Tuesday, September 26, 2023
To err is human—to really mess up takes a computer
I ran the code to fix the BLOCKQUOTE issue and as it turns out,
there were 54 entries that needed further fixing due to the fix I just applied.
I wanted the HTML files to still be editable,
and as such,
I wrapped the contents of the block-level elements to fit within 80 columns,
and the function I used did not take into account where it was safe to break on an HTML tag.
So for future reference,
I'll have to write a customize word-wrapping function to take into account HTML.
As it was,
I fixed all 54 entries by hand;
some were trivial,
some required going into the backups.
Ah, the wonders of automation. A human can mess up, a computer can mess up a lot. Quickly.
The other thing I learned is that the entity ' is not defined for HTML 4
(it is for HTML 5,
and XML).
This is important because I'm still using HTML 4 for my blog.
Why not HTML 5?
Because I'm not fond of the “living standard”
(read: changes whenever,
meaning an ever-constant churn of updating HTML to maintain the standard du jour)
and the
step-by-step parsing rules instead of a concise syntax.
It also doesn't help that whenever I see WHATWG,
I read it as “What working group?”
