I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Despite being struck by the freedom of expression permitted in America when he visited it in the 1860s, Clemenceau was later recorded as saying this of America:
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
Amusing, but hardly consistent.
I haven’t whinged about Internet Explorer for some time now, at least, not on this website, so I feel justified.
The background property in CSS has the attribute fixed for a reason. Internet Explorer supports this, but fails to interpret it in the same way as every other visual UA on the planet — the background is fixed relative to the element, not the page.
This is specified in the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (Level 1) recommendation (Yes, it is a recommendation, not a standard. If “web standards” people are going to obsess over geek semantics, you’d think they would care a little more about the meaning of real words, as well. Apparently not.), which Internet Explorer claims to have full support for.
That part of the specification appears a little ambiguous on first reading, but seriously, what makes greater logical sense, in terms of the actual applications of the technology?! Keeping in mind this is a recommendation, if there is ambiguity (which is clarified by contextual reading and general understanding of the material at hand), then it is the responsibility of any recommendation implementors to apply their own best-practice policies to this, in order to clarify it.
Best practice at Microsoft, it would seem, encompasses flawed “full” implementations of a technology, with an eye firmly set in the past. Comments such as those made recently at IEBlog excusing these failures anger me, especially given the blatant irrelevance of defences used in relation to poor support of W3C recommendation technology.
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English teachers should not use the symbol for “at” (namely “@”) in place of the characters “a” and “t” for anything but denoting email addresses. Not when working with print media, and not when writing on paper. Please.
I already have too little respect for certain members of the St. Andrew’s teaching staff. You don’t need to reinforce my opinions.
I’m currently trying to negotiate photocopying the HSC 2005 English Stimulus Booklet. This has to be the most challenging experience of my schooling career. Folded without any sense of order, and with margins not large enough for my copier to happily accept it being haphazardly thrown onto the plate, I wish this were an assessable task!
I’m clearing out various cupboards, to make moving less painful, and I’ve got the first thirty-eight issues of the Australian computer magazine, Atomic sitting there, doing very little. It’s a shame to see them sitting unread and unappreciated, so I’m offloading them to… well, whoever wants them.
If you’d like to buy them (preferably as a single lot), feel free to get in contact, either by means of the contact form, or the comments field below. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve also advertised the same on the Atomic forums, under a post entitled “FS: Atomic 1 – 38 inclusive (Sydney)”.
Failing anyone wanting to purchase them (at whatever amount you’d think is reasonable — I’m fairly flexible), I’ll donate them to my public library, assuming they’ll take them (they’ve already taken my APC magazine pile a few months back).
Update: Issue 38 and corresponding CD has been sold. Issues 1 through 37 remain for sale.