"Code Sandwiches"

[Walter Bright]

On 3/11/2011 1:21 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "lurker"<a at a.a>  wrote in message news:ile1fe$2i8q$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Walter Bright Wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/9/2011 10:18 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>> They're text. With minor formatting. That alone makes html better. Html
>>>> is
>>>> lousy for a lot of things, but formatted text is the one thing it's
>>>> always
>>>> been perfectly good at. And frankly I think I'd *rather* go with pretty
>>>> much
>>>> any word processing format if the only other option was pdf.
>>>
>>> I used to use HTML for presentations. Frankly, it was terrible. The text
>>> was
>>> rendered badly, especially when blown up on a screen. I could never get
>>> it to
>>> look right
>
> What specifically was done badly?

Something as simple as getting the text to be rendered attractively. HTML text 
looks ragged blown up. HTML fonts simply do not look good. There were other 
problems such as the presentation machine differing slightly from my dev 
machine, throwing everything off.

The HTML stuff was so bad that I regularly got pretty negative feedback about 
it. Those problems all vanished when I switched to pdf. No complaints.


> I'm going to try to refrain from saying anything about "the cloud". Don't
> really feel like another big debate, atm.

As if I'm really going to have my presentation hinge on getting a reliable 
internet connection. (I've seen some that did, and they always got derailed and 
spent their allotted time trying to get it to work.)

One huge impediment to me doing cloud computing is the random nature of 
responsiveness of the internet. And, when it is not responding, the software 
gives you no clue what the problem is:

1. your browser crashed
2. your browser is slowly executing javascript
3. your ethernet cable fell out of its socket again
4. your hub needs to be power cycled
5. another machine on your lan is hogging the bandwidth
6. your router needs to be rebooted
7. your cable modem needs to be rebooted
8. your ISP needs to be rebooted
9. a tree fell on the wires again
10. the internet is just slow today
11. any of the above happened to the web site you're trying to access