21 Oct 2004
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.
<\/rant class=”off”>
19 Oct 2004
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.
19 Oct 2004
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!
19 Oct 2004
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.
18 Oct 2004
At some time around 11 last night, the enormity of this horrific thing hit me. Not so much the packing side — that’s okay, I can deal with that; enough of my life is already existing in boxes for it to be no huge difference (that said, I think I have an assessment or two the week we’re moving, so that will be fun…). I’m more worried about continuity of life in general.
Despite what too many geeks would tell you, there is life beyond the Internet. My physical address is just as important to me as other addresses, although certainly less often visited. Having said that, the circumstances which brought me to worry about such things can be attributed to geek effects, specifically, my ownership of domain names. Bugger.
Does that make me as sad as I thought it did but moments after? Screw the bank, my school, friends and whoever else has my address! What about my Whois records!?
This’d be easier to resolve if I knew where I’m moving to in however many weeks time it is now — my present nightmare isn’t living in a Self-Storage facility (heh, taking the “Self” part of “Self-Storage” a little too literally, perhaps), but rather having to temporarily receive mail at such a location! What do I do? Is it easier just to hope that I don’t get any correspondence of substance for a few weeks in limbo, and leave a forwarding address, hoping nothing too urgent arrives? Or should I send people “DON’T SEND ME MAIL!!!” messages for the week preceding the great traversal to the as-yet-undefined new place of residence?
Perhaps I should leave a scanner behind, and request the new owners email letters to me. Hmm. The geek options are always the most appealing…