20030331 #
2359
Welcome spring #
weather
This past weekend we had some of the most beautiful weather that I can ever remember having in San Francisco in March. From Thursday when the skies cleared and you could easily see the Pacific ocean and the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge towers from Buena Vista Park, to Sunday when 80+ degree temperatures drove city crowds to Ocean Beach.
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friends
Thursday evening I attended a wonderful panel on spoken word [panel photo] led by Kevin Smokler. Afterwards [escalator photo] a bunch of us met up for drinks and late eats at Thirsty Bear. Ran into some folks I haven't seen in over a year, and met some new folks too. Looking forward to making it to an upcoming slam, perhaps some Friday night at Cafe International.
Friday I learned of my last grandparent's passing. It hit me faster and harder than I expected — I don't remember the last time (if ever?) I cried at work. I thought to leave work early but after just trying to finish up what I was in the middle of, 5 o'clock came around before I stole away to Borders to dispose of soon to expire certificates.
Somehow I managed to mostly enjoy a very nice dinner at Julie's with a new friend. Still, my heart was absent. Independently invited and half crashing we went to a friend's birthday gathering where I met one or two friendly folk with whom I had previously only exchanged email. Happy I was to see two friends in particular getting along so well. [Ev birthday photos]
Saturday I BARTed across the bay to help a DJ friend move from the outskirts of Berkeley to the nearby outskirts of Oakland. I met some other folks she both knew and barely knew. There is a unique satisfaction that one feels by helping a distant friend. The Smokehouse veggie burger and chocolate shake was quite satisfying as well. Thanks Amber. A day of taking different trains, walking different (in many ways) hoods, doing activities I almost never do, in weather reminiscent of many a Los Angeles day was a nice escape.
Cooking myself dinner at home provided more comfort than I had expected. Time enough to recover from running around and moving all manner of records and furniture before walking mere blocks for a recent friend's fondue party.
What happened next was both relieving (the host and I had met under somewhat unusual circumstances) and surprising. A coworker of a friend of her's had the cutest of pigtails — but it was familiar diction (the San Fernando Valley is not far from Claremont) and openly warm friendly conversation which disarmed any resistance.
Sunday's dawn was witnessed through bleary eyes, only to oversleep through park skating plans that apparently never materialized. Last minute late lunch plans turned out to be sushi to go with a smarty-pants friend on a San Francisco beach with only the slightest of breezes punctuating the unseasonally balmy weather.
And tonight, dinner at Andalu with a good set of friends, some I had not seen for over a year, and one I had heard of and was happy to finally meet. [Andalu photos]
Friends like soft velvet helped cushion Friday's sad news. Thanks to you all for your warmth, kind words and emails.
Spring has arrived with open warmth, and coupled with open hearts, makes sad hours seem short. Sweet intoxication always hazards withdrawal. But what of these socks?
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20030330 #
1945
CSS Examples and Creative Commons#
web
At the SXSW interactive conference, I attended a panel on the Creative Commons Project. More on the panel and other SXSWi panels later. I had read about some of their work before, but the panel (and introductory animation) helped inspire me to do something I had been thinking about doing for some time.
My intention, when I wrote my CSS Examples, was to provide examples of CSS for the web community to learn from and perhaps even put to use. This is work that I did on my own. Some of those examples were inspired by and reconstructed from (presumably copyrighted) work in other media. These I've left alone for now because I don't know/understand fair use well enough to stick a clear license on them.
However, I have finally licensed all my wholly original examples (including the Box Model Hack and High Pass Filter) under a Creative Commons License. I've indicated as much on each such example page, and in each such example style sheet.
I decided on the "by" (attribution) Creative Commons license because it seemed like the least restrictive CC license. I avoided the "nc" (non-commercial) restriction, because I wrote these examples for folks to use in their personal works, and their professional works. May you profit and prosper.
I realize many of these examples are quite elementary at this point, and there are numerous folks in the web development community that have created far more interesting/useful examples, some of which use some of the tricks/hacks from my examples. I'm happy to of been some help, as I intended to, and the Creative Commons license helps me officially say so.
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20030328 #
1609
Her name is Fatma Dildeg˘mez Çelik #
family
Grandma, you were a stubborn, hardworking dynamo and we loved you. You grew up in a different time and a different country that we can barely begin to understand or relate to and lived a much harder life than any of us kids have or ever will likely come close to. We will miss you. I hope you found peace in your final moments. You have more than earned it.
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20030326 #
1712
screen grab #
media
One of the hazards of having a television attached to your desk (yes, that's what happens when you work in a TV group) is that you see things on TV. Normally I leave mine off because it usually ends up getting tuned to a news channel and then I just find myself getting angrier and angrier over the course of the day. However, I've had it on recently just to catch glimpses of the war
propagandanews.Imagine my surprise when I saw this on CNBC just moments ago (and captured it on my Minolta DImageX thanks to its fast switch-on and snap speed):
Well, Jane, I knew you were painting and perhaps even got some in your hair, but I had no idea you had gotten a collagen implant and were moonlighting as a reporter on CNBC.#
friends
A few more pictures from last Sunday.
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20030325 #
1903
Displacia #
music
So I'm snaking the open wifi at Rockin' Java again (still working on those specifications, they call them working drafts for a reason) and it turns out to be live music open mike night. There are kids lined up with guitars, drums and tambourines. Girls in t-shirts and jeans, dreds and torn threads; guys in hoodies and slacker orange cargos, beards mop hair and sandles. For a moment I blinked and thought I was back in Austin. The music is not bad. But the people are definitely weirder. Which is a good thing.
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friends
Had a great time Sunday. Just keeping it short — shout outs to Eric, Doug, Matt, Merlin, Scott, Mike, Erika, Min Jung, and Cheyenne of course. Merlin snapped some great photos.
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20030322 #
1828
Saturday snippets #
news
It's the weekend, so in between unpacking and cleaning up from being away at two conferences in two weather extremes, I've been catching up a bit on my reading.
- Jason Kottke provides an excellent summary: The war
- Robin reminds us: Never Forget Traitor Jane (At least most of which appears to be very sadly true). Related: WorldNetDaily: Not saluting Jane Fonda, part II, Traitor Jane Fonda.
- Jett Superior: The most dangerous place
- Completely humours offtopic reading to distract you: Robyn: In her post titled My new-style American girlfriend informs us of the possibility of a sequel to Sixteen Candles titled "Thirty-Two Candles".
Update:
- Matt Haughey: Marketers take note
- Chris Pirillo: If I Ran The Zoo
- Derek Powazek: Snapshots from San Francisco
- Damn tourist protesters. Get the f*** off my porch.
Comments:
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friends
I'm off in a bit to a friend's place for small gathering. Maybe I'll see some of you there. If you're staying at home tonight, my movie suggestion for the night is Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hepburn and Peppard will keep you company.
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20030321 #
1910
Cafe S5 #
web
If you happen to be in the San Francisco area this weekend and can avoid getting arrested (or can be released by Sunday afternoon), feel free to join:
- Who: myself, Eric Meyer, Douglas Bowman and whoever else wants to
- What: talk about standards, semantics, structure, style, sxsw, etc.. snack, imbibe caffeinated (or not) beverages and take advantage of open wifi at
- Where: Rockin' Java
- When: this Sunday 20030323 14:00-18:00.
This is the third informal wifi/cafe/web related gathering that Doug and I have planned. So far it's been a good size crowd, just barely big enough to discuss a few topics at a time, still small enough for everyone to join in on a particularly hot topic. Hope to see you there.
Comments:
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20030320 #
1945
Rockin' Java: default )( 900kbps #
cafe
Thanks to a tip from Leila, I'm sitting at Rockin' Java sipping a mocha and on the speakers they just played New Order, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, The Cure. I might as well be in highschool.
But in highschool my net connectivity was through the phone line into a 300/1200 baud(bps) modem card in an Apple //e 128KB/1MHz with 280x192 (560x192 in super hires mode) monochrome green display at my parents house. I couldn't have dreamed back then that one day I would be sitting in a cafe connected through the frickin air at 900000+ bps with a 11000000 bps modem card in an Apple PowerBook 256MB/500MHz with 1152x768 millions of colors display. Makes me wonder what another 10+ years will bring.
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1030
Roll reset #
blog
I've moved all that I was reading daily, weekly, monthly etc. from my now file to my was file because I'm certainly not keeping up with that much and it was time for a roll reset. The lists of msft and w3c bloggers are references more than an indication of what I read (hence the heading level promotions). And I've still kept a handful of folks referenced nested inside the
<object>markup, which all the bots should find for their statistical purposes.For now, I have much work to catch up on since returning from two weeks of travels. And I still have piles of paper and taxes to go through. So I am self-limiting my blog reading. I'll probably still keep up with a few close friends' sites, and you can of course always get my attention by linking to my blog or a specific entry, as I'll still be constantly doing egorati searches for comments and references.
Comments:
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20030319 #
1942
SXSW review part I: interactive people #
web
It's been a week since the SXSW interactive conference closed. With each passing day I can feel the memories slipping and blurring. Some have already been lost.
SXSW is overwhelming, and I was certainly overwhelmed. The plethora of people, panels, parties, movies, music and random happenings sprinkled throughout is enough to exceed anyone's sensory attention bandwidth, even those that consider themselves multitaskers.
I bumped into lots of incredible people at this year's SXSW: good friends, folks I had met perhaps but once before, people with whom I'd only exchanged email / blogposts, and few who I had never met nor heard of before.
I started this list in my blogroll during the conference — it was fun to watch it grow — and I finally styled the unordered list with list-style:decimal so I could keep count. No need to change the underlying markup, because semantically the list was still unordered — there was no particular meaning implied by the order of the list items. They were sorted alphabetically purely for ease of navigation. I'm sure I've missed a few folks, certainly not intentionally (if we met at SXSW and you're not listed here, drop me a line with your URL). Here are they, from Aaron to Zeldman:
- Aaron — kid genius with maturity beyond his years.
Adam — ultrageek from Japan and overall nice guy.
Prone to jumping into people's laps. Thanks so much for your spontaneous OXO bag handle gift — what a brilliant product.
- Anil — softspoken NYC hipster and blogstar.
Anitra —
always pleasant accessibility expert from Kansas.
- Ben & Mena — wonderful to finally meet the Movable Type dynamic duo. Easy to see why everyone adores you two. May you reap good fortune for all your good work.
Billy & Jessica —
another cute couple who is not afraid to share their happiness, optimism and hip sense of cool. nicely done with that Sprint project Jessica. Posts: breaking bread with brad, true texan experience,
- Bob of Macromedia — who has the admirable title of "Senior Product Manager for Accessibility". I salute your efforts.
Boris — who had special business cards made just for SXSW 2003 which informed the holder that that was where they met. thanks for your kind words as well. and for helping spread the message. Posts: Necessary evil, and the next 4-5.
- Brad Fitzpatrick — Mr. Livejournal himself. Any chance it might serve valid XHTML+CSS (or even just valid HTML+CSS) some day?
- Brad Graham — who I missed my opportunity to break bread with because I was catching up an overdue work assignment. My loss. The "Hello, My URL is" name tags were brilliant. And who would have guessed what EtherPeg would pluck from the air late night in the OMNI Lobby?
Brandon —
thanks for the ride back from Sterling's party, and for the one word (miscommunication) that explained so much.
- Bruce — thanks for yet another head twirling party and the silky smooth smoked cactus tequila.
- Cam — world traveler and fellow cinemaniac.
- Carole & JF — wonderful to start the conference off with some friendly verbal jousting in the OMNI lobby. keep on diving into beauty. us non-designers appreciate it! Carole's Post_sxsw03 after_words.
Carrie — the proud brandisher and deservedly so. Your glow radius is quite impressive. Post(s): SXSW Notes.
Christine — even Starbucks has Big Pink Cookies.
And apologies for the eyebleeds. Keep the curly braces in the sheets, not in your eyes.
Christine's SXSW photos.
- Cory — giver of conference wifi and source of inspiration for many.
- Dan — met briefly but now memory not found.
- Derek — Mr. Fray from the Citay. Why the bitterness o'er blogs? Peace Powazek, peace. Let us drown such bitterness over a Reverie mocha or two. I'm buying.
Doug — too suave for words. catching eyes and watching eyes being caught. don't [stop]. we'll be causing more trouble soon enough. what else is a rel="friend"for? When Names Become People.- Edward — nice to briefly meet you in the green room as we were both hurriedly preparing for our respective panels which unfortunately overlapped. Nice looking work site, and it's valid too!
Elizabeth of Milkshake Media — nice to meet you, please pass on my thanks to your whole crew for a superb party, and did I mention how cute those bunny ears looked and how I'm almost ashamed of thinking that? But what I really meant to ask was — where's the HTML version of milkshakemedia.com?
- Eric — super CSS book author, teacher and overall nice guy. It was an honor to serve on a panel with you — nevermind that I was blogging (while still on the panel) while you were speaking. Distraction is a constant hazard for multitaskers with very short attention spans. Fun at SXSW.
Ernie — blogstar. thanks for keeping it funny and real.
We interrupt this vacation...
- Ev — Mr. Blogger and now Googlian. Always good to see a nice guy succeed and stay nice.
- Heather Champ — Queen of reflective surfaces and those that would photograph themselves in them. NYC transplant catching the pot for calling the kettle black, literally.
- Heather Gold — nice to briefly meet you and looking forward to seeing your performance in SF.
- Ian Lloyd — gregarious british WaSP member who helped keep me conversationally awake the night I worked on my presentation.
- James — file not found. Attempting neural pathway recovery...
- Jane — hanging in the OMNI not taking any shiyat, keepin' the lungs on the inside, just barely. Happy that you could make it out to southby. Wishing you well.
Jen — super HTML book author and rockstar interviewer. Hopefully the Liz Phair magnet magic worked. Good guess on her new song title. Jen's SXSW photos.
- Jesse — soft spoken usability expert and HTML 3.2 advocate. Just try a little CSS — it won't hurt. I promise. Perhaps a little 'color' on a 'background' with your choice of 'font' on tap.
- Jish — warm friend to all, don't you know everyone wants to hang with you? looking forward to helping warm your new house.
- JP — met briefly. memory file empty.
- June — who seems to lack a home page, surprising for a former Hotwired person. Bummed that our panels were at the same time so I had to miss yours. Don't be a stranger.
- Justin — we only briefly met. Simpler formats do matter. Especially for tool makers.
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Karl — W3C QA lead extraordinaire. Great to have someone from W3C attend SXSW and meet/chat with real web authors and real web designers.
- Kevin — publishing rockstar, film buff, gamer and optimist. Thanks for the late night / early morning conversations. Here's to having an impact all year long. Kevin's SXSW summaries: The way home... and Ten Things I Learned at SXSW.
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Lane — Adaptive Path partner and self-deprecating humorist. Parties make it easy to miss(mess?) with human interface don't they? Don't mind the X's on the backs of her hands.
- Marc — any friend of Molly's is a friend of mine. Keep it usable.
Matt — Nice photos, matt. Careful with those porn stars, this one looks hungry enough to eat you all up.
- Meryl — nice to finally meet you. Your site looks just fine to me in IE5/Mac.
- Michael — Mr. Kaliber10000. Apologies for not answering your email about valid frames without borders. I had no answer, and still don't, except perhaps: use javascript as a workaround.
- Mike — of course the next time we saw each other after last year's SXSW would be in the lobby of the OMNI. At least this time we were not looking up a drink recipe.
- Min Jung — great to meet you after all that Cheyenne has said. Where did that incriminating photo go?
- Molly — Professora with the beautiful Berlin dress and olive leather jacket. SF will miss your sense of style among other things. Good luck in Italy!
- Natalie — nice to meet you and thanks for your very kind words about the CSS panel. CSS is not evil! Just take it a little bit at a time and headaches can be avoided. Looking forward to your pictures.
- Nick — Mr. Digital-Web who recognized me moments before I recognized him.
- Pableaux — thanks for the ride in the back of a pickup and entertaining conversation to boot.
- Rebecca — dark and dashing with the killer coat or was it a cloak?
Scott — guitarist and geek lyricist without equal. crazy punk bands, mosh pit included. What more trouble can we get into next year?
Scott's belated photos.
Shannon — soft spoken with short hair and a super skirt. i really didn't need to know what grade that skirt was originally for. thanks for the recursion shot.
- Steve — techie extraordinaire and assembler of comprehensive CSS filter templates. looking forward to seeing more of your good work. until then, try and stay out of trouble.
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Styn — awardshow MC and all around great guy. red bad. green good. the rest is up to you.
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Tanya — so nice to meet you and hang out. We missed goodbyes but perhaps there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe we can swap taxonomies some time.
- Vadim — web renaissance man. Glad you made it out to southby. Now when are we going to see that blog?
- Wes — HtP! Nice to meet you and thanks for the SXSW music updates/recommendations.
Zeldman — the jedi master of web design. If we had but one tenth of his wisdom, generosity or charm.
Last but certainly not least, huge props to Hugh Forrest and all the SXSW staff for an excellent job at running things smoothly, working out minor projector display problems, making the green room into a "safe comfort zone" and helping keep the overall atmosphere informal and fun.
I have not seen such polite badge checkers. And to the siren sweet SXSW volunteer girls, your presence was intoxicating and made focussing on the tasks/presentations/panelists/speakers quite a fun challenge indeed. You may break my heart anytime. Please.
Update:
Saw at a distance, maybe even exchanged eye contact, but didn't meet.
- Alison: south by southwest 2003
- Jason Levine: March 2003 archives and SXSW 2003 photos
- Matt Haughey: SXSW 2003 and his photos
Comments:
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1151
Last card undefined #
travel
I ran out of business cards at SXSW. Nearly. I had one left in my pocket when I lifted off from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport last Sunday.
Then I met a very cool person at the gate for my next flight at Houston airport. Not my fault. She just happened to be sitting next the only empty comfortable spot within range of a power outlet. We swapped cards. She invited me to lunch, and later the option of dinner. No, nothing like that. It would be presumptuous for me to think so, so I chose instead to not know, to consider it undefined, regardless of what fleeting hopes may want or want not. It may be ironic that she got my last business card. Or not.
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work
I probably have a very small handful of remaining business cards scattered around my office — there's one behind my keyboard now. Oh but it has part of some other paper stuck on the back. Not in any shape to hand out. The point is I have to order new business cards, and the process of doing so seems to always force a reevaluation.
What really is my title? What do I really work on? For a software developer, coding on a single project, there are easy obvious answers. But I don't just write code. In fact, only a fraction of my time is spent writing code these days, and then, most of the time on other people's machines. The work I do can or may affect multiple projects. Product definitions/names/version numbers change sometimes week to week. And I don't just do product development, I also represent Microsoft in two working groups at the W3C.
Ordering new business cards also feels like an affirmation of commitment — it's like saying: I see myself staying long enough to pass out this new set of business cards that I acquired (even though that has never happened to me in the past, until now. Either I switched groups or companies before being able to hand out all previous sets of business cards.)
So I need to think about this a bit before I order a new set. It is good to periodically reevaluate how your job/career is going anyway, to see if it is going the way you want it to, and if not, take an active role in changing it. But I'm procrastinating for now. Enough navel gazing. I have working drafts to update.
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20030317 #
2315
Not ready, not waiting #
1208
Test of the emergency inbox overflow system — 6 years #
infra
It appears that while I was traveling my work mailbox exceeded the ridiculously low quota of 100MB (imagine that). Everyone with whom I swapped cards with over the past two weeks: don't bother emailing me at tantekc at microsoft dotcom — email me at tantek dotcom instead. So far it looks like the inbox stuffing culprits are (in no particular order):
- Spam. Enough said.
- System Administrator "Undeliverable" messages (which I can only presume are in response to a spammer forging their headers to cause replies to go to me — not sure why spammers are picking on me in particular)
- Fellow workers sending out mass emailings to lists with big enclosures. I am this close to setting up a rule bouncing any email with an enclosure greater than say about 50K. For anything bigger than that (and enclosures in general), it is much more appropriate to post such documents to the appropriate website (intrasite) and just send me the URL.
- A stingy quota. 100MB is too small and I have complained about this to our IT department. Disk space is cheap, and the spammers know it. People are not going to login during vacation etc. to delete the spam in their inboxes just so they can keep receiving work email. The disk quota should be at a minimum enough to hold six weeks worth of spam (and large enclosures from folks who have yet to hear of something called a webserver (or even file server for that matter)).
Bottom line: don't bother emailing me at work for a while. Email me at tantek dotcom instead.
Now back to your regularly scheduled log entries.
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work
Six years.
Today I have been at Microsoft for six years.
This is the longest I have worked anywhere (Apple was second longest at four years). I didn't think when I started that I would be here this long. I can see still being here in a year, but it is difficult to see much beyond that. Sometimes I'm not even sure about six months. Sometimes it feels like if I only fixed a few more things I would be happily productive here for years.
I've decided to start a list of all the stupid things that happen at work and what smarter alternatives should be happening instead. You won't be seeing this list, but I will say that the first few items on the list can be inferred from the above paragraphs on email. We'll see how long the list gets and if/when any of the things on it get fixed/resolved.
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20030313 #
1733
Liz Phair signed my Powerbook #
music
We saw and heard last minute addition Liz Phair at SXSW. A quick summary for now because Scott just came downstairs and we have food and music to get to.
- Liz Phair is amazing. Her pictures do not come close to capturing her presence.
- She started out by playing four songs; three from her yet to be released album — hearing her voice almost makes you forget her looks. Almost.
- The President of the Recording Academy interviewed her.
- Her new album is being released June 24th.
- A plant fell down.
- Lots of Q&A.
- They played two of her new songs over the speakers.
- A bit more Q&A.
- Afterwards she hung around to meet people and sign things for them.
- We weren't going to, but Scott got inspired and decided to have her sign one of his postcards. I suggested — only half seriously — that he have her sign his iBook. He was all over it. I figure, hey why not, so I had her sign my TiBook as well.
- Pictures to follow.
See Scott's brief writeup as well.
Comments:
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1448
Daniel Lanois, The Journey #
music
SXSW interactive ended Tuesday night (still working on the write-up and photos) so work is done, and the next three days will be a nice brief vacation in Austin with plenty of independent films and music. Scott called me this morning and reminded me that the SXSW music keynote address for the day by Daniel Lanois started at 10:30. I went directly to the big ballroom and found Scott sitting in the front row next to an empty seat.
Daniel Lanois played acoustic guitar bit, and then talked a bit about what inspires him, what it's been like and what keeps him going. Choice quote:
"Yeah I'll tell you about preproduction. Press the record button because that might be your master tape."
Afterwards I picked up my SXSW Music bag with its 30 pounds of goodies. We checked out the exposition floor briefly where a friend of a friend gave us some passes to a private party.
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movie
We walked quickly over to the Alamo theatre, entered right at noon and found decent seats to watch "The Journey". They serve food at the Alamo which was good since I skipped breakfast. Quite an inspirational movie and highly recommended. The best I have seen so far at SXSW. Yesterday I caught "A Midsummer Nights Rave", and the evening before saw the US premiere of "Phone Booth", which was an excellent one-act style suspense thriller with a bit of comedy mixed in.
"The Journey" was first shown at SXSW 2001 and was brought back for a repeat this year. The film was apparently filmed over 200 days, probably in 2000. I won't spoil the film for you, but they ran into great difficulty trying to get an interview with a particular individual and it made more sense once I considered the fact that it was the year 2000 when they asked for the interview, and that's when things were particularly insane in that industry.
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20030311 #
1428
Rise of the creatives #
anthro
Just got out of a talk by Richard Florida titled "The Rise of the Creative Class". Quite a few good points. What I liked perhaps the most was that he openly admitted to the weaknesses in his theories.
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mind
Side thought: one of the signs of intelligence is the ability to recognize your own flaws and mistakes, admit them and actively seek input and feedback on them. It matters more to be correct today than to have been correct yesterday. But don't tell that to all those "experts" that spend 95% of their time defending the clever things they said in the past rather than swiftly correcting and improving, so they can move onto saying newer, better and more clever things.
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1317
Presentation style tweak #
web
I updated the styling with a couple more style rules (it was that easy) for IE6/Windows. François Nonnenmacher posted a screenshot of Safari's attempt. Looks like a lack of support for visibility:hidden which I use to show one slide at a time and hide the rest. If experience is any measure, Dave Hyatt will have it fixed quickly, just as text/html object inclusion problem was fixed quickly. Or am I missing something? Certainly possible as the presentation was written between midnight and six, when creativity seems to flow the best, particularly for procastinators.
Comments:
- Dave Hyatt
[Nice to know it wasn't a quirk in my style sheet. Thanks for the followup Dave.]
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- Dave Hyatt
20030310 #
0851
CSS: Between the Style Sheets #
web
Just finished up my brief presentation portion of the CSS panel at SXSW. I've posted my presentation - but be forewarned, it uses "position:fixed", which is not widely supported, and I've only tried it out on IE5/Mac. Of course you can always toggle the style sheets off using the "Toggle CSS Style Sheets" favelet and look at markup with default styling.
Comments:
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20030309 #
0858
Preoccupied #
blog
SXSW is a bit overwhelming. There is so much to see, so much to do, so many parties, and of course so many great people to meet up with. I'm also still working on my panel presentation for tomorrow (shhh... don't tell Hugh). So I'm keeping the "bumping" section updated (email me if we bumped and I didn't get your URL), but there won't be many posts until after the panel tomorrow. See you then.
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20030308 #
1442
Odometer photos and SXSW sightings #
transport
Tim Bray photographed his odometer at 11,111km. I caught my odometer at the end of last year with some appropriate numbers as well.
20020 miles, with 200.2 miles on the tripmeter. The number 2002, which is a palindrome, is repeated twice with surrounding zeroes 02002020020 (if you can see the 0 mph indicator as the last 0 on the end of the tripmeter) which is of course also a palindrome.
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blog
New (temporary) section in my "now...": bumping into at SXSW.
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20030307 #
1824
+70 degrees #
travel
I just went from Boston, where it was about 10 degrees F give or take a few degrees at times, to Austin where it is (or was a few hours ago) about 80 degrees F. Checked into the OMNI, unpacked, gathered essentials for the evening and headed downstairs...
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friends
to the lounge to grab a bite, when Nick Finck recognized me just moments before I recognized him. Carole Guevin was there too. I missed going to "Breaking Bread with Brad" because I was finishing up some work that I was supposed to have completed a week ago, before I left for the W3C week long meeting. And now I'm off to finish that up.
I did however manage to snap off a quick photo just as I was getting Carole riled up about something.
First of many "2003 SXSW OMNI lounge photos" to be sure.
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20030306 #
2359
Wrapping up #
web
My attendance at the week long W3C plenary and all group meeting is drawing to a close. There was a reception after yesterday's sessions. I've posted a few photos from the W3C plenary reception. I have a few in particular which I'm reserving for W3C members only. Some of them are awkward in one way or another, and some of them are simply goofy. It's not like anyone was doing a Princess Leia "Help me Obi-wan" impression. No — I can't imagine that happening at a W3C meeting.
Today I attended the HTML working group meeting. Late in the morning we joined (no pun intended) the Semantic Web Architecture meeting where we talked about how to reformulate RDF into a
<meta>syntax to enable validatable embedding into HTML documents. Just afterwards I finally got a chance to meet my AC representative David Turner face-to-face for the first time — which is ironic because we have emailed each other for years.And of course — it snowed! Check out Chaals with cape and pipe, undaunted by the rapidly falling snow. There's also a shot of the Sonesta hotel with snow encrusted signage.
Sat next to Tim at lunch. Asked him if URLs are supposed to be treated as names, then why didn't our name tags for the conference have our URLs on them? He said he'd talk to the staff about it.
Afternoon meetings went pretty well too. Took a one hour break before dinner.
Unwilling to venture very far, a crowd of us went across the street for dinner at the Cheesecake factory. Nobody had cheesecake. Afterwards we wandered back to the Sonesta where clusters of W3C-types had claimed the lounge, the bar, etc.
Somehow we got into a discussion about which (or how many) Google search queries (for normal words, without our names) would return pages from our sites at or near the top of the search results. Michael Rys seems to own the term masked puffer (Google search). Of course I had to share that I seem to own bathroom tiles (Google search), and box model (Google search — nevermind that the definitive CSS2 chapter on the Box Model shows up at #2). These rankings/results change all the time however, so your results may vary.
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blog
Our search engine discussions splintered into a number of different but related threads of conversation. Paul Cotton remarked as to how this one time, when he was in Hong Kong, he decided to google his daughter, and found her blog. At which point he encouraged me to bring up her page because he wanted to show me something.
Look what she made. As someone who spent countless hours (days?) in my gradeschool years constructing polyhedra from paper starting with little more than a few math books, how could I find such gorgeous objects anything short of super cool?
I don't think Paul had any hidden agenda in directing me there. Or if so he hid it quite well when I joked about it with him. She is quite cute, and into origami polyhedra though.
Random blog note: I got email from a few folks with URLs to either home pages or blogs of W3C folks. Haven't had a chance to go through them all yet. Expect the W3C section in my blogroll to grow soon.
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travel
I'm totally shredded. Up late (way post this blog post time) wrapping up a few things, photos, etc. Only a few hours to pack, sleep, checkout and find a cab to the airport. Enjoy the photos — not sure when I'll have a chance to reconnect (though I have a feeling Cory will have setup some wifi by the time I get to the conference hall.) I'll be on the Monday morning CSS panel from 10-11am in Room 18AB. See you in Austin.
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Remote presence #
web
One cannot be in two places at once. Perhaps not physically, but certainly virtually, and sometimes without even knowing it.
Due to my caffeine excursion I ended up missing the final session of the day, the "open floor session", the infamous session which has provided an opportunity for any number of outspoken opinions to be aired. This year was no exception. Or so I heard.
First Steven Pemberton stood up and said something along the lines of: "RDF's model is useful, but its syntax..." I'm neutral on the utility of RDF's model (see Cory Doctorow's Metacrap). However, I'm certainly in agreement that RDF syntax is far more complex than it needs to be.
Next, Håkon Lie stood up and essentially pointed out that a <p> is a <p> is a <p>. There is no need for multiple namespaces for such elements. In fact, there could easily be a single W3C namespace for all document format work.
Ian Jacobs pointed out that he had heard me say the same thing a while ago [This is true, I have been saying this, for over a year if not two at this point]. To which Håkon retorted that he likes to steal ideas from Microsoft from time to time [which apparently was not minuted in the IRC log ;-)]. Apparently TimBL had something to say about this as well:
- 22:50:37 [AK-Scribe]
- IJ: Tantek suggested there be a W3C namespace
- 22:51:12 [AK-Scribe]
- TimBL: I think it's a perfectly reasonable idea.
Note: IRC log timestamps appear to be in Z+0, whereas my blog is in Z-8, and the meeting was taking place in Z-5. Here is the entire IRC log for the plenary day.
Appears to be W3C member only — not sure why — keep trying to reload it to see if they fix the perms.Namespaces can be useful for some applications. And certainly they provide different vendors the flexibility necessary to reuse tag names for different uses. However, web authors don't want to deal with the additional complexity and markupJunk that namespaces bring to documents. While multiple namespaces may be good (even necessary) for multiple vendors, why does W3C need to use multiple namespaces in end user document formats?
As far as I can tell, the only instance of tagname reuse that namespaces have enabled in W3C document formats is the new <a> tag in SVG, which uses XLink attributes, e.g. 'xlink:href' rather than simply using 'href' as in HTML. Every typical web developer to whom I have explained this to has responded with a look of confusion. Followed shortly thereafter with some exasperated expression like: "That's just stupid. Why would they do that?" This typically leads to a brief discussion of XLink at which point the tone of the response turns from confusion to anger: "Why the hell are they taking something so short and simple and making it so lengthy and complicated? They're smoking crack!" To which I have had no answer. After hearing this enough times from enough web developers, I was convinced that XLink is doomed to failure on the web, and not just because it conflates presentation and semantics.
But getting back to the point, which is that in the one instance of tagname reuse that namespaces have permitted so far in W3C document formats, it's been gratuitous (different tag namespace, different attribute namespace, same hyperlink anchor functionality), and only enabled one working group to take a simple, well understood tag (perhaps the single most important tag on the web, since hyperlinks are the most defining aspect of the web), and make it needlessly different, and more complex at that. For what reason? To make use of a "generic XML solution" (XLink).
Namespaces allow different working groups to use the same tag names to mean different things. Even if namespaces allow XML processors to distinguish between such tags, to humans, a tag name is a tag name, and we can't help but be confused when the same tag means different things, especially in the same document, or even on the same web.
If rather than resorting to namespaces to independently define their own variants of tags, working groups would simply communicate more and reuse each others' well established tags (attributes, properties, values, etc.), everyone would benefit. Of course reuse is not always possible. Innovation is appropriate when current solutions are insufficient, or perhaps simply ugly. In either case, it makes sense to simply pick new names for such new features.
Comments:
- Daniel Glazman
[Daniel, my point was not one W3C namespace for all things common to all XML dialects, but one W3C namespace for W3C end user document formats. Let the XML dialects for machines have as many namespaces as they want — what matters is the simplicity and ease of use of end user document formats.]
- Dan Cederholm
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1553
Whither CSS in tomorrow's web? #
web
In the block diagram on slide 6 of Steve Bratt's presentation which shows some relative relationship of W3C standards, there is one W3C standard that is missing: CSS.
In my opinion CSS should be in the aqua colored box along with Accessibility etc. E.g.:
CSS, Accessibility, Internationalization, Device Independence, QA
This makes sense because all XML based semantic content markup languages can(should?) use CSS for presentation, and using CSS to separate the presentation from the content markup helps accessibility (with user style sheets and the cascade), internationalization (with :lang etc.), and device independence (media queries).
Fear not folks, I just spoke with Steve Bratt, and he said it was an unintended omission (DOM is also missing from the diagram), and agreed that the aqua box is the right place for CSS. He said he'd fix the diagram. Cool.
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W3C plenary session 6: One Web or Four? #
web
Panel with Steven Pemberton, Brian McBride, Noah Mendelsohn, Roy T. Fielding, and moderated by Stuart Williams.
- One Web or
FourFiveThreeFourThreeMore: Hypertext.Presentation appears to be W3C member only — not sure why — keep trying to reload it to see if they fix the perms.Steven Pemberton is out of control! (in a very good way)
This is the funniest presentation I have seen all week.
Every XML-head needs to see this presentation
(W3C member only)now.The bottom line: it's the ease of authoring, stupid.
No URL for slides. Check the agenda overview where links may show up later.
- One Web or Three? HTTP by Roy T. Fielding. AKA "Boring Web" (his words). HTTP hasn't changed much in the past 10 years, and that's a good thing.
- Web Services & The World Wide Web by Noah Mendelsohn
- Answering the brief (in part) by Brian McBride
Comments:
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- One Web or
cafe
Ok, I haven't had coffee all day and I'm just not a plumbing person. HTTP and Web Services aren't quite enough to get me excited. I need to run across the street to Starbucks for a fix. And I just wanted to leave you with some brief writings from William Gibson's blog: CAFE ELECTRIQUE. Summary: Hey all you Starbucks haters — get over yourselves.
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W3C plenary session 5: W3C Glossary #
web
Schema and Tools for Interoperability and Common Understanding
- Wendy Chisholm is chairing the panel, introducing the subject, and exploring how it relates to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). No URL for slides. Check the agenda overview where links may show up later.
- Lofton Henderson is following up with "A Glossary Case Study: QA". Again, no URL for slides. Check the agenda overview where links may show up later.
- Glossaries in XML Spec by Norman Walsh
- Ideas and prototype for a W3C Glossary by Olivier Thereaux
Having seen something which made me think WTF?, I had to get up and ask what seemed to be a really dumb question. Always best to ask really dumb questions in front of a big crowd.
Q: I have heard many times today and this week that we should all be trying to reuse W3C technologies rather than making up our own. So, I feel I have to ask the obvious question, why is there <termdef> and <term> elements when we have <DL>, <DT>, <DD> and <DFN> which have been in HTML since at least six years ago?
A: XML Spec has more precise semantics.
Q: Followup: Not according to this presentation. It looks like all that happened was a gratuitous renaming of element names.
A: Followup: People have misused HTML.
I didn't bother answering. I think I had made my point. Dan Connolly agreed with me on IRC:
- 20:47:20 [dj-scribe]
- Tantek Celik (Microsoft)
- 20:47:59 [dj-scribe]
- TC: <term> and <termdef> are new, why aren't we using <dl> <dd> <dt>?
- ...
- ...
- 20:48:33 [DanC]
- (go TC! that was my question to spec-prod years ago. or to SGML-ERB or something. yes, seems gratuitous to me too.)
Many folks came up to me afterwards during the break and agreed as well.
For more reading on the whole problem of people trying to replace HTML just for the sake of replacing HTML, here is a previous post on semantic markup.
Comments:
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Multiple namespaces is #
web
The elephant in the middle of the room for any W3C language integration discussion — how do you solve the problem of integration of multiple namespaces?
Well, consider the possibility that integration isn't the problem.
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W3C plenary session 4: Integrating our Products #
web
- Integrating our Products: XForms by Steven Pemberton
- Growing up with MathML by Stephen Buswell (Stilo), David Carlisle (NAG)
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Linking lunch #
web
I sat at one of the two Linking BOF tables with, clockwise around the table from my left: Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer (SAP / Mozquito), Liam Quin (W3C staff), David Cleary (Progress Software), Dmitry Lenkov (Oracle), Micah Dubinko (Cardiff), Glenn Adams (XFSI), Steven Pemberton (CWI/W3C), Håkon Lie (Opera Software ), and Henry S. Thompson (University of Edinburgh).
We brainstormed mostly about what kind of process might have a hope of moving linking forward, but we also discussed some issues about linking as well. As this wasn't minuted, and it wasn't clear whether the discussion should be public or not, I'm not going to say much here.
I'll repeat one statement I made during the discussion:
Interoperability should not be used to block evolution.
I'll let the other folks blog what they said during lunch. Well, those few of them that have blogs (Hey Sebastian and Micah!). You would think that with blogs being the first widely adopted realization of Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a two-way web, that more W3C staff (and folks involved with W3C) would have blogs. You would think.
Note: I have a "w3c blogs" section in my now... "blogroll". Notice that there are only two of them. Any other W3C team members have blogs? Let me know and I'll add you to the list.
Update: Henry S. Thompson has posted his Notes from XLink BOF at W3C Technical Plenary. Appears to be W3C member only — not sure why — keep trying to reload it to see if they fix the perms.
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BLOG CLUB #
blog
- The first rule of BLOG CLUB is you talk about BLOG CLUB.
- The second rule of BLOG CLUB is you talk about BLOG CLUB.
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TAG presentation and discussion #
web
The W3C TAG are holding a panel, giving presentations, and discussing a few issues. Presentations:
- Stuart Williams — TAG Introduction
- Dan Connolly — Architecture Document Overview
- Chris Lilley — XMLl ID for Well-Formed Documents
- Norm Walsh — XML Profiles
- Paul Cotton — Namespace Documents
Some of the issues being discussed:
- The ID problem. In an XML document, how do you know which attribute is the "ID" attribute without always downloading the DTD? Should you just always download the DTD? Mobile phones cannot be required to "just download the DTD". And wouldn't downloading the DTD result in w3.org suffering from the equivalent of a DoS attack?
- XML documents without DTDs. Should there be a third level of XML processor conformance that allows ignoring DTDs or lack thereof?
- General problem of subset/profile proliferation and interoperability.
- What is at the end of a namespace URI? Is it machine readable? Human readable? Can it be both? [My opinion: it MUST be both human and machine readable, and if you first make it human readable, with a little more work you can make it machine readable, but not vice versa]
I'm fairly certain that the whole linking issue is not going to be discussed during this session, since there is a BOF table (actually two — not sure if they will be linked or not) at lunch time.
Yes of course I will be there. Not sure if will be able to eat lunch, discuss the topic(s), talk on IRC and live-blog all at the same time. There are limitations in human multitasking capabilities. At least using present day technologies.
Comments:
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0723
No P2P in the ballroom please #
infra
Someone just made an announcement that [here at the W3C plenary meeting] we have a 3Mbit network connection which is plenty for everyone [in this massive ballroom] to check email, do IRC and even browse the web, but is not sufficient for folks to be running P2P file sharing services.
Everyone was just asked to disable P2P software on their machiens, or else their MAC address(es) will be disabled from the hotel network, and there can be no guarantee as to when (if ever) it(they) will be renabled.
(Loud cheer from the crowd).
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Any where, any device, any time #
web
- Dave Raggett's presentation on device independence.
- Device Independence — now
by Roger Gimson.
Presentation appears to be W3C member only — not sure why — keep trying to reload it to see if they fix the perms. - Voice Browser Working Group by Jim Larson. Jim commits the first plenary day foul and uses something OTHER than HTMl for his presentation (in this case, PDF).
- Multimodal Interaction Goals by Debbie Dahl.
Presentation appears to be W3C member only.
... any person
Challenges
- Device Independence - future by Roger Gimson.
Presentation appears to be W3C member only. - Voice Browser by Scott McGlashan.
Presentation appears to be W3C member only. - Multimodal Interaction Challenges for the Web by Debbie Dahl.
Presentation appears to be W3C member only.
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0612
W3C Plenary Day #
web
I'm at the W3C Plenary day listening to Steve Bratt's intro to the day and overview. His presentation is available. Update: Agenda for the day.
If you have IRC, you are welcome to join channel #tp on irc.w3.org:6665 to help record the meeting.
and on that channel:
ht confirms this is a public channel
So come on in!
Note: from any IRC connection enter:
- /server irc.w3.org 6665 to connect
- /join #tp to join the technical plenary channel
- /list to see the list of channels
- /who to see the list of who is on your current channel
Comments:
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1920
Evening Escape #
game
Chris lives mere minutes from the Sonesta where the W3C week long all group meeting is being held, and his friends were putting on a game night. After three grueling days of CSS working group meetings, I was ready to swap out my standards engine and swap in my gaming engine. Sebastian (who founded Mozquito) was about to crash so I dragged him along.
Chris drove past the hotel as we ran into the mall across the street. We grabbed Mexican food to go (in a Cambridge food court — not sure what we were thinking), and Chris drove around and met us behind an alley. Went over to his friend Dennis' place and played a couple of games: Cube Farm and Settlers of course. Somehow I scored the most cube farm points (beginner's luck), and Chris crushed everyone at Settlers, despite Sebastian completely encircling me with roads and connecting the coasts.
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20030303 #
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Colder #
weather
It's a bit colder here. 14F - nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing. I've updated my Weather Pixie so you can see what kind of weather we're having here in Cambridge.
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Zoneshifting #
travel
It's actually about 1AM local (Eastern) time — my blog times are always in Pacific. The CSS working group meeting starts bright and early in eight hours. Time to start zone shifting. I can't remember the last time I went to sleep at 10pm PST. Good night.
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Can you hear me now? #
comm
It only took a couple of days of considering the options after cancelling my cell to decide on a new phone and plan. I was already leaning toward the Nokia 3590, and John Hardman emailed me to confirm my leanings. Thanks John. So a couple of weeks ago I picked up my new cell. Say hello to 415.254.96** on the AT&T GSM network.
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transport
I was leaning towards taking the T (Boston's light rail system) from the airport to (somewhere close to) the hotel, but I still remember how bad (long, freezing, wet) the walk was from the Lechmere station to the Sonesta hotel two years ago. So I opted for a cab which turned out to be far more entertaining.
The driver was a polite gentleman (not what I remember of Boston cabbies) and quite talkative. Thought I heard my phone ring, but it turned out my cabbie had the same phone and had just happened to have chosen the same polyphonic ringtone (15th on the list of default choices). It was his two year old calling him. He asked me how much my hotel was, and then proceeded to relate a story about how he had had to pay $150 for only a three hour stay at a hotel room. I decided not to ask.
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10 minute checkin #
transport
I made it from curbside arrival to my departure gate at SFO in about 10 minutes. Unbelievable. No line at the Continental e-ticket checkin. As I raced the touch-screen, a ticket agent materialized and tagged my bag . She directed me to the baggage x-ray where a bald man waited patiently. He took my rollaway in one swift motion and fed the machine. A few minutes of shuffling through security, some express cash from the ATM, a hundred yards or so and there was the gate. Plenty of time for a Peets to go.
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Comments: