Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

It is not often that the worlds of UNIX skills and liturgical observances intersect. Perhaps that means that any example of something even approaching this is to be highly valued, because of its rarity. That reason alone is almost enough to share an example of what is mentioned in the title to this post. Also, the following story may illustrate the solving of a genuine (albeit slightly esoteric) problem, using the powerful but sometimes daunting toolkit of a UNIX shell and its associated applications. With a toolkit so versatile and modular, it is often the case that parts of the solution to one problem can be used in the solution to another problem, which should make the audience for this post larger than it would otherwise seem.

A web developer’s work is never done, assuming the web developer is prepared to work on any conceivable web project and there are more project vacancies than web developers to fill them. In my case, that means I have been working on a web project since I last blogged about creating test cases for bugs found in web pages. In this latest project, I have found yet another bug in Firefox, or rather another way to trigger the reflow problem. Unfortunately, unlike the previous case, this one could not be fixed by simply specifying widths; indeed, the problem occurred because widths were specified. Here is the code: