Categories
Just Shelley

Earthlink DSL

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

After a week of trying to get DSL setup and having it work for exactly one day; and after a week of Earthlink not returning calls or following through on promised actions, I’m throwing in the towel. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if any other DSL carriers serve my particular area, though I’ll call Southwest Bell/SBC tomorrow and hope for the best.

I guess the next step is to check out cable modems.

On the bright side, the complex where the townhouse is located has a lovely group of white-tailed bunnies, racoons that get stuck in the dumpsters – and a rabid, vicious cricket that trapped me in the laundry room today.

Categories
Semantics Standards

Up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The markup folks are going to be the weblogging death of me yet. It’s a variation on the classic differences between the back-end or server-side developer and the front-end designer/developer.

All front-end folks know that we back-end folks are slobs when it comes to proper markup, clean web pages, and so on. And all back-end folks know that the front-end people are anal (in the nicest possible way of course). And for a client, this is the perfect combination – the back-end folks should focus on their area of expertise – back-end development – and leave the front-end to the experts.

Of course, when a back-end developer has a weblog, then all you see is sloppy markup, improper use of tags, and so on. I know. Bad Me.

(Still, I know of a front-end person or two who has needed my help for back-end issues, but we won’t quibble over that, will we?)

I know I’m a markup slob, a hopeless case if there was one. However, in recent discussions, I’m left unsure if what I’m doing is “wrong” from a technical viewpoint, or only “wrong” from an esthetic viewpoint. In particular, I’ve been reading Dorothea’s and Jonathon’s weblogs about CSS style sheets, markup, use of bold for hypertext links and so on.

Am I wrong in my use of markup? Or is this a case of pure esthetic differences? Am I a slob? Or is Jonathon, as an example, being an effete snob (saying this in the nicest possible way, of course)?

For instance, there’s the sweeping statement that underline for hypertext links is ugly. Well, ugly or not, the underline has been used to designate hypertext links since the dawn of web time. And underline is still used, by default, to mark links.

In some of my web sites, I use bold to mark hypertext links; in others, such as this weblog, I use underline within the content, bold in the sidebars. I will admit the bold un-underlined hypertext links within the content is elegant and tasteful. However, though ugly, there’s no accessibility issue or problem with using underlines within the posting, is there?

(Side question: what’s with the blue/gray in all the weblogs lately? Is this a civil war thing?)

Today, another issue arose about emphasis and the strong, em, b, and i elements. Jonathon asked the question of Dorothea about the proper use of the <strong>, <em>, <b>, <i> tags. In response, Dorothea provided a very, very nice discussion of the history, purpose, use of these particular tags.

From Dorothea’s response, I believe I am using the strong element correctly. I use it when I want to bold something – when I want to make it more noticeable, to stand out, to strongly emphasis a point, a line, a statement. I tend to use the em element to emphasis something that I don’t want to stand out if a person does a quick sweep of the eye down the page.

However, I use the strong element specifically because it is bold, and the em element because it does result in italic text. I never use <b> or <i>. Though the result is correct, is my underlying behavior incorrect? What happens in this mix when a blind person reads the page?

Sigh. At this point, I am faced with two choices: I can spend all my time fretting on these issues; or I can work on ThreadNeedle, accept the fact that I’m a hopeless web page slob who will never have an elegant weblog page, and hope that folks like Dorothea and Jonathon will specifically let me know when I’m doing something that makes my material inaccessible, or makes it break within a browser.

Categories
RDF

Discussion thread

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Working on ThreadNeedle’s vocabulary tonight. One additional level of sophistication could be to record a posts entire parentage within the RDF

e.g.

a – b – c
– x – f – g

The “path” to ‘g’ would be:

a – x – f – g

This isn’t complete discussion, but is complete thread.

Nested data such as this isn’t trivial within RDF, but doable. First case of a simple RDF file at http://weblog.burningbird.net/threadreplies.rdf. By using bagID, I should be able to encapsulate each level into a single reified statement that allows each nested level of blogging reply to be processed individually; the bagID prevents recursive looping back on the property. However, the complexity is increased. True, the generating and parsing of the RDF is automated, but I don’t want to add unnecessary CPU cycles to the apps.

RDF people in audience – comments? Am I cracked on this one?

As an aside, line breaks generated by blogging tools are a pain in the butt. HTML break annotation is added to the RDF, which breaks the RDF processors. The only way to avoid this is to have users add their own line breaks (and won’t that go over big); or to generate the RDF to be copied and pasted as breakless content – friggen long lines. Most likely break something, and even if it doesn’t – solution is inelegant and offensive.

A better bet would be to have a tool pre-process the RDF and pull out extraneous HTML garbage. Same tool can also grab multiple RDF blocks within same document – something many of the RDF tools don’t like. Unfortunately, this puts burden on those building tools to process ThreadNeedle data directly from files.

No solution yet to the problem of how to distribute RDF so that no dependency exists on ThreadNeedle. Or I should say, no solution yet as to how to track the distributed bits of the discussion within several different weblog postings without reliance on ThreadNeedle. This isn’t necessary to first release of ThreadNeedle – but bothers me nonetheless.

(I desperately need DSL – this work over a modem is slow torture.)

Categories
Just Shelley

More angry voices

From the archives, Wayback Machine has an entry including comments from 2002

Interesting comments on the Value of Anger posting. As I expected, this is not a subject that people tread lightly. However, I was surprised at how personally some people took this posting.

For instance, Dave Rogers disagrees, strongly, with the concept of “healthy anger”, writing:

Anger isn’t some transcendent experience. It’s a temporary (hopefully) abnormal condition. Let it go.

Frank Paynter was actually “pissed” because Mike Golby and I talked about the healing power of anger. He wrote:

Anger is a bad thing. It comes from fear, and it inspires fear. Fear has a proximate cause. Root out the cause, displace the anger. Anger sucks. Angry people rationalize inhuman behavior. Angry people foster hostility and resentment in others. Angry people haven’t learned a loving acceptance that transcends helpless acceptance. Angry people are stunted in their personal development.

And both Jonathon and Dorothea saw themselves as “gently melancholic and intellectually pessimistic”, taking exception to the line If it’s angry people that forge a new society, it’s the gently melancholic, the intellectually pessimistic, and the complacent and indifferent people that destroy it.

Considering that I was wrote this line after reading a book based on a period of time 1000 years ago, I wasn’t expecting immediate identification. However, this shouldn’t be surprising. No matter how technologically advanced we get, no matter how we see ourselves advancing as a species, we’re still nothing more than humans experiencing human emotions. Love. Hate. Joy. Compassion. And Anger.

Anger is a part of us. It’s been a part of us before we ever attached a name to the emotion so that we could discuss it rather than act it out. To deny anger is to deny ourselves. Might as well deny love – it, too, can lead to destructive actions.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have no interest in being a saint. And I have no interest in denying my capability for love or anger. I would hope that I expend my love on those that return it – to do otherwise leads to a great deal of pain. And I hope that I can control my anger and use the energy it generates for something productive, such as fighting the current political administration.

Mike had it right – anger is sharing.