Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 8 January 2002

# 6:45 PM

More fun with CSS

Redid the layout again, this time with position: absolute. This lets me put the links at the bottom of the HTML source, where they don't interfere with adding new entries or with people reading without CSS. It should also be a bit more robust. Floats have this nasty habit of deciding to shift around, often leaving a long trail of yellow background behind.

CSS, it seems to me, has serious issues apart from the sea of browser bugs. A lot of the tools one would want in order to control layout are either missing or don't work the way you would expect. For instance: there is no way to measure the total displayed size of a box. You only get the size ignoring all padding and borders. There's no way to specify "the width of the display less N pixels." There doesn't appear to be any way to say "put this below all other boxes on the page, even the ones with absolute positioning" unless you know all the box heights. (This last is why there isn't a link to the HTML validator at the bottom of the page anymore.)

Geopolitical ramblings

Several of my friends are Indians, and they are understandably nervous over the recent tensions between India and Pakistan. Last week in conversation Sumana argued that the partition of India should never have happened: the Hindus and Muslims had gotten along just fine living in the same country for centuries. When the British rubbed their collective noses in their differences by insisting on partition, however, everything blew up.

This is not a position which would ever have occurred to this white boy. I can't even evaluate it for historical accuracy: who originally suggested the partition, what was their agenda? Is it legitimate to blame the British? However, if we look at some of the other places where there's a conflict between ethnic or religious groups, we see that it's often over a partition line, existing or proposed. Israel versus Palestine, for instance, fits the exact same pattern as India versus Pakistan: continual conflict over the location of a partition line between two religious groups, who have historically been able to get along in the same country. You might even be able to blame the British again.

Looking farther, you can easily find situations that don't match the pattern along any number of axes. In the former Yugoslavia, the ethnic groups involved in the conflict didn't get along to begin with; the Communist Party managed to suppress the conflict, but only through totalitarianism. In Turkey, the Kurds are genuinely oppressed; partition is one proposed solution. In Bangladesh, political tensions with India are no worse than between other rival countries (although there seems to be some feeling in India that Bangladesh might side with Pakistan if it came down to choosing sides). Czechloslovakia split in half with hardly a murmur.

So what we have, it seems to me, is a topic for some serious historical research. Can we support an argument that partitions of countries along religious or ethnic lines do more harm than good? Can we suggest alternate techniques for dealing with this sort of conflict?

# 4 PM

This is the first entry written before noon.

Yesterday we had an episode of our Shadowrun campaign. I was specifically asked to make it combat-heavy since Dan would be joining us, and his character is a combat monster. (The game normally includes very little combat; none of us are that interested in sitting around rolling dice for hours to find out who has a sucking chest wound.) I did my best, but somehow the first four hours of the session involved no fighting at all, and when they did get into a fight it was over almost instantly.

I'm cursed with PCs who insist on planning beforehand, you see, and believe in not attracting attention. And when faced with a serious threat, they retreat rather than endanger the mission. This puts a damper on "blow things up good" sessions.

Still, it beats hell out of the game I was in in 1994, where we never did anything but blow things up good.