My comments on other blogs, blogged.

(ie, the poor man's trackback)

http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/000664.html

AJ, did you see the one a few weeks ago of the lady giving birth in a tub of water? That was crazy.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Orville Schell's (!) comment on the China Digital News weblog that the Muzi Mei phenomenon is iconoclastic and even "revolutionary", but not "political". I am *very* curious as to the editorial process which allowed these galleries to go to print.

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/archives/001613.html

12/18/2003 06:16:00 PM

http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/geekery/underappreciated_xhtml_tags.php

Thanks for the link Richard, that's a handy page.

12/12/2003 10:55:00 AM

http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/geekery/underappreciated_xhtml_tags.php

And technically, the INS and DEL tags carry a DATETIME attribute so people can tell when the content was modified. The value of the DATETIME attribute is supposed to be in a (non)standard format, so I whipped up a little CGI script to automagically output the correct value (for Michigan/EastCoast only):

http://msittig.freeshell.org/cgi/datetime

12/11/2003 11:50:00 PM

http://www.sinosplice.com/weblog/archives/001027.html

Work well in Linux, too. Thanks John, these will come in handy.

12/10/2003 05:06:00 AM

http://www.simplebits.com/archives/2003/12/01/simplequiz_part_x_multiparagraph_list_items.html#comment51

Hehe, I didn't mean to come across so harshly. I see where you are headed, and I agree that our styles are different. Whereas you value terse, "just enough to get the job done" markup, I've grown towards a "(semantic) markup = meaning, so include as much as you like within the limit of validation" style of marking up content. It's great that XHTML, despite being a very *long* specification, still allows enough flexibility for people to express their individual styles.

12/10/2003 03:05:00 AM

http://disjointed.org/movable-type/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=420

My feeling, as a BS in applied physics now doing a masters program in "area studies", is that some students in undergrad science programs (though I don't want to generalize too far) believe that a college education is about learning more facts than "uneducated" people. Being now in what you might call the "softer" side of academia, I've learned that my sense of critical thinking was really left underdeveloped by being at a science school for four years, and that there is a lot to be gained from studying how to think and learn. I think that the arts and communications majors probably have a better sense of this. However, I will admit that it's easier to sneak by in those majors without a good education because it's harder to measure critial thinking than it is to measure factual knowledge.

12/09/2003 05:16:00 PM

http://www.luckykat.com/blog/

Hmm, at least think of it as a little publicity and a chance to increase your readership. I'd never heard of your weblog before the awards, and this is the third time I've visited in the last week or so. Silver lining?

12/08/2003 01:28:00 AM

http://www.simplebits.com/archives/2003/12/01/simplequiz_part_x_multiparagraph_list_items.html#comments

I go with Doug's answer (Ps in every LI) and kudos to him for the Bartleby reference. Very classy. I would also propose that redundant but semantically meaninful markup is not a crime.

12/06/2003 02:45:00 AM

http://www.simplebits.com/archives/2003/12/05/blogs.html

I haven't used blo.gs, but like Joe I've been using Bloglines for the past week. Very neat, framed interface with weblogs in a tree structure and the ability to group them in folders, arrange them, sort them by name, read all of the new posts in a folder at once... it has cut down on the time I need to check "the usuals".

12/05/2003 06:38:00 PM

http://gominosensei.org/?p=archive/2003_12_01_archive.gomi#107051587560811678

the smashing pumpkins back in their heyday, definitely elastica, veruca salt, the shibuya crowd (P5, cornelius, fantastic plastic machine).

funny, I just heard portishead's "sour times" at the bubble tea shop the other day.

12/05/2003 04:36:00 AM

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/12/04/gawds

Funny, I did something exactly like that just the other day.

12/05/2003 04:36:00 AM

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/12/04/gawds

It's important when composing an ALT text to consider the context of the graphic. For example, a few months ago Hixie gave a markup quiz that asked, among other questions, what would be the proper ALT text for a picture of a wind-blown tree in a weather report. I answered that it would be "Wind-blown tree", but came to realize (when he posted the answers) that it would be more appropriate as "Windy weather today" because that is the message that this image was trying to communicate. If you give a full description in prose of a subsequent graph, it is not necessary to write such a comprehensive ALT text for that graphic. In fact, if you think that there is nothign left to communicate -- that the graphic is just gratuitous eye-candy -- you can even leave the ALT text blank.

I browse the web mostly in lynx (I stay in the console to keep me from random pointless web-surfing; obviously, this is not working). So the Zeldman tutorial was all text to me, although knowing Zeldman I'm sure it's presented very well. The examples he gives are solid, but I think that he could refine the ALT texts that he actually uses for the graphics in his tutorial. For example, I'm guessing that the "slide" that says something about ignoring section 508 if the client says so has an image of Puff Daddy on it, because I see a single line with the two words "Puff Daddy" on it. I don't think this conveys the message that Zeldman is trying to get across, and I would suggest something like "Celebrity clients may feel that ignoring accesibility is OK." Either that, or maybe what he calls the null alt, alt="".

12/04/2003 06:07:00 PM

http://www.sinosplice.com/weblog/archives/000260.html

I suffered :) from an attack similar to Simon's.

Hits to website during Muzi Mei mania

12/04/2003 12:43:00 AM

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/12/02/selectutorial

Russ has a gift for clear and comprehensive explanation. Another great tutorial, in my opinion.

The only thing I would mention is that, like last time, he sometimes chooses to use presentational class names like "big" and "indent", in a tutorial whose intended audience would be better off developing the habit of using semantically meaningful class names.

Again, beautiful tutorial, especially love the diagrams and clean layout.

12/01/2003 10:55:00 PM