Posts from 2003

It’s true: Netscape is no longer a viable entity.  I’ll leave it to others to draw conclusions regarding how this move is related to the agreement AOL and Microsoft reached a while back.  Y’all can probably do a much better job of it anyway.

From what I can discern, there will be no more new versions of Netscape; the browser will go into maintenance mode, whatever that means.  More than half the staff was let go today, and Mozilla has been spun off into an independent, non-profit foundation supported by AOL, IBM, Sun, and others.  I have no idea what will happen with netscape.com itself.  DevEdge will cease producing new content, it would seem, which is a shame.  We produced some really good stuff, and had more in the pipeline.  Hopefully that forthcoming material will find another outlet.

For now, I still have a job, although my team’s been split up and sent to different organizations within AOL.  I don’t know yet how this will turn out for me, but I do know that today I’m saddened by the loss.  Yes, Mozilla will go on, but another pioneering force of the Web has just been painfully dimmed.  It’s worth a moment to reflect on where we’ve been… and where we might be headed.

• Moments of Transition was published on Tuesday, July 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m having one of those moments where I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.  I checked CNN this morning and noticed the headline “White House: Iraq uranium claim was wrong.”  I must be reading that wrong, I thought, but it turns out that Ari Fleischer admitted today that the whole “Iraq bought a bunch of uranium in Africa” thing was incorrect.  Whoops.  Anyway, in the article, I found this sentence:

A British parliamentary committee concluded that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government mishandled intelligence material on Iraqi weapons.

The British government was cited by President Bush as having found out about the uranium sale, so that’s how he ended up making an incorrect claim.  Well, it’s more complicated than that, but the article’s there for you to read, so go ahead.

As I finished the article, a sense of morbid curiosity overcame me; I wondered what the Republican News Channel would have to say about all this.  So I went on over, and found no headline relating to the issue at all, two hours after the CNN story was posted.  In fact, the only thing I could find was a “Video” box sited well below the fold, which contained this text:

The British parliament concludes Tony Blair did not doctor evidence to support the war in Iraq

Okay, here’s your mental exercise for the day: devise a scenario in which both these statements can be true.  I came up with one, although since I refused to set up a Fox News user account—I get enough spam exhorting me to buy Ann Coulter books as it is—I can’t watch the video to see if I was right.

It isn’t that news outlets slant their reporting that bothers me.  I just wish they’d be honest about it, so we could take the slant into account.  In times past, newspapers were very open about their ideological leanings.  Yes, many news outlets have a liberal bias, and others have a conservative bias.  That’s fine.  But don’t try to tell me you’re being fair or balanced when clearly neither is true, because frankly, it’s insulting.

• You Say Po-TAY-to… was published on Tuesday, July 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Is anyone else getting spam from German e-mail addresses looking for a dimensional warp generator, preferably in the New York/Boston area?  Because so far I have three of them, and for once my spam actually amuses me more than it annoys me.  A few unedited excerpts:

I’m offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment)… The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available… The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system

Wow, five thousand whole dollars?  Somebody’s sure willing to spend a lot of money, eh?  There’s more to the message, but I’m laughing too hard to reproduce any more of it.  Here’s the whole message, with a strategic edit.

The best part is that all my copies of this spam show a date of 5/15/48, so I’m not even sure of its century of origin.  All I am sure of is that whoever’s sending it is seriously warped, possibly to the point they don’t actually need the equipment they seek.  Well, either that or somebody’s time machine broke down and they’re looking for parts.  I wonder how long they’ll have to wait before a reliable “vender” emerges?

• Warped was published on Sunday, July 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

For a long time, I’ve been semi-fascinated by The Mirror Project.  I never submitted anything, though, because my relevant pictures were years old and would need to be scanned, cleaned up, and all that kind of thing.  I was basically being lazy.

But now I have a Canon PowerShot S45, and taking reflective images is a simple matter of having enough memory space and clicking away—and no scanning needed later on.  In the meantime, though, I’ve discovered another limit to my participation in the Project.  I’m not willing to go out and intentionally create images appropriate for the Project: they have to be “found reflections,” as it were.  I’m only interested in reflections that occur in the course of my normal actions, and just in the unusual ones.  I can see myself reflected in a monitor any time the system goes to sleep.  Yawn.  Now that I think about it, perhaps my main interest is in reflections in non-glassy surfaces.

So now I have two entries in the Project, both taken in the last month: Pitcher Picture and Eye See Me.  The latter is the most interesting to me by far, but I didn’t know I’d be taking it when I submitted the first one.

My most recent trips have been eventful, and sometimes stressful, but they’ve had a very beneficial side effect.  For the past few months I’ve been pondering my professional and personal lives, wondering if I’d be better off doing something else or adjusting my balance.  Everything’s been up for consideration: my career, my line of work, my interests, my relationships with friends, my relationship with Kat—everything.  A lot of this springs from turbulence in the wake of my mother’s death, of course.  But thanks to my constantly changing locations and moods, I’ve been able to look at my life from new angles.  In the sharing of ideas and recent personal events, I’ve found a new way to look at myself.  I needed that quite a bit, and will need it even more in the coming weeks and months.

It hasn’t helped me catch up on my e-mail, sadly, but two or three things at a time is all I can handle.

Today, behind the sounds of wind rushing the summer trees and birds chirping, I can hear high-performance race cars in the distance, gearshifting and Doppler shifting with a muted, hyperactive beehive sound.  It takes me back two decades, when I lived with my parents about the same distance from Mid-Ohio that I now live from downtown Cleveland, and we could hear every weekend race echoing over the hills and forests of north central Ohio.  Usually I’d hear them while out in the back yard, weeding Mom’s gardens as part of my weekly chores.  I remember the sun on my back and the insects buzzing around me, entranced by my hair color… the smell of the earth as I ripped weeds out of it, the color of dirt in the afternoon sun, my grouchy mood over having to get mud under my fingernails, which I hate.  And the sound of wind in the trees and annoyingly cheerful avian chirps all around me.

I also remember the time that I and the woman I then loved went to Mid-Ohio to watch a go-kart race.  We knew someone who acted as pit crew and engineering staff for one of the racers, and these were serious vehicles: they ran on high-performance fuel and could exceed highway speeds in a matter of seconds, despite being about a third the size of a regular compact car.  The race went only a few laps before there was an accident.  The driver who lost control was killed, a rare and shocking event even for the other drivers.  The race was cancelled, and we all went home early.

The sound of the go-karts racing wasn’t altogether different than the sounds of stock or performance cars.  It was just louder because for once I was standing next to the track, instead of sitting a few miles away weeding.  Or typing.

• Reflections was published on Friday, July 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Since I’ve been known to link to interviews with me in the past, it’s only fair that I give you a chance to participate in an upcoming one.  DMX Zone will be interviewing me in the near future, and you can submit questions to be asked.  If you’ve ever wanted to put me on the spot in public, here’s your chance.  DMX Zone recently published an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman, which I point out not only because it’s interesting but because the graphic they created for it is hilarious.  Not as hilarious as the graphic on Molly’s interview, though.

• Hit Me With Your Best Shot was published on Thursday, July 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Interviews category.
• There have been no replies.

There’s been some speculation that Microsoft’s recent browser moves may actually be good for Web standardization, not bad.  It’s a side of the issue I hadn’t considered, and it does make a certain degree of sense.  Suppose you’re a large bank and you want a browser that you can rely on to protect your data.  You might well decide that adopting an open-source browser, one which you can influence and even improve if your staff programmers contribute to the project, makes more sense than being beholden to a glacially developing and poorly secured product.  Ditto for companies who care about security—and now that spam-filtering’s built into at least one product’s mail client, ditching Outlook and IE for Mozilla or a variant makes a lot more business sense.

But there’s a down side to the whole situation, which is effectively that the adoption of standards is limited by the available browsers.  If IE/Win stays in its present state for the next two or three years, then use of CSS, XML, XSLT, RDF, P3P, PNG, and pretty much everything else will be constrained by the support IE/Win embodies—not totally beholden to it, but still definitely affected, in the same way the poor CSS support of NN4.x retarded CSS adoption for years.  When IE7 comes out in 2005 or 2006, it will help determine the standards-use landscape by how far its support advances (or doesn’t).  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe having bigger updates less often is better than smaller updates all the time.  It just feels a little too much like stagnation, especially for an industry as drunk on change as ours has been.

Then again, if we’re lucky and Microsoft’s Web competitors don’t fold their cards just when they have a chance of winning back some of the pot, maybe in a couple of years IE/Win won’t be as weighty a gorilla as it is today.

• Salvation in the Storm? was published on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

Chris Hester wrote earlier to point out the CSS2 Test Suite’s main page was completely unreadable in Internet Explorer 6 if you had the “Text Size” set to “Smaller.”  This was news to me; I’d set my text to “Medium” the day I installed IE6 and never looked back.  So I went to the page, changed my text size, and winced.

The problem’s since been worked around, but to see the problem as well as read about the trigger and the solution, try this testcase.  Note that if you’re using IE6 and your browser is set to “Smaller” the testcase will start out completely unreadable.  Set it to “Medium” first and then go to the page and follow the directions.

The flaws in IE6 continue to amaze me, and now we’re stuck with it for another three years, minimum.  Great, just great.

Dave Hyatt recently made some observations about standards-support charts (starting with Standards Charts and continuing into three posts the next day).  I agree with most of what he has to say, actually.  Charts like the “master grid” are by their nature coarse.  They can do no better than provide support information for whichever tests the chart author happened to run.  In presenting an overview and comparison of CSS support, for example, depth-of-implementation testing is sacrificed.  It has to be.  The CSS support charts I published on Web Review for years, and now on DevEdge, are basically the work of one person: me.  I wrote most of what became the W3C’s CSS1 Test Suite in the creation of the original charts, back in late 1996 and early 1997.  Back then, it was easier—bugs were more obvious, and all implementations were shallow.  The charts could afford to be as shallow.

Now, thanks to years of experience, implementations are getting much, much better, and the bugs harder to find.  To fully test modern CSS implementations requires a far more complex set of tests than I could author in a lifetime of evenings (which is when I wrote the tests and the charts).  To be really comprehensive, you’d need to test every property and value combination on every element in HTML (or a markup language of similar complexity), which I think was once calculated to run into a few trillion combinations.  It’s a lot harder to create tests, to run tests, and to chart results than it used to be.  This fact was driven home to me recently as I worked on (finally!) updating the CSS charts.  For the tests I have at hand, most browsers score perfectly, or close to it.  I know that’s not true: every browser has bugs in its CSS support, some worse than others (*cough*WinIE*cough*).

(Aside: I feel either amused or gratified that there’s support for the concept of penalizing browsers for having bugs, a concept I used in compiling the “CSS leader board,” back in the day.  “Full” support earned a point, partial support got half a point, no support got zero, and a bug lost you half a point.  It was a touch crude, perhaps, but it worked.)

But I only have so many hours in every day, the same as anyone else.  It’s not reasonable to expect one or even five people to meet this challenge.  The only way to handle it is to find a moderately large crowd of CSS experts, all of whom trust the others completely, and distribute deep-test creation among them.  In a few months, they may have gotten far enough to run browsers through their tests.  A month or so after that, they could start compiling results, and eventually publish them.  But even assuming all of that data could be collected and presented, how useful would it really be to the Web community?  One of the keys to the original CSS support charts’ success was that they were easy to comprehend: their very shallowness made them useful.  Authors don’t have time for much more.

Implementors have different needs, of course.  If those needs are strong enough, they’re going to need to fund positions (and I do mean more than one) to coordinate the work necessary to fulfill their needs.  The money could come out of the Quality Assurance budget, even.  In any case, if standards support testing is a serious problem, then we’ll need a serious commitment to address it.  Who’s going to step up to the plate?

• Testing for Flaws was published on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve been trying to catch up on e-mail.  Astonishingly, after only a couple of days of sustained effort, I’ve managed to get to the point where I’m only two weeks behind on my Inbox!  This is to a large degree because I’ve been sending out terse responses, for the most part, and pointing people to css-discuss in case they need more help.  Out of the 300 – 400 messages that arrive every day, once I strip away the listserv traffic and ditch the spam, I’m generally left with anywhere from three to twenty pieces of mail sitting in my Inbox.  The average is somewhere just below ten.

So if you’re thinking about asking me for help with understanding CSS, my best advice is to go join css-discuss.  As much as I love to help people out, you’re more likely to get much quicker and more complete answers from the community than from me, especially this summer, which is shaping up to be one of the busiest of my life.

As if in answer to all of my past grumblings about XSLT being all icky and bloated and clumsy, Simon brings word of the Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language (or PXSL, pronounced “pixel”).  This language basically turns XML syntax inside out, introduces indentation sensitivity, and ends up with a smaller and much less cluttered language.  Consider this example, which I nicked straight from the PXSL documentation:

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:for-each select="//*/@src|//*/@href">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

Here’s the PXSL version:

template /
  for-each //*/@src|//*/@href
    value-of .
    text <<&#10;>>

Okay, maybe not as compact as I would like, but it’s still a lot better than the XSLT version.  True, it still has to use XPath, so the line-noise quotient isn’t as close to zero as it should be, and it won’t do anything about the template-nesting rules XSLT imposes for no apparent reason.  It is also true PXSL is dependent on indentation and that never makes me happy, being a veteran of BASIC (where there was no indentation), PASCAL (where it didn’t matter), and HTML (ditto).  If I were programming Python already, I probably wouldn’t bat an eye, but guess why I’m not programming in Python?

The fascinating part to me is that, if you dig far enough into the document (which isn’t actually all that long), PXSL was originally designed “to reduce the verbosity of XSLT stylesheets.”  Ay-men, brother!  I do have to wonder about its whitespace handling, though.  Fortunately, when I’m ready to learn more I can find out about it via the PXSL Community site, which employs both XHTML and CSS for layout, including a styled unordered list to set up the navigation.  Most excellent.

What a great way to start a week!

• Reduced to Efficiency was published on Monday, June 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and XSLT categories.
• There have been no replies.