Cappuccino Orders

Let:

Then:

But:

So:

I just prefer soy, ok?

Gift Giving

Rules of the game are the same as the standard version, but with the following additions:

• Oblivious to the requirement of 2 dice to play correctly, use the single remaining die in your dog-eared set, circa 1972, to move around the board.
• Complain about spending most of the time in corridors.
• Express displeasure that some of the other players are being far too "clever" with their detective notes.
• Regularly note that you don't understand what some other players are up to
• Employ liberal amounts of set theory and boolean algebra to keep track of the whereabouts of every card in the game.
• When a player, in response to your choice of suspect, announces that they have no card to show in blatant contradiction to your faultless system of logic, declare that player to be a filthy liar. Continue verbal abuse for several minutes before breaking down in tears.
• On every other of your turns, suspect a character, weapon and room that you yourself own in an attempt to "bluff" the other players, but such that this becomes completely obvious and offers absolutely no advantage to you.
• Repeatedly declare in exasperation that the weapons are strewn about the board in a way that is "confusing everybody".
• Each time a female character is mentioned, argue about whether their correct title is "Miss" or "Mrs".
• If a player mentions "Mr Mustard", suggest that they are now "just taking the p*ss".
• On your turn, wait no less than 3 minutes while examining your cards, your notes, and the board in silence before asking "who's go is it?"
• When required to show a card to another player, do one of the following:
  1. Hold the card out at arm's length at an angle that can still clearly be seen by another player. Said player must recoil, eyes covered, crying out in a similar fashion to a vampire exposed to direct sunlight, before noting down the card carefully on their note sheet.
  2. Slide the card face down across the table, driving it skillfully around drinking glasses as if it were a toy car. In response, the recipient must peel the card cautiously from the surface of the table, just enough to glimpse its front, before sighing loudly at the sight of the same card they were shown last turn.
• Every time a player starts to move away from a corner room, remind them excitedly about the "secret passage" as though this will be the very first time they have heard about the rule.
• Finally, realise that you forgot to put the murder cards in the envelope at the start of the game.

What caught my attention, though, was that fact that the post consists entirely of a rage comic. A rage comic, for the uninitiated, is an internet meme wherein a hilarious anecdote is retold in the form a crudely-drawn comic strip, usually full of cartoon facial expressions which are themselves internet memes. I joked that such a blog post, due to its entirely rasterised nature, would be difficult for a search engine to index. Difficult, that is, unless the comic's semantics could be encoded as text-based data. Sometimes, a joke gets out of hand.

Encoded Meaning

Introducing RageML - a markup language for describing rage comics. In the age of the semantic web, information has no place being embedded in pixel data where it is difficult to extract and catalogue. Instead, the meaning of comic-based media can be encoded in a rich, standards-based machine- and human-readable language, thereby facilitating a broad spectrum of consumption methods from printed media to screen-readers.

Web Transport

RageML is an XML-based language, making it suitable for delivery via the internet using the HTTP protocol. The text-based nature of XML makes it human-readable whist at the same time its strictly-defined formal structure makes it ideal for parsing with software. It is also full of pointy brackets, if that's your thing.

Syntax Description

Document Root

At the root of a RageML document is the <comic> element. The RageML namespace should be declared on the document root, as follows:

<comic xmlns="http://markfrimston.co.uk/rageml">
    ...
</comic>

Panels

A <comic> may contain one or more <panel> elements, each describing a panel of the comic, in reading order.

<comic>
    <panel>
        ...
    </panel>
    <panel>
        ...
    </panel>
</comic>

Characters

RageML may describe up to 5 characters in the comic. These are labeled with the letters A-E. A character's presence in a panel is indicated with an element with the corresponding name. The following example demonstrates a 2-panel comic in which characters A, B and C are present but character B leaves in panel 2:

<comic>
    <panel>
        <a />
        <b />
        <c />
    </panel>
    <panel>
        <a />
        <c />
    </panel>
</comic>

Dialogue

The dialogue spoken by a character in a panel is inserted as the content of the corresponding character element. Lines of dialogue are listed in reading order regardless of the characters speaking them. The following example demonstrates dialogue spoken between 3 characters:

<panel>
    <b>Look at that over there</b>
    <c>What? Where?</c>
    <a>I don't see anything</a>
</panel>

Replies

If a character speaks more than one line of dialogue in the same panel, the subsequent lines are described by <x-reply> elements, where x is the letter corresponding to the character. <x-reply> elements must follow the <a>-<e> elements in the panel. The following example demonstrates a conversation between 2 characters, each speaking more than one line:

<panel>
    <b>Check out that sweet-ass car</b>
    <a>More like sweet ass-car</a>
    <b-reply>Dude shut up</b-reply>
    <a-reply>You shut up</a-reply>
    <b-reply>No you shut up</b-reply>
</panel>

Facial Expressions

The facial expression used by a character is described by one of the many face elements. The face element for the character should be the one and only child element of the corresponding character element. If a face element is used, any opening dialogue is specified as the contents of this element rather than the character element.

Some facial expressions imply accompanying dialogue. In the following example, character A speaks their dialogue with a "troll" face, while character B wears a simple "derp" face. Later character B's "rage" face implies that they are yelling "FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...":

<panel>
    <a>
        <trollface>I just used the last of the milk</trollface>
    </a>
    <b>
        <derp />
    </b>
</panel>
<panel>
    <b>
        <rage />
    </b>
</panel>

Overriding Implied Dialogue

A face element with implied dialogue may contain different dialogue which overrides the default. The <silent> element may be used to indicate that the character has no dialogue when their facial expression would otherwise imply default dialogue. In the following example, character A's dialogue is in fact "CLOSE ENOUGH" rather than the default "FUCK YEA" which the face element would otherwise imply. Character B wears the "are you serious" facial expression, but remains silent.

<panel>
    <b>
        <are-you-serious>
            <silent/>
        </are-you-serious>
    </b>
    <a>
        <fuck-yea>CLOSE ENOUGH</fuck-yea>
    </a>
</panel>

Anonymous Faces

As a shorthand notation, RageML allows face elements to be used without specifying a character. The face element must follow the <a>-<e> elements, amongst the <x-reply> elements. Such shorthand indicates the presence of some unnamed character wearing the corresponding facial expression. In the following example, lines of dialogue are exchanged between 2 unnamed characters:

<panel>
    <herp>herp derp derp</herp>
    <derp>derpy herp derp</derp>
</panel>

Narration

The <narration> element is used to describe opening and closing text for a panel. The element may appear as the first line of the panel, or the last line, or neither, or both. In the following example the panel is introduced with, and closes with, narration text:

<panel>
    <narration>Meanwhile, at the library</narration>
    <herp>Ssssshhhhhhhhh!</herp>
    <narration>But then...</narration>
</panel>

Labels

Each character presence may be given a description to aid the reader in their understanding of the portrayed situation. This is achieved with the label attribute which applies to the character elements <a>-<e>. In the following example, characters A and B are described by label attributes:

<panel>
    <b label="le teacher">Did you do your homework?</b>
    <a label="le me">Um...</a>
</panel>

Gender

The gender of a character is indicated with the gender attribute, which applies to the character elements <a>-<e>. Valid values for this attribute are "m" and "f" to denote male and female, respectively. In the following example, character A is indicated to be female, and character B to be male:

<panel>
    <a gender="f">Would you like a wormdo?</a>
    <b gender="m">A what?</b>
</panel>

Complete Example

The following is a complete example demonstrating some of the features described above:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<comic xmlns="http://markfrimston.co.uk/rageml">
    <panel>
        <a gender="f" label="le girlfriend">
            <trollface>
                Check out this new cola "T-abasco"
            </trollface>
        </a>
        <b gender="m" label="le me" />
    </panel>
    <panel>
        <b />
        <a>
            Bet you can't drink a whole bottle!
        </a>
        <pffftttchh />
    </panel>
    <panel>
        <challenge-accepted />
    </panel>
    <panel>
        <narration>Later...</narration>
        <rage />
    </panel>
</comic>

Validation

RageML documents may be validated against rageml.xsd, an XML Schema document defining the permitted structure of RageML content. The schema file should be declared as follows:

<comic xmlns="http://markfrimston.co.uk/rageml"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://markfrimston.co.uk/rageml rageml.xsd">
    ...
    
</comic>

The author would like to note, at this point, that if you have to write a Python script to generate 900 lines of markup in order to allow all possible orderings of 5 elements, it may highlight something of a deficiency in the schema language.

Transformation

A RageML document may be displayed as an image by linking it to the file rageml.xsl, as follows:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="rageml.xsl"?>
<comic>
    ...
</comic>

rageml.xsl is an XSL stylesheet declaring a transform from XML to Scalable Vector Graphics format, and is an excellent example of just how far you shouldn't take XSL.

An example of the transform can be found here: example.xml. Most modern web browsers are able to perform this transformation simply by opening the XML document. However, due to the same-origin policy implemented by all the major browsers, the XSL file must be located at the same domain as the RageML document itself - a small point which the author really wishes he had found out before embarking on this whole escapade.

The Future of RageML

RageML represents a bright new future for rage-comic-based content as it takes its place in the exciting and information-rich world of Web 3.0. By separating semantic meaning from visual presentation, RageML provides a simple platform for data mining whilst at the same time streamlining the delivery of the visual content itself. RageML's concise data format allows rage comic content to be communicated without superfluous pixel information, thereby helping to reduce bandwidth consumption across the world wide web. Especially 4-chan. It is surely only a matter of time before RageML becomes a web standard.

Chinese encoding not accepted by this server

Chinese encoding? I checked the data being sent - there shouldn't have ever been any kind of non-latin character data going into the emails. Maybe the application was using the wrong encoding for some reason? But I couldn't find any evidence for this either.

At this point I decided to try to find out under what circumstances the mail server would give this response. We were using Postfix, and after a bit of searching I discovered a file containing header checks that the server ran against every email in an attempt to trap spam messages. Partway into the file I found the line:

/^Subject: =?big5?/    REJECT Chinese encoding not accepted by this server

Ok, so the email was being caught by this check. It appeared to be a regular expression that was being checked against the email headers, followed by the action to take, and finally the message to return. I knew from dealing with email encoding in the past, that Big5 was a single-byte Chinese character set, and the question marks and equals sign were part of the syntax for specifying the encoding (RFC2047). For example, a subject header containing German characters encoded in Latin-1 might look like:

Subject: =?latin-1?q?Gro=DFbritannien?=

But the application should have been encoding the email headers as UTF-8 - I was setting that encoding explicitly in JavaMail - where had Big5 appeared from, all of a sudden? I looked again at one of the emails that was being rejected by the server. This time I noticed that the email subject began with the word "Big". Surely that couldn't be a coincidence?

Then it dawned on me. The regular expression didn't match what the author thought it did. Because, of course, '?' has a special meaning in regular expressions - it means "zero or one of the preceding character". Instead of matching the sequence of equals and question mark symbols, the expression was matching start-of-line, "Subject:", an optional equals, "big" and an optional "5". In other words, any email subject starting with the word "big" would trigger the rejection message. Nice one.

A little extra escaping with some backslashes solved the problem:

/^Subject: =\?big5\?/    REJECT Chinese encoding not accepted by this server

You can't do big business and make big profits if your mail server is trapping big false-positives!