Mokka mit Schlag » Web Development

Rusty Shackleford demonstrates by example:

I have to say, though, that I’m a bit flattered by Jamaal’s death fatwa. Long time readers know, that its been a goal of mine to get myself one. Not just a death threat from a Muslim, I have loads of those, but an official fatwa. I would consider myself lucky to be included in the ranks of Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Wafa Sultan–all alleged “blasphemers” and critics of sharia and the traditional understanding of the sunna (example of Muhammed).

I’m also flattered that he decided to name his list of targets “fatwa worthy” in an apparent ironic homage to my own “fatwa worthy” list of links to the right [which seem to be down right now due to a problem at blogrolling]. Of course, irony means something like the use of words other than their literal intentions. So, when I say Charles Johnson’s LGF, Ed Morrissey’s CQ, Michelle Malkine’s Hot Air, or Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch are ‘fatwa worthy’, I’m being ironic. When he attempts irony, it falls flat. He really means that the links, like mine, are literally ‘fatwa worthy’. Nice try. Moron.

Which kind of makes me suspect that Jamal is just some unemployed teenager with too much caffeine in his bloodstream and not enough real spice in his life. Maybe he doesn’t have the authority to issue such a fatwa? Bummer.

I also notice that “Radical Muslim” Jamaal claims to live in London. Where the picture above right was taken at rally against some others accused of blaspheming Mohammed. Do we have another Bakri Mohammed follower here? That would explain a lot.

Oh, and last time I checked, death threats were illegal. Even in London.

We’re watching you Jamaal. You, and all your ‘radical Muslim’ friends.

I’ve upgraded the WordPress engine on this site to the latest version, 2.1.3. Initial results look positive, but holler (preferably via e-mail) if you notice anything going wrong.
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What if any tools are available for reading HTML, finding missing width and height attributes on img elements, and filling in the relevant values? So far all I’ve found is this Perl Script from Randal Schwartz circa 1999 and this Perl script based on ImageMagik from Marc Merlins. I haven’t been able to resolve the dependencies for Schwartz’s script yet. Merlins’ runs, but is not XHTML savvy. That may be easy to fix though.

BBEdit almost does this, but it replaces existing height and width attributes too, including ones you’ve deliberately set to a different size. I only want to fill in missing height and width attributes, not change existing ones.

I’d love to find a simple open source GUI tool that could pull this off for an entire site.

I’ve been avoiding comment on the whole Sierra/Locke/etc. dust-up lately. Most of the commentary seems pretty on-the-mark, but a few usually sensible people are starting to overreact and call for self-censorship. Once the mainstream media gets hold of this next week, expect the customary cast of Congressional idiots to elevate that to calls for government mandated censorship. However the problem has been blown way out of proportion. There’s one thing that I think needs to be said that hasn’t been said yet to put this whole sordid mess in its proper perspective:

Death threats are no big deal.
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Proper use of the abbr and acronym elements is good for accessibility and good for conversational style writing. No longer do you have to write phrases that grate on the ear such as, “Many problems are much easier to solve with a native Extensible Markup Language (XML) database and XQuery than with a relational database and Structured Query Language (SQL).” Instead, you just assume 99% of your audience knows what you’re talking about, and instead you write:

Many problems are much easier to solve with a native <abbr title="Extensible Markup Language">XML</abbr> database and XQuery than with a relational database and <abbr title="Structured Query Language">SQL</abbr>.

However, there are two problems with this:
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Testing for some plain text problems in WordPress title formatting. Hmm, looks like this one is OK. WordPress turns the double quote into a curly quote which does not terminate the attribute value. The greater than sign is escaped inside the attribute value. so the problems only arise if there’s real markup.

The curly quote may be an accidental fix. I’m not sure what would happen if I figured out how to publish a real straight double quote in a title. I wonder if there’s a preference for that somewhere?