John's Junk Drawer

There's a hierarchy here.

You can appear ignorant without asking a question, but

You can't ask a question without appearing ignorant.

This is because the simple act of asking a question is a demonstration to observers that you are (or believe you might be) ignorant about something.

Either way. Whether you're appearing ignorant because you're asking a question, or because you're (for example) just trying something you don't know how to do, it seems to be best to look ignorant.

That's because, when you look ignorant, you have a better chance of learning something new, than when you do not look ignorant.

-John

On the one hand - I wanted to move old entries in from a very old, static, page as plain old (did I mention it was old) HTML. In other words, the old HTML from the static junk-drawer page (back when Netscape 4.x was king of the world) needed to be cut and pasted into the entry area and simply display as if it were html placed directly in the blog-page.

On the other hand - I didn't want to give up the modern convenience of being able to use s9y's Line-feed-to-break-tag plug-in for new entries going forward.

Solution! - Add suppresslf (suppressLF) to the list of exceptions in the NL2BR tool. Now, if I want to cut and paste-in html of any kind I start with <suppresslf> </suppresslf> and then Ctrl-V the html text in between them. Will it work you ask? YES, IT DOES!

But (there's always a but) - S9y's display functionality fixes old <p> tags, AND stand-alone <p/> tags, by producing a "real" block of text. That is, the display function subsumes the text that follows the tag. The practical effect is that something like: "<p /> hello world", is turned into "<p>hello world</p>".

So you still have to do a little fixup - Replacing the original <p> or <p /> tags with "<p></p>" pairings.. Still much better than manually retyping the whole thing in. No?

Also, you now have a custom tag <suppresslf> in your output html. This is well within the standard unless you want your pages to be well-formed and valid (good luck with that obsession ). Even in the event you are even more OCD than me, you could still achieve this, simply by pointing to your own DTD that includes a definition of your new tag.

Just sharing

-John

P.S. This message is the first attempt to employ BBCodes (there's a plug-in for that). There will likely be some learning to do for that as well.

Hi.

The plan is to start using this blog for Junk-Drawer entries from now on. I'll start by moving the old entries over from old, static Junk-Drawer page, where they have been on for the last few years.

When moved here, the old entries will be given their original posting. Some of the oldest entries (entries before 15-Feb-2004) didn't have dates on the static page. Those will be given dates here that start in January of 2003 (though the earliest ones will not be moved over).

So here goes. next post in this Junk Drawer blog category, will be the oldest one from the old static JD page. It will be displayed below this entry, because of its early date.
-djr