The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

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?”

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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