Dammit, can't get past the first one, but that's because my brain has conjured up:
Long afloat on shipless oceans,
Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo
Bloody Julie Andrews....
A Few Songs For A Monday Evening
"Long afloat on shipless oceans, I did all my best to smile"
"Love, love is a verb, love is a doing word"
"Recollect me darling, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
"10,000 miles or more, the rocks may melt, and the seas may burn, if I should not return"
"You're not from New York City, you're from Rotherham, so get off the bandwagon, and put down the handbook"
"If something has to change, then it always will"
"Whenever I see you on MTV, I can't stop my big wide smile and past the children's appeal, I see the darkness behind"
"Are you there? Are you square? Are you fair? Are you bare?"
"Some nights kept me awake, I thought that I was stronger, when you gonna realise that you don't even have to try any longer?"
"I guess I'm thinking of you like I would know what to do when I found you, but I don't, have got no clue"
"I'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song"
"Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that we were and the way that we were meant to be"
"Turn the candles on, turn the candles on I'm coming home"
"Let me tell you how I've been, I've been hiding from my friends, hiding from the world, hiding from myself"
"It's a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want, because you cannot know yourself or what you'd really do"
Posted by Hg on Monday 17 April 2006 at 23:50.
Received 12 comments so far.
Comments
Although I also see Arctic Monkeys... from Rotherham... and about half of these ring a faint, very quiet, bell... dammit...
Yes, the Arctic Monkeys one leapt out at me. Two others (#3 and #14) were ringing a bell, and I Googled for the sources. The rest mean nothing to me.
Incidentally, it would have been niced if you'd used an ol for these instead of a bunch of blockquotes. You could even style a special class of ol with padding, borders and italics in the li element to maintain the same look, but with the additional semantic benefits of having an ol holding it together.
You seem to be falling asleep. Wake up now.
Gordon - I've heard that particular song mangled on several occasions, but never quite in that way :-)
Pete - interesting point. I know that there isn't a clear enough division between markup and styling on this site and I have ongoing good intentions to sort that out. (One day. No, really. Seriously.) I see where you're coming from with this, but I think both approaches are valid.
You're suggesting an Ordered List, which in principle is correct because they are presented in the order in which I chose them when I played them. Insofar as there is any significance to this order (e.g. an opportunity for readers to form judgements on whatever subconscious processes might have led me to move from one track to another), it would be appropriate to preserve it.
However, I was coming at it from a slightly different angle. I like the concept of presenting these lines as quoted snippits, completely out of context. Presented in this way, without the benefit of rhythm or melody to support them, I see them as self-contained nuggets of prose. They are anonymised quotations, without the baggage associated with the knowledge of musical genre, etc.
In that respect, I don't want to show any relationship between them at all and thus the use of blockquote could be seen as a deliberate semantic choice to support this approach. It could also be, of course, that I just didn't know about the ol method. But now I know about it, I don't think it supports my fundamental reason for publishing this post in the first place.
(Gosh, do I really feel that strongly about this? Mostly, no. I was just intrigued by the issue that you raised and wanted to capture my thought processes. Navel duly gazed.)
On a lighter note, I always forget that this kind of post makes a cool game (for anal lyric trainspotters like me, that is). "Answers" will appear here in the comments in a couple of days' time.
Answers had BETTER appear here you evil lyric master you!! (that's evil, lyric master not evil lyric, master).
And whilst I get Pete's comment, I think I agree with your response. ... although you could achieve exactly the same LOOK using a list... and it would be much nicer and accessible.
You can't deny that these lines form a list. The only question is whether it is an ordered list or an unordered list.
From your last comment, you think that they are an unordered list. In this case, you should use a ul with appropriate styling to make it look however you want it to look.
However, if this is a quiz, then I think that they should be an ordered list. Question 1, blah blah blah, question 2, blah blah blah. THAT is the significance to the order in which they are presented.
The problem here is that people associated HTML lists with a vertical column of items, and bullets or numbers in the left margin. And I can see why, because the default styling for a list contains style rules that create this configuration (a bullet, an indent, line breaks between each item). However, with three style rules you can turn this:
- This
- is
- a
- list
- of
- words
into something that looks like this:
This is a list of words
Which opens a whole can of worms about what is and isn't a list. Programmers have a head start here, because they have already had to come to terms with the whole "a string is actually an array of characters" mentality.
Your list of song lyrics was a list. I don't see how you can deny that. Make the HTML (and CSS) work for you, not the other way round. They are your bitch!
Gordon - I'm not sure that a sequential progression of blockquote tags compromises accessibility. All it's saying is "quote starts here", "quote ends here", "quote starts here" and so on. (Maybe Pix has an opinion, if she's reading?)
Pete - I'm in two minds on this. One says you're right, the other says you're wrong. Put a gun to my head and I would choose the latter. Not to be contrary, here's why.
Scenario #1 - you're right. It's very true that though I work in IT, I am not a programmer. I am used to dealing with logical concepts, but not right down at the nuts-and-bolts level required by the programming mindset. My (technical) brain is infrastructure-based, meaning primarily that I look at relationships between things. A string is not an array of characters to me, it's a discrete unit that has relationships to other units around it. I could admit that you're right because what you're saying is utterly correct and maybe it's just a lack of perception on my part. A "list" of a sequence of things put one after another and there's no doubting that this is what I've done in this post.
However...
Scenario #2 - you're wrong. Or, let's be kinder and more objective about this: your proposition doesn't adequately address, at either the semantic, conceptual or philosophical level, my intention in creating this post. I don't consider this to be an unordered list of items, because I'm not really that interested in them as a collection. Quite the opposite, I would rather everyone focused individually on each quote in total isolation to what is around it.
The collection above is not a list, in the same way that a collection of leaves randomly fallen from a tree is not a list, just because they happened to fall in a certain sequence and landed vaguely near each other. It is not a list in the same way that a train carriage of passengers is not a list, even though they happen to have boarded in a certain order and remain in close proximity to each other. It is not a list in the same way that the rooms in my house are not a list, even though they were constructed in a certain order and constitute a coherent whole within the context of "house".
That's my intention, anyway. Whether I've achieved it - whether it's even possible to achieve it - is another matter. How does that fit into the programmer worldview? I'm quite open to the possibility that my confused, unstructured mind just hasn't acknowledged the inevitable, but I need further convincing.
(Tell you what, though - this is the best mental exercise I've had all week.)
Mental exercise indeed, I'm currently trying to figure out what on earth I was thinking... hmmm...
nope, no idea.
Your argument about leaves and train passengers is highly convincing. But what if those passengers were in an orderly queue for the ticket office instead, one directly in front of eachother? Or the leaves were collected together and placed into a regular pile? Surely then you can begin to see how they would be a list?
The song quotes above are all aligned to the same left-hand margin, they are all the same width, they are all written in the same font size and font style. They look more like the guys queueing for the ticket office than the guys hanging from the straps on the Central line.
I know that this was not your intention, but the web is largely about perception. Though you dumped them onto the page in a scattered fashion, they aligned themselves, and that is how they will be perceived by your reader.
Now, if you had scribbled all these quotes onto a piece of paper, scanned it in, and then posted the JPEG on your page, then I think you'd be getting much closer to your original intention.
Oh yeah. Been a bit busy, see subsequent post :-)
Tim Buckley - Song To The Siren
Massive Attack - Teardrop
Massive Attack - Inertia Creeps
June Tabor - Ten Thousand Miles
Arctic Monkeys - Fake Tales Of San Francisco
Editors - Bullets
The Streets - When You Wasn't Famous
King Creosote - You Are Could I?
Corinne Bailey Rae - Put Your Records On
Infernal - From Paris To Berlin
Fall Out Boy - Sugar We're Going Down
Van Morrison - The Way Young Lovers Do
Guillemots - Turn The Candles On
Hard-Fi - Better Do Better
Flaming Lips - The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
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