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Feel like a blind man with a color tv
Everything's fine but I just can't see

(Element of Crime, "Almost dead")

Questions and Answers

This chapter provides a list of questions and answers which have come to the mind of several people. Some of them are only neccessary because many users don't read this manual, some of them are not very serious,.. but anyway, here's a list of them:

Questions dealing with the archives Questions about hsc and it's usage Miscelleneous questions

Q: What about those strange .lha files?
A: LHA is the standard compression utility for AmigaOS. A portable version of lha is available from aminet:misc/unix/lha_1_00.tar.Z.

Q: I've downloaded the .lha-archives using my WWW-Browser, but they seem to be corrupt?!
A: Seems that your browser has no MIME-type configured for .lha. Look up the manual of your browser how to configure MIME-types.


Q: hsc doesn't know about the tag <XYZ> (the attribute ZYX), but I need this one!
A: Read the chapter about Syntax definition and how to extend it.

Q: hsc tells me loads of warnings I don't care about! Is there a way to prevent it from doing this?
A: All non-error messages can be suppressed adding a simple IGNORE=message_id to the call used to invoke hsc. Take a look at the chapter about Options and switches to find out more.

Q: Somewhere in these manual You are talking about a tool called make/weblint/... Where can I obtain it from?
A: All tools mentioned within these documents should be denoted in the chapter about Related stuff (if not, let me know). Normally I only mention the version for AmigaOS, but the archives or ReadMes usually include some notes where to look for other systems.

Q: Why is hsc that slow?
A: One reason is, that hsc handles (nearly) all resources dynamically (Technical note:That means, it often calls malloc() and free(), which are known to be quite slow).

Another, quite embarrasing, reason is, that most of these resources are kept in linked lists. And therefor, if hsc has to look for something, it sequentially searches these list. Shame on me, I should use an AVL-tree for such things. But the problem with AVL-tree is: though there are lots of sources around, most of them are perverted ``real´´ C-sources perpetrated by some braindead Unix-fossiles, ignoring the fact that memory can run out or that there is a "-Wall" option in most compilers; some of these sources also date back to 1863, when no one even pretended there is a language definition for C. Currently I'm too lazy to write (and, even more work, test) an AVL-tree myself. Maybe in another life...


Q: Why do You call it URI? I thought it's URL (Universal Resource Locator or U R lost)?
A: Ok, put a finger into your mouth and try to reach as far inside as possible. After some specific point, you will empty your stomach. And what do you say then? Exactly, ``URL´´! So the main reason why I do not like the term URL is because it always reminds me of puking.

Additionally, the Internet-Draft for HTML 2.0, June 16, 1995, tells you:
    URI
            A Universal Resource Identifier is a formatted string
            that serves as an identifier for a resource, typically
            on the Internet. URIs are used in HTML to identify the
            destination of hyperlinks. URIs in common practice
            include Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)[URL] and
            Relative URLs [RELURL].
And one of the users of hsc submitted this interpretation to me:
    To me it seems:

    URI = URL and RELURL
    URL = "http://www.intercom.no/~XXXXXX/index.html" - always the same doc
    RELURL = "docs/about.html"  - relative to which dir/machine you are on

Anyway, I really like that term URI a lot more and I've never really understood what's the difference between URL and URI. But who cares anyway?

Q: But URI reminds me of pissing! Add a simple ``n´´, and there we are!
A: ..which I personally prefer to puking. Certainly a matter of taste.

Q: What are jerks?
A: Jerks are persons suffered by a well-known desease called Netscapissm. Their sources contain sections like
    <BODY BGCOLOR=#123456>
    <BLINK>Click here!</BLINK>

But, not all jerks became jerks because they like to be a jerk. Very often, jerks are forced to use code as seen above by their employee. In this case, they should be refered to as ``prostitutes´´.


Thomas Aglassinger (agi@giga.or.at), 04-Dec-1996