strange fascinations fascinate me.

this article fascinates me. can you guess why?

if you can't see it, click on it to get a better view.

guess 1. it's about the olympics, and you like sports.
both phrases are true, but the relationship isn't causal. stee-rike one!

guess 2. you were drawn in by the human interest angle.
hahahaaaaa!!! no. stee-rike two!

guess 3. right there it says "every athlete’s biggest enemy: injury". you're fascinated by injury and injury prevention.
again you've hit a truth. being prone to injury myself, i am intrigued by the causes and preventions of injury. however, the cause of this injury was an olympian doing a stunt while skiing the halfpipe, so it's pretty clear how i can avoid that one - stay off the freaking halfpipe. stee-rike three!

noble tries all three, but alas, you struck out. i'll be over later to punch you in the arm.

here's the right answer:



what kind of professional news outfit can't sup a th?! c'mon, sports dot yahoo. you can do better.

i wanted to laugh what was clearly their sub, so i right-clicked to view the source. yeah, i know you'd have done the same thing. i mean, who wouldn't, amirite?

this is what i saw: (had to make it a pic because blogger doesn't like you to type in codes unless you MEAN THEM.)



what the hell? clearly, this is a sup. now i am more intrigued than ever. what combination of tags makes a sup behave like a sub? that's about the weirdest HTML i ever saw and believe you me, i have seen some weird HTML in my time.

the first thing that could make a sup act like a sub would be the CSS is overriding the natural sup behaviour. i searched the source for the CSS reference and found what is possibly guiness-record longest CSS path. copy&paste it into the browser and wah-lah, the CSS shows up. now THAT's fascinating. i thought for sure that path would blow up.

in the cluttered CSS, i found:
sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline}sup{top:-0.5em}

i thought the "baseline" was a clue, but when i took that line and tested it at www.w3schools.com... it sup'd where it should sup. dead end there, so i went back the source and found this:



see how there's a tag highlighted in red? there's also a red-highlighted "amp" a couple lines down and just out of the frame to the right, there's a red-highlighted close-span. this is from the source view in firefox, and my thinking is that these tags are red because they are in some way mangled, and the red is firefox's "your tag is mangled" indicator.

ah... mystery solved. their tags are mangled. not quite as funny as sub'ing a sup, but still fairly amusing. no, i am not sure the tags are mangled, but i am sure i am not going to track that shit down. i have enough mangled tags of my own, thank you very much.

in conclusion, tag fascinations fascinate me.

i am sure you feel the same about something.

strange is in the eye of the beholder.