Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 6 January 2002

# 11 PM

Fun browser fact: If you put the document type declaration for strict HTML at the top of your webpage (this means you solemnly promise not to use any deprecated markup) then Mozilla will ignore your style sheet unless the web server gives it the proper MIME type.

# 10:30 PM

I taught Shweta how to read Usenet. She taught me how to make curry. I think I got the better deal.

This is how I get my MP3 collection: someone mentions a song on some newsgroup I read, and I curiously download it, add it to the xmms playlist, listen to it once, and (unless I can't stand it at all) leave it there and forget about it. Usually it's random anime theme music (yeah, I'm an otaku, I admit it) but for some reason I seem to have picked up TISM's song Choose Bad Smack. (Think Monty Python does Trainspotting.) It's playing on my stereo right now. The disturbing part is, I'm tempted to go buy the album.

Half the fun of weblogging seems to be looking up appropriate hyperlinks for all the things I mention. Do I pick Pythonline or montypython.net to use as a reference for Monty Python? It's a beautiful excuse to spend hours surfing websites I normally wouldn't go anywhere near...

# 4:45 PM

Further cat-vacuuming

I've rewritten the markup of this web page to use cascading style sheets rather than the old hairy nested tables. It's a huge improvement, both in terms of how easy it is to write new entries, and how robust it is against browsers that don't understand the spiffy markup. For instance, the date and time markers are now called out by <h2> and <h3> tags, instead of being table cells. This makes far more structural sense, is easier to type, and if you shut off CSS entirely, it still looks halfway decent.

Having said that, it doesn't work quite the way I'd wanted. The most visually obvious problem is that the yellow block at the left is supposed to be a column as tall as the right column. I haven't found any way to do that. Also, the links have to appear in the source before the content. This is suboptimal for editing, and if you're here with a browser that doesn't do CSS, you have to scroll past the links to get to the content, which is annoying. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.