Engineer's Revenge
It can be done. You just make it possible to add new tags, code snippets
etc. to it. May not be perfect, but very few things are perfect. I once
made a perfect print, but I lost it, and there has never been another one
since. So we can get along without 100% perfection for awhile.
You point out JavaScript. Yes. How about that? How come CS can handle JS
but chokes on <tame tamepage> ?? The latter tame code is orders of
magnitude simpler.
If they can do it for Javascript they can surely do it for something else.
I suspect the problem is not technical but one of attitude. Germans have
their own peculiar way of doing things. My father in law, for example, was
an engineer at Daimler during the war. He designed a new high perfomance
engine for one of their big airplanes .. a 4 engine bomber. I think it was
the Condor. Anyway, this new engine he designed was supposed to make it
possible to bomb Allied positions from bases way inside the German occupied
territory, and they even expected it to be able to cross the Atlantic and
hit the U.S. and go on and land in Mexico to refuel and return.
Except that it blew up after about 50 hours running, and nobody could find
out why. Well, he knew why. The parts of this engine were sized and shaped
and weighted so that they set up high frequency vibrations that caused the
alloys it was made out of to crystallize. He hated Hitler and the Nazis,
and had designed it to do that. Not only that, he figured it all out in his
head before it even went on the drawing board. No drawings or notes to
catch him with. He designed like that all the time. Used to stand at the
window looking out over the vinyards toward Heilbronn for several days,
hands folded behind his back. Then he would turn to his drafting board, ink
up his pen and start drawing in ink. No CAD program, you understand ... pen
and ink. And I never saw him make an error.
One day I asked him what the thing was, and he said a compressor. I said it
looked like a sealed unit, and he replied it was. I told him I didn't like
sealed units. He asked why, and I told him it was because when they wore
out you couldn't fix them.
He said "I can design a sealed unit that will run for a thousand years."
I asked "Why don't you do it?"
He replied "I just did .. there it is ... but they will change it so it
will break down in ten years so they can sell another one."
He had some cook pots on the stove made out of those huge Condor pistons.
Proud family possessions. He died long ago, so I can tell the story now.
There is a lot more to it, of course ... maybe that is the book I'll write.
But back to present time:
This thoroughness is something to be admired. I can't imagine an American
or a Frenchman, or an Italian figuring out how to do something like that,
especially not in his head. It requires a German.
We see the result of it in CyberStudio and the comparison with what others
have managed to invent. Freeway. FrontPage. DreamWeaver. Net Objects
Confusion. There is something special about German Engineering.
On the other hand, there also is the old story about the four zoologists
who went to the International Zoology Convention. (It's an old joke and a
little dated, so excuse that element, please.) Somebody had given a
presentation on camels. Over lunch, they discussed it and realized there
was very little literature about camels, so they agreed they would each
take it upon themselves to publish something on this fine animal.
Six months later the American published his book: "How to Make Money
Raising Bigger and Better Camels."
A year later, the Englishman published "Camel Hunting in the Colonies".
Soon after the Frenchman's book arrived on the scene: " The Love Life of
the Camel".
Six years later, the German published his magnum opus:
"A HANDBOOK OF CAMELS
Volume 1: Camels, the Fossil Record
Volume 2: The Camel in Classical Times
Volume 3: The Camel in the Holy Land
Volume 4: The Camel in the Middle Ages
Volume 5: The Camel in Modern German Society"
So. My point is, we don't need a "Handbuch der Fremdkodex" here ... what we
need is a little bitty way to keep CS from screwing with a few lines of
code.
... Doug