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Hi Todd,
Sorry about the trouble my message has caused, I should have brought the
discussion up right here in admin.general. And it was rude of me to say
"stupidly"; I apologize!
To answer your comments --
I agree completely that Times or another proportional font is way more
readable. I also really like the graphic design of lugnet as it is now. I kind
of reacted badly when I started posting test messages with embedded "<pre>" and
"</pre>" keywords and saw them getting stripped out by the all-too-smart LUGNET
software. I wish there were a simple solution. I almost wish I could read just
the db.inv newsgroup in Courier and the rest in the proportional font.
For now I've found another solution that works for me, which is to subscribe to
the db.inv group as a read-via-EMAIL group. Maybe others will choose to do that
too. And of course most people can read groups via NNTP (not me, my firewall
administrator won't consider it.)
If you wish to work on the more robust solution, I'd support it, although the
"raw message" option (another option I didn't even notice!) is yet another
solution available to people right now. Since this is a problem only for
inventories, I'd say spend your time on something else!
It's true that my inventory lines don't always line up. I always leave at least
3 spaces in a row between the part description and the color(s). That's all I
need for my scripts to parse them accurately. If I put the color at the
beginning of the line I would have to leave lots of space for it because
sometimes it's long ("black with gray" for example) and honestly I consider
colors to be rather unimportant (I mainly use LEGO pieces to build MindStorms
robots, and all my robots are ugly! :-)
I don't want to use tabs because they're even less reliable than spaces:
- My editor is Emacs running under Linux and I have tabs set to 4 spaces per
tab. Most "normal" users have tabs set to 8 spaces.
- Tabs fail when you quote the message in a reply, because the "> " inserted
at the beginning makes all the lines start a couple characters farther over.
In lugnet.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> Are you sure it really did? I'm looking at the raw NNTP text article right
> now, and it doesn't line up in all cases. [...]
> If you took Steve's suggestion, and also used tab-delimited ASCII
> instead of spaces, it would probably all work out better.
> [...]
> This isn't stupid, although it may not be an appropriate way to display
> messages in that particular group.
> Nine out of ten news messages, being bodies of paragraph-based text, are
> actually more readable with the default variable-width font
> [...]
> A robust solution (which will come later) would be to store a preference on
> a user-by-user basis -- how do you want your messages displayed (what font)?
> Then you can just set that to <FONT FACE="Courier"> or <TT> or whatever. Or
> maybe it'll happen via CSS and you can just store a self-created CSS page on
> your local system.
>
> A workaround for now, anyway, is a new link that you can click on at the top
> of each message -- it says "View Raw Message" -- and clicking it pops up the
> entire raw NNTP message as a MIME content-type of "text/plain".
>
> --Todd
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On Wed, 7 Jul 1999 22:33:30 GMT, "Robert Munafo" <munafo@gcctech.com>
wrote:
> I don't want to use tabs because they're even less reliable than spaces:
> - My editor is Emacs running under Linux and I have tabs set to 4 spaces per
> tab. Most "normal" users have tabs set to 8 spaces.
> - Tabs fail when you quote the message in a reply, because the "> " inserted
> at the beginning makes all the lines start a couple characters farther over.
But tabs are better than spaces when it's a program reading the data,
instead of a person looking at the screen. Excel is going to handle
tab-delimited data much more accurately than 3-space delimited data.
But I'm guilty of posting inventories in space-delimited formats.
One more reason to shift your color column: The most common
inventory-posting format lists Quantity, Color, Description. But maybe the
"standard inventory post format" should specify that columns have
*headers*, instead of a specific format. That way, posters could use
whichever column-order they desire, and downloaders could still suck the
data into their own programs.
So far, we've got about 6 standard columns:
Quantity
Color
ID (ie, part number)
Size
Type
Description (includes ID, size, and/or type)
Steve
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I don't think you'll be able to use Excel macros to do the type of processing
that inventory work requires. You need a programming language that includes
native string data types, grep-style regular expression pattern matching, and
associative arrays. It also helps if the language can invoke shell commands and
access the filesystem directly. The only platform and language I have found
that comes anywhere close to doing all this is perl running on Unix.
I also don't see the point in posting my data in a format that is designed with
machine-readability as its highest priority. The machine should work harder,
not the human. My Perl scripts have no problem reading the format I'm using and
they can automatically detect the formats other people are using. So why not
use a format that's easy for people to read. Most people don't need to read the
data into a database, they just want to find out how many 2x3 inverted roof
bricks they'll get if they go out and buy the set.
I like your ideas about using column headers. I haven't seen inventories that
put the type and size in seperate columns, but that's a good idea that lots of
people will want to use. I can't just do count-color-description alone, I need
to add a 4th column for "ID"/part number. But my inventories do start with
column headers.
In lugnet.admin.general, Steve Bliss writes:
> On Wed, 7 Jul 1999 22:33:30 GMT, "Robert Munafo" <munafo@gcctech.com>
> wrote:
> > I don't want to use tabs because [...]
>
> But tabs are better than spaces when it's a program reading the data,
> instead of a person looking at the screen. Excel is going to handle
> tab-delimited data much more accurately than 3-space delimited data.
>
> [...] The most common inventory-posting format lists Quantity,
> Color, Description. But maybe the "standard inventory post format"
> should specify that columns have *headers*, instead of a specific
> format. [...]
> So far, we've got about 6 standard columns:
> Quantity
> Color
> ID (ie, part number)
> Size
> Type
> Description (includes ID, size, and/or type)
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On Thu, 8 Jul 1999 17:29:24 GMT, "Robert Munafo" <munafo@gcctech.com>
wrote:
> I don't think you'll be able to use Excel macros to do the type of processing
> that inventory work requires. You need a programming language that includes
> native string data types, grep-style regular expression pattern matching, and
> associative arrays. It also helps if the language can invoke shell commands and
> access the filesystem directly. The only platform and language I have found
> that comes anywhere close to doing all this is perl running on Unix.
My point was that it would be useful for people to be able to use the
inventory data in as many different ways as possible. For a lot of people,
using the data means opening a list in Excel. Non-techies need data in
better formats than programmers. Programmers can code around deficiencies
in the data format. Excel users can't.
> I also don't see the point in posting my data in a format that is designed with
> machine-readability as its highest priority. The machine should work harder,
> not the human. My Perl scripts have no problem reading the format I'm using and
> they can automatically detect the formats other people are using. So why not
> use a format that's easy for people to read. Most people don't need to read the
> data into a database, they just want to find out how many 2x3 inverted roof
> bricks they'll get if they go out and buy the set.
The point is to use a format that both humans and their software tools can
use.
> I like your ideas about using column headers. I haven't seen inventories that
> put the type and size in seperate columns, but that's a good idea that lots of
> people will want to use. I can't just do count-color-description alone, I need
> to add a 4th column for "ID"/part number.
Todd Lehman posts inventories with size and description in separate
columns, and his AucZILLA database is the same (but the lists on the
AucZILLA site have the two columns run together).
> But my inventories do start with
> column headers.
Mine don't, and they should.
I'm going to look at my inventory tool (an MS Access app, eek!), and change
the data around to separate size and description. And add those pesky
column headers on the output.
Steve
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> I'm going to look at my inventory tool (an MS Access app, eek!), and • change
> the data around to separate size and description. And add those pesky
> column headers on the output.
You think an MS Access app is bad? How about MS Works? :o) I know, I
know, but it came pre-installed! :)
--
Cheers ...
Geoffrey Hyde
--
www.fastinternet.net.au/~ghyde
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