Open Source is around to ensure that, as companies live and die, software continues. They regard software as an essential enabler that should be free for everyone to use. This Open Source model has worked, defeating even mighty Microsoft attempts to sabotage it. Microsoft has even come out recently with its own linux “distro”. You can’t suck it up more than that. All software I use is free and usually Open Source.
Anyway, back to tags, and HTML. I will go as far as to say that nowadays the web is the way to go. If you can’t program for the web, then, if your program language is C/C++ or any of many systems/desktop languages, you will need to find dwindling jobs in those fields, The bottom lines are HTML, CSS and Javascript. Javascript is a program language that makes things on web pages happen, like altering a page on the fly. HTML and CSS only change the ways text appears on a web page. They, like XML, are markup only, and are not programming languages. They are all about tags.
I am OCD enough to write these articles in pure HTML and CSS, marking them up myself. However, it does get tedious. Another acronym I like is DRY. For coders, that stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself. Tags are the very stuff of repetition. The beginning tag and the end tag are the same, except for a backslash, as you can see in the header of this article.
I want to say “Duh”. But I don’t. Instead, I found a way to avoid typing out all those closing tags. I now end them with a simple curly brace, like this: “}”. And I write in a coding IDE. The instant I produce an opening tag, this coding editor nags me for that closing brace.
The markup language I use to accomplish this is called Pollen. Created by a very smart guy named Matthew Butterick, it allows me to write my articles in a coding IDE using “Racket”, a dialect of “Scheme”, which itself is a dialect of LISP. The payoff is that I can render the article, if I want to, in four formats: text (.txt), LaTex, (.ltx), PDF (.pdf) and HTML (.html). I don’t bother with text, LaTex or PDF. I am content with HTML, and even more content that it frees me from writing all those closing tags. They are nothing but a repeat of the first tag, but with a backslash inserted to indicate closure, and I have find it intensely boring and tedious to repeat those tag words ad nauseam.
I am not a Racket coder. Saying that, it is not a mystery to me, and I can understand it when reading it. Better than that, with my coding experience in several languages, I understand its logs and error messages. That means I produce consistently good HTML, and it saves me from typing all those closing tags. I can configure it so that the tag pair “<figcaption></figcaption>” becomes “<fc></fc>”, and then use "◊fc{}" with my writing between curly braces. This is a rare example, but if you count, you will see that I type 5 characters instead of 25 and save boredom doing it. That alone is a win for me.
I don’t think everyone out there can do this, and I wouldn’t if I were not a coder, but it works for me. It keeps my coding “eye” in, and that makes me happy. The last step, once I have my HTML, is to spell check the article. The result is always at least good. Editors may have to correct my grammar (not [shudder] often), but they need never correct my spelling, and my copy is HTML ready. They do not need to save a .docx article in HTML format, which produces really terrible HTML markup. I can post my article straight onto my website with no changes. That is a good thing, because editing my web pages online in my hosting server instance is quite a drain on data, a lot of two way data traffic. So, it’s a win all round.