Thoughts From Eric Archive

The W3C has released a public beta of a major upgrade to their HTML validator, and authors are very much encouraged to try it out—I did!  It adds a lot of new things to the service, including better handling of document MIME types (like application/xhtml+xml) and more.  One of the validator’s lead developers e-mailed me about it, and then dropped this comment in at the end of the message:

The new CSS is loosely inspired by your stuff (well, that’s probably true for most CSS these days I suppose).

Pardon me while my ego starts beating its chest and howling.  (And Kat’s not home to keep it under control, either.)

• (X)HTML Validator Upgrade in Beta was published on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Personal, Standards, and W3C categories.
• There have been no replies.

The stress hasn’t ebbed yet, but a few good people have thrown me lifelines over the past couple of days.  I feel a touch better about life in general thanks to a few kinds words from those folks.  “I just wanted to say thanks, and let you know that your work is much appreciated,” said one.  Another one wrote:

So here’s a bit of my thanks and appreciation for taking [list administration] on, AND for all you do to forward the use of CSS, including the writing of books, especially your most recent!

And a while back, Jeff Cohan e-mailed me to say:

…for what it’s worth, that I really appreciate not only the wisdom/expertise that comes through in your CSS-discuss and [newsgroup] posts but also the respectful tone you consistently use. (I just read your “Table design (was Re: Is there a way to “synchronize” div heights?)” response in CSS-discuss.) Folks like you (and Linda Rathgeber, whom I put in the same boat) set a great example, I think.

All of which reminds me that whatever stress I feel, whether I brought it on myself or not, and no matter how much I might sometimes want to just walk away from everything, I’m doing things that make a difference.  As I wrote to a correspondent a few days back:

I figure everyone has three choices in life: they can work to effect positive change, effect negative change, or do their best not to make any change at all.  I’ve chosen the first of the three, to the best of my ability.

I’d like to thank Jeff, Adam, Peter, Darinda, and others for reminding me that effecting change is always difficult, but that it yields rewards beyond measure.

Oh, and I ended up choosing Pinnock and the English Concert yesterday.  That may have helped a little bit, too.

• Saving Graces was published on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

We all have fluctuating stress levels in our lives, and I’m currently fighting through a relative high tide.  Starting a few days ago, all kinds of pressure came flowing in, and I keep waiting for the ebb.  A while back, I assembled the “Fear” quadrology in iTunes, and it was the first thing I fired up this morning.

To you—is it movement, or is it action? Is it contact, or just reaction? And you—revolution, or just resistance? Is it living, or just existence?

After the quadrology finishes, it’s a tossup between The Prodigy and Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert.  That should tell you how divergent my internal states are getting.

Nevertheless, I’m still interested in hearing about outbound traffic rates for large sites (see Saturday’s entry).  I’ve found a few plans that charge a nickel per megabyte—is that about the average?  Anyone paying a lot more or less than that?

• Waiting For the Ebb was published on Monday, October 21st, 2002.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Kat and I just got back from a week in Boston, where Molly and I presented at User Interface 7 East.  The gang at User Interface Engineering put on an amazing conference, and I’m really looking forward to the next one.

As usual I’m trying to catch up with my e-mail, but in a bid to make it worse, I have a question maybe some of you can answer.  If you pay for your site based on the bandwidth its traffic consumes, how much are you paying for that bandwidth?  I’m not interested in the monthly charge for flat-rate plans so much as I am the per-megabyte fee for large volume accounts, or what you pay for exceeding your monthly quota.  Please let me know.

• Back From Beantown was published on Saturday, October 19th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been no replies.

Wired News has redesigned their site, and not just the front end, either: the really important stuff all happened behind the scenes.  Using no tables to lay out the page, but instead applying CSS to XHTML, the site is a stunning example of how standards can be made to work today.  They have an article with some details (and a few quotes from yours truly).

There are a few flies in this ointment, but they’re fairly understandable.  The pages don’t always validate, in part because of third-party advertisement code (which is notoriously horrible) and in part because converting seven-plus years of pages isn’t a simple task.  Actually, most of their validation errors seem to involve unencoded ampersands in URLs, which ought to be easy enough to fix.

The Web Standards Project calls this a gutsy move, and I agree.  A site with their kind of traffic has to make a big commitment to do something like this and stick to it.  The management of Wired is to be applauded for approving this move, and the men behind the scenes deserve even more applause for their work.  Look for a DevEdge article soon where we interview Douglas Bowman, the point man on the Wired redesign.

• Wired With Standards was published on Friday, October 11th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

A random thought that came to me at 6:40am as I was pulling records for my radio show: wouldn’t it be cool if we restructured our government so that any declaration of war had to be approved by a majority vote of the country’s citizens, and those who voted in favor of the war were required to report for combat duty if the war referendum passed?  I suppose those physically unable to fight could be required to fund another soldier’s training, transportation, supplies, and funeral (if necessary).

I just wonder how many people would be willing to go to war if they knew they’d have to fight in it, or at least go broke for it—and how much more likely it would be to create a situation where we only went to war when it was felt truly necessary and just to do so.

• Put Up or… was published on Wednesday, October 9th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

I’m a little late coming to this party, but it was worth posting anyway: Ted Rall’s War Cry.  It just doesn’t sound quite so reasonable when we’re the rhetorical target, does it?

• Like In a Funhouse Mirror was published on Tuesday, October 8th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

In all the head-pounding over learning XSLT last week, I let some things slide by without comment, so I’ll try to cover them all in a single post.  (And remember, if you have an RSS aggregator, you can syndicate these posts via my RSS feed!)

In early November, I’ll be appearing at Meet The Makers New York on a “standards mini-panel” with Jeffrey Zeldman, so I’d better get around to calling Moishe.  There will also be a San Francisco Meet The Makers where my co-worker Arun will be on a panel with Tantek Çelik of Microsoft.  You might be able to score a free VIP ticket to either event if you hurry (and are willing to fill out the questionnaire).

I’ve added more information to the upcoming events on my Speaking page, including promotional codes for events that have them.  I disclose when using a code will make me money, and have been thinking about ways to turn those into community-building exercises.  Maybe I’ll take everyone who used my code(s) to a group dinner, assuming I can come up with a way to verify code use.

Last week, we published a CSS2.1 Quick Reference sidebar tab for Gecko-based browsers, and French translations of the CSS2 and DOM2 sidebar tabs, to the Sidebars area of the DevEdge Toolbox.  I also published a technical note on fixing list-item marker size in the NS6.x series.

Over the weekend, I not only dug into more XSLT (which almost made me pound my head against a wall, again), but I wrote some Javascript bookmarklets to help manage the administration of css-discuss.  It’s been a while since I thought of myself as a programmer, and I certainly am no expert—but it’s been good to stretch those mental muscles again, after so long.  The neural paths needed for exploring and using CSS and structural markup aren’t the same as those needed for programming.  The sense of achievement I felt when I figured out how to do what I wanted to do was a welcome change of pace.

It’s really cold in our house right now, but at least the shaking and banging of workmen dismantling our 82-year-old boiler has stopped.  Kat and I are sort of sad to see the old beast go, but since it had suddenly started leaking enough carbon monoxide to form its own atmospheric system, we don’t exactly regret replacing it.  The replacement boiler is almost ridiculously smaller than our old boiler.  I have trouble believing that it can heat the basement, let alone the whole house.

• Catching Up was published on Monday, October 7th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, Standards, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.