31 Jan 2007
In my account at least, I think.
Note that it displays perfectly and sans any word obfuscation/misspelling as is usual for these things — though I would hasten to add that anyone that follows up aforementioned spam is unlikely to have intelligence enough to avoid something with shifty spelling.
It’s achieved by embedding arbitrary characters in the middle of a word in a span element, and then floating these to the right. It’s only a two-part division at this stage, so it’s fairly trivial to break up keywords into their component parts and match either side of spans occurring in the middle of a word — hardly common in respectable markup. Even if there were more divisions, the fact that they occur without even a space either side of the element should be a giveaway.
The other notable feature is the inversion of “web!master at example dot org (remove the exclamation mark)” concept — here, they’re using it to avoid immediate blacklisting based on a reported domain.
This will in all probability be dealt with soon by people who know far more about it than I, but I thought it an interesting enough development to be worth mention, particularly in a “explaining the absurdity of their markup” sense — this constitutes, for anyone significant who reads this, absolutely no reason for reconsidering the (limited) CSS given to campaign authors as it is best dealt with at a markup level alone.
In terms of minimal impact to legitimate email, this is the only way forward — contrary to what Microsoft might have you believe with their recent brain-deadness concerning Outlook 2007′s rendering engine. (Though we’re all still guessing at the reasoning behind this, and I’m falling closer to the anti-trust separation theory than anything related to security/spam prevention, etc.)
30 Jan 2007
I just realised I haven’t used the W3C validator in probably close to 6 months. I had some browser inconsistencies building CSS today and, whilst I don’t know the cause, the problem in question resolved itself a few hours later… I think because I must’ve just had poorly formed markup that I fixed without even bothering to note in my mind.
Well formed markup has its (decidedly useful) place, but we could all probably learn to live without validators quite happily!
30 Jan 2007
So. Good. Toasted or not. *is particularly enjoying a sandwich for no apparent reason*
29 Jan 2007
I seem to recall a lot of people whining about how expensive Windows Vista is. I didn’t pay a lot of attention at the time because it seemed a long way off (for me, it still is — I’ll probably sit out until the second service pack before spending money on it) but kind of accepted that it was going to be horrendously expensive when the time came.
And then today I took a look at OEM pricing of it (incidentally, I was looking for something else) and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about. Vista Business is $190, and Ultimate weighs in at about $250. It occurred to me at that point that those who had been complaining have probably never paid for software in their life. Newsflash: XP Pro OEM has cost around $200 for the last couple of years and I don’t hear anyone whining about the cost of that.
Maybe I’m getting older and grumpier, but it seems like a lot of the Internet’s self-professed geeks really don’t have the foggiest sense of real-world perspective.
29 Jan 2007
TACKLES is back again for another year next Sunday and we’re gonna try and sell parents the end of year video we made (yes, at the end of last year) for $5 a copy when they come down to rego for the year. Accordingly, the more reliable DVD burner here (it’s — surprisingly — a Sony, the other drive is a Liteon that plays up quite a lot) has been spinning nearly non-stop from about 5.30 til now. All done, though.
DVDs and so forth aside, it’s shaping up to be quite the exciting year. We’re kicking off with four weeks looking at why Paul wrote letters in the New Testament part of the Bible, which should be good fun. Will probably post more as the term progresses.