Where I’m @

20030327

So we’re walking to work from the subway when we encounter (not unexpectedly) an assembly against the war at 5th Ave. and 49th St. Several (one person told me as many as 100) have been arrested and it’s all over but the shouting.

Two things occur which are really kind of sad:

1. A burly man pushes his way into the crowd of protesters, grabs an anti-war sign out of someone’s hands, tries to rip it up, and then tries to get away. First, the violence. Nobody had done a thing to this guy, but he uses violence as the answer. Second, the cowardice. He was a big guy; why couldn’t he stand up for himself instead of trying to run away? Part of the protest was a die-in; whatever one may think of civil disobedience, it’s pretty clear that those engaging in it are willing to take the consequences.
   
   The thug was arrested. To judge a book by its cover, we would guess that he was a laborer of some sort and may lose wages because of his actions.
   
   
2. We’re watching the cleaning-up and the milling-about, and 5th Ave. is mostly closed, since that’s where the dying occurred. Two men approach the police barricade next to me, and one says “They should just let the busses through and beat the f*** out of them.” Let’s go through this again, people. American citizens have a right guaranteed by the Constitution, custom, and over 200 years of legal action to political speech.The police do not have a right to beat them up except in self-defense.
   
   You have the right to disagree with them. You have the right to say they should get beat up. But think about it — will you permit us to beat you up when you do something we don’t like? How about when rogue bankers on Wall Street deprive millions of people of their hard-earned dollars? Can we beat them up? Perhaps when an HMO declines coverage to a sick person. Can we beat them up? Or, to take less allegedly bleeding-heart issues, can we beat someone up when they say you shouldn’t own a gun? Or when the Supreme Court said abortion should be legal. Why didn’t we bum rush them?

We listened yesterday to Michael Moore’s press-room Q&A at the Oscars. He says a lot, and yes, he can seem as interested in Michael Moore as he is in his causes. However, something that stuck with us was that he pointed out the lessons our government is teaching our children. They are teaching that violence is a solution, that being a violent maverick is cool, as long as you get the results you want. When our maternal grandfather committed suicide in January, we remarked that he killed himself by the same means as his father. We have agreed in conversations since that his father gave him permission, in a sense, to kill himself. Showed him that suicide was an option. If nobody committed suicide, the social pressure against it would be great. Likewise, if our government did not revert to a primal eye-for-an . . . well, not for anything, really, but in any case, if they did not pursue that tack, we might see American violence decrease as well.

20030324

Note To Self

For an inside look at the development of the Semantic Web, check in from time to time with SWAD-Europe.

(indirectly via .Conforme)

20030323

Web News Worth Noting

Eric Meyer kindly referred us to Part I of his presentation of an interview with ESPN’s Mike Davidson at Netscape’s DevEdge. (In the interest of accuracy, we should say that he referred us to the interview at DevEdge, and it turned out that it was he who, as an employee of AOL/TimeWarner’s Netscape group, was presenting the interview.) The interview concerns the recreation of ESPN’s markup into a standards-compliant format. Interesting stuff, though we of course do not find Davidson’s words to be controversial. Unless you would prefer large corporate sites to remain based on tag soup so that standards advocates continue to have Goliaths at whom to sling stones.

Tristan Nitot refers us to a little side projet called OpenWeb, curiously enough a site in French advocating and teaching proper Web building practices and skills. Curious because the name is in anglais; perhaps that is merely a sly nod to the ubiquity of English in computer languages and markup. You don’t contain much of your HTML document in a CORPS element when you’re in France, do you? That said, it would be an interesting challenge for someone to build a Web editor (WYSIWYG or not) that allowed you to write markup, scripting, and coding elements in your native tongue but output the standardized ones.

<html>
     <tête>
          <titre>FHTML</titre>
          <script type="texte/javascript">
                document.ecrire "foo";
          </script>
     </tête>
     <corps>
     </corps>
</html>

20030320

CSS Entomology

For some reason (perhaps that we do not subscribe to [css-d]), we were not informed about the highly useful site Position Is Everything, wherein a number of CSS hiccups in various browsers are discussed. The author gives good examples (though it would be useful to highlight better which version(s) of IE are affected in the IE Codex) and workarounds. Something to refer to when those highly-specific CSS-based layouts just aren’t working.

20030319

Kill ’Em All — Let God Sort ’Em Out

And so we begin our invasion, and the world gets to learn what American consumers had beaten into their heads some time ago: Packaging wins.

The marketing genius of this administration is admirable, in a perverse way. Wrapping truth and reality in layers and layers of verbal cellophane takes a certain sort of talent.

Not that they don’t say what they mean — good marketing is not about lying. Rather, it’s about doing whatever it takes short of lying or committing actual crimes to sell your product. Marketing perfectly encapsulates what America is (perhaps what it always was, but what we are reading about mid-19th century New York city in Gotham suggests otherwise). Marketing is permanent soft-sell, creating a buying public where there is none, figuring out ways not to shove products down people’s throats but to convince them the gag reflex is good protection against throat cancer.

Marketing is FUD when necessary, charitable donations when necessary. Marketing is the reduction sauce you get by boiling down a mixture of sales and PR. Marketing is predicated on denial, because you neither have to do the unpleasant work of transacting money nor do you have to authorize the two-cent wage reduction for sweatshop workers in Southeast Asia or maquiladoras in Mexico. Marketing forms partnerships, but the partners know that the union is strictly convenience, or rather results-oriented, dissolvable at will when it becomes undesirable. And marketing is about never having to say you’re sorry.

20030316

When Good Contests Go Bad

We are not usually given to slamming the work of web designers. Sure, there’s a lot of lousy design out there, but as even a casual Bleahh reader can tell, our design sense orbits around a bastardized appreciation of Mondrian’s middle-period work and not much else. It’s not really our place to slag work that we could not match.

However. Where Accessify sees “[p]roof that standards-compliant web page designs do not have to be dull” in the submissions to the WThRemix contest, we see a sad comment about the skills of alleged web designers.

1. More than one submission was missing a default background color
2. Multiple submissions took up too much of the screen with an over-enlarged version of the W3C’s mission statement
3. Several were missing the “W3C A to Z” section (a section responsible for most of our visits to the W3C site) and one had it visible in IE 6 but not in Mozilla 1.3
4. many were no more interesting or exciting than the original and one found a way to be even less interesting
5. One told us our Netscape 4.74 browser was “sooo old that you can't [without even using the proper HTML character entity reference for an apostrophe — ed.] display this page properly”
6. More than one had an inexplicable amount of whitespace in a visually confusing location
7. More than one was just plain bugly

One of the saddest things is that there were only 25 entries, 20 if you eliminate multiple entries from a single person. This despite being reasonably well publicized (on Zeldman, Meyerweb, and the W3’s own WAI mailing list, inter alia), despite having a pretty low bar to hop, and despite a contest run length of nearly three months — part of which was likely holiday time for the target pool.

Some entries had some very worthwhile aspects. One entry had an excellent use of the OPTGROUP element and its semantics and one had some nice faded background elements (despite being one of those that neglected a default background color in part). Really, there was only one that we think is deserving of any prize (even though the contest is pledged to one Grand Prize and four runner-ups): that of Homeless pixel. It does wonders for the W3C image, it works fine in our older NS browsers (though it would be even nicer if it sent to those browsers what CSS they can handle) and in newer browsers including IE6, Mozilla 1.3, and Opera 7, and it is, of course, conformant to the baseline rules of the contest. Since we are not an official judge of the contest, we will hold ourselves blameless for not having a Mac or Linux box on which to test these pages.

20030313

It Was Bound To Happen

This morning, we needed to move the car to avoid getting slapped with a huge ugly sticker and a ticket (PDF). We ended up parking at the intersection of President and Clinton.

20030310

.af: Standing, But Not Yet Going Anywhere

It’s really great, as reported by various operations (inter alia, cnet News and Wired News; official press release at the UNDP) that Afghanistan’s got their TLD operational. As might be expected, there are only two sites registered at this point, one of which is actually the Kabul branch of the UN Development Program rather than an Afghan company or government agency. The other site, that of the Afghan Communications Ministry, had an ironic Under Construction page as its public face when we pulled it up this morning. Perhaps there are not-for-public-consumption pages that are operational.

The opportunities here are staggering. Combine Logo Contest, Geek Corps, and some 5K contest winners (not to mention a little va-et-vient with the W3 validator) and the Afghani gov or the UN could get a site together that would show the world the way to go. Instead, you have a UN site dependent on a Microsoft web publishing product and, so, a site that does not validate. Looking at the site in a copy of Netscape 4.03 gives us pictures that lie on top of text and a width that requires us to scroll horizontally even at 1152×864 resolution. How easy would it be to change that?

20030307

one

20030306

Somewhere between ho and hum

CNET reports today that IRTF, an organization affiliated with IETF, is forming a group to study the spam problem. Which is good, because we need another group studying a problem for which there are clear starter solutions, just not externally imposable ones. Somehow, this doesn’t make us think that spam will be decreasing any time soon.

20030304

Oh, and the picture was really funny, with a tremendous energy. It was also dated and racist. We may never forget the exchange between two characters:

Monty Brewster (white employer): Jackson! Get me the Merkin Poultry Farm on the phone!
Jackson (no last name, black employee): Poultry!? Now you’re talkin’!

No mention of Jackson’s interest in any kind of poultry was made before this exchange, some 15 minutes into the flick.

An interesting encounter with standards

We went to the picture show last night, to see a screening of Brewster’s Millions at the Walter Reade Theater in their series of Allan Dwan films. (No, not the original Brewster’s Millions, or the English one, the Fatty Arbuckle one, or even the Richard Pryor one; we went to see the mid-century version.) After a year or so of forgetting, we brought to our friend an album of old 78 rpm records, an eclectic collection in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English that we had rescued at a stoop sale. While reviewing them with him, we were struck by the fact that whatever the condition of the grooves in the wax, the records were still eminently playable. Same spindle hole, and a RPM rate that is still available on modern record players.

What will your webpages look like in 60 years?