I was starting to think that nobody noticed my JabFoaf announcment. On the one hand, I figured that a lot of people are too busy with holiday travelling/relaxing to worry about FOAF. But on the other hand, I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t getting much feedback.
But as it turned out, some people noticed, after all.
I really need to get TrackBack and/or PingBack working on my blog, so I can learn about links like this more easily….
In response to Mark Pilgrim’s “Pushing the envelope” post, Hans Nowak complains that sometimes semantically correct HTML elements don’t “look good”. So, he tends to use <pre> instead of <code> to designate code fragments in web pages.
The answer, of course, is to just use CSS to make <code> act more like <pre>. Here’s my CSS:
code {
white-space: pre;
}
And here’s how it renders Hans’ code fragment:
def f(x, y):
if x > y:
print "foo!"
else:
print "bar!"
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a couple of different FOAF-related projects wandering around the back of my brain. I’m finally ready to announce the first one: JabFoaf: Jabber/FOAF conversion utilities. Since Jabber and FOAF are both aimed at connecting people (one literally, the other semantically), it just seemed like a natural thing to do.
From Hixie, some info on the case against Jon Johansen, the kid who caused the DVD encryption debacle to make the international news:
It’s been reported all over the place, of course, but this week Oslo has seen the opening of the trial of Jon Lech Johansen, who, as far as I can tell, is accused of trying to watch a DVD that he had bought.
Yeah, we can’t have that. Whatever next. Someone who thinks it’s ok to buy a book and then read it?
He also includes a mega-cool illegal(?) link. Note to MPAA reps: that link is encoded. Decoding it could be punishable under the terms of the DMCA. Thpppbbbt!
I ran across a great sysadmin story about a problem sending email farther than 500 miles. To a technical person familiar with how SMTP works, that sounds like a user jumping to an incorrect conclusion. But sometimes, life can be stranger than fiction….
“We could send email. Just not more than–”
“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t
you call earlier?”“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now.” Right. This is the chairman of
*statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look
into it–”“Geostatisticians…”
“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we
can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number
of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or
reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”
Man kills friend for drinking last beer. These are the kind of rednecks that give rednecks a bad name.
“There was only two beers left, so I took one, and I told Willie not to take my last beer.”
At least it happed in Texas, and not here in Alabama. Around here, people mostly shoot each other over arguments about the Alabama/Auburn football game.
The other day, I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla. In the past, I’ve fired it up from time to time just to check that my web design efforts look reasonably sane in it. But now I’m starting to use it as my primary browser. I normally surf the web with liberal use of “Open in new window”, and I typically have three separate browser windows opened to different pages. So with Mozilla, I’m all about tabbed browsing, which allows me to have multiple sites opened up within the same browser instance.
And the fact that Mozilla is deliciously standards-compliant doesn’t hurt, either.
I figured I’d better bookmark this before I forget. Chris Nott (c.f. Dithered)has a new Javascript API that ports the DOM2 events API to older versions of Internet Explorer. Mmmm…. Cross-browser goodness.
Joy. Zeldman points out:
Whatever its failings, Netscape 4 made it easy to install digital certificates essential for encrypting sensitive data–which is one reason web pros in the cash-strapped public sector have been stuck with that browser since man first walked upright. Hark! Hope: CREN has partnered with Opera. Hence Opera 7 will include a group certificate signed by CREN, enabling libraries and universities to migrate from a 1997 browser to a modern one that supports standards. (Hat tip: Tanya.)
I don’t know if this will make a dent in the old NS4 install-base or not. But I sure hope so.
So I spent a few minutes modifying my template to give my blog better semantics. I use header elements for blog entry titles, the date & author are in a <cite> element, the menu uses lists and header elements. I cleaned up the CSS to the point that there aren’t even any warnings any more.
So of course Netscape 4 didn’t see the styles anymore. Oh well. At least it saw a fairly well-structured document. So then I investigated a littler more and figured out that NS4 was choking on the Simplified Box Model Hack. When I then used a comment hack to hide the SBMH from NS4, I discovered that it doesn’t understand "background-color: inherit", and rendered a goodly portion of the page with a putrid neon green background. Sooooo, I’ve inserted more comment hacks to hide the inherited properties from NS4.
So, to anybody browsing this page with that majorly outdated browser, “you’re frickin’ welcome.”