2 questions - vml, and documentation



  • First question, does anyone use VML?  And I mean "anyone" in the "anyone in the universe" sense.  I got the impression that no one uses it.  I ask because my boss is having me write some graph/chart net app using vml and I'm just wondering how supported/compatible it is.  I can't imagine why Flash wouldn't be a better choice.

     

    Second question, what type of documentation do you "real" professionals have to provide with your applications?  The company I work for is a long story, but the jist of it is that my boss doesn't require ANY documentation.  The other guy doesn't even comment his code - besides, of course, any comments that come with "examples" from the internet.  You can guess why I hate having to debug his stuff.  Anyways, since this is the only company that I've worked for, I'm curious as to what a normal programmer has to do to support his code.  I've told my boss many times before we need to document, document, document, but he just says "yeah ok" and we never speak of it again.  One of these times the other programmer (there's only 2 of us) will quit or something and I'll be left to figure out what the hell is mis-spelled filenames and the code inside them is trying to do.



  • I had to Google to find out what VML means. Half the hits on the first page weren't actually about VML. I assume from that it's not exactly very widely used, nor supported.

    I can't find any references to VML, [i]on the W3C site[/i], that are newer than 1998.

    It seems to me that VML is made entirely obsolete by fresher standards like SVG (supported via plugin, like Flash) and javascript graphics via <canvas> (supported a little bit by Firefox 1.5), though I havent actually used either.

    With "real" applications/products, you provide "real" documents, with header, contents, chapters, version etc etc. Not an offhand .txt file in the root source directory, anyway. :)



  • @dhromed said:

    I had to Google to find out what VML means. Half the hits on the first page weren't actually about VML. I assume from that it's not exactly very widely used, nor supported.

    I can't find any references to VML, [i]on the W3C site[/i], that are newer than 1998.

    It seems to me that VML is made entirely obsolete by fresher standards like SVG (supported via plugin, like Flash) and javascript graphics via <CANVAS>(supported a little bit by Firefox 1.5), though I havent actually used either.

    With "real" applications/products, you provide "real" documents, with header, contents, chapters, version etc etc. Not an offhand .txt file in the root source directory, anyway. :)

    From Wikipedia:

    Vector Markup Language (VML) is an XML language used to produce vector graphics. VML was submitted as a proposed standard to the W3C in 1998 by Microsoft, Macromedia, and others. VML was rejected as a web standard because Adobe, Sun, and others submitted a competing proposal known as PGML. The two standards were joined and improved upon to create SVG.

    Even though rejected as a standard by the W3C, and largely ignored by developers, Microsoft still implemented VML into Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher and in Microsoft Office 2000 and higher.

    Google Maps currently uses VML for rendering vectors when running on Internet Explorer 5.5+.



  • We use VML in one of our apps to create a well-scalable background watermark. But the app is used only in IE 5.0+. Personally I've made a piechart example in VML, and some spinning cubes (sorry, couldn't resist ;).

    On documentation, we've been having to properly document (Function Design and Technical Design documents, and function header comments) our work for the past year, and it does help. But it's still a pain having to look up things in the design documents if the comments in the function headers are 'old' or 'copy-pasted', which does sometimes happen.

    Drak


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