Wandering Thoughts archives

The best April Fools joke I've seen here

My department has always done a lot of different things. Many years ago we were called 'Computing Services' ('University of Toronto Computing Services' if you were being formal), and one of those things was a bunch of modems on a Sun 4. Of course, we had a greeting banner:

U of T Computing Services.

login:

(roughly what you saw if you dialed in.)

One April 1st, a co-worker changed this to 'U of T Confusing Services'.

The best part of this (as far as I'm concerned, because I like subtle April Fools' jokes) is that hardly anyone noticed; after all, who really reads a login banner that you see routinely?

The Sun 4 is long gone, and so are most of our modems. But one modem remains, and to this day (even after several changes of hardware and operating system, and two departmental renamings) it still greets callers with:

U of T Confusing Services.

login:

A Firefox CSS irritation

I'm not going to fault Firefox for not supporting the CSS 2.1 'word-wrap: pre-wrap', no matter how convenient it would be for me if it did. Especially since CSS 2.1 is not yet a standard, merely a late stage working draft. But I am annoyed that Firefox doesn't support the CSS2 'display: compact', since I could have used it just now.

'display: compact' is classically used (in that it is right there in the CSS2 spec as an example) to create <DL> lists where the <DT> term is on the same line as the start of the <DD> definition (or definitions, since you can have more than one). But with Firefox not supporting this, your only real option for the same visual appearance is a table.

(Please don't suggest floats.)

The Bugzilla bug is #180468, open since 2002. Mozilla not supporting <dl compact> is the impressively ancient #2055 from 1998, marked WONTFIX.

(Firefox is hardly alone in not supporting display: compact, judging from here or here; I believe that this is why the CSS 2.1 working draft quietly drops it. However, support may be on the uptick; the KHTML engine, used by Konqueror and Apple's Safari, seems to support it.)