If it's too old, you're too loud

2005-09-07

If it's too old, you're too loud

Why bother studying the Manyoushuu properly, when you can just view a poorly formatted, randomly chosen one any time you like?

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is the last "random x generator" for a while. By the way, is it poor form to link sideways into someone's database like that? I figure since we're just talking about small text files it doesn't really matter, but...

Popularity factor: 3

IbaDaiRon:

Is it poor form...

No, just incredibly poor format. Bleh! "That's not formatting, that's...database dumping!" Yet to discover the joys and benefits of CSS, I see. (sigh) (A bit of encoding info on the pages would be nice as well! Grrrr!)

Seriously, I don't see any problem with linking to a specific poem; how would it differ from linking to a page in Wikipedia?

(And what are these small text files of which you speak? It's probably a database. It's got to be a database.)

Anonymous:

I'm ashamed of your theft.

Matt:

Oh, right. But I meant that although a database, it's still a database of small text files, rather than large images or whatever.

It is kind of frustrating to see that although they surely store the database in some sort of meaningful format, they dump it out into a flat table.* I just consider myself lucky that the HTML they generate is regular enough to turn that table back into something meaningful.

* Yeah, yeah, I can't talk.

2005-09-07