December 23, 2005
It seems to me that if a poster complains about something and the OP responds, the complainer is obliged to say at least something. Am I wrong? Is the utter failure of, in this case, rkts, to respond typical on the SD boards?
Johnegee: rkts is not obliged to do anything, even continue the ‘conversation’. He/she may have said everything he/she wanted to say and is now done with the thread, he/she may not have read this thread again yet and may yet come back to it at some future date. (The usual comment that this place isn’t a chat room and that you cannot expect instant replies doesn’t seem to apply as ten days passed between rkts’s post and the post I am responding to now.)
As for your webpage, I find the current color scheme agreeable and moderately attractive. (I am not color blind but my sense of taste isn’t all that great, either.) Your content is good; it could serve as an introduction to Cecil Adams, the Straight Dope, and the SDMB for someone completely new to all three. I am not a big fan of people designing their own navigation systems with Javascript, however: I’m never quite sure precisely how they work, or even if they work in my browser the same as they were intended to work by the site designer. Plus, your site could be quite Lynx-friendly if it weren’t for the Javascript, which is important if you want Google to like your site. (Google is the one web surfer you really must please, and Google surfs the web using the equivalent of Lynx.)
All in all, I think your website qualifies as ‘barely bad’. 
Not to sound smart-alecky, but that’s why they’re called cascading style sheets. The idea is for the innermost nested style to take precedence over styles nested at higher levels. It is both more convenient and more in keeping with the spirit of CSS to override general styles with local styles wherever appropriate. I’ve seen developers try to use external style sheets so bloated with declarations just for the sake of one-time or two-time usages that they couldn’t even remember the class names anymore. On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages with <div style=“font-face:Verdana; font-size:10pt; width:100%; float:left; clear:both”> copied and pasted throughout the whole page when a single reusable class would be much more appropriate (and easier). Anyway, that’s my opinion of it.
*Hello, all, *
punctuation mistake
I have done wrote
usage mistake
I have done wrote . . . I’m wondering
parallelism mistake
this is the appropriate board
vocabulary mistkake
the appropriate board of which to ask
preposition mistake
There were five mistakes before the second sentence of your OP. Reviewing further would be a waste of time.
Similarly, your web page is a waste of time. When compared against the SD main page, your web page offers very little further information, and is laid out as a blog rather than as a reference page.
Although off topic, welcome to the boards, and top of the season to you.
Gosh, Muffin, I’m intrigued that you would challenge my use of English in the ways you have. I don’t claim to be a good writer, but I do claim to have a fairly strong grasp of the technical aspects such as punctuation and grammar. Accordingly I will start by defending myself and end by asking you a question.
I’ll be interested to see whether you respond. When I challenge someone in a forum such as this, I have the courage to stand there and wait for the response, as I will do here. I hate being wrong, but even more do I hate not knowing it.
- As I think everyone else understood (except picunurse), “I have done wrote” was an intentional error. I thought it was mildly humorous (go to Reverend Dr. Abe to see a page that reels in a few e-mails a year), and I really didn’t expect anyone here would bite. Nevertheless, I tried to make it more obvious it was an intentional error in my second postscript, in which I said, “I can see now that in the first paragraph above I should have said, ‘I have wrote . . . .’ If I knew how to work the delete key on this computer I’d fix it.”
I mean, come on, Muffin, did you really believe the part about how I couldn’t work the delete key? Did you really think I typed that whole original post and that whole page about Straight Dope and the other 230 or so pages of my Web site without ever figuring out how to delete characters?
- You say there’s a punctuation mistake in my salutation, but you don’t say what the mistake is, so I have to guess. I’m going to guess that you object to the first comma, and if I’m right then I think you’re wrong. A comma would be wrong if the salutation were “Dear Bob,” i.e., it should not say, “Dear, Bob,” but that’s not what I said. I said the equivalent of “Hello, Bob,” and in that construction the comma is, I think, mandatory. And even if you can cite an authority who says including the comma is not mandatory, I’m sure I can cite several who would say including it is certainly not a mistake.
Well Muffin, do you agree?
<pause for mild, silent chuckles here from the Dopers who realize there has to be a comma between “Well” and “Muffin” above>
<pause for Muffin to re-read the above and to realize it appears I’m referring to someone named Well Muffin>
- You say that “I have done wrote . . . I’m wondering” is a parallelism mistake, but here again you don’t say what the mistake is, and this time, Muffin, I can’t even guess. It might have been helpful if in pointing out my mistakes you had used actual sentences with subjects and verbs and everything.
You went to the trouble to quote me, but you failed to quote me in full. You inserted an ellipsis for no reason I can discern. As an aid to you and anyone else reading this who doesn’t want to scroll back up to the original post, the quote starts as follows: “I have done wrote a Web page about the Straight Dope Web site, and I’m wondering whether . . . .”
Since you haven’t explained yourself I can’t know for sure what your objection is, but I will tell you that I don’t think you can find any authority who would find anything wrong with that construction, whether a parallelism mistake or any other.
Try it this way, Muffin. If I had instead said, “I wrote you, and I’m wondering whether you answered,” what would you say is the parallelism mistake therein?
- You say there’s a vocuabulary mistake in the phrase “this is the appropriate board.” And for the third time you don’t say what the mistake is.
Furthermore, not surprisingly, you don’t quote me in full. It seems to me it would have been more useful to me and other readers of this thread if you had added the word “whether” in front, but I suppose that’s your call.
I admit I don’t know exactly what you mean by a “vocabulary mistake,” but seeing as how there are only four words in the phrase, why don’t you at least tell us which one is mistaken. I won’t ask you to go so far as to explain the mistake, but if you can take the time to pinpoint the exact word, that would help me a lot in guessing what you mean.
The phrase “whether this is the appropriate board” is perfectly ordinary to me, but if you can cite some authority saying it’s not, I’d be most interested in that explanation.
- You say there’s a preposition mistake in the phrase “the appropriate board of which to ask.” Not surprisingly, you don’t say what the mistake is. But this time at least I don’t have to guess which word you’re referring to. It can only be the word “of.”
Not surpsingly, you have again failed to provide us with a full-enough quote, so let me again step in to help us all out. The full quote is as follows:
"I have done wrote a Web page about the Straight Dope Web site, and I’m wondering whether this is the appropriate board of which to ask a favor about it."
The first independent clause is irrelevant to whether “of” is incorrect, and we can further simplify. If I had typed, “Is this the appropriate board of which to ask a favor?”, would you have objected? Do you not ask a favor of someone? I do.
In concluding your list of objections to how I used English you say unequivocally,
As I think I’ve made clear to anyone who’s slogged through this, Muffin, there were NO mistakes before the second sentence, which means YOU made five mistakes. And if that’s true then it follows that you were even wronger to challenge my technical command of English to begin with.
As to whether reviewing further would be a waste of time, I hope you appreciate the amount of time I have spent trying to help you think about English better. And it would not be a waste of my time, if that’s what you mean. I would be interested in, and possibly amused by, all the mistakes you can find in the rest of the post, but I would ask that you try out the idea of using actual sentences to explain them. Also, quoting the examples more fully might make your complaints easier for all of us to understand.
You say,
Finally, Muffin, thanks for reviewing that page for me. I asked a favor of you, and you complied, and you even found the time to use sentences. I will give due consideration to your comments. Both of your specific complaints were expressed by rkts nearly two weeks ago (and I responded thereto), so I guess you were just seconding his motion. For that effort I thank you again.
My question is this: Did you choose the phrase “a waste of time” because you were just being blunt, or did you intend to offend me? Unless you tell me different, I’ll assume it was the former.
–JohnEGee
Welcome, Johnegee. You’ve got the right attitude to snarky replies 
Well, your web page doesn’t validate. There is no DOCTYPE to start. Even so, the 479 errors found is not good. Your basic page code syntax is wrong at the top. Learn to nest tags properly.
You are creative in spelling the non-breaking space tag. It’s spelled ** **. If you have to use it, spell it correctly. Ideally, you should not use it at all, but I see you created the page with FrontPage. My condolences.
As mentioned before, you have a combination of an attached stylesheet and inline styles. I suggest only using the former.
Using tables for page layout are fine (although some CSS purists may not agree). However, you would do much better if you studied up a bit more on CSS and applied a standard approach to CSS. For example, use a table for page layout but everything else could be CSS. Once you appreaciate the difference between layout vs presentation, migrate to an all CSS design.
There are CSS and JavaScript tags in the wrong places. Unless you have a defined need to use JavaScript, leave it out.
Finally, when it comes to links, make them obvious. Using color boxes for links is not appropriate, especially when they are followed by phrases and sentences that should be the links. More importantly, usinhg colored boxes for links causes problems with people who are color-blind. While you are not legally bound by SEction 508 accessibility requirements, you would do well to make the effort.
Criticism inappropriate for the situation. If you can see something that’s very wrong, explain why it’s wrong, or point to an explanation. Just saying “Nope, that’s not right” isn’t helpful.
That’s good advice.
I’ve had fantastic help from this place when I’ve asked about my own mediocre creations…I just hope other people can get the same.
GorillaMan: A webpage that doesn’t validate will often render incorrectly on common browsers and make you look like a boob. Trying to create good webpages using Frontpage is akin to trying to type with boxing gloves on. That is why it’s not good.
And again, I disagree. Stylesheets are cascading for a reason. The idea, again, is that the more local should override the more general. A bloated attached stylesheet is a clue that the developer does not understand the spirit and purpose of CSS. It is much better to define a general paragraph class for the attached sheet with the assignment of local attributes as appropriate than it is to define a slew of paragraph classes with tiny differences among them, the names of which you can’t even remember two days after you’ve saved the sheet.
Johnegee
Well you did add the HTML tags but the first one is wrong.
The <html> tag should be before the <head> tag.
Also, your home page http://www.barelybad.com/ has no <HTML> </HTML> tags whatsoever.
And just a bit of advice. You seem to be a tad confrontational for someone so new to the board. Heck, I can be a real hothead sometimes on this board (and others) but it is a bit disrespectful to ask for help and to come back with snippy remarks.
As you wish. However, it becomes quite difficult to change a site when individual pages have their own inline styles. It is far easier to create another attached stylesheet, even if it is only used by a single page. One cascades from the other.
I have fixed the html tags problems on a few pages, but I fear the lack of HTML tags is rampant among the pages of the site. Obviously I need to do some serious search-and-replacing.
I appreciate your less technical advice as well, wolf_meister.
If I have come across as unduly snippy, that certainly was not my intention.
If you check the record you’ll see that I’ve been what you might call snippy twice, once in response to picunurse and once in response to Muffin. In both cases they started it by picking on me (gosh, I feel like I’m eight again instead of 6.5 times that), and I responded in full. If I was bit snide, I think my responses were less hostile, and certainly less factually incorrect, than the attacks launched upon me without warrant. I also admit I’m testing these boards a bit to see whether I want to pay $15 a year to join. Does my newness to the board disappear if I pay the money?
You imply I was disrespectful in that I asked for help and then got snippy with the respondents. But wolf_meister, with the two exceptions above (unless you count rkts, in which case I really was not being snippy, just provocative), I think you’ll find I have been pleasant and appreciative. (In the two cases above where I got snippy, you’ll note that the respondents offered their help not on that Straight Dope Web page I asked about but on the way in which I asked the question about it!)
If I haven’t thanked each respondent individually, it’s not because I haven’t read and analyzed each response; it’s because I assume it’s not good form on this forum to clog the bandwidth with little “Thank-you” “You’re welcome” messages. In case it needs to be said, I really do appreciate all the substantive responses I’ve received, and I find the recent discussion of pure CSS versus some local tags interesting. I’m starting a new Web site just now for a friend, and I want to get started right.
Anyway, wolf_meister, I do appreciate your advice and the advice of other veterans on the SDMBs as to my attitude. I will continue to defend myself, as I think we all should, and I will continue to denounce falsery, as I think we all should, so I guess you’re saying I need to be less impertinent about it.
–JohnEGee
P.S. I don’t know what your nickname means, wolf_meister, but I do know that my cousin, who lives on a farm about an hour south of here, owns and pens five wolves! As interesting as they are in books and movies, they’re just as interesting up close.
It’s not either-or. They’re supposed to work together. Use the topmost sheet in the hierarchy to define the most general styles. Don’t rewrite those at the local level, but do augment them. For example:
[External Sheet]
<style>
p.CommonText {
font-family:Verdana;
font-size:10pt;
font-weight:normal;
margin-bottom:20px;
}
[Inline]
<p class=“CommonText” style=“margin-bottom:0;”>I want this paragraph to look like all the others but have no bottom margin.</p>
You can change your CommonText class and change your pages throughout without disturbing the local overrides.