Thoughts From Eric Archive

A partial braindump from WWW2005.  I’ll get to the professional stuff in another post.

• A staggering majority of the personal vehicles on the streets in the Chiba and Tokyo areas are black, white, and varying shades of gray.  Even dark blue is a rare sighting, and forest green seemed to be Right Out.  There were, however, the occasional splashes of color, like red sports cars and yellow Beetles.  Were those the rebels of Japanese society?  I don’t know.  I just know that any time I turned to look at the cars, it was a very monochromatic affair.

• On a related note, I did see three Hummers—all in very dark colors, by the way—and two of them had those thin tires that the street kids love so much.  Because, after all, nothing screams “please lower my gas mileage” quite so much as a Hummer.

  (I wish I were rich enough to buy a Hummer and have it completely painted with a “My Little Pony” theme, complete with stuffed ponies on the dashboard and an all-pink shaggy carpet interior.  That would be totally bumpin’.)

• The Japanese are really, really serious about their fresh seafood.

• Tim Bray says I’ve been one of his heroes for the longest time.  Whoa.  Tim Bray said that.  I mean, Tim’s long been one of my heroes.  Mutual heroism?  Whatever.  I remember hanging around him like a fanboi at WWW7 while he talked to someone else about stuff I’m not smart enough to understand.  When I finally got a chance to introduce myself, he had to leave as he was already running late.  Despite my feeling like a rube for imposing on him when he was clearly intensely busy, I still walked away from it thinking, I got to shake Tim Bray’s hand.

  Before you start to project too much creepiness into this little scenario, be assured that I did not (then or ever) resolve to leave my shaking hand unwashed.

• I did manage to get into Tokyo on Sunday, tagging along with Rohit Khare and his wife to meet up with their friend John in the Ueno area.  We had lunch at an unagi place, and after they all left I took a river ferry toward the bay.  A thunderstorm rolled through the city as we sailed, shrouding the buildings and the radio tower where Mothra cocooned.  After disembarking at a transfer point, I watched a rainbow form over the river, with the far edge of the Rainbow Bridge as a backdrop.

  Later the same evening, making my way back toward my hotel, I was standing in a JR Shinbashi station looking for the Yamanote line to Nippori, where I would catch the Skyliner to Narita Airport.  Frowning, I peered at various maps as I searched for some sort of indication that I was even in the right station.  As I leaned in close to one, a voice to my right said, “Oh, hey, Eric”.

  My head snapped around and I found that I was standing next to Richard Ishida of the W3C, who I’d met just a few days before, and who was studying the map trying to find the line that would get him to Keio University.  When I told him what I was looking for, he pointed me toward the right line.

  I still believe that the universe is an essentially random place, but it’s days like that when I completely understand why many people believe that there are no coincidences, that everything happens in a time and a place for a reason, when I come closest to knowing why they believe in angels.

• On the flight back to the United States, there was a dim glow on the horizon that I thought might be the Aurora Borealis.  The last time I saw the lights, I was seven or eight and my parents woke me up at three in the morning so I could see them.  The memory is dim with so many years gone and the sleep that filled my eyes that night, but what I do remember has always stayed with me.

  The glow turned out to be the ‘top’ edge of the terminator, something I have never seen before.  I wonder what of it I will remember, thirty years from now.

• Out of the East was published on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been five replies.

Last fall, Tantek and I presented a poster at HT04.  To get it to the conference in one piece and to avoid having to lug it across the country, I created a PDF of the poster and sent it off to the Kinko’s web site.  It was printed for me by the Kinko’s closest to the conference.  All I had to do was send them a digital file, and 2,150 miles later I retrieved the physical output.

As I did so, I thought: This is really amazing.  This is what’s so great about being connected.

A few months later, Kat upgraded her car, and the new one came with XM digital radio.  We started receiving music from geosynchronous orbit, a digital signal broadcast from 22,600 miles above the equator and deciphered by the short, stubby antenna on the car’s roof.  On a drive to visit relatives, we listened to the same station for the entire four-hour drive there, and again for the return drive.

As we did so, I thought: This is incredible.  This is a great example of the benefits of connecting everything.

I was wrong in both cases.

This morning, I stood in a hotel room in Chiba, Japan and saw my wife and daughter on the television.  Back home in Cleveland, they saw me on a computer monitor.  We talked to each other, waved hello, got caught up on recent events.  I watched as Carolyn ran around my office, heard her say “mama”, and agreed with her when she signed “telephone” while she watched my image.  I stuck my tongue out to make a silly face, and six thousand miles away, my daughter laughed with delight at my antics.

A few minutes after we’d finished the chat, with the glow of home and family still warm upon me, I thought: This is why we connected everything in the first place.

• Connected was published on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Personal, Tech, and Technovertigo categories.
• There have been two replies.

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.