typewriting

I’m moving most of my tech geek posts to a new WordPress blog on my MakeDataMakeSense.com domain. No wait — not blog, log. A long time ago I had a blog. Here I have a weblog. Now I'm trying a log.

Anyway, for those of you interested in tech geekdom, find it over there now. And for those of you who have suffered through the tech talk in hopes I might get around to discussing what I'm eating or whatever (that's right, mom, I'm talking about you), suffer no more. I had cheese and crackers for dinner. The crackers were multi-grain, so that counts as a healthy dinner, right?

There's more exciting insight into the life of Scott where that came from! Stay tuned. Or retune. The choice is now up to you.

One of my pet peeves is the incorrect use of technical terminology in public. Sometimes I feel like I’m some sort of linguistic elitist when I point out that not everything interesting done in JavaScript is "AJAX." But unlike those who obstinately repeat “ain’t ain’t a word,” technically meaningless terminology actually affects people’s ability to communicate.

Case in point:

>> If I have a form element like
>> <input type="text" name="mydata">
>> Is there a way to select it in a similar manner to getElemntById()?
>
> var nameArray = document.getElementsByTagName('mydata');


I can' seem to get getElementsByTagName working. I am not sure what I am doing wrong.

This confused individual thought “TagName” referred to the “name” attribute. Why would anyone think the “name” attribute was a tag? Because hundreds of people go around referring to attributes and tags. Stop it. You’re confusing people. If you don’t know what a technical term means, don’t use it. Use plain English instead.