I need to vent. So I opened a thread to vent to the only people I know who would actually understand the conversation I'm about to relay. Do I have a point for discussion, aside from the sharing of other dumb people stories? No. Nor do I care at the moment that a true discussion point is lacking. I need to vent before I flipping explode, so shut-up and read the post. Thank you. And have a nice day.

I have been in an ongoing battle with my department secretary for the better part of a week now.

We have a WYSIWYG editor back-end for our company intranet site. She has permissions to edit our specific department's portion of said intranet site.

Last Friday, she sent me an email stating that:

(1) the page title displayed in her file tree was showing the "old" department name instead of the "new" department name (the department name was changed before I started here.. so it's been incorrect for a minimum of two years now and she's never mentioned it before)

(2) she's been trying to create a page called "Forms" to display all the printable forms our department uses on a regular basis. She says she created it, lost it, found it, deleted it, created it again, and subsequently lost it again. She wanted me to find it and delete it so she could create it a third time.

I pulled up the directory listing - there were TWO files called "Forms" (more specifically "Forms" and "Forms2"). I opened the files to check the contents. "Forms2" was empty, so I deleted it. "Forms", however, contained our departmental list of policies and procedures. I emailed her to explain this. She insisted I delete the "Forms" file so she could recreate it.

Not being a complete idiot, I first saved a backup copy of the file and proceeded to delete it from the server as requested.

Not two minutes later, I get a frantic email crying "Something's wrong! My policies and procedures page worked fine yesterday! And now it's not showing up at all! What did you do to all my work??"

I replied, "I deleted it, just like you asked. The policies and procedures page was a file called "Forms". You asked for "Forms" to be deleted, I explained to you in a previous email that the file was in use, but you insisted, so I complied. However, in anticipation of this exact moment, I saved a back-up copy of the "Forms" file. I will restore it to the server and your policies and procedures page will magically reappear."

Her response: "The policies and procedures page is working fine now, but I'm having the same problem I had in the beginning where I can't create a forms page! What are you doing wrong?!"

Dear Secret Satan, I know the shipping fees would be a nightmare, but I'd really love a cement block for Christmas. I want to keep it on my desk to smack my head on when the dumb attacks. Thank you.

B9...we all feel your pain. I regularly experience similar exchanges with our customer service and sales folk. I have one who cannot open a report on an Excel worksheet without getting some kind of bizzaro "font not displayable" issue (only person in the building this happens to). I have suggested saving the sheet as a .csv, closing Excel, reopening Excel, loading the .csv, save the .csv as an Excel sheet...and the problem is gone. Perhaps 15 seconds of effort. He won't do it.

Instead he runs the report then emails it to me and asks "Getting the font error again – can you please do that thing you do?" (actual cut/paste from the last time he asked). Keep in mind this is supposed to be the technical liason between sales/support and IT. "That thing you do"...which is nothing more than what I describe above.

I'm going to have to locate a wizard hat and keep it close at hand in my office.

Unfortunately, there arent many other options for tech degrees at the school im at. I mean even the CS program is up to be cut.

Im really confused, some say I just need to ask for more help and work with a team. Others say, its just not right. I mean I am barely passing pre calc and its my 3rd time taking it in 3 years lol.

HTML vs. XHTML reveals a mistake in how the W3C thought about the web. Setting aside XML transformations, XHTML had an underlying philosophy. That philosophy was the notion of clean, absolutely correct webpages, that would then be handled efficiently by an XML parser in various clients like web browsers.

In reality, this was a disaster. That's kind of why W3C had to backtrack and go along with the WHATWG group anyway. The reality is that unless you are specifically talking about XML translations, clients are going to be flexible about HTML input. I.e. whether you call your page XHTML or HTML, it will just be treated as tag soup.

The only worthwhile takeaway from XHTML in practice is the proper closing of tags, which HTML doesn't always require, but you should do anyway. Rest of it you can ignore. Completely.

well keep in mind that XHTML is pretty much HTML being held to the XML strict standards. It really isn't a whole other world and you can probably learn a few rules and convert your HTML straight to XHTML in the blink of an eye. So while HTML5 finishes becoming finalized (which probably won't be until next year sometime) you could most certainly learn XHTML and then leverage that knowledge to move into HTML5.

As for specific examples... well everyone should strive for a stricter HTML but use XHTML anywhere you think it might be parsed (could the page be fetched by a specific bot or program instead of a real person?) or need to be fully "proper" to work ok. Use HTML anywhere you don't need this level of strictness (casual pages... but at least use a transitional dtd format). Use HTML5 when you really want to take advantage of the advanced elements like the <canvas> tag or targeting the latest browsers which support HTML5.

Most modern browsers should handle XHTML just fine. I have known IE to be ok with XHTML for at least the last few versions (probably 7+). However, IE is always quirky even though they have gotten a lot better as of late (version 9 is pretty solid).

Let your target audience help dictate which method you should use. If you have a lot of people visiting your page using IE 6, I probably would do regular HTML. If you can rest assured that they are doing IE7 or Firefox/Chrome you can easily go to XHTML or dabble in HTML5 if they are primarily IE 9/Firefox 4+/Chrome 10+.

These are just my guidelines. There are no hardcore rules for it.

They know I'm good at computers, Just not as good as I really am. Try telling a person that has trouble turning on the computer, and a father who runs a computer business, but has no idea how to code (he fixes/installs). Its hard.

You can get prepaid cards? Probably not in Australia. I'm going to check though.