HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
Tumbly
goodness 
Kottke
says a tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream
of consciousness… with more than just links.
Anarchaia was the first, but there are many copies. And they
have a plan.
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You should read the rest of Henri’s article, because I’m simplifying immensely here. Even in IE5/Mac, there were a few older doctypes that didn’t count as far as opting into standards support. Over time, the list of quirks grew, and so did the list of doctypes that triggered “quirks mode.” The last time I tried to count, there were 15 doctypes that triggered “standards mode,” 5 that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.
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It says a lot about CEDET that a full-blown CLOS implementation is the least onerous part of it.
— Phil Hagelberg, in #emacs, referring to EIEIO.
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here’s a toast to Alan Turing born in harsher, darker times who thought outside the container and loved outside the lines and so the code-breaker was broken and we’re sorry yes now the s-word has been spoken the official conscience woken – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted – and the story does suggest a part 2 to the Turing Test: 1. can machines behave like humans? 2. can we?
— poet Matt Harvey, on the BBC
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I’ve found that it’s useful for antisocial behaviors to be given names and URLs. It makes it easier to refer to them in conversation, and you can direct people here for further explanation.
— Mark Pilgrim, commenting on his own HTTP Error 447: Gone until I get the attention I deserve.
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Has anyone tweaked Viper to become more productive? Care to share your tweaks?
One trick I learned from Kai Großjohann is to use the z key as a prefix for my custom key bindings. (I don’t even know what z is supposed to do in
vi.) He posted his .viper tocomp.emacsa few years ago, with lots of goodies inside.I use zz for C-c C-c, and zs for C-c C-s. You can see how to do that in a general way by looking at
`ted-viper-install-z-bindings'in my .viper. -
As a long time “web accessibility” guy myself, I have to concur with Joe – the WCAG 2 is unworkable, fatally flawed, and will never receive the required up-take within the developer community required to make it useful. Oh, and it does nothing to improve web accessibility – something Joe has amply illustrated. I may not always agree with Joe’s “style”, but this time he’s bang on the money!
— John Foliot, in a comment on Joe Clark’s ALA article To Hell with WCAG 2
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@Paulymer:
'
.mine .sweet' This is what happens when I spend the day writing CSS and listening to Guns N’ Roses. -
@hober:
@Paulymer I think you mean '
#me > .sweet'. “Sweet descendant of mine” doesn’t have quite the right ring to it. -
@jauricchio:
@hober But the child selector doesn’t work in IE6. Welcome to the Jungle of legacy support.
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@Paulymer:
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Linkified text of an email I sent to Marketplace on Thursday.
In today's afternoon segment about tax preparation services, you discussed a test in which investigators tried 19 different tax preparation services and found that all committed at least one error.
Instead of attributing this to the lack of licensing or certification of tax preparation workers, perhaps we should consider the real culprit: the complexity of our tax code.
Were paying taxes as simple as paying a utility bill, we would hardly need to impose any sort of market-entry-limiting certification or licensing scheme on those in this line of work.
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San Diego’s first BarCamp of 2009 was this weekend; I’ve just finished giving my talk on Extensibility, HTML, and the Web ecosystem. The talk was a cleaned-up version of my drunken rant about distributed extensibility, aka ISSUE-41.
This is the second BarCamp in town that I haven’t helped to organize. It’s fun to simply be a participant without having to worry about all of the things that inevitably go wrong.
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Several of us in San Diego have recently launched 50ft, a joint design blog. Here’s my favorite sign shot from my post on the Neighborhood signs of San Diego:
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When I first saw this usage of an old family photo I posted to flickr under CC BY-SA, I felt a pang of sharer’s remorse.
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As you may have guessed from my halloween costume, I loved Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Anathem. Seriously, it’s fantastic, and you should drop everything you’re doing and read it, right now.
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The only thing I will oppose very strongly is the setting up of guidelines and requirements and all sorts of foolish rules, because that doesn’t improve the text. It just prevents other people from posting. Way to go, social skills.
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Stucco, by nathangibbs.
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THYME CUBE—perhaps the most brilliant parody website ever created. via trivium.
(If you’re unfamiliar with Time Cube, you were educated stupid.)
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PUBLIC FUCKING CHOICE THEORY YOU IGNORANT FUCKING IDIOTS! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!
— Bill, on this New York Times article.
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Today is Dictionary Day, the anniversary of the birth of Noah Webster. Despite The Oniyon’s strenuous opposition at the time (HT: Language Hat), Webster went on to write the first dictionary of American English, for which we should always thank him.
Why don’t you celebrate Dictionary Day by contributing some of your favorite words to Wordie? I will. You might enjoy checking out some of the wonderful neologisms at neologasm, my favorite word blog.
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