Posts from 2005

As recently announced by Mark Baker, Tantek Çelik and I will be co-chairing a full-day track on microformats as part of Developers’ Day at WWW2005.  We’ll announce the details in the near future, but we can already say that have some great speakers and topics lined up.  I encourage anyone who can to come check it out.  You can register at the WWW2005 site; make sure to check the option for “Developers’ Day, 5/14” when you do.

Tantek and I will also be presenting a poster on XMDP at the conference, and on Tuesday, May 10th, I’ll be delivering a half-day tutorial on Standards-Based Design—assuming enough people register, anyway—as well as delivering the afternoon keynote at, and participating in the closing panel for, the 2nd International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A).

Add to that an expected public appearance in Tokyo the evening of Friday the 13th (for which I hope to have details very soon) as well as a few other agenda items, and I’ve started to wonder if I’m going to have any time to sightsee while I’m there.  That’s becoming something of a theme, actually: I’m not expecting to have more than a day or so to make the rounds when I’m in London this June.

For some reason, I’m reminded of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles: “Work work work work work!”

• WWW2005: Microformats Track was published on Monday, April 4th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS, semantic web, Speaking, and W3C categories.
• There have been nine replies.

A little while back, I made a joke about presentational class names.  As it happened, there was a second joke hidden within the joke—as is so often the case with me—and I was delighted to see that one of my readers caught it.

But is there a reasonable alternative?  I’ve long been using the class value border to indicate when I want to put a border around a picture.  This is, to me, one of those gray-area situations that’s very hard to resolve.  I can claim that border is not very presentational: it doesn’t say anything about the specific appearance of the border, only that there should be one.  I could also argue that it’s entirely too presentational: from a semantic point of view, what does it matter if the picture is bordered or not?  It doesn’t, so the class name is unacceptable.

And yet, it does matter.  Visually, some images need to have borders, while others need to lack a border.  I can’t invent a new element or attribute to express the difference (not without writing my own DTD, anyway).  Technologically, class values are the only place I can make the distinction.

There are some other sort-of-presentational class names hanging around my site, too.  standalone is used when an image, or set of images, stands on its own, as opposed to illustrative images that are floated.  The intent is presentational, though again, standalone doesn’t say exactly how the images stand alone.  It just says that they do.

I’ve yet to come up with a good semantic way of saying “this image needs to have something that visually separates it from the rest of the page”.  I’ve kicked around ideas for other values, like framed or separated, but these fall into the same gray area… probably because the intent is basically presentational.  I’ve abstracted the presentationalism of the intent, but it’s still there.

So, anyone have a better class name, or even a better approach to drawing the distinction?  And before anyone tells me to quit worrying about this, I’m not worrying—I’m playing.  It’s like doing a crossword, or working on a logic puzzle.  Usually I just do this stuff in my head, but in this case I’m fairly stumped, and could use some help.

• Class Presentation was published on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML and CSS categories.
• There have been forty replies.

I was going to ignore the whole WordPress search engine gaming situation, especially with Matt on vacation and so unable to speak for himself at the moment.  Dougal and Jonas have weighed in with their bits, and that seemed good enough.  But as a high-profile WordPress user and supporter, I’ve had some readers ask me about my opinion.  So okay, here it is.

I’m not going to call Matt any names, or declare his actions to have been evil.  Matt and I, along with Tantek, founded GMPG and worked together on XFN.  I would consider Matt a very good acquaintance.  (Don’t read too much into that: I’m unusually choosy about using the term “friend”.)  He’s young, enthusiastic, and very smart.  That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make mistakes, but it might mean he’s more willing to try things out just to see how they go.

From a technical point of view, though, this isn’t much of a change from past practices.  Anyone who’s installed WordPress has probably noticed that, by default, the system contains links to all of the big WordPress contributors.  If you just set up the default template and don’t fiddle with anything, those links show up in your blog.

And what effect do those links have?  They can pump enormous amounts of Google juice into the sites of those people, for one.  Remember when Matt reached the #1 result on Google for “Matt”?  The pre-installed links can seriously skew blog-networking systems, for another.  If Technorati didn’t exclude those people from the ranking lists, they’d dominate the Technorati Top 100.  As of this writing, photomatt.net has more links from more sources than does Boing Boing.  So do most, if not all, of the other blogs that come with your WordPress install.

Adding hidden article links seems to me to be another step along the same path.  Is it a good path?  All I can say is that it isn’t a path I would have followed.  Then again, I’m such an old-school hippie-Utopian pseudo-socialist about the Web that I don’t have retailer affiliate accounts, and never did.

Based on what I’ve been picking up from conversations and sessions at the Search Engine Strategies conferences, what Matt did with these hidden links is at best a gray-hat SEO tactic, and probably a black-hat move.  There will be (and already have been) reprecussions, and Matt will have to deal with them.  How he deals with them will, I think, be far more important than what he did.  We’ll just have to wait to see how that unfolds.

Meanwhile, I fully intend to keep using, hacking on, and contributing to WordPress, because it’s a good system at a great price with an even better license.

Update: Matt has explained his side of the story.

• My Two WordPress Cents was published on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

Terri Schiavo, as you’re no doubt aware, died this morning as the result of twelve days of starvation and dehydration.

I am not qualified to judge the actions of anyone involved in the situation, nor do I have a clear sense of what the “right thing” to do was in that particular case, but I know this much for myself.  If it is acceptable to end a life, then it should be mandatory that the ending be as quick and painless as possible.  Withholding sustenance strikes me as a horrible form of euthanasia.  An overdose of painkillers, or a painless poison, would be far more merciful.

Years ago, long before she was diagnosed with cancer, my mother made me promise that, given certain circumstances, I would help her by ending her life.  Those circumstances didn’t come about; instead, an aggressive, pervasive malignancy destroyed her body and took her life.  But had those circumstances come about, no matter how much keeping that promise might have meant to me and to her, I do not think I could have starved her to death.

Again, this is in no way a comment on whether or not Mrs. Schiavo should have been allowed to die.  It is simply a wish that we might make termination procedures more merciful, or else stop them altogether.

• At The End was published on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.

Oh, the joys of emergency restoration, drive repartitioning, data gaps, and reconstructing an absent work environment.

You may recall that I mentioned sending my PowerBook in for repair.  It’s still at the repair depot.  Apparently it needs a replacement for a rare component, so its repair is held up by a backorder situation.  You’d think they could do the Dell thing and just swap the hard drive into a new machine with the same configuration and send that to me, but I guess that would make too much sense.  So my only hopes for getting back up to speed lay with my trusty G4/500 with 384MB of RAM.

The first step: I had to install OS X on it if I had any hope of getting myself back to a semblance of productivity.  The only problem was that my boot volume, even stripped down to its essentials, didn’t have enough room to play host to both OS 9 and OS X.  I’d originally set up the drive to have a 2GB boot volume—acres of room in the Classic days—plus a 1GB scratch volume and a 22 GB main partition.  I’ve been doing drives this way for a decade or so.  Unfortunately, my strategy wasn’t sufficient for a Panther-driven world.

So before I could even install OS X, I’d have to repartition the hard drive.  That meant shunting everything to my newly arrived OWC Mercury Elite Pro 250GB hard drive, repartitioning the internal HD, installing OS X, running it through a zillion software updates, and then copying over the OS 9 folder so I’ll have it if I need to reboot into Classic.

Joy and more joy.  So I did all that over the weekend, starting off with a full Retrospect backup of all the drive volumes and then proceeding to move files around like I was playing a FireWire-based version of Towers of Hanoi.  While I was at it, I threw away a good deal of cruft (old installers, log files, that kind of thing) and moved a big heap of old data to a new permanent archival home on my external drive.

I’m happy to report that, in the end, everything came together rather nicely.  I’m now up and running with OS X on this aging beast, and while it certainly isn’t as snappy as my 1.25GHz/1GB RAM PowerBook, it’s quite functional.

Why did I just bore you with all that?  Because I wanted to share which free packages and extra doodads I’ve discovered are absolutely necessary to my getting back up to speed in OS X.

• Complete MySQL from Server Logistics — I can’t run WordPress locally without MySQL, and this is the package that actually installs correctly.
• CocoaMySQL — a nice little GUI front end to MySQL.  Handy for reaching into the DBs and tweaking values, which can be necessary if you do a sqldump on one machine and then jam it wholesale onto another.  Which I did.
• Classic Window Management v1.0 — makes the OS act rational again by grouping together windows by process.  So if I click on the desktop, all the Finder windows pop to the fore.  When I click on a BBEdit window, all the BBEdit windows pop up.  None of this interleaved application nonsense.  (Which you can still invoke with a modifier key.)  Installing this also meant installing APE, but that’s probably a good thing anyway.
• This isn’t really a software install, but it’s free.  I also hacked OS X to make Command-N create a new folder, instead of open a new Finder window.  More details can be found via my post “Now That’s A Switch“.  No, I will not adapt to the OS in this case: it will adapt to me instead, whether it really wants to or not.
• SheetSpeed — if there’s one thing I can’t stand about OS X, it’s the bendy slidy dialog boxes, otherwise known as “sheets”.  (Which I sometimes pronouce with more of a “ih” sound than an “ee” sound in the middle, if you know what I mean.)  With SheetSpeed, you can crank the slide time down to zero, meaning the sheets just pop into existence and then disappear the instant you’re done with them.  You can also slow them way, way down, but doing so for any purpose other than temporary amusement should be grounds for a mental examination.
• Ejector — great for clearing out .dmg volumes.  Sure, I could use Exposé to move everything aside and click-drag-toss, but that’s just not my style.  Ejector is far more capable than the Eject.menu file that comes with OS X.
• Mouseposé — I’m forever losing my mouse pointer on my Cinema Display.  Or I was, until I installed Mouseposé.  It’s also very handy for presentations, which will be a lot more relevant when I finally get my laptop back.
• TinkerTool — nice for things like putting the Dock precisely where I want it, and also for tweaking the OS here and there.

In addition to all those goodies, there are the more robust programs, some of them costing actual money (gasp!), that I just can’t live without.

• BBEdit 8.1 — natch.
• SubEthaEdit — this is becoming invaluable to me for remote collaborative document editing.  Tantek and I recently worked on a document while physically separated by 2100+ miles, and then worked on the same document while in the same room at SXSW.
• Firefox — of course.
• Thunderbird 1.0.2 — better at IMAP than Eudora 5.2, which is the version I’m using.  (I was surprised to discover it’s Carbonized!)
• Transmit — all right, I admit I’m still without this one.  I’m a registered user of Transmit 2, and I can’t find an installer for it anywhere.  I miss it.  In the meantime, Fugu has been filling in.  I’d actually consider switching to it if it supported drag-and-dropping.  Instead, I just emailed the folks at Panic to see if they can point me to a 2.x installer.
• DragThing — so much better than the Dock in so many ways.  Its one failing is that when you minimize windows to its process dock, they don’t appear as tiny thumbnails of themselves.  So I use the Dock as a process dock, and DragThing for everything else a dock should do.

Then there are the programs I want to install but can’t find in the form I want, like CalendarClock, which has become a commercial product and is no longer available as donationware.  I might have an installer for it on my laptop… not that it does me any good right now.

Anyway, there will undoubtedly be more to come, but I thought I’d share my gotta-have-’em bits with you.

• Workspace Restoration was published on Wednesday, March 30th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been twenty-two replies.

It turns out that the reason Durstan wasn’t on the cover of his book is that he’d made his way onto the covers of some other books.  All of them from another publisher, even.  I present the shocking evidence!

Believe it… or don’t.

• Here’s Durstan! was published on Friday, March 25th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Tech categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

There’s the World Tour, which is exciting and all that, but then there’s the fun of hometown gigs.  It just so happens that I have two coming up in the near future.  Here they are, along with some brief information on what I’ll be talking about.

NOTACON 2

Conference dates: 8-10 April 2005.  Both my talks will be the morning of Saturday, 9 April.

• The Construction of S5; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM — a look at where S5 started, why it grew, how its growth was accomplished, what kinds of design decisions had to be made, and where it’s headed in the future.
• Humanely Wielding a Clue By Four: Reflections on Managing a Massive Mailing List — a look back at three-plus years of managing css-discuss, this will be an unvarnished peek into the life of a list administrator who actually cares about the list.

Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (NEOUPA)

Metting date: Tuesday, 24 May 2005.

• Rapid UI Prototyping and Easy A/B Usability Testing with CSS — an updated version of the short talk Molly Holzschlag and I gave last year at User Interface 9, this will look at ways to use CSS and standards-oriented design to quickly develop UI designs and to do comparison testing of different designs.

Neither event is free, but then, neither event is terribly expensive, either.  So come on down!  They should be a peck o’ fun.

I’m also speaking at the NASA Glenn Research Center this afternoon, but that’s an internal gathering, not a public event, which is why I didn’t mention it before.  I haven’t been there since the late 1980s, so it’ll be interesting to see if anything’s really different.

• Localized Content was published on Thursday, March 24th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland, S5, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been two replies.

World Tour 2005 continues to add dates.  In addition to Japan (May) and Austraila (September), I’ll be heading to London for a one-day workshop on CSS, XHTML, and standards-oriented design to be held Saturday, June 4th.  You can get all the agenda and other details on “Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” from the Carson Workshops website.

This is a limited-access event: only 40 attendees will be allowed.  Suppose you’re one of that 40, as of course you should be if at all possible.  Not only does that give you a 1-in-40 chance of winning a full copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004, it also gets you the “Survival Kit”, a disc containing all kinds of examples, articles, tools, and so forth.  You’ll also get a whole day of high-tempo, practical instruction in CSS-driven design, with plenty of opportunity to pose questions and get answers.

While this won’t be a workshop for total beginners, it won’t require advanced knowledge of CSS and XHTML, either.  Basically, if you’re at least somewhat familiar with HTML or XHTML and know the basics of writing style sheets, then you’ll fit right in.  Even if you’re beyond that, I’ll be covering a  lot of ground that you should find interesting.

And then there’s always the opportunity to hang out that evening, after the workshop is officially over, and talk about whatever comes to mind.

“Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” — London, UK on Saturday, 4 June 2005.  Hope to see you there!

• Workshopping in London was published on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.