Concerted effort

[j4]

Cambridge people! A friend of mine is organising a concert this Friday in aid of the Leukaemia Research Foundation. I'm intending to go, and I'd love some other people to come with me.

Who?	Cambridge Voices, a 16-strong chamber choir with a passion for sensual music, a love of liturgical ceremony, a keen eye for choreographic musical illumination, a devotion to French cuisine and an unconventional sense of theatre. For this special concert a reduced choir of eight voices, conducted by Ian De Massini, will present a dramatic, mixed, multi-part programme, ranging from sacred motets to secular madrigals and close harmony.
Where?	St. Paul's Church, Hills Road, Cambridge. [Map]
When?	Friday 30th June, Doors 7:30-10:30pm, music 8:00-10:00pm.
Go on then... how much?	Pew Seats, £6 Table for 6, £50 (includes 1 bottle of wine and snacks). I'm aiming to get together a table of 6.
Sounds great! How do I get tickets?
If you want to make up a table with me, please comment here or email me before Wednesday evening. Otherwise, you can buy tickets from Miller's Music shop / Ken Stevens Instruments, Sussex Street, Cambridge. To avoid disappointment, pre-booking is recommended.

Full details of the concert are on the Raise1000 website.

I went to a previous event in this series, a concert given by the Silicon Edge Big Band, and it was great fun -- an evening of toe-tapping music, food, wine, and generally a really good atmosphere. I suspect this concert will be a slightly quieter affair, but the music promises to be absolutely fantastic. So let me know if you want to come along!

Comments

[rgl.livejournal.com]

For some reason the use of tables within LJ posts wreaks havoc on my friends page layout. Doubtless this is LJ's fault, but would it be possible to put it behind a cut? Sorry...

[j4.livejournal.com]

Sorry! Done. (Meh. What *is* it with tables?)

[simont]

It's not all tables, as closely as I can tell: it's tables which use implicit internal closing tags </td> and </tr>.

LJ's HTML cleaner has a bug in which it fails to mentally insert these where a real renderer would, and instead it builds up a list of close tags it hasn't seen yet. Then, at the end of the entry, it spews out a great big splurge of close tags, which means they come after the </table> within which they might have had a fighting chance of making sense.

This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that many LJ styles are also table-based, so all those close tags appearing at the end of the HTML for the actual entry blow away most of the table structure of the style. In a non-table-based style this isn't so problematic and browsers will just ignore the spew of spurious close tags.

I tried to prepare a patch at one time, but the code in that area was just too horrid for me to cope with without screaming. Instead, my own LJ style compensates for the bug by trimming </td> and </tr> tags off the end of the entry HTML before writing it into the output page. That usually works fine, but for some reason this entry of yours has managed to confuse even my style; I have yet to figure out what special case I've failed to allow for.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I suspect it is Not Actually A Bug for LJ to break when presented with invalid tables. My fault for not validating! (*looks sheepish*)

I have now fixed my table, so I think I'll un-cut it and see if people complain again...

[simont]

Certainly it now doesn't cause the problem which it caused for me a moment ago.

However, that means I now can't use it to debug the defence in my LJ style code, which I was just about to attempt :-) Perhaps I should write a private LJ entry in an attempt to reproduce it myself...

Are implicit closing tags not permitted these days, then? I was under the impression that they might be deprecated, they might not be valid XHTML, and they might be so 1990s dahling, but they still weren't technically illegal.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ah, hm, sorry about that. But I suspect you're right and you're better off reproducing the bugs you want in a private journal entry!

I was thinking of XHTML (because that's what we do here, theoretically), indeed. Not sure if implicit closing tags are illegal, but they're definitely morally wrong. 8-) You can validate your HTML 4.0 here (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/) if you want, but I'm afraid I don't have the energy to test it (or ferret through documentation) at the moment... sorry, just too lazy!

[rgl.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure implicit closing tags for table rows are still legal in HTML 4.01. The DTD says e.g.
<!ELEMENT TR - O (TH|TD)+ -- table row -->
where the "O" means optional IIRC

[simont]

Aha, I've reproduced the problem. My defence didn't trigger because you put a tag on this entry: the bit of HTML that handles tags appears to be glued on to the entry's own HTML before my style code gets to process it, which means my defence code didn't see </tr> at the end of that string because it was somewhere in the middle.

Sigh. I'm not even sure I can compensate for that in my style code, since it would require me to do a much fuller job of HTML parsing; I may just have to fall back to the traditional method of whinging at people who trigger the bug :-/

[imc.livejournal.com]

Certainly XHTML requires all tags to be closed explicitly. I'm under the impression that in HTML 4 the closing tags for <tr> and <td> elements are optional (though you always used to have to put them in anyway in order to avoid breaking Netscape 4).

LiveJournal is aiming for XHTML compliance, but that's a nonsense: you're never going to be able to massage random user-supplied HTML into syntactically valid XHTML (and syntactically invalid XHTML is completely pointless in my view). Indeed, the page into which I'm typing this comment has an HTML 4 doctype, so strictly speaking all the XHTML self-closing tags on this page are syntactically invalid. [See previous rant (http://imc.livejournal.com/121775.html).]

Anyway. The point of LiveJournal's HTML cleaner is that it's supposed to protect the LiveJournal environment from the effects of any bad HTML appearing within your entry; so if you can break it, it's definitely a bug regardless of whether or not the HTML you typed happened to be valid.

[imc.livejournal.com]

It's because the penultimate row of your table doesn't have a </tr>, so LiveJournal "helpfully" adds it for you in the wrong place.

This has been open on LiveJournal's bug tracker for as long as I've had a journal, I think. Except they recently switched from bugzilla to RT and haven't imported all the old bugs yet.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I have now fixed my HTML and un-cut the table, so it *should* work sensibly now; but if it breaks your flist again, please a) accept my apologies in advance, and b) shout at me and I will fix it with all due speed and whatnot as soon as I see your comment.

[rgl.livejournal.com]

Aha! Yes, that works now.

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to go - given I'll be in London. Have a good concert!

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

I have the old LJ page choices and your table was fine all day long.
Concert sounds fab but as you can guess I can't; but it's a good cause and I will donate.

A keen eye for liturgical cuisine and French theatre. Fish paste sandwiches, undressed lettuce, water, oatcakes, and something Sartrean on stage.

Or maybe I've mixed something up somewhere along the line. I'll get my chequebook.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I'd like to come, if you don't mind.

Tom

[j4.livejournal.com]

Hurrah!

Will sort out admin when I know for sure who is/isn't coming. Which had better be soon. Erk.

[dragonwoodshed.livejournal.com]

Hello! I'm hoping to come along, but will be with boaties I think, Athena was trying to organise something. Have a good time, maybe see you there.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ah, didn't know you knew Athena. Small world!