Categories
Technology Web

First, let’s fire the boy-racer HTML programmers

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Webs in a Jonathon Delacour interview:

 

And of course we’ll also have to fire the boy racers’ clueless Dockers-wearing manager dweebs, who consider themselves old-timers because they got online in 1998 (!) and whose entire experience of the Internet is the commercial Web as rendered through Internet Explorer for Windows. These people cannot even *spell* “W3C” and still think banner ads have not been given a fair shake.

Boy racers and clueless Dockers-wearing managers, beware!

(And will Jonathon ask the question we’re dying to know: Does Joe use a Dishmatique?)

Categories
Technology

Office and XML

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Sam Ruby has an interesting thread going about Microsoft’s next version of Office and its support for XML:

 

On one side, the ability of MS tools to adapt to formats that users can describe will be an incredible step forward. On the other hand, this doesn’t explain an unwillingness to working with others to describe the semantics that PowerPoint 11 uses to capture a pie chart.

Interesting thread and comments. However, I’m also linking to this post in case Sam’s comments run out; the interested parties can then come over here and use the comments attached to this posting. I’m providing a Weblogger Comment Overflow Buffer.

Always a good neighbor.

Categories
Weblogging

Roll Call

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve managed to come up with a new page design for all my web site resources except one: this weblog. However, in the last few days this design has crystallized in my mind. I know how I want it to look. Better, I know what I want it to say.

One major change to the design will be the elimination of the blogroll. What started out as a way of introducing favorite webloggers to our readers has somehow become a weapon used in a war of hypertext popularity.

If you search in Google on the words weblog delinking you’ll see weblog entry after another focusing on the use of ‘delinking’ to make some kind of point about an individual. The world is falling quickly into wars fought with bullets and bombs, and we, in the comfort of our safe homes, wield weblog links as if they’re swords.

I loved what Photo Dude wrote on this:

 

We also now have public delinking ceremonies, for those times when someone with whom you’ve become belinked strays from your personal political sphere, and therefore must be publicly shamed and flayed bloody with the stripped strand of HTML that once formed a connection. Personally, I find a One Flavor link list to be boring, but then I thought the point of weblogs was to experience the diversity of people, thoughts, and philosophies around the world, not delink them when you disagree. If I only link people like me, or who think like me, that’s going to be one short list. What’s the point?

There’s a high level of inflated self importance in such a delinking. Myself, I’m certain that my little link to anyone is but a snowflake in a blizzard, of no impact at all, added or removed. It’s a shame others think their links are such precious pearls.

 

Precious pearls. Instead of writing ourselves into existence, we’re delinking others out of existence. And we watch the rise and fall of our weblogs and others in popularity sheets such as Blogging Ecosphere and Technorati and congratulate ourselves on our positions in comparison to others. Phaw! I’d rather resort to outlining.

Hypertext links were meant to bring us together, not become Teflon-coated projectiles. What is is about people that whatever we touch becomes a weapon? That’s not what this is all about. Or at least, I don’t think this is what this is all about. So I’m getting rid of my blogroll.

In it’s place I’m creating a set of files containing lists of my favorite essays/postings written by other webloggers, sorted into my own categories based on my interpretation of the posting subject. I started this as a test case with my Comfort Food posts. And the process of adding new links continues as I dig through archives (Blogger sucks at this), and read what you write today and tomorrow.

Technically, the link, author, and excerpt for these postings will go into a subject-related RDF/RSS file. I’ll then link to PHP pages that display these postings when you click on the subject (displayed in random order). Since the pages are valid RSS 1.0, you can even subscribe to these pages if you want.

Additionally, PHP code in my main weblog page will randomly select entries from one or more of the categories and print the link, author, and excerpt on my front page (in addition to the comments and trackback links and excerpts).

The posts I select are ones that have made an impact on me. The weblogger may not consider the post their best writing; others may prefer different posts. However, by linking to the writing that I connect with, the reader learns more about the other weblogger, and more about me. Something a dry, featureless, blogroll link can never provide.

More importantly, once listed in the pages, a link to a post will never be pulled. As time goes on and we drift apart, these moments of connection will remain. I may not read a weblogger now because they’ve taken a direction I won’t follow. But I did at one time and one moment, and that moment will be captured and persisted. Eventually these pages will form a more accurate history of my personal weblogging adventure than my own posts.

So what am I saying with all this? I guess this is my way of saying you’re all going to be delinked. Go away with your bad selves.

 

 

 

Categories
Web

Accessible web pages

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Jonathon Delacour is reviewing Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Web Sites. In addition, he interviewed Joe and will be posting results of the interview over the next few days. This promises to be excellent reading, and I do want to get the book when I can scrape the pennies together.

I used Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Accessibility in the current re-design and re-organization of my web sites. Between the two — Mark’s online book and Joe’s hard copy book — I hope that I’ll be providing accessible and usable pages, in addition to meeting the CSS and XHTML 1.0 strict specification validation criteria.

Oh, and I’ll be using RDF as the primary data structure for the applications I’m integrating into the site. I am just as determined to make RDF as friendly and usable to all of you, as Mark, Joe, and Jonathon are determined to make web pages accessible to those who need this effort.

I will make even the most RDF-resistant among you into RDF appreciators, if not out-and-out RDF fans. It is my goal. I have a mission.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs Weblogging Writing

Licensed to weblog

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve added a Creative Commons License to the Burningbird Weblog. You’ll see it at the end of my blogroll.

The generated license code embedded in the page validates as XHTML 1.0 strict as long as you remove the ‘border=”0″‘ attribute from the image.

I’ve licensed myself as Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0:

Attribution: The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.

No Derivative Works: The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work — not derivative works based on it.

Noncommercial: The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes — unless they get the licensor’s permission.

Easy as 1-2-3 — fill in a couple of forms asking simple questions, mail the HTML to yourself, make the modification I recommended, paste it into your weblog template, and baby, you’ve just joined the Commons.

Update: I incorporated the CCL RDF into my PostCon RDF, as demonstrated in the example PostCon RDF file. This is a good fit because the PostCon RDF file is a description about the web resource, and this includes licensing information as well as format, validation, history, and so on. I’ll also add ability to add CCL to the PostCon generation tool, but not using the Common’s form — people will have to know the specific license type ahead of time. At least for the first release of PostCon.