Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “New Reptillian Rule for Comments”

« Israel vs. America In Blame War - Updated | Main | Words of Wall »

July 13, 2006

New Reptillian Rule for Comments

Hatched by Dafydd

I admit, part of my reason for enunciating this new rule is just to smirk as one particular commenter squirms, trying to follow it. But the other part is that Sachi and I read enough of this garbage in the antique media, and we don't need it on our blog, too.

Here it is:

We don't mind you gloating over the deaths of our enemies; but Big Lizards will not tolerate any gloating over the deaths of Americans or American allies.

I will also make one other long overdue change to the Reptillian Comment Policy. Originally, I had the following bullet point under the "what we do want" section, the part where I listed what HTML is allowed:

for paragraph, though I don't know why you would ever need that

Well, I quickly figured out why. If you have multiple paragraphs sitting inside a blockquote or list tag, you should put the tags around the first paragraph, or it will look goofy. Let me illustrate.

Here is an example where I used the tags around the first of the two paragraphs:

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.

Just the place for a snark, the Bellman cried, as he landed his crew with care. Supporting each man on the top of the tide by a finger entwined in his hair.

And now, here is that same pair of paragraphs when I did not put the tag around the first of the two:

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.
Just the place for a snark, the Bellman cried, as he landed his crew with care. Supporting each man on the top of the tide by a finger entwined in his hair.

As you can see, the paragraphination gets all goofy when you leave out the tag. Note that it's only necessary when you have two or more paragraphs inside a <blockquote> or <li> (list) tag. If you have only one paragraph, there is no need to use the tag.

I know it makes no sense; but every time I try to rework my .css stylesheet to eliminate this necessity, it crashes Big Lizards (and also the Sexually Transmitted Diseases database of the Needles County Cafeteria Chefs Union, for some inexplicable reason).

So bear that in mind, all of youse who quote multiple paragraphs or create lists with multi-paragraph entries. And do not forget Rule 6; it will be rigidly enforced.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 13, 2006, at the time of 12:39 AM