Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Oh, great, now I'm coming up with ways to improve the HTML code on this LiveJournal in my sleep. I think I might have thought of a way to solve most of the friends-page validation problems (briefly: given their varied internal structure, an LJ event really ought to be a DIV element, which can contain nested block-level elements, rather than a P, which can officially contain only inline content).

Doing this will also enable various showoffy special effects, such as an easy, syntactically correct way to put giant dropcaps and book-like paragraph formatting in posts of the author's choosing. Addendum: Without, I should add, affecting the appearance of the entry on others' friends pages, so you can be a good neighbor!

It will probably be a little while before I have the time to play around with it, though. Update: You knew I couldn't resist, right? To be this fancy I do have to turn off auto-formatting and put in paragraphs by hand, though.

This journal now looks pretty good in Lynx. The userinfo pages don't, though. I don't have any control over that.

This blog doesn't look that great in Netscape 4's broken CSS rendering. Oh, well, it's still usable. (Maybe. I haven't yet checked to see if this dropcap trick breaks it.) I think I can safely assume that anyone still using Netscape 4 either is used to pages looking weird, or has CSS turned off (in which case this page looks perfectly all right, if plain).

It's funny that it's still even an issue. A wisecrack about zombie Netscape 4 from almost three years ago is the single most .sig-quoted thing I ever wrote.

(Now a bunch of people are going to be upset for wanting them to use a fancier browser. Actually, Netscape 3 was easier to deal with. And NS4's fine too as long as you turn off the horrible, defective style sheet support. Turning off Javascript will do it too, because NS4 rendered style sheets through Javascript.)