5mo ago

HTML with Excel

My sister started a new position that involves HTML. She tried to explain an issue to me, but I'm not a web guy. I told her to send it to me on Monday and she sent this...

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Oh, that's an excellent way to start if you're building a database in CSS.
- https://css-tricks.com/css-database-queries/
  Use a hand-modified-to-ESM version of SQL.js, which is SQLite in JavaScript.
  Get a database ready that SQL.js can query.
  Build a Houdini PaintWorklet that executes queries in JavaScript and paints the results back to the screen in that
  <canvas>
  -y way that PaintWorklets do.
  Pass the query you want to run into the worklet by way of a CSS custom property.
  
  Go straight to jail.
  Edit: No idea what's up with the formatting. In my app this shows as step 5 but it seems to render as step 1. Is the Lemmy DB done in CSS?
  
  oh fuck off with this bullshit
- What colour do you want your database to be?
  
  In the shape of a kitten
  
  "And do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"

Now I want to know what the issue was.
And the “solution”.
- I have used Excel to make tags from a table before. Usually just for one off stuff and before I was very familiar with JavaScript.
  E.g. if you have a table of 100 urls you could use excel to easily turn them into a tags using the various text formulas like concat.
  It's probably never the best tool for the job but sometimes I'll do stuff in Excel just because I'm very familiar with it.
  To clarify I am not a programmer by trade lol
  
  I saw a meme somewhere along the line that Excel is the third best tool for every job.
  
  FWIW many modern text editors just let you modify multiple lines at once.
- Yeah I’m having a hard time imagining what this could even possibly be about.
  
  Sounds like the boss wanted a grid layout of some kind. Honestly, if they can express themselves in Excel, and they can be made to understand the limitations of responsive Web design, then it's not so bad. At least it's a requirement and you don't have to guess.

The double-space between "Excel" and "of" is what hurts me. Such a boss thing to do.
- Everyone knows you should only have a double space after a full stop, so your computer knows it's the end of a sentence.
  
  Someone eventually is going to come in here and say that no, because of modern typeface on computers the convention is a single space after a period and to that person I say this:
  Go fuck yourself.

Ah, good ol' TEXTJOIN. I've used excel to write M before when I couldn't figure out a way to do something concisely but I also couldn't be bothered to write it out by hand. In hindsight, I was a shit programmer, but I'm at least good enough now that I can see how shit I was then!

Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.
I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn't exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.
- Save as csv and then import?
  
  This was so long ago that I can't actually remember the actual reason why things had to be done by hand. Part of it may have been a conversion snag, but there were probably some other reasons why it wasn't as simple as writing a script to do the job. Because I distinctly remember I wrote some scripts to help with other data conversion jobs.

l often get sent a long list of info/ criteria in excel. It's often easiest (and traceable / maintainable back to their request) just to stay in the excel to generate large chunks of the SQL

heresy

I've build entire databases/management tools out of Excel with following of administrative file completion, warning of due payment and KPIs. It was a pain to build but it kinda worked. Then I learn to build actual relational database and I went on rebuilding them on PostgreSQL... as a back, using Acess as front that would allow Excel-like usage and Excel export of the request response.
We can say what we want about Excel but it is working really well and people are already formed to use it or at least they are enough familiar with it so they are not nearly as frighten by the idea of learning Excel as they are to learn to read a single-table SELECT SQL statement.

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