Geeky weekend
Sunday, May 18th, 2003 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerI've been taking advantage of a lull in paper-grading to bone up on my computer skills.
My long-term plan is to write a Mozilla application for marking student papers (see how my current lifestyle is affecting me?). A while back, a colleague referred me to a program called Markin, which does this kind of thing - it's basically a WYSIWYG HTML editor with a lot of buttons for highlighting errors, inserting comments etc. Now of course I wouldn't use this, because it's a horrid Windows program. Ideology aside, the whole point of using software to mark papers rather than doing it by hand is convenience, and rebooting into Windows would not be convenient.
So I thought that all I'd need to do would be to customise Mozilla Composer, which is a half-way decent WYSIWYG HTML editor (for Netscape users, it's pretty much the same as Netscape Composer). Problem. Unlike my main "real" HTML editor, Quanta, you can't add items to the toolbar via a cute little dialogue. You have to write an proper program to do it.
This means learning XUL (pronounced "zool", as in Ghostbusters). Actually XUL looks like an pretty cool language (if I'd found I had to write extensions in C++, I would have given up straight away). It's basically a mixture of XML, CSS and Javascript. So I thought, "OK, learning XUL would be a good project for the summer" and worked through a tutorial.
It then became apparent that I needed to learn Javascript. Although I'd done some cut-and-paste stuff in Javascript, I'd never bothered learning it properly, as (a) I hate the weird Java-style syntax and (b) it is largely used as a way of adding useless and annoying features to websites (like pop-ups). I persevered and worked through a few more tutorials, to find that for anyone who has any programming experience whatsoever, Javascript is absurdly easy. Just to prove it, I added some features to our department website, like an automated "Last updated on ..." line, and a button to give the boring technical details that used to take up space on the main page.
Enjoyable though this is, it is obvious that I have a long way to go. But what the hell, summer's coming.
My long-term plan is to write a Mozilla application for marking student papers (see how my current lifestyle is affecting me?). A while back, a colleague referred me to a program called Markin, which does this kind of thing - it's basically a WYSIWYG HTML editor with a lot of buttons for highlighting errors, inserting comments etc. Now of course I wouldn't use this, because it's a horrid Windows program. Ideology aside, the whole point of using software to mark papers rather than doing it by hand is convenience, and rebooting into Windows would not be convenient.
So I thought that all I'd need to do would be to customise Mozilla Composer, which is a half-way decent WYSIWYG HTML editor (for Netscape users, it's pretty much the same as Netscape Composer). Problem. Unlike my main "real" HTML editor, Quanta, you can't add items to the toolbar via a cute little dialogue. You have to write an proper program to do it.
This means learning XUL (pronounced "zool", as in Ghostbusters). Actually XUL looks like an pretty cool language (if I'd found I had to write extensions in C++, I would have given up straight away). It's basically a mixture of XML, CSS and Javascript. So I thought, "OK, learning XUL would be a good project for the summer" and worked through a tutorial.
It then became apparent that I needed to learn Javascript. Although I'd done some cut-and-paste stuff in Javascript, I'd never bothered learning it properly, as (a) I hate the weird Java-style syntax and (b) it is largely used as a way of adding useless and annoying features to websites (like pop-ups). I persevered and worked through a few more tutorials, to find that for anyone who has any programming experience whatsoever, Javascript is absurdly easy. Just to prove it, I added some features to our department website, like an automated "Last updated on ..." line, and a button to give the boring technical details that used to take up space on the main page.
Enjoyable though this is, it is obvious that I have a long way to go. But what the hell, summer's coming.
