[html4all] Introductions or a Who's who of html4all (was Just curious)

[Leif Halvard Silli]

Hi - thanks Jane and Laura for starting it off - and for the other introductions!

This is about me. I'm married. And when I met my wife, she had a b/w Macintosh Classic - and a cat (who turned 15 this year - with 1 corner teeth and 2 pills a day, he is still going strong). We bought the most multingual Word Processor/Text Editor for Mac at that time - Nisus Writer (NW), which would introduce me to GREP/RegEx and Unicode/Script problems and a little bit macro-programming.  (At times, I still need to fire up that old devil in Mac OS Classic - amongst other things I have a HTML Macro package for it which I, to this day, think have features that I have not seen anywhere else.) Together we run a company that is dealing mainly with the teaching of Russian to students with a Scandinavian language background. We develope our own study material to a large extent. My wife has written her own «beginners book in Russian», which I set in XHTML - (using Prince XML - which has allowed me to skip focusing on e.g. LaTeX.).

Unfortunately, I am almost entirely autodidact in computerstuff. I am glad to see that you, the others in this group, are not! Of I education, I was set out to become a theologian from the University of Oslo. That hasn't happened yet. I also have a background in ecological farming. Eco-Farming is like Acessible HTML: It is more interesting.

I find that authoring in HTML is surprisingly difficult ... WYSIWYG-wise.  Recently I have asked my wife to work in Amaya. But I am somewhat surprised to find many problems that I thought NVU was alone about ... (Nesting and unnesting - plust the stupid thing of creating multipl BR instead of Paragraphs.) There are many tools for creating small snippets and short pages. But little that uses HTML as «document format» and with which it is possible to author in a relaxed way. Instead it too often becomes like working with WordPerfect :-D (nosing into the "mark-up" of WP document.)

I am a quite experienced with Freeway (www.softpress.com) - a tool with low cred factor, I suppose. But which have many unique (typo)graphic features and also a great interest amongst some its users for creating standards supporting web pages. But nowadays, I work mostly in text editors.

Norwegian is the only language, probably, which has 3 ISO language codes to represent itself: NN for the Nynorsk variant. NB for the "competing" variant, and NO covering both. In reality it often seems as if NO is used for the competing variant (Google do it e.g.) - a "cowpath" that should be made the norm! Well, as you understand, I am jealous spokesperson for of Nynorsk <http://www.nm.no/english.cfm>. I do not have any background especially in Accessible HTML, but like Gregory once said  - when I rephrase him a little - accessibility is not an island, it borders on Multilingual HTML.

Someone at PublicHTML said that writing specifications was just another form of programming. If so, then I hope I can have a role at least as bug finder.  I feel I have done a lot of beta testing and feature suggesting through the times - on open as well as proprietary source programs. (I have filed bugs on Opera, Safari, Mozilla, but first and foremost of iCab). I have also done localisation of software (e.g. iCab) and «web applications» (e.g. Google). 

It was reading Anne van Kesteren's blog that took me to PublicHTML. He, like Ian, encouraged people to join both WHATwg and publicHTML - something which I did - almost simultaneously - in May. Perhaps what I learned from reading Anne can be boiled down to  the realisation that XHTML isn't more semantic than HTML.
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leif halvard silli