Archive for October, 2004

Instead of taking time to gather together for you all the sadness that is the current political reality, I’ll just repost iocaste’s great summary:

Feeling the Outrage

Just feeling so angry and disheartened by the crap that I can’t even work up snarky comments. I’ll just report some of the stuff you may have seen around the blogosphere, for anyone who isn’t following the standard liberal sites like a maniac.

1. First, a company that registers voters - and is largely funded by the Republican National Committee - has been tearing up Democratic voter registrations in Nevada. The company is now registering voters in Oregon.
2. Second, former SD Governor - and Republican - Bill Janklow has accused the national GOP of deliberately encouraging “cheating” on voter registrations. And then there’s Milwaukee… (via The Poor Man)
3. Third, Dick Cheney has been holding private meetings with newspaper publishers in swing states - and keeping out political reporters. This matters not only because of news coverage, but also because endorsements are crucial.
4. Fourth, the blogosphere, as part of its efforts to take down Sinclair Broadcasting (the company planning to run a 90-minute Swift Boat ad on its television stations just before the election), has discovered that Sinclair has very strong financial ties to this Administration, all unsavory.
5. Fifth, still more news on the “W is for Wired” front.
6. Sixth, Howard Kurtz is yet another journalist to openly accuse the Bush Admin of lying.
7. Seventh, you want outrage? Watch the video (via Shrillblog)All of which is to say, Kerry should totally take Jon Stewart’s advice for a new campaign slogan: “Kerry: For fuck’s sake!”

In my opinion, number one is the more disgusting and probably the most felonious. The fifth is absolutely incomprehensible yet totally believable and seemingly factual. There’s a pool going on how long before they both reach the mainstream media.

From: http://www.newdonkey.com/2004/10/rove-reverts-to-type.html

As revealed by Drudge, The Note’s Mark Halperin sent a memo to his ABC colleagues warning them not to simply report exchanges between the campaigns as morally equivalent, because: “The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.” (emphasis mine - natek) Josh Marshall notes that Fox News is already trying to Ratherize Halperin (an absurd characterization given The Note’s unctuous treatment of BC04 throughout the campaign), and I’m sure other conservative media will follow. It will be interesting–not to mention important–to see if the rest of the political world will go along with the idea that the president’s flat-out lies about Kerry’s record should be treated as no more negative than Kerry’s efforts to point out what’s actually happening in Iraq.

I’ll say this: if Bush wins this thing by following Rove’s strategy, it will have a baleful effect on political campaigns here and around the world for years to come. So much for Bush’s interest in spreading the blessings of democracy.

AOL prepares its own browser | CNET News.com

AOL is planning to release its own stand-alone Web browser based on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer technology, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

AOL Browser, as it’s called, will be available as a separate download for Web users. The software will be based on a stripped-down version of IE and will be branded with AOL’s logos, the sources said. Up until now, the Time Warner division has only offered a browser that’s tied to its popular Internet service. That browser also uses IE technology.

Microsoft last year granted AOL a seven-year royalty-free license to use IE technology in its products. The license was one of many concessions that Microsoft offered AOL as part of a $750 million settlement in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Netscape in January 2002.

Click here for screen shots of the AOL browser

I’ve been working on a framework called Layered Semantic Markup for I guess a few years now. While I spend most of my time considering the Structural Layer (Content, aka HTML) and the Presentation Layer (CSS), there is a third layer: Behavior Layer (scripts and the DOM). Having stable and appropriate Content and Presentation layers are helpful before one can appropriately address the Beharior Layer, which is why I’ve spent my time as I have.

A foundational idea of Layered Semantic Markup is Accessibility (and not just in the Section 508 of Accessibility for indivisuals with disabilities). Content should be accessible to ALL. Content should be available without Presentation. Presentation should be available without Behavior. In other words, each can only reach their potential (and some would argue bare minimum) if they are isolated and independent.

I don’t want my snazzy Javascript DHTML behaviors (which makes my navigation more efficient to desktop computer users) to make my navigation unusable to cell phone browsers. With a nod to “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash”, what’s good for one user may be detrimental to another.

With this in mind, take a look at this great tutorial on how to write an Unobstrsive Behavior Layer, or as the author brands it, “Unobtrusive Javascript .

Javascript is a wonderful tool to enhance the usability of web sites. It is the extra layer above the mark-up ‘what is this text’ and the CSS ‘how should it be displayed’. Javascript adds a new dimension, the ‘how should this element behave’.

On the following pages we will discuss and see how we can use Javascript, but still maintain accessibility. The technique to completely separate Javascript from the other two layers of web development has become commonly named ‘unobtrusive Javascript’, as ‘accessible Javascript’ does not quite cut it. You can have a perfectly separated Javascript and still be totally inaccessible.

Hat tip to little. yellow. different’s mini-blog.

More browser commentary from the New York Times: Sampling a World of New Ways to Grapple With the Web

At the moment, at least eight different Web browsers reside in my computer…. The number and diversity of these browsers is, to me, a very hopeful sign…. What’s refreshing about these programs is their diversity. The best of them are astonishingly nimble. They are almost absurdly adaptable to the tastes and needs of the user. Most are free, and many are open source. They have none of the monolith about them, none of that feeling of being shackled to a leviathan.

Microsoft argued that only a browser tightly integrated with the rest of the operating system could deliver the seamless, gratifying Web-browsing experience most people hope for. … But Microsoft was wrong. These days, nobody wants to have anything tightly integrated with the Windows operating system, which has come to seem surprisingly troublesome. Windows takes a lot of care and feeding, more than most people want to give it. As for Internet Explorer, it has grown into a problem in its own right. Software developers complain about it. Ordinary users get sick of the pop-up fireworks. Even in corporate America - which finds its allegiance to Microsoft routinely tested - business users are being asked to switch from Explorer to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox for security reasons.

… It taught me that market share means nothing in terms of quality. It made me wonder whether there was any inherent advantage in a browser that happened to be the same brand as the computer that was running it. The answer, it turns out, is no. These days, there is an array of agile, interesting browsers.

Being a designer is being a professional problem solver. One of the joys of web design and development is that are always multiple solutions — always another way to do the same thing. This variety keeps me on my toes. It requires that problems are clearly defined, that users are considered, that edge cases are accounted for, and the rationales are justified and reasonable.

But this variety is a challenge. Drawing each project from a teaming pool of options requires considerable, well, consideration. Starting from scratch tastes good, but it’s tons of work, and usually just too much work.

To the rescue come patterns. Similar problems have similar solutions. Solutions are not only defined by their specifics but by their generalities. There are broad patterns. Since first reading A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, 1977) in 2000, I’ve seen an obvious connection between that school of thought and the “Towns, Buildings [and] Construction” of the web.

I must give credit to my Dad, who has recommended this book to his friends since probably the early-1980’s (in an architecture context), and encouraged me to read it. In fact, his first-printing copy sits in prominence on my office desk.

I’ve been working on web patterns extensively at my day job, and will write more about that here soon. In the meantime, let me point you to this An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design that’s been getting passed around the web since Ryan Singer posted it on October 5th, 2004.

It’s not exactly what I’d write about patterns, but it’s worth a read.