Yes, I need to refer to this book more often. It is right there on my shelf, but....
And if you happened to visit this page Wednesday evening, and found titles, but no content, it was due to me trying out the MTplugin Amputator. The plugin is supposed to fix all of my goofy ampersand references (mostly from links that are poorly built) to validate my html.
If you want your HTML or XHTML to display smoothly across browsers and platforms, you need to use a little finesse with non-ASCII characters such as curly quotes, or “ä” or “™.” If you view source on this page, you’ll see I specified those last two characters by writing “ä” and “™.” Sequences like “™” are called entity references, and their sole benefit is that they can be expressed in plain ASCII. HTML includes heaps of entity references to stand in for various accented and otherwise special characters not found in ASCII. Entity references all start with ampersands, and end with semicolons. Unfortunately, HTML and XML reserve the ampersand exclusively for entity references. Any time you use an ampersand by itself, for example within the token delimiters of GET-style URLs like this one, the HTML parser will try to read it like the start of a nonexistent entity reference. Any decent browser will catch the error and recover, but it’s still a mistake, and your HTML won’t validate. You can make your HTML clean again by replacing the ampersand with an entity reference for an ampersand. So instead of just “&”, you’d write “&”, and the browser will make the last-minute substitution
I think this ampersand overlap is a stupid rule, but there it is, and it is one of the main html errors on my page (probably due to my quoting from the New York Times so frequently). However, at first attempt, the Amputator altered my page so that nothing at all was published, other than titles. I'm sure it is some typo or misconfiguration on my part, but it's erev of Yom Kippur, and I'm being dragged out of bed early tomorrow by my significant other, so I must rest now, and steel myself for a long day listening to Hebrew (of which I understand maybe 20 words). The ironic part is that I might fast, depending on my mood, but she certainly will not.
My words to live by, Do No Harm, in this case mean going to Shul. Sigh.
Tags: MT
