As I said in the morning, it was mostl ycloudy today, it only got better in mid-afternoon, when even some sun came out.
It didn’t bother me at all, because I had to work on the tutorial for the Programming blog anyway.
In fact, most of the time I was held up with CSS. The matter is, when you do kind of a technical documentation, you very often refer to places in the user interface of the tool (like I might say “From the context menu use New Class”), you explain important terms, and you refer to things a user has to type in or the system prints out. You also want to structure your post into sections, subsections and maybe sus-subsections. It does not happen that often on this blog, but I had to find a solution for the tutorial on the other blog.
This is the kind of text that I will write very often, and I really want to use structural markup for that. Thus instead of using italics and bold fonts or such things (that’s visual markup), I instead use a span with a class “term” for terms, a class “gui” for user interface objects, etc. This way I can use a CSS stylesheet attached to the whole blog, and when I ever change my design, all occurrences of terms and references to user interface elements get changed together.
That tutorial is something that I write at work as well, and at work I use our Wiki. That’s the same software that runs Wikipedia, and I only realized today, how much easier it is to write documentation, when you’re not forced to plain HTML.
I could set up a Wiki of course, and maybe it would be even a better resource than a blog, but blogging is what I want, thus I maybe have no choice but using that verbose HTML/CSS crud.
Today’s three images were taken on a short afternoon outing, all within 100 meters of each other.
The Song of the Day is “This Is How It Goes” from Aimee Mann’s 2002 album “Lost in Space”. Hear it on YouTube.