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neon fish
Wednesday, September 5 2001
setting: Manhattan, New York
I stayed at work until 9pm trying to get caught up on things I hadn't been doing during my long vacation. Much of the work-related stuff I'm doing involves coding pages in XSL. XSL is supposed to be this wonderful new technology for transforming XML into glorious web pages. But someone should be a little suspicious of the fact that Microsoft is throwing so much support behind it. What's more, it's a computer language, one distinct from all the others that people like to write down on their resumés, and as such it needs to be learned before it can be used effectively. I'm a gross amateur, or course, having only just today figured out the advantage of using match="blah blah blah" instead of simply passing variables to a template. XSL's big advantage is that it is supposed to enable relatively risk-free server-side scripting for low-level web monkeys working from well-defined XML schema. But since XML is an entirely new language and yet doesn't do a lot of really important things, code written in it seem to less maintainable and less flexible than real server-side technology such as ASP or PHP, especially in a real application where the XML schema is likely to be undergoing constant revision.
As the Red Line subway passed through the tunnel beneath the East River this evening, I thought about what it would be like if someone were to put neon-glowing bubbles and fish down there for us to see out the window as we pass. No one will ever do this, of course, certainly not as a form of guerilla performance art. It's a long scary tunnel down there and there probably isn't a lot of room for avoiding trains when they come through.
That's Edna, from a picture shot a couple weeks ago.
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