The Talking

Communication is a strange and wondrous thing. I’m amazed at the ways it works and the ways it fails. Some days, I’m amazed it works at all. We seem to have a handle on the basics, but it’s when we stray from some accepted vocabulary that we start to have trouble. Idiomatic speech is interesting--a guy can talk about a hot car and another guy can talk about a cool car and they’re both talking about the same car.

My first holiday dinner with my wife’s family amazed me. All of the sisters talking at once, saying “Oh! Remember that time…?” “With the…?” “No, the other time.” “Oh, at the place with…?” “Yeah!”

It kind of untidied my understanding of discourse, and what I knew of subjects and predicates and adverbs and so on. These people were sparking-off ideas and sending memories around the table without any of that stuff. I still marvel at it, twenty years on, every time all of the sisters get together.

Every group seems to develop its own language. That’s probably be one of the definitions of Group. Surfers have difficulty talking with networking geeks, who can’t understand musicians who can’t discuss Big Ideas with MBA types. All of us born here in the Big PX. All of us products of the public schools system. All of us, nominally, speaking English.

I was in conversation with a friend a few weeks ago when we were interrupted by someone with a Web problem. This happens to me a lot. Everyone in my little corner of the world knows I am The Web Guy, wise in the ways of HTML, Dreamweaver and so on. He had a problem with a .pdf file he was trying to get into a Web page. But he wanted to be seen as a cut above the great unwashed. He told me he was trying to hook it up on the page, inline.

Constant Lurker will know there are two types of HTML tags that display elements in the body of any page; block-level tags, and inline tags. Block level tags include headers and paragraphs, which start new lines and extend from sea-to-shining-sea across the entire available area, or across the entire restricted area if a page has been divided into, say, columns. Inline tags affect only a subset of the entire block. <em> turns on emphasis for some fraction of the greater paragraph. Link text is set off by <a> tags, anchor tags, but it’s very rare that an entire paragraph is clickable text.

Now, stir into this the idea that we have recently added a class for anchor tags that displays the Adobe Acrobat icon after a clickable link to a .pdf file, and confusion starts. As we have just covered, Anchor Tags are inline tags. “You mean you want the pdf link inline, with the new little icon?” “Uh, yeah” comes the reply. So I (quickly) showed him how to create an anchor tag that pointed not to a Web page, but to a .pdf file, and how to indicate this to the page visitor by means of this new application-pdf class in the style sheet for anchor tags. Kewl, right?

“No, I wanted it to display inline”.

“It is inline. All anchor tags are inline.”

What he wanted, it turned out, was a way to turn the information on the .pdf file into something someone would see when they came to that page. I suggested he make a screenshot of the .pdf, trim it a little with Photoshop, and put that up. “But then they wouldn’t be able to select parts of the text, right?” Right.

It was never made clear to me why the information was a .pdf in the first place, but eventually we got him hooked up.

I ended up showing him Dreamweaver’s Table wizard, and how to create a table with as many rows and columns as he needed, and then transcribed the .pdf information into the various cells, matching as best I could the fonts and colors used, and so forth.

It ended up being about an hour’s job, instead of about three minutes. But it could have gone much better if he hadn’t insisted on using the word inline the way he did.

Imagine how life must be at the UN, huh?