A blog entry titled “what is right with CSS” would be far longer, CSS may remain my favourite W3C specs, but on retrospect there are a number of things that haven’t worked out and should have.
(more…)Dante
Surely the third round of the ninth circle of hell would be filled up with the designers and programmers of Chinese Internet banking sites.
CSS 2.1 Solid Soon?
XKCD recently published the future and found through a good number of Google searches that finishing up HTML5 would herald the demise of newspapers and the Third Coming of Christ.
Coincidentally the W3C declared that finally CSS 2.1 had reached Proposed Recommendation status, and surely, surely!, the end, in the form of CSS 2.1 as Recommendation, should be nigh [Note from the future: it became one later same year]. I recapped the story in an almost four year earlier entry, Cruelly Slow Slog, a slog that cruelly continued for four more years. 11 years of labour is not bad for what was intended as a quick fix.
(more…)Map to the future
Wikipedia has a nice and extremely useful map of the Beijing metro system with upcoming extensions. As the Beijing metro system is expanding extremely rapidly the future is almost now.
Like most Wikipedia maps of this type it is made in SVG (using Adobe Illustrator). The code it generates it fairly decent, better than some code I have seen earlier, but still hard to read and use for my purpose, so I cleaned it up with Kommodo Edit. The regular expressions work well in that editor, which makes clean-up much quicker and easier.
Maps are, or at least should be, ideal for SVG and SVG animations. Famously they are not the territory, but they are a layer of information that can be used instead of or as an overlay to other maps of the territory, highlighting the information you are looking for and hiding the information that distracts. …
If you are on the route from here to there, first of all future extensions are of no use, and neither are current lines if they are not going to take you there. Stations you enter and leave the system is important, as is the transfer stations. Stations before the important stations are useful as well, to prepare for leaving at the next station.
(more…)Open Urban Planning
Urban planning and city architecture has traditionally been a closed process between the client and the planner, possibly with a public hearing (too) late in the process.
We are now at a stage technically, and sometimes socially, that this process could be organised differently. It could be more like the process for producing the HTML5 standard for instance, with early prototyping, public involvement with the stakeholders, scenarios and visualisations, and a transparent process.
Any area potentially under development could be put on Google maps, or local equivalents, as well as on a time line for any interested citizen to see or get involved with.
I am interested to know: What “prior art” do you know of in architecture along these lines, how was it done, what were the consequences and lessons?
Opera ’10 and ’11: Named tab stacks
Many of the developments in the 10 and 11 versions of Opera are important, but personally my key word for these upgrade would be “disappointment”. There is one feature/bug fix which would make a huge difference in my browser use, not when things works smoothly, but be a life saver when they don’t, fixing bug 155102. For such an important bug it has taken its time fixing. It was still there in Opera 9, when finally there was an interest in fixing it, it was still there in Opera 10, and it is still there in Opera 11.
(more…)Panopticlick
"How unique – and trackable – is your browser?"
To let a web site adapt the content to fit your needs a browser will make a number of configuration details available, what operating system you use (this shouldn't really matter, but that is a different story), which version browser you are using (for browser sniffing), what screen size you have (to let the site content better fit your screen), what fonts you have (to create fallbacks in case you are lacking the font the web site uses) and so on.
This is well and nice, but there is a problem. These configuration details don't usually change very often and there are so many combinations of these configurations that it is possible, even probable, that your personal settings may be globally unique. In other words nobody else will have the settings that your browser has, even if you haven't personalised it. In the words of this site, your browser will have a fingerprint. Where ever it is used it can be identified. …
Third second
Today at 十/十/十 十:十:十 in your zone is the third last factino second this century.
Time out
When you have “dinner at seven” it would be dinner at seven tonight unless that time has already passed, then it would be dinner at seven tomorrow night. If it were “breakfast at seven” then it would be tomorrow morning as most of us have breakfast in the morning and dinner in the evening. The way we specify dates is highly contextual and highly cultural, so artificial or natural intelligence will have a hard time figuring out what time it really is. …
HTML5 allows you to specify that when it matter, so that when the HTML processor encounters “7/11” the markup will tell if you if the fraction 0.6363.. was meant, a date (and which one), a convenience chain, or something else. The time-related capabilities are limited, but HTML5 can give you the time of day. In other cases you need to go beyond HTML5. If you need to establish “7/11” as your friend’s birthday, as opposed to day of birth, you need to use some calendar extension, as you would if a vague time is needed, like “during next week”.
(more…)Water wagon
The water wagon, a public house that only sells water.
