12 Oct 2005
Note to self:
It might be worth considering doing something about this blog’s appearance in IE, in light of traffic from that creeping towards the 60% mark.
“It is the masses, the majority–this infernal compact majority–that poisons the sources of our moral life and infects the ground we stand on.”
– Dr Stockmann, An Enemy of the People, IV
Or, you know, this infernal compact majority that, by their choice of browser, poisons our CSS with hacks and conditionally-commented stylesheets. Or alternatively, our markup… the ground the web stands on.
11 Oct 2005
[21:28:33] Sphinx^: how does one spell eletist?
[21:28:40] Josh: elitist
[21:28:46] Sphinx^: aHA!
[21:29:07] Josh: or dyu want it with the grave (or is it acute, i can never remember) e?
[21:29:21] Josh: élitist
[21:29:35] Josh: it goes that way, whatever that is
[21:29:48] Sphinx^: i much rather my friends undead… err not dead
Not terribly well marked up, might fix later.
11 Oct 2005
The article “R.I.P. WYSIWYG – Results-Oriented UI Coming” published in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column yesterday (maybe today, depending on timezones… I discovered it now, and it’s the 11th here) provides an interesting insight into the changes to Office 12. I’m actually really excited about the release of this software, because it promises to change the face of word processing interfaces, as well as anticipated type quality (for the better, I hope!), and set a benchmark for the rest of the world to aspire to.
OpenOffice.org is, put simply, a poor clone. It doesn’t offer anything particularly innovative, it doesn’t do anything particularly better — with the exception of the formats it uses and its inbuilt PDF and SWF export capability (though these exports are often pretty poor in quality) — but it is free as in speech/beer.
There is, to my knowledge, little in the way of real competition to Office products… perhaps with the exception of iWork to, what, four percent of the computer market?
Hopefully this paradigm shift in the way Office approaches content will mean the proliferation of more applications capable of embracing and extending — with full interoperability — Microsoft’s product. I say this because, at present, any application trying to read Word documents has to kludge around its format (this is true of Word as well… its interoperability with prior versions of the same software is notoriously poor).
Hopefully, a renewed focus on the semantic integrity of documents will enable greater file exchange between platforms (ha ha, as if?) — and also result in a greater ubiquity of sensible user interfaces, that make it manifestly more difficult for users to spend an hour typing for every three hours formatting.
Goodness knows the corporate style guide people are going to want to hug Microsoft when this one comes out. Hopefully it’ll deliver.
10 Oct 2005
Jason Freid, of 37Signals, writes of what he spoke at the recent Web 2.0 conference (Is it possible to not look at that name and anticipate it will be derided and ridiculed in five, ten years time, as much as we now look at the pre-dot com burst and shudder/giggle?) on their weblog, Signal vs Noise.
No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive–you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)—so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
Less is more in web application development, apparently, and so we are judged: more successful yet strangely lesser in several ways to make this so. Whether or not you agree with this is irrelevant. In what may just be the best weblog comment of the year, Jason succinctly (yet rather eloquently) issues a rebuttal to a commenter who complains of the appropriateness of 37Signals issuing directives on what does and doesn’t work.
“But what position are 37signals in to make these statements? What you do, works for you.”
We have a blog.</p>
I was wondering how long it would take the Internet to realise this. ‘A-list’ digerati or not, any website assuming that form (i.e. a blog) remains, at its core, a personal publishing platform. Or soapbox. Or… whatever. You can give it corporate gloss, if that’s your thing, but the content is (read: should be, by the directive I am now issuing as to what this does and does not entail, because I have a blog, you are reading it, and therefore I will say what should and should not be, damn it!) intrinsically and at its essence of a personal nature. This can mean a variety of things to different people in different contexts, but I think the most important (and unescapable) facet of this is the importance of opinion and the fact that much blogging content is simply that.
Disclaimer: I think I’m morally opposed to meta-blog posts, but they have to happen once in a while… and I try and contain myself to simply responding to stuff that’s happened elsewhere. Feel free to get angry with me in the comments.
p.s. Please excuse my appalling markup in this post. WordPress was being a cow and not letting me nest blockquotes (it mightn’t be valid, anyway, but it would have been semantically appropriate so I don’t particularly care even if it wasn’t), and I’m tired and Alex King’s WP Unformatted plugin doesn’t seem to be working. *cries self to sleep over bad markup* ;-)
09 Oct 2005
George Bernard Shaw is guilty of hitting one of my pet peeves in “an initialled review” he wrote of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1897. Yeah, I’m still not over it.1
His review is, in all other respects, perfectly fine. I’d argue over the semantic appropriateness of describing it as a “review”, for it seems more a belated criticism, focussing more on society’s response to the play than on the play itself, but I digress. Write about the annoying bit already! Okay, okay.
The woman’s eyes are opened; and instantly her doll’s dress is thrown off and her husband left staring at her, helpless, bound thenceforth either to do without her (an alternative which makes short work of his fancied independence) or else treat her as a human being like himself, fully recognizing that he is not a creature of one superior species, Man, living with a creature of another and inferior species, Woman, but that Mankind is male and female, like other kinds, and that the inequality of the sexes is literally a cock and bull story, certain to end in such unbearable humiliation as that which our suburban King Arthurs suffer at the hands of Ibsen.
No, my complaint is not with multiple-run-on sentences (for I myself am often guilty of that, though perhaps less spectacularly than his rather-admirable effor there), but rather with his abuse of the term “literally”. No, GBS, A Doll’s House‘s rejection of the notion of the inequality of the sexes is not achieved through literally presenting this as a story about a cock and a bull. You may use that as a metaphor, but not literally. Declaring something to be literal does not serve to emphasise the point. In fact, in this instance, it serves only to ridicule it.
*pulls faces*
The end.
1 I’m the first to admit I was born in the wrong century. Love of the Internet and technology in general aside, I could quite happily have spent my days as a fringe-Romantic intellectual arguing with various figures of similar standing in the late nineteenth century. So call me an élitist, or something. I enabled dead keys on my keyboard just so I could type élitist properly, you know? I’m that bad. It makes typing apostrophes hellish…