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Suffice it to say that this *great XML thing* is but a petty, comparatively useless, partial clone of what we were using decades ago.
What turned people off of PostScript is that adobe sort-of took ownership of it, when they created that king of bloat PDF. Everyone associated PS with PDF, from then on, without actually looking at what a magnificent -- and phenomenally efficient -- beast PS is.
So now we're stuck with the endless devotion to XML of people who don't realise that it's trivial, overcomplicated cr@p, compared to PS.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I have come to hate EVERYTHING from Adobe. Adobe Acrobat was and is a complicated, non-performing monstrosity. Windows 10 creates better PDFs than dungware Acrobat. Photoshop is overly complicated, counter-intuitive crapware. Illustrator and InDesign are unstable, even on the latest Apple machines. So I understand where you come from!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Hey, here's the only good thing I have to say about MSO higher than 2003:
The save as PDF functions are INCREDIBLE! ( and don't take a fifth of the time of the adobe "distiller" cr@pware!)
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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True! True! 
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: The save as PDF functions are INCREDIBLE!
Absolutely amazing. Creating PDFs with the hierarchy and automatic summary with links without doing anything particular is wonderful.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
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It's how it should always have been. Postscript is bloatless and fast, but adobe managed to turn it into a nightmare of wasted resources.
MS designers and devs are far from being my favourite people, right now, but their work on this is blindingly good.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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den2k88 wrote: Creating PDFs with the hierarchy and automatic summary with links without doing anything particular is wonderful.
Meh! Had that in OpenOffice at least a decade ago (at least since version 1.1). MSO is still catching up on functionality, they spent all their time designing the ribbon and forgot to actually give users better tools.
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No please don't speak about that abomination of openOffice. I used it for years, when I was all the revolutionary Penguinman. Then for work I've been "forced" to use MSO 2010 - never been happier in my life.
OO and LibreOffice are wonderful tools... compared to MS Office 97. Maybe even Office 2000 (which was unbeatable IMHO until 2010). We're lucky it's only 2016 
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
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I'm not sure why you're comparing XML to PostScript, I'm guessing you mean Open XML from Microsoft?
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XML is like a version of PostScript that's had it's teeth drawn, its arms and legs chopped off, and its dangly bits removed.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: a. Gives the customer what he needs.
b. Does not cost an arm and a leg of developer time to produce and maintain.
c. Is very fast despite the unnecessary extras that were added to make it pretty.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Hey, don't go promising too much!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I seem to remember you having this same rant before. I still agree.
This space for rent
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Chris Maunder wrote: We developers who bend a UL backwards to show (essentially) tabular data instead of using a TABLE element.
Web development is like working in the stone ages, whether you coerce ul or deal with the idiocy of table. They're both square pegs and the hole sure isn't.
Marc
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Isn't it about time we dumped a documentation standard language from the 1980's and developed a 21st Century browser language that was fit for the modern world? Dump HTML, dump JS, dump the whole "human readable" bit for a compressed binary format that supported sandboxed, VM'ed, clientside C# with built in security, authentication, messaging, and so forth?
Drag the web (kicking and screaming, probably) into the 21st Century? Heck, the late 20th would be an improvement! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Get get rid of all of the languages developed in the 80's or earlier!
That'll teach 'em! Dirty b^st^rds that they are!
YANTS: The bloke probably thinks javaScript is something you create with a fountain pen full of coffee.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Agreed wholeheartedly!
Even HTML5 is like driving a dump truck over a dead horse in the hopes it would fly! Just use a bird FES! You don't even need to look far for any such stuff, nearly every single thing ever needing serialization and/or network throughput soon realizes that XML and even JSON is simply too wasteful and inept, and nearly always turns to binary formatting. HTML is just a hamstrung XML anyway.
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Have no fear!
I proudly use table elements - and in abundance.*
If anyone gives you trouble, you just refer them to me.
Feel free, then, to hold your head up high and get the job done right!
* As target of a php script that creates them from database recordsets programmatically and generically, table-containing pages number in the neighborhood of 500.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I wasn't aware of tables being 'uncool'. Even those fancy abstracted controls eventually render to table most of the time.
Tables rule!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Speaking or practicality, I get annoyed maintaining C++-code which uses C techniques, like char* instead of std::string or shifts pointers all over the place instead of using offsets from that pointer. Way to kill symbolic debugging, who'd never need that!
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Yeah, that one really annoys me too. Yes, tables got abused a bit for layout back in the day (totally guilty here), but that's because they're so useful and for a while nothing else could do the job. Nowadays it seems fashionable to avoid tables at all costs, as if using big steaming piles of CSS to display tabular data without a table is somehow not a sign of idiocy.
It's like a religious thing, people cling to this idea that tables are evil without bothering to think about why. It's just become blind dogma among those who think they understand Web development.
There has never been anything wrong with tables, but there's everything wrong with designers telling programmers how to do their jobs. And yes, I blame the designers, forever and always, they are the root of all Web evil 
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Tables are EVIL INCARNATE when they're being used for page layout, especially when no planning has been done to consider printing a page full of tables nested in tables when that's one of the unstated (because it was elephant-ing obvious) requirements.
Trust me, I'm trying to unwind a nested cesspool of tables used on an old form into something mildly better using Bootstrap, just because printers can deal with it so much better.
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Yeah, there's no excuse for using tables for layout these days. But there was a time when there was no good alternative, so we're still dealing with that legacy.
Nowadays people are abusing CSS, which deserves it due to its broken inheritance model. When browsers are forced to implement something like "!important," which should never ever be used because it "breaks" inheritance, then you know that there's something fundamentally wrong with the inheritance model in the first place...but that's a whole other rant. I do find it hysterical that "!important" reads as "not important" to people who know logic
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... gone through a code set, making changes, wishing that you could rewrite it, et accepting the fact that it must remain the fragile house of cards that it is?
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Many years ago I was working on a real-time telemetry system (for jet fighter flight testing) and was asked to go through my boss's code (by his boss) while he was on a three-week vacation as the real time code wasn't running fast enough to maintain real-time! I looked at a couple of core modules to find the most inefficient load of cr*p I have ever seen before or since! I made a couple of quick fixes - such as making sure a search algorithm actually stopped searching once it found what it was looking for and storing non-volatile pointers on the first look-up rather than searching every time - and the code ran approximately 2,000 times faster and could maintain real-time easily! I wanted to rewrite the whole thing but was afraid of what my boss would say when he got back. The code I had fixed was on his "don't touch, don't look, don't even think of looking" list and I got a specific OK in writing from his boss before I risked changing it at all! When he got back he raged at me for "ruining his code" and "putting the entire system in jeopardy" despite the fact that our team got a commendation from the engineering group for making the real-time system actually real-time again! I got a terrible performance review from him at the next six-monthly review and a 0% pay raise as a result. I quit my otherwise dream job (I am an aeroplane nut) shortly afterwards.
I heard he was eventually "promoted" to "special projects" where he nearly destroyed an international contract agreement and was finally fired for gross incompetence (as a manager, not a programmer).
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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