Posts in the Personal Category

Back in January, I reacted to Peter Nederlof‘s whatever:hover by musing that it would be nice to see behaviors used to extend IE in other useful ways, like adding generated content support and so on.  Dean Edwards, regardless of whether he saw what I had to say, is doing that and more with his in-progress IE7 behavior suite.  Can you say, “will add support for attrribute selectors, multiclass selectors, and adjacent-sibling selectors to IE/Win?”  Oh yeah… I thought so.  And that’s just the beginning.  He has generated content on his list of things that will be supported, and a whole lot more besides.  The behavior is currently alpha, but it’s everything I could possibly have hoped for and more.  I’m going to be keeping a close eye on Dean’s work, and will be putting it to use as it moves out of beta.

In a similar vein, Dean also created an XBL binding to let Gecko-based browsers use Microsoft behaviors.  I think he just might be a genius.  Thankfully, he’s using his powers for good instead of evil.

Hopefully, I can get one of you XSLT gurus to do the same on my behalf.  I have a problem that’s proven beyond my ability to grasp.  Basically, I have a list of events that include start and end dates; here’s the basic markup that drives it.  I can get a list of upcoming events, no problem; I just pass in information about the current date when I run the XSLT and do comparisons.  What I need is a list of recent events, where “recent” is defined as occuring within the past three months, even if those months straddle a New Year.  I also want to get at least the most recent event even if it didn’t happen within the last three months.  And, of course, I want any results sorted in reverse chronological order.  I cannot figure out how to do all that in XSLT.  Any pointers or takers for this one?  I could really use some help.

(Yeah, yeah, doing it with some database or other would be a snap.  I’m trying to do it in XSLT.  Think of it as a creative design constraint.)

On a totally different note, here’s an interesting pair of articles from SF Gate: Gay marriage momentum stuns both backers and foes and Where Is My Gay Apocalypse?  Thanks to Jeff Veen and Simon Willison for the pointers.

• Hack and Slash was published on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Culture, Standards, and XSLT categories.
• There have been no replies.

Travel and work have conspired to keep me from updating in a while.  We headed off to New York City (or at least its eastern suburbs) for an extended weekend at Kat’s parents’ house, so Carolyn’s now taken her first two airline flights.  She was really well behaved, which was no doubt a relief to the people seated around us in the ERJ-135s (seating capacity: 37) we took to and from JFK.  Kat’s brother Neil flew in from San Francisco to meet his niece for the first time, and some friends and family in the area gathered on Sunday to meet Carolyn.  It’s a good thing she’s so cheerful and happy to meet new people.

While we were gone, I received some e-mail that hypothesized that last week’s masthead graphic was, um… was… er… let’s just say he wanted to know if it was an extreme anatomical closeup.  In a sense, the answer is “yes.”  It was a closeup from a picture of a giraffe’s eye taken from a distance of about two feet; the same picture, in fact, that I submitted to the Mirror Project.  I’ve been told that I should have an “About the Masthead” area of the site.  Somehow, I find it more fun to leave things a little mysterious, at least for the more abstract masthead images.  After all, if I explained everything up front, I wouldn’t get amusing e-mail.

There should be plenty of opportunities for you to guess.  This week’s masthead is #5 in a series of 26, and I expect I’ll have added even more before #26 goes up at the end of July.

• Family Leave was published on Thursday, March 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, maybe Tantek’s right and the CSS I devised yesterday wasn’t the greatest (note to self: avoid writing journal entries at 4:45am).  And yes, it would be more elegant, at least on the markup side, to use the href values to determine how to style links.  It feels a touch clumsy, for some reason, maybe because the selectors end up being so long and I’m used to short selectors.  Go check out what he has to say and suggestions for better selectors, and while you’re at it go take a look at substring selectors to get ideas for how to do even better.  (I don’t think anyone supports *= yet, so you’re likely to have to use ^= instead.)

Back in high school, my best friend Dave and I devised a scenario where water shortages in the American southwest became so severe that states literally went to war with each other over water rights and access, fragmenting the United States in the process.  It never really went much of anywhere, just an idea we kicked around, and that I thought about trying to turn into a hex-based strategic wargame but never did.  It’s always lurked in the back of my head, though, the idea of climate-driven warfare.

According to Yahoo! News, a Pentagon report asserts that climate change is a major threat to national security; well, actually, to global security.  And that if the global climate crossing a “tipping point,” the changes will be radical and swift.  In such a situation, economic upheaval will be the least of our concerns—we’ll be more worried about adding to the climate shifts with the aftereffects of nuclear exchanges.

I actually read about this on Fortune.com a few weeks ago, and although now you have to be a member to read the full article at Fortune, there’s a copy at Independent Media TV.  The Fortune article characterizes the report as presenting the possible scenarios if global climate shifts occur, but not claiming that they are happening or will happen.  It also says that the Pentagon agreed to share the unclassified report with Fortune, whereas the Yahoo! News article says the report was leaked after attempts to hush it up.  For that matter, the Yahoo! News article makes it sound like the report claims that The Netherlands will definitely be uninhabitable by 2007, and so on.  According to the Fortune article, that was one aspect of a scenario, not a concrete prediction.  This is probably due to the Yahoo! News article being a summary of an article in The Observer, which is a production of The Guardian and claims to be the “best daily newspaper on the world wide web.”  Uh-huh.

So I guess I’m saying read the Fortune article, as it gives more information and takes a more balanced tone—not that it sounds any less disturbing, really.  The fact that the report was commissioned at all suggests that the subject is being taken seriously at the Pentagon, which is not exactly a gathering place for leftist wackos.  I’ll be very interested to see what reaction, official or otherwise, is triggered by this report in the weeks to come.  My fear is that it doesn’t matter any more, that whatever accusatory words might get thrown around will just be insignificant noise lost in the rising wind.

• Gathering Stormclouds was published on Friday, February 27th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Politics, and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

If you thought XFN or VoteLinks were the last (or only) word on lightweight semantic link annotation, think again.  Tantek writes about the idea of adding a license value to indicate a link that points to licensing terms.  In his post, the expression of this idea is centered around Creative Commons (CC) licenses, but as he says, any license-link could be so annotated.  Apparently the CC folks agree, because their license generator has been updated to include rel="license" in the markup it creates. Accordingly, I’ve updated my CC license link for the Color Blender to carry rel="license", thus making it easier for a spider to auto-discover the licensing terms for the Color Blender.

Tantek also said of the idea of applying CSS to documents that uniquely styles license-links:

I wonder who will be the first to post a user style sheet that demonstrates this.

Ooo, me, me!  Well, not quite.  I don’t have a complete user stylesheet for download, but here are some quick rules I devised to highlight license links.  Add any of them to your user stylesheet, or you can use these as the basis for your own styles.  (Sorry, but they won’t work in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t support attribute selectors.)

/* simple styles */
*[rel~="license"] {font-weight: bold;}
*[rel~="license"] img {border: 3px double; color: inherit;
  padding: 1px;}

/* add a "legal" icon at the beginning of the link */
*[rel~="license"]:before {content: url(legal.gif);}

Here’s my question: should the possible values be extended?  Because I’d really like to be able to insert information based on what kind of license is being referenced.  For example, suppose there were a c-commons value for rel; that way, authors could declare a link to be rel="c-commons license".  Then we could use a rule like:

*[rel~="c-commons"]:before {content: url(c-commons.gif);}

…thus inserting a Creative Commons logo before any link that points to a CC license.  At the moment, it’s highly likely that the only rel="license" links are going to point to CC licenses, but as we move forward I suspect that will be less and less true.  I hope we’ll soon see some finer grains to this particular semantic extension.

If you don’t like using generated content for whatever reason, you could modify the rule to put the icon in the background instead, using a rule something like this:

*[rel~="c-commons"] {background: url(c-commons.gif) no-repeat;
  padding-left: 15px;}

The usual reason to avoid generated content is that IE doesn’t support it, but then IE doesn’t support attribute selectors either, as I mentioned.  So don’t add any of these rules to an IE user stylesheet.  Use Firefox, Safari, Opera, or one of the other currently-in-development browsers instead.

In other news, I was tickled pink (or maybe a dusky red) to see that for sol 34, one of the “wake-up” songs for the Spirit team was The Bobs’ Pounded on a Rock.  My hat’s off to you, Dr. Adler!  I’ve been listening to that particular album recently, mostly to relearn the lyrics.  I’ve been singing to Carolyn when I feed her, and some favorites of ours are Plastic or Paper, Now I Am A Hippie Again, Corn Dogs, and of course Food To Rent.  It’s awfully cute that she smiles at me when I sing to her, mostly because I know one day she’ll grow up, learn about things like “being on key,” and stop smiling when I sing.

In the meantime, though, she’s perfectly happy to rock on!

• License To rel was published on Thursday, February 26th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, CSS, semantic web, and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

There’s something about this picture that really works for me—there’s joy and hope and melancholy all wrapped up together, and that’s a mix I can rarely refuse.  It’s available as a 16″ x 20″ poster from Cafépress, and I’m seriously considering making the purchase.  If you like the image, or if you support the cause to which all proceeds will go, then get on over there and buy it!

Personally, I do support the cause benefiting from sales of the poster, which is to resist any attempt to amend the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriages.  I primarily support that cause because in my view, there’s no good reason why the subject of who can or can’t be married should be a part of the Constitution, amended or otherwise.  I mean, if we’re going to start amending the Constitution to prohibit behaviors we don’t like, then when do I get my amendments banning civilian ownership of vehicles that get less than 30mpg on the highway, poorly formed HTML markup, and televangelists?  And if those seem silly, how come my dislikes are less worthy of being Constitutionally enshrined than somebody else’s?

Beyond that, I’m generally supportive of what’s happening in San Francisco, at least in a general sense—I’m not sufficiently informed about the specific legal situation in California to have an opinion about the legalities, but the fundamental purpose is A-OK with me.  Because as longtime readers (all four of you) can probably guess, I see no reason why homosexual couples should have any less ability to marry than heterosexual couples.  I once was friendly with a couple who had been together twelve years, wore marriage bands, and had thrown a ceremony in which they exchanged the bands.  The works, pretty much.  Yet they couldn’t get married, legally speaking.  They were a far better example of loving pair than a lot of hetero couples I’ve known, and yet they could never be spouses.  You might be wondering… were they male or female?  It doesn’t matter.  Which is, I think, sort of my point.  It isn’t original, but I thought it was worth repeating.

Especially since we now have a new federal appeals judge in place, one who said that homosexual acts are comparable to “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia.”  I’m sorry, but if you can’t perceive a difference between activities engaged in by consenting adults and, say, an action perpetrated by a person upon a corpse or an animal, then you aren’t intellectually qualified to sweep the floor of the federal appeals court, let alone sit on it.

Deep breath.  Move on.

I guess Saturday was a day for talking about aggregator experiences; in a post made that day, Meryl put forth a different perspective on the topic than I did, and at about the same time.  I agree with Meryl that an aggregator that can present a styled article should provide the option of disabling that behavior, and just delivering the text content.  I just suspect that she and I would have different settings for that preference.

• Bonding was published on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Politics, and RSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, enough talking about computer repair; it’s time for another picture of Carolyn.  It’s one of the first good ones we have of her smiling, and this is, for her, a relatively understated smile.  When she’s happy, she’ll let loose with grins so wide her eyes scrunch shut.  She actually smiles quite often, but each one is of fairly short duration—and when she does smile, we’re too busy enjoying the sudden rush of dopamine and other neurochemical whatnots our brains start pumping out.  It’s really, really hard not to smile back.  Not that we’re resisting.

I keep meaning to crate an actual picture gallery on her personal page, but other stuff keeps getting in the way.  Heck, I haven’t even created an e-mail account for her, mostly on the grounds that it does her no good until she learns to type.  I just hope that by the time she’s old enough to want an account, Carolyn won’t have to deal with the volume of spam we see every single day.  I’m not holding my breath, though.

Love the haircut, myself.  I think this may well be the first published picture for which she tries to hurt me, a decade or so from now.  Sorry, sweetheart, but it was just too cute not to share.

• Fear The Cute! was published on Wednesday, February 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn category.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, so I can’t count.  I claimed yesterday that there were three new XFN tools, and then listed four.  Plus I missed one.  So… among our many XFN tools are rubhub; Rubhub It; Autoxfn; the MT template; Daniel Glazman‘s Nvu, which supports the editing of XFN values on links as part of the UI; and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Based on the feedback to my question yesterday, it seems the #1 reason to link to your Amazon wish list is to help out family members who can’t seem to remember what you like whenever a birthday rolls around.  The other reason given was to provide a window into your interests, which is felt to help foster a sense of familiarity in what can sometimes seem an impersonal medium.  Fair enough.  I did something along those lines when I added the “Reading” feature (with archive) to my personal page.  Perhaps the only real difference is that I’m giving a current and backward glace at my interests, whereas the wish list link provides a forward look.

A couple of people also wrote to say that they actually have had random passers-by send them something off of the wish list, sometimes in thanks for a favor they’d done online, and that it was pretty neat.  I’m not sure I’d feel the same way, but I thought I’d pass along their feelings on the matter.

Speaking of passing things along, I promised that I’d summarize the suggestions I received regarding books presenting reasonable arguments for the conservative point of view.  Here’s the summary.

• Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D’Souza
• Radical Son by David Horowitz
• The Content of Our Character by Shelby Steele
• The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce
• First Principles: A Primer of Ideas for the College-Bound Student by Hugh Hewitt
• The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man by J. Budziszewski
• A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat by Zell Miller

I also received e-mail from liberals who had been looking at the same issue, and wanted to mention some books they thought were good.  They are:

• Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell (for a look at both sides)
• The 2% Solution by Matthew Miller
• The Politics of Rich and Poor and other books by Kevin Philips

Please note that I have not read any of the books I just listed, and so am neither recommending nor condemning any of them.  Similarly, I’m passing along an unchecked recommendation for The Weekly Standard, not to be confused with The Weekly Standards.

Those of you more interested in the latter of those two links will probably also be interested in the Web Standards Awards, with three awards to be given every month.  You can submit any site for consideration, whether it be your work or someone else’s, but be sure to check the competition criteria first.  The first three winners are already listed on the site.  Check them out—there’s some great work there—and then go check out Wasabicube.  It’s elegant, lovely, and I love the current-page effect in the sidebar.  Now I want to redesign meyerweb again, except if I did it would be a ripoff of Peter’s design.  So I’d probably better refrain.

• Confess! Confess! was published on Wednesday, February 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Politics, and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

The masthead has changed, as those of you dropping by will probably notice but those of you depending on RSS might not.  Like the first week’s masthead, this one is based on an old meyerweb theme (“Natural”).  At this point I plan to change the masthead every Sunday until I run out of new ones, at which point I’ll start randomly cycling through the old ones on a weekly or twice-weekly basis.  I’ll decide when the time comes.

I got several screenshots from helpful correspondents pointing out that the Redesign Watch and Platelets modules either do sit next to each other, or don’t, apparently depending on your native time zones.  Or maybe whether your house’s street address is even or odd, I don’t know.  So when you get right down to it, this seems to be a pseudo-random problem at best.  The layout works for me in every browser I tested, both Mac and Windows.  At this point, I guess it’s up to the whims of the Layout Gods.

I’ve spent the past week feeling more and more downcast about the state of America.  Why?  Janet Jackson, of course.  A one-second glimpse of half a woman’s chest has lead to an FCC probe (which seems an unfortunate choice of words), the possibility of several million dollars in fines for CBS, digital delay for the Grammys and Oscars, an enforced edit of ER by network executives, and a complete change to the Pro Bowl’s halftime show.  Apparently, Ms. Jackson’s right breast wields more power than we could possibly comprehend.  What would happen if she revealed them both at the same time?  The world trembles in fear.

No word on whether the FCC also plans to investigate CBS in relation to the rapes, murders, assaults, thefts, and other ‘immoral’ behavior depicted on CSI and CSI: Miami, or for its willingness to charge enormous sums of money to run advertisements featuring flatulent horses and crotch-savaging dogs.

• Au Naturel was published on Sunday, February 8th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.