Thoughts From Eric Archive

Just as I prepare to leave for WWW2005 in Japan, John Allsopp has announced the details for Web Essentials05  in Sydney this September.  Everyone’s fave Molly kicks things off with a keynote, and there will be some great speakers: Tantek Çelik, Jeff Veen, Kelly Goto, Derek Featherstone, Douglas Bowman, Russ Weakley, Cameron Adams, John Allsopp himself, and more.

Oh, and me.  I’ll be there, too.  You can get all the details at the WE05 web site.  I heard great things about WE04, so I’m really looking forward to WE05.  Hopefully I’ll see you there!  It’ll be a fair dinkum, and very likely truly bonzer, no worries.

Did I use any of those colloquialisms correctly?

• Web Essentials 05 was published on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Web categories.
• There have been nine replies.

You know the effect where, if you only catch a TV show every now and again, it’s always the same episode?

Whenever I happen to catch Stargate: SG-1, it’s always the episode “Window of Opportunity“.  Seriously.

How awesome is that?

• Thrown For a Loop was published on Monday, May 2nd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been twenty-seven replies.

I just talked with Ryan, organizer of the XHTML and CSS Workshop happening in London on Saturday, 4 June 2005, and he says there are only a few seats left—there were but seven when he contacted me on Friday, but for all I know it’s fewer now (and no doubt it is if you’re reading this post in the archives, instead of when it was first published).

Thanks to the very strong registration numbers, Ryan is seriously considering adding another day.  If that happens, it will mean the Saturday session is all sold out, so if you want to attend that day, you’d better get your reservation in quickly.  We’ll spend the day learning about the ins and outs of standards-based design, as well as chewing over attendee questions and generally having fun while we learn a ton.  And don’t forget about the exclusive Survival Kit CD-ROM that all attendees will receive.

All in all, a good time is in the offing, and it’s yours… but only if you grab a seat.

Update | 22 Apr 05: the Saturday session has sold out, and the Friday session has been scheduled.  Registration is open!

• London Workshop Filling Up! was published on Sunday, April 17th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There have been nine replies.

Have I been busy?  Oh so very much yes.

A couple of questions for the crowd.

1. In order to get to Japan, I’m flying to Newark, New Jersey and then direct from there to Tokyo, Japan.  That second leg is a 13.5 hour flight.  Whee!  The good news is that I scored a seat with a power outlet, so I can compute my way across the Pacific.  I’d like to take along some DVDs and listen to my music library, but that’s the trick: I need good, comfortable, middle-to-high quality headphones that will be nicely audible even on an airliner.  Any suggestions?  They don’t have to be noise-cancellers, although I’m not opposed to such devices.  I’m just wary of their price tags.
2. My desktop machine is a G4/500, circa 2000, and it runs OS X fine so long as I don’t try to run too many concurrent applications.  I should probably know this, but I don’t, so help me out: what kind of RAM chips does it take, and where do I get said RAM for a good price?

Thanks.

• Wanted: Headphones and RAM was published on Friday, April 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tech categories.
• There have been fifty-three replies.

As recently announced by Mark Baker, Tantek Çelik and I will be co-chairing a full-day track on microformats as part of Developers’ Day at WWW2005.  We’ll announce the details in the near future, but we can already say that have some great speakers and topics lined up.  I encourage anyone who can to come check it out.  You can register at the WWW2005 site; make sure to check the option for “Developers’ Day, 5/14” when you do.

Tantek and I will also be presenting a poster on XMDP at the conference, and on Tuesday, May 10th, I’ll be delivering a half-day tutorial on Standards-Based Design—assuming enough people register, anyway—as well as delivering the afternoon keynote at, and participating in the closing panel for, the 2nd International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A).

Add to that an expected public appearance in Tokyo the evening of Friday the 13th (for which I hope to have details very soon) as well as a few other agenda items, and I’ve started to wonder if I’m going to have any time to sightsee while I’m there.  That’s becoming something of a theme, actually: I’m not expecting to have more than a day or so to make the rounds when I’m in London this June.

For some reason, I’m reminded of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles: “Work work work work work!”

• WWW2005: Microformats Track was published on Monday, April 4th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS, semantic web, Speaking, and W3C categories.
• There have been nine replies.

A little while back, I made a joke about presentational class names.  As it happened, there was a second joke hidden within the joke—as is so often the case with me—and I was delighted to see that one of my readers caught it.

But is there a reasonable alternative?  I’ve long been using the class value border to indicate when I want to put a border around a picture.  This is, to me, one of those gray-area situations that’s very hard to resolve.  I can claim that border is not very presentational: it doesn’t say anything about the specific appearance of the border, only that there should be one.  I could also argue that it’s entirely too presentational: from a semantic point of view, what does it matter if the picture is bordered or not?  It doesn’t, so the class name is unacceptable.

And yet, it does matter.  Visually, some images need to have borders, while others need to lack a border.  I can’t invent a new element or attribute to express the difference (not without writing my own DTD, anyway).  Technologically, class values are the only place I can make the distinction.

There are some other sort-of-presentational class names hanging around my site, too.  standalone is used when an image, or set of images, stands on its own, as opposed to illustrative images that are floated.  The intent is presentational, though again, standalone doesn’t say exactly how the images stand alone.  It just says that they do.

I’ve yet to come up with a good semantic way of saying “this image needs to have something that visually separates it from the rest of the page”.  I’ve kicked around ideas for other values, like framed or separated, but these fall into the same gray area… probably because the intent is basically presentational.  I’ve abstracted the presentationalism of the intent, but it’s still there.

So, anyone have a better class name, or even a better approach to drawing the distinction?  And before anyone tells me to quit worrying about this, I’m not worrying—I’m playing.  It’s like doing a crossword, or working on a logic puzzle.  Usually I just do this stuff in my head, but in this case I’m fairly stumped, and could use some help.

• Class Presentation was published on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML and CSS categories.
• There have been forty replies.

I was going to ignore the whole WordPress search engine gaming situation, especially with Matt on vacation and so unable to speak for himself at the moment.  Dougal and Jonas have weighed in with their bits, and that seemed good enough.  But as a high-profile WordPress user and supporter, I’ve had some readers ask me about my opinion.  So okay, here it is.

I’m not going to call Matt any names, or declare his actions to have been evil.  Matt and I, along with Tantek, founded GMPG and worked together on XFN.  I would consider Matt a very good acquaintance.  (Don’t read too much into that: I’m unusually choosy about using the term “friend”.)  He’s young, enthusiastic, and very smart.  That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make mistakes, but it might mean he’s more willing to try things out just to see how they go.

From a technical point of view, though, this isn’t much of a change from past practices.  Anyone who’s installed WordPress has probably noticed that, by default, the system contains links to all of the big WordPress contributors.  If you just set up the default template and don’t fiddle with anything, those links show up in your blog.

And what effect do those links have?  They can pump enormous amounts of Google juice into the sites of those people, for one.  Remember when Matt reached the #1 result on Google for “Matt”?  The pre-installed links can seriously skew blog-networking systems, for another.  If Technorati didn’t exclude those people from the ranking lists, they’d dominate the Technorati Top 100.  As of this writing, photomatt.net has more links from more sources than does Boing Boing.  So do most, if not all, of the other blogs that come with your WordPress install.

Adding hidden article links seems to me to be another step along the same path.  Is it a good path?  All I can say is that it isn’t a path I would have followed.  Then again, I’m such an old-school hippie-Utopian pseudo-socialist about the Web that I don’t have retailer affiliate accounts, and never did.

Based on what I’ve been picking up from conversations and sessions at the Search Engine Strategies conferences, what Matt did with these hidden links is at best a gray-hat SEO tactic, and probably a black-hat move.  There will be (and already have been) reprecussions, and Matt will have to deal with them.  How he deals with them will, I think, be far more important than what he did.  We’ll just have to wait to see how that unfolds.

Meanwhile, I fully intend to keep using, hacking on, and contributing to WordPress, because it’s a good system at a great price with an even better license.

Update: Matt has explained his side of the story.

• My Two WordPress Cents was published on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

Terri Schiavo, as you’re no doubt aware, died this morning as the result of twelve days of starvation and dehydration.

I am not qualified to judge the actions of anyone involved in the situation, nor do I have a clear sense of what the “right thing” to do was in that particular case, but I know this much for myself.  If it is acceptable to end a life, then it should be mandatory that the ending be as quick and painless as possible.  Withholding sustenance strikes me as a horrible form of euthanasia.  An overdose of painkillers, or a painless poison, would be far more merciful.

Years ago, long before she was diagnosed with cancer, my mother made me promise that, given certain circumstances, I would help her by ending her life.  Those circumstances didn’t come about; instead, an aggressive, pervasive malignancy destroyed her body and took her life.  But had those circumstances come about, no matter how much keeping that promise might have meant to me and to her, I do not think I could have starved her to death.

Again, this is in no way a comment on whether or not Mrs. Schiavo should have been allowed to die.  It is simply a wish that we might make termination procedures more merciful, or else stop them altogether.

• At The End was published on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.