Tuesday, September 30, 2003

HTML - Fractal complexity

Hello World.
I've been coding /fighting/ the template of the small blog I use for the links (left bottom corner of your screen - hopefully) for several hours.
I didn't want to have the standard scroll bar, but some arrows, couldn't make them out of the frame as you can't perform javascript 'scrollBy' on a page placed on a different host (whateverwimm is the main page, wwimm-links is the links page). I still did want some fix arrows, not the up/down links I had before on the date line. So here we go for some javascript quick learning. I'm a fast learner (for coding and whatever mathematical stuff (yeah right)), so I quickly wrote a small code on a test page to do the nice scrolling of the page, the arrows staying at the top. Cut 'n Paste, didn't work. After hours, I figured that the DOCTYPE at the very begining of the template was screwing everything, as (I suppose) my code was not coherent with the doctype. Kill that. Now it works.
That is something like a Basic Rule in computer programming: when you have no idea why it doesn't work, you can be sure it's not coming from what you just wrote but from another detail, unnoticed before and quickly forgotten, hidden in some (remote) part of your (huge) code.
That leads to the title: Fractal complexity: basic HTML is simple and quick, anybody can write a HelloWorld page, then you feel confident and embrace the whole complexity of the Internet. And you don't sleep anymore. Beware.
- Thanks to the likes of phpnuke and blogger, you don't (really) need hardcoding anymore (except when it comes to details, forget about details) -.
BTW, here are my sources for html, javascript and co: CommentCaMarche (fr) & DevGuru. Of course you already knew php.net.
Sorry for such a long techy post - Cya World!

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