{"id":2116,"date":"2005-09-28T15:44:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-28T23:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/the-ms-dos-of-theweb"},"modified":"2024-02-28T18:01:45","modified_gmt":"2024-02-29T02:01:45","slug":"the-ms-dos-of-theweb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/the-ms-dos-of-theweb\/","title":{"rendered":"The MS-DOS of the Web?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now you\u2019ve probably heard about our website updating application, Ladybug<\/a>. Inspired by the best ideas of \u201cWeb 2.0\u201d and software like Backpack<\/a> and Strongspace<\/a>, we\u2019ve borrowed some great ideas and practices from many of these great web-based applications. We\u2019ve also been writing our software in Ruby on Rails<\/a> which, like the apps mentioned above, definitely creates software with opinions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What is \u201csoftware with opinions,\u201d and why on earth would you create it? I\u2019ve cited another\u2019s opinions above, but I believe that, like opinions, it\u2019s a matter of personal choice. For one thing, we have to use the software a lot, probably more often than our customers. So it needs to be good, fast and intuitive. I\u2019ve written about being careful when adding features<\/a> before, so I\u2019ll not get into that right now. But I will focus on one feature that seems to generate a lot of controversy these days \u2013 how your users edit text in the pages of your site.<\/p>\n

Text editing on the web has been around since the earliest graphical browsers, albeit in a somewhat primitive form. Typically you type plain text into a box on your screen, and hit \u201cSubmit\u201d when you\u2019re done. If you\u2019re on a Mac, you might have your misspellings underlined in red, which is nice. But that\u2019s about it. When you\u2019re using this as a means to edit the text that\u2019s going to appear on your website, as you do with our software, you\u2019re quickly going to have questions like \u201chow do I make this word bold?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a problem that needs solving. You could train your users to type in HTML code, but not only is that cumbersome for most users, it\u2019s easy to break, or write invalid markup. Since the point of our application is to keep our clients websites looking pretty, that rules out HTML. What we\u2019ve chosen instead is a higher-level markup language (one of many) called Textile<\/a>. It\u2019s easy for us to program, it\u2019s easy for our clients to use, and it\u2019s nearly impossible to break or to generate invalid markup. In short, it works really well for us, and for the foreseeable future, it\u2019s what we\u2019re going to use. But it does lead to humorous comments like this one, spotted in a thread in the TextDrive forum<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I love textile, but I\u2019ll never forget one client who, when he saw me demonstrate it, made the off-hand comment that it was \u201clike MS-DOS for the web.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ouch! That\u2019s a frightening analogy, and if we hadn\u2019t given careful consideration to our options from the start, we certainly would after reading that! But we have indeed experimented with graphical editors that you can embed in the web page, to allow visual editing, and we\u2019ve found that they create far more problems than you\u2019d expect. So for now, we\u2019re sticking to Textile.<\/p>\n

The MS-DOS of the web!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By now you\u2019ve probably heard about our website updating application, Ladybug. Inspired by the best ideas of \u201cWeb 2.0\u201d and software like Backpack and Strongspace, we\u2019ve borrowed some great ideas and practices from many of these great web-based applications. We\u2019ve also been writing our software in Ruby on Rails which, like the apps mentioned above,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[479,81],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2005\/09\/close-up-view-of-water-drops-on-fresh-apples-backd-2023-11-27-04-50-04-utc-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27245,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions\/27245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}