'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Peter Flynn]

On 15/10/18 15:10, Liam Proven wrote:> It held on in the legal field in
the UK for _decades_ and that made me
> a little bit of money fixing balky systems.

Excellent. Always good to take lawyers' excess money :-)

> It also sometimes leaves bits of deleted or edited-out text in the
> saved files, which can be extremely legally embarrassing.

No longer, fortunately.

> So, lawyers stuck with it until well into the WinXP era.

On 15/10/18 17:13, Jim wrote:
>
> This reminds me that about 10 years ago I was in my lawyers office
> and I somehow noticed he was using WP. I had just assumed that
> professionals would all would be using MSWord. He said no. If you
> wanted to exchange documents you had to be using WP, especially in
> small firms. I don't know if it is still that way.

It is, and not just for compatibility. Many lawyers (including mine) now
use Word, but those working in some specialist areas apparently still
have a copy of WP. And those using the latest legislative drafting
systems may actually be using OpenOffice, although they are probably
unaware of it, because its XML format allows all kinds of fun bells and
whistles for our elected representatives to query and change.

On 15/10/18 15:10, Liam Proven wrote:
[...]
> If you use a whole different office suite, you probably don't really care.

Most office workers have only the vaguest idea of the software they are
using. Microsoft's marketing in this area has been really amazing,
firstly convincing people that if it looks pretty, that automatically
means it must be right :-) and secondly ironing out the seams between
applications and between the applications and the OS interface so that
people no longer know nor care whether they are using Word or Excel or
Edge, and wouldn't be able to describe the difference anyway.

That on its own is the one reason that Linux (including Mac OS X) will
not (indeed cannot) supersede Windows (barring some world-shattering
catastrophy).

> OK, OK, me too. I was attempting to be a bit tactful.

Since I retired from my last 9–5 job to concentrate on consultancy I
have stopped being so tactful :-) If a program is a dog — or worse — I
will probably say so, unless a client thinks it's wunnerful...

> I didn't know that one, but I only encountered XML professionally from
> 2014 onwards.
> 
> I am *not* a fan.

No, it's not a technology that you should ever need or want to know.
Unfortunately [see my rant about editors the other day] it's still
missing some software, so users are still exposed to the pointy
brackets, which is silly. When it was being written, the assumption was
that the software would grow up with it, and that's only partially true.

> I am still learning to produce clear, readable DocBook, thanks in part
> to some occasionally-crunchy feedback from my more expert colleagues.

I use it for pretty much everything except actual Humanities texts, for
which TEI is designed.  And I'm still learning DocBook's oddities :-)

///Peter