I finally dredged up the courage to join two rather scary groups over the last few days. Well, at least somewhat put-offish for me to say the least. And those two groups are Mozilla’s Bugzilla and the (shudder) WordPress Codex. Now the problem for me isn’t the fact that I’m not a developer nor programmer (I’m a software tester and have been for over 20 years), it’s the damn markup language differences that get me. That plus the differences in the overall functions between each platform that’s making me grit my teeth in frustration and sometimes even embarrassment.
Take just now for example. I submitted a comment (is that even the correct term?) to a particular “bug” page concerning flash powered dynamic scroll bars in certain sites driving Firefox 3 CPU usage to near 100%. I had found a site that does this in the nightly builds but not in Firefox 2 which would make a great comparison test case blah, blah, blah. But I wasn’t sure on how to post the actual link to the site which brings me to the meat of this post…
There just ain’t no standards! It’s the 21st century and there’s still no standards on the Webernet!
Point in case:
In the above example I had to guess at which type of format I would successfully need to use to put the following link into that post at Bugzilla in order for it to show up like this:
Now in a WordPress comment box and most forums that I know of, the format would look like this (without the quotes):
“<a href=”http://www.wcax.com”>www.wcax.com</a>”
But in a “Wiki” based platform like the WordPress Codex it needs to look like this (again, without the quotes):
“[http://www.wcax.com www.wcax.com]”
Or do I just type the it out the actual URL and hope for the best?
Since Bugzilla is it’s own platform and not actually based on something else I really had know idea about the correct way of doing this and I couldn’t seem to find a “Help with posting” type of link such as the Codex provides for those new to Wiki markup so I finally defaulted to old standard HTML. That should be safe enough, right?
Wrong!
Turns out that all I had to do was type the actual simple URL. Instead I ended up posting a link that looked something like this:
<a href=”http://www.wcax.com/“>www.wcax.com</a>
You have no idea how embarrassing that is. Not only that but 347.568 emails were sent out and CC’d to every person who was involved with or “watching” this bug and when I went to correct this foible (no edit?) I found that yet another 347.568 emails were sent out once again. So in an act of pure vindictiveness (Lord, forgive me that I should do such a thing) I posted an apology for the double posting just so I could see yet a third round of 347.568 emails sent out telling each and every one of those “watchers” that I was sorry for being new to Bugzilla and screwing up all over the place.
It’s all do to standards or the lack thereof. Hell, there’s not even any standard to Wiki markup language I found out when I was searching around to see if there was such a thing as a local Wiki editor or a plugin for Windows Live Writer. Apparently all Wiki platforms are not created equal either. Although it all may be similar among the different Wiki platforms, the markup is most definitely not the same. Thankfully the WordPress Codex has a fairly straight forward markup guide that I can go by and the built in editor has a decent preview mode so I catch mistakes before I go public.
With having to learn Wiki markup language that the Codex uses, dealing with Bugzilla, forums, different comment forms, WordPress Trac, PHP, CSS, Google Groups, various Microsoft forums (all different) and just plain old HTML, it’s become very clear that I simply do not have enough time left to learn all this crap before I die.
Why couldn’t all this happen when I was younger?
Tags: bugzilla, Firefox, firefox3, Wordpress, wordpress codex
Comments 3
Thank you for sharing this. I have landed into similar situations before too. The part on the wiki formats will be useful to others too.
Posted 23 Feb 2008 at 10:27 pm ¶Just goes to show you that no matter how deep into the world of tech you may happen to be, you’ll always find a curve ball headed your way.
On another note, why is it that every time I visit your blog I get hungry?
Posted 24 Feb 2008 at 5:10 pm ¶“it’s become very clear that I simply do not have enough time left to learn all this crap before I die.”
And why would you want to. There comes a moment in life when it finally dawns that you aint 21 anymore and also “why do I have to put up with this nonsense?” I’m not a real techie but I have used computers for a long time. They either work, when serviced regular or they don’t. When they don’t I just feel “they” should try harder and I will respond when “they” do.
Posted 26 Feb 2008 at 11:15 am ¶Post a Comment