Do you suffer from loose, unvalidated backslashes? Brian Whitaker reports

The Guardian, 11 June, 1998

IT'S A LITTLE-KNOWN fact - which I unearthed during a recent Web search - that the Internet has 987,998 pages labelled "under construction". For good measure, there are also 1,208 "under costruction" and 383 "under consturction". Some have even hit on the stunningly original idea of displaying a triangular road sign of a man with a shovel.

One day I shall take my revenge on these time-wasters by creating a Web site which is totally empty apart from a home page saying "Please wait". What annoys me most about blank Web pages is not their futility but their creators' stupidity in assuming that other pages are complete. Any half-decent Web site is permanently under construction.

A Web site is almost a living organism which has to be constantly nurtured, developed and kept in trim. But the more it grows and evolves, the more complicated alterations become.

My own site, Yemen Gateway, now has over 200 files in 16 folders. Files are heavily cross-linked, which means that if I rename a file or move it to another folder there will be at least three or four links to it elsewhere on the site which need amending. There are also a couple of hundred external links to other addresses on the Internet - any of which may change without warning.

To help keep track of changes, I recently documented the entire site and now have a spreadsheet listing every file and link, with its location. The advantage of a spreadsheet is that it allows easy sorting by category. Yes, I know spreadsheets have a grey, accountancy image but I'm surprised that so few people recognise them as a Web tool. They are especially useful for creating tables of statistics. Anyone who has worked on HTML tables will know that they are the icebergs of the Internet, requiring vast amounts of unseen code to produce a few nuggets of visible data.

Putting in the tags is a nightmare. But with a spreadsheet you can type each tag once, then use the "fill down" command to apply it to every row. When it's ready, you simply export it to an HTML document.

For those people still hand-tagging HTML, there are short cuts. Textbooks say that each tag must be cancelled after use. So you start a listed item with and end it with . But soon you discover that cancelling , , (and probably a few others) makes no practical difference - and so you leave out , etc. This is anathema to some people, and the Net now has its own Schwarzenegger-type "Validators" whose goal is to eradicate loose HTML right down to the last backslash.

If your HTML is in need of discipline,http://validator.w3.org/will provide it automatically, but there are newsgroups offering a more personalised torture service. You send them the address of your Web site and ask for an appraisal, though what you get in most cases - according to the reader who told me about it - is desecration.

"The more brash your opening gambit the more open-minded you will have to be about the replies," the reader wrote. "This is a group that believes sites are accidents waiting to happen. Be warned - even armadillos have been skinned here."

I bunged off a message to the newsgroup at comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html in the brashest possible terms: "A friend(?) tells me you're the dreaded Electronic Inquisition. He dared me to contact you. So let the HTML thought police loose on my site. I can take it."

Checking the newsgroup next morning I found my words mysteriously changed to: "No longer available on the server". Since then, utter silence. Some people take HTML very seriously indeed.

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FEEDBACK:

• Jonathan Anderson- pages "under construction" and HTML validators. 11 June 1998
• Mike Cox- converting spreadsheets to HTML. 16 June 1998

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