A tool to maintain and share a bidding system

[coyot]

Hello, folks :)

 

I rarely happen to produce anything useful on demand, but some things I created for myself might be of use to others.

 

IF you happen to be a system freak (who is not content with the bidding system he plays unless there is a lot of personal touch to it)

OR play generally the same system with a few different partners and they each refuse to play some of your favorite gadgets

OR want to share your system over the web and allow people to modify it,

you might be interested in visiting

My Webpage.

 

If you follow the link to English version of the system and LIKE what you see (meaning the form, not the actual contents), click on back and read a bit more about what and how it does.

 

For those who are either lazy to look or not interested yet:

 

The system is a SA 2/1GF (fairly uninteresting) in a HTML/Javascript shape that allows you to hide/show parts by simply clicking, then clean it for printing. This might seem unremarkable apart from the fact that it should behave the very same way when you download the zipped version onto your computer, should work on any platform with any browser (hopefully, tested in FF 1.0.6 and MSIE 6.something)

AND it allows you to (quite easily, by modifying one file) make your permanent "preset" of hidden/shown parts.

 

Now, I'm not trying to make you play my system - feel free to rip the contents away and use the javascript engine for your own system.

 

Also, if you ever happen to be out of your mind so much to be interested to play with me, this would be the system of my choice :)

 

(There is one longish part left in Czech in the English version - defense against 2♦ multi. It is quite sophisticated and I've never had the time to learn it :), so I did not bother with translating).

 

I hope that somebody will find the HTML/Javascript useful for some purpose, may it not necessarily be sharing a bidding system.

[the hog]

Had a look. Thanks for sharing this, this has numerous possibilities.

[coyot]

You're welcome. It was about 30 mins of googling and a few hours of enhancements (spread around a day or so of translating the system to english, correcting errors, cleaning the HTML etc...)

 

The current version has some problems (limey reported a javascript error in MSIE when clicking on Print Version - under win98, my copy of the same msie version (6.0.2800.x) does not complain (on XP).

 

The biggest problem is that it produces grossly invalid HTML, abusing duplicate element names, proprietary attributes etc. I will think about possible workarounds.

 

THe idea with a ton of elements with the same name has it's merits - the code to handle it is then pretty small - and you don't have to worry about duplicate names for multiple elements added over time...

 

I'm not sure there would be a clean workaround. I'll be grateful for any corrections, enhancements and suggestions that will make it easier to use etc.

[1eyedjack]

I am not in the IT industry, so could someone please in layman terms tell me what is the difference between XML and HTML, and which is better (and why) as a tool for documenting bridge systems? Is it simply that they are broadly the same but XML has more cross-platform compatibility?

 

Or perhaps some other alternative than those?

I was having a look at this site and found it quite interesting:

 

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jisbert/index_xml.html

[the hog]

XML is extended markup language - the second generation of html. Bit more powerful

[coyot]

Not exactly true, Hog. Second generation of HTML is XHTML.

XML is a generic markup language, which basically allows you to define any element structure - and is therefore used for data representation. You basically define which elements your document may contain, as you wish, but it has nothing to do with HTML.

 

If you decide to store your bidding system in XML, you will have to give every reader an application that will "understand" your particular XML document.

(That is, every XML parser can extract the data, but no generic parser would be able to make any special sense out of it, so you might as well use plain text or HTML).

[1eyedjack]

Still not sure I quite understand.

I have no special software - just basic Windows stuff,

but my machine seems to make sense of the system in XML that I get when I follow the above link.

[coyot]

If you open the example bidding system and use "view frame source" from context menu, you will see what XML is about.

The second line in the source tells the browser to use a .xsl stylesheet, which is the "application" that extracts and shows data from the source itself.

(XSL styhesheet basically tells the browser how to produce HTML from the XML data - which items to show where etc.

 

Now, I don't want to criticise the system, but the page looks like no other bidding system I've ever seen - and seems much harder to comprehend - and I think that this is partially due to the XML organization, which rigidly pushes the data into a tree structure.

 

XML has some merits, definitely, but if you have a look at that page, you must agree that it is not something you would want to use and print to learn a bidding system quickly.