HTM Hell

There has been a small hiatus, my loyal readership, as I had a very busy week and could not quite crack the HTML task in DITA. I managed to get all the pages up and viewable after following some advice from a tutor and I also crowd sourced some answers from others on the message boards.  

But I still could still not get the images to show up. Once again the answers were on the message boards and I had to copy the picture files over to the W drive to make them appear. A clash between relative and absolute links had seemed to be the issue and low and behold it was.

A quick copy across and there I was. It looks like a personal website from when I was first on the information superhighway back in the early nineties. Sparse, plenty of bone white screen, not very well adjusted and pretty dull. But it is still up there and the links between all sites work with the pictures and that can only be called a victory.

As well as managing to get that page up, this has shown me the value of the course message boards. There’s currently talk of arranging a visit to Kings and some sort of social gathering which is all good and the assistance available via tutors and other students  has already proved its worth beyond doubt. Hopefully I’ll be able to help out some others as the course goes on.

Unfortunately I have to go to my tailors to pick up a new suit tonight so will miss any first post lecture drinks, but hope to make any future meet ups. Just who are most of these people I am surrounded by on a Monday...?

Now we have moved to databases and SQL. Familiar terms from my time at Nokia but I never cracked those books open. I think I understand the basics of it and have an intellectual understanding of database construction and interrogation but the proof is in the eating of the pudding.

Just looking at the end tasks, this is going to take some more skull power to solve, so in I go to SQL Land, population millions of bits of data.

File Under File Types

I have now completed the first D.I.T.A exercise which was based around Experimenting with data formats, types of views and applications.

Obviously I have used Word an awful lot but WordPad or NotePad is something I have avoided due to the apparently weird formatting it would do to docs. Plus how you can type on one line forever and it never switches down to the next paragraph unless you want to. I knew it was used for various HTML, web, etc, tasks but other than that it was usually just left alone.

Seeing how a document is represented in ASCII was interesting as the actual text was at the bottom of the file and above it was masses of nonsense or code. Nonsense in that it meant little to me but it is important and if you start to monkey around with it, bad things can happen.

The most useful thing from this exercise has been adding a picture or image but doing so in a more than cut and paste fashion. Previously when I have done that in Word or anywhere else I have just inserted it in the document. Job done.

However, linking the image to the original file – so that when the original is changed the copy elsewhere is as well – is very useful and I see how you can have a more dynamic environment or end product without really having to do anything but make the correct Save As first time around. A mini eureka moment on my first day of the course. Splendid.

The different file types you can save a document as are very useful, more useful than I would have thought before. I suppose that in a standard office environment saving in many different ways is generally just a distraction (even a dangerous mistake) but if you start to use the power of the file types it’s far easier to set up HTML, add things and generally get more bang for your buck.

Finally, I suppose that opening a document in ASCII / a different format than the original is a way to create primitive cryptography. As solvable as re-saving back in the correct format perhaps but maybe a cheap code system.