Philip Taylor

What I didn”t want, though, was the randomized layout weirdness that resulted once I started styling the descendants of the link. Sometimes everything would lay out properly, and other times the bits and pieces were all over the place. I could (randomly) flip back and forth between the two just by repeatedly hitting reload.

So it’s a bit late now, but I believe this is caused by an issue in Firefox where the parsing of blocks-in-inlines is dependent on TCP/IP packet boundaries (which is why it changes on reloads). I’ve not tested this recently, but I’m fairly sure it’s possible to work(/hack) around the bug by writing <a ...><span> ... all the normal semantic block elements ... </span></a>. (But then it’s no longer valid HTML5.) ... See all content Hide content

11 months ago onWordpress in meyerweb.com

Craig Russell writes : '[…] a "Concordance" (list of the 100 most commonly occurring words in the book, when you exclude "common words such as 'of' and 'it.'").'

and then asks : '(I notice that last sentence ended with five pieces of punctuation in a row. Did I need both periods?)"'

I think not. I cannot see what the embedding of the earlier period gains, given that what you quote at that point is merely a fragment of a sentence (albeit the final fragment) rather than a full sentence which would then justify punctuating it as such.

Incidentally, I assume that the very odd punctuation of " 'it.' " is an exact transcription of the original, and is presumably to be blamed on Chicago's insane rule for requiring final punctuation to be placed within the quotation marks rather than at the logical place (i.e., just after the final closing question mark). ... See all content Hide content

4 months ago onWordpress in languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

I'm sorry if you (Language Hat) are offended by my classification of the "final punctuation must be placed inside final quotation marks, if any" rule as "insane", but if you can offer any logical reason for such a rule, and/or explain how it can be reasonably regarded as a sane rule, then I am more than willing to stand corrected. I would add, in my defence, that this is not solely a British perspective — I know well-educated and highly literate Americans who are equally condemnatory of that rule. ... See all content Hide content

4 months ago onWordpress in languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

John Cowan : is there not an odd mixture of tenses in "I don't know if he could swim or not" ? Would this not be more idiomatic as "I don't know if he can swim or not" and/or "I didn't know if he could swim or not" ?

3 months, 4 weeks ago onWordpress in languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu