Posts in the Humor Category

At least one good thing has come out of the apparently-ending-soon thread on www-style: Robin Berjon posted a link to the specification for Ook!, which I hadn’t encountered before.  It was so beautiful, I shed a tear of joy.  Great domain name, too.

As I read How to Write Like a Wanker (thanks to Simon for the pointer), for some strange and obscure reason I found my thoughts once more turning to the aforementioned www-style thread.  I really have to find something else to occupy my mind.  I hear girls are a very popular mental obsession for some people; maybe I’ll try that.  I’m sure my wife will be just thrilled.

Carol Spears wrote in to share some CSS magnetic poetry with me, so I’m sharing it with you.  There are some other interesting CSS examples on the same page, so check them out.  They remind me a little of my one bout of noodling.  (Suddenly I wonder if I should shift that into css/edge.)

Here’s something interesting: Now Corporations Claim The “Right to Lie”.  I found the link at the O’Reilly Network, so you’ve probably already seen it, but if not I highly recommend a reading.  The historical information alone was quite fascinating.  For another side to the story, there’s a wire piece from last November over at CNN Money that concerns me as well.  I don’t believe corporations should ever have a right to lie, and it appalls me that we’ve come to that even being a question.  But is there a right to restrict what news organizations (even those owned by huge media conglomerates) can say, or what corporate members can say to the press, about politics or corporate behavior?  Does the actual ruling mean that?  I don’t know, but the whole thing bothers me.

• Elegance and Eloquence was published on Monday, January 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Humor, and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Earlier this afternoon, I was seriously thinking about smashing my forehead through the monitor of my Windows machine.  Why?  I was trying to do some standards-based scripting for IE5.5.  You’d think I’d know better by now, but no.  It’s a very simple little routine, and yet IE5.5 just silently fails at one point for no good reason (and, I’m told, so does IE6).  I have script debugging turned on and it still doesn’t tell me anything.  It just stops the routine.

In another area of the page, I have a block-level element set to 100% the width of its parent element, which is also 100% the width of its parent, with none of them having any margins or padding.  The expected result is that the “innermost” element will be as wide as its parent, and that element as wide as its parent.  Does IE5.5 do this?  Of course not—that would be too easy.  Instead it leaves a roughly-one-em gap to the left.  Oh, and the links in about half the lists simply fail to respond to user interaction of any kind.  The link text becomes plain old ordinary text for no apparent reason.

I’m really beginning to loathe IE/Win.  Sure, sure, NN4.x is worse, but I’ve stopped worrying about how it renders pages (by dint of hiding most styles from it) and I don’t even try to script for it.  Thus IE/Win now occupies the “most unforgivably broken browser” slot in my life.

I should learn not to talk about music until I’ve had a chance to listen to it a few times.  My opinion of Gravity has sharply improved in the past week.  I really started to like it when I told iTunes to always skip track 9.  Gravity still hasn’t grabbed me the way Spiritual Machines did this time last year, but it’s still darned good.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan in your life is likely to find the Buffy Sex Chart amusing on some level.  I found myself remembering the relationship charts that were drawn up in an attempt to map the emotional landscape of Twin Peaks—which was, let’s admit, only possible if you extended the chart into several more dimensions than the usual three.  I was also reminded of an analysis of the show’s vampire population ecology I spotted recently.  It’s  a population-dynamics paper with equations and graphs and everything, although it’s written specifically to be understandable even if you don’t follow the math.  Now that’s über-geekitude for you.  I love it.

Speaking of television, last night Kat and I saw a commercial for Domino’s Dots™.  These are, it would seem, fried dough balls with cinnamon-sugar coating and a white icing.  They sound like donut holes to me, and they seem like a half-step from the Cinna Stix®, which are themselves a half-step from breadsticks.  So here’s my theory: Domino’s is very slowly evolving into a national-chain version of the typical local neighborhood Italian bakery.

It’s so crazy, it just might work.

• Head Banging was published on Friday, January 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Kat and I are no longer sick, and I’d like to thank everyone who wrote with notes of concern.  Last Thursday, shortly after I wrote the previous entry, we got a call informing us that Kat’s grandmother Ruth had passed away.  This was not an unexpected event, but that doesn’t make the loss easier to bear.  So last Friday afternoon, still sick, we boarded a plane to New York City and were there until last night.  Fortunately we got over our illnesses before the memorial service.

Obviously, e-mail was one of the last things on my mind while we were away, so now that I’m back and it’s foremost again I’ll be trying to catch up before next week’s trip to Boston for Web Design World.  If I don’t, and you wrote me, at least now you know why I seem to be blowing you off.

On a lighter note, I’d like to share one of the best literary interpretations I’ve seen in quite some time.

• A Space Between Silences was published on Thursday, November 14th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Humor, Personal, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

I knew I shouldn’t have gone to work for a Netscape group that interfaces so directly with the Mozilla crew—those guys are sharp.  Sooner or later, they were bound to figure out my secret.  I suppose I may as well confess it all now.

A few years back, I realized that while I was making good progress toward total domination of the CSS space (thanks to some judicious “retirements” of my competitors), something more was required.  There needed to be a rallying personality for all standards, not just CSS, and unfortunately my name was already too well associated with CSS.  A whole new persona was required—a figurehead, if you will.

So I invented Jeffrey Zeldman, whom I’ve always thought of as the imaginary friend I never had.  Sure, zeldman.com says it’s been online since 1995, but how do you know that for sure?  You don’t.  A little Wayback hacking and is all it takes to create a false Web history, specifically from 1996 through 1998, when the site actually went live.

Eventually, though, both “Zeldman” and I were getting invited to the same events.  I was facing a very awkward situation, because obviously Clark Kent and Superman can’t both be in the room at the same time.  So whenever I need “Zeldman” to appear, I use a NYC-area stand-up comic and character actor whose real name is Moishe Applebaum.  He’s actually picked up a lot of this Web stuff in the course of playing the role, and makes a little extra money on the side doing sites for small non-profits.  His stand-up routine is really funny, too; catch it some time when you’re in the Village.  I think he still has a couple more dates this month.

Fun trivia facts:

• I came up with the name “Zeldman” because I’d just finished reading The Prisoner of Zenda and The Invisible Man.  Somehow the two mutated into “Zeldman.”
• The “Jeffrey” part is actually a riff on Jeff Veen‘s first name.  I thought at the time that it would be funny to have two experts with the same name.  Of course, when Eric Costello came along the joke was on me, but that’s okay.
• The incredibly different color schemes historically used on meyerweb.com and zeldman.com was sort of an in-joke, in addition to being a simple way to make the two personas seem more distinct.
• My wife Kat is in fact a real person, and so is Carrie.  She’s Moishe’s girlfriend, not mine, so get your minds out of the gutter.  You’re blocking my periscope.

The next time “Zeldman” and I are supposed to appear at the same time is an upcoming Web Design World this November.  I’ll probably keep the illusion going; I’d hate to call it off after all these years.  Still, you never know what could happen now that the word’s out…

• The Truth At Last! was published on Wednesday, August 14th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

This just in: a large area of nightfall was spotted over west central Lake Erie late this morning, reducing visibility and confusing the heck out of everyone in the area.  Doppler radar registered the following at 10:52am local time:

By early afternoon, the unexpectedly large area of nightfall had developed into a line of thunderstorms that moved slowly out of the area.

In a development that surprised nobody, Youngstown area Representative James A. Traficant phoned in from the planet Mars to blame the entire situation on vindictive federal prosecutors out to get him and anyone near him.  The U.S. Department of Vindictive Prosecutions could not be reached for immediate comment.

• Friday, 12 April 2002 was published on Friday, April 12th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

The other day I got e-mail containing this amusing vignette:

I took my four-year-old to Borders Bookstore today because I needed three books (Dreamweaver 4 Bible, Heinle’s latest JavaScript book, and your CSS book). Because he can spend almost forever in the Children’s Section, I told him that we had to get my books first.

I find the JavaScript book, then manage to find the DW book. But I can’t find yours. (Of course, this is Borders’ computer section…loaded with books not always organized.) [My son] is getting bored…it’s not much fun for him in this section. He starts looking at different books and liking the O’Reilly ones because of the animals on the covers.

I reach his limit…he’s ready to go. So he reaches up, grabs a book, and says, “This is the one we want.”

And he was right…it was your book.

So you can honestly say that the popularity of your book extends to young and old alike.

As a result, I’ve decided that I’m going to follow Zeldman’s example and term myself “Friend of the Developers’ Children.”

• Monday, 4 March 2002 was published on Monday, March 4th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Books and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

Ohio is forcing everyone with old-style license plates (three letters, three numbers) to get the new “Bicentennial” plates, which are still six characters long.  From what I can tell, the difference is that with the new plates the first and third character pairs go from AA through ZZ, and the middle pair from 00 through 99.

About a week ago, as I pulled up to a traffic light, I noticed the car in front of me had the license plate AA31FF.  Without even thinking about it, I did the translation in my head and came up with a shade of purple.  Then I burst out laughing at myself.  I fear I’m going to spend the next ten years seeing sporadic colors while driving, which is as strange a route to pseudo-synaesthesia as I can imagine.

When I went to reluctantly pick up my new plates, they didn’t bear a hexadecimal number.

• Thursday, 28 February 2002 was published on Thursday, February 28th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

Remember the Martian Sphinx?  Well, now we have similarly incontrovertible proof that Hallmark is controlled by alien beings.  Never mind watching the skies—keep an eye on your local drug store!

• Tuesday, 19 February 2002 was published on Tuesday, February 19th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.