Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Your Lileks for the Day

The day was yesterday.

The evening: watched “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” which I’d been led to believe was disappointing. It wasn’t. I liked it just fine, even though the long chase sequence through the jungle was a bit ridiculous; the old straddling-two-fast-moving-vehicles-while-underbrush-strikes-you-in-the-goolies is a bit old, and the bit with the waterfalls patently unbelievable. They might as well have sprouted wings and flown down to the next scene.


I apologize for using HTML's blockquote there. It's ugly, but my usual trick of bumping the quote over by putting it in a table isn't working for some reason. Man, do I hate blockquote, though.

And as long as I'm kvetching, I'd like to ask the gods of the world wide web why I can't find a way to apply an XSL template to an element based on whether it has a certain attribute. It's like having a natural language where there's no combination of words that allows you to address your wife on days beginning with "T". Said the guy who's been using XML for all of three days.

Maybe Pirate Jimmy can help, and we'll rename the blog "Ask a Pirate."

4 comments:

Pirate Jimmy said...

I don't really know anything about XSL templates, but after perusing http://www.w3schools.com/Xsl/el_template.asp for about 2 minutes I'm curious why you'd want to match a template based on the attributes that element contains? The element's name should probably be sufficient in determining it's attributes, shouldn't it?

Pirate Jimmy said...

Sorry, that link was:
http://www.w3schools.com/Xsl/el_template.asp

Chaka said...

I probably didn't word my problem very well. I've got that part of the program working now.

Anonymous said...

I'll confess I've never deeply pondered the aesthetics of the block quote but I've always enjoyed the moment when I typed one into my paper. Always felt legitimizing. As if I was a serious scholar engaged in Serious In-Depth Analysis and not simply cherry picking quotes to make my point. Although in this case you did not analyze James's assertions only pissed and moaned about some obscure technical point lost on us blogging dilettantes. So the mystique of the block quote is tarnished somewhat. I admit it.