In the context of a heated debate over the prospect of going to war with Iraq and the politics surrounding that potential action, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (Rep. – Mississippi) has posed the question, “Who is the enemy here, the president of the United States or Saddam Hussein?”
It’s an excellent question, but geez, if he has to ask, where does that leave the rest of us?
Exactly one year ago, I posted an entry with exactly two words: “My God.”
I was then, as I am today, over 2100 miles from home, sitting in a building on the Netscape campus. The distance has its time effects as well, of course. When Kat and I were awakened that morning, the towers were already down. We were very lucky, really, back on that horrible day—we were together even though far from home, and everyone we knew who could have perished in New York did not.
In the intervening 365 days, we have learned that someone very close to us is terminally ill, that others are still suffering from what they saw a year ago, met new friends and heard from old ones, traveled more than we probably should have, worried about the government, been denied the chance to know someone who would have been everything to us, made agonizing choices, been through job changes and home repair, tried to understand and respect each other, and held each other as we tried to shut out the world for a few minutes of grief or joy at a time.
Life continues to move onward, and as much as we would sometimes like to stop, we keep moving with it.
In one of those surreal turns that really makes life worth living, I spotted a link (on zeldman.com) to a contest at Consolation Champs where the winning haiku gets a free copy of Eric Meyer on CSS. I love haiku; it’s probably my favorite poetic form and about the only one in which I ever intentionally set out to compose verse. Some of the entries are funny, others elegant, still others sublime… and I was very amused by the entry that says, in effect, “CSS is inferior to HTML-based design.” Check it out!
With everything else going on, it’s nice to know that life still retains its capacity to surprise and delight. It can be all too easy to forget that simple but important truth.
The HTML-based slides from last week’s keynote address at Web Design World are now available on my “Speaking” page; note that these slides will only work well in a CSS2 positioning-savvy browser. Gecko-based browsers and IE/Win both qualify, and IE5/Mac does not in this case. Other browsers weren’t (and won’t be) checked, although I suspect Opera won’t deal well with my styles either. Also, given the nature of this presenation, the styles pretty much assume a 1024-by-768 display with the browser window maximized. After all, that was the projection environment in which I was working. If the text comes out too big and your browser lets you resize pixel-based text, then go for it. If it doesn’t, sorry. You could always use a browser that does.
While I was at it, I put up links to the talks I delivered in May and June of this year; these slides are best viewed in Opera 6 for Windows in “OperaShow” mode (hit F11). But you can read the content in any browser, all the way back to Mosaic betas, with no real loss of information.
Happy anniversary to us. If you like, you can work out the anniversary number from the text of our honeymoon journal.
Ser Zeldman did me the great favor of publishing a glowing note regarding my latest book, which adds to his already incredible favor of writing a truly wonderful Foreword for the same book. Thanks, Jeffrey.
I don’t know how many of your remember the 1988 movie Scrooged (one of my favorite holiday movies, by the way, despite the fact that much of the primary cast and the director inexplicably wishes it had never happened) but it turns out to have been disturbingly prophetic.
Over the weekend, InformIT published the primary text of Project 4 of my latest book as an article (registration is required to read it). The article elicited a few reader responses, including this one, which I absolutely love:
Great article. This article presents some new things about CSS that I didnt know. It also uses a very practical example which helps grasp the material. I have never heard of Eric Meyer before. From the detail and attention shown in this article, I expect to hear his name more.
Wow, tough room. No matter. It’s always nice to be regarded as an up-and-comer!
“With strict enforcement and higher ethical standards, we must usher in a new era of integrity in Corporate America… In the end, there is no capitalism without conscience, no wealth without character,” says the President. Right. So why did it take a court order to see the list of people with whom Vice President Richard Cheney consulted on energy policies last year, and when do we actually get to see it anyway? The White House is still claiming executive privilege and appealing these court decisions, rather like the Nixon administration did in regard to Watergate-related files.
Still, it sounds good, doesn’t it? “No capitalism without conscience” does have a certain ring to it. Maybe similar rhetorical devices should be used in the struggle to make standards a priority, in spite of lazy Webmasters. “No sites without standards, no Web without validation.” Hmmm… needs work.
The advent of Independence Day (U.S.) caused me to reflect on freedom and what it means, and I was going to say a few things about that when I started thinking about the recent court rulings on the Pledge of Allegiance and school vouchers, and that took me in a whole new direction… one that went on for a while. So I turned it into its own short essay. Take it for whatever it’s worth to you. Finally, proof that on occasion I do think about stuff other than CSS!