New Nickname

For years now I've occasionally mentioned a co-worker who I've called SWoaN, or "She Without a Nickname". I always intended that to be temporary, but it kinda stuck.

(By the way, the first story to mention SWoaN is worth a re-read. You can find it here, if you are so inclined.)

Last week, SWoaN opened up some website code and started shouting. When she calmed down a bit she shared the offending code with us.

Blah, blah, blah...

Now, for those of you who are not Web Programmers, I'll try to be gentle. There is a simple beastie called a "SPAN" that can be placed around text. Generally, this is done to change the text's style; to make something bold, or change color, that sort of thing.

<span class="RedText">It looks like this</span>

Simple, right?

The code that SWoaN opened up had at least 50 of those SPAN beasties, all clobbered around more or less randomly. It filled up the entire screen.

...<span class="rs18"><span class="jt27"><span class="ds5">It looked something like this</span></span></span>...

I gotta admit, that's the sort of thing that would make me scream, too.

Tools of the trade

Well, obviously I couldn't just let this one slide. I took a post-it note and wrote <span class="SpanFan"> on it. Then I took another post-it note and wrote </span>.

I walked over to SWoaN's desk and put the two post-it's on either side of her computer monitor. The whole time she was sitting right there asking, "What the heck are you doing?"

Once the second wave of shouting died down, I grinned at SWoaN. "You realize you finally have a real blog nickname now, don't you?"

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce (again), SpanFan! (the artist formerly known as SWoaN)

Welcome to the family, SpanFan. :)