an argument over lenght of lines...

This site is best viewed in a modern browser with JavaScript enabled.

Jerome

Hi everybody!

I am having an argument with a colleague over the necessity of manually wrapping lines of text and HTML code to 75 characters max per line. He also insists that we do not use indents to separate HTML code into blocks.

I keep on saying that it is pointless, but he says that it causes problems for him when he looks at the page source using notepad without the wordwrap function on. He also says that with the wordwrap on he can't do he's quality assurance right.

What do you guys think? Have you ever had to deal with that kind of guidelines?

Thanks!

Jerome

Charles

[font=georgia]Introduce you colleague to HTML Tidy (http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/) by Dave Raggett, the guy who also wrote the HTML 3.2 Specification. It will quickly add whatever indentation, word wrapping and capitalization that you happen to like at the time. And it will do a good bit of the quality control. As much as I like Kierkegaard, this isn't an either/or situation.[/font]

spufi

Smack him upside the head and tell him to get out of the stone age and get a real text editor.

Tell him that making sure you use 75 charcters per line actually slows down your work production. It would mine.

If I read you correctly on the indent issue, then that's another issue where I think he is wrong. Having indents makes coding a lot easier. It does wonders when you are trying to figure out if you have a matching closing tag with it's own opening tag. If I have a div tag, I'll then on the next line indent two spaces for the extent of that info, and then have a closing div tag on a seperate line below the div tag content that lines up with the original tag. I can't imagine trying to weed through code that's all lined up with the left margin.

In something like JavaScript, you can easily line up brackets so you know you have an opening and closing one that match up.

So in both cases, wordwrap and indenting, you are actually saving yourself time and reducing errors by doing it your way. I would try to find out why his quality assurance isn't coming out right.