Cox Crow

A Diagram

I drew a small diagram on my wall. On it is a house. In the house is a handset, labeled "voice"; a desklamp, labeled "iMac"; a square, labeled "big screen"; some speakers, labeled "speakers"; a square, labeled "disk farm"; a lightning bolt, labeled "power"; a camera, and a pencil. A halo surrounds the house, and arrows point outside and in.

4:08:37 PM # Google It!

This Note's for You

Raph Levien:

I love reading stories to Alan and Max, and have lately become somewhat taken by the idea of recording audiotexts and releasing them under a Creative Commons license. So far, I've just been playing around, but you might be interested in listening to what I've recorded anyway.

The Big Sister pays rapt attention to the audiobooks that my wife's checked out of the library. And yet she never seems to miss a word of the front seat conversation. I wonder what she would think if my voice came out of the speakers.

3:42:06 PM # Google It!
categories: Media

What if we had to explain all of our in-line data?

In the previous post, I added the following metadata so that you would know that it wasn't my original work. I used the blockquote element, since the quote is more than a few lines. This is a stylistic convention of English. I added a cite attribute to the blockquote element, since I found the quote on-line and could do so. But since you're not a machine, I added a line break, and then an em-dash, and then the source of the quote, in this case Jim Stewart. This is another stylistic convention, used with a block quotation. I placed Mr. Stewart's name within a cite element, to indicate that he was the source of the quotation. In the cite attribute of the cite element, I included a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) specifically for Mr. Stewart, not for the source of the quote. I then confused the issue by creating a link between my page and the source of Mr. Stewart's quote, anchoring it on Mr. Stewart's name. And in this post I've enclosed the references to the names of the elements and attributes in the code element, so that you know that I'm talking about the cite element, rather than cite. That last is a link to the definition of cite.

What's the point? The point is that there's a difference between a source, Foo, of something, and source, Bar, of something. That difference being who said it (the cite element) and where you found it (the cite attribute).

2:11:52 PM # Google It!

Questions, Anyone?

The manager's responsibility is to ask the questions.

So it must be the staff's role to answer the questions. That would make sense. The consolidated statement would then become: Management's role is to ask the questions and the staff's role is to answer them. In thinking this through I determined that there must be more to it. Here's why.

How, as a manager, do you know what questions to ask? Are you smart enough to ask all of the relevent questions?
— Jim Stewart

1:49:02 PM # Google It!

Fork That

Mark Pilgrim says, "Semantic obsolescence: Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant."

Looking at the documents that Mark references, it seems they've resolved the debate over what is an abbreviation and what's an acronym by eliminating the acronym tag. That makes sense in a way, as an acronym could be seen as a kind of abbreviation. Besides, their examples of abbreviations were incorrect in the first place. But do the committee members notice that the most popular browser ignores abbr tags? The working draft notes

Visual user agents must not add delimiting quotation marks (as was the case for the q element in earlier versions of XHTML). It is the responsibility of the document author to add any required quotation marks.

That requires some explanation. The quote element has become merely a means of noting the source of the quotation, assuming that the source is on-line someplace, rather than a means of determining the display of a quote. So, in say, a Spanish text, I have to replace the " with « instead of translating the quotation and letting the displaying device handle localization of the quotation marks. On the other hand, Internet Explorer's handling would then be correct.

We do all this to represent what we know about some bit of something. I know what some acronyms mean, and so can elaborate on that. The old style would have us writing "Internet Explorer (IE)" rather than using Hyper-text Markup Language (HTML) to surround the acronym or whatever, with more information, essentially making things visible that normally exist only in your head. Of course, augmenting one's writing plays havoc with literary criticism. What challenge is it to read a multi-dimensional work that refers to things outside its bounds if Joyce paints the way for you?

I suppose I could revert to exposing these things, rather than creating real links in my work. Or maybe YOU should figure out where to go from here, given this feeping creaturism.

12:22:31 PM # Google It!

Watching the Wheels Go Round and Round

Make a conscious decision to fall behind.

10:59:00 AM # Google It!
categories: Learning

My Weblog is a Post-It Note pad

rendering oddities that i noticed recently:

• In Mozilla, if you quote something, and don't close the q, every block element following is quoted.
• In Safari, the q is not rendered, just as it is in IE 6/win
• In Safari, acronyms are italicized.
• In Safari, the title attribute is not displayed for elements other than acronym.
• IE/mac renders the q quite nicely.

9:21:27 AM # Google It!