Posts from Wednesday, August 11th, 2004

Hypertext 2004

Published 19 years, 7 months past

So here I am in Santa Cruz, California, at the Hypertext 2004 conference. Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer flank a conference poster presenting XFN. Our XFN poster presentation, in its full A0 glory, is up for everyone to see.  We’re really looking forward to hearing the conference attendees’ feedback.

Yesterday I presented a full-day tutorial on standards-oriented design which seems to have been well received by those who attended.  In the afternoon portion I presented a standards-oriented makeover of acm.org, which has some of the worst markup I’ve ever seen.  Go ahead, take a look at the HTML source for the links in the right-hand sidebar.  You’ll be astonished.

Then again, yesterday I went to download the conference program and discovered it was a link to a PDF file with PHP session ID information appended to the URL.

(A short pause while I contemplate some choice words.)

What they pretty obviously did was take the PDF that was used to create the printed program and throw it online, which I suppose I can understand.  It’s easy to take an existing file and just publish it.  In addition, the Thursday keynote is a case study of the creation of the PDF format.  But c’mon, guys—how about some hypertext, maybe?  Just a little?  Even links in the PDF?  The content lends itself beautifully to structural HTML, actually.

Oh well.  The cobbler’s children and all that, I suppose.


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