h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks for the link pheloxi* but, as you pointed out, h2jargon (A632431) does what it says on the lid so to speak ~ it covers lots of h2jargon BUT not a great deal of GuideML jargon

The plan (A985773) is to create introductory level pages

for A B S O L U T E B E G I N N E R S

who are new to GuideML AND computers AND all the terms and phrases (that, once upon a time, *none* of us knew) AND are totally confuzzled by the existing help pages

Going by the number of threads hanging off of those help pages and elsewhere, they're not a dying breed




I guess I'm really looking for ideas and suggestions from researchers who have:

__________________________________________

thought about livening up their pages

gone to the help pages

and

been absolutely mystified

and have then back to plain text

__________________________________________



Alkland, you could be the best *resource* to date

> Never used HTML and frankly GuideML scares me.
> It's confusing and the help pages just confuse you more.
> If a relatively easy to follow guide was available -
> I'd definitely be more willing to learn to use GuideML.





Please, this thread is ONLY for

suggestions about GudieML acronyms and jargon

from or for B E G I N N E R S

The thing that confused me the most when I switched over to Guide ML was that my smileys no longer worked. It took me a while to find a user page that had smileys on it, so I could take and peek at the code and figure out how to use the smiley tag. I didn't know one was even needed.

JEllen

By the way, I wrote a little entry on how to copy and paste. Y'all interested in including that in this project? It's so much easier to "borrow" someone else's code when you know how to copy and paste.

The thing that confused me the most when I switched over to Guide ML was that my smileys no longer worked. It took me a while to find a user page that had smileys on it, so I could take and peek at the code and figure out how to use the smiley tag. I didn't know one was even needed.

JEllen

By the way, I wrote a little entry on how to copy and paste (under my JEllenJ42 username). Y'all interested in including that in this project? It's so much easier to "borrow" someone else's code when you know how to copy and paste.

I can't get this darn thing to post, sorry if it winds up a double or triple post.

I had a look at the GuideML Clinic page, thinking I might titivate My Space but was completely put off by all the symbols etc that I don't understand.

Short of one of you guys actually coming round to my house and showing me how to use GuideML - an Idiots Guide that could be printed off and followed would be helpful ie - Step by Step instructions. Or a template to follow - as was suggested earlier.

Jeez... the Clinic isn't that hard to follow, and it even has examples which you can cut'n'paste into an entry to try out. I'd never coded a page in my life until I started using it - a bit of trial and error was all it took

It may have been easy for you Gosho - if it had been easy for me I wouldn't be having problems now would I!!!

It wasn't easy for me, but I had a bash at it and got it working

Er, Teuchter are you female by any chance?

> ... the Clinic isn't that hard to follow,
> and it even has examples which you can
> cut'n'paste into an entry to try out.

Gosho, I know this might sound absurd to you but some *absolute beginners* don't know what cut & paste means

> I'd never coded a page in my life until ....

This suggests that you were at least familiar with using a computer when you landed in hootooville - ie *not* an absolute beginner

Sorry if I'm labouring the point here, but really...

Anyone reading this text that doesn`t know how to cut and paste should not attempt crossing busy roads without holding the hand of an adult.

I qualify as a complete ignoramus about this, not having learned either HTML or Guide ML.

From this position of ignorance, I'd like to know how the two differ. I'm about to learn HTML anyway (to build a website), and also learn GuideML.

HTML looks, at first glance, even easier than Basic. But is Guide ML (a) HTML with added bits, (b) HTML with bits taken away or (c) Other? And which (if either) is it more efficient to learn first?

c) other - technically speaking at least.

GuideML is, in concept, very similar to HTML, but conforms to XML rules, which are stricter than those in HTML, which is based on SGML, and this is all very confusing. However, if you happen to learn XHTML instead of HTML, you'll find that GuideML's syntax rules are IDENTICAL - the only thing that's different is that the available tags are different. Even if you learn traditional HTML you'll still find GuideML's syntax to be very similar, and it's fairly easy to learn GuideML's basic tagset.

That probably didn't make any sense at all, this is why I can't write beginners' guides!

The cut and paste thing is not possible on a digibox so anyone using one of those has to write the code on a piece of paper and type it all out by hand even if they are an expert at cut and pasting.

Just in case anyone didn't realise that.

When I was a beginner I didn't really care what GuideML is or what other ML it is similar to, I just wanted to know questions like

How do I get a picture/moving fish/big writing/coloured writing/smiley/link on my page?
How do I fix this error message e.g. unexpected closing element?

I just got by by ignoring anything I didn't understand and some of it remains ignored to this day.

I recreated my error and it was "Bad closing element BODY expecting MAGIC"

Now it may be obvious that "Bad closing element BODY expecting MAGIC" means that a smiley is still in plain text instead of GuideML, but it wasn't to me.

That, however, is why it is important for people to learn the fundamentals of XML syntax, because then they may be in a position to realise that a smiley code like will get seen by the XML parser as an opening tag, and so cause problems.

At least, that's how I'd prefer things to be done.

Perhaps I'm just old and tired.

No, I'm a