Book meme

[nancylebov]

--Hardback or paperback?
Paperback, but I'll buy hardcover if it's half-price or less and I can't get the paperback.

--Highlight or underline?
I don't write in books.

--Lewis or Tolkien?
It used to be both, but now it's just Tolkien.

--E.B. White or A.A. Milne?
I've got a mild interest in White, but have disliked Milne since I was a kid. I finally figured out that the characters were too stupid for my tastes. I also have limited patience for Pratchet's pictsies and nomes.

--T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings?
Moderate interest in some cummings, haven't seen any Eliot I liked.

--Stephen King or Dean Koontz?
King, as a read-once author. May take another look at Koontz's science fiction someday--I used to like it.

--Barnes & Noble or Borders?
Whichever is handy.

--Waldenbooks or B. Dalton?
Mercifully, I rarely need to used either of them--they don't seem to have much.

--Fantasy or science fiction?
Both, about equally.

--Horror or suspense?
Horror-flavored suspense.

--Bookmark or dogear?
Either I remember where I was, or I leave the book open facedown--more usually, it's the former.

-Hemingway or Faulkner?
Neither

--Fitzgerald or Steinbeck?
Neither

--Homer or Plato?
Neither

--Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser?
Neither

--Pen or pencil?
Pen. Pencil fades. When I was a kid, I preferred pencil because ballpoints (all that was available to me then) took more pressure than I liked applying. Not sure whether ball points have improved or my hands are stronger or both.

--Looseleaf or notepad?
Neither. I mostly don't keep notes.

--Alphabetize?
By author.

A lot of my books aren't filed.

--Dustjacket: on or off?
On.

--Novella or epic?
Given equal appeal, I prefer to sink into the epic. No strong preference, but it's harder to find good novellas these days.

--John Grisham or Scott Turow?
Neither.

--J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket?

Rowling. I get bored with Snicket.


--John Irving or John Updike?
Neither.

-Fiction or non-fiction?
Fiction mostly, but definitely some non-fiction.

--Historical biography or historical romance?
Not much of either.

--A few pages per sitting or finish at least a chapter?
At least a chapter, usually.

--Short story or creative non-fiction essay?
Both. I also like creative fictional essays.

--"It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"?
Not sure what the question signifies. I don't mind if a story has no connection to our time-line.

--Buy or borrow?
Buy.

--Book reviews or word of mouth?
Both.



And I finally figured out why I have to keep going back to the faq for lj-cut and lj user....one is hyphenated and the other isn't, and for no particular reason. Now that I realize that there's something to remember rather than a blur of vagueness on the subject, I've probably got a handle on it. All I need now is for "preview" to start displaying lj-cuts.

Comments

[mneme]

Ah, you fixed it. GOod.

Don't think of it as "lj-cut" and "lj user" -- remember, they're both pseudo-html. So it's "<lj-cut" (with the text option) and "<lj" (with the user option).

[avram]

Yeah, I see lots of people typing <lj-user="...">. That was bad naming on their part. They should have called it lj-link or something.

I can keep it straight because I internalized HTML syntax years ago. Element names don’t take attribute values, so <lj-user="..."> is improper syntax. Also I’m usually using a GUI client that handles it for me.

[ckd]

Also, you can think of lj-cut as a container, with a start and an end, which is why it has a hyphen (that may help as a mnemonic).

[thette.livejournal.com]

Like many things on LJ, those must have grown out of the efforts of a collective.

You can blame so many inconsistencies here on that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by my fixing it.

I suppose I think of them as real but localized html. You think of them as pseudo because they aren't official?

[mneme]

You probably didn't, actually...
Hmmm. Looks like you did.
When I first viewed this entry, it had "invalid markup" or somethhing
at the top. Later (and now) it doesn't.

I think of them as pseudo-html because they don't actually serve the purpose of HTML markup (ie, instructions to the browser) Instead, they are server-side instructions which take the format of html tags in order to fit into the rest of the page, in the same way that a lot of scripting systems
designed to be mixed into html do.

IOW, they're not HTML because they're not part of any official -or- de-facto HTML standard; instead, they are valid XML which is meant to be mixed with actual HTML.

My point, btw, was that the tags are actually "lj" and "lj-cut" -- this isn't very sensible (I would have just either overloaded the "lj" tag, or provided lj-user (with a name parameter) and lj-cut (as current)), but
it's the way it's actually structured.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I didn't fix it. I suspect LJ was being kittenish. Or at least I'm reasonably certain that I didn't fix it--I've edited enough of my own defective html in lj posts (usually by way of preview) that I can't swear that I remember every time, but I really don't think I did.

I'll see if I can get it to work the way I intended--there was something I thought was an lj-cut with something more interesting than "read more".

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

OK--got it--I'd left the = out of the

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

And that's when I find out that it activated an lj-cut tag that I merely wanted to mention. Let's see whether quotes do the trick. "".

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

OK, how about lj-raw? .

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Nope. Is there something better than just telling people to imagine ordinary parens as angle brackets if you want to mention html tags without having them activated?

(I didn't think lj-raw was likely to work, but it was only thing left to try that I could see.)

[avram]

Entity codes.

Type this	to get this
&lt;	<
&gt;	>

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Given my druthers, there'd be a make-it-dead tag, but if there isn't, there isn't.