Thoughts From Eric Archive

As someone who studied 20th Century geopolitics in college, I’m quite fascinated by the latest news from Libya, which I had long assumed would only change course when Gadhafi left office (one way or the other).  To see a leader—any leader—take such steps is quite frankly astonishing; I feel like next thing will be Kim Jong-Il announcing that the whole nuclear-weapons inspection problem there was a big misunderstanding and he’d really like to get it all cleared up so McDonald’s can start opening some Pyongyang branches.

I’m even more fascinated by two things that will probably raise my Total Information Awareness rating for even mentioning them:

1. The willingness of the Bush administration to support IAEA inspections in Libya (and Iran) when it denounced them as being useless in Iraq.  What’s the difference, I wonder?
2. It would appear that, given enough patience, economic sanctions do in fact work, contrary to the administration’s claims when building a case for attacking Iraq.  You have to be in it for the long haul, but in the end they pay off.  After all, it seems that the sanctions imposed on Libya in the late Eighties were a motivating force in Gadhafi’s recent decisions.  Not the threat of attack, which Libya hasn’t faced from the U.S. since Reagan left office.  Just plain old exclusion from the global economy.  (Dissenters might point to Cuba as proof that this isn’t true, except Cuba is only excluded from the American economy, not the global economy.)

I’m not seeking to excuse Libya’s role in the downing of Pan Am 103, but then I could hardly do so: they admitted to it earlier this year, and explained their motivations.  Whether or not I agree with them is beside the point I’m trying to make here.  The real point, at least to me, is that Libya is on a course that I could hardly have imagined a week or two ago.  It gives me a smidgen of hope that humanity might be a little more grown-up than I tend to believe.

My deepest wish is that this starts a change in the way diplomacy is conducted in the future, and how nations choose to deal with the skeletons in their closets.  Right next to that is my hope that America responds to these moves positively and with a willingness to negotiate, to compromise if necessary.  We have to leave behind poisonous concepts like “unconditional surrender” and start working with leaders who want to act responsibly.  Given the increasing ease with which massively destructive weapons can be created, the future of humanity could very well depend on it.

• Out Of The Cradle was published on Sunday, December 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

A couple of weeks back, I threw out a relatively strong opinion on civilians who drive Hummers.  At the time, I didn’t back up what I said, and fortunately I don’t have to now.  Seth Stevenson has explained it for me in his analysis of a recent Hummer ad.  The three points in the middle of the analysis very nicely sum up my perceptions of Hummer owners.  Just past that, Seth says:

Of course, some will love the shameless Hummer kid and his take-no-prisoners, win-at-all-costs individualism. Not coincidentally, these are the sort of people who buy Hummers…. The Hummer kid is a me-first kid, and the Hummer is without doubt a me-first vehicle.

That ties it up all together for me, providing a near-perfect summary of reasons behind my opinion.  I’m all for individualism, but not win-at-all-costs individualism.  Sometimes victory is not worth the cost, and that’s usually when your victory damages those around you.  Society plays an important role in all our lives, except of course for those of you living completely off the land—that is, no electricity, sewer, or heat utilities, and absolutely no trips to the grocery store for food—and those of us who benefit from society owe it some consideration and preservation in return.  Express yourself as you see fit, believe what you want to believe, take chances and chart your own course… as long as it isn’t needlessly harmful to others, or to society as a whole.  Have some consideration for the people around you from time to time, and take the time to ponder how your actions might affect them, positively or negatively.

In other words, be a responsible adult—which, so far as I can tell, civilian Hummer owners simply aren’t, and I find that irks me.  I’m not about to call for the abolition of Hummer ownership or anything like that: everyone has the freedom to display their short-sighted wastefulness and arrogance as much as they like.  I just wish we (as a whole) were a little more grown-up than that.

And don’t even get me started on people who own more than one Hummer, let alone five.

So that’s why I said what I said, and why I’ve been careful to make it clear that I’m talking about civilians who drive Hummers (not all SUVs, although I think some of them are excessive as well).  They’re incredibly useful vehicles for the military, forest rangers, and other people who have to go where there are no roads and not much in the way of flat terrain.  It’s the people who think they need a forty-ton vehicle to pick up a double latté at the Starbucks down the street who could use a good whack with a clue-by-four.

My views on the relationship betwen the individual and society also explain why I have little patience for Americans who complain about the cost of gasoline and our income tax rates, and even less patience for people who think the way to revive an economy is through reduced federal taxation and increased federal spending.  Pick one or the other, chief.  Otherwise you end up with debts large enough to, you know, crush an economy.

• Hummering Past the Graveyard was published on Saturday, December 20th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.

We’ve gotten some interesting feedback about XFN, as well as a number of blogroll adoptions and even tools that offer XFN support!  Two commentaries in particular drew me in:

• Richard Tallent pointed out that XFN could be a key component of building trust networks between blogs.  He also had some gripes about the syntax and scope, which is fine, as we don’t envision XFN as being complete by any means and are very keen to see what people suggest.  My responses can be found in the comments section of his post.
• Leigh Dodds took me mildly and quite fairly to task for some minor inaccuracies in the XFN/FOAF comparison article I wrote, and also had some great observations and ideas regarding XFN.  Leigh’s comment that he finds XFN to be elegant was especially satisfying, because Matt, Tantek, and I worked hard to keep it that way.

One of the things I forgot to point out in my announcement yesterday is that not only can you add XFN values to your links, but you can do so and still have your HTML validate— see, for example, the validator report for the main page of meyerweb— because XFN uses an existing HTML attribute (rel) in a way that HTML itself allows.  In other words, XFN enhances the Web without breaking it, very much in the spirit of Tim’s original vision of interlocking technologies that worked together to create a social medium.  That’s an important aspect of XFN, and one I didn’t want to overlook.

Of course, XFN isn’t constrained to HTML.  Any XML language can also use XFN, given the right hooks are included in the language’s DTD.  Thus, we’ve created something that works today as well as tomorrow.

We’re still very interested in suggestions and constructive criticism, so keep those posts coming!

• Friendly Discussions was published on Wednesday, December 17th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

Put a human face on your linking: XFN.  Originally designed for blogrolls, but useful in any situation where you link to a personal Web site, XFN is a grass-roots social networking tool that anyone can use at any time on any site.  I’m using it on my blogroll right now, in fact.

The goal of XFN is, quite simply, to make it possible for links to carry information about the human relationships behind the linking.  It lets you designate which links are to the sites of people you’ve met, which are to those who are your friends, which ones represent your sweethearts, and quite a bit more.  Best of all, it does all this with just a few simple values that can be added to any link.  The great thing, from my point of view, is that it adds a lot of interesting semantic value without being overly complex or difficult to understand.  Check it out!

(Update: you might also like to see what Tantek and Matt, who were really the driving forces behind XFN, have to say about it.)

• XFN was published on Monday, December 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Projects and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, a lot of you have managed to come up with puns and jokes similar to the one I first saw at Jay Allen‘s site, and Dunstan Orchard has taken the whole theme to the (il)logical conclusion.  One of the most common puns I’ve seen is:

#ericmeyer:first-child

Amusing, yes, but here’s the problem: that describes any element with an id of ericmeyer that is the first child of another element.  Now, I can be described that way; I am the oldest of my parents’ two children.  But it doesn’t describe Carolyn, unless we accept the convention that a child’s id should be given a value with his or her father’s name.  Such a convention would limit every father to one child, which might make for excellent social policy but seems unnecessarily restrictive from a structural point of view.

So, while this particular little joke validates, it doesn’t do what the author(s) intended, probably due to the widespread lack of understanding about what :first-child actually does. You’re supposed to be describing her, people, not me!  Every time you write an inappropriate selector, it makes the Baby Carolyn cry.  You wouldn’t want to make her cry, would you?

A selector that does describe her is:

#ericmeyer :first-child

…which is functionally equivalent to:

#ericmeyer *:first-child

Both will select any element that is the first child of another element and is also descended from an element with an id of ericmeyer.  This would also select the first children of any children that I have, so first grandchildren (and so on) would be members of the same set.  Thus, it might make slightly more sense to use the following:

#EricMeyer > :first-child

…which is to say, any element that’s the first child of an element whose id is EricMeyer—more precisely, any element that is the first child of another element and is also the child of an element with an id of EricMeyer.  I suppose that this particular selector could describe many children, as I expect I’m not the only ‘EricMeyer’ (and yes, the capitalization matters) in the world to have had a child.  But it should, at least within the confines of my docu—er, my family tree, select Carolyn uniquely.

Here endeth the lesson.

At another time of year, I might have struggled with what kind of music to play for Carolyn.  Big Band?  Classical?  Hard rock?  Some blues, maybe?  “Weird Al”?  Fortunately, there is no dilemma, as we’re pretty much playing holiday music front to back.  Jiminy Cricket sings “From All Of Us To All Of You” about twenty times a day.  Good thing I have a fondness for that record.  I’m still going to get Handel’s “Messiah,” Bach’sBeethoven’s “Ode To Joy,” and a few other pieces from Bombastic Dead White Guys into the mix.  Plus “Santa Baby” as sung by Eartha Kitt.  May as well start with the confusion early!

I’ve just read, much to my confusion, that Diana Krall and Elvis Costello were married in Elton John’s mansion, thus forming a Weirdness Trifecta.  I mean, hey, if they’re happy with each other, I’m all for it, but those just aren’t names I would have put into the same sentence.  Ever.

• Appropriate Selections was published on Thursday, December 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn and CSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

First off, our deepest thanks to everyone who’s linked, commented, e-mailed, or has otherwise expressed happiness over our happiness.  We may not respond right away, but your good wishes and blessings for Carolyn have meant the world to us, and one day will to her, as I’m keeping a copy of everything for her memory box.  So watch your language!

The first night with Carolyn went very well; she let us sleep for a few hours at a time, and only woke us when she was hungry.  It’s obviously too early to say what kind of baby she’ll be, but so far she’s pretty quiet, fairly mellow, and just as precious and cute as every parent fundamentally believes their baby to be.

Lest you wonder, this isn’t going to turn into a baby blog.  I won’t ignore her presence, of course, but I’m not planning to have her take over this journal.  Much. I have plans percolating in the back of my head to set up a page for Carolyn—what else would you expect?—where we can put up pictures, share the latest baby news, and all that kind of fun stuff.  I never had a page about pets or babies, even when I first started out on the Web, so I guess this is my chance to make up for lost time.

I haven’t quite decided if I’ll come up with a unique design for Carolyn’s page-to-be, but if I do, I guess I’ll have to use CSS like Jay Allen proposed (and which was just too darned funny; why didn’t I think of that?).

I’ll have to think carefully about what I post about her, though.  Derek Powazek pointed out to me a few weeks back that today’s kids are really unlucky, because anything they do that’s posted on the Web gets archived and preserved pretty much forever.  So if I write a post about the contents of her diapers or something similarly stupid and personally embarrassing, it could end up printed out and taped to her high school locker.  And all of her friends’ lockers.

Maybe by then kids will be so used to the lack of historical amnesia that it won’t bother them, or even occur to them to try such tactics.  Maybe my concerns will seem as dated and goofy as parental concerns about their children being persecuted over the family’s having emigrated from Germany instead of Poland in the late Thirties.  I can hope, but in the meantime, I have to act as though it will continue to be a concern for decades to come.

I’m used to taking a long-term view, but the focus of that view has certainly changed in the last twenty hours.

• A Multitude of Blessings was published on Tuesday, December 9th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn category.
• There have been no replies.

Kat and I are now parents.  Earlier this evening, we welcomed four-day-old Carolyn Maxwell Meyer into our home and our hearts.

We named her Carolyn in honor of my late mother, a plan which we conceived (so to speak) shortly after Mom was diagnosed with cancer.  We kept it to ourselves for a while, hoping to make it a surprise.  Last Christmas Eve, realizing that Mom would almost certainly not live to see our first daughter, I told her what we planned.  It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  It was a tacit admission that Mom had only a few months to live, and that she would never, despite our best efforts and a good deal of medical intervention, get to be a grandmother.

The middle name, Maxwell, is in honor of Kat’s late grandfather Max.  It was he who gave Kat her middle name, and instilled in her a deep love of jewelry.  Kat remembers him taking her for long walks through Brooklyn and talking to her like an adult, and how he would let her play with gemstones on black velvet workpads in his workshop.  Both Kat and her mother loved Max very much, and Kat had decided to honor him with a namesake long before we even met.

We’ve had Carolyn home for just a few hours, and already the cat is annoyed.  But she’ll adjust.  In the meantime, we’re still trying to grasp that this tiny little person is actually ours, and that she’ll be staying for quite a long time.

• Welcome was published on Monday, December 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn category.
• There have been no replies.

As an experiment, I’ve added a ‘blogroll’ to the home page of meyerweb.  Those of you using IE/Win and the default theme (Eos) won’t see it because of positioning bugs in IE/Win, and you’ll get slightly incorrect display in a couple of other themes, but people using more conformant browsers should have no trouble.  This isn’t the list’s final form by any means—as I say, it’s an experiment.  It’s actually pushing me toward YAR (Yet Another Redesign), truth be told, one that compacts the sidebar content so that I can introduce new stuff.

Suddenly I have an idea for an update of the classic “Yar’s Revenge.”  In this new version, you control a Web designer who runs around the screen avoiding validation errors, font-sizing bugs, table-layout fanatics, CSS-layout fanatics, wandering usability experts, and snarky bloggers while trying to collect as many design components, standards powerups, and “help points” as possible in pursuit of your ultimate goal: a new redesign that’s accessible, attractive, and uses very lightweight markup.  Every level is a new redesign, each one requiring more standards and components than the last one.  Anyone who makes it past five redesigns without giving up in frustration earns the title “Web design guru.”  Once you attain that rank, you’ll have about ten times as many bloggers trying to tear you down in subsequent levels.  Have fun!

For some reason, I’m strongly reminded of the writing I’ve been doing this weekend.  I said a while back I had one chapter left to write in the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide.  I still do, although said chapter is (at the moment) about 80% done.  It’s the chapter on table presentation, and let me tell you, it’s definitely my least favorite chapter.  I think I did a decent job explaining things, but the subject matter itself is… well, I don’t like it.  Both of my technical reviewers expressed their sympathies to me before I started writing it; that ought to tell you something.

Regardless, the chapter should be done by the end of the weekend.  Then all I’ll have to do is write/create the last few appendixes (no big deal) and go through the author review stage, where I look over the copyeditor and technical review comments and make any necessary changes.  And then it will be really and truly done.  I’m no longer sure how long it will take to finish up those last few bits, but I still hope we’ll have the book on shelves before next summer.  Keep your digits crossed…

• Rolling On was published on Sunday, December 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Redesign, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.