In which a paralyzingly obvious confession is made and the enigma of technology is pondered

[truepenny]

"Truepenny," for anyone who's wondering, comes from Hamlet 1.5.153 (in the Norton Shakespeare); it's one of the rather bizarre endearments Hamlet uses toward his father's ghost.

It also comes from L. M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe, in which Truepenny is the name the ghost children have given to the mole they've befriended. That's where I first encountered it, and that's the meaning I use.

Which is a circumlocutory way of saying the severity of my myopia is a source of frequent amazement to those around me.

This means, among other things, that any program I use regularly must have some way that I can adjust the text-size up. LJ lets one do that, but boy howdy is it weird about it. It seems to treat that particular command as highly contingent when it comes to html tags, so that some of them are the size I want and some of them are the size LJ wants, and rolling over a tag causes it to revert from legible to miniscule in a most disconcerting fashion.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a code geek, but I know html and I understand what it was Here's Luck tweaked to get the tags the right size to begin with. So it disturbs me that LJ can apparently treat that command as optional. It makes me think of all those Golden Age sf omnipotent technology stories and want to laugh until I cry.

The computer is being subversive, and I don't like it.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The Green Knowe mole connection is the one I immediately made when I saw the name in my Friends list yesterday. But it's at the front of my mind because we read the book aloud every Christmas, timing it, when we are clever, so that we get to Christmas at the right point.

I call that feeling one gets when one considers how amazingly primitive and broken our tech is compared to what one might have been led to expect from reading too much SF "past shock".

[heresluck]

Ah, and you see I didn't know about the mole bit, but I'll vouch for its aptness.

I have some thoughts about the evil rollover problem. In the GLOBAL_HEAD that we messed with yesterday, try adding a:hover after a. Also, I think I may have figured out why the override is implementing strangely; I think there may be a special span tag somewhere in the inline style sheet which we need to work around. I can come take a look at that if you want.

[vrya.livejournal.com]

I've got an idea why your font size flickers down to 8pts whenever you pass a mouse over a link... it looks like the style sheet that comes with the template you've chosen defines link hover, active & visiting properties (including 8pt size), whereas your override style for 12 pts only overrides the regular (inactive, mouse-out) links. So in theory, if you override the hover, active & visiting links too, you should be able to nix that. Something along the lines of:



hope that works!

[vrya.livejournal.com]

oops, LJ killed my code. Let's try that again:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
body, td, font, div, p, a, a:visited, a:active, a:hover { font-size: 12pt; }
-->
</style>

Thanks!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

O marvellous code-geeks!

(In my lexicon, "geek" and "nerd" are never insults.)