Wednesday January 25, 2006; part of:
Blather
- Interesting Google survey of a billion pages showing that no one, to a first approximation, uses CSS correctly. hundreds of millions of font attributes around, and more <br> tags than <p> tags out there. I admit that I gave up trying to do all the positioning on this page in css after spending three hours failing to get the two books lined up as the current table displays them in all browsers. But it's only a very small table.
- Full page Telegraph obit of "Peter Simple" fails entirely to mention the surely quite interesting fact that his second wife had two children by his friend -- and indeed the man who hired him to write the column, Colin Welch, later deputy editor of the paper.Next to to it a generous and acute appreciation by Craig Brown, who is married to one of Colin's daughters by his own wife. The two families ran in parallel for a decade or more.
- The Vatican asserting its IP rights over encyclicals is a story that needs more thought. It makes a kind of bookend to the great firewall of China. What they should have done, of course, is to release them under Creative Commons licenses.
Posted by andrewb at January 25, 2006 08:30 AM
There was a time when Linux browsers (esp. Konqueror) disagreed with IE about how to interpret CSS, with the inevitable consequence that pages perpetrated by "designers" didn't render. So I downloaded the CSS standard to figure out what was really what and discovered it was more than 200 pages long. And that, boys and girls, is why it sucks.
Did the 'tards at the W3C ever do anything right, ever? They've even taking to deprecating "I" tags, on the grounds they're not semantic enough, without bothering to ask the countless generations of LateX sufferers whether "semantic markup" works. (It doesn't, of course.)
If copyright extends for a fixed period past the death of the author and then lapses, then surely our more fundamentalist brethren will have great trouble reproducing the Bible. On the other hand, it does raise the engaging prospect that some court will have to decide on the exact date of the death of God.
R
CSS has brought me joy and gnashing of teeth for years. But remember, it beats the browser wars.
I am, for personal reasons, very interested in the expanded stories of Peter Simple and co.
Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make
italics bold and other silly effects easily.
- Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
- A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
- I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.
