), it unfortunately compensated for that fact by its bloated and
inconsistent HTML documents.
I really can't blame Louis for that, he simply did what worked for him. So
who or what is to blame for that mess?! Well, as the title suggests,
responsible for all that are the actual tools that were used to create most of
the content - the so-called "WYSIWYG" HTML editors! Many editors of this kind
(i.e. good ol' MS Word) produce extremely ugly and beyond-bloated HTML document
structure, and sadly that's exactly what we are dealing with here. In some
cases the documents are filled with hundreds of lines that consist of nothing
but useless metadata. This extra data is there only to allow for more accurate
reverse-conversion of the document. Even if we ignore the metadata the
documents are stuffed with redundant and/or nonsensical HTML constructions -
constructions no sane human being would ever create. To make the situation even
worse, the document structure deteriorates over time with all the incremental
updates and modifications. This often leads to formatting problems and all kind
of strange inconsistencies. While modern browsers and modern computers
typically won't have too much trouble parsing and displaying this mess, you may
run into trouble if you access the pages from some older machine that doesn't
have many CPU cycles to spare (like any of our beloved PS/2s), and/or from a
browser that isn't smart enough to cope with the poor document structure.
Another downside of the WYSIWYG approach is that it makes it significantly
more difficult to compare different versions of the same document when merging
changes from different sources (i.e. from me and from Louis). This is because
the entire document gets re-generated with every change, and unfortunately the
generator doesn't seems to be very stable (or perhaps multiple different tools
or settings are being used) and the result differs greatly even if only a very
minor change was made. This makes it much more difficult to automate the
merging process. Manual diff/merge tools must be used in many cases to review
and merge the changes, which is - of course - slower and more tedious.
I have managed to clean up many pages and remove a huge amount of the
auto-generated bloat, but there is much more to go. No WYSIWYG editors or
similar tools are used to create or edit pages of the MAD Edition, only
plain-text editors (Notepad++ and Sublime Text). Additionally any larger
external changes are first checked and polished before they get merged to this
branch of the Tool. The pages that already received this special treatment are
easier to edit, there are far less formatting problems and they have more
consistent look.
|