I was idly talking to myself this morning while waiting for the Circus Day parade to start at Jacob and Jessie’s preschool:
“…then I need to figure out the HTML…”
A woman hears this and speaks to me, “…HTML? Do you need help with something? I’m a web designer.”
“Yeah,” I respond, “I’m trying to figure out Ruby and Ruby on Rails in order to implement database transactions easily.”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah, Rails is nice because it builds you a scaffolding system that handles a lot of the database transaction dirty work for you without making you pull teeth to get the syntax right, especially in XML.”
“That sounds like something our sponsor needs,” she goes on. “We send them big sheets of XML and they have no idea what to do with it.”
“So what languages do you work in?” I ask.
“HTML.”
…
It is at this point that I must stop and make a digression. I’ve been idly doing web pages for about 12 years now. There is a large difference between simply creating a page, laying it out, and making it look good (which are difficult skills to do well–don’t let me deprecate that knowledge at all) and the “learn a new programming language, figure out how to connect to databases, figure out how to interact with databases, figure out how to do asynchronous Javascript to pre-fetch results to make it look nifty” stuff about which I was talking to myself. And I had just inadvertently taken this woman’s skill set and pretty much compared it to preschool in terms of complexity.
So in an effort to preserve dignity, I rejoin with “Oh, so you do CSS style sheets and that.”
“Yes,” comes her reply, “and I tell the programmers what I want and they build it.”
So I blather on a bit about the advantages of Ruby and its XPath object, and how you can scrape the data from web pages and store it in strings. Her eyes start to glaze over a bit, and I realized I’ve hit the knowledge frontier with her.
Another day, another story.