Archive — hermiene.net

I'm back from England. You know, the strange little country where they drive on the left (wrong) side of the road...? Alex and I went to Alton Towers, a huge amusement park. I believe it's the 3rd largest park in the world, but I'm not sure about that. It is colossal, anyhow. I rode Oblivion, a vertical drop roller coaster. It didn't look like it was an exact 90 degree drop, but very close. When on the ride, though, it actually felt like more than 90 degrees. I also tried Nemesis, a roller coaster with an outside loop. It's fast, and it sometimes feels like you're going to hit the ground (but you're not, of course). Definitely worth trying. Also, try Air. You're lying on your stomach the whole ride, so it feels like you're flying. The roller coaster does a corkscrew move, very enjoyable. Those are the three most intense rides in the park, but if you're still hungry for more, you might try Submission and Enterprise.

I went to London, too. There, I went rock climbing on artificial climbing walls inside a castle (actually, make that The Castle) and to the London Science Museum. I greatly enjoyed the mathematics section; it's got 3D figures of platonic solids, "wire"-frame models (the lines being colored strings connected to "vertices"), a mechanical counting machine, old measuring equipment, etc. I also went to the iMax theater and saw Reloaded. Man, that was fun.

When the subject is brought up, many people ask me why I've made the decision not to drink. I haven't made that decision. I simply haven't made the decision to drink, which effectively means that I haven't made any decision at all. You see, before I make the decision to drink, you have to provide me with a good argument that (either alone or together with other arguments for drinking) will outweigh all the counter-arguments. For example: Just because I don't buy rockets from NASA every week doesn't mean that I've made the decision to boycott them. It simply means that I don't see any reason for me to buy one.

I've had the misfortune of reading an article about HTML and CSS in the Norwegian computer magazine PC Pro, issue #4 2003. First of all, it's riddled with typos (which I will not bother to correct since it's in Norwegian), but there are also inconsistencies and flat-out errors in the CSS and HTML code examples. There are a lot of inconsistent uses of spacing, semi-colons and capitalizations which I will also not bother to point out. One rather stupid mistake they make, though, is that they write "Veranda" instead of "Verdana" throughout the article (both in the normal text and the examples). The text in [brackets] are comments by me.

Example #1:

<style type="text/css">
   h1 {font-family: sans-serif; font-size: x-large; color=red}
</style>

["color=red" is obviously completely wrong.]

Example #2:

H1 {font-family:"Brush Script"}

Example #3:

<link type="text/css" rel=stylesheet" href="stilark.css">

[Missing the quotation mark in front of stylesheet.]

Example #4:

<style type="text/css">
   body {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%}
</style>

Example #5:

<style type="text/css">
   body {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
   h1 {h6 {margin-left: -8%; }
   h2, {h3, h4, h5, h6 {margin-left: -4%;}
</style>

[h2, {h3... Wrong, wrong, wrong.]

Example #6:

   em { font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;}
   strong <text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: bold;}

[strong <text-transform... No hope.]

Example #7:

   h1 {font-size: 200%; }
   h2 {font-size: 150%;}
   h3 {font-size: 120%;}

Example #8:

   body {font-family: Veranda, sans-serif;}
   h1, h2 {font-family: Garamond, "Times New Roman", serif;}

Example #9:

div.box {border: solid; border-width: thin; width: 50%}

Example #10:

<div class = "box">
Denne teksten får en boks med tynne linjer rundt seg
</div>

[The text means "this text is encapsulated in a box with a thin border".]

Example #11:

body {

   color: silver;
   background: olive;
}

strong: {color: red}

:link {color: rgb (0, 0, 153);}
:visited {color: rgb (153, 0, 153;}
:active {color: rbg (255, 0, 102;}
:hover {color: rgb (0, 96, 255;}

[strong: {color: red... is wrong. Notice that on the three last pseudo-classes, the rgb value is missing the last parenthesis. The :active selector has misspelt rgb into rbg.]

The ironic thing is that throughout the article, they describe how important it is with correct syntax in CSS (and it certainly is). But they completely fail to show it.