CSS On Demand – a Perl solution that allows the user to set preferences for three parameters—font size, colour scheme, image display. [via mefi]

Icon War

The Designers’ Outpost – a tangible user interface that combines the affordances of paper and a large physical workspace with the advantages of electronic media to support collaborative information design for the web.[ed.—video is cool, but Windows Media only.] [via designflea]

PC Lobby taking cigs outta the hands of history – ridiculous, shameful, revisionist PC crap. [via doc]

My sympathies go out to Jim who’s been dealing with a bit of a house fire. [ed.—Hell, we’d welcome a little fire, it’s freezing here!]

Michael’s beard continues to grow. More fun than a chia pet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll combine them into a stop motion video.

Opera 7 Final – Ready to Rock

Word for the Day

punctilio

Dude, that’s like so punk, it’s punctilio!

Give me a ping, Vasily. One ping only please. Never underestimate your blip on life’s radar.

Yes, I was pointing out that Mark is very aware.of.his.Daypop.ranking, but it was meant as a bit of sarcasm, and I don’t want to infer that Mark writes with an eye on popularity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mark is at a point where he could burp and hit Daypop’s top 40 [ed.—Go ahead, we dare you.], so seeing what I read as a rant with the tone of, “This sucks, that sucks, they suck! Fuck this, I’m outta here!” start the dittoheads nodding was a bit frustrating.

I grant you, Mark neither asked for, nor needs to acknowledge any responsibility in his writing, based on his popularity, but he has set himself up as pundit. To me, that sets up a certain dynamic, but it isn’t my place to beat around the bush talking smack when I could have simply, and more concisely said, “Dude, where’s the responsibility? Where’s the humility?”.

Boys, put down the pointy sticks and play nice.

“Sounds like a movie we saw once,…” made me hyper aware [ed.—Get it; hyper aware?] that I was doing the exact thing that I was at odds with, and that it was the wrong approach. I was doing a bit of ranting, and a bit of baiting, both of which were wrong. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for the spanking. Actually, me spanking Mark leaves me with a visual that I’d rather avoid. It was closer to burned in effigy anyway, since spanking implies that I am somehow in the dominant position here, and that is hardly the case. I also got rid of those leather chaps years ago.

It’s often not what you say, but how you say it.

I see the direction XHTML 2.0 is taking as being in keeping with the W3C’s stated goal of transitioning HTML to XHTML; XHTML being an application of XML. Is it hostile to ordinary people who design websites? Well yeah, certain aspects of it are very hostile. HTML is an application of SGML, and is very easy to learn and use. XHTML is an application of XML, which is a subset of SGML, and as it rolls along towards its future, it may well break with everything that made the web an everyman’s playground.

I’ve made mention previously that I thought people may have been moving to XHTML without knowing what that meant. Validating to XHTML became the cool thing to do in the independent community, when they probably should have stayed with HTML 4.01. In that, I think Mark is correct, but for the wrong reason. Not that the standards are bullshit, or the W3C irrelevant, but that XHTML is the wrong application for the typical personal site. There isn’t all that much X in XHTML at the moment, unless you can write your own DTD and/or understand Modularization. Even then, currently it’s easier to (validly) write a document in an application of XML, and include XHTML, than it is to include an application of XML in an XHTML document. The future compatibility issue really only becomes a problem when environments, or user agents can no longer feasibly support the tag soup of HTML. And who is the chicken, and who is the egg in that scenario? If these new XML capable environments are smart, they’ll be dumb as browsers when it comes to legacy markup, much like Mark’s parse-at-all-costs RSS parser.

XHTML 2.0 is not a fork in the road. The scenic coastal road that was HTML has been found to be a dead end, and XHTML 1.0 is a rest stop on the way to the eXtensible future of the web. At least that’s the way the W3C seems to see it.

Lastly, yes, it took me at least a day to figure out how to properly formulate this post so as to remove my foot from my mouth without calling for the jaws of life. And whenever you need to put any of this in perspective, Mark pointed out a Doonesbury comic that sums it up pretty well.

Now that the bickering, and virtual frothing at the mouth has died down, lets take another look and see what everyone was up in arms about.

XHTML 2.0 became the talk of the town after a seemingly rabid Mark Pilgrim took it, and the W3C to task for leading him down the primrose path to perdition and ruin. He was up in arms over the deprecation of certain elements, and the overall lack of backwards compatibility in XHTML 2.0 that would effectively render his finely-tuned, semantic markup obsolete.

Funny though… he knew all this in August when he wrote about the Changes in XHTML 2.0 and he didn’t seem all that upset about it. He also pointed out, in this earlier post, that someone had already mocked up a working XHTML 2.0 page. After seeing it he even brazenly said he was going to convert all his pages to XHTML 2.0.

So who could have predicted that the bickering that Mark envisioned would occur over this working draft would originate with Mark himself? Well, umm, Mark of course.

Mark “Find me another site that is as semantically rich” Pilgrim has everyone’s ear, and what better way to keep it than to rant about the deprecation of the cite element, and point to it as an example of all the web’s ills. Hey, if a post doesn’t go over well the first time, just rehash it, add a couple of invective flourishes, and you’re sure to hit #1 on Daypop.

Now I’ll admit to currently not understanding word one of XForms, but XHTML 2.0, on the whole, is nothing to get your panties in a twist over. The fact that some dive into mark fanboys, on the basis of his rant, are out there rethinking their use of XHTML, and inviting others to do the same, is more than a little silly.

Mark, I suggest you watch what you rant about before we wind up back in 1996. And yes, I’m talking at you and not with you.

On a totally unrelated note, look who’s powered by creativity.

…or, what I learned on my winter vacation.

In Entertainment

Maurice Gibb has died, and the family is allegedly criticizing doctors’ treatment.

Regardless of the disco brush that they are consistently painted with, the Bee Gees wrote some excellent music. Maurice’s passing is another in a string of musical losses.

Detained but not formally charged, Pete Townshend has been released on bail.

In his statement, Pete says, “I am not a paedophile.” The stigma of an allegation of this sort is hard to overcome. Pete is in a no win situation. True or not, alleged paedophile [or pedophile if you’re American] is going to be forever footnoted to his legacy.

Nicole Kidman got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

No drama, just a beautiful woman in a black knit suit and spiked heels.

In Geek News

PHP 4.3.0 is released.

The changelog details the err, umm, changes. I am still trying to get over the changes from 4.2.2, but that’s another story.

Safari, a new bowser for Mac OS X was released

Great, another buggy beta browser released into the wild. I’m happy to see the web community come out in support of the beloved Apple [ed.—in what’s become the meme from hell.], doing all the legwork by pointing out bugs, shortcomings, and improvements, but could you all give it a rest? Apple is toying with you all. Just look at the logo. It screams the words, Bite Me! Wake me when your little pet browser actually works.

In Community News

Carey is back!

And there was much rejoicing. Hey Carey, release the album already, sheesh! And would someone please hire that boy?

Redcricket redesigns.

Dig the design. I’m still not sold on the color scheme. <whine>Change it for me Dan!</whine>

Waferbaby redesigns.

It’s like all orange and stuff. Reminds me a bit of the BBC’s site… only in orange.

Tantek redesigns/restructures into a ordered list of posts.

It’s not my first choice for structure, but it’s certainly valid. When to call a grouping of content a list, or just a structured grouping, is ultimately just a choice. I do like the thinking that went into it though.

JimFormation redesigns and sloughs off irksome CMSs in favour of hand coding.

I thought it might be the start of a trend, but then I remembered we’re all lazy.

stonefishspine switches from pMachine to hand coding to MovableType.

I’m still wondering what prompted the change.

Todd tells the Mac community where to learn about favicons.

Please, don’t do that. It’s so 1999. Favicons considered harmful?

Dean very nearly releases his CMS, Textpattern.

Hundreds drool in anticipation.

Jeffrey Zeldman celebrated a birthday.

Happy Birthday Z!

I’ve been amusing myself with some remixed W3C designs, and some guitar playing, interspersed with plenty of snow shoveling. I am optimistic that this winter thing is just a passing phase.

My only resolution for the new year has been to give up and start over. In that regard, yesterday was a personal rebirthing of sorts. I also resolve to be back here updating regularly. My apologies for the quiescence.

On December 27, this little weblog turned 2.