What's New in Cracks and Shards
May 2003:
I'm starting to implement Cascading Style Sheets, in hopes it'll make
this hobby a little easier for me, make the site look more uniform (bit
by bit), and give me practice for one part of my work. Unfortunately,
even some of the simple features of CSS are not supported by some of the
major browsers, but of course. (I use primarily MS Internet Explorer,
but I also test with Netscape and Mozilla. At the moment Netscape seems
to be the worst in this regard.)
I've cleaned up the internal "name" anchors. For those of you who know
HTML, that means I've removed spaces and other characters likely to
cause problems, so now all the "names" begin with a letter and contain
only letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores. For the rest of you,
some site-internal links that may have not functioned for you in the
past should be working now.
And in checking my work I've discovered that this site now contains
exactly seventeen HTML files, which tempts me to stop here. That would
be cute, and it might be smart for other reasons, but I ain't gonna do
it.... I might, however, try to arrange any changes so as to keep the
mystic number.
("Boss, that would really be stupid!" *
"Give me three reasons."
"First, you've always tried to keep the size of your files under 32k
to keep download time reasonable, and you'd have to give that up.
Second, you'd be adding an unnecessary constraint to the arrangement of
your site."
"That's two. You used to be able to count."
"Dead mouse on your pillow. Reason number three is, you were gonna
shower and go to bed a friggin' hour ago!"
"I yield to the force of your argument.")
Table of Contents for Paths of the Dead.
From POTD: Some Eastern peoples and languages, and Morrolan's name.
These all constituted one complex set of cross-referenced entries in
three files and took a couple of hours to set up to my satisfaction.
("Well, boss, how much of that are you going to blame on the material
and how much on your own fussiness?"
"Hmph. Call it 'perfectionism' and I might share this doughnut with
you."
"Your perfectionism, then."
"Here you go."
[munch] "And as MoCo said, 'Vi ne devas cxiam esti tia goddam
perfectionist!'")
Spellbreaker, cracks, Brusts, and memories
The rocks in Sethra's fireplace.
April 2003:
Mark Plattner has supplied several more Grateful Dead references:
Brokedown Palace, Fenario, Dobpergés Ördög (Rhythm Devils), Dark Star,
Master Hunter, and allusions to the song "Terrapin Station". I'm sure
any Deadhead would know some of these in his sleep. I'm not a Deadhead,
and so thanks again to Mark P. and all the other 'Heads who've
contributed here.
March 2003:
Koldus Sirbolt and Sárgacukorférfi on the map of Fenario in BP.
Fixed a bug in my "Feedback" links that has been there for years, and
nobody ever told me! Of course, if they tried to tell me through the
Feedback links...
Vlad as Joe Friday from Dragnet.
A small clue to the order of the days of the week.
Easterners are descended from Terrans.
A lighter grey in the background of the "cracks" pages, which should
make them easier to read.
-- Mark A. Mandel
http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/
a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website