Revisiting Budapest was a reminder of what damage the automobile, the scourge of the 20th century, has caused human society. The same century started a departure from cities built to a human scale to cities built to suit the the car.

This is likely to change in the 21th century. While an immediate car ban in urban areas is unlikely, economic savvy will move us there anyway. It is no accident that Venezia is the most attractive city in Europe. It may be an open sewer, the buildings are dilapidated, it suffers from chronic floods, the commotion and the prices are high, but this is a city where you find no cars and the tourists love it.

The same can be seen in other cites as well. Where there are zones with high traffic and zones with no traffic, tourists, and the locals as well, gravitate towards the no traffic zones. While tourism is important in itself as the largest economic activity in Europe, they are also an eye-opener. Tourists have the privilege to choose where they want to go and you don’t see them flock to traffic junctions.

The car belongs to the country-side and not in the city. In less densely populated areas it is a symbol of freedom, each individual can go where he wants to go when he wants to go there. In the city the car is the symbol of gridlock. More people live in cities than anywhere else, for them the city is their home not just a place of work or entertainment. If the citizen had a direct say in whether their own street was pedestrian or allowed cars to drive through it the changeover would happen sooner, but they do have a say indirectly.

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I finally got around to watch Der Untergang (or “The fall of the third realm” in the uninspired Czech translation, the English title “Downfall” is considerably better) a few days ago. Set in the fast imploding Nazi universe in the days before the ultimate collapse, this is a refreshingly real and honest account of madness set upon itself. Real as a story that is, not an arbiter of historical truth. Unsurprisingly, given its subject, the European debate has been on its instrumental role. Will it prevent a rise of neo-nazism? No, certainly not. Neither will it be their The Birth of A Nation.

I rarely visit the cinemas, but this film ought to be seen in one and not just watched on DVD. Partly to reinforce its claustrophobic nature and partly to feel, and not just look at, the shells ripping Berlin and its tattered defenders apart. Meanwhile, down in the bunker, Adolf weds Eva even though the required paperwork that the couple are of proper mateable Aryan descent is waived.

There was an unsettling idea to stage the Nazis’ final downfall not in Berlin, but in the fairly impenetrable Festung Norwegen. The several hundred thousand German soldiers stationed there had a relative comfortable and safe existence by the northern bunkers, far away from both the west and east fronts. There was less comfort in the labour camps for the largely Russian prisoners that managed to survive the arctic winters.

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The otherwise honourable Acid2 test dredged up something I had hoped I wouldn’t see again. Most tests are CSS tests, parsing and layout, but they also threw in an old misfeature from HTML’s past. If you look at the test’s source code you will find “ERROR”. An HTML comment followed by “ERROR”, right? No, unlike in the more modern XML "" are not comment delimiters, “--” is. In SGML so ERROR is actually a part of a long comment. Easy to see, isn’t it?

In theory HTML is a SGML application so SGML rules apply. In practice there has never been a SGML web browser and there never will. For a long time Opera was alone in supporting some SGML-isms like “--” comment delimiters until we removed them around Opera 5 or 6, but Opera wasn’t even close to being a SGML browser so all we did was to add quirks and give no benefits.

Mozilla later made exactly the same mistake as we did and they are still doing it. This causes an interoperability problem as Mozilla will fail on this comment and other browsers don’t. The obvious solution would be for Mozilla to change their browser, but WaSP opted for the other option instead. If that view wins through web developers will be bound to count their hyphens. Any multiple of four is good, anything else is bad.

New member beckfield started two threads on XSLT and Opera, one civil, one less so. That is fairly topical as the recent buzzword AJAX (no relation) includes XSLT and Opera does not.

There is no discussion about XSLT on the server side, transformations is what web servers do, but client-side transformations would put XSLT into another role. XSLT will have to think like a client and is it up to the task?

This has not been an issue due to the dearth of XSLT-enhanced web pages, there is just a handful sites on the web though Google Maps is one of those, but as far as I know nobody has studied this. Where does client-side XSLT really fit in with the Web UI (HTML, CSS, JS) and how well does it adapt to the user’s environment?

[Test post] Top 10 Merriam-Webster word in 2004 by popular demand. øx

Forms handling is among the most important functions in a browser, the HTML 2.0 forms are seriously outdated and news.com.com considers the forms alternatives. As I see it there isn’t a conflict Web Forms 2.0 vs XForms. Web Forms is designed partially XForms compatible. There are substantial differences that run deeper than on the syntactic level (such as the names of the elements) and there is no tool today that can automatially turn arbitrary XForms forms into Web Forms. Some, probably most, forms will be very similar in the two languages both in structure and functionality and could be converted easily.

The strange charm of tragedy.

The css Zen Garden has done more than any other site to evangelize that having a simple, expressive markup will allow you to create a great variety of displays. Even so I am struck with how similar most of the designs are, just throwing in different pictures. It is the same with Opera skins. Many are pretty, more are ugly, some are plain weird. But only a few are original. Neither are conformity breaking or pragmatic.

Simple markup and baroque styles is also more mallable, something that matters most in the field where I spend most of my time, between device independence (device is most of the time Opera-speak for phone), accessibility, and multimodality (which in Opera most of the time means Voice). They all have similar, but not identical, requirements, there are even a few features that would be a boon for one group of users but detrimental for others.

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