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Jef Raskin, who helped invent the Macintosh, passed away yesterday
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- 20050227T1545
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DigiBarn reports Jef's passing. Via Kottke. It seems like just last week that I saw him speak (it was just over a year ago), and had the briefest of exchanges:
You don't need "are you sure?" [alert boxes].
How do you get rid of "are you sure?"
[Tantek blurts out] Undo.
Yes, Undo.
He was one of the better human interface / user interface speakers I have had the chance to see, and was not afraid to state the obvious criticisms about the evolution of the Macintosh user interface that the rest of the fanbase is more than happy to gloss over.
And little did I know, he also hired his former student Bill Atkinson from UCSD to work at Apple, who then went on to create HyperCard, a simple prototyping platform whose ease of use and speed of creation have yet to be replicated.
We will miss you Jef.
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What's in a name? Ajax? How about Cadex?
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- 20050225T1709
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Alex Russell just pointed me to a superb article on web applications by Jesse James Garrett. A really good summary of an excellent approach. See also Jesse's post on his blog. Reading through the comments, a few folks have raised various concerns about the name, "Ajax", that has been suggested for this approach of using XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, Asynchronous data retrieval and JavaScript/Ecmascript. Concerns like it's a "trademark of the Colgate-Palmolive company", and folks would "really hate to work on 'soap' full time". Alternative suggestions have been made like "Responsive Web App" or "Responsive Internet App" - though "RIA" seems a bit too close to "RIAA".
I like playing with naming things, just because it is often a fun intellectual challenge, so after Alex complained to me about the "Ajax" name, I thought I'd take a shot. Starting with the initials of a few of the technologies/concepts involved ("X", "C", "D", "A", "E", "J"), and playing a little mental Scrabble, I came up with:
- CADEX. Pronounced "kay-decks", and stands for CSS Asynchronous DOM Ecmascript XML/XHTML. Just a listing of some of the tech, nothing fancy, and not very mnemonic. And a little googling reveals two different companies using that name.
Why not try the exercise yourself? Suggest another name for folks to use before Colgate-Palmolive sends the requisite C&D.
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Amber and Karmacoda at Blue Cube tonight
Amber spinning @ Canvas tonight!
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- 20050218T0750
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Amber will be spinning tonight at the Canvas Gallery and Cafe as part of their DJ Showdown. It's from 8pm to 2am, but I have a feeling that Amber will be spinning sometime around 10pm-11pmish. If you're looking for a competitive display of independent DJ music, this is the event to check out. Did I mention the free wifi? Hope to see you there!
Amber will be spinning at 10:30pm.
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SXSW sessions and last chance discount
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- 20050211T1247
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I'm really looking forward to SXSW this year, from the looks of the SXSWi speakers and sessions, it's going to be the best one yet.
I'm very happy to have been invited back for a third year of speaking at SXSW and will be participating in the following presentation and panels:
- The Elements of Meaningful XHTML
- How to Leverage Decentralized Social Networks (moderator)
- How to Trick Out Your Blog (moderator)
We've got found some amazing panelists for the two panels. More details to follow.
But for now, be sure to act quickly and register to attend today, because today is the last discount deadline. After today, prices go up, so hurry and register to attend!
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Joe Clark is right
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- 20050202T0800
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Matthew Mullenweg recently referenced a short but to the point posting from Joe Clark analyzing the markup of Technorati's Tags home page.
Joe points out the markup used for the terms in the tag "heat map" which are a sequence of
<a href>hyperlinks with inline styling to set their font size to indicate their popularity. And while this is certainly cleaner than earlier approaches which typically use the deprecated<font>element, and finer grained (CSS font-sizes 9px...24px vs. HTML FONT SIZE=1...6), the markup still doesn't convey the "weight" or "importance" of those popular tags.Mea culpa. I take full responsibility for the markup (or lack thereof) used, and agree that Joe Clark is right, we can do better.
Joe suggests that this tag collection should be an unordered list to begin with, which makes sense to me.
He also suggests using
<big>and<small>to modify the assumed default size. This I'm not so sure about. If we reference the HTML4.01 specification, we see:15.2.1 Font style elements: the TT, I, B, BIG, SMALL, STRIKE, S, and U elements
Which quite clearly indicates that those elements are presentational since they are listed as Font style elements. A little further down is the description of
<big>and<small>:- BIG: Renders text in a "large" font.
- SMALL: Renders text in a "small" font.
(And don't even get me started on the abuse of a
<dl>/<dd>(when<ul>/<li>would have worked just fine, or perhaps the<b>s should have been<dt>s) in that portion quoted from the W3C HTML4.01 spec.)Ironically, this isn't what popular implementations do, which is to render text in a largeR font or a smallER font respectively. But regardless the
<big>and<small>are about fonts and nothing more. They have no semantics per the specification (if you can find any hint otherwise in HTML4.01, please point it out!), which also only provide two additional font sizing levels, and by popular implementation are nothing more than a shorthand for<font size="+1">and<font size="-1">as pointed out by David Gouch. Why weren't<big>and<small>deprecated? I don't know — why wasn't the 'width' attribute of<td>deprecated which is also clearly nothing but presentational? There are a few other examples of presentational markup that somehow survived in HTML4.01 Strict (and thus propagated to XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1, and even into XHTML Basic!). My guess: mistakes were made. But that's something for markup historians to figure out.The closest element I could find in HTML to represent greater "weight" or "importance" was
<em>. Nesting<em>s is valid, and the semantics of such are also something that can easily be inferred from discussions of nesting<strong>within<em>. After some more research I found that others had also discussed the valid semantics of just nesting<em>s themselves.Thus I'm taking Joe's suggestion to use an unordered list with list items, but using nested
<em>s rather than<big>and<small>to indicate the relative popularity of the tags. I'll leave what this means for the respective style sheet as an exercise for the reader. Check out the updated Technorati Tags home page .Update: Anne van Kesteren independently came up with the idea of using nested
<em>elements a week ago.- Comments
Welcome Niall!
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As he previously announced, Niall Kennedy has joined Technorati as our Community Manager starting today!
Niall has done some amazing things with Technorati to date, including founding the Technorati Users Group, writing an AppleScript to export Attention.xml from NetNewsWire, and writing an award-winning Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire AppleScript.
We're all very excited about working with Niall, and in particular, I'm looking forward to working with Niall on being of even better service to the community of Technorati developers.
Welcome!
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